A public lecture in the Humanities, especially a lecture dedicated to the memory of a brilliant young professor of philosophy -- Jerry Jackson, of your faculty, who was killed in a car accident in 1985 -- is a great opportunity to think together about intrinsically important things. The Humanities are notorious for being important -- and "useless." Professor Jackson was a philosopher, one who was known for his imaginative ways of teaching our subject. And therefore I am sure, even though I never knew him, that he had imaginative ways of answering the inevitable question: "Philosophy? But what can anyone do with it?"

All the humanities subjects, not just philosophy, are subject to that question. We live in a culture in which the whole notion of intrinsic importance seems hard to grasp. People are very quick to ask for the "bottom line." The value of education is measured in the number of additional dollars it will bring in over a lifetime, not so much in terms of the quality of that lifetime as a whole. This, at any rate, has been my own experience in a long career in the liberal arts. And it is about this difficult topic I want to speak tonight. I want to focus on the liberal ideals of education--by which I mean the ideals of clear-eyed wholeness of perspective linked to appreciation for the intrinsic value of learning.

I am not against instrumental values. On the contrary, I, more than most philosophers, have been deeply interested in the instruments by which we attain our ends. For decades I have devoted special attention to the philosophy of technology, which is the critical study, at its most comprehensive dimensions, of the interface between means and ends--the interface where our tools circle back to influence and reshape our ends in a perpetual dance of tension and reinforcement. I plan to return a little later to acknowledge the importance of vocational and professional education. But means are properly to be valued as means, not as ends in themselves. And liberal arts learning at its best keeps the focus on ends. This means that the expanding universe of knowledge is a cause for rejoicing in its own right, quite apart from any new applications it may have.

This is the creed--the theory--of liberal education, whether pursued at liberal arts colleges on the one hand, or in liberal arts units like those here at Western Carolina University or my current academic employer in Athens, Georgia, on the other. But is it more than creed and theory? Can this faith shelter us when the icy winds of reality blow against the structures of our minds? This is the question I hope to raise and answer in the remainder of this talk.

I want to raise it in the context of the fiercest, coldest wind that can strike at the heart of teachers and students gathered in pursuit of learning. Such an icy wind buffets us with every premature death of a promising young life, like Jerry Jackson's, which was so sadly cut short on July 5, 1985. That same cold wind whirled through my campus, too, one year ago last December, when a University of Georgia student, Melissa Lynn Hague, only 20 years old, was struck and killed by a bus when crossing a street on her way to a final examination. I did not know Melissa personally. This would have been irrelevant, in any case, to the problem raised by her tragic death. The point, rather, is that she was in every way a paradigmatic student of the liberal arts. She was working on a major in Anthropology, a central study of what it is to be human, engaging both the sciences and the arts. She was a caring person, actively concerned about others in distress. In high school she had been a leading member of Amnesty International. Her caring, indeed, extended even more widely than the species, Homo sapiens. She had been president of Students for Environmental Awareness. And then, one gray December day, preoccupied with her final examination, she attempted to cross a street. She started across when the traffic light allowed, but failed to notice the great white bus, also moving forward in obedience to the traffic light but in a sweeping left turn that caught her against its long side, knocked her down, and crushed out the promise of her life.

Few can remain unmoved by this tragic accident. Mothers and fathers think anxiously of their daughters; young people see themselves and their friends mirrored in Melissa's untimely snuffing out. But I want to focus on what it means for higher education, when one of our professors, in the midst of his creative teaching, or one of our students, in the midst of her studies, is snatched away in the blindspot of a lumbering bus, so suddenly, so wastefully, so permanently. In thinking these thoughts were are of course thinking about more than Jerry Jackson or Melissa Hague themselves. They become archetypes. Ultimately they require us to think about ourselves and the meaning of our own quests in knowing and teaching. Each of us is mortal. Some, like Jerry and Melissa, live briefly. Some, the temporary survivors, less so. But life for everyone is brief enough. Compared to the institutions of learning we serve and are served by, we are ephemera. At Mount Holyoke College, at the start of my first year as a faculty member, my wise old department head shocked me, as he gazed out on the campus, by saying, "Frederick, you'll learn that everything else changes, but the students are always the same." "How perverse," I thought, "since the exact opposite is true!" But now, having matched his years, I think I understand. Teachers are recruited, age, and retire; buildings rise and are razed; but not so with students. For all their particular variety and their myriad names, they are always fresh-faced, eager, hopeful, and ready to learn.

