newman now: re-examining the concepts of 'philosophical' and 'liberal' in...

Newman Now: Re-Examining the Concepts of 'Philosophical' and 'Liberal' in "The Idea of aUniversity"Author(s): Joseph DunneSource: British Journal of Educational Studies, Vol. 54, No. 4 (Dec., 2006), pp. 412-428Published by: Taylor & Francis, Ltd. on behalf of the Society for Educational StudiesStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/4122405 .

Accessed: 21/05/2014 03:56

Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of the Terms & Conditions of Use, available at .http://www.jstor.org/page/info/about/policies/terms.jsp

.JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range ofcontent in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new formsof scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact [email protected].

.

Taylor & Francis, Ltd. and Society for Educational Studies are collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserveand extend access to British Journal of Educational Studies.

http://www.jstor.org

This content downloaded from 80.218.18.22 on Wed, 21 May 2014 03:56:55 AMAll use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions

http://www.jstor.org/action/showPublisher?publisherCode=taylorfrancis

http://www.jstor.org/action/showPublisher?publisherCode=ses

http://www.jstor.org/stable/4122405?origin=JSTOR-pdf

http://www.jstor.org/page/info/about/policies/terms.jsp


BRITISH JOURNAL OF EDUCATIONAL STUDIES, ISSN 0007-1005 DOI number: 10.1111/j.1467-8527.2006.00347.x VOL. 54, No. 4, DECEMBER 2006, PP 412-428

NEWMAN NOW: RE-EXAMINING THE CONCEPTS OF 'PHILOSOPHICAL' AND 'LIBERAL' IN THE IDEA OF A UNIVERSITY

byJOSEPH DUNNE, St. Patrick's College, Dublin City University

ABSTRACT: Taking account of crucial differences between the social environments of universities in Newman's time and in ours, this paper considers two key concepts in the The Idea of the University, the

'philosophical' and the 'liberal'. It argues that, despite their merits, both concepts are beset by problems. And it suggests some lines of anal-

ysis, partly inspired by an Aristotelian influence both in Newman's own work and in some recent philosophy, that may help to address these

problems and to support claims for the continuing power of Newman's

thinking about university education.

Keywords: modernity,.J.

H. Newman, reason, 'philosophical, 'liberal' universities

I

To students of his work it is ironic that Newman's name is now best known, or perhaps only known, as the author of The Idea of a University. For this is not his greatest book: it lacks the analytical subtlety of the Grammar of Assent, the historical mastery of the Development of Doctrine, and the psychological penetration of the Apologia pro Vita Sua. It is a further irony that while Newman's name lives on because the Idea has achieved classic status in the context of debates about the nature and purposes of universities, its place in these debates is now almost entirely ceremonial. Phrases from it can still be invoked to lend respectability to ritual occasions - though even this conceit is perhaps no longer necessary: bracing winds have blown away the fig-leaf and universities are proud to disclose the nakedness of their instrumentalist and managerialist ambitions. When two leading British analysts of higher education recently concurred that 'we can scarcely imagine anyone writing' like Newman now (Barnett and Standish, 2003, pp. 216, 221), they intended to call attention not to

412 O 2006 The Author Journal compilation ? 2006 SES. Published by Blackwell Publishing Ltd, 9600 Garsington Road, Oxford OX4 2DQ, UK and 350 Main Street, Malden, MA 02148, USA.



NEWMAN AND THE IDEA OF THE UNIVERSITY

the matchless cadences of Newman's prose but to the absence of readers for what now appears as, at best, an elegy for a lost age.

Here my intention is not to bury Newman, nor to praise him - still less to ceremonialise him. I want to pay him the respect of a serious reading, of listening to what he has to say and of speaking back. But first I need to acknowledge and take some stock of the temporal distance (Gadamer, 1975, pp. 258-267) that separates his age from ours and across which, necessarily, we have to listen and speak. New- man himself recognises that every great writer is a 'man of his age ... made for his day, and his day for him', so that his work is determined by 'the call made on his resources by the exigencies of his day' (New- man, 1996, pp. 187-188; all subsequent page references are to this edition of The Idea of a University). It is well to begin, then, by adverting to the great difference between the exigencies bearing on education in Newman's own day and those that bear on it now.

Once present in his university, students have Newman's generous attention. But why it is persons of this kind, and not of some other class or age or gender, who arrive within his portals is a question that does not arise for him, or perhaps for most of his contemporaries. It is simply a given that while there are 'schools for the poor and middle classes ... higher education ... is given to comparatively the few' (pp. 6-7). He refers to 'the poorer classes of the community, whose secular acquirements ever must be limited' (p. 19) and when adverting later to the 'mechanical arts', which lie outside the university's remit, he can say without intended condescension: 'their exercise is the duty of the many, and we owe to the many a debt of gratitude for fulfill- ing that duty' (p. 84). Access or participation, then - that is to say, the issue of who are to benefit from being students of educational institutions, and who are not so to benefit - is not Newman's concern. We, however, live at a time when education at all levels is a social good the allocation of which is inevitably a matter of distributivejustice.

