Life Mastery – Liberal Learning Blog

To train the imagination, turn to the liberal arts

By WilliamP | May 25, 2017

As I mentioned in the last post, the liberal arts are not primarily about becoming “well rounded.” They are primarily about developing the discernment and judgment to make good choices in life.

A liberal education tries to attain this by developing imagination.

If this seems strange, I suspect it’s because we tend of think of imagination as a special talent belonging to people called “creatives.” But that isn’t true. All human beings have imagination. To see this, let’s begin with a definition.

What is imagination? It’s not something esoteric or mystical. It’s simply the capacity to think things that are not immediately present. Whenever we daydream, conjuring up images in our minds, or whenever we think about what has to be done later in the day, we are exercising imagination.

This is obviously a natural faculty of human beings, as is proved by our universal capacity to use language. In essence, language is a system of signs. And signs are natural or artificial images that stand for things other than themselves. So, every spoken utterance is a thinking of something that is not present, namely the things that the signs stand for. Speech itself is an act of imagination.

Like other natural faculties, imagination can be improved, developed, heightened. There is no question that an aptitude for art, for science, for business, for athletics can be enhanced. In every case, it is done by immersing oneself in the particulars of the field and exercising. In every specialty, the imaginative muscles that make connections in that field are built up by exercise and repetition, so that a trained person makes faster, better, more accurate connections in the field.

Now, imagination too can be trained by exercising the ability to make connections. Why making connections? Because connections, which exist between and among things, are by nature not immediately present. They exist on the borderline between objects and ideas. They can create effects on objects, but they are seen, for the most part, by the mind’s eye. Connections, therefore, are the perfect material on which to exercise the imagination.

The goal of liberal learning is to exercise the connection-making faculty so that the learner becomes able to make connections among all the aspects of life as needed.

A person with this kind of training, who is skilled at making connections in general, can move in and out of specialties with relative ease. It is just a matter of mastering the basics of the specialty and familiarizing oneself with the characteristic modes of connection-making used in that particular specialty.

This generalized competence at making connections is the actual basis of the oft-heard claim that liberal arts students are better at adapting to changes in the workplace than students who pursue a narrow specialty. The claim is usually backed up with talk about how liberal education broadens the mind, but this is misdirection.

It is generalized competence at making connections, not wide-ranging familiarity with different fields of study alone, that makes liberally educated people more adaptable and flexible than specialists. The heightened ability to link together ideas and see connections makes it easier for them to grasp the outlines of different specialties than for those whose connection-making ability has been limited to the kinds of connections typically used in a given specialty.

It is this same generalized competence at making connections that helps liberally educated people with the discernment and judgment needed to make confident choices in life, as mentioned in the last post. The more connections one can see among the various options life presents, the more informed and considered one’s choices will be.

The next question you might be asking is this: How does liberal education develop and enhance the faculty of imagination?

The answer is: through the study of metaphor.

Liberal education—not just about being smarter

By WilliamP | May 23, 2017

Some readers were surprised at the focus on autonomy in my previous post. Why, they asked, did I choose to write about personal freedom instead of the usual topics that crop up when one talks about liberal education—classic texts, arts and sciences, critical thinking, and the like?

Well, of course, liberal education is at least partly about those things. You cannot really get a liberal education—an education pertaining to freedom—without engaging those things.

But liberal learning is much more about developing two key proficiencies that human beings need to meet the demands of life—discernment and judgment. The reason we all need to improve these proficiencies is that we all want to live the best life we possibly can. Discernment and judgment are indispensable in attaining that aim.

Now the classics, the great books in all fields of human activity, are material for developing discernment and judgment. They have stood the test of time. They show how fictional characters or real people have navigated life’s deepest challenges. They provide a fund of examples for us to ponder, to select among, to pattern our lives on, if we so choose.

And critical thinking—which, as far as I can tell, just means thinking better—is of course a crucial part of education. Since we are thinking beings that can hardly get through a few moments of the day without thinking, we should do it well rather than poorly.

But we liberal artists do not immerse ourselves in the great books just to become familiar with canonical examples of human activity. Nor do we try to master critical thinking just to be smarter.

We do these things for a higher purpose. We do them to improve our discernment—that is, adroitness is distinguishing differences or identifying similarities—and to improve our judgment—that is, our confidence in choosing better and worse among alternatives. Life presents us with innumerable objects and situations. We deal with them through discernment and judgment.

The point of improving our discernment and judgment is to live a good a life as we can—a task that is made easier by being able to take account of the objects and situations around us and make confident choices about which are better and more choiceworthy.

If you can’t discern very will the properties of things in the world around you, or if you can’t judge well about what is better and worse, how can you expect anything but random outcomes from your choices in life?

So, liberal education is not primarily about great books or critical thinking. It’s primarily about developing the discernment and judgment to lead the best possible life. And that life, as I said in the previous post, will be an autonomous one in which we use discernment and judgment to determine the laws we will set for ourselves.

Now, contemporary approaches to higher education tend to center on so-called “core competencies,” intellectual skills such as written and oral communication, quantitative reasoning, scientific reasoning, information literacy, and critical thinking.

But these skills are not themselves capable of improving discernment and judgment. How may effective writers and compelling speakers, how many brilliant mathematicians and scientists, how many erudite scholars and precise logicians have neither the discernment or judgment to make wise choices outside of their area of expertise? And yet, most of life lies outside our areas of expertise.

The truth is that all these intellectual skills are not goals in themselves. They are means by which we attain to the higher aim of improving discernment and judgment. By practicing them, we hope to exercise our faculties of discernment and judgment so that we can develop them to the point of making good choices in life generally.

But, it turns out, there is another element that must come into play if we are to attain the discernment and judgment we need. In some ways, this element is even more important that the intellectual skills.

It’s imagination.