But why should they bother learning? What if they should die young, like Melissa? What good was her eagerness? To what end were her labors? What of her teachers, the Jerry Jackson equivalents, who encouraged her, lectured her, prepared examinations for her, delighted in her achievements?

These of course are no longer just questions about Jerry and Melissa, or even general questions about faculty and students. They are much more intimately questions about ourselves. What is the point of our teaching and learning in a universe of short-lived expectations?

One familiar answer is offered by some religious traditions. It denies that our expectations should really be short. It claims, instead, that we can look forward to endless awareness. We are building, on this view, for eternity. This may be true. It is not my intent to dispute it. But I do not plan to rely on it as a satisfying answer. By itself it is not enough, for two main reasons.

First, even many religious people would not want to make this their main answer to the worth of teaching and knowing in this life. Christians have often anticipated great transformations in consciousness after this life is over. Some expect such blinding infusions of new truth as to render all that we have come to "know" in this life quite tawdry and irrelevant. St. Paul, in his famous paean to love in a letter to the young church at Corinth, asserts that " . . . now we see as through a glass, darkly, but then, face to face." In addition, many Christians believe that there will be a long period of nonexistence between the end of this life and the day of resurrection, in which the dead will be miraculously reconstituted with new bodies and new minds, making what we have learned in this life of dubious relevance for eternity. In other traditions, ancient Hebrew religion put little stake in personal immortality, and many adherents of contemporary Judaism are quite agnostic on the subject. Classical Buddhism outright denies not only the fact but even the desirability of continued post-mortem existence. Secular moderns (of whom there are many at the University of Georgia--perhaps some, as well, at Eckerd College) will consider answers couched in terms of an afterlife no answers at all.

Second, an even deeper reason for not appealing to immortality as the quick answer to the "point" of knowing by finite selves is that appeal to an infinite prolongation of awareness says nothing about what is worthwhile in awareness. If it is good that awareness be prolonged (and classical Buddhism, as I mentioned earlier, denies this), what is it about awareness that makes it worthwhile, if it is worthwhile? The point is not just that awareness should continue, but that awareness should be satisfactory, whether it continues or not. If awareness is completely unsatisfactory, as depicted in those vivid descriptions of hell so fascinating to some Christians from Hieronymus Bosch to Jonathan Edwards and beyond, then the point cannot be simply in the prolongation, but in the quality of the experience itself.

What makes an experience something to be treasured in itself--something which, when prolonged, is to be celebrated, but which, even if not prolonged, is worthwhile while it lasts? There are many words that have been used to name this quality. Even Buddhists, perhaps paradoxically, use the word "bliss" for nirvana, though they deny that such bliss, fully understood, is the experience of a "self," as usually understood. Others, closer to Western traditions, use such words as "rapture," or "blessedness," or "joy." The quality I am searching for is not fully captured by the sometimes trivial or gross meanings of "happiness" or "pleasure," although such words are surely markers pointing in the right direction. "Fulfillment" would be better. But the word I, personally, prefer for the quality of intrinsic satisfactoryness that justifies experience whenever it occurs is "beauty."

Now let me try to explain this choice, and relate it to teaching and learning in general before finally returning to the specific problem posed by Jerry Jackson and Melissa Lynn Hague.