The classical Greek culture that was so influential an exemplar for Newman was the birthplace of democracy, giving us not only the name but the ideal of this form of politics. Citizenship, however, was restricted to a male elite which, among its other privileges, could benefit from a liberal education - but only because (in a manner still echoed in Newman's remarks above) the work of production and reproduction was done by the disenfranchised majority which included skilled craftsmen, slaves and women. If we now aspire not only to universal suffrage but to mass education (and to both of these as intimately related to each other) this is because our egalitarian conscience is more developed than that of classical Greeks. But this aspiration would have remained just that - an aspiration - had something

413

? 2006 The Author Journal compilation ? 2006 SES




else not also intervened, namely a huge shift in the nature of knowledge and of its role in society, a shift that was already underway in Newman's time and a recognition of whose threat to the classical ideal is a leitmotif throughout his text. It makes a crucial difference that knowledge has become power - scientia propter potentiam, in Bacon's phrase - ultimately the power, through prediction, to trans- form matter and become productive. It is primarily this change in the role of knowledge that underlies the huge change in access to education and the transformation of egalitarianism into a more viable option in education. So long as the kind of knowledge that was highly esteemed stood apart from production, no society could afford to have more than a minority educated for its pursuit. And if, by contrast, a modern liberal democratic society tries to provide something like universal education this is not just because its egalitarian conscience is more developed or because it is any less concerned than earlier societies with the imperatives of production; it is, rather, that the productive person now is the educated person.

The point here might be made by saying that we are heirs, as Newman was not, of the Enlightenment and of the twin aspirations derived from its emphasis on Reason: first, the emancipation of people whose own possession of reason was the foundation of their dignity and consequently of their inalienable rights to live their individual lives autonomously and to participate with their fellows in a democratic form of politics in which inequalities of entitlement to such basic goods as education were to become unconscionable; and second, the technical mastery that was to subdue the material environment, making it submissive to these newly emancipated individuals and citizens. Politically, Newman had no great sympathy with the emancipatory and democratic ideals of the Enlightenment and educationally he was opposed to its emphasis on knowledge as productive and useful, an emphasis that was associated at the time with Bentham and that, like Coleridge (Rothblatt, 1997, ch. 1), he traced further back to Locke.

But if Newman was not a child of the Enlightenment, this may not count unambiguously against him. Or, rather, we are now in a

position to see how ambiguous is the legacy that we ourselves derive from it - or, otherwise put, how deep have been the strains between the two strands of the Reason that it has canonised. As emancipatory, Reason has sponsored a combination of individual autonomy and democratic empowerment - the latter presupposing not only liberty but a fair share of equality and solidarity too. And, as instrumental, it has sought to provide enlightened individuals and political communities with an ars dominandi, an instrument for extending

414

O 2006 The Author

Journal compilation ? 2006 SES




their mastery over nature, making it answerable to their purposes and needs. If this was the Enlightenment script, however, it has been badly garbled in the way historical events have actually fallen out. For it is instrumental reason, yoked to capitalist expansion, that has proved to be the stronger force, subduing not only nature but, in important respects, the human beings who were to be its masters. Those who were to be served by the ars dominandi have been threatened by servitude to it; appearing less as sovereign shapers of ends, they have increasingly been incorporated into the whole apparatus of means over which instrumental reason exerts its sway.

What I draw attention to here is a large thesis about modernisation that was already given classic expression by Max Weber in his image of the 'iron cage' created by the inverted dominance of instrumental over substantive reason, and further elaborated by Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer as the 'dialectic of Enlightenment'. Other variations of it can be found in a later generation of thinkers hostile to Enlightenment pretensions, such as, in their very different ways, Michel Foucault and Alasdair MacIntyre, and even by friendly critics, keen, as it were, to save modernity from its own potential for debasement, such as (again in their different ways) Jfirgen Habermas and Charles Taylor. While here is not the place to explore this thesis, I advert briefly to its particular import for higher education. It is clear that universities have become a functional element within the economy, turning out cohorts of people with the qualifications required by an increasingly knowledge-hungry division of labour. As it becomes increasingly dependent on commercial sponsorship and vulnerable to the funding policies of the state, the university loses the authority to determine the priorities for academic research and define the relative significance of different knowledge-domains. It is not just that it is made to serve some specific purposes whose motivating forces lie outside itself; were this simply the case, there would still be enough separation between it and these external agencies to allow it at least to recognise the potential of this deflection to compromise its integrity as a university. But what we witness is the dissolution of any such boundaries and the well nigh total assimilation of the university into the wider nexus.

