The Liberal Arts: Embracing Profound Thinking
The concept of Liberal Arts came full circle on the scene in the late 90s and early 2000s. To the casual observer, it seemed like a hodge lodge of the arts, sciences, and humanities blended together with no specific formula (trust my assertion, it was there) which seemed rather like an experimental exercise at learning adaptation with the times.
That latter part is true. But prior to that, in the age of academic and professional specialization, there were economists who thought like economist, engineers as…..you guessed it, prototypical engineers, scientists committed to logic and strict interpretation of data and linguists bound by the content of the lexicons they studied to view yonder to associations and origins.
The beauty of Liberal Arts is that it posits that each subject study affects or vice versa or bears a course parallel to each other whom we can institute equalities or inequalities in origin, development, cross influence or causality and a pull to develop in complexity along the times to describe objects, relationships, and dynamics in the current day.
The other, perhaps aforementioned, value of the Liberal Arts is the symbiotic and causal relationship they appear to exert on STEM. The earliest scientists and mathematicians—Newton, Galileo, Copernicus, Tesla—were all versed in Philosophy as a means of guiding thought and discourse. They had the phenomena and hence the what. But not necessarily the how and the why. Given their technical limitation vis-a-vis modern technology, they had to resort to reason, logic, and ordered but sometimes necessarily tangential inquiry. Concepts of “metaphysics”—the transcendent driving forces whose dimensional superseding influence were responsible for the seeming interconnected workings of the cosmos, and the earth in this case, were rife in their phenomenal characterization and solution determination.
My take? The hard sciences, mathematics, economics—all that is quantitative and posits an
irrefutable set of facts—inclines one towards what to know and how to apply it to known problems thus solved or similar problems of different variables. At least some of the liberal arts—Philosophy, Psychology, Anthropology, and more—teach how to think. They prompt the notion of attaining curiosity. They help form the central thesis and the null hypothesis. They determine the central axioms that qualify or disqualify a phenomenon, and in so doing determine a working definition of the subject being pondered.
I wouldn’t presume to declare the Liberal Arts the long awaited answer to STEM performance, or any other gains of which I don’t doubt exist. However, it’s capacity to direct thought on a logical, convincing, and illustrative manner is something people in either set of careers may find a great deal of usefulness for.
