Leo Strauss: What Is Liberal Education?

Robert Maynard Hutchins Distinguished Service Professor
Department of Political Science
The University of Chicago
An Address Delivered
at the Tenth Annual Graduation Exercises
of the Basic Program of Liberal Education for Adults
June 6, 1959

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Leo Strauss was born in Germany in 1899. Since coming to the United States in 1938
he has been professor of political science and philosophy at the New School for
Social Research and professor of political science at the University of Chicago. In
1954-55 he was visiting professor of philosophy and political science at the Hebrew
University of Jerusalem. Among the books Professor Strauss has written are The
Political Philosophy of Hobbes, Natural Right and History, and Thoughts on
Machiavelli.
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You have acquired a liberal education. I congratulate you on your achievement.
If I were entitled to do so, I would praise you for your achievement. But I would be
untrue to the obligation which I have undertaken if I did not supplement my
congratulations with a warning. The liberal education which you have acquired will
avert the danger that the warning will be understood as a counsel of despair.

Liberal education is education in culture or toward culture. The finished
product of a liberal education is a cultured human being. "Culture" (cultura) means
primarily agriculture: the cultivation of the soil and its products, taking care of
the soil, improving the soil in accordance with its nature. "Culture" means
derivatively and today chiefly the cultivation of the mind, the taking care and
improving of the native faculties of the mind in accordance with the nature of the
mind. Just as the soil needs cultivators of the soil, the mind needs teachers. But
teachers are not as easy to come by as farmers. The teachers themselves are pupils
and must be pupils. But there cannot be an infinite regress: ultimately there must
be teachers who are not in turn pupils. Those teachers who are not in turn pupils
are the great minds or, in order to avoid any ambiguity in a matter of such
importance, the greatest minds. Such men are extremely rare. We are not likely to
meet any of them in any classroom. We are not likely to meet any of them anywhere.
It is a piece of good luck if there is a single one alive in one's time. For all
practical purposes, pupils, of whatever degree of proficiency, have access to the
teachers who are not in turn pupils, to the greatest minds, only through the great
books. Liberal education will then consist in studying with the proper care the
great books which the greatest minds have left behind -- a study in which the more
experienced pupils assist the less experienced pupils, including the beginners.

This is not an easy task, as would appear if we were to consider the formula
which I have just mentioned. That formula requires a long commentary. Many lives
have been spent and may still be spent in writing such commentaries. For instance,
what is meant by the remark that the great books should be studied "with the proper
care"? At present I mention only one difficulty which is obvious to everyone among
you: the greatest minds do not all tell us the same things regarding the most
important themes; the community of the greatest minds is rent by discord and even by
various kinds of discord. Whatever further consequences this may entail, it
certainly entails the consequence that liberal education cannot be simply
indoctrination. I mention yet another difficulty. "Liberal education is education in
culture." In what culture? Our answer is: culture in the sense of the Western
tradition. Yet Western culture is only one among many cultures. By limiting
ourselves to Western culture, do we not condemn liberal education to a kind of
parochialism, and is not parochialism incompatible with the liberalism, the
generosity, the open-mindedness, of liberal education? Our notion of liberal
education does not seem to fit an age which is aware of the fact that there is not
the culture of the human mind but a variety of cultures. Obviously, "culture" if
susceptible of being used in the plural is not quite the same thing as "culture"
which is a singulare tantum, which can be used only in the singular. "Culture" is
now no longer, as people say, an absolute but has become relative. It is not easy to
say what culture susceptible of being used in the plural means. As a consequence of
this obscurity people have suggested, explicitly or implicitly, that "culture" is
any pattern of conduct common to any human group. Hence we do not hesitate to speak
of the culture of suburbia or of the cultures of juvenile gangs both non-delinquent
and delinquent. In other words, every human being outside of lunatic asylums is a
cultured human being, for he participates in a culture. At the frontiers of research
there arises the question as to whether there are not cultures also of inmates of
lunatic asylums. If we contrast the present day usage of "culture" with the original
meaning, it is as if someone would say that the cultivation of a garden may consist
of the garden being littered with empty tin cans and whiskey bottles and used papers
of various descriptions thrown around the garden at random. Having arrived at this
point, we realize that we have lost our way somehow. Let us then make a fresh start
by raising the question: what can liberal education mean here and now?

