Liberty, Good, Context
Those arts which:
- Set you free
- To cultivate virtue and value
- In the context of your society (or ecology)
This is my personal definition of the liberal arts. All three parts are crucial, because without them you cannot come up with any specific practical protocol for teaching. For instance, there are numerous ways to be “set free”, including, in the extreme, killing yourself. We are not seeking freedom from, but rather freedom to. And specifically, freedom to cultivate virtue. But it is not enough to be able to cultivate virtue, without context, because why then would we not all simply cultivate the same virtues. Surely we should all just read the great books and be done with it. Well, we know from experience that this is not enough, because every possible context has a different landscape of value and virtue. So the point of the liberal arts is to normalize the practitioner to the methods and arts of cultivating virtue IN THEIR social context.
For example, today that would mean learning how to build a Super Mecha Suit and a Personal Website, and learning how to publish your ideas on the internet. Just like how in medieval times it meant learning how to Orate.
There is also the old medieval definition of the liberal arts, which is a curricular definition referring simply to “the trivium and the quadrivium”.
The trivium was Grammar, Rhetoric, and Logic (mastery of language)
The quadrivium was Arithmetic, Geometry, Music, and Astronomy (mastery of numbers, and their relationships in space, in time, and in both space and time).