Seneca on Liberal Arts Education 16

. . . "Apion, the scholar, who drew crowds to his lectures all over Greece in the days of Gaius Caesar and was acclaimed a Homer scholar by every state, used to maintain that Homer, when he had finished his two poems, the Iliad and the Odyssey, added a preliminary poem to his work, wherein he embraced the whole Trojan war^.

"The argument which Apion adduced to prove this statement was that Homer had purposely inserted in the opening line two letters which contained a key to the number of his books.

"A man who wishes to know many things must know such things as these, and must take no thought of all the time which one loses by ill-health, public duties, private duties, daily duties, and sleep.

"Apply the measure to the years of your life; they have no room for all these things." . . .

--Seneca the Younger, Moral Letters to  Lucilius, 88 (tr Gummere)

Seneca seems to be getting a bit frustrated and snarky about the supposed 'values' of misguided attempts at liberal learning, and I honestly can't blame him.

I had never heard of Apion before reading this passage from Seneca, and perhaps that is a weakness in my education, but I've seen much the same, time and time again. I too have been tempted to dedicate myself exclusively to technical details at the expense of meaning, seeing the moss on the trees and ignoring not just the forest but the actual tree, and developing elaborate hypotheses based upon the flimsiest of evidence. It all sounds good and looks good, but it's really just sound and fury.

I would think it wonderful if there was indeed a third Homeric epic, and I'd gobble that text down in an instant. But I think what I love about Homer is hopefully what Seneca also loved about him. The plot, the language, the attention to character and to detail are all only means to an end. I ask myself only, in the end, whether these narratives have helped me and others to live better lives. All that thinking is there to help with the living. That's a classic Stoic approach.

I find, with a certain degree of both comfort and frustration, that the problem of sound education is hardly a new one. It is now, as it was in the time of Seneca, a question of the intersection of quantity and quality, and of breadth and depth.

If I spend my time concerned only with knowing more in quantity, I will easily neglect how well and thoroughly I understand something in quality. If I spend my time concerned only with the specifics of depth in one field, I will easily neglect how I must understand all things in their breadth.

A liberal education is most certainly not professional, in that it isn't designed to get me a job. If the job, and the professional success that comes with it, are all that you want, liberal learning isn't for you. Yet if you'd like your learning to help build the core of your humanity, don't confuse how much you learn with how well you learn it, and don't assume that an attention to detail negates the bigger picture.

I regularly ask myself whether I am first and foremost defined by my profession, or by my humanity. It gets quite a bit easier when I can laugh at that ridiculous question.

I've been told over the years that doctors and nurses need to learn about medicine, and lawyers need to learn about legal precedents, and teachers need to learn about lesson plans and assessment tools. This is just like a carpenter, electrician, or plumber learning about the tools of their trade. This must, apparently, be done by covering as much material in as little time as possible.

By all means, learn these servile skills. They are useful tools, but they are also just tools, and that is why they are servile. Will they make me a better person, capable of living well? Let us not reduce the liberal arts to another set of professional arts. The liberal arts are a condition for a philosophical life, and only the true philosophical life, whether practiced in the hallowed halls of academia or in daily life on the street, will foster virtue.

Over the last two decades, I've seen the increasing prevalence of people very well skilled in their trades grandstanding as authorities of the measure of truth and falsehood, of right and wrong. I see physicists telling me about God, lawyers and doctors telling me about moral standards, and politicians telling me what true happiness really is.

There's no reason they couldn't do this as men and women committed to a life of wisdom, but their professional skills certainly don't qualify them at all. Only our commitment to genuine philosophy, nurtured by the real liberal arts, could ever do that. 

Written 1/2010