In Defense of the Liberal Arts
Triumph of St. Thomas Aquinas | Creative Commons Image
The opinions reflected in this OpEd are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the opinions of staff, faculty and students of The King's College.
The controversy surrounding the Interregnum Opening Lecture with Roger Kimball is an opportunity to live out the liberal arts education we have pursued at The King’s College. As King’s students, we have been equipped with the tools provided to us by the liberal arts to have thoughtful discourse.
The liberal arts are the seedbed of what we know as Western ideals and Western culture. Among those ideals is not just freedom of speech and the press, but the free exploration of ideas, especially ideas that differ from our own. The freedom of exploration is a core ideal of the liberal arts.
But exploration is not always comfortable; it requires engaging with ideas that we may sometimes find distasteful, but this is necessary for a liberal education and a liberal society. Liberal learning is founded on the exploration of ideas and beliefs but also the critique of your own. Liberal learning does not fear these critiques; in fact, it embraces them because, without critique, education loses its liberality and becomes dogma. This welcoming of critical questioning is the foundation of a liberal education and also the foundation of Western ideals.
The liberality of the West is expressed in two distinct ways that have a symbiotic relationship. First, there is liber as bodily freedom. Cicero viewed the meaning of liber or liberalis as the physical state of people free from slavery. This has been continued in a Western ideal as freedom of choice — to do with one's life the best one sees fit. I believe that the ideal of individual choice is best summed by Benjamin Constant: “Individual liberty, I repeat, is the true modern liberty.”
Second, liber is the freedom of the mind. Aquinas saw liber as the freedom of “intellectual cognition.” Freedom to seek, critique and develop new ideas is the truest form of freedom for Aquinas. The relationship between the freedom of action and freedom of intellect is fundamental to Western freedom. These ideals are the natural progression of what the liberal arts, or liberal learning, inevitably teach. Liberal education is not just a transfer of knowledge from the teacher to the students. It is a tool that teaches students how to harness the knowledge taught to them so that they can critically view not only their own ideas and opinions but also those of others. It helps the students find interconnections between different subjects or ideas. To be critical of your own ideas and of others, you have to allow others to voice their ideas no matter how distasteful you find them.
Allowing the vocalization of opposing viewpoints is not an endorsement of them. How can one condemn or rebut those one finds objectionable if one first does not let them speak? If you truly believe that your ideas are superior in reason and morality, then why would you need to silence or shame another into ideological submission? Attempting to silence or shame anyone’s views and convictions into ideological irrelevance is only needed by those who have not dialectically refined their own beliefs to a point where they can survive the rigors of the marketplace of ideas. When a society sees the acknowledgment of an idea as legitimizing it, that society loses its ability to rationally evaluate ideas, whether those ideas are opposed or congruent with that society's values.
The liberal arts aim at the interaction with and dialectical evaluation of all ideas. A liberal education's mission is to teach us how to recognize, evaluate and determine the legitimate and non-legitimate parts of an argument. But to use this education in a critical way we have to risk being offensive. To critique or challenge inherently means that one risks being offensive. If one wishes to participate in the marketplace of ideas they have to accept that they will be offended and that they might also offend. In essence, a liberal education is an education on how to think, and in order to be able to think freely, you have to risk being offensive.
As students of King’s, we believe in the values of a liberal education, or else we would not have come to King’s. In this belief, we must uphold the core value of a liberal education which is the exploration and examination of all ideas. The liberal arts have provided us with a tool to evaluate and explore ideas and ideologies that would otherwise be foreign to us. It is guaranteed that in our exploration of our own beliefs and those of others, we will offend and be offended. We should not have an aversion to offense because, without offense, or the risk of it, we would be incapable of growth.
This is not an endorsement of offending. On the contrary, in most situations avoiding offense is preferable. Nonetheless, this op-ed offers a defense to preserve the ability to offend. Without the liberal arts, we cannot learn how to defend our own ideas and dissect others. By defending the liberal arts, we are defending the system that fertilized the ground where the seeds of our core philosophies of personal and intellectual freedom were planted. These seeds grew into the ideas that have formed our modern society and the virtues we hold dear. As students of King’s, if we fail to recognize the past and the present value of the liberal arts, we have failed in our education.
Free speech is not the cause of the tensions that are growing around us, but the only possible solution to them.
— Roger Scruton
Nate Palmer is a junior at The King’s College majoring in Business and minoring in Pre-Law & International Business