Why call the quality that makes awareness worthwhile whenever it happens, for however long or short its duration, by the familiar name "beauty"? I have several reasons. The first two are closely linked. First, beauty places appropriate weight on subjectivity. Apart from the experience of an appreciator, there is no beauty. By saying this I am not siding with the old, reductive adage that "beauty is in the eye of the beholder." There are many more kinds of beauty than meet the eye. There are beauties of smell and taste, beauties of felt textures, beauties of the ear--and, as I hope to make clear--beauties of friendship, of thinking, and of acting as well. But all these beauties depend on modes of awareness, without which none could exist at all. Second, however, and inseparable from the first, the idea of beauty carries with it the idea of something more than a subjective state alone. The experience of beauty is of something: it is experience of "the beautiful." Such a referential character may or may not hold for experiences of joy or bliss. Buddhists explicitly deny it of the highest kind of bliss, and perhaps it is possible to feel generally happy without any particular object of happiness. But beauty is a subjective state with an object to which it is the response. Both are necessary. Without the beautiful object, there would be nothing to appreciate; without the appreciation, there would be only potential beauty--some possibility unrealized for intrinsic satisfaction, some chance missed for value.

A third reason for choosing "beauty" as the key to what justifies any state of awareness that manifests it is that we commonly allow that beauty comes in many degrees. Unlike "bliss," which is an either/or concept, beauty may grow or diminish. Also, one object of beauty may remain beautiful while others are recognized as its equal or as even still more beautiful. At the same time, there may be many distinct kinds of beauty--beauties which do not diminish each other by being different, beauties which may be incommensurable with one another. This is because, fourth, the concept of beauty can give us some guidance--but only some--in specifying its essential characteristics. It is a term, as philosophers say, that "under determines" its range of application. We realize, that is, that for anything to have the character of significant beauty, it must to some extent be composed of a variety of elements. The alternative would be total boredom, not beauty. But these elements must have some positive connection to one another. They may clash, but only as far as enhancing interest. Dissonances add to beauty within the context of larger harmonies. Tensions make for more satisfying resolutions. Dissonances and tensions alone, unharmonized and unresolved, would destroy the experience of beauty.

A good example might be drawn from the often-neglected beauties of food and drink. Sweet-and-sour sauce is a simple but effective synthesis of conflicting elements which, together, enhance gustatory experience more intensely than either cloying sweetness or mouth-puckering sourness alone can do. Together, mutually adjusted and with other elements (such as salt and other spices), sugar and vinegar enhance one another without ceasing to be what they are or to perform their characteristic functions. Intrinsically satisfying experience comes from the harmonious synthesis of discordant ingredients. Intrinsically satisfying experience is what I mean by "beauty."

Still more complex beauties of the dining experience are based on the same principle. Distinguished chefs labor to bring their guests maximum intensities of satisfaction by finding just the right balances of herbs, sauces, textures, etc., in the foods they carefully prepare, as well as in the sequencing of the various courses in the menus they construct. The beauty of the taste of great wine, similarly, lies in the subtle contrasts between its elements--tannin, acid, sugar, etc.--blended in organic harmonies beyond full analysis, even by experts who devote their lives to the task. More, with the harmonies of aroma and taste, from both food and drink, are integrated the additional visual beauties of the table. Contrasting colors on the plate; the bloom of red wine through sparkling crystal; the warm ambiance of candlelight illuminating the background of white linen and glowing silver; and, at best, the stimulating mix of different personalities among the diners, providing rich conversational variety--these disparate elements are unified by the experiencing subjects who thereby enjoy a truly beautiful evening.

Our human bias toward eyesight--perhaps because of our highly-developed optical-neurological system--draws us too quickly (and sometimes even exclusively) to the visual, to paintings, landscapes, sunsets, rainbows, or comely people, as instances of what it is to know beauty. With my food examples, I have offered what I hope is a fresh alternative. But an even better example is found in music.

