In an important and general sense, any art or technique may be said to be liberating. . . . any art liberates certain characteristics of the material it works on . . . the artisan by continued practice of his art acquires skill or, as it might be said, he liberates his own powers to make and apply his knowledge . . . Finally, it may be said that art is self-liberating . . . The liberal arts are not the special prerogative of the humanities nor of medieval professors, and pursuit of them does not turn a scientist into a literary man, nor a philosopher into a pedant. They may be understood – and properly understand, I should like to maintain – as arts, ways of making things, ways of producing a product. Among university people, instructors as well as students, I do not find a secure grasp upon the liberal arts in this sense. Usually courses in them are regarding as ways of acknowledging a subject matter that is not quite worth prolonged study or of touching ceremonially upon an area honored by a probably outworn tradition. They are not ways of actively producing something, but are rather a passive viewing which convention recommends from old habit. Nevertheless, the ancient conviction has it that they are arts in the proper sense, ways of making, only in their instance ways of making an internal, intellectual, and moral, product. I believe this tradition to be correct, and that we acquiesce in its loss to our peril. The liberal arts compose the craft of the mind and are practiced successfully whenever anyone succeeds in an intellectual or linguistic endeavor, whether in science, technology, the humanities, or in a fine art. . . . the arts of using language . . . are the arts of achieving such material, operative, and productive liberation as the human mind is capable. They define the craft of the mind in whatever context that mind happens to labor, whether scientific, technological, literary, or philosophic. Lumping the liberal arts vaguely together with the humanities and opposing them to the sciences is productive only of confusion and ultimately of disaster, for thus the primary ground of the unity of the mind's operation is concealed.
– E. G. Ballard (1989)
