• Dr. Pius V Thomas

Throughout the history The Catholic Church has been the inspiring source of championing the cause of Liberal Humanities. It undoubtedly pioneered the university system in the Western world. Its efforts were also praised for preserving and promoting the classical knowledge as classical literature. As acknowledged by the popular knowledge repositories, the philosophy of the Catholic Church, mainly since St Augustine, St. Thomas Acquinas and the School Men, was committed to moderate realism (the complementarity of faith and reason) and objective truth. Therefore, it recognized the Humanities as tools to ‘cultivate reason, virtue, and an appreciation for the human condition, viewing them as essential partners in spiritual formation’. Interesting example like the categorization of knowledge into Trivium and Quadrivium of the traditional liberal arts is commendable. According to such a division, the liberal arts were divided into grammar, logic, rhetoric on the one side and arithmetic, geometry, music, and astronomy on the other side. The first universities, such as the University of Bologna and the University of Paris, were established under the auspices of the Church, with the Humanities serving as the preparatory foundation for theology.
In the recent decades, the growing colonization of the cultural and natural environments by the technological environment and civilization, shows tendencies to systemically discredit the Liberal Humanities and their knowledge as insignificant disvalues. Lack of interest in the disciplinary domains of the Humanities and Liberal Arts has been discussed over the last few decades as an alarming sign of deflated higher education all over the world. Though several critical pedagogical traditions have deliberated the limitations of the one-sided techno-learning posed as education, perhaps, Martha Nussbaum (In her major works, Cultivating Humanity and Not for Profit, etc.) highlighted it by passionately arguing against it as the absence of liberal education fails to develop the key capacities such as “Socratic questioning and justification of beliefs, the ability to be a world citizen, and a developed narrative imagination”. She uses the feelers of many thought traditions to tell us that without disciplinary dialogically, cultivating a “fully human” individual, freeing minds from tradition, and fostering critical thinking and global citizenship, is practically impossible.
As Michael Holden wrote some time back, the latest addition to the indifference to the Humanities and Liberal Education can be seen in the following report, “Last month, the Federation for the Humanities and Social Sciences (FHSS) – a pan-Canadian organization representing dozens of scholarly associations – announced that it will be unable to hold its 2026 Congress after an unnamed institution backed out of months-long negotiations to host the event. Congress – whose June 2025 edition included some 7,000 faculty, graduate students, and community members at Toronto’s George Brown College – is Canada’s largest academic gathering. The event has been a mainstay of Canadian humanities and social science research for nearly a century. The cancellation of the in-person event for 2026 has sent research groups into a scramble to arrange alternatives that will be smaller, less well- funded, and will garner less attention from host venues and the public.

In the recent decades, the growing colonization of the cultural and natural environments by the technological environment and civilization, shows tendencies to systemically discredit the Liberal Humanities and their knowledge as insignificant disvalues. Lack of interest in the disciplinary domains of the Humanities and Liberal Arts has been discussed over the last few decades as an alarming sign of deflated higher education all over the world.

In India, nonetheless, we have the policy perspectives of NEP (National Education Policy), which talks highly of interdisciplinary dialogue and exchange, as some of the thinkers and educationalists have pointed out that our centres of higher education and the universities most often fail to understand the cherished interdisciplinary policy. Endorsing Interdisciplinarity necessarily makes universities act as the Intercultural Centres of Knowledge Production. The major epistemic model and insight in this connection is that the Universities, both historically/contextually and conceptually, have an enlarged scope than the corporates. The term corporate is used as a rival imagination of institutions like the Universities. It is hinted here that the corporates are without a dialogical self-understanding and a reflective denial of hierarchization. Though the modernist idea of the university is being local and merely ‘the community of teachers and learners’, our contemporary vision and expectation of the universities are far more wanting and creative than their primarily defined functions. The universities/centres of higher education inform us of a more nuanced public domain of associating social responsibilities with knowledge and ethics. The universities are more democratic, more people-oriented, life-oriented, and thus closer to the ideal of dialogue, human dignity, ethical sustainability, and creatively constructed knowledge.
Interdisciplinarity, as a harmonious dialogue with different disciplines, has been also envisioned as a higher-order organization of creating a different discipline and presenting an altogether different object (object domain) of inquiry for knowledge as Roland Barthes has suggested. By providing various alternative knowledge, interdisciplinarity plumps for an epistemic break to extend the disciplinary boundaries of knowledge to liberatingly border- cross. Here comes the organic intervention by which interdisciplinarity takes us to interculturality which seeks to understand how to transform the existential brokenness of a historically varied situation into a spiritual or cognitive attitude that can generate adequate objective insights and truths about intentional objects, as Rudolf Bradner and Raymond Panikkar illustrate. Interculturality challenges our consciousness, which frames the other and the mono-cultural understanding. It encourages us to traverse the boundaries of disciplinary knowledge and our culture while remaining unaware that other disciplines or cultures may have radically different approaches to reality. Juergen Habermas’s notion of interculturality emerges in response to the project of global or macro ethics that regards knowledge as a form of social dialogue. Social dialogue is the inevitable outcome of the limitations of disciplinary and cultural self-understanding. Interculturality evokes the interaction between disciplines as knowledge cultures, where a mutual recognition and acceptance of the reciprocity demand a communicative and ethical commitment to interact with and understand the other disciplines to dialogically modify one’s own. In doing so, it goes beyond disciplinary narcissism and meditates upon the alternative principles of coexistence and democracy by the divergent value orientations to achieve, as Martha Nussbaum has said, the “Socratic questioning and justification of beliefs, the ability to be a world citizen, and a developed narrative imagination”.

An idea of interdisciplinary sense transforms knowledge into contextual and thus welds it with the local and starts cultivating a “fully human” individual, freeing minds from tradition and fostering critical thinking and global citizenship. Hence, knowledge becomes inter-generational sustainability.

We can presume that such an idea of interdisciplinary sense transforms knowledge into contextual and thus welds it with the local and starts cultivating a “fully human” individual, freeing minds from tradition and fostering critical thinking and global citizenship. Hence, knowledge becomes inter-generational sustainability, where it becomes a shared horizon wherein it negotiates the domain of ethics and ethical singularities along with truth, meaning and peaceful, just coexistence. Is it not what Pierre Teilhard de Chardin’s understanding of knowledge that blends facts with human experience in order to intuit the cosmic unity, which in his language Christ as the Omega Point?
More importantly, as we live in post-traditional societies, wherein values manifest their innumerable plurality and enormous ‘oppositionality’, is it not the duty of the Church’s educational philosophy to make deep educational efforts and pedagogical endeavours to respond to the fathomless and boundless terrain of the multitudinous dimensions of ‘knowledge values’ by promoting the interdisciplinary import of Humanities and the Liberal arts? Such an effort is adorably boundless social communication and dialogical ability, which is the core of Catholic education, it becomes that which engenders intercultural communication, and the utmost ethical choice of our times, that is, a life flourished by the democratic social coexistence endorsed by a creative praxis of Christianity and Catholicism.

• (Dr. Pius V Thomas is Professor, Department of Philosophy, Assam University, Silchar).