The Arts of the Mind

A convincing case could be made, I think, that if ever there were a moment when looking back at the origin of an idea could give us a needed perspective, now might be such a time. We seem to have lost the plot in much of the schooling we confer on our young people. Good plots are organized to an end, but can we really say the same for the multitudinous, uncoordinated courses of study we offer our students and call an education? Not the curriculum, I mean, of specific subjects—chemistry, mathematics, engineering—but the basics which arise from certain presuppositions we hold about what an education—the training of the mind—is ultimately for. We should not be surprised if we slip and slide when we cannot say why we should try to cultivate our intellect.

Western education in its traditional form is, or was, organized around what is termed the seven liberal arts. The phrase likely rings hopelessly antiquated, even quaint, to most of us these days, but until we understand what they were originally after, we place ourselves outside the reach of the real help they can yet offer. In a textbook on writing from more than half a century ago, Robert Hughes and P. Albert Duhamel, in their Rhetoric: Principles and Usage, 1962, describe the traditional liberal arts curriculum this way:

Considered necessary parts of the training of the truly educated man until the Renaissance, these seven arts were divided into two parts: the Trivium and the Quadrivium. The Quadrivium, which was the course of study leading to the Master of Arts degree, consisted of arithmetic, music, geometry, and astronomy. The Trivium, which was the course of study leading to the Bachelor of Arts degree, dealt with grammar, logic, and rhetoric. The Quadrivium consisted of subject-matter arts, studied for the information which they convey about their respective subjects…. The Trivium dealt with disciplinary arts, studied because they train the mind to understand, communicate and reason correctly.

The Trivium, then, was the preprofessional course of study, as I have heard it modernly described. Though we can take the point in that description, it was more than what we today call a core curriculum. It had—and has—to do with inculcating and training the abilities which have specially to do with being human: using language to represent and symbolize one’s awareness, conceptualizing those perceptions and relating them rationally, and acknowledging their emotive value and strength and appeal. More than a core, the three studies of the trivium—grammar and logic and rhetoric—comprise the nucleus of all subsequent and particularized learning. Hughes and Duhamel continue:

The arts of the Trivium are not concerned with a limited subject matter area, but can be applied to all subject matters. Logic is not the art of correct reasoning in physics or philosophy, but the art of reasoning rightly on any subject. The art of rhetoric teaches how to write effectively—not merely on political or social problems—but on any problem about which people can deliberate.

But the purpose of these three nuclear studies was originally after something even more than rational deliberation and clear conceptualization. The Swiss scholar and art historian Titus Burckhardt, in his Mirror of the Intellect, 1987, speaks of the “contemplative structure” of this curriculum: “They were,” he says, “the expression of so many faculties of the soul, faculties demanding harmonious development. This is why they were also called arts.” And this mention of the soul and our education of it (what Plato called our tendance, or watchful care, over it, which he believed was the highest business of life) points to the first purposes of both parts of the liberal arts curriculum. If the Trivium was, as Burckhardt puts it, “a schooling in both language and thought,” the Quadrivium too looked beyond the obvious to its metaphysical sources: the end of arithmetic is not merely calculating, but contemplating how it is that number arises from unity; geometry is number seen in linear configurations, not merely the manipulation of numerals; music has to do with harmony, and astronomy with the coordinated rhythm of the visible skies—all to the inciting of wonder, the very origin of philosophy and perhaps even the counsel needed in a time of confusion. Says Burckhardt:

Number, proportion, harmony, and rhythm are clear manifestations of unity in diversity, and clear indications of the way of return from diversity to unity. According to Boethius [the fifth century Roman philosopher] the essence of things is intimately connected with unity: the more unity a thing possesses in itself, the more profoundly it participates in being.

It might just be that we need now such a return in the direction of unity, of what is common to us not just as citizens of a particular nation, but as human beings of one shared nature. It has been said that what binds us most essentially to one another in the modern world is economics, but that would be too narrow and sorry a hope for the original vision of the liberal arts. The liberality, or freedom, which they are set up to inculcate is to be had whether rich or comfortable or poor—a state of mind found, if ever, only after a disciplined inner search under the guidance of language in the direction of higher things. These serious arts can help us address our now most pressing need: to be once again serious persons.

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