Integrated Learning and Newman’s “Idea of a University”

by | Sep 23, 2022 | Summer 2022 Volume I | 0 comments

by Anthony L. Haynor

A major takeaway for me from the 2021 Faculty Summer Seminar with Jeremy Wilkins, “From Facts to Truth to Wisdom with Thomas Aquinas,” involved the pivotal position of the senses and reason in the understanding of Being in its varied forms.  In the past year, I have been reading two texts that bear on what can be called the “metaphysical project”—sustained and disciplined intellectual effort that achieves (or at least moves toward) a grasp of the totality of Being, that is, the relations among the various forms of Being. The first is Insight by Bernard Lonergan, chapters 12-17 especially.1 The second is The One and the Many: A Contemporary Thomistic Metaphysics2 by W. Norris Clarke. Making progress toward an understanding of “proportionate being” (in Lonergan’s terms), that is, finite being, is a primary intellectual destination for human knowers—as individuals and as communities. Getting the metaphysics right sets the stage for ethical reasoning, for virtuous conduct must be in accord with nature as established through metaphysical inquiry. Conversely, getting the metaphysics wrong can make ethical conduct implausible, if not impossible.  Comprehending “proportionate” or “finite” being also triggers inquiry into “transcendent being”—the being in which it is ultimately grounded.   I have become convinced that taking “being” very seriously as well as the philosophy of being—which is metaphysics—goes to the heart of the liberal university’s mission.  Putting metaphysics first is arguably not in tune with the prevailing zeitgeist—with its relativistic worldview, with its emphasis on language games, and with its proclamation of the “end of metaphysics.”3 However, giving primacy to a metaphysical project is very much in line with the mission of a Catholic University, and should be embraced, arguably, by all universities.

In our recent2022 Faculty Summer Seminar with Ken Parker “Ideas of a Catholic University: Then, Now, and Into the Future,” a key question emerged for me: Is the metaphysical project (which encompasses both finite and transcendent being) one that is implied by, or at least, highly consistent with, Newman’s “Idea of a University”?  I reviewed Sections V, VI, and VIII of The Idea of a University to address this issue. What struck me was Newman’s emphasis on cultivating the philosophical mind in order to foster an integrated understanding of being. While he didn’t introduce the term “metaphysics” a plausible case can be made that this is what he meant.

In Discourse V, “Knowledge Its Own End,” Newman argues that:

…all branches of knowledge are connected together, because the subject-matter of knowledge is intimately united in itself, as being the acts and the work of the Creator. Hence it is that the Sciences, into which our knowledge may be said to be cast, have multiplied bearings one on another, and an internal sympathy, and admit, or rather demand, comparison and adjustment. They complete, correct, balance each other. This consideration, if well-founded, must be taken into account, not only as regards the attainment of truth, which is their common end, but as regarded the influence which they exercise upon those whose education consists in the study of them.4

Newman goes on to argue that undue specialization serves “to contract [the learner’s” mind.”5 Students need to be exposed to all of the disciplines and along with teachers and scholars, need to regard themselves of part of an intellectual fraternity, as it were, aiming to “adjust together the claims and relations of their respective subjects of investigation.”6 In the process, “they learn to respect, to consult, to aid each other.”7  He places considerable emphasis on cultivating “a habit of mind” directed toward the integration of knowledge:

A habit of mind is formed which lasts through life, of which the attributes are, freedom, equitableness, calmness, moderation, and wisdom; or what…I have ventured to call a philosophical habit. Knowledge is capable of being its own end. Such is the constitution of the human mind, that any kind of knowledge, if it be really such, is its own reward. And this is true of all knowledge, it is true also of that special Philosophy, which I have made to consist in a comprehensive view of truth in all its branches, of the relations of science to science, of their mutual bearings, ad their respective values.8

According to Newman, it is built into our human nature to seek knowledge for its own sake knowledge that relates the various disciplines of knowledge to each other and by implication the subject matters (the orders of being) to which they attend. This is the essence of “liberal knowledge,” the “liberal arts,” “liberal education.”9  He contrasts the “philosophical” method of education—aimed at general and universal knowledge—to “the mechanical” method—aimed at the external and the practical.10 The philosophical method is quintessentially “intellectual”; it seeks knowledge that “grasps what it perceives through the senses; something which takes a view of things; which sees more than the senses convey; which reasons upon what is sees, and while it sees; which invests it with an idea.”  The journey on which the intellect embarks seeks nothing less than “to have mapped out the Universe.” This is the “boast, or at least the ambition, of Philosophy.”11