Not simply serving industry, the university has itself become an industry, its ethos dominated by the new technicism that increasingly holds sway in all spheres of modern endeavour. Its conception of education is that of the production model, governed by performance indicators, input-outputs ratios and unit costs. It succumbs to the relentless quantification and abstract exhangeability of everything - goods, services, activities, courses and people, in globalised

415 ? 2006 The Author Journal compilation ? 2006 SES




modernity. A recent report on universities in Ireland (OECD, 2004) recommended the establishment of a centralised Tertiary Education Authority with which each university would have to negotiate an annual funding contract, and which would have the role of setting 'strategic purposes' and guarding against 'mission drift'. In this Report it is assumed - with no discussion of the nature of knowledge, or of teaching and learning, or of the purposes of universities - that knowledge is entirely instrumental and that universities exist simply to service the 'innovative society' and the 'knowledge economy'. Discharged from the need for any substantive analysis or argument, the Report effortlessly appropriates the master terms of the new discourse - e.g. 'excellence', 'high-performance', 'competitive', 'world- class' - energised rather than embarrassed by their vacuousness.

II

The implication I draw from the foregoing remarks is that our conceptions of knowledge, education and universities are not in conspicuously good order and that, this being the case, there may be some point in revisiting Newman's text, with a particular focus on what he has to say about Reason. In doing this now, inevitably quite selectively (without reference, for example, to the relation between reason and religious faith), I shall attend in particular to two of the central concepts in the Idea of a University: reason as philosophical and the distinct but related concept of the kind of rational cultivation that qualifies as liberal.

Newman's way of speaking of 'Philosophy' may invite the supposition that he envisages it as a distinct subject (Culler, 1955; Svaglic, 1982), albeit one very different from the professionalised discipline that is now the preserve of philosophy departments in most universities of the Anglophone world. In contrast to the latter's analytical tendency and under-labourer role, philosophy as conceived by Newman is unabashedly architectonic, 'a science of sciences' that comprehends 'the bearings of one science on another, and the use of each to each, and the location and limitation and adjustment and appreciation of them all' (p. 45); or again it is a 'comprehensive view of truth in all its branches, of science to science, of their mutual bearings, and their respective values' (p. 78). One might suppose that Newman is here envisaging a second-order science (such as metaphysics has sometimes aspired to be) that, from a vantage-point above the first order sciences, can assign them their proper places and instruct them in their mutual connections and dependencies. Just how this master-vision is itself to be achieved and how it could





hope not to be continually undone by the actual advances of science, as it were from below, is by no means clear; even if much silliness has been perpetrated by scientists when they have posed as philosophers, still philosophers' own record as legislators for science is hardly more creditable. But perhaps we should be especially alert here, as one of his leading commentators suggests, to the 'potentially misleading' effect of the element of 'hyperbole' in Newman's style (Ker, 1991, p. 20). In fact he nowhere offers any account of this supremely ambitious discipline, and from a few incidental remarks it seems clear that it would not occupy a significant place in his university curriculum (for example, in a chapter on Literature, St. Thomas appears on all fours with Bacon as a threat to be seen off by the Faculty of Arts). Invariably throughout the work 'Philosophy' works adverbially or adjectivally rather than as a substantive: it is less the matter of any specific domain of education than the aim of all education, so that we might speak (all going well) of every graduate as having a philosophical mind or of being able to think philosophically.

Were it available, a science of sciences would provide a substantive though inevitably schematic unity; but what Newman envisages instead is more a quality of mind, an alertness to the dangers of single vision, a vigilance against monopolising tendencies from any single quarter, a predisposition as it were to 'only connect', and a general inclination to what he calls 'largeness of view'. This emphasis is perhaps related to the distinction he makes in the preface between 'the Sciences, which are to be the matter' and 'the Students, who are to be the subjects' of university teaching (p. 4) and to his indication that it is to subjects in the sense of persons rather than knowledge- matter that priority is due. Indeed this priority might lead one to claim that in spite of its title the chief 'idea' of Newman's book is not of 'a university' but rather - something most contemporary writing on higher education hardly considers - of 'the educated mind' or the 'educated person'.

The largeness of view that Newman attributes to the philosophical mind implies some kind of unity, which I shall examine presently. But first I advert to another, related, feature of the philosophical mind - its resourcefulness and mobility, or the fact of its not being encumbered by inert or unappropriated matter. I do so partly in order to counter the egregious charge, in one of the 'interpretive essays' accompanying a recent issue of the Idea from Yale University Press, that Newman supports a pedagogy akin to what Paulo Freire has castigated as 'the "banking concept of education", whereby with the teacher as narrator, "education becomes an act of 'depositing'". The teacher is the expositor of hardened knowledge. The student





by contrast passively receives the teacher's elaboration, inclusion, exclusion, interpretation, and disposition of knowledge' (Castro-Klaren, 1996, p. 323). That Newman is a spectacularly inappropriate target for this charge should be apparent to anyone who has attended to his text. There Newman argues expressly against the view of 'an enlarged mind [as] that which holds a great deal' or dwells in 'the consciousness and enjoyment of large intellectual possessions' (p. 95). Learning consists 'not merely in the passive reception into the mind of a number of ideas hitherto unknown to it, but in the mind's energetic and simultaneous action upon and towards and among those ideas' (pp. 97-98); an educated mind is one 'which knows, and thinks while it knows, which has learned to leaven the dense mass of facts and events with the elastic force of reason' (p. 100).