Like all varieties of beauty, musical beauty is capable of more or less. Contrasting pitches, timbres, volume changes, rhythms, and melodic lines may be exceedingly simple. The insistent periodicity of the drum functions to provide contrast between moments of sound and moments of silence, and to build expectation of continuing contrasts in the immediate future. Drums may be powerful in their insistent throb and can be immensely intricate. But just as there can be aesthetic excitement, there can be boredom, too. Some kinds of "disco" music, for example, offer only a few distinct qualities of sound, minimal rhythmic contrast, and few melodic surprises. Even these allow syntheses of elements constituting minor moments of beauty. This may be as far as some uncultivated musical tastes feel they need to reach. But, at the other extreme, a great symphony orchestra can supply almost unlimited variety in instrumental tones, dynamic ranges (from barely audible to deafening), and music carefully devised for it by composers as intent as any master chef on evoking intensity of experience from the blending of many contrasting elements. This music allows the delights of subtle dissonances and rhythmic variation taken up and resolved in endlessly engaging ways. Distinct themes can be toyed with, repeated in different registers, inverted, made to clash with other elements--all within the capacities of human experiencers to distinguish, remember, recognize, associate, learn to anticipate, feel the satisfaction of expectations confirmed, feel the stimulating jolt of expectations playfully postponed, and feel the sweet surprise of expectations met in unexpected, still-more-interesting ways.

My position entails that there are genuinely higher and lower orders of beauty, finer and coarser satisfactions, greater and lesser expressions of music, depending on the character and complexity of its blend of richness and wholeness. It does not, however, entail that there is such a thing as "absolute" music or art, any more than there are "absolute" meals or wines. On the contrary, just as there are multiplicities of ways to achieve great culinary satisfactions in different cultural traditions, using different ingredients, in different ways, there must be room for generous pluralism in what rightly counts as great beauty in poetry, visual art, and music. As one who has played both, I am sure that there is great jazz as well as great symphonic music, for example. There must also be room for future advances in all these domains, room for open-ended enhancement of experience by ever-finer discriminations of elements, thus creating real possibilities of ever-growing coherences in ever-more-intense satisfactions.

Why this turn to the merits of music in what began as a meditation on the intrinsic value of learning and teaching? My reason--the clue to my leading metaphor--is my conviction that knowing is the music of thought. More literally, I believe that the knowing of beauty is our best access to the beauty of knowing.

If some should be surprised at the phrase, "the beauty of knowing," it may be because often in our busy society, so devoted to business and careers, we play down, even repress, the intrinsic aesthetic hungers of the mind. We think it our duty to stuff our minds with "facts, facts, facts," as Mr. Gradgrind demanded in Charles Dickens's Hard Times. We grow embarrassed or mistrustful at our own yearnings to make connections--to create harmonies--among the clashing elements and between disconnected disciplines that claim, discordantly, to be the exclusive center of our attention.

Knowing as an act of mind, however, arises from the hunger for beauty. At the very base of knowing is recognition. If we could not recognize elements of experience, our experience would not be of a world made up of familiar events and relations. We must be able to draw similarities together, binding them across time, if the process of concept construction is ever to get started. And in this primitive mental capacity to have the experience of "hello, again!" when encountered by similar sounds, or sights, or textures, is the primitive beginning of beauty: the harmonization of elements in significant ways. When our mental capacities to recognize are activated, particular elements of experience for the first time begin to take shape in definite forms. Our senses crave these forms. We have hungry eyes, hungry ears, hungry tongues and noses--each in its way eager for comprehensible novelty wrapped in the familiarities of form. Our eyes love to watch the endless variations-in-similarity as waves curl on the beach, as clouds make or remake quasi-recognizable, tantalizing patterns, and as flames lick fireplace logs with ever-different but ever-renewing familiarity. Our ears are no less hungry for repeated rhythms and tonalities, especially when interestingly varied in detail. Exactly such intrinsic satisfactions from experienced variety in harmony is what I named beauty.

