Liberal and Illiberal Arts

In the previous post we suggested that the practice of philosophy -- if successful -- transforms a merely useless man into a perfectly useless one. Pieper writes that 

Philosophy by its nature is a free endeavor, and for this reason it serves no one and nothing.

But this idea goes waaaay back to the beginning of philosophy. For example,

Analyzing Aristotle's text in his Metaphysics, we find to our amazement that "free" there means the same as "nonpractical!" 

Conversely, practical "is everything that serves a purpose." The operative word is serve, as in serf, service, servile, and slave. Philosophy is intellectual freedom truly lived,

insofar as it is not geared toward some purpose outside itself. Philosophy, rather, is an endeavor containing its own meaning and requires no justification from a purpose "served" (ibid.). 

Just yesterday I was telling my son that when I first began hearing rumblings about the left's sinister plans to eliminate free speech, I assumed it was just the usual paranoid ravings from the fringes of the periphery of the outskirts beyond the pale of the fever swamps of the conspiracy theorists of the pre-MAGA insurrectionists. 

Indeed, having once been a man of the left, I knew the principle of free speech was inviolate, and that no real liberal would ever question it. 

But ever since then, we see how the left has rapidly disavowed every last liberal principle, culminating most recently in Brandon's fascist attack on half the population (but in reality the other half as well, except they're too stupid or indoctrinated to see it).

Back when I was a Democrat, I didn't even know anyone who would have disagreed that academia should be a free space for rational beings to indulge our irrepressible search for the truth of reality. No one outside the Soviet sphere would have imagined otherwise. 

"Liberal arts" are "those that are oriented toward knowledge alone." Which is interesting, because today's illiberal arts -- or subhumanities -- are indeed useless (e.g, gender studies, queer theory, CRT, etc.), only in an inverted way, since they are detached from the freedom and truth that is their ground and telos. 

In other words, in order to be perfectly useless, we must be silent and passive in the face of reality, which is the real instructor:

only in silence is hearing possible. Moreover, the stronger the determination prevails to hear all there is, the more complete the silence must be.

Conversely, science doesn't shut up, nor should it, for every answer is simultaneously the next question. And no answer is true per se, only falsifiable. Moreover, the questions are never about reality as such, rather, only particular aspects or objects which determine the method of approach. Therefore,

entire realms of reality are expressly "of no interest" right from the start. Seen from this angle, the philosopher's question, strictly, is no question at all: What is it all about? 

Any questions?