UnCommon Core | Leo Strauss on Liberal Education

I'm not sure whether to assume everyone who's here came because of the words Leo Strauss in the title or whether many of them came because of the words liberal education in the title I'm going to take the risk of assuming somewhere in between and say a little but only a little about who Strauss was in case you didn't especially come for that reason but I feel somewhat awkward doing so or maybe actually reassured doing so because I see at least two people in the audience georgeanna stop Lowe and Ralph Lerner who knew Leo Strauss much longer and much better than I so I'm afraid to say anything in front of them on the other hand if you ask me any tough questions I can refer you to them so I feel better about it so I hope having done this for several audiences in in which some of you were present I will give the brief brief version Leo Strauss was born in a small village in HESA in Germany in 1899 he left Germany in 1932 on a Rockefeller fellowship first to Paris and then to England during between Germany and France and England he wrote several books one on Spinoza's critique of religion one on Maimonides and his predecessors and one on Hobbes in 1937 I believe he came to the United States first as a researcher at Columbia and then for about a decade at the New School for Social Research in New York where many of his colleagues were also European refugees and exiled indeed it was referred to as the University in exile in the winter quarter of 1949 he came to the University of Chicago as a man of the political science department Robert Hutchins having been instrumental to say the least in his being hired there and taught through the full quarter of 1967 at this university where he delivered his lectures on natural right in history that became probably his best-known book and on his lectures on Machiavelli that became thoughts on Machiavelli one of his more difficult books on which I took a took not taught a seminar last quarter he left the university in the winter of 68 going first to Claremont bends College in California where I had the privilege of studying with him for a year and then in might he had this right in 1969 went to st. John's College Annapolis where he spent the last years of his life until his death in October of 1973 his books have had a great impact I think he is increasingly recognized maybe even more so abroad and in the United States as one of the foremost thinkers of the 20th century I just got back a few weeks ago from a conference on his sort in Rome were several Italian scholars who had written books one of them three books unstressed were giving papers there have been conferences I've been invited to not all of which I've attended on his thought in France the Netherlands Germany Japan and I'm probably leaving leaving some out his works have been translated into more languages than I can recall and he also and perhaps especially important for us at the university had an enormous impact as a teacher students of his who went and did important scholarly work in philosophy in classics and above all in political science and his teaching helped to inspire many other teachers including ones at the University of Chicago including the two I mentioned who are in the room today as well as Allan bloom who was Martin mentioned earlier and of course Joseph cropsy and her restoring and amy and leon kass Krauss is probably best known for his attempt to recover what he called classical political philosophy and to challenge what he saw as the foremost let me switch glasses here so I could actually see that rather than my notes there there I wasn't sure if the room was empty it was quiet for a minute that's better now I can hear it he challenged what he saw as the chief obstacles to a recovery of classical political philosophy what positivism and what he called historicism he argued perhaps most notoriously for a distinction between the exoteric and the esoteric teachings of many writers of the past and attempted to reopen not only the issue between ancients and moderns but that between reason and revelation Martin has already poured the center that I now direct if you go to our website which is you can now hear the digitally remastered audio files of about 25 of the courses that he taught you can download them put them on your iPod and you stroll about listening to his courses once again and we do plan to also have transcripts both of the ones for which the audio files survived and the ones for which the audio files have perished transcripts of his courses on our website over the next several years if all goes well both financially and editorially my hope was is that we can have something like a core session at which point I will sit down today taking as our text the his lecture which was a commencement address at the basic program for adult education in June of 1959 on what is liberal education I have been led to understand you were given a link that could enable you to read those eight pages and here to UM perhaps I'll steer a middle course between assuming everyone has read it and assuming that they haven't and give what is on the one hand a brief summary of this brief commencement address and on the other hand what I hope will raise some issues that could structure our discussion and so what I want to say along those lines is as follows there's this brief commencement address gives I think three different accounts of or three different justifications in any case of liberal education each of which raises lots of questions we might want to discuss and I won't rule out though I'd rather not start with discussion questions pertaining to the political controversy that Martin alluded to that he encountered at that bar in Washington so the first couple of paragraphs of this lecture present a notion of liberal education as the culture of the mind in accordance with its nature what he we'd have to put quotation marks around it since he says this is what other people call it what you could call an quote absolute notion of liberal education which seems contrary to the relativism of our times and which has to at least two difficulties that Straus points out on the one hand if liberal education means learning from the great minds of the past through the great books they left behind they all they all contradict each other people who talk about the Western tradition as if