CHAPTER 4 EDUCATION WITHOUT AIMS? Paul Standish A standard analysis of the aims of education might proceed by offering three possible areas for their location: first, to serve the needs of society; second, to pass on and develop those ways of knowing and understanding which are the common heritage; third, to help individual learners to develop, either through a process of unfolding from within or through an authentic creation of themselves. Within these parameters, though not entirely co-extensive with these categories, ideas of progressivism (child-centred education) and liberal education can be differentiated. Most obviously progressivism is concerned with the third aim, with the development of the learner. The liberal position seems to align itself with the second aim, of the passing on of ways of knowing and understanding. These are slippery terms, however. The second and third aims, and thus the progressivist position, are liberal in that they are concerned in some sense with the freeing of the learner; both reject an education which is primarily instrumental. While in America John Dewey is thought of as a liberal,1 in the UK he has been seen as a key figure in the growth of progressivism which the liberal education of R. S. Peters, P. H. Hirst and R. F. Dearden sought to criticise and oppose. It is in this latter sense of liberal education that the term is used in the present discussion. Thus the conception of freedom and how it is achieved are crucial points of difference between these positions. If the first aim – of serving the needs of society – is not concerned with freedom in the same way, who might support it? The short answer is perhaps most people, including many employed in education. It is likely to be favoured by those who call for a rejection of progressivism and a return to traditional education. This is commonly characterised in terms of formal methods of instruction and an authoritarian and didactic pedagogy, with the belief that education is primarily concerned with the passing on of facts and skills. When pressed about the substance of what is to be learned, advocates of this ‘traditional’ education may well be in favour of such subjects as business studies, information technology, enterprise skills, and whatever else is imagined to be conducive to the strengthening of industrial competitiveness. This may be traditional insofar as it points to certain instructional methods; the irony of the term in other respects hardly needs pointing up. In contrast, liberal education is not primarily concerned with method, its quarrel with progressivism being concerned rather with questions of content, and with progressivism’s failure adequately to address these questions. The fact that the modern restatement of liberal education in the 1960s is a renewal of an ancient idea underlines the strength of the traditions on which it draws. It is unfortunate that this has led to a tendency to call liberal education ‘traditional education’, leading to inevitable confusion with the more common employment of this phrase sketched above. It scarcely needs pointing out, of course, that there are robust traditions of progressivism as well. A liberal education is primarily concerned with initiation into those ways of knowing and understanding which are the common heritage. It is not clear, however, that this aim is at odds with the third aim, the idea that the purpose of education is the development of the learner. For it might be held that the individual is indeed best developed precisely by being initiated into that common heritage, and, more strongly, that not to be so initiated is a kind of privation. Such thinking is particularly relevant to P. H. Hirst’s forms of knowledge thesis: there are a number of distinct forms of knowledge, and a liberal education should encompass an introduction to each one of these; a person who has not been introduced to any one of these forms will be deprived of the ability to look at and to understand the world in that way, ultimately with effects on that person’s practical reason. Such a limitation is a partial denial of freedom. What is rejected is the idea that a person can come upon such forms of knowledge by chance or by themselves: such possibilities of understanding are not matters of unfolding or development from within nor are they effected through a process of discovery in a kind of raw confrontation with the world. At this point it is appropriate to register an important divergence between the ancient conception of liberal education and its restatement in the 1960s. In the classical ideal the learner is led towards the contemplation of truth. The metaphor of sight, of true vision, itself illuminates the kind of intimation of reality with which Plato is concerned. In the modern conception, in contrast, the emphasis is rather on the powers of reasoning which each of the forms of knowledge introduces to the learner. If the classical liberal education frees the learner by dispelling illusion and enabling the contemplation of objects of truth and goodness, the modern version empowers the learner by providing the ability to reason effectively across that range of modes of thought which have been passed down to us, and which can inform our rational agency. That this is the case is brought out especially by the preoccupation within the modern version with