Liberal education is literate education of a certain kind: some sort of
education in letters or through letters. There is no need to make a case for
literacy; every voter knows that modern democracy stands or falls by literacy. In
order to understand this need we must reflect on modern democracy. What is modern
democracy? It was once said that democracy is the regime that stands or falls by
virtue: a democracy is a regime in which all or most adults are men of virtue, and
since virtue seems to require wisdom, a regime in which all or most adults are
virtuous and wise, or the society in which all or most adults have developed their
reason to a high degree, or the rational society. Democracy in a word is meant to be
an aristocracy which has broadened into a universal aristocracy. Prior to the
emergence of modern democracy some doubts were felt whether democracy thus
understood is possible. As one of the two greatest minds among the theorists of
democracy put it, "If there were a people consisting of gods, it would rule itself
democratically. A government of such perfection is not suitable for human beings."
This still and small voice has by now become a high-powered loudspeaker. There
exists a whole science -- the science which I among thousands profess to teach,
political science -- which so to speak has no other theme than the contrast between
the original conception of democracy, or what one may call the ideal of democracy,
and democracy as it is. According to an extreme view which is the predominant view
in the profession, the ideal of democracy was a sheer delusion and the only thing
which matters is the behavior of democracies and the behavior of men in democracies.
Modem democracy, so far from being universal aristocracy, would be mass rule were it
not for the fact that the mass cannot rule but is ruled by elites, i.e., groupings
of men who for whatever reason are on top or have a fair chance to arrive at the
top; one of the most important virtues required for the smooth working of democracy,
as far as the mass is concerned, is said to be electoral apathy, i.e., lack of
public spirit; not indeed the salt of the earth but the salt of modern democracy are
those citizens who read nothing except the sports page and the comic section.
Democracy is then not indeed mass rule but mass culture. A mass culture is a culture
which can be appropriated by the meanest capacities without any intellectual and
moral effort whatsoever and at a very low monetary price. But even a mass culture
and precisely a mass culture requires a constant supply of what are called new
ideas, which are the products of what are called creative minds: even singing
commercials lose their appeal if they are not varied from time to time. But
democracy, even if it is only regarded as the hard shell which protects the soft
mass culture, requires in the long run qualities of an entirely different kind:
qualities of dedication, of concentration, of breadth and of depth. Thus we
understand most easily what liberal education means here and now. Liberal education
is the counter-poison to mass culture, to the corroding effects of mass culture, to
its inherent tendency to produce nothing but "specialists without spirit or vision
and voluptuaries without heart." Liberal education is the ladder by which we try to
ascend from mass democracy to democracy as originally meant. Liberal education is
the necessary endeavor to found an aristocracy within democratic mass society.
Liberal education reminds those members of a mass democracy who have ears to hear,
of human greatness.

Someone might say that this notion of liberal education is merely political,
that it dogmatically assumes the goodness of modem democracy. Can we not turn our
backs on modem society? Can we not return to nature, to the life of preliterate
tribes? Are we not crushed, nauseated, degraded by the mass of printed material, the
graveyards of so many beautiful and majestic forests? It is not sufficient to say
that this is mere romanticism, that we today cannot return to nature: may not coming
generations, after a man-wrought cataclysm, be compelled to live in illiterate
tribes? Will our thoughts concerning thermonuclear wars not be affected by such
prospects? Certain it is that the horrors of mass culture (which include guided
tours to integer nature) render intelligible the longing for a return to nature. An
illiterate society at its best is a society ruled by age-old ancestral custom which
it traces to original founders, gods or sons of gods or pupils of gods; since there
are no letters in such a society, the late heirs cannot be in direct contact with
the original founders; they cannot know whether the fathers or grandfathers have not
deviated from what the original founders meant, or have not defaced the divine
message by merely human additions or subtractions; hence an illiterate society
cannot consistently act on its principle that the best is the oldest. Only letters
which have come down from the founders can make it possible for the founders to
speak directly to the latest heirs. It is then self-contradictory to wish to return
to illiteracy. We are compelled to live with books. But life is too short to live
with any but the greatest books. In this respect as well as in some others, we do
well to take as our model that one among the greatest minds who because of his
common sense is the mediator between us and the greatest minds. Socrates never wrote
a book but be read books. Let me quote a statement of Socrates which says almost
everything that has to be said on our subject, with the noble simplicity and quiet
greatness of the ancients. "Just as others are pleased by a good horse or dog or
bird, I myself am pleased to an even higher degree by good friends. . . . And the
treasures of the wise men of old which they left behind by writing them in books, I
unfold and go through them together with my friends, and if we see something good,
we pick it out and regard it as a great gain if we thus become useful to one
another." The man who reports this utterance, adds the remark: "When I heard this,
it seemed to me both that Socrates was blessed and that be was leading those
listening to him toward perfect gentlemanship." This report is defective since it
does not tell us anything as to what Socrates did regarding those passages in the
books of the wise men of old of which he did not know whether they were good. From
another report we learn that Euripides once gave Socrates the writing of Heraclitus
and then asked him for his opinion about that writing. Socrates said: "What I have
understood is great and noble; I believe this is also true of what I have not
understood; but one surely needs for understanding that writing some special sort of
a diver."