So averse is Newman to what he calls 'mere acquisition', and so far from blessing those who are 'possessed by their knowledge, not possessed of it' (so that they 'hang upon the opinion of others, for want of internal resource'), that he is led to make a remarkable declaration, as provocative perhaps to his original audience as it has surely been to many earnest pedagogues since: 'if I had to choose between a so-called University, which dispensed with residence and tutorial superintendence, and gave its degrees to any person who passed an examination in a wide range of subjects, and a University which had no professors or examinations at all, but merely brought a number of young men together for three or four years' (p. 105), he would have no hesitation, he tells us, in choosing the latter. For the 'self-education' enacted through the students' 'conversation' together, he believes, would lead them to a kind of real learning, 'which never will issue from the most strenuous efforts of a set of teachers, with no mutual sympathies ... [or] of a set of examiners with no opinions which they dare profess ... who are teaching or questioning a set of youths who not know them, and do not know each other' (pp. 106-107). (The well-known opening words of the Preface seem to exclude research from Newman's university; but to exclude teaching and assessment too is a heroically deconstructive feat!) It is in the same pages - among the most spirited perhaps in all Newman's writing - that he tells us that 'a University is ... not a foundry, or a mint, or a treadmill'; and, whatever else we may think about them, these pages surely make clear that the view attributed to him by our recent commentator is the exact opposite of what he in fact holds.

I return now to the unity that Newman valorises. His idea seems to be that, our minds being incapable of a single comprehensive view of reality, their first and as it were natural movement is to divide, to

418 ? 2006 The Author





take successive partial views that articulate themselves into the several single sciences. Each of these abstracts from reality under a particular aspect, determining a specific set of relations obtaining within the total field. Although Newman does not give us a very precise account of it, his drift seems to be that this division is at once a strength and a weakness: a strength in terms of concentrated focus that gives real, otherwise unattainable, knowledge; a weakness because all such knowledge remains both partial and prone to the distortion that results when this partiality is not recognised. It follows then that each science needs to be complemented and even cor- rected by others; and the more this happens the more the faults of abstraction are overcome, the more closely the mind approximates to adequacy with reality and achieves the unity that Newman extols.

What Newman is driving at here seems to me to be reasonable; in its aversion to the fragmentation caused by narrowly specialised disciplines, we might take it as, among other things, an encourage- ment to interdisciplinarity. But he also elaborates his ideal of unity through two recurrent metaphors suggesting a stronger and, I think, more problematic, kind of unity. The first is that of a centre. Already in his preface Newman emphasises the need to impress on young minds 'the idea of science, method, order, principle and system ... of rule and harmony' and recommends grammar and mathematics because they give 'a conception of development and arrangement from and around a common centre' (p. 9). Later he tells us more grandly that 'in the mind of the Philosopher ... the elements of the physical and moral worlds, sciences, arts, pursuits, ranks, offices, events, opinions, individualities, are all viewed as one, with correlative fiunctions, and as gradually by successive combinations converging, one and all, to the true centre' (p. 100). Or again in a condensation of several metaphors he imagines this centre as moving rather than still: 'It is not the mere addition to our knowledge that is the illumination; but the locomotion, the movement onward, of that mental centre, to which what we know, and what we are learning, the accumulating mass of our acquirements, gravitates' (p. 98).

The second metaphor to which Newman frequently recurs has - though he does not advert to it - an ancient and especially a Platonic lineage; it is that of elevation or ascent. It is a feature of the 'philosophical' as one of two 'methods of education' (the 'mechanical' being the other) that it 'rises towards general ideas'; or a related distinction is made between a professor outside a university who 'is in danger of being absorbed and narrowed by his pursuit' and a professor within a university, who 'will just know where he and his science stand, he has come to it, as it were, from a height' (p. 118).

419 O 2()006 The Author

Journal compilation O 2006 SES



NEWMAN AND THE IDtA OF THE UNIVERSITY

Or again Newman writes: '[i]t matters not whether our field of operation be wide or limited; in every case, to command it, is to move above it'; and, bringing this metaphor back to its more literal home: 'you hear of practised travellers, when they first come into a place, mounting some high hill or church tower, by way of reconnoitring its neighbourhood. In like manner you must be above your knowledge, not under it, or it will oppress you' (p. 101). Or, finally, he tells us that '[t]o have even a portion of this illuminative reason and true philosophy is the highest state to which nature can aspire, in the way of intellect, it puts the mind above the influences of chance and necessity ... [leaving it] patient, collected, and majestically calm, because it discerns the end in every beginning, the origin in every end ... because it ever knows where it stands, and how its path lies from one point to another' (p. 100).