rational autonomy. In some respects this development was in keeping with formalistic tendencies in postwar British philosophy which shaped the approach of Peters, Hirst and Dearden, though in other respects it derives more obviously from Immanuel Kant. In his celebrated essay ‘Autonomy and education’, Dearden attributes the philosophical currency of the concept to Kant and succinctly expresses what is central to it: ‘A man was autonomous, on Kant’s view, if in his actions he bound himself by moral laws legislated by his own reason, as opposed to being governed by his inclinations’ (Dearden et al. 1972: 58). The formalism of this reasoning contrasts with the substantive nature of the contemplation required by Plato’s theory of the Forms. Not surprisingly, the metaphysical realism of this did not seem to be available or desirable to the modern philosopher of education, and so rational autonomy, which in principle leaves matters of substance as open questions, came very much to the fore. A significant influence in this development is perhaps Peters’ account o worthwhile activities (Peters 1966: 144–66). Peters rightly challenges instrumental conceptions of education on the grounds of their deferral of the question of justification. The absurdity of the merry-go-round of instrumentalism suggests that at some point there must be a stop, a point at which something will be of value in itself. In other words, at some point we must be able to identify what is worthwhile in itself. Peters considers various , taking as relatively uncontroversial the notion of pleasure. He goes through a series of stages beginning with the pleasures of the flesh – of eating, drinking and sex. These, it is to be emphasised, are not mere animal satisfactions but possible occasions for the exercise of considerable skill and style. They are, however, limited by the natural capacities and appetites of the body. Greater potential for enjoyment may perhaps be found in sports, games and similar pastimes. There the artificial object of the game enables the exercise and display of considerable know-how and the possibility for this to be developed and refined. Such pleasures extend to a delight in knowing about the game and in the appreciation of the prowess of others. They are nevertheless limited in terms of the range of their significance, in terms of the bearing they have on the rest of a person’s life and how far they enhance understanding of the world. In the case of theoretical activities – the disinterested study of academic subjects – the limitations of these other sources of pleasure are not found. Theoretical activities do not depend on cyclical appetites but offer unlimited scope for the pursuit of interests, satisfaction being the greater the more one progresses; they are not competitive – noone has to lose and there is no shortage of the thing which is pursued; they have a rich bearing on one’s life as a whole and illuminate the fields of one’s action. At a slightly different level they help to answer the question which Peters introduced at the start: ‘Why do this rather than that?’ They give a clearer grasp of the different alternatives which are available, some of which would not be intelligible outside the frames of reference which they themselves provide, and, developing the ability to reason, they assist in the weighing up of those different alternatives. Behind this there is also the classical argument to the effect that human beings should develop that capacity which distinguishes them from other animals, which is reason. Socrates’ remark that the unexamined life is not worth living stresses that human beings must ask questions about their own lives; not to do this is to fail to be fully human. Asking the question, of course, ‘Why do this rather than that?’ already shows some commitment to rationality. The direction of the argument here is towards the view that rational autonomy is valuable as an end and not just as a means: it is central to the good life. The position of Peters, Hirst and Dearden on this point builds on the socalled transcendental or self-referential argument advanced above. But it is filled out in various ways. One will opt for the kinds of work and leisure pursuits which are rich in opportunities for the exercise of one’s judgement. One could not rationally opt for a life in which it did not play a major part. One could not opt to give up one’s freedom and to be a happy slave. It is perhaps here that we reach the apotheosis of the formalistic tendencies of modern liberal education, and here that we should begin to acknowledge some of the points of divergence and criticism. Anyone surveying the literature on liberal education over the last two decades will be struck by the prominence which autonomy has acquired. The argument has been developed and complicated. Thus, rational autonomy may be highly valued but ultimately seen as a means rather than an end: having become rationally autonomous, one can then (rationally) give this up to become the happy slave. It may be seen in weak and strong guises, as requiring the exercise of autonomy within established practices, on the one hand, and as requiring the questioning of those practices themselves, on the other. Greater sensitivity to cultural difference has led to the claim that personal autonomy is not universally valuable, as there are