{"id":628,"date":"2022-03-11T07:22:37","date_gmt":"2022-03-11T07:22:37","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/alliance.edu.in\/blog\/?p=628"},"modified":"2023-12-19T21:55:34","modified_gmt":"2023-12-19T16:25:34","slug":"towards-the-philosophy-of-a-liberal-arts-teacher","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/web.pinklemonadedigital.com\/alliance_blog\/towards-the-philosophy-of-a-liberal-arts-teacher\/","title":{"rendered":"Towards the Philosophy of a Liberal Arts Teacher"},"content":{"rendered":"

Let\u2019s begin at the beginning!\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

To understand the role of the Liberal Arts teacher in an age otherwise arraigned illiberal, we must go down the lanes of classic <\/span>Greek philosophy<\/span><\/a>. During the second half of the fifth century B.C., in Greece, we saw the rise of a group of tutors for the aristocrats and nobilities, the Sophists. The <\/span>Sophists<\/span><\/a> were itinerant teachers (read private tutors) who got students enrolled indiscriminately for money and pelf. In Athens and other\u00a0\u03ba\u03ac\u03bb\u03bb\u03bf\u03c2<\/em>\u00a0(and please don\u2019t read the beauty in it other than its nonreflexive understanding of architecture, for sublime is yet to be), the word Sophists owes its origin to\u00a0\u03c3\u03bf\u03c6\u03cc\u03c2<\/em>\u00a0(sophos<\/em>, a wise man). Instead of being conditioned through wisdom, the Sophists shrank to the level of being nothing more than an instructor or \u03c3\u03bf\u03c6\u03af\u03b6\u03c9 (sophizo<\/em>). They speciously and deceptively instructed the rich youths to package lies sophisticatedly in public discourses. Such speeches, filled with rhetorics and were bereft of \u201cTruth\u201d and were meant as persuasive speeches to crowd-pull and gain favor. More as teachers who taught pragmatic management skills and shrewd administration style to control the city-states, the Sophists with their ultra-pragmatic\u00a0cymini sectore<\/em>\u00a0analytical views dismissed the celestial associations of human subjects. They criticized God, spirituality, heaven, and even\u00a0philosophia<\/em>\u00a0(philo<\/em>=love;\u00a0Sophia<\/em>=wisdom) or love for wisdom, a wisdom that owed its origin to tradition and religiosity. If this attitude of the Sophists whetted the liberal democracy in Greece and paved the way for secular atheists, then in its extreme form, it espoused the \u201cmeans justified the end\u201d method of inhumane\u00a0modus operandi<\/em>. Hence, the Sophist teacher and his worldview were far from liberal.<\/span><\/p>\n

\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

It is here where Socrates and his philosophy as a necessity demanded intervention.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

The Socratic teaching must be contradistinguished from those of Sophists and rested on the motive of finding \u201cTruth.\u201d Such a method, as propounded by Socrates, that was logical, founded on the dialectics of refutation of\u00a0\u03c8\u03b5\u1fe6\u03b4\u03bf\u03c2 (pse\u00fbdos)<\/em>\u00a0or false belief, infused in\u00a0philosophia<\/em>, had its appeal to the young\u00a0avant-garde<\/em>\u00a0students of Athens. Such students had an iconoclastic conviction against the extreme rationalism of the then Athenian administration. Socratic teaching method infused the students with a passion for\u00a0alethe<\/em>\u00a0or truth.\u00a0Alethe<\/em>\u00a0was equated with\u00a0agathos\u00a0<\/em>or good and\u00a0kalon<\/em>\u00a0or beauty. The\u00a0Satyam<\/em>, the\u00a0Shivam<\/em>, the\u00a0Sundaram<\/em>! This search for \u201cTruth,\u201d as later Plato, his disciple, in his\u00a0Republic<\/em>\u00a0that scripted the discourses of Socrates would assert, always elides and is yet not to be given up. For \u201cTruth\u201d is an \u201cIdea\u201d or\u00a0\u1f30\u03b4\u03ad\u03b1<\/em>, one that in its perfect form is to be found in the mind of the God, placed beyond the sensible world in\u00a0huperouranios topos<\/em>\u00a0(\u201cplace beyond heaven\u201d). That we see on earth is but a shadow, an imperfect imitation (mimesis<\/em>) of the Perfect Form! The \u201ctree\u201d that we sensibly perceive on earth is an incomplete copy of the ideal \u201cTree,\u201d whose concept exists in heaven. Thus, the <\/span>idealistic Socratic<\/span><\/a> or <\/span>Platonic philosophy<\/span><\/a> and a dialogic method of understanding it, much contrary to the Sophist school, in extreme form, is highly spiritual, limiting of human creativity and traditional. Thus, howsoever contrary to the ways of Sophists, the Socratic teacher and his philosophies failed to project a liberal worldview.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

Finally, it is about the balance between <\/span><\/strong>rationalism<\/span><\/a> and <\/span><\/strong>spiritualism<\/span><\/a>, as achieved by Plato\u2019s student Aristotle, that becomes the model for a liberal arts teacher.\u00a0<\/span><\/strong><\/p>\n

\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

If Aristotle taught Alexander as a paid sophist, at the behest of King Phillip II of Macedon, the rationalities of expansionism, militarism, pragmaticism, then he also philosophized a post-Platonic concept of art. Pushing art beyond the realm of good and truth and freeing it of every morality, Aristotle found artistic creation to be\u00a0re-presentations<\/em>\u00a0rather than a simplified, non-imaginative attempt at copying. Hence, beyond the failed Platonic attempt to create a copy of the \u201cTrue\u201d ideal, art, for Aristotle, was infused with the man-creator\u2019s creative\u00a0gusto<\/em>. Endowing equal imaginative agency to the man-creator in creating public policy, ethics, and administration, on one hand, and poetry, music, and fine arts, on the other, Aristotle balances practicality and creativity.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

Today, liberal arts teachers’ agenda is about\u00a0enabling student-subjects with the creative agency.\u00a0<\/strong>Such creative agency, invoked\u00a0<\/strong>to complete the project with innate and innovative imagination, is the lifeblood of all available subjects.<\/span><\/p>\n

\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

Dr. Arindam Das<\/span><\/strong><\/p>\n

Associate Professor, Department of Language & Literature<\/span><\/p>\n

Alliance School of Liberal Arts<\/span><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Let\u2019s begin at the beginning!\u00a0 \u00a0 To understand the role of the Liberal Arts teacher in an age otherwise arraigned illiberal, we must go down the lanes of classic Greek philosophy. During the second half of the fifth century B.C., in Greece, we saw the rise of a group of tutors for the aristocrats and … Read more<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":5,"featured_media":625,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[132,120],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-628","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-alliance-school-of-liberal-arts","category-arts-humanities"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/web.pinklemonadedigital.com\/alliance_blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/628","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/web.pinklemonadedigital.com\/alliance_blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/web.pinklemonadedigital.com\/alliance_blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/web.pinklemonadedigital.com\/alliance_blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/5"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/web.pinklemonadedigital.com\/alliance_blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=628"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/web.pinklemonadedigital.com\/alliance_blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/628\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":3164,"href":"https:\/\/web.pinklemonadedigital.com\/alliance_blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/628\/revisions\/3164"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/web.pinklemonadedigital.com\/alliance_blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/625"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/web.pinklemonadedigital.com\/alliance_blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=628"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/web.pinklemonadedigital.com\/alliance_blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=628"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/web.pinklemonadedigital.com\/alliance_blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=628"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}