Education to perfect gentlemanship, to human excellence, liberal education
consists in reminding oneself of human excellence, of human greatness. In what way,
by what means does liberal education remind us of human greatness? We cannot think
highly enough of what liberal education is meant to be. We have beard Plato's
suggestion that education in the highest sense is philosophy. Philosophy is quest
for wisdom or quest for knowledge regarding the most important, the highest, or the
most comprehensive things; such knowledge, he suggested, is virtue and is happiness.
But wisdom is inaccessible to man and hence virtue and happiness will always be
imperfect. In spite of this, the philosopher, who, as such, is not simply wise, is
declared to be the only true king; be is declared to possess all the excellences of
which man's mind is capable, to the highest degree. From this we must draw the
conclusion that we cannot be philosophers -- that we cannot acquire the highest form
of education. We must not be deceived by the fact that we meet many people who say
that they are philosophers. For those people employ a loose expression which is
perhaps necessitated by administrative convenience. Often they mean merely that they
are members of philosophy departments. And it is as absurd to expect members of
philosophy departments to be philosophers as it is to expect members of art
departments to be artists. We cannot be philosophers but we can love philosophy; we
can try to philosophize. This philosophizing consists at any rate primarily and in a
way chiefly in listening to the conversation between the great philosophers or, more
generally and more cautiously, between the greatest minds, and therefore in studying
the great books. The greatest minds to whom we ought to listen are by no means
exclusively the greatest minds of the West. It is merely an unfortunate necessity
which prevents us from listening to the greatest minds of India and of China: we do
not understand their languages, and we cannot learn all languages. To repeat,
liberal education consists in listening to the conversation among the greatest
minds. But here we are confronted with the overwhelming difficulty that this
conversation does not take place without our help -- that in fact we must bring
about that conversation. The greatest minds utter monologues. We must transform
their monologues into a dialogue, their "side by side" into a "together." The
greatest minds utter monologues even when they write dialogues. When we look at the
Platonic dialogues, we observe that there is never a dialogue among minds of the
highest order: all Platonic dialogues are dialogues between a superior man and men
inferior to him. Plato apparently felt that one could not write a dialogue between
two men of the highest order. We must then do something which the greatest minds
were unable to do. Let us face this difficulty -- a difficulty so great that it
seems to condemn liberal education as an absurdity. Since the greatest minds
contradict one another regarding the most important matters, they compel us to judge
of their monologues; we cannot take on trust what any one of them says. On the other
hand we cannot but notice that we are not competent to be judges. This state of
things is concealed from us by a number of facile delusions. We somehow believe that
our point of view is superior, higher than those of the greatest minds -- either
because our point of view is that of our time, and our time, being later than the
time of the greatest minds, can be presumed to be superior to their times; or else
because we believe that each of the greatest minds was right from his point of view
but not, as be claims, simply right: we know that there cannot be the simply true
substantive view but only a simply true formal view; that formal view consists in
the insight that every comprehensive view is relative to a specific perspective, or
that all comprehensive views are mutually exclusive and none can be simply true. The
facile delusions which conceal from us our true situation all amount to this, that
we are, or can be, wiser than the wisest men of the past. We are thus induced to
play the part not of attentive and docile listeners but of impresarios or lion-
tamers. Yet we must face our awesome situation, created by the necessity that we try
to be more than attentive and docile listeners, namely, judges, and yet we are not
competent to be judges. As it seems to me, the cause of this situation is that we
have lost all simply authoritative traditions in which we could trust, the nomos
which gave us authoritative guidance, because our immediate teachers and teachers'
teachers believed in the possibility of a simply rational society. Each of us here
is compelled to find his bearings by his own powers however defective they may be.

We have no comfort other than that inherent in this activity. Philosophy, we
have learned, must be on its guard against the wish to be edifying -- philosophy can
only be intrinsically edifying. We cannot exert our understanding without from time
to time understanding something of importance; and this act of understanding may be
accompanied by the awareness of our understanding, by the understanding of
understanding, by noesis noeseos, and this is so high, so pure, so noble an
experience that Aristotle could ascribe it to his God. This experience is entirely
independent of whether what we understand primarily is pleasing or displeasing, fair or ugly. It leads us to realize that all evils are in a sense necessary if there is to be understanding. It enables us to accept all evils which befall us and which may well break our hearts in the spirit of good citizens of the city of God. By becoming aware of the dignity of the mind, we realize the true ground of the dignity of man and therewith the goodness of the world, whether we understand it as created or as uncreated, which is the home of man because it is the home of the human mind.

Liberal education, which consists in the constant intercourse with the
greatest minds, is a training in the highest form of modesty, not to say of
humility. It is at the same time a training in boldness: it demands from us the
complete break with the noise, the rush, the thoughtlessness, the cheapness of the
Vanity Fair of the intellectuals as well as of their enemies. It demands from us the boldness implied in the resolve to regard the accepted views as mere opinions, or to regard the average opinions as extreme opinions which are at least as likely to be wrong as the most strange or the least popular opinions. Liberal education is liberation from vulgarity. The Greeks had a beautiful word for "vulgarity"; they called it apeirokalia, lack of experience in things beautiful. Liberal education supplies us with experience in things beautiful.