Together these metaphors of centering and elevation represent what might be called 'the imperial intellect' (Newman's own phrase [p. 221] and also the title of a book on his philosophy of education published fifty years ago; Culler, 1955). With the other metaphor, of illumination, that sometimes accompanies them, they evoke something of that very Enlightenment reason to which we take Newman to be hostile. A critic might indeed read these aspects of Newman's text as all too clearly betraying his own very particular position in the middle of the nineteenth century - the eccentricity of his conversion to Roman Catholicism notwithstanding - at the commanding centre of a great empire, bringing order and rule to a multiplicity of subaltern territories. Colour might be given to this suspicious reading by advertence to Newman's assumption in his Discourses on Letters that Swift, Goldsmith and Burke, whom he variously praises, are simply English writers, and by his failure to acknowledge that his addressees in Dublin might have their own Gaelic literature (though as Rector, he founded the first chair of Archaeology and Irish History, appointing the eminent scholar, Eugene O Curry, whose ground-breaking researches he helped into publication and who vouched for his sympathy with 'Irish Literature' [Stockley, 1933, p. 64]). More serious than this local omission, however, is Newman's identification of the societies and cultures of the Mediterranean as having together originated what 'has a claim to be considered as the representative Society and Civilization of the human race, as its perfect result and limit, in fact; - those portions of the race which do not coalesce with it being left to stand by themselves as anomalies, unaccountable' (p. 169). These 'anomalies', we have already learned, include the cultures of China, of the Hindoos, the ancient Mexicans and the Turks. Of them Newman writes: 'There are indeed great

420 ? 2006 The Author





outlying portions of mankind which are not ... included in this Human Society; still they are outlying portions and nothing else, fragmentary, unsociable, solitary, and unmeaning, protesting and revolting against the grand central formation of which I am speaking' (p. 167).

Insupportable as these remarks must now seem, they were hardly exceptional in the context of their time (even Mill, in On Liberty, can say of 'the whole East' that it has 'strictly speaking, no history' [Mill, 1975, p. 66]); and we are no doubt captive to complacencies of our own age that a later one may more sharply expose. But I want now to suggest that this tendency in Newman's thought (that of the 'imperial intellect', evinced by images of centre and height and perhaps complicit with a deeper cultural imperialism) is in serious tension with another tendency that is also present though less con- spicuous in the Idea of a University and that was to be much more fully developed in his later work. In the Idea, this other tendency comes out most strongly when, rather than offering a general characterisation of the philosophical mind, Newman is reporting on, or confessing to, the workings of his own mind as it is engaged in the process of thinking and composition. 'No anxiety, no effort of mind', he tells us, 'is more severe than his, who in a difficult matter has as it seriously at heart to investigate without error'; and he goes on to remark of his own 'great labour and fatigue' in composing these lectures, when he 'felt like a navigator on a strange sea, who is out of sight of land, is surprised by night ... [so that there are no] great objects, with distinct and continuous outlines ... which stand up and confront and

occupy our gaze, and relieve us from the tension and suspense of our personal observation' (p. 148). And these remarks seem to bear out, in the case of his own inquiry in the Idea, what he attributes to the general operation of the inquiring, rather than the commanding, intellect.

It is the very law of the human mind in its inquiry after ... truth to make its advances by a process which consists of many stages, and is circuitous. There are no short cuts to knowledge; nor does the road to it always lie in the direction in which it terminates, nor are we able to see the end on starting ... No one can go straight up a mountain; no sailing vessel makes for port without tacking ... If we invite reason to take its place in our schools, we must let reason have fair and full play ... we cannot use it by halves ... The

passenger should not have embarked at all, if he did not reckon on the chance of a rough sea, of currents, or wind and tide, of rocks and shoals. (p. 230)

421

? 2006 The Author





It follows then that '[g]reat minds need elbow-room ... And so indeed do lesser minds, and all minds ... Theories, speculations, hypotheses, are started up; perhaps they are to die, still not before

they have suggested ideas better than themselves ... The errors of some minds in scientific investigation are more fruitful than the truths of others' (pp. 231-232). Elbow-room for students' minds -

surely one of the too-little-regretted casualties of universities'

penchant now for 'continuous assessment' and their embrace of the confinement and reassuring linearity of 'modularisation' and 'semesterisation'.

I am suggesting that there are two very different, competing rhetorics at work in the Idea of a University, in one of which the mind is figured as 'majestically calm, because it discerns the end in every beginning', whereas in the other it appears in 'tension and suspense and is not 'able to see the end on starting'. It is the latter of these rhetorics that better represents not just the native movements of Newman's own sinuous mind but the essential thrust of his

conception of reason as it was to be articulated with great subtlety twenty years later in the Grammar of Assent. In that book, we find a fine-textured account of the inquiring mind, whether in inter-

preting a text or adjudicating between rival interpretations, in

formulating a proposal, judging a sequence of events, recognising salience, making a case, or in the myriad of other networked activities in which it has to make its way; in each of them it has to bring forth an understanding that is contextually embedded, responsive both to whole and to part (or to 'universal' and 'particular') and possessed by neither in isolation from the other. There being no fixed method or procedure that it can rely on to make it equal to these tasks, the rhetoric that Newman develops for evoking it is one of' discrimination, fluency, versatility, and resourcefulness; but perhaps its master term is 'judgment', referred to occasionally in the Idea (e.g. pp. 91, 109, 118) and later developed brilliantly in his conception of' the 'Illative Sense' (the 'power of judging ... in its perfection') in the

Grammar. In that book, as I have argued elsewhere (Dunne, 1997), Newman not only offers an altogether more nuanced analysis of reason than the stock Enlightenment account but also strikingly anticipates much of the 'post-foundationalist' thinking of' recent decades.