societies in which there are valuable social institutions which are not autonomy-supporting. Numerous aspects of autonomy have been discussed since the time of Dearden’s essay. A move away from the formalism of the principle of rational autonomy is made where the possibility of its qualified subordination to a regime of ends is entertained. An important contribution to the development of this aspect of liberal education has been made by John White’s writings on well-being, the outcome of a concern to give some substance to the idea of the good. This is found in the idea of informed desire-satisfaction, based on ‘empirical features of our make-up, namely our desires and their satisfaction. It sees human beings as animals of a certain sort, endowed with certain innate desires, and their well-being as constituted by the fulfilment of desires based on these’ (White 1990: 32). There is a clear resonance here with prevalent attitudes in favour of a naturalistic ethics. In his recent inaugural lecture White has supplemented this with a humanistic concern for some kind of cosmic framework. Here it is acknowledged that ‘[a]s well as providing the ultimate framework, nature, globally or in its particular manifestations, can also be the object of many of our values’ (White 1995: 9). These include: pleasures of the senses deriving from the natural world; attachment to the world as our dwelling place, in which the continuity of natural and social frameworks is realised; aesthetic delight in natural beauty; the sense of sublimity caused by nature in its more grand and terrifying aspects; wonder, which stops short of answers, at the very existence of the world; finally, respect for the world and concern with its conservation. Even for the non-religious person, White suggests, awe at natural phenomena has something of the quality of religious emotion. Nevertheless, the values identified here remain within the ambit of desire-dependent conceptions of the good and avoid what White finds to be the implausible underpinning of the Platonic and Christian metaphysics. White ends his lecture with a plea for philosophy of education to take on the role of illuminating a non-religious cosmic framework in the education ‘of all our children’. The concern with well-being and with the cosmic framework has taken us away from the centrality of rational autonomy, but it is worth registering the way that that aim may not be fully sensitive to the needs of all our children. It seems less convincing for those who are of lesser intelligence, in that the scope for its exercise in their lives is likely to be duly restricted. This does not, of course, necessarily undermine it as a principle. It does, however, perhaps remind us that those who advocate it, who are likely to be intelligent and rationally autonomous people, may lose sight of the fact that it is a peculiarly attractive principle from their point of view, one which they are particularly well disposed to enjoy and to value. Conversely, they may fail to see types of the good life which are not characterised by the principle. In this respect White’s more substantive conception of human flourishing has rather more in its favour. This attractiveness also helps to explain the way rational autonomy has come to be central to the tacit assumptions of educated people about the point of education. Such assumptions are in certain respects characteristic of the modern age – at least, it might be added, of what such people imagine their lives to be like, and at least, it might be further added, where such people are in work. Because it relates to these tacit assumptions and because most people who write about education are educated people, argument tends to be skewed in its favour. There is also, of course, the selfreferential point: if one is discussing this issue one must value rational autonomy. Taking part (seriously and sincerely) in the argument demonstrates precisely this. A challenge to the kind of self-perpetuating language which supports autonomy, and to the conception of the good life which seems to inform it, has been made under the banner of authenticity. This is, no doubt, an overworked term, but it is worth distinguishing divergent viewpoints which are associated with it. In its more crude versions authenticity can involve a direction towards the discovery of one’s real nature; it can, alternatively, be shaped by a principle of self-creation. Such accounts align most obviously with the third aim above – of personal development. What is of most interest here, however, is the extent to which arguments from authenticity invite a reappraisal of the terms in which the aims are expressed. They call into question the nature of the relation to the cultural heritage and also the epistemological presuppositions upon which an initiation into the forms of knowledge is based. Some accounts of authenticity then begin directly to question the way of reasoning behind the valuing of autonomy, pointing to its lack of sensitivity to context and its failure adequately to recognise the nature of freedom and responsibility. As David Cooper puts it, ‘When yoked to critical rationality, the concept has no place for those concerns where the giving and criticizing of reasons is only modestly engaged, or for the importance, in the case of some individual convictions, of not being bowled over