BY MARÍA BULLÓN-FERNÁNDEZ, PATRICIA GRANT, MICHELLE MALDONADO, MICHAEL A. ZAMPELLI, S.J., AND ROOSEVELT MONTÁS
Four experts discuss whether the Western canon is still at the heart of a liberal arts education and whether it should be. These four essays are based on the new book by Roosevelt Montás called Rescuing Socrates: How the Great Books Changed My Life and Why They Matter for a New Generation (Princeton University Press, 2021). It is followed by a comment from Montás.
One Size Does Not Fit All
Right from the start, Roosevelt Montás announces that Rescuing Socrates is both “a personal and a polemical book.” It is personal because it traces Montás’ encounters with “great books” after emigrating as a 12-year-old Dominican to New York City and experiencing Columbia’s famous Core Curriculum, first as a student and later as a teacher and administrator. It is polemical, because it confronts head-on, debates about the purpose of a liberal arts education and supports the study of “great books” in the Western tradition. What sets this book apart from most, not all, defenses of the Western canon is that the author is a person of color and sets up his defense, partly, from this viewpoint.
The arguments in the book are more complex than its polemical title might suggest. In the course of an introduction, four chapters, and an epilogue, Montás says he “[weaves] together three strands: a discussion of the work of each author, a meditation on how each has helped me make sense of my own life, and a critique of the practice of liberal education in the contemporary university.” Montás’ central argument is that liberal education is primarily a liberating education; it is about transcending material limitations, asking “what living is for,” and finding freedom in doing so. More controversially, this kind of education, to Montás, can transcend identity. Liberal education gives all students, not just white affluent students, the space and time to fulfill their human desire to go “beyond questions of survival to questions of existence.” It teaches students to become self-aware, to understand the world they live in and the structures and ideologies that underpin it, so that they can become political agents for change. This type of education, he argues, is most especially valuable for low-income students. Through some effective storytelling, deeply personal meditations on his family relationships, and on his personal experience with psychoanalysis, Montás offers his own personal story to prove his claim that Western authors can speak to white students and BIPOC students alike.
St. Augustine, Socrates, Freud, and Gandhi are each the main subject of one of the four chapters in the book. I will highlight just two threads connecting the four thinkers. First is a commitment to self-knowledge and self-awareness and to understanding the role that the self plays in society in the context of the search for the common good. Gandhi, the only non-Western author, is included both as a direct link to Socrates in his focus on the self and his notion of truth and as a means by which to challenge the centrality of the individual in Western culture.
The second thread linking these authors is their belief in truth. Montás argues that exploring notions of truth, which he sees, like Plato, as equivalent to the good, is central to liberal education. This leads him to argue that the current “crisis of consensus” about the liberal arts curriculum and the rejection of the Western canon is rooted in Nietzsche’s and his postmodernist intellectual heirs’ rejection of the notion of truth and objectivity.
Two Seattle University students (above) explore notions of truth in the campus student center. Photo courtesy of Seattle University.
For Montás the purpose of a liberal education is not to teach one notion of the good, but to ask questions about it: the good becomes “the central inquiry of liberal education.” Postmodernism, however, not only undermines any notion of the human good, but even makes such an inquiry seem naive, for, from a postmodernist stance, he argues, the good is no more than someone’s cynical ploy to exert power. This is not a new argument and it is somewhat reductive. Exploring how notions of truth are contingent and immersed in vectors of power could, but does not, necessarily have to lead students to reject any notion of truth. Placed in the last chapter of the book, moreover, this argument obscures the complex role that other major forces that Montás himself briefly mentioned earlier in the book, such as late capitalism, play in the current devaluing of liberal education.
Montás argues, too, that what is often identified as the Western tradition has a special claim in general education curricula in the United States, a nation founded on principles primarily influenced by that tradition. While this is a reasonable argument, it raises an important question: If a major aim of liberal education is to transform our students and encourage them to be self-aware, might non-Western texts not accomplish this quite effectively too? Would it not be as, if not more, transformative for students to be taken outside their Western context to explore other cultural assumptions?
More crucially, if those of us teaching in U.S. universities teach primarily Western authors based on the premise that we are in a Western country, aren’t we participating in the erasure of indigenous and other cultures that have also shaped the United States? A similar argument could be made about gender, as all the authors Montás writes about are male.
More unique than Montás’ argument that the purpose of liberal education is to transform our students and empower them to be self-aware agents, an argument central to Jesuit education, is the way he constructs his case, that is, through an exploration of his own personal transformation, compelling analyses of works that have affected him, and reflections on the history of liberal education in the United States.
Rescuing Socrates is polemical, as Montás promises, but it is polemical in a carefully argued way. It adds valuable perspectives to current debates about what we ought to teach and why. Whether or not one agrees with them, it is worth reading and engaging with.
María Bullón-Fernández is director of the University Honors Program, associate dean for Arts and Humanities, and professor of English at Seattle University.
The featured cover photo (above) is courtesy of Balázs Horváth via Unsplash.