Newman is clear in identifying the limitations of the philosophical mind while asserting its inherent value. About the knowledge that we gain through the exercise of the philosophical mind, Newman writes:

Its direct business is not to steal the soul against temptation or to console it in affliction, any more than to set the loom in motion, or to direct the steam carriage; be it ever so much the means or the condition of both material and moral advancement, still, taken by and in itself, it as little mends our hearts as it improves our temporal circumstances. Knowledge is one thing, virtue is another. Philosophy, however enlightened, however profound, gives no command over the passions, no influential motives, no vivifying principles. Liberal Education makes not the Christian, not the Catholic, but the gentleman.12

The qualities of the gentleman for Newman “are no guarantee for sanctity or even for conscientiousness, they may attach to the man of the world, to the profligate, to the heartless.”14 The cultivation of the intellect is but one kind of excellence for Newman: “Every thing has its own perfection, be it higher or lower in the scale of things; and the perfection of one is not the perfection of another.”15  We can safely surmise, I think, that moral excellence (virtue) and spiritual or religious excellence are regarded by Newman as higher “in the scale of things” than intellectual excellence. A key question for me is: In what sense can intellectual excellence serve as a precondition for moral excellence?   Clearly for Newman intellectual excellence does not guarantee moral excellence, let alone spiritual excellence.  He also took the position that the striving for intellectual excellence had intrinsic worth.  It is self-evident to me that the cultivation of the philosophical mind requires “completion” and “perfection” in the form of moral and spiritual excellence, and that the university’s mission is to foster all three kinds of human excellence.  Discourse V concludes with the following thoughts, first on the distinction between the cultivation of the intellect and the cultivation of virtue, and second on the transition from the natural plane to the supernatural plane of existence:

To open the mind, to correct it, to refine it, to enable it to know, and to digest, master, rule, and use its knowledge, to give it power over its own faculties, application, flexibility, method, critical exactness, sagacity, resource, address, eloquent expression, is an object as intelligible…as the cultivation of virtue, while, at the same time, it is absolutely distinct from it.

We attain to heaven by using this world well, though it is to pass away; we perfect our nature, not by undoing it, but by adding to it what is more than nature, and directing it towards aims higher than its own.16

In Discourse VI Newman focuses on the constituents of “intellectual perfection” as well as factors that inhibit it.  Regarding the former, “philosophical knowledge” requires that the university “educates the intellect to reason well in all matters, to reach out towards truth, and to grasp it.”17   Acquiring knowledge (or information) is not sufficient—intellectual excellence requires an “expansion of mind,” which involves “a comparison of ideas one with another, as they come before the mind, and a systematizing of them.”18  Newman here is calling for the university to foster a dialectical attitude on the part of faculty and students alike. The objective is not for those in the university community to “abound in information in detail”19 but rather to integrate the various fields of knowledge through active, inter-subjective engagement. I would add that the dialectical attitude should extend to the relationship between metaphysical understanding, on the one hand, and moral imperatives, on the other, as well as that between the natural and supernatural planes of existence.  Newman emphasizes the intelligibility of the world, that is, its fundamental unity:

Just as our bodily organs, when mentioned, recall their function in the body, as the word ‘creation’ suggests the Creator, and ‘subjects’ a sovereign, so, in the mind of the Philosopher, as we are abstractedly conceiving of him, the elements of the physical and moral world, sciences, arts, pursuits, ranks, offices, events, opinions, individualities, are all viewed as one, with correlative functions, and as gradually by successive combinations converging, one and all, to the true centre. That perfection of the Intellect, which is the result of Education, and its beau ideal, to be imparted to individuals in their respective measures, is the clear, calm, accurate vision and comprehension of all things, as far as the finite mind can embrace them, each in its place, and with own characteristics upon it.20

 Newman concludes that “the true and adequate end of intellectual training and of a University is not Learning or Acquirement, but rather, is Thought or Reason exercised upon Knowledge, or what may be called Philosophy.”21

