Dean's Messages

May 2008 (vol 2., issue 3)
On the Liberal Artist

At the spring meetings of our online Integral Theory cohort held last month in Denver, Ken Wilber noted that study of the Liberal Arts and Humanities provide fertile contexts from which many people embrace Integral perspectives and practices with the hope of entering the "house of wisdom." A few weeks earlier, I engaged in a preliminary conversation with the leadership of the School of Education and Liberal Arts about the possibility of developing an undergraduate degree in Holistic Studies taught in the school of Liberal Arts. Several weeks ago, a student of Transformative Arts said to me after her mid-point review that she took inspiration from the Liberal Arts. These events raised several questions in my mind.

Are the Liberal Arts related to the fine and performing arts? What value comes from being a liberal artist? Do the Liberal Arts prepare the mind to enter the "house of wisdom" and if so, how? What precisely is the art of the Liberal Arts?

The art of the Liberal Arts is the art of learning -- learning how to think; learning how to learn. The Liberal Arts provide the basic perceptive, productive, and reflective skills essential to that end: reading, writing, speaking, listening, and focusing attention. It follows from this that the Liberal Arts are a humanistic organon, that is, a body of guidelines and skills for structuring and rectifying the body-mind. These skills must be obtained before students face the questions of what to think and what to learn. They must come prior to seeking financial compensation essential to specialization and professionalism.

In addition, the Liberal Arts are best pursued neither for the sake of learning nor for the sake of earning, since both ends may lead to human isolation from the world. They are not final ends, self-sufficient in themselves but intermediate steps toward becoming a generally educated person capable of living well in society. Learning and the production of intellectual and material goods are essential elements of the well-lived life of a liberal artist. Ideally, a liberal artist acquires skills necessary to earn a living, develop moral and intellectual virtues, possess a healthy body, demonstrate clear thinking, and employ skillful means necessary for personal satisfactions and stable social relationships.

A good Liberal Arts education should result in a finely tuned body-mind. Liberal artists ostensibly possess capacities for self-inquiry, judgment, empathy, and imagination. They know and learn with their entire being as an integrated act, animating parts of the body-mind with the spirit of the whole. A well-tuned awareness of body-mind is a necessary but insufficient condition for the achievement of many other goods in life, including a life in art, medicine, law, education, architecture, psychology, and politics. Moreover, a body-mind disciplined by study of the Liberal Arts is capable of physical restraint and enduring awareness of oneself and one's involvement with others.

A calm and ordered body-mind is the master key to one's education. Without it, little of importance can be learned. Without the ability to gain control over what our body-minds are doing, our psycho-physical energies scatter and wane, our best efforts are in vain. Intention is the helmsman of consciousness, steering bodily energies in line with psychic aspirations and goals. Without intentional acts, we merely react to the dictates of circumstance, and our lives are not our own. Overcoming genetic instructions, cultural conventions, and personal distractions allow us to willfully choose which information reaches consciousness and upon what information we act. Because a Liberal Arts education nurtures the power of the body-mind to select, structure, and act upon its contents, it is essential to all professions. Let me briefly consider here the Liberal Arts relative to the fine and performing arts.

Rigorous study of the Liberal Arts should develop and expand the mind, and the mind is, along with the body and spirit, an integral component of an artist's true "instrument." Confucius, a musician and composer, as well as a teacher and philosopher, wrote, "When the mind is not present, we look but do not see, listen but do not hear, eat but do not know the taste of food." Whether a painter, or a musician, a human being is his instrument. Violins, chisels, brushes, and paints are but physical extensions of talents and skills. A musician or composer thinks in music and knows his ideas and designs through and by music. A painter makes aesthetic decisions in color and form and sees his art as a form of decision making and knowledge.

From this perspective, the body-mind is the center of perception and intelligence, the indivisible tool with which we experience art and life. A musician's body and violin, for example, form a complex system suggestive of properties of mind. The musician enhances and realizes the artistic possibilities of the violin, and the violin enhances and realizes those of the musician. The same can be said of a sculptor and her chisel, or a photographer and her camera. The point here is that mind extends beyond the body into physical space of an audience, just as ideas about the production and performances of art extend mind into somatic and spiritual domains.

People who manifest oneness with their body-mind instrument integrate their sensing and knowing characteristic of what I am referring to here as the liberal artist. This integration of mental awareness with intended activities releases bodily-kinesthetic intelligence and gives rise to moments of high human functioning sometimes referred to as optimum or flow experiences. A quiet and disciplined mind opens receptively to inner talent and outer instruction. It organizes emotions, disciplines creative energies, and balances training and constraint with passion and spontaneity. On the other hand, when the mental component of the artist is agitated, fear-ridden, or otherwise distracted from its task, the mind's agitation undermines the artist physically and spiritually and leads to incomplete works.

Technical training of the body-mind is a necessary condition of art; joining it to learning and education is a sufficient condition. When we train art students without liberally educating them, they are, at best, technicians, mechanics, or practitioners. Creativity, it should be stressed, requires a combination of reason and imagination. When we can educate artists to be learned in the Liberal Arts, they are free to organize their talents around meaningful structures; their craft becomes part of cognitive and perceptual processes involving aesthetic decision making, rational problem solving, and reflection. To train artists without educating them to learn how to learn and think is to forsake their mental and spiritual being in favor of a mechanical treatment of the body. We thus develop their know how at the costly expense of the know what and why of the arts.

I envision a broad Liberal Arts curriculum as essential experiments for strengthening attention and embodiment. Students of any discipline are liberal artists when they learn to stretch the borders of their sense perceptions and cognitive imaginations in order to create for themselves new mental and emotional constructs that effectively guide behavior in their professions and their lives. Each course can be a "practicum" for reading and writing the body-mind, directing it, choreographing it, composing and conducting it in service of a good life. I envision people who learn in such a context embodying the cooperative practice of mind with heart and spirit. According to William James, "The greatest thing in all education is to make the nervous system our ally instead of our enemy." The goal of a Liberal Arts education is the general enlightenment of people through an understanding of basic human issues and ideas as part of an ethic of power and heart. By accomplishing that end, the liberal artist may indeed enter the "house of wisdom."

Peter M. Rojcewicz, PhD
Dean, School of Holistic Studies

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