These beauties are real but very basic. From the simple, daydreaming level, learning leaps to more complexity. Individual senses interrelate with others to offer the multidimensional world of familiar objects. Thus, to the idle sensory beauties are added the harmonies and dissonances underlying practical anticipation and action. Coherence in action depends on prior coherence in cognition. The vector of such coherences carries us first to folk wisdom about the world and thence to the observational sciences, which offer their own intrinsic satisfactions of eye and ear and mind. The discovery of an empirical law is the creation of a new harmony within the sheer multiplicity of experience. It represents the positive binding together of past, present, and future aspects of experience. The verification of a prediction is a moment of sweetness for the mind. Falsification, however, a startling dissonance in its moment of discovery, has the potential for challenging cognition to even more subtle and complex harmonies yet to be enjoyed.

I am suggesting an aesthetic theory of knowing. The satisfactions of knowing, however practical they may be, are at the same time (and even more deeply) intrinsically rewarding as well. Even the practical benefits, seen in full perspective, are ultimately for the sake of those intrinsic satisfactions that need no further justification. What a shame--what a loss--if we should allow the business of life to obscure the point of living!

For these reasons I rejoice in the liberal arts, since the liberal arts are precisely aimed at freeing and enlarging our minds to be the most comprehensive domains of satisfaction they can be. The liberal arts are not enemies of the "nuts and bolts knowledge" that everyone needs to make a life work; but they hold them at a different level. At their best, the liberal arts make sure that the intrinsic satisfactions of life remain prominent and in control, so that life's nuts and bolts themselves become meaningful elements in the higher harmony that is the aim of life itself--to become a work of beauty.

On this ideal, the liberal arts are never identical to the sum of their component disciplines: history, art, music, literature, languages, mathematics, physics, chemistry, anthropology, sociology, political science, philosophy, religion, and the like. These all strive to integrate elements into meaningful wholes of their own, but the liberally educated mind hungers for wholes beyond these wholes, craves harmonies beyond these harmonies.

This means that there is something profoundly attractive about interdisciplinarity. In an era of knowledge explosions and outwardly expanding universes of knowledge, it reminds us that the characteristically modern way of specialization is not the only--or even the best--way to go. It demands an ecology of the mind, in which everything is related to everything else. It also means that the mind's quest for harmonies will not be fully satisfied until it hears the music of the ultimate spheres themselves.

Consider now the analogies between the composition of music and the construction of theories. Both are abstract, symbolic activities. A composer and a theorist must often be satisfied with something mundane, just a simple little ditty or a minor scrap of theory. But sometimes great works beckon. The composer may assay a symphony; the theorist may tackle a wide-ranging scientific problem or even hope to craft a worldview.

In both cases, there will be vastly more elements available than can possibly be given their due. There must be selection, subordination, thematic configuration, internal relation--all organized around a few central ideas. There will be a mood set, a key. This need not remain unchanged throughout--it should not, since the spice of variety is craved, e.g., flashes of humor, even in a serious work--but the unity of affective tone underlies all other, lesser unities that make up the work as a whole. If the work is to be rich, it needs tension between elements that rival each other for notice and for dominance. If the work is to be whole, the tensions need to be resolved, over and over again, in lesser resolutions that spark larger tensions, finally finding full voice in a climax that offers acknowledgment, acceptance, peace.

"Coherence" is the dreary word some philosophers use for the unity that ought to offer peace to theory. But there are coherences and coherences, systems and systems--just as there are symphonies and other symphonies. Not all are on a par. We may not wish to dismiss any. We may agree that all are great achievements. But some may move and inspire more than others. There are some symphonies we might choose to dwell with often. There are some philosophical thought-worlds we might choose to dwell in for a lifetime.

Philosophical systems are constructed as possible habitations for whole persons. This involves conceptual satisfaction, of course, but also satisfactions for feeling and acting. And not only for isolated individuals. Ecology reminds us that there are no isolated individuals. Theoretical knowing at its most comprehensive is not full enough if it does not comprehend society. The satisfying system would unite not only the fragmented knowledge of the sciences in a harmony of cognition; it would also draw together ethics and religion, humanity and nature, technologies and institutions worthy of a common life.

