Rhetoric and the Liberal Education

Just rediscovering the obvious again: my rhetoric schtick overlaps with the principles of liberal-arts education. (Rhetoric - humanism - humanities - funny that.) Liberal arts is about developing character, wisdom, rather than about learning particular skills to apply on the objects of the world. It is about applying the rhetorical mode of reason, which cannot but have a reflexive effect on character. Following Garver, it is about educating rhetoricians rather than sophists--people who persuade other people by staking their own character, by opening themselves up to persuasion, who do not simply regard persuasion as a way of manipulating other people, but as the reason of the heart and the character.

The place of tradition, the core curriculum, is to provide resources for the young to develop their characters. But character is distinct from personality--character is not just expressed by actions, deeds, it is essentially expressed in relation to other people, it is political; developed within the context of the tradition (which the core curriculum provides). The idea of a unique self, sufficient unto itself, inner and essential, is alien to the entire idea of the rhetorical liberal arts. We have a core curriculum, rather than choosing our own texts, precisely because our character is generated by our polis, living and dead--and because character is developed as a relation between people who have read the same texts, character constitutes the relations of the polis as much as it is constituted by them.

The liberal arts are meant to generate plural capacities for plural characters, not individual personalities; plural capabilities for action in the polis, not individually self-satisfied contemplation; capacities for the varieties of office (officium) necessary to sustain the republic. The value of such plural character is inseparable from its function to sustain the polis; it is never intended for its own sake.