I am at the wrong school.
Hillsdale is a place focused on the liberal arts, on the ideals of literature, philosophy, art, and reason. I, on the other hand, am a math and physics double-major — hardly typical here. While those subjects may seem horribly pragmatic and insignificant compared to the deep, human ideas found in the humanities, I believe that mathematics and natural sciences are an essential part of a true liberal arts education, and one that too many of my peers have ignored.
To understand the purpose of the liberal arts, let us briefly consider their history. In medieval universities, seven subjects were taught as liberal arts: rhetoric, logic, grammar, music, arithmetic, geometry, and astronomy. To even a casual observer, the latter three are clearly scientific fields, and logic is nowhere more strict than in mathematics. Likewise, musical education consisted of learning theory as well as artistic skill — and music theory was geometry — ratios and shapes — applied to sound (think, for example think of Pythagorean tuning).
In the early Renaissance, Petrus Paulus Vergarius defined the liberal arts as “those studies…by which we attain and practice virtue and wisdom.” While the Renaissance added history and other humanities to the liberal arts curriculum, it did not discount math and science. Vergarius declared mathematics “weighty” because it possessed “a peculiar element of certainty”, and called scientific subjects “a most delightful, and at the same time most profitable, study.” Indeed, the inherent beauty and delight of math and science is one of the best reasons to study them. If you have not beheld with wonder Euler’s Identity, or understood how Fourier series describe sound waves, you are missing some of the most beautiful of God’s creations.
And yet, sometime between the Renaissance and now, mathematics and science have been relegated to the realm of technology and practical applications. We have remembered Locke, but ignored Newton, studied the Founding Father’s politics, but forgotten Benjamin Franklin’s contributions to the understanding of electricity, learned about human action from Mises, but not the action of time and space from Einstein. In our understanding of our Western Heritage, we have discarded one of its most revolutionary components: science.
This is unfortunate, not only because these things are beautiful, (and I believe Hillsdale students are better equipped to see this than most), but because understanding them is necessary to understanding our place in the modern world. Whether it be climate change, evolution, or a subtler issue such as the ontological implications of mathematical set theory, many of the important “big questions” humans have always asked are now informed by scientific discoveries.
This is where many Hillsdale students run afoul. Without a firm knowledge of science, it is difficult to seriously engage these issues. For example, following a meeting of the Gadfly Group, I heard a conversation in which it was remarked that “Quantum Mechanics is a failure of empiricism”. Scientifically speaking, this is ludicrous. The quantum mechanical wave description of reality is perhaps the most well-verified theory in all of science. In fact, without it modern life would be totally different (every device containing a computer processor depends upon it). Now, the metaphysical implications of quantum mechanics are much less clear, and potentially rather unsettling. We ought to take that as a reason to study and understand the theory more deeply, so as to allow it to cogently inform our philosophy. However, too often we consider a rudimentary understanding acceptable. To anyone with a more rigorous knowledge, this renders one’s viewpoint foolish. You need to understand the Schrödinger equation to speak intelligently about Schrödinger’s cat.
That is why I am studying math and physics at Hillsdale. I want my knowledge of rigorous, technical subjects to be moderated by a deep understanding of literature, philosophy, and art. And that is why you ought to challenge yourself, step beyond the simplistic introductory science classes and discover the beauty of science and mathematics. It will deepen your understanding of the universe, and develop “those highest gifts of body and of mind which ennoble men” — which, after all, is the reason to study the liberal arts at Hillsdale.
