The Tradition of the West
Robert M. Hutchins
["The Tradition of the West" is published
in The Great Conversation: The Substance of a Liberal Education,
Vol.I, The Great Books of the Western World (Chicago: Encyclopaedia
Brittainnica, Inc., 1952]
Note about science in the Western tradition
The tradition of the West is an
intellectual dialogue of opposing views about the central ideas
and ideals of the historical civilization that developed out of
the ancient Hebraic and Greek cultures. From Hebraic culture
flowed the religious concerns of the West, including Judaism and
Christianity. Out of Greek culture (Hellenism) came philosophy,
science, and technology. The origin of the tradition of the West
in ancient Hebraism and Hellenism made the relationship of
religion and science one of the original and basic subjects in
the Western dialogue. This relationship appears in a variety of
themes in the tradition, such as the relation of faith to reason
and spiritualism to materialism. For over two thousand years
(ca. 500 BCE - 1500 CE), the tradition of the West was of
interest primarily to European societies. The essence of the
tradition was, however, the intellectual discussion itself, not
the ethnicities or political systems of the societies sponsoring
the discussion, or the European residence of principal authors
and participants in the dialogue. The scientific revolution
(1542-1686) proved that the essence of the tradition was the
discussion of ideas, because many non-European societies became
interested in the Western tradition through science and adopted
its ideas and ideals. (Some societies of course had those ideas
and ideals imposed upon them.) The tradition of the West is
alive wherever persons read and discuss the major writings in
the tradition and believe that the ideas and ideals of the
tradition are important in the conduct of their own lives,
regardless of those persons' gender, race, class, ethnicity,
cultural background, or geographical homeland.
Hutchins' essay, "The Tradition of the West," defines
and defends the Western intellectual tradition. The essay had
three important contexts. The first context was the debate in
the United States over liberal arts education versus vocational
education. Hutchins defended the liberal arts education based in
reading of the "great books of the Western world."
Indeed, he had made the great books the basis of the University
of Chicago's undergraduate education. A second context was the
mid-twentieth century struggle against fascism and
totalitarianism. Hutchins believed that a liberal arts education
based in the great books was a defense against the
authoritarianism of fascism. The third context was the wave of
decolonization after 1945, when European colonies became
independent nations. Decolonization generated a political
rhetoric that identified the Western tradition with colonial
oppression of non-European societies, thereby denying that the
tradition supported freedom. These historical contexts have
largely passed from the scene today. Separated from them,
Hutchins' essay still provides a useful conceptualization and
defense of the tradition of the West.
Ronald Tobey, Professor
Department of History 049
University of California
Riverside CA 92521-0204 USA
June 10, 1998
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The tradition of the West is embodied in the Great Conversation
that began in the dawn of history and that continues to the present
day. Whatever the merits of other civilizations in other respects,
no civilization is like that of the West in this respect. No other
civilization can claim that its defining characteristic is a
dialogue of this sort. No dialogue in any other civilization can
compare with that of the West in the number of great works of the
mind that have contributed to this dialogue. The goal toward which
Western society moves is the Civilization of the Dialogue. The
spirit of Western civilization is the spirit of inquiry. Its
dominant element is the Logos. Nothing is to remain
undiscussed. Everybody is to speak his mind. No proposition is to be
left unexamined. The exchange of ideas is held to be the path to the
realization of the potentialities of the race.
At a time when the West is most often represented by its friends
as the source of that technology for which the whole world yearns
and by its enemies as the fountainhead of selfishness and greed, it
is worth remarking that, though both elements can be found in the
Great Conversation, the Western ideal is not one or the other strand
in the Conversation, but the Conversation itself. It would be an
exaggeration to say that Western civilization means these books. The
exaggeration would lie in the omission of the plastic arts and
music, which have quite as important a part in Western civilization
as the great productions included in this set. But to the extent to
which books can present the idea of a civilization, the idea of
Western civilization is here presented.
These books are the means of understanding our society and
ourselves. They contain the great ideas that dominate us without our
knowing it. There is no comparable repository of our tradition.
To put an end to the spirit of inquiry that has characterized the
West it is not necessary to burn the books. All we have to do is to
leave them unread for a few generations. On the other hand, the
revival of interest in these books from time to time throughout
history has provided the West with new drive and creativeness. Great
books have salvaged, preserved, and transmitted the tradition on
many occasions similar to our own.
The books contain not merely the tradition, but also the great
exponents of the tradition. Their writings are models of the fine
and liberal arts. They hold before us what Whitehead called "the
habitual vision of greatness." These books have endured because
men in every era have been lifted beyond themselves by the
inspiration of their example. Sir Richard Livingstone said: "We
are tied down, all our days and for the greater part of our days, to
the commonplace. That is where contact with great thinkers, great
literature helps. In their company we are still in the ordinary
world, but it is the ordinary world transfigured and seen through
the eyes of wisdom and genius. And some of their vision becomes our
own."
