When we speak of the “liberal arts tradition,” there are only two things wrong with the phrase: the words ‘liberal’ and ‘arts.’ There’s nothing wrong in this context with ‘tradition.’ However inapt the phrase, the tradition itself is a fine one – or at least, it’s all we’ve got. We’re talking about a 2,500-year intellectual journey, a stagger-step march of Western Civilization (with many infusions from non-Western cultures, and the enormous contributions, but original and preservative, of Arab scholar) from the Ancient Greeks to the present.
The Emergence of the Liberal Arts Tradition
It may sometimes seem as if the Greeks were the acme of that tradition; but there has been some clear thinking since. The Greeks just invented the practice of intellectual reasoning. The tradition arguably embraces virtually all formal knowledge (if any knowledge can be said to be “formal”), excluding only the most applied forms of science, and practical skills from fortune-telling and tax-preparation to nuclear power production.
The idea of knowledge within that tradition is, in important ways, both bounded (limited) and boundless. But there is no contradiction here. It is unbounded in the sense that it is an expanding universe of understanding of the world (expanding faster in some areas than others), driven by questions about what we don’t know. It is also self-revising; open to new avenues of inquiry, data-collection, and experimentation; and flexible, insofar as the traditional disciplinary boundaries are useful logical containers, but not ultimate or fixed barriers, in the geography of knowledge. We explore, think about, and report on, whatever it is useful to explore, think about, and report on (while also producing some non-essential doctoral theses and academic tomes.)
Even connections across distant realms can be illuminating. And connections across more proximate realms can be essential to understanding them; hence the recent shift toward interdisciplinary learning. As E.O. Wilson writes [The Creation, p. 136]:
[W]hat was once perceived as an epistemological divide between the great branches of learning is now emerging from the academic fog as something far different and much more interesting: a wide middle domain of mostly unexplored phenomena open to a cooperative approach from both sides of the former divide. Already disciplines from one side of this middle domain – for example, neuroscience and evolutionary biology – have connected with their closest neighbors, psychology and anthropology, on the other side. The middle domain is a region of exceptionally rapid intellectual advance.
But flexibility means maintaining supple and porous categories, not throwing them away. Whatever the connections, distinctions remain: for example, between nature (science), society (social science), and human nature and imagination (the humanities). If there is one essential principle of critical thinking in the liberal arts, it is that such distinctions and connections can, and must, coexist.
If the liberal arts tradition is open in those ways, it is bounded in the sense that everything we think and talk about has meaning, or we might as well not think it or say it, and meaning must be communicable with clarity and efficiency. Thus we need the forms of rationality that give the learning process rigor. Meaning “means” that everything has a context – a relation to other meanings. Contexts and relations – forms of association and dissociation – are the stuff of knowledge. This does or does not go with that, resemble that, cause that, contain that, etc. Definitions of words, no matter how conventional, arbitrary, or subject to change, are the building blocks of written and spoken language, and the essential agreements on which all thought and communication is based.
Put another way: meaning is a system of interconnected parts – of distinctions and connections. We can tinker with that system, shade meanings or create nominally new ones. But our ideas, like our words, always relate to something else, something prior or adjacent or similar or inside or outside of that idea or word, and that’s why they work for us.