By Kyle Johnston ’08

One of my first Saint Michael’s memories is a history class on the modern Middle East. I remember the professor exclaimed to us with an ironic smile on his face, “If you leave my class a little more confused than when you started, you are learning something.”

I didn’t realize it at the time, but I was being introduced to the heart of a liberal arts education. I know now that harboring a little sense of confusion is to realize that the spectrum of knowledge vastly exceeds our own limited understanding.

As a philosophy major, my schedule at Saint Michael’s is laden with courses filled with ideas that I had never fathomed. But my surprise came in junior year when I took an astronomy class to fulfill my final Liberal Studies Requirement. The same semester, I had a course on the 17th-century rationalist philosopher Benedict Spinoza. To sum up Spinoza — and may Professor John Izzi forgive me for oversimplifying the intricacies of his work — he believed that the entire universe was divine; from the heavenly cosmos to the windswept trees.

What does Spinoza have to do with astronomy? Although today we have a compartmentalized way of demarcating disciplines, throughout history, philosophy and astronomy were considered to be intimately linked. While I may have learned that in my modern civilization course, I now felt it. At the start of every astronomy class, Professor Alain Brizard would show the class a picture of something related to astronomy.

One day he showed us a picture of the sun encircled by strange orange halos that were coronal mass ejections—think of them as intensely hot volcanic explosions from the sun. All that I could think about was that, according to Spinoza, in some sense, I am no different than that burning flame. We, as humans, are not distinct from nature, but are a part of nature. We are all divine. I knew now that the disciplines were speaking to each other: philosophy and astronomy, two distinct educational disciplines, were in dialogue with each other. From their interconnectedness, the knowledge we gain is that much deeper and therefore deepens us. In their dialogue, they were exclaiming, “Kyle, you are divine!”

What transformed me was the subject I was learning. While the what is important, I have come to learn that in many ways, it is how we learn that is most transformative. Herein lies the magic and wonder of a liberal arts education—it cannot and should not be measured only by what we learn, but also how we learn. I have spent four years at a liberal arts college and in that freedom to explore various subjects what I found to be most beneficial is how genuinely we learn, how deeply we love and how fiercely we live.

The fact that Saint Michael’s is a liberal arts institution means that every student’s lived experience is different and free to take on its own form. A liberal arts education gives us the opportunity to fight intellectual petrifaction; we have but to seize it! When we begin to uncover the unknown, hopefully it will shake our very foundations and shatter what we think we know of ourselves. And hopefully we all have the ears to listen to the voice in our soul that craves more, and I hope that we have the courage to answer when
it beckons.

Kyle Johnston ’08 is a philosophy major. This essay is an excerpt of a speech he delivered at the Dean’s Reception in April 2008.