I have always liked the idea that at their core, the liberal arts carry with them a particularly humanist sense of value, without necessarily all of the philosophical commitments of humanism. Essentially, this boils down to the idea that knowledge and the transmission of human learning is good, that it benefits us spiritually, ethically, practically, even when its benefits aren’t obvious on any of those counts.

We’ve had a big fat slug in our off-site chart of new liberal arts, titled “ethics.” And next to it, someone typed — without any sense of irony, I swear — “needs development.”

I don’t know if “ethics” does the trick. But some sense of philosophy-ethics-humanism, that can try to reason in this light of understanding value, of a science of the self that can answer or at least continually pose that philo-humanist a priori question — “when we do X, what do we mean?” — yes, I think we have to say that we need that!

Or fuck it, liberal arts moratorium, because we need better batteries.

That said: Maybe we should have a little meter in the corner of every page that rates each NLA according to the axes of truth/beauty/good :-)

1. Much of the New Liberal Arts discussion in the other post, while exciting and fascinating, strikes me as a tad superficial: lots of gee-whiz, lots of practical power, but maybe not asking “why” and “what for.” By all means, let’s discuss the New Beauty of today, or the New Science, but only if we also consider the New Humanities.

2. As a kind of response to the anti-humanities fight at the beginning of the other thread. My argument here: the humanities are not truly separate from the sciences. Without considering the value of scientific knowledge, it’s, well, valueless. Humanists (be they trained as philosophers, historians, or scientists) need to ask fundamental questions about science.

More writing about Thoreau!

Value: in the end, unless you have a sense of purpose, of the good, I don’t see how you can have a measure of utility.

Durable knowledge: exactly! I want us to think about the disciplines as a whole host of wonderful knowledge defining traditions. The liberally-trained individual need not be fluent in all of them, but knows they exist.

Rather, I’m happy to continue talking about what new disciplines and media-specific modes of inquiry grab our attention these days. That’s ultimately what I gather this book-project to be about. But I think the truth/beauty/good nexus ought to help as a tool for assessment. If a new mode or discipline does not contribute notably to all of them: it’s incomplete.

1) Communication and beauty aren’t the same thing. At all.

2) Value in the sense of the good and value in the sense of the useful are related but aren’t quite the same thing.

3) “Durable knowledge” really does mean different things across the disciplines.

4) There is and has always been a “liberal arts” that is like the trivium and a liberal arts that is like the quadrivium, arts of form and those of content/disciplinarity. Going back to the Greeks and Romans, there are even practical liberal arts like architecture and medicine. The liberal arts have always been heterogenous. So there is no reason why we should be unduly anxious about purifying away discipline– or media-specific modes of inquiry.

Pure Reason (how is knowledge possible?);

Practical Reason (how is ethics possibile?);

and Judgment (how is aesthetics possible?).

Now think of history.

It’s got a form (NARRATIVE) that communicates ideas very effectively.[Rhetoric/Beauty]

It produces trustworthy knowledge about the past by effectively gathering and classifying data (ARCHIVING–DATA-MANAGING, be that data machine-readable or not).[Science/Truth]

It serves the broader purpose of supporting a big, crazy, changing world by showing how un-natural that world is: how it evolved haphazardly due to a thousand tiny contingencies (De-NATURALIZING).[Humanities/Good]

What makes a good—and I mean a really good—research psychologist? I’ll posit three elements:

1. an ability to frame answerable questions drawing on the tools of the discipline (be they scanners, flashcards, stopwatches, or statistical methods)

2. the ability to pick a worthwhile question; the power to scale up from small study to significant finding

3. the ability to convey new knowledge to a world that might be resistant to it.

This list could also distill down to:

1. science

2. humanities

3. rhetoric

That is:

1. framing answerable investigations; getting durable knowledge

2. asking big questions; judging value; understanding purpose

3. conveying; expressing; persuading—broadly: communicating

Which all maps pretty well to:

1. Truth [most limited, yet most powerful]

2. Good [most important, b/c foundational]

3. Beauty [most expansive, and most delightful]

And we’re back to Howard Gardner. Or Aristotle.