III

If I am right in suggesting that we might read 'judgement' as the most defining capability of what Newman was pointing to with his

422

O 2006 The Author





conception of the 'philosophical mind', to which university education should aspire, the question naturally arises as to what course of study - and here we return to the question of subject-matter - most favourably develops it. Here one thing can immediately be said in Newman's favour: he is not in the least tempted to suppose that this quality could ever be developed by a regime of exercises abstracted from content, as some later advocates of 'critical thinking' would suggest; it is only in the throes of getting to grips with some substantive content, and with lots of it, that judgement develops. But given this merit of his position, Newman's answer to the question is disconcert- ingly peremptory: 'The simple question to be considered is, how best to strengthen, refine and enrich the intellectual powers; the perusal of the poets, historians and philosophers of Greece and Rome will accomplish the purpose, as long experience has shown; but that the study of the experimental sciences will do the like, is proved as yet by no experience whatever' (p. 175).

To make sense of the privileged role that Newman here assigns to the 'Humanities' (or more narrowly, the 'Classics') and of his airy dismissal of the 'Sciences', we need to turn to the second main issue that I promised to discuss, namely his conception of a 'liberal education'. For their venerable status as the staple of such an education is, in Newman estimation, the basis of the Classics' claims to curricular pre-eminence. But what does he mean by 'liberal' and is he right to accord it such importance?

The idea of the liberal is distinct from (though related to) the idea of the 'philosophical'. Its meaning can be approached first in terms of a contrast with what is 'servile', in the sense of serving the necessities or conveniences of life or, in the older Greek (and especially Socratic) usage, what is 'banausic', in the sense of being tied to the needs of the body - and thus lacking the mind's freedom of thought. But in fact a straightforward distinction here between mind and body is misleading. For Newman holds that some bodily pursuits are liberal while some pursuits of the mind, even recondite and demanding ones, are not. Indeed even the highest intellectual activity, which for him is theology, can be pursued illiberally - when, for example, considerations of pastoral application are to the fore - while bodily activities such as dancing and athletics remain liberal. The more essential distinction, then, is between the instrumental and non-instrumental: an activity is liberal when, pursued for no external end, it is, rather, its own end. With no need to effect or affect anything else, it has the kind of concentration in itself and justification for itself that is wonderfully captured by Yeats in the final stanza of 'Among Schoolchildren':





Labour is blossoming and dancing Where body is not bruised to pleasure soul Nor beauty born out of its own despair Nor blear-eyed wisdom out of mid-night oil ... Oh body swayed to music, oh brightening glance How can we know the dancer from the dance?

In fact the body supplies a large clue for Newman as to how we should properly conceive the liberality of the philosophical mind (VII, p. 6). For with regard to the body, we readily understand health as its flourishing state and inherent perfection. And it is unfortunate, he suggests (p. 91), that we have no corresponding, intuitively suggestive, term for the state of the rational mind in which would lie its comparable state of vigour and cultivated perfection. For it is in such a state, and not in any application or use of the knowledge gained through it, that the true end of education lies; knowledge is diminished if, rather than showing itself to be 'self-sufficient and complete', it is applied or extrudes on to something beyond itself. It is hard not to find in Newman's position here an unattractive purism and preciousness, betrayed by the similes he uses when referring to theology's loss of liberality when it becomes pastorally orientated: it is the same, he says, as when 'a face worn by tears and fasting loses its beauty, or a labourer's hand loses its delicateness' (p. 82).

Newman is surely right to oppose utility as the criterion of knowledge. But is he not mistaken, in turn, to make non-utility its criterion? Perhaps usefulness, whether one is for or against it, is not the point here. And perhaps, too, the analogy with the body misleads. Thinking of health as its telos, one too easily treats the body as an abstraction - whereas in the case of living human bodies it is good to be healthy for the sake of all kinds of engagements, projects, and absorptions, in, with, and by the world. Those dedicated to health, fitness, or the body-beautiful as its own end too easily miss this point. As pheno- menological analysis (Heidegger, 1962; Merleau-Ponty, 1962) has well taught us, human bodies exist only as always already open to an environing world with which they are deeply intricated. The body is already mindful, as the mind is embodied. And if we are to extrapo- late from body thus understood to intellect/reason, it is the latter's intentionality that will strike us - its relational reality, its openness to and disclosure of a world - rather than its enjoyment of its own virtuosity as a self-enclosed or self-justifying faculty. Newman is not insensitive to what is at stake here: he knows that the good of the intellect is truth and that truth brings it into relationship with reality - however vexing it may be to formulate the precise nature of this





