My close friend and I often discuss our classes, though our courses of study couldn’t be more different. She is majoring in Urban Studies, enrolled in a Civic Leadership Program, and taking a class this semester titled Poverty, Justice, & Transformation. Her educational path is preparing her for community-based non-profit work, a tangible and direct way to help others. Meanwhile, I spend my school days reading Wordsworth, translating Cicero, and studying the paintings of Botticelli. Compared to her selflessly practical focus, my academic pursuits feel indulgent and gratuitous. My studies are worthwhile, perhaps, but they appear distant from the needs of the world.
I’ve always felt this tension between my thirst for truth and my desire to serve others. At times, it seems like I must sacrifice serving others to study what I love—literature, philosophy, languages, art. Having the freedom to shape my own academic path as a college student only sharpens this tension. If I want to think with Plato about the definition of justice, how can I ignore the injustice unfolding right outside my door?
Liberal learning has long been falling out of favor. Critics of the liberal arts make reasonable arguments—why care about literature or philosophy when people can’t get food on the table? Why study something “useless” when other fields offer tangible ways to improve the lives of others? Ultimately, the criticisms come down to one central question: can the liberal arts serve others, or are they merely a selfish luxury?
This question is one that every serious scholar must consider. Luckily, the wisdom of thinkers from ages past can guide us toward an answer. It begins with correcting society’s beliefs about what the liberal arts are and what they offer us. To help reform society’s understanding, I turn to the 20th-century Catholic philosopher Josef Pieper.
In his book Leisure: the Basis of Culture, Pieper writes a compelling defense of the liberal arts as meaningful and necessary. He defines the liberal arts as “ways of human action which have their justification in themselves…The ‘liberality’ or ‘freedom’ of the liberal arts consists in their not being disposable for purposes, that they do not need to be legitimized by a social function, by being ‘work’” (41). In other words, the liberal arts are those things that are done for their own sake, not in the service of separate ends. Their value is intrinsic, not instrumental. For Pieper, the foundation of liberal learning is leisure, which he defines not as idleness or escapism, but as “the disposition of receptive understanding, of contemplative beholding, and immersion—in the real” (50). While leisure may take place in the classroom, it is certainly not confined to one. Pieper argues that this contemplative and receptive posture requires a particular inner attitude, a “celebrating spirit” (52). In this way, all leisurely activity, including the liberal arts, depends upon a joyful affirmation of reality. One must acknowledge that the world is a wonderful place—rich with truth, goodness, and beauty, even amidst suffering—before one can genuinely pursue liberal learning.
One must acknowledge that the world is a wonderful place—rich with truth, goodness, and beauty, even amidst suffering—before one can genuinely pursue liberal learning.
A proper conception of the liberal arts defeats the argument that they are selfish to pursue. In fact, liberal learning nurtures an outward-facing disposition in a number of different ways. First, the leisurely activity at the heart of liberal education is itself a process of “un-selfing.” Pieper writes that leisure is the attitude of someone “who opens himself; not of someone who seizes but of one who lets go, who lets himself go” (51). In studying the liberal arts—whether it be philosophy or geology or art history—one becomes completely absorbed in some fascinating feature of existence. For a time, the self recedes, suspended in attentive appreciation.
Second, contemplation perfects not just the individual, but society. Dominican priest and philosopher A.G. Sertillanges agrees with this social dimension of liberal education: “The time of a thinker, when he really uses it, is in reality charity to all; only thus do we appreciate it properly. The man of truth belongs to the human race with truth itself; there is no risk of selfishness when one has isolated oneself jealously to serve this sublime and universal benefactor of mankind.” Liberal education shapes good citizens, preparing people for productive political contribution. It equips students with skills of reasoning and self-expression that are essential for democracy and shared life.
Dr. Elizabeth Corey, Professor of Political Science and Director of the Honors Program at Baylor University, has much to say about the value of a liberal education, especially for the person living in a democratic society. When I interviewed her, she shared that she had recently been called to serve jury duty for a man that was on trial for committing a felony: “I realized in that trial that I had things to bring to the jury that were really helpful because of what I have learned through liberal education—how to have a conversation, how to set the parameters for people who are very different to come together and dispute some really weighted issues.” For Dr. Corey, liberal education is not something set apart from the needs of our society; rather, it equips us to respond to them with empathy and equity.
Lastly, liberal education is not selfish because it elicits a burning desire to invite others into the contemplative life. Witnessing a startling sunrise or listening to a Tchaikovsky concerto is definitely self-fulfilling, but it also turns one outward towards other people. Like the enlightened man in Plato’s Allegory of the Cave, the liberally educated person yearns to guide others toward the light to share in their contemplative experience of truth and wonder.