 The relationship between knowledge and religion is taken up in Discourse VIII.  Newman states that “the educated mind may be said to be in a certain sense religious; that is, it has what may be considered a religion of its own, independent of Catholicism, partly co-operating with it, partly thwarting it.”22 This suggests a dialectical process at work in the university arena—involving the identification of affinities, and tensions and seeming contradictions that require addressing. At the same time, Newman argues that “Right Reason, that is, Reason rightly exercised, leads the mind to the Catholic Faith, and plants it there, and teaches it in all its religious speculations to act under its guidance.”23 A major thrust of Discourse VIII is that “Intellectualism” by itself is insufficient, even dangerous.  It has a restricted worldview, rooted in fleeting opinions and trapped in naturalistic dogmatism. For those with a genuine “enlargement of mind” their “religion is one of imagination and sentiment; it is the embodiment of those ideas of the sublime, majestic, and beautiful, without which there can be no large philosophy.”24

 Let me conclude with a quote from a recent book, Hollowed Out, which analyzes the current state of higher education in the United States and calls for a radically new direction that is remarkably consistent with Newman’s “Idea of a University”:

…the job of the modern teacher is largely therapeutic—make students feel safe, make them feel good about themselves, impart the curriculum without insisting with too much awkward emphasis on how they might benefit from engaging with big thinkers, big ideas, big themes, thinking historically or philosophically rather than about the Almighty Me.25

 

 ENDNOTES 

  1. Lonergan, B. Insight (University of Toronto Press: Toronto, 1992).
  2. Clarke, W. N. The One and the Many: A Contemporary Thomistic Metaphysics (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 2001).
  3. Wittgenstein, L. Philosophical Investigations (Hoboken: Wiley-Blackwell, 2010); Martin Heidegger, Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy.
  4. Newman, J. H. and Ed. Martin J. Svaglic, The Idea of a University (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 1982), p. 75.
  5. Newman, J. H. and Ed. Martin J. Svaglic, The Idea of a University (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 1982), p. 75.
  6. Newman, J. H. and Ed. Martin J. Svaglic, The Idea of a University (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 1982), p. 76.
  7. Newman, J. H. and Ed. Martin J. Svaglic, The Idea of a University (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 1982), p. 76.
  8. Newman, J. H. and Ed. Martin J. Svaglic, The Idea of a University (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 1982), pp. 76-77.
  9. Newman, J. H. and Ed. Martin J. Svaglic, The Idea of a University (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 1982), p. 80.
  10. Newman, J. H. and Ed. Martin J. Svaglic, The Idea of a University (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 1982), p. 85.
  11. Newman, J. H. and Ed. Martin J. Svaglic, The Idea of a University (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 1982), p. 85.
  12. Newman, J. H. and Ed. Martin J. Svaglic, The Idea of a University (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 1982), p. 91.
  13. Newman, J. H. and Ed. Martin J. Svaglic, The Idea of a University (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 1982), p. 91.
  14. Newman, J. H. and Ed. Martin J. Svaglic, The Idea of a University (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 1982), p. 91.
  15. Newman, J. H. and Ed. Martin J. Svaglic, The Idea of a University (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 1982), p. 92.
  16. Newman, J. H. and Ed. Martin J. Svaglic, The Idea of a University (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 1982), pp. 92-93.
  17. Newman, J. H. and Ed. Martin J. Svaglic, The Idea of a University (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 1982), p. 95.
  18. Newman, J. H. and Ed. Martin J. Svaglic, The Idea of a University (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 1982), p. 101.
  19. Newman, J. H. and Ed. Martin J. Svaglic, The Idea of a University (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 1982), p. 102.
  20. Newman, J. H. and Ed. Martin J. Svaglic, The Idea of a University (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 1982), pp. 103-104, 105.
  21. Newman, J. H. and Ed. Martin J. Svaglic, The Idea of a University (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 1982), p. 105.
  22. Newman, J. H. and Ed. Martin J. Svaglic, The Idea of a University (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 1982), p. 137.
  23. Newman, J. H. and Ed. Martin J. Svaglic, The Idea of a University (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 1982), p. 137.
  24. Newman, J. H. and Ed. Martin J. Svaglic, The Idea of a University (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 1982), p. 160
  25. Adams, J. Hollowed Out: A Warning About America’s Next Generation (Washington DC: Regnery Publishing, 2021), quoted in Trotter, S. “A Great Teacher’s Warning,” Quillette (August 1, 2022).