relationship. He knows this if for no other reason than that he is an Aristotelian ('[w]hile we are men, we cannot help, to a great extent, being Aristotelians' [p. 82]; 'to think correctly, is to think like Aristotle' [p. 83]). But with regard to the Aristotelian concept that is chiefly in play in Newman's conception of liberality, that of the end-in-itself (entelecheia), there are two different emphases in Aristotle's own thought, especially in the Nicomachean Ethics. Notoriously, in the early books of that treatise, he depicts flourishing (eudaimonia) as consisting in a life of action (praxis), in which various virtues of character are displayed in civic and inter-personal settings, whereas in the last book (succumbing to a 'residual Platonism') he seems to set this depiction aside, reserving eudaimonia to a life of contemplation (theoria), which is assured greater sovereignty and self-sufficiency (autarcheia) just because the immutable and eternal character of its objects puts them beyond the range of human intervention. In the Idea of the University Newman is closer to the latter Aristotle whereas in the Grammar of Assent he models the Illative Sense quite explicitly on the analysis, in book six of the Ethics, of phronesis as the kind of wisdom that informs the life of practical virtue depicted in the earlier books.

Newman would have been better guided in the Idea by the Aristotle who did not restrict entelecheia to 'pure' theoria but saw praxis as exhibiting it too. Indeed he might have gone on to elide the other distinction that Aristotle still kept in place, even in the early books of the Ethics (and especially in book six), between praxis as action, the purpose of which transpires in the very doing (for example, virtuous action or dancing or flute-playing), and poiesis as making, the purpose of which is realised in a product or end-state separate from and enduring after the activity of making itself (for example, architecture or medicine). This further elision is made by perhaps the foremost contemporary Aristotelian, Alasdair MacIntyre, in his concept of 'practice' (MacIntyre, 1981; MacIntyre and Dunne, 2004). A practice, for MacIntyre, is a coherent, complex set of activities that has evolved cooperatively and cumulatively over time, that is alive in the community who are its practitioners, and that remains alive only so long as they remain committed to sustaining - and creatively developing and extending - its internal goods and its proper standards of excellence. Like Aristotle, MacIntyre works with a distinction between 'internal' and 'external'. But whereas for Aristotle this distinction is deployed with respect to the activity of the practitioner, MacIntyre understands it in relation to the wider practice. Thus, whereas architecture and medicine cannot count for Aristotle as cases of praxis - because their proper ends, good design and good health, are realised outside the practitioner in building materials





and in patients - for MacIntyre, they do indeed count as examples of practice - because for him good building and good health are internal to them as practices, are the goods whose intended achievement defines them as the particular practices that they are.

MacIntyre counts as internal goods of a practice not only these overarching ends but also qualities acquired and exercised by practitioners through their submission to the demands of achieving these ends and their answerability to the specific standards of excellence that this requires. These qualities are both competencies proper to each practice - technical proficiencies in, for example, draughtsmanship or diagnosis - and virtues of character - for example, patience, temperance, courage or honesty - that discipline one's desires and direct one's energy and attention so as to serve the demands of particular practices. The external goods of a practice, then, are what can accrue to one as a consequence of one's accomplishment in achieving its internal goods - for example money, power, status and reputation. It is not of course in itself a bad thing that such accomplishment can be a means to these external goods. But the possibility arises here of an unacceptable instrumentalism, when the latter are maximised at the cost of violating the fabric of a practice and subverting the achievement of its internal goods.

Returning now to Newman, I want to affirm his prophetic value for us - who live in an age when the triumph of instrumental reason can easily seem complete and irreversible - in, already in the nineteenth century, taking up the cause against instrumentalism. I have also been suggesting, however, that this cause is better served by a distinction other than that between 'liberal' and 'illiberal' as he conceived them. The advantage for university education of the notion of practice briefly outlined above is that it enlarges the domain of the non-instrumental - whereas Newman's narrow conception of the liberal has the unfortunate consequence that everything that it does not include (which amounts to a great deal) is ipsofacto surrendered to instrumentalism. To return to the two examples adverted to above, architecture and medicine are assumed to be inherently instrumental. To conceive them as practices, by contrast, is to see them as incorporating internal ends and goods. To be sure these ends and goods can be instrumentalised unacceptably. But when this happens - as it does only too easily and often - it is to be seen as

undermining their integrity precisely as practices. To be initiated into such practices - that is to say, to become prac-

titioners who understand, care about and are proficient in achieving their characteristic goods - is ipso facto to be educated deeply and broadly. Newman himself acknowledges that 'the professions afford





scope for the highest and most diversified powers of the mind' (p. 81) - surely an important concession. Conceived as practices, however, they also carry ethical weight. When Newman says in the Idea that 'the object of a university is intellectual, not moral' (p. 4) and that '[i] t is as real a mistake to burden it [Knowledge] with virtue ... as with the mechanical arts' (p. 89), he might be taken as an Enlightenment philosopher rather than a student of Aristotle, for whom any strong separation of the intellectual and ethical virtues is untenable. But in fact these statements belie his own deepest convictions, as we can discern in one or two places in the Idea (especially p. 133) and as becomes abundantly clear in the Grammar of Assent with its powerful arguments against any such separation. Practices in MacIntyre's sense are not value-neutral; committed to the achievement of genuine human goods, they are proving grounds for the acquisition and exercise of virtues as well as of knowledge and technical competencies.