it gave us some unified unequivocal uplifting edifying teaching haven't read very many of those books how miss prism they say all kinds of contrary and difficult things not all of them edifying and certainly not all of them in agreement secondly West the Western culture and again one does have to bear in mind Strauss is speaking to the basic program which at least at that point someone can update me now was teaching only Western text I'm actually aware that it no longer is is so confined and there are other other traditions Chinese and Indian he mentions worth studying then in the next two paragraphs the third and fourth paragraphs of the talk he makes what he calls a fresh beginning I hope I'm doing this right you a fresh start which takes a rather different tack as to the just meaning I think and certainly the justification of liberal education a much more political and much more contemporary account of why liberal education justification of it here and now in modern liberal democracy that modern liberal democracy was originally conceived of like people like but I was a Rousseau Jefferson as depending on the virtue of the people so that they would be the virtue and wisdom of the people so that they would be capable of ruling or at the very least here I veer actually to the sequel like a paper he gave liberal education and responsibility or where he quotes Jefferson is saying that democracy is the best means of selecting the natural aristoi to rule as we recently did here for our new mayor that the original intention or meaning of liberal democracy was meant to be a kind of universal aristocracy and that therefore liberal education is essential to liberal democracy as the education that would make its citizens wise and virtuous enough to rule then in the fifth somewhere in the fifth paragraph after a strange consideration of all could we reject modern liberal democracy could we reject modernity could we reject civilization altogether and go back to preliterate societies which he rejects as self contradictory he concludes again that we are compelled to live with books but gives what seems to me a different justification either from that first one of liberal education the culture of the mind or the second one the more political one of liberal education has the servant of liberal democracy he gives a Socratic justification of liberal education based not on the assumption we know the absolute truth about culture or the nature of the mind but on the contrary based on our ignorance it is a Socratic or we could say given what he says in these last paragraphs a full-on philosophic justification that is to say if philosophy is the love of wisdom then he speaks here of what we can't be philosophers if philosophers are what Plato says they are worthy of being kings we can be lovers of philosophy fellow philosophers and returns to the problem that he raised with the first notion at the beginning the greatest minds the and the great books that that the basic program is wasn't is devoted to contradict each other we're compelled but if we want guidance about the most important issues from the people who are thought to had the most wisdom about them to be the judges between Plato and Nietzsche between content Hegel even though we are ourselves inferior to them but it's unavoidable that's our situation that we can if we want to listen to what he calls the conversation amongst the greatest minds we have to conduct it they don't they say as he says engage in monologues we have to create the dialogue and we have no alternative given what he calls the loss of all it's simply authoritative traditions in our time we can't simply follow a tradition including that quote Western tradition I spoke of earlier we have to think for ourselves so my hope before I sit down and bring the mic over there is that we could talk perhaps about all three of these notions or justifications of liberal education it as the education in the culture of the mine liberal education as what liberal democracy needs and this more Socratic or fellow philosophic one something were compelled to do by our by our ignorance but maybe before doing so it would be useful to put on our table here other notions of liberal education because I think it's fair to say that none of the three notions or justifications of liberal education that Strauss gives all of which of course and not only because he was addressing the basic program all of which do revolve around some notion of learning from great books I think none of those notions could be said to be the dominant notions of liberal education today so I thought maybe just ask people not necessarily to speak in their own name but what what do people say liberal education is these days or how do they justify it liberal education presumably would not be the only education any liberally educated person would have one hopes that before they get a liberal education you know they perhaps you know got a moral education from their parents or their their pastors one would hope they learned you know to read and write and count and things like that and have some experience of life I I don't think one can make sense of the great books that strategy talks about apart from one's experience of life Martin referred I forget what the adjective was to Allan bloom legendary now he no no he actually existed at Cornell University I have distinct memories and in the closing of the American mind Alan tells the story of how one student unnamed in the book sends him a postcard from Italy saying you're not a professor you're really a travel agent you did and how pleased he was with this idea because he thought I think Strauss as a European in some sense probably took this for granted or didn't think about it I don't know blooms certainly thought you couldn't really appreciate what Machiavelli says if you've never seen Florence I don't know if Leo Strauss ever saw Florence so I thought sure he thought would have thought that was quite as necessary but he had his fill of experience in Europe from 1899 to well depending whether you count England part of Europe to nine 1932 or 1937 so it's certain but I'm not sure we should say that is liberal education I think you know getting the experience is a life most whether it's a matter of seeing foreign countries or you know experiencing love and loss and sadness and and injustice those things are just crucial