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294 5 Toward Material Principles Fulfilling Formal Conditions for Education for Freedom: Philosophy as Paideia and the Liberal Arts The tradition that has borne the banner of an education for freedom is that of the liberal arts, while the sense of philosophy to which paideia is integral is its classical conception as the quintessentially free human activity . In this chapter we will explore the role of philosophy and the liberal arts in the concrete (material) translation of the formal Kantian articles of education into a program for the active cultivation of the mind. The relation between these two parts of the erstwhile lower faculty of the university is of utmost importance—namely, for setting down the conditions also for the possibility of the liberal arts being genuinely arts of learning, the learning indispensable for the human understood as fundamentally a being of reason and speech, and for avoiding the relegation of these arts to the modern commodification of knowledge, to a storehouse of historical information. The key is that their study be approached as an inward and not an outward directed activity. In other words, at stake here is the recovery of the metaphysical act of contemplation, the philosophical habit of mind (the call for which is expressed in the final article for a cosmopolitan education, the article that is the counterpart of the relation of the philosopher and the legislator in the last article of Kant’s essay Perpetual Peace). The development of this point draws on Kant’s cosmopolitan conception of philosophy (as the inner teacher and principle of order for relating all cognition to the essential purposes of human reason), on his identification of metaphysics as the completion of the cultivation of reason , on the interpretation of his sense of a metaphysics of morals (and so of the relation to the moral law) as a contemplative activity, and on the recovery of the original sense of “theory” as the act of contemplation, the wonder-struck beholding that is the beginning of thought and wisdom 295 T O W A R D M A T E R I A L P R I N C I P L E S F U L F I L L I N G F O R M A L C O N D I T I O N S F O R E D U C A T I O N F O R F R E E D O M (instead of its conventional sense today as an outward directed, mere application of theory in everyday affairs). The inward directed activity establishes the formative relation of the mind to its principle of contemplation ; here theory and praxis are two sides of one coin. This insight is important for understanding the arts and sciences of the liberal arts as the threefold and fourfold ways of cultivating the mind and not simply as so many bodies of knowledge (theories) to be applied in human life. The contemplation of their principles as an inward act that perfects the inquirer is the sense of education that we are seeking. As we saw, one of the conditions set by the articles is first to learn to be learners, to come to self-knowledge as the being of reason and speech “made to walk upright and contemplate the heavens” (as Kant puts it in his essay on theory and praxis), to be ourselves under way in the Socratic way of knowing that we do not know. We must comprehend learning as an end and not as a means. The goal is wisdom achieved as the inner relation of reason to the principles of its ordered use consonant with the vocation and determination of what it is to be a human rational, moral being (as the condition, in turn, for the well-ordered use of reason in all possible relations to the world). To explore in this context the traditional claim for liberal learning that it is the education which perfects the inquirer , we turn to an early text that is a benchmark in the establishment of the canon of the Seven Liberal Arts, Martianus Capella’s Marriage of Philology and Mercury. This part of the examination helps us also to get clearer on the distinction between education that is a matter of Bildung and one that is focused on the acquisition of knowledge. Our discussion will then turn to the question of the place and role of philosophy in relation to the other faculties of...

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