Aristotle and Liberal Learning

On my desk as I write this morning sits a wooden carpenter’s plane from the mid-nineteenth century. The stamp on one end says “Sandusky Tool Co., Ohio.” Other stamps on both ends say “J. A. Apgar”—impressed into the wood four times so there would be no mistake about whose tool this was. John Apgar was born in the 1840s. He was my great great-grandfather, part of a long line of German Reformed immigrants who settled in and around Lebanon, New Jersey, beginning in the 1740s.

I own a few dozen of these remarkable tools. They are adjustable and have all sorts of thumb screws. A skilled finish carpenter could make elaborate Victorian molding with them. Their blades are still as sharp as razors. I say I “own” them, but really I hold them in trust for future generations in the family. They will pass out of my hands to someone who will cherish them. I hope they are kept intact as a set, the tools of the trade as John Apgar knew and used them and then handed on to his son, Ross, who added to the collection. Some bear the double stamp of “J. A. Apgar” and “R. S. Apgar.”

My father learned the craft of carpentry from his grandfather Ross. Ross was born in 1870, 150 years ago next month. I knew him. He died in 1966 when I was five.

My father gave these wooden planes to me in May 2016 when he knew he was dying of a brain tumor. We thought he had six months to live. He had three. It may have been the last day I saw him alive that we went into the garage. He had a careful list of what he wanted to accomplish before he died. I climbed a step ladder to retrieve the three or four boxes of tools from the garage’s very tidy loft. My father’s parents were packrats, but not my father. I put the boxes in the back of my SUV, and they made the journey back to Michigan, closer to the part of the US where they were made than where they had helped make a living and a life.

I have no idea how to use these tools.

They make me feel stupid. I don’t know the names of each tool or of the parts that compose them. I learned how to re-glaze windows and paint from my father, who was a perfectionist. But I could have learned much more. I regret my stubborn indifference as an adolescent. I now own a house built in 1881, and hardly a day goes by that I don’t think about my missed opportunities. But regrets can be good things when they help us remember what we have lost.

But what hath Aristotle to do with John Apgar?

I thought about these tools as I reread and discussed Aristotle this week with the students and teachers enrolled in “Great Beginnings.” It was Aristotle who left behind one of the most important and durable definitions of liberal education. “Liberal” in his sense meant an education worthy of a freeman. The liberal realm is free from the labor of necessity, the day to day tasks of meeting our physical needs and comforts. For Aristotle, physical labor, the work of the hand, belonged to the slave. It was “slavish” and unworthy of free citizen. Menial labor degraded and vulgarized those who engaged in it. The freeman, in contrast, had the liberty to pursue the life of moral and intellectual excellence. He would develop sound judgment in statesmanship, morals, and aesthetics. The ultimate goal was the wellbeing of city-state. Those who would be responsible for promoting and protecting the common good needed to be cultivated in heart and mind, in virtue, wisdom, and eloquence. If “hand” were joined with heart and mind, it was in the act of service to the community. And one of the greatest acts of service would be to legislate for the education of the young beyond what their parents could or would provide.

Aristotle’s warning against “illiberal” pursuits at times sounds harsh. The question for him wasn’t whether education should be useful or not. Aristotle insisted that a good education fit for citizens of noble character was truly useful. It produced great good for the individual and the community. But, he wrote in the Politics, “any occupation, art, or science, which makes the body or soul or mind of the freeman less fit for the practice or exercise of virtue, is vulgar; wherefore we call those arts vulgar which tend to deform the body, and likewise all paid employments, for they absorb and degrade the mind.”

It would be easy to caricature these words, especially out of context. Aristotle was a cautious thinker and avoided simplistic either/or choices. Yes, he thought menial labor unworthy of a free man, as has any aristocratic society in history. But his larger concern was that nothing be pursued to the degree that it distracted from, crowded out, or obstructed the right use of leisure—those pursuits that cultivate the things that make humans truly and distinctive human, the realm of thought, and language, and beauty. The obsessively busy life of getting ahead in this world makes the cultivation of nobler things impossible. And amusement has its place in refreshing body and mind after times of stress and exertion, but taken too far it distracts and impoverishes the heart and mind. Even liberal learning itself is not free from dangers. Any one discipline carried to excess interferes with the education of the complete human being.

Aristotle’s worry about the “slavish,” “vulgar” labor of human hands ought to be handled with care. We ought not to teach young people by word or example that physical labor is beneath them. The skilled trades are honorable callings. They require virtue and intellect. And they serve their communities in ways we ignore at our peril.

The wooden plane on my desk (World War II surplus and my father’s desk for more than 60 years) reminds me of how much I don’t know about the world and how many things I don’t know how to do. It reminds me of a lost world of handcrafted goods. Even the plane itself was made by hand. The work of our hands—the literal, not abstract or metaphorical, work of our hands, will keep us grounded and connected to “ordinary” people. My hours gardening remind me that I am dust; the weeds remind me of our first parents’ disobedience, and that I live as exile from Eden until the consummation of the ages. Gardening also keeps me talking to my neighbors about things as pleasantly mundane as the weather. In their own way, these conversions are as important as “great conversations.”