e important to education and liberal education without them would be very sick I can't really speak on behalf of the whole faculty obviously on this matter I say a few things maybe first up just about the core the first part of your pension now I came the year after you left I came in the fall of 77 and had during my job in to visit been essentially interviewed not only by the Department of Political Science which hired me but also by the staff of political order and change I remember Roger Weiss taking me for a tour of the campus that February of 1977 it was the coldest day of the century it was about minus 20 degrees and I thought he was actually taking me to his office it took me a while to realize Roger was giving me a tour once we had go to the circle I began to realize that but in any case I joined it the staff of political order and change as well as the political science department and it was very much as you described it here before with common exams staff meetings etc I given my obligations to the political science department would only teach one quarter I thought sometimes to fall and sometimes the winter I'd ever taught the sprague that had all the political economy in it that I was intimidated by Ralph Lerner can fill in the details somewhere in the 1980s that course came to a halt and disappeared and then a few years later Ralph and some other colleagues not including myself we created a new social science core course called classics of social and political thought Roger was no longer available in the political economy part that disappeared so there were no economists teaching in it but I do think it's true that but first one very important thing happened and I think John Boyer probably must get much of the credit for this sometime in the 1990s it became the case that every appointment to the University with maybe a few exceptions I don't I'm not supposed to know about every appointment explicitly required a faculty member to teach half their courses in the college and one of them in general education and that certainly just become the standard everybody practically teaches in the core now the College of course is twice as big as it was when you left and when I came it was about twenty five hundred then and it's five thousand now and the arithmetic you can do the arithmetic yourself there's no way and another good thing that John Boyer has done is unlike this uncommon color class the corner sections in the humanities and the Social Sciences are now absolutely capped at nineteen which is a lot smaller than when I came in you left it is a lot better for discussion purposes than twenty eight or whatever one had then but if you do the arithmetic nineteen and X hundred faculty yeah so we now a large portion of the core sections are taught by the harper-schmidt fellows who do teach all that who are wonderful people who in a better job market would have tenure-track positions at major universities and liberal arts colleges and they now and they teach all through the year which does provide a continuity that the typical faculty participation does not I can't speak for the other course sequences but classics of social and political thought has very lively staff lunches in which we pretend we're talking about how shall we teach the material but really are arguing with each other about the materials and I think those are great and I've gotten to know people that way I think and again I can't speak about the humanities at all in the social sciences I think the fact that the social sciences went created this diaspora took place we are no longer all in the social science building has diminished somewhat the the legendary to borrow your word again TT's in the social science tea room where built-in Friedman and Hans Morgenthau and Leo Strauss would and Edward Banfield would argue about things no longer take place one sees colleagues in different places and committees and seminars and work the workshop system which came in in the 80s that Keith Baker was largely responsible for that I participate regular semi-regularly in the political theory workshop where faculty from classics and divinity and history as well as political science are involved and that's a good thing but that's impersonal impressionistic the picture as a whole I couldn't attempt to sketch and I've had the blessing these past 20 years is that true oh yeah time flies of also being a member of the Committee on social thought where I've gotten to know people from different disciplines and have done a lot of co-teaching with Robert Pippen when most Jonathan Lear a former colleague at Betty Holland and above all else Lerner which has been a great experience for me and as I mentioned in another context earlier sometimes attend colleagues classes earlier this this quarter I attended Heinrich Meyers class Strauss's thoughts of Machiavelli so these things still happen whether they happen more or less IIIi don't know I'll add that III did not I'm not a graduate unlike you I am NOT an alumnus of the University of Chicago I did my undergraduate work at Cornell as was mentioned earlier in my graduate work starting at Claremont Graduate School as was mentioned earlier and finishing at Harvard but my father is an alumnus of our College class of 39 my daughter is an alumna of our College class of 2006 hey it's her fifth reunion why isn't she here she's attending a wedding in Iowa and my son will graduate from our college in 2012 he had a list but basically almost the same list as your granddaughter he got applied to Michigan at Michigan State and Wisconsin in Indiana and Iowa and Texas and went to Iowa and for various reasons got sick of Iowa or maybe Iowa City and decided to transfer to the University of Chicago which is taking him some time because Iowa had no core requirements and we do and so as I do think after a total of five years he will graduate next and having a great time here in a different way and people did you know it was City I don't know I tend I mean some of my friends some best friends amongst the faculty say thing somewhat similar to Karen and complain about the students I'm not like that I love the students we have wonderful state I mean I think I've had as wonderful students these past five six years as I did my first five six years here in the college I mean I'd say that also for the the graduate students I think I mean the first thing that