by judgements on the weight of evidence’ (Cooper 1983: 25). The liberal aims which have been entertained here have given voice to that critical rationality. It has worked its way through hierarchies of worth in a process of refinement and progressive clarity and precision. As Cooper’s arguments may suggest, there is an internal relation between the discursive form in which the arguments are expressed and the values which are espoused – between clarity and enlightenment, it might be supposed. Peters’ argument concerning self-referentiality recognises something important in recognising something of this. That relation, nevertheless, may be a limitation. But must there be aims? The assumption that there must be accords with the principles of rational planning which in many respects characterise the modern world. The assumption that there must be invests in advance in that discursive form. Thus there are indeed difficulties in arguing against this, in that in argument one is almost bound to rely on those same principles of rationality which inform the practice in question. When education is undertaken on a large, systematic scale – which is, of course, likely to be the case in the late twentieth century – scepticism about the giving of aims may seem like a kind of political irresponsibility. Surely there must be aims. And should these not be explicit? Yet that large systematic scale makes it reasonable to question how far the presumption in favour of rational planning has been influenced by a sort of scientism or technicism. Scientism is familiar enough in the tendency to treat all manner of things as if they were the appropriate objects of empirical and systematic investigation. The optimism which was generated about making curriculum planning into a science has been an example of this; research into school effectiveness may be a more recent manifestation of this, symptomatic as this is of the more pervasive preoccupation with performativity. Technicism is similarly evident in the common assumption that all difficulties are in principle to be overcome by a technical solution. The vogue for skills and competences in education, and the tendency to reduce all learning to these terms, has borne witness to this. At a more grammatical level, furthermore, it is worth instancing examples of valued practice where the aims are inexplicit or where there are no aims – or perhaps where talk of aims seems inappropriate. Indeed some of the most important aspects of people’s lives – their intimate relationships, for example – seem to be characterised in this way. Within such practices there may be a great many smaller-scale practices in which aims can more or less be identified. But these are likely to be understood in the light of something which cannot be formulated in any tidy way and which would be inappropriately thought of in terms of aims. To ask for the aims of education may be like asking for the aims of a town. What, for example, are the aims of Aberdeen? The grammatical oddness here suggests that there may not be much sense in the question. The critic will respond that there are indeed aims of Aberdeen and these have been made quite explicitly by the members of the town’s council, who have worked earnestly to devise their mission statement. A mission statement of this sort may or may not be desirable but it is clear that, although this may be an appropriate expression of the political intentions of a dominant faction, this hardly warrants their attribution to the town! While a townincorporates a diverse range of purposeful practices, it is not clear that aims of an over-arching kind can be given. The multiple smaller-scale projects which go to make up the life of the town will include in their number those where things do need to be planned out, sometimes systematically. But these will have their sense in the light of that larger purposiveness. Taking the aims of the town councillors as an expression of the aims of the town will be a kind of inappropriate metonymy prejudiced in favour of a particular group. The statement of aims may purport to be a description derived from a kind of analysis, apparently revealing the essence of the town or its foundations. It may be an expression of attitude or intent, designed to provide a steady orientation for policy. In both cases it seems to offer a security. But if such statements of aims are indeed ungrammatical or prejudicial, this may be an unwarranted security, one which is apt to distort our practices. It is not difficult to imagine a dystopia in which everything about the town is determined by the aims (and the surveillance) laid down by its governing body. This would be an Orwellian distortion of what we commonly think of and value as the town. By analogy, the suspicion which emerges is that stating the aims of education may lead to a kind of stifling. A seemingly logical progression leads towards systems of aims and objectives and to a preoccupation with performativity which dominates the curriculum. It is not difficult to imagin the dystopia which this suggests. But surely this is to be too quick and too dismissive. It may be edifying to consider John Dewey’s more balanced comments here. Over-arching or supposedly ultimate aims are to be viewed with caution, as these may exert a limitation on the ‘freeing activity’ which education should incorporate. He