The first great advantage of an arts and humanities curriculum is that the typical objects studied in it teach students both to recognize in the world and to cultivate within themselves a deep existential spirit of freedom and possibility. By “existential freedom” I do not mean to say that students of the arts and humanities learn particular views of or theories about political freedom. They may, but I am using “existential” in its root sense to refer to the most basic features and conditions of existence, and I am using “freedom” to refer to something different from and deeper than politics.
Both in the process by which arts and humanities objects are created and in the contents they express, these objects evade determinism and predictability. No one can ever predict, determine, or reduce to the operation of laws either how a poem, philosophical argument, or painting will be created or what it will say. Once an object of humanistic study has been created – an object, say, such as a breakthrough theorem in calculus or a Shakespearean sonnet or a new musical composition – that object teaches us the rightness of the placement and content of each of its parts and in that sense it seems predictable, but we only acquire this sense of the inevitability after we have seen the finished product. In the process of creation itself, the mathematician working on the theorem, Shakespeare
working on his sonnet, or the composer working on her symphony literally does not know what is going to come next into his head or out of her mouth. No scheme of analysis or theory of creativity could ever have predicted that the opening line of Shakespeare's Sonnet 73, "That time of year thou mayst in me behold", would be followed by “When yellow leaves, or none, or few, do hang / Upon those boughs which shake against the cold, / Bare ruined choirs where late the sweet birds sang.” The first line, “That time of year thou mayst in me behold,” could have been followed by comparisons to grass, to clocks, to the sun, to wind, to some kind of human activity, or to almost anything. Once we see what actually does follow we then see the rightness of it but we never could have predicted it because in the moments during which Shakespeare wrote his second, third, and fourth lines he was exercising a deep kind of existential freedom: the freedom to choose his next word one at a time, the freedom to choose his next image, the freedom, in short, to choose his next choice. In his capacity as a poet, as a maker of the kinds of objects studied in a liberal arts curriculum, Shakespeare is not predictable. There is no law of psychology or economics or history or sociology which would have allowed us to predict that in Sonnet 73 these words in this order would come into the world as a consequence of someone’s poetic choices or that William Shakespeare would be that poetic someone. Not even Shakespeare could have predicted it. He did not know what the specific lines of his sonnet were going to be until he had written them, and the unpredictability of that act of creation is paradigmatic of a deep spirit of existential freedom that lies at the heart of the objects studied in an arts and humanities curriculum.
– Marshall Gregory (1998)