struck me when I came from Harvard where I had been on the faculty the three years before was a the students came to class here that was different that it seemed to be sort of like the center of their lives for many of them and the second thing that struck me is so different from Harvard was the math students and they pre-med students and the physics students were taking these upper-level courses and the things I taught Plato back in a little block and were often the best participants whereas at I mean they did you never saw them at Harvard they were off doing their thing and I think that remains the case in my experience one of the when I read I read applications usually for the college and one of the ones that most struck me was a math a self-confessed math nerd math team Prize winner and home who was explaining why he wanted to come to University of Chicago he said I don't want to go to the school for the blamin MIT there would be all math nerds I want to go to a school where there all kinds of nerd and he did come to the University instead of MIT III just have a much more cheerful view of these matters so it maybe it's not based on a scientific sampling it's based on the students I see who are by definition you know a self-selected even in the core the ones who choose my our court sequence classics of social and political thought and or ones who pick my section would not necessarily be a cross section for example relevant to what you said I'd see very few econ majors they don't take few of them take take our course and they're 18% of the college the largest major so I'm although I have a really rosy cheerful picture of what our students are like it may not be a scientific based on a scientific sample he speaks of the idea of a universal error starting to say that basically that democracy presumes that everyone in the society will become an aristocrat in in the sequel essay he quotes Jefferson as saying that democracy is the means whereby the people are well enough educated to select the natural aristoi and as I mentioned earlier as we do in the city of Chicago to be our alderman and mayor it's a crooked way speaking of a subset as an aristocracy or of the effort to broaden into a universal one I'm not sure yeah I think that that to use the fashionable word there is something a latest obviously about Strauss's approach whichever version you take here that is to say he speaks of great minds and great book she doesn't think all minds and all books are equal he thinks you can learn more from Plato than from x-men I'm not sure my children would all agree and I know I'm too ignorant to say to ignorant of x-men so certainly in a way just I think the premise of everything he says there and that great books version of liberal education which is nobody said rob is hoping they would say I also have to say it for them in a minute but that great books version of liberal education assumes there's such a thing as greatness that Plato or contour Hegel or Nietzsche have something to teach us because and they are in some ways you know they contradict each other wiser then we are in that sense it certainly elitist or in egalitarian or to put it in terms of what he says at the end of the lecture there's both a boldness and a modesty involved in liberal education there's a modesty in which you say he pick up the critique of Pure Reason do you think he would be good right this how I can't even imagine what it would be like to to have fought this through myself he must have been of a superior kind to me and or and I don't mean to only say that for philosophy read Shakespeare I think have the same sense so there's that modesty or to put it more sharply than he does there a sense of inferiority on one's own part is presumed but also a boldness boldness as he says they're both to think that maybe common accepted opinions are wrong and the boldness to conduct that that dialogue to say well Plato seems a lot smarter than me but so does nature I guess I have to think myself which is the thing no one has said which I was sort of hoping for because one does hear it in our College and elsewhere is that liberal education is teaching people quote how to think that it's teaching them method critical methods rather than what to think or even what to think about or what books to read so it doesn't matter what books you read or what you think about as long as you're thinking critically or correctly which is a very different notion of what liberal education is and would not in itself point to the great books this the most obvious problem with that approach is it seems to presume there's some agreement amongst us as to how to think that there is a critical method we all embrace whereas in fact the people who say it disagree radically it likes themselves some of the means that you should learn Adorno's critical theory of Marxism or Freudianism or or analytical logic we get to the same problem that Plato it Marx and Freud a teacher and Aristotle disagree about how to think so that there seems to be some begging of the question and those who think that liberal education can just teach us how to think without great books and without just what to think or what to think about I think I'm pretty much in agreement with you on this I mean I don't actually think of myself as an advocate of great books education in the sense in which it is often involved I do actually think of it even though I have greatly enjoyed as a member of the committee on social teaching books that are way outside my specialty I still actually do believe in scholarship and expertise - I for example would if at all possible try to avoid ever teaching a book where I cannot read it in the original language that's why I had to persuade mr. Lerner to teach with me in the winter quarter of course of the political philosophy of Alpha Robby's I don't read Arabic or feel cotton really confident about that tradition and Strauss of course himself was in a way that few of us could aspire to be a specialist an expert a scholar who read of many languages there is that strange in subways irritated line or frustrated line in this lecture where he says well we should it would be good to study China and India too but we don't know their languages and we can't learn all languages I read this for a man who read help me Ralph's Hebrew Arabic Aramaic Greek Latin French German Italian why but but even that