warns against the imposition of aims from outside, where the existing conditions are not taken as the starting point fromwhich the aim is conceived: The vice of externally imposed ends has deep roots. Teachers receive them from superior authorities; these authorities accept them from what is current in the community. The teachers impose them upon children. As a first consequence, the intelligence of the children is not free; it is confined to receiving the aims laid down from above. Too rarely is the individual teacher so free from the dictation of authoritative supervisor, textbook on methods, prescribed course of study, etc., that he can let his mind come to close quarters with the pupil’s mind and the subject matter. This distrust of the teacher’s experience is then reflected in lack of confidence in the responses of pupils. The latter receive their aims through a double or treble external imposition, and are constantly confused by conflict between the aims which are natural to their own experience at the time and those in which they are taught to acquiesce. (Dewey 1916: 108–9) Persons, parents and teachers have aims, Dewey reminds us, not an abstract idea like education. In contrast to the above, aims are to be understood first in terms of the purposiveness of human activity, as internally related to particular activities. Truly general aims, if such there are to be, should broaden the outlook, enabling a wider and more flexible observation of means and exposing the endless connections of particular activities: teaching and learning should lead indefinitely into other things. As a particular action will be compatible with a number of general ends, it may be that the more general ends we have the better. Just as a scene can profitably be surveyed from different mountain tops, so these will provide varied perspectives on our field of activity. Dewey’s emphasis on the need for sensitivity to context, to variety and to individual potential is established in part through a contrast with the rigidity of the kind of education Plato envisages in The Republic: Plato’s starting point is that the organization of society depends ultimately upon knowledge of the end of existence. If we do not know its end, we shall be at the mercy of accident and caprice. Unless we know the end, the good, we shall have no criterion for rationally deciding what the possibilities are which should be promoted, nor how social arrangements are to be ordered. (Ibid.: 88) Dewey criticises Plato’s ‘lumping together of individuals and their original powers into a few sharply marked-off classes’ because the progress of knowledge has taught us that these are indefinitely varied and numerous (ibid.: 90). One way to put this, which maintains the down-to-earth tone, might be that Dewey is opposing this kind of top-down setting of aims in favour of a bottom-up approach arising from the learner’s activities themselves. Dewey is speaking of The Republic above all, and it is clear that this kind of interpretation is well enough established. If we attend to details of this work and to some of the dialogues, however, it is a different picture which emerges. As a first step in appreciating this we might consider the kind of voice and form in which Plato’s ideas are expressed. Consider, first, the following words from The Symposium. These concern the way a man’s love for beautiful things can be sublimated into a love of beauty and of goodness in itself: The man who has been guided thus far in the mysteries of love, and who has directed his thoughts towards examples of beauty in due and orderly succession, will suddenly have revealed to him as he approaches the end of his initiation a beauty whose nature is marvellous indeed, the final goal, Socrates, of all his previous efforts. This beauty is first of all eternal; it neither comes into being nor passes away, neither waxes nor wanes; next, it is not beautiful in part and ugly in part, nor beautiful at one time and ugly at another, nor beautiful in this relation and ugly in that, nor beautiful here and ugly there, as varying according to its beholders; nor again will this beauty appear to him like the beauty of a face or hands or anything else corporeal, or like the beauty of a thought or a science, or like beauty which has its seat in something other than it self, be it a living thing or the earth or the sky or anything else whatever; he will see it as absolute, existing alone with itself, unique, eternal, and all other beautiful things as partaking of it, yet in such a manner that, while they come into being and pass away, it neither undergoes any increase or diminution nor suffers any change. (Plato 1951: 93–4) This then is the good which Dewey sees Plato as identifying as the starting point for the organisation of society. Of course, goals are spoken of here, and are these not of the order of aims and objectives, approached by way of a path of learning with ‘due and orderly succession’? Yet it is clear that the tone of these words is different from that of Dewey’s remarks on Plato and the nature of this warrants some examination. Imagine the trite absurdity of setting this erotic development down in terms of aims and objectives! The idea of the good here is approached not by explicit statement or straightforward exposition but through a kind of lyrical intimation. The