Mention of institutions draws this discussion back where we began--to fundamental issues of teaching and learning. In our society these are institutionalized in educational roles and practices, themselves supported by brick and mortar, faculty and staff, books and computers.

Some of our institutions of teaching and learning are mainly devoted to the perfectly legitimate advancement of specific skills and modes of awareness that help persons prepare themselves for socially necessary occupations. Vocational schools, professional schools, create their own kind of music. There is a beauty in the performance of a well-learned craft that deserves admiration. One of the flaws in our contemporary American civilization, indeed, is that too often the potential beauty of well-performed practical tasks is undermined in the increasingly automated context of the service sector of our society. The intrinsic rewards of intelligent awareness are short-circuited by transferring expectations of intelligence from the workers to machines. For example, the humble intrinsic satisfactions of calculating and giving out correct change (which I remember from my college days, working behind a lunch counter) have been stolen by "smart" cash registers that make orders, take inventory, and return change automatically--all at the push of a pictogram that removes even the need for literacy, much less numeracy, in fast-food counter attendants. In America, unlike Europe, the genuine dignity of learning how to be a really good waiter--or salesperson--is hard even to discuss intelligibly these days, even harder to find exemplified. Other vocations and professions, requiring more educational investment, still enjoy their intrinsic beauties, but even these are perilously under pressure. Medical doctors, long the paradigm of high professional status, are rapidly being transformed, by insurance companies and profit-seeking managements of health-provider organizations, into employees working under the direction of accountants. High pay checks can assure continuing some obvious kinds of intrinsic satisfactions for their families, but many doctors are finding that even these rewards, received at the price of accepting the direction of others, are not adequate compensation for the loss of the professional autonomy in which their own harmonies of judgment and treatment could be performed under their own baton.

Other educational institutions, or colleges within larger institutions, are devoted directly and consciously to the task of increasing the quality of human autonomy, in whatever circumstances persons may find themselves. This does not mean that liberal arts discourages the learning of significant facts and meaningful techniques. Learning must be of something. There must be elements if there are to be harmonies. But when the context is the liberal arts, the stress in the phrase, "significant facts," remains on significant. What do the facts mean in the larger context of life's symphony? All the disciplines of the liberal arts--the humanities and languages, the formal sciences, the empirical sciences--are players in this symphony. Knowing is an end in itself. Each type of knowing has its own beauty. The joy in participating in such beauty is the intrinsic and inalienable reward of teaching and learning in the liberal arts.

This brings us back, finally, to Jerry Jackson and Melissa Hague. Jerry was a teacher of philosophy; Melissa was a student of anthropology. Both were drawn by their lives to see more deeply, to listen more attentively to the music of learning. Like all of us, they had to cope with many details, they knew frustrations and disappointments. But they lived within institutions structured to remind them not to miss the music, to help them attend, through all the details of life and all the dissonances of distraction, to the intrinsic joys of knowing. In those experiences of beauty, both teacher and learner were in the presence of what justifies itself. In the language of the Christian tradition, they were then in the presence of the divine. Their minds were brushed at those moments by echoes and anticipations of the great Harmony of harmonies that structures the cosmos at its deepest core. The fact that these experiences of beauty happened -- is their point. They need no other point. They were self-warranting moments. The fact that they came to an end, like all things finite, does not change their status of intrinsic worth. To be touched by the divine does not make an end to finiteness. It confirms finiteness in finding it beautiful. And by linking all finite, partial harmonies in the still-unfinished symphony of the universe, new possibilities for wider, deeper harmonies are rendered real.

This is important for us, still coping with the distractions and dissonances of daily life. Life hungers for beauty and, in making it actual, finds both its subjective justification for being and its objective role in enlarging the beauty of the whole. Since our lives are not guaranteed to be long, we need to attend noticingly, while we can, to their intrinsic quality. We need caring institutions, faculties and friends, who will say to us, "Don't miss the music!"

1. Prepared for presentation as a Jerry Jackson Lecture in the Humanities, a public lecture at Western Carolina University, Cullowhee, North Carolina, on March 26, 1998.