but it still expresses this the notion that you need some kinds of expertise the core does in some ways encourage or compel faculty to teach outside their expertise but it's nice has someone in the room at the staff meeting who has the expertise to correct to prevent one from saying really foolish you know so I certainly think that there needs to be some combination of the generality that liberal education requires and specialization I you know I was not here in the Hutchins college as my father was in its earliest days in the late 30s but I don't mind the fact that our students have majors and get some expert quasi or preliminary expertise in one field as well as having the core and if I could say something that's my colleagues and close friends micro guard is heretical I don't even mind that in the late 90s we somewhat reduced the core requirements so as to make more room for electives and for majors mainly for electives as given the way it it worked out I think the core is still alive and well this now that's partly because I'm in the Social Sciences and we refuse to reduce the humanities they wanted they were willing to reduce their core we refused so it didn't really affect us but but I but I think the fact that that undergraduates today are able to take more electives and about which I have more mixed feelings had met more and more of them to double majors which I don't think it's really necessary but which they really couldn't have done or would have been much harder to do under the pre 1998-99 set of core requirement but it didn't bother me at the time I did not sign the faculty petitions objecting to the reductions at that time they seemed to be not unreasonable so now everyone will be furious no I didn't mean to imply this wasn't in a sense method but it's certainly not a method in this strict sense strach says at the beginning that it means studying the great books with the proper care then in an aside he says you could write volumes and volumes about what is the proper care and elsewhere in his correspondence with the German hermeneutic philosopher concierge godom Herr Strauss says I don't believe in the possibility of a theory of an reputation I think each interpretation is suing address is different there aren't rules or a method of interpretation even and then makes this very disconcerting remark in wet both reassuring and disconcerting remark he says to Garber in every book I studied there's always been something I'm not sure I can quote it the adjective writes of great importance I forget what the adjective that I didn't understand whereas presumably if you had a method everything in everybody who added its know if there were such a thing so obviously it's you know speaking in a kind of loose colloquial way it's a way that it's a way of liberal education to say we should read the greatest books by the greatest minds we'll then argue about which they are but but maybe we'll agree that Plato's Republic is one of them and the x-men comic books aren't it seems to me some ways that the crucial thing in the kind of liberal education that stress argued for is the notion that one is studying these books because you think you would learn something from them that would help you to understand your world and lead your life that you're not studying them to learn about them or about their time or place or the society that produced them because you're presuming they weren't produced by a society but by a mind that was not simply a reflection of its society in saying that I don't necessarily wish to imply that the opposite of is true of cultural studies but certainly there is a difference there I think that that premise that or at least hypothesis that one could learn things of that kind from some kinds of books probably not from although I mean again mister how to stop low and mr. learner can correct me I don't know Strauss we know is a regular watcher of Gunsmoke and Perry Mason did he think he was learning from them or leave it to them to okay fairly comfortable and happy with where we are curriculum that that students take the core they take some courses that I give where you're reading some old book over ten weeks but they also learn something of the quote methods of political scientists I say quote methods because political science as some of you may know is not a coherent discipline there are 23 different methods and everybody's arguing about them but learn something about the methods of discipline they learn something about contemporary sort I think it would be unhealthy if one read nothing but great books how would you know they were great if you didn't read some third-rate books also how would you understand the world you live in if you're not reading the prevalent influential kinds of thought in your own society which are probably lodged in the back of your own mind too if you and in some ways filtering your reading of contour Plato I think it is is crucial for people to study the contemporary things things that are here and now too I certainly don't see myself as an advocate of a education of great books and nothing but great books one of the interesting things about stresses courses which you can have access hit listen to through our Center's website is that whereas in his published books he tends to talk almost exclusively about great books in the courses he sometimes devotes weeks to Ernest Nagle and r.j. Collingwood and other contemporary thinkers his course on the introduction to political philosophy the last half or slightly less than half is on Aristotle's politics but the whole first half is on what were for him not for us contemporary thinkers who are defenders of the positivism or historicism that Strauss himself critiques I think his in some sense I think he thought that you could not simply turn to the great books without confronting the obstacles to doing so which are a different set of obstacles in I time than they were in his time of the kinds of thoughts that say that that's impossible or even immoral or wrong to be reading old books by dead like the hell we have to leave the room

Channel: The University of Chicago

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Keywords: education, uchicago, university of chicago, lectures, chicago university, rigorous inquiry, curriculum, liberal, core, uncommon

Id: sTWBwSc4qjE

Length: 47min 34sec (2854 seconds)

Published: Thu Aug 04 2011