starting point of the passage finds the learner already partially initiated into the mysteries of love and that towards which attention is gradually to be directed is marvellous indeed. The nature of this marvel is pursued, in the long second sentence, through a cumulative series of negatives. The enigmatic and climactic ‘absolute, existing alone with itself, unique, eternal’, the most direct description of the good, then yields again to the negatives of the final phrases. The good is unstatable other than in these opaque terms; it is not to be approached directly. It requires this kind of difficult ascent; any premature or over-hasty identification would prove illusory. And the discursive form bears this out. This is not an essay by Plato. The speaker is Socrates but he is reporting the words of Diotima, the woman from Mantinea with whom he has previously discussed these matters. These might well be taken to be thoughts which Socrates would espouse, and Socrates himself might but be taken to epitomise one who has undertaken this type of ascent. But his position is subtly effaced: here, as elsewhere when love and the fate of the soul are being considered, Plato adopts the device of reported speech. This indirectness complicates the relation of the reader and of Socrates to what is being said, and indicates that what is to be understood here requires subtle intimation. Overt expression, it seems to be implied, would miss the point; it would distort the good which is the object of this erotic perfectionist longing, and perhaps dull the energy with which that longing is alive. It is to be noted also that Diotima, unlike the other characters in the dialogue, is thought to have been Plato’s invention. This intrusion of the fictional at a stage where the dialogue builds to its most serious point further suggests the need for an evocative indirectness, a recourse to the literary where the limitations of a more straightforward discursive are most acutely evident. Of course, Plato’s thoughts are almost always hidden in the form of dialogue. It might be objected that The Republic is nevertheless far more clearly didactic; certainly it does not have the humour and vitality found here. But there also the deepest and most important thoughts seem to take a literary turn. Consider Iris Murdoch’s words on the myth of the Cave: In the Cave myth the Theory of the Forms is presented as a pilgrimage where different realities or thought-objects exist for individual thinkers at different levels, appearing at lower levels as shadows cast by objects at the next higher level: an endlessly instructive image. The pilgrimage is inspired by intimations of realities which lie just beyond what can be easily seen. (Murdoch 1992: 399) This ‘endlessly instructive image’ makes possible a thinking of what is not present, not overtly statable and not immediately available: these features are, it would seem, not just contingently related to the highest objects but essential to their reality; necessary also if learning is to avoid bedazzlement. This is an appeal to experience which points to the ways in which ‘[we] learn of perfection and imperfection through our ability to understand what we see as an image or shadow of something better which we cannot yet see’ (ibid.: 405). In contrast to the binary opposition of the true and the false, this image and the kind of erotic progression which radiates through The Symposium admit the possibility of degrees of reality. Our understanding of the world is partial and veiled, our experience can lead us towards a clearer view – in a sense which, outside philosophy, is familiar enough: ‘When she said that to me, suddenly I began to see the way things really were.’ Writing about the good in this way Plato writes about what an education might be; he presents, if you like, the aims of education. But the attention is turned increasingly away from the ineffable and fixed end and towards the movement of Eros, itself intimated by the literary movement in the text. Murdoch sees Eros, understood in the sense of this energy described and shown in The Symposium, as picturing ‘probably a greater part of what we think of as “the moral life”; that is, most of our moral problems involve an orientation of our energy and our appetites’ (ibid.: 497). Our practical lives, our relations with others, our work and leisure, what we do in school, provide daily experience of possibilities of good where the immediate incorporates a glimpse of something beyond. Sometimes, in spite of his protests that he knows nothing, Socrates can appear as the teacher who has everything taped. But sometimes he is himsel like Eros, poor and needy and (hence) desirous of the good. And then he can be seen as a terrible magician, in Diotima’s words, and elsewhere a gad-fly, a sting-ray and a purveyor of drugs. Will these powers be goads to action, effective stimulants, or will they anaesthetise, deaden and distract? Ambiguity here, the risk of the situation, connects internally with the arousal and direction of passionate energy, with the kind of quest with which the learner must be engaged. There cannot be a mechanical effectivity in the teaching Socrates gives, for this would dissipate that energy. Nor is the matter which Socrates has to impart so much content to be packaged and passed on: he himself remains held in its thrall. The