But even if intellectually challenging and ethically engaging, how could education in a practice be broad? Mainly by opening up issues of how the specific goods achieved through that practice fit with other goods and contribute to the overall human good realised in the pattern of individual human lives and as the common good of whole communities (Newman himself associates the 'formation of the citizen' with the 'proper function of a university' [p. 119]). Each significant human practice is a site both for the consolidation and extension of specific human excellences and for reflection, from a quite particular vantage-point, on the overall goods and ends of human life (Higgins, 2004; MacIntyre, 1999). Such reflection, arising from within specific practices - though doubtless substantially reconfiguring what goes on at present in most universities under the rubric of professional education - well deserves to be called, in Newman's sense of the term, 'philosophical' (though it would certainly include wide-ranging historical and sociological as well as more strictly philosophical aspects). Moreover, a place in which such reflection went on in a variety of different practices (and 'practice' of course includes, as well as professional fields of the kind I have focused on here, disciplines such as physics, zoology, history and, yes, Greek and Roman studies) and in which these reflections were porous to each other - such a place would surely deserve to be called, in Newman's still richly resonant sense, a university.

REFERENCES

ARISTOTLE (1985) The Nicomachean Ethics (trans. T. IRWIN) (Indianapolis, Hackett).

427

? 2006 The Author





BARNETT, R. and STANDISH, P. (2003) Higher Education and the University. In N. BLAKE et al. (Eds) The Blackwell Guide to the Philosophy of Education (Oxford, Blackwell).

CASTRO-KLAREN, S. (1996) The paradox of self in The Idea of a University. In F. M. TURNER (Ed.) The Idea of a University (New Haven, Yale University Press).

CULLER, A. D. (1955) The Imperial Intellect: a Study of Cardinal Newman's Educational Ideas (New Haven, Yale University Press).

DUNNE, J. (1997) Back to the Rough Ground: Practical Judgment and the Lure of Technique (Notre Dame and London, 1997).

GADAMER, H.-G. (1975) Truth and Method (trans. G. BARDEN and J. CUMMINGS) (London, Sheed and Ward).

HEIDEGGER, M. (1962) Being and Time (trans. J. J. Macquarrie and E. Robinson) (Oxford, Blackwell).

HIGGINS, C. (2004) MacIntyre's moral theory and the possibility of an Aretaic ethics of teaching. In J. Dunne and P. Hogan (Eds) Education and Practice: Upholding the Integrity of Teaching and Learning (Oxford, Blackwell), pp. 35-47.

KER, I. T. (1991) The Achievement ofJohn Henry Newman (London, Collins). MacINTYRE, A. (1981) After Virtue (London, Duckworth). MacINTYRE, A. (1999) Social structures and their threats to moral agency,

Philosophy, 74, 311-329. MacINTYRE, A. and DUNNE, J. (2004) Alasdair MacIntyre on education: in

dialogue with Joseph Dunne. In J. DUNNE and P. HOGAN (Eds) Education and Practice: Upholding the Integrity of Teaching and Learning (Oxford, Blackwell).

MERLEAU-PONTY, M. (1962) The Phenomenology of Perception (trans. C. SMITH) (London, Routledge and Kegan Paul).

MILL, J. S. On Liberty (1975; 1859) (New York, Norton). NEWMAN, J. H. (1974; 1845) An Essay on the Development of Doctrine (Ed. J. M. CAM-

ERON) (Harmondsworth, Penguin). NEWMAN, J. H. (1967; 1865) Apologia Pro Vita Sua (Ed. M. J. SVAGLIC) (Oxford,

Clarendon Press). NEWMAN, J. H. (1996; 1852) The Idea of a University (Ed. F. M. TURNER) (New

Haven and London, Yale University Press). NEWMAN,J. H. (1985; 1870) An Essay in Aid of a Grammar of Assent (Ed. I. T. KER)

(Oxford, Oxford University Press). OECD (2004) Report on Higher Education in Ireland (Dublin, The Stationery Office). ROTHBLATT, S. (1997) The Modern University and its Discontents: The Fate of New-

man's Legacies in Britain and America (Cambridge, Cambridge University Press). STOCKLEY, W. F. (1933) Newman, Education and Ireland (London, Sands and Co). SVAGLIC, Martin J. (Ed.) (1982) The Idea of a University (University of Notre Dame

Press, 1982).

Correspondence Dr Joseph Dunne Education Department St Patrick's College Dublin City University Drumcondra Dublin 9 Ireland E-mail: [email protected]




newman now: re-examining the concepts of 'philosophical' and 'liberal' in...

Documents