"Virtue will not surrender herself to these narrow bounds of ours; a great subject needs wide space in which to move. Let all other things be driven out, and let the breast be emptied to receive virtue." . . .
--Seneca the Younger, Moral Letters to Lucilius, 88 (tr Gummere)
A man can hardly know everything that can be known. Hopefully, as he gets older and wiser, he sees that he really knows less and less. We are often told, therefore, to remove what is superfluous, unnecessary, or not required. Pay attention to the essentials, and keep in mind the priority of those things that we should truly know to live well.
What we consider essential or necessary, however, will depend upon the very way we choose to define the good life. If it is the acquisition of wealth and power that we seek, then we will dedicate ourselves to learning the skills that will bring us profit and popularity.
For Seneca, or for any person committed to virtue as the measure of happiness, looking inward to the content of our actions over the circumstances of our fortune, such pursuits must take a distant second, good for us only insofar as they can assist us in building character.
While marketing, finance, and public relations might be the essential arts for the seeker of money and fame, the liberal arts seek the fulfillment of our very humanity. They ask us to think and act with a concern for the true and the good in themselves. The essential is therefore hardly being a lawyer, politician, businessman, doctor, or educator. The essential is what aid is needed to live with the dignity of a human being, to embrace and practice wisdom, temperance, fortitude, and justice in whatever else we may desire or be called to do.
I rarely ever gave much thought to 'what' people did for a career, and I usually didn't worry about the status associated with these things. I remember the character of Death in one of the Bill and Ted movies rapping, "you may be a king, or a little street sweeper, but sooner or later, you dance with the Reaper." We're all going to die, and what defines us then will not be what we did for a living, but how well we lived. The means are entirely secondary to the ends, so what someone tells you is essential or superfluous will tell you pretty much everything you need to know about what they really care for.
A life of virtue is much broader and much wider than the narrow confines of career and status. It is also, in a sense, much deeper, not because there may be more to know, but because what we seek to understand looks to the very heart of things. I have sadly found that so much of our professional education is very deep, but hardly broad, while our version of liberal education is usually broad but rarely deep.
There's only a tension here if we misunderstand such terms. Neither breadth nor depth are defined by the quantity of what we learn, but the quality with which we learn it. Liberal studies are truly broad, because they are arts helpful in any human endeavor. Liberal studies are also deep because they strike to the root of our identity, as beings made to know the true and love the good.
My own experience has taught me that most professional studies teach you about a few skills very carefully, while most liberal studies teach you about many things very sloppily. In either case, we are missing the mark.
Show me the man of liberty, not necessarily a political or economic one, but one of the mind and heart, and you've shown me the man who sees the essential, who moves in a great space, and who puts his priorities in order. Using Seneca's earlier examples of virtue, he asks himself, whatever his situation, whether he is being brave, loyal, temperate, and kindly in anything and everything he does.
That is the essential, and that is the necessary. As soon as I hide my head to gain approval, or sell out another for my profit, or worry first about consuming more, or dispose of anyone who is inconvenient, I'm swapping the essential and the superfluous.
Written 1/2010
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