good is not a particular, not a thing among others. Beyond the verbal formulas – ‘the final goal’, ‘absolute beauty’ – the good is to be understood in terms of what it is not, through the manner in which one’s energies can be progressively directed towards it. The evocation of this energy blends into a literary and rhetorical intimation of what cannot directly be expressed. Murdoch’s thoughts are never far from the via negativa here and the mystical tendencies in these reflections can be traced through the rest of the discussion from which these comments are drawn, its subject the Ontological Proof of St Anselm. Frequently in her writings Murdoch has been concerned with the kinds of thinking about the religious which might be available but which have been suppressed by the tendencies of modern reason. Thus, the Ontological Proof – that God, conceived of as supreme perfection, cannot be thought not to exist (for this would be a lack of perfection), and so if we can conceive of him, as we surely can, he must exist – is apt to be thought of as ‘a charming joke’, in Schopenhauer’s phrase (ibid.: 392–3). If we approach this with our usual critical capacities, we are likely to be frustrated, seeing nothing more than a bad argument. To what deeper truth might such reasoning appeal? The Proof offers the possibility of a thinking of God of a different kind from our accustomed images of the Creator. Above all, God is then not to be found in the order of contingent things; his existence is necessary. God is not an object, a strange body with remarkable (supreme) attributes. Again it is by negative expressions that the matter is addressed. The sense here is elusive and this, it would seem, is part of the point. The Proof is not an argument in any conventional sense; indeed it seems defiantly unconcerned with the obvious objections. It is rather an expression of a religious conviction, a kind of a priori to the possibility of any argument, the unconditional within which things come to be seen. One might think, perhaps, that the world is already meaningful is a condition for understanding it; that unconditional good is necessary for our finding value in the world, as the sun is necessary for our seeing shadows in the Cave. We are offered stronger words drawn from Simone Weil’s Notebooks: ‘an orientation of the soul towards something which one does not know, but whose reality one does know’, and ‘an effort of attention empty of all content’ which then ‘catches’ what is certainly its object, as when we try to remember a word. Also: ‘Ontological Proof is mysterious because it does not address itself to intelligence but to love.’ (Ibid., p. 401) Anselm does not seek understanding as a basis for belief but believes in order to understand. The danger without this unconditional element in the structure of reason and reality, in Paul Tillich’s view, is that a certain approach to the possibility of the question of God is closed off, that God becomes a ‘strange body’ which once required heteronomous subjection and which the modern judgement autonomously rejects (ibid.: 391–2). The loss which Tillich fears is to be understood as related to the overriding of that oblique and tentative approach to the question of the good which the imagery of Eros conveys. What is the consequence of this? To identify the good as having particular features (other than through negation) entails locating it within the range of predicates attributable to objects in the world. It amounts to reducing the good to an object. The direct statement of the good, its representation, must be avoided. For in the statement one can only produce a false version of the good, and this will be a false God. It is no surprise, then, that Murdoch connects this force of the Ontological Proof with the Second Commandment: ‘Thou shalt not make unto thee any graven image’ (Exodus 20). The latter part of this chapter has found that the attempt to name the good is an attempt to identify something mysterious and marvellous. This has proved unsayable, other than in opaque, negative and oblique ways. The opening expository discourse has gradually given way to a language mobilised by rhetorical devices and the tropes of literature. This is not a matter merely of style. Something like this distinction is found in Michel Despland’s contrast between didactic (or scholastic) theology and literarily crafted theology, as found, for example, in Kierkegaard’s writings. What the latter singularly takes away, he seems to suggest, is the pretence of directly communicating true opinion, such truths as may be assimilated by the acquisition and interiorization of language. In ensuring the absence of such a lesson to be learned, in disrupting the expectations of the docile reader, the writer achieves something more important than the formulation of memorable sentences; he or she prevents the establishment of the wrong relationship between writer and reader, and facilitates the sort of relationship genuine spiritual discipline requires.