But as essential as contemplation is, it does not encompass the whole of a well-lived life. The liberal arts do not ask us to retreat from the world indefinitely, nor are they properly practiced in isolation. A true liberal education equips us to return to the world, ready to see it more vividly and love it more passionately. When conducted properly, liberal learning nurtures friendship between the student and the world. The world offers itself up to the student by revealing its beauty, truth, and goodness in moments of leisure. In return, the student responds not with grasping but with gratitude, as he seeks to love and serve the world and its inhabitants.
A true liberal education equips us to return to the world, ready to see it more vividly and love it more passionately.
Work in the world is a necessary part of life. Unlike leisure, it is purely instrumental, but similar to leisure, it is crucial to fulfilling our purpose as human beings. Sertillanges supports this idea: “A country priest who devotes himself to his parishioners, a doctor who turns away from study to give help in urgent cases, a young man of good family who adopts a calling to help his people and in doing so has to turn his back on liberal studies, are not profaning the gift that is in them, they are paying homage to the True which is one and the same being with the Good.” When one works to love others in true charity, it can never be contrary to the vision of goodness and truth which the liberal arts point to.
The conviction that true liberal learning turns us outward points to a potential resolution to the tension between study and service.While fields like social work and public health are urgent and valuable, studying the liberal arts shapes how we see the world and ignites a desire to act in it. Literature stretches our human sympathy, philosophy reminds us that everyone wrestles with meaning, and science intensifies our reverence for all creation.
Dr. Rebecca Flavin, Senior Lecturer of Political Science and Director of Engaged Learning Curriculum at Baylor University, has a foot in both worlds. As a lecturer in the College of Arts and Sciences, she studies and teaches political philosophy, but in her role in the Office of Engaged Learning, she seeks to integrate scholarship with service. She points out another crucial reason why liberal study must predicate service in the world: “In order to understand why people are sleeping on the streets, you need a liberal education . . . you’re not going to remedy the problem of people sleeping on the streets if you don’t understand the complex causes that contribute to . . . homelessness, as an example.” An education in the liberal arts gives one the prerequisite understanding to serve others in a productive manner.
I do not seek to diminish the important work of non-profit organizations or global relief efforts. Relieving the suffering of the diseased, the poor, the hungry, and the unhoused is a noble and necessary cause. But to what end? When the people you are helping are freed from poverty, what will they do with their lives? We know what they are freed from, but what are they freed for? As various research reports on the mental health of middle-class Americans will show, economic security and a comfortable lifestyle do not guarantee happiness. Relief efforts must be conducted with a fuller understanding of the human person, acknowledging that mankind does not live to survive, he survives to live.
It must have been this view of the human person, as understood by the liberally educated man or woman, that sparked the desire to serve others in the first place. Tragically, mankind will often do what is most advantageous or pleasurable for himself instead of what is right. But liberal study alerts one to the transcendent reality that lies beneath the surface of our existence. The liberal arts instill a sense of wonder toward others and implant a desire to serve and contribute to civilization. In her essay How Should One Read a Book?, Virginia Woolf eloquently captures this idea: “But that pleasure [we get from reading]—mysterious, unknown, useless as it is—is enough. That pleasure is so curious, so complex, so immensely fertilizing to the mind of anyone who enjoys it, and so wide in its effects, that it would not be in the least surprising to discover, on the day of judgement when secrets are revealed and the obscure is made plain, that the reason why we have grown from pigs to men and women, and come out from our caves, and dropped our bows and arrows, and sat round the fire and talked and drunk and made merry and given to the poor and helped the sick and made pavements and house and erected some sort of shelter and society on the waste of the world, is nothing but this: we have loved reading.” Study of the liberal arts results in a mysterious outpouring of love, rooted in gratitude for the miracle of the world we live in.
But liberal study alerts one to the transcendent reality that lies beneath the surface of our existence.
This is how the liberal arts can inform and elevate the work of service. Focused on establishing material security, service runs the risk of being solely directed towards the incomplete purpose of survival. We become susceptible to approaching the population we serve as a problem to be solved or a statistic in a sociological study. Meanwhile, the liberally educated man or woman will conduct service with a full vision of human flourishing. The liberal arts cultivate a receptiveness to the world’s goodness, thereby enabling us to see the beauty in suffering people. This combats the tendency towards surface-level service. Instead, it motivates and enriches service by expanding our capacity to see the inherent mystery and complexity of other people.
The liberally educated man or woman will conduct service with a full vision of human flourishing.
Liberal study and service work should not and cannot exist apart from one another. Instead, they belong together when they are rightly ordered. Openness to wonder allows true service to transform the servant in the same way that liberal learning transforms the learner. When we pursue the liberal arts hand-in-hand with service in the world, we love our fellow inhabitants of this world with our utmost. People are miracles—not problems to be fixed, but mysteries to behold.