Until very recently these books have been central in education in
the West. They were the principal instrument of liberal education,
the education that men acquired as an end in itself, for no other
purpose than that it would help them to be men, to lead human lives,
and better lives than they would otherwise be able to lead.
The aim of liberal education is human excellence, both private and
public (for man is a political animal). Its object is the excellence
of man as man and man as citizen. It regards man as an end, not as a
means; and it regards the ends of life, and not the means to it. For
this reason it is the education of free men. Other types of
education or training treat men as means to some other end, or are
at best concerned with the means of life, with earning a living, and
not with its ends.
The substance of liberal education appears to consist in the
recognition of basic problems, in knowledge of distinctions and
interrelations in subject matter, and in the comprehension of ideas.
Liberal education seeks to clarify the basic problems and to
understand the way in which one problem bears upon another. It
strives for a grasp of the methods by which solutions can be reached
and the formulation of standards for testing solutions proposed. The
liberally educated man understands, for example, the relation
between the problem of the immortality of the soul and the problem
of the best form of government; he understands that the one problem
cannot be solved by the same method as the other, and that the test
that he will have to bring to bear upon solutions proposed differs
from one problem to the other.
The liberally educated man understands, by understanding the
distinctions and interrelations of the basic fields of subject
matter, the differences and connections between poetry and history,
science and philosophy, theoretical and practical science; he
understands that the same methods cannot be applied in all these
fields; he knows the methods appropriate to each.
The liberally educated man comprehends the ideas that are relevant
to the basic problems and that operate in the basic fields of
subject matter. He knows what is meant by soul, state, God, beauty,
and by the other terms that are basic to the discussion of
fundamental issues. He has some notion of the insights that these
ideas, singly or in combination, pro-ride concerning human
experience.
The liberally educated man has a mind that can operate well in all
fields. He may be a specialist in one field. But he can understand
anything important that is said in any held and can see and use the
light that it sheds upon his own. The liberally educated man is at
home in the world of ideas and in the world of practical affairs,
too, because he understands the relation of the two. He may not be
at home in the world of practical affairs in the sense of liking the
life he finds about him; but he will be at home in that world in the
sense that he understands it. He may even derive from his liberal
education some conception of the difference between a bad world and
a good one and some notion of the ways in which one might be turned
into the other.
The method of liberal education is the liberal arts, and the
result of liberal education is discipline in those arts. The liberal
artist learns to read, write, speak, listen, understand, and think.
He learns to reckon, measure, and manipulate matter, quantity, and
motion in order to predict, produce, and exchange. As we live in the
tradition, whether we know it or not, so we are all liberal artists,
whether we know it or not. We all practice the liberal arts, well or
badly, all the time every day. As we should understand the tradition
as well as we can in order to understand ourselves, so we should be
as good liberal artists as we can in order to become as fully human
as we can.
The liberal arts are not merely indispensable; they are
unavoidable. Nobody can decide for himself whether he is going to be
a human being. The only question open to him is whether he will be
an ignorant, undeveloped one or one who has sought to reach the
highest point he is capable of attaining. The question, in short, is
whether he will be a poor liberal artist or a good one.
The tradition of the West in education is the tradition of the
liberal arts. Until very recently nobody took seriously the
suggestion that there could be any other ideal. The educational
ideas of John Locke, for example, which were directed to the
preparation of the pupil to fit conveniently into the social and
economic environment in which he found himself, made no impression
on Locke's contemporaries. And so it will be found that other voices
raised in criticism of liberal education fell upon deaf ears until
about a half-century ago.
This Western devotion to the liberal arts and liberal education
must have been largely responsible for the emergence of democracy as
an ideal. The democratic ideal is equal opportunity for full human
development, and, since the liberal arts are the basic means of such
development, devotion to democracy naturally results from devotion
to them. On the other hand, if acquisition of the liberal arts is an
intrinsic part of human dignity, then the democratic ideal demands
that we should strive to see to it that all have the opportunity to
attain to the fullest measure of the liberal arts that is possible
to each.
The present crisis in the world has been precipitated by the
vision of the range of practical and productive art offered by the
West. All over the world men are on the move, expressing their
determination to share in the technology in which the West has
excelled. This movement is one of the most spectacular in history,
and everybody is agreed upon one thing about it: we do not know how
to deal with it. It would be tragic if in our preoccupation with the
crisis we failed to hold up as a thing of value for the world, even
as that which might show us a way in which to deal with the crisis,
our vision of the best that the West has to offer. That vision is
the range of the liberal arts and liberal education. Our
determination about the distribution of the fullest measure of these
arts and this education will measure our loyalty to the best in our
own past and our total service to the future of the world .
The great books were written by the greatest liberal artists. They
exhibit the range of the liberal arts. The authors were also the
greatest teachers. They taught one another. They taught all previous
generations, up to a few years ago. The question is whether they can
teach us. To this question we now turn.