(Coward and Foshay 1992: 154–5) It is perhaps not straining the meaning of these words too much to see figured in them teaching and learning. The dogmatic and didactic teacher who supposes that they are in possession of a set of truths which are to be communicated in the neutral medium of their words is challenged by the first sentence, as, at the opening of the second, is the docile student in complicity with this. Disrupting expectations prevents the kind of tranquillised acceptance which stands in the way of deeper engagement and at the same time animates the teacher’s own text. That this is a discipline says something about the development of the mind but something also about what a subject involves. The spiritual nature of the discipline here is not remote from that Platonic perfectionist progression, no from a liberal eduction understood in those terms. How do these words help us to see the efforts of the liberal educators to answer the question of the aims of education? In the via negativa and the negative theology of which Despland writes, the kind of reality which God and the good are conceived to have is an open question. These religious approaches are designed to avoid bogus metaphysical constructions and the kind of objectification where false gods thrive. The oblique and indirect literary approach is necessary. Such a literarily crafted theology does not simply debunk its positive counterpart, though it does undo the claims of outright dogmatism. It is apparent here, and in the works of Jacques Derrida to which Despland is responding, that this way of thinking serves us best when it is held not to overthrow and replace but to complicate and destabilise, to test the limits of, more affirmative expression. A literarily crafted philosophy of education would open the possibility of a way of thinking which would unsteady the discourse of liberal education. It would do this not to jettison liberal education but to resist the limitations to which its monologism makes it subject. In doing so it would keep liberal education open to that ancient sense of the good which modern formalistic and naturalistic tendencies have subdued or obscured. Sceptical of the direct representation of the good it would locate itself in a recollection of what has been said before, in a response to texts going beyond anything which could be made fully present. Its withholding and humility, sometimes its renunciation of the claim to know, would themselves be characteristics of that intimation of the good which defies clear statement in a set of aims. This is the kind of thing in which teacher and learner might well be enthralled. We have come a long way from the scepticism expressed by Dewey concerning aims of education. If an aim is an external end to which the means is related only instrumentally, then education in liberal terms is indeed aimless; in The Sovereignty of Good Murdoch speaks of virtue as pointless. But clearly this is not the only possibility and it should not stop argument. Modern philosophies of liberal education have recognised correctly that the aims of education must be seen in terms of the good. Attempts to state these have been worthy forms of resistance against limited and debased practices of education, though themselves ultimately forms of limitation. If we look beyond these enlightened statements and survey the contemporary scene, we find the kind of inflexibility against which Dewey warned. The concern with accountability, quality assurance, objectives, performativity . . . the picture is familiar enough. If the good is ineffable, the statement of aims runs the risk of opening up a metaphysical perspective which reifies the good. The debased form which objective characterisations can then take becomes clear. Such rigid specifications promise the security of control, management information systems, lists. They have a glossy presentational allure which seduces many and for some becomes an obsession. The rational nature of their modes of organisation is hard to argue against. The metaphysical picture behind this is hard to escape. The archaic and alien language of ‘graven images’ is not easily – not comfortably – related to our contemporary world. In the reifications of the language of objectives, however, do we not see false goods? Are there not dangers here of idolatry? Notes Of course, the term ‘liberal’ has a range of (connected) senses, among which are a political one, (b) a more technical one related to free market economics, and the idea of a liberal education, which needs to be used stipulatively to avoid the broader connotations of (a). This chapter is loosely based on talks given at the universities of Aberdeen and Utrecht in 1995. I am grateful to those present on those occasions for their comments. References Cooper, D. E. (1983) Authenticity and Learning, London: Routledge & Kegan Paul. Coward, H. and Foshay, T. (1992) Derrida and Negative Theology, Albany, NY: State University of New York Press. Dearden, R. F., Hirst, P. H. and Peters, R. S. (1972) Education and Reason, London: Routledge & Kegan Paul. Dewey, J. (1916) Democracy and Education, New York: The Free Press. Murdoch, I. (1970) The Sovereignty of Good, London: Routledge & Kegan Paul. ——(1992) Metaphysics as a Guide to Morals, London: Chatto & Windus. Peters, R. S. (1966) Ethics and Education, London: George Allen & Unwin. Plato (1951) The Symposium, London: Penguin. White, J. P. (1990) Education and the Good Life: Beyond the National Curriculum, London: Kogan Page (in association with the Institute of Education, University of London). ——(1995) Education and Personal Well-being in a Secular Universe, London: Institute of Education, University of London.