INDIVIDUALISM IN THE LIBERAL ARTS: THOUGHTS ON HABITS OF THE HEART *SHIRLEY A. MULLEN* Assistant Professor of History Westmont College Do the collection of disciplines known as the liberal arts foster dissociated, fragmented individualism? The "liberal arts" have been associated throughout history with the disinterested pursuit of truth--I believe the phrase is "the pursuit of truth for its own sake." Those who have followed their call could expect to be challenged with the great human questions, to be exposed to the classic human efforts to answer those questions, and to be nurtured in the skills that would enable them to continue the quest for an understanding of what it means to be fully human in this world. On these terms, it might appear that the liberal arts could not help but serve the cause of human community over "dissociated fragmented individualism." After all, they draw the individual into the community of scholars that transcends geographical and chronological bounds. They dictate that the individual submit to various disciplines that together purport to draw him out of himself into the integrating experience of participation in a mature humanity. Finally, the liberal arts promise a moral foundation in the union of truth and goodness that will enable the individual to ground his life in a foundation of oughtness and thus to escape the morally inconclusive justification of personal preference. Despite initial appearances, one finds that, upon closer examination, the liberal arts prove to be fraught with the ambiguities of individualistic/community tensions that, according to Habits of the Heart, characterize other institutions capable of mediating between public and private life. In this world, Truth refuses to dictate the terms under which it will be served. This is to say that the liberal arts disciplines cannot themselves foster either community or individualism. The degree to which they draw an individual further into isolation or out of himself into community will depend on the individual, not on the disciplines themselves. But this is not to suggest that the liberal arts disciplines are irrelevant to this discussion. There are potential limitations and possibilities to this approach to truth as a barrier against individualism that are worthy of consideration. On the one hand, liberal arts is no guaranteed route out of isolation. For one thing, what confronts even an eager, disinterested truth-seeker upon entrance into today's institutions of higher learning is a panoply of self-centered, politicized, professionalized disciplines--not a community of scholars intently bent on the pursuit of a whole vision of truth. Further, this truth-seeker must choose to "cast his lot" with one of those disciplines if he is to make any progress at all toward his higher objective. The proliferation of content in any subject field today, the increasing specialization of methodology, the in-house jargon, and departmental survival politics will all work on the enterprising truth-seeker to draw him ever deeper into the intricacies of his chosen discipline and away from the bigger questions with which he had begun his pursuit of truth. The more capable the student, the more he will be tempted by the practicalities of academia to be first a disciplinarian, rather than a human. Apart from this fragmentation fostered by academic structures, there are two further threats to the integrating capacity of the liberal arts. First, one may, instead of pursuing truth through the liberal arts, be making the liberal arts a tool of one's own purposes. As one hears the praises of liberal arts graduates being sung even by the nation's largest corporations, one may wonder if a liberal arts degree will become, for some, merely another enhancement to one's own marketability in the competitive public sphere. If liberal arts may become an instrument of "utilitarian individualism," it can also be used in the service of "expressive individualism." An individual may become enamored less with the pursuit of truth, and more with the fact that the pursuit of truth is his own. He can use his truth as a means of self-identification, as a way of obtaining personal power, and as a way of setting himself apart from the human community rather than participating in it. If liberal arts do not themselves ensure escape from isolated individualism, they are, at the same time, one avenue that makes possible such an escape. The very discipline that can confine can also liberate. The methodology, the questions, the content that make one feel at home inside a subject are the means for venturing into other disciplines as well. They can provide a foundation of content, a basis of comparison and clarification of information, and a strategy of truth-seeking that can as easily enable a person to survive in an ever-widening arena, with an ever-clearer vision of reality, as entrap one within the world of a discipline. If the discipline is a ship, one can choose to work in the hold on its engines, thinking that is the "whole," or one can ride at the helm and experience a never-ending adventure into mysterious and uncharted waters. The utilitarian potential of the liberal arts as a program for cultivating critical, analytical, and communicative skills can be a bridge toward greater interpersonal understanding that can extend far beyond the limits of the often self-serving therapeutic model of relationships that, according to Habits of the Heart, characterizes the functioning of the person in the public world. One of the problems identified by the authors as typical of Americans today is the lack of a language with which to understand and communicate realities that transcend individualism. The liberal arts, it would seem, with its commitment to enabling people to think clearly about human experience in the world through time and space, and to communicate about that experience, would be an ideal setting for facilitating the acquiring of a vocabulary with which to appropriate and appreciate the aspects of our reality not contained within the words of individualism. Finally, the expressive capacity of the liberal arts, while it does enable an individual to set himself apart as an ivory tower intellectual, can also be the means whereby an individual finds himself coming as if by magic into a "community of memory"--a "context that connects his aspirations with others and with good" (p. 153)--in which, while he is most truly himself, he is most unselfconsciously so. His consciousness is of the shared life of the quest--of truth, more than of his truth; of humanity, more than of his humanity; of the struggle, more than of his struggle. If an individual comes to the liberal arts to find himself, or to serve his own ends, he will discover his "self," and, if he is intelligent enough, he will bring the work to the service of his own private ends. He will also, in this process, encounter countless other selves locked in the competitive struggle to bring truth to the service of power. And the individual self, struggling to wrest more control of truth from other individual selves, will find the truth to be only as large as he can allow it to be. The liberal arts would be only a confirming of his isolation. But if an individual comes to the liberal arts to be carried away to a world bigger than himself; if he comes to the liberal arts to identify with humans of his own times, and of other times and places, who have struggled to give meaning to their existence by conscious examination of that existence; if he comes to the liberal arts to be freed from the parochialism of his own personal experience; if he comes, without reservation, to serve truth, rather than to use it, he will not be left alone and disappointed. The liberal arts will be for him the gateway out of individualism into genuine community.