“The Value of the Humanities” –
Short Overview Introduction Leading Victoria defenders of humane letters: John Stuart Mill, Ruskin, Newman, Mathew Arnold, Pattison…saw the Socratic model as the origin of modern forms of dialectical argument. Two conventional modes of arguments for the value of the
humanities: 1) ‘use value’, 2) contribution to happiness. From “Culture & Anarchy”, Matthew Arnold’s famous
expressions about culture: “sweetness and light”; “the best of what's been thought and
said”. "Philistines” - self-satisfied Victorian bourgeoisie shaped by narrow-minded Puritan and nonconformist worldview who congratulated themselves for achievements like free trade and freedom of thought. Arnold dismisses that claim as mere mechanism, empty and formal ideals when have higher purpose behind them (art, beauty, spirituality, intellect). The term ‘humanities’ rose out of American efforts against the claim that the natural sciences are the basis for all true knowledge. CH1 – Distinction from Other
Disciplines Philosophy (al la Derrida) may claim priority over all intellectual operations as the discipline that thinks about thinking. The Sokal
Affair The Sokal
Affair can be credited with affecting the virtual
disappearance of the term “social construction” from serious venues of cultural criticism. Sokal
effectively captured the dubious correlation of epistemology with politics (social constructionism with
left-wing commitments). …the modern American and also a modern British graduate training program whose function is almost exclusively to reproduce the profession. “One doesn’t enter [the humanities] to equip business with flexible analytic intellects (although that will happen). One enters it…to devote oneself to something greater… ‘rescuing lives’, giving individuals access to ‘salvational or transformational modes of thought’. The ‘prime direct aim’ of education ‘is to enable a man to know himself and the world’. Humanists have long recognized the first part of this description, the Greek ideal of self-knowledge. Horace wrote in his Ars Poetica that poetry must be dulce et utile (a sweet and useful thing), both enjoyable and instructive. (alternate translation: ‘pleasant and profitable’). Oxford University’s motto: Dominus Illuminatio Mea (God is my Light) -- Psalm 27 CH3 – Socrates
Dissatisfied …the problem arises when a person is unable to exert his or her own free will (‘morally unfree’). Swift is explicitly invoked, as is Shakespeare on at least one occasion. Johnson is surely there, too, in the pitch and cadence of ‘Those only are happy…who have their minds fixed on some object other than their own happiness…Aiming thus at something else, they find happiness by the way. All defenses are circumstantial…it is as hard to find universally accepted pleasures as it is to find universally accepted notions of duty. CH4 – ‘Democracy Needs Us’:
The Gadfly Argument for the Humanities Rex Warner’s 1938 novel The Professor indicates some of the reasons why suspicion might be warranted. The Professor, who is ‘greatest living authority on Sophocles’, finds himself called upon to lead the nation at a moment of crisis when a neighboring fascist state threatens to take over his nation’s democracy. He proves inapt. His conception of the ancient Greek polis as the first ‘safety zone’ for a ‘liberal organization’ of citizens against ‘the barbarism of others’ fails to connect with the seriousness of his democracy’s predicament. A coup results in his out casting. The professor’s students burn the Illiad, Odyssey, Herodotus, Thuchdides and Keats while shouting “Bung it in, and damn democracy!” It is unsurprising that a man who has spent his life in scholarship proves a poor political leader; nor is there any real difficulty with the thought that democratic values need to be backed up by strong armies (the Athenians would have agreed). The classical claim for the political value of education was that it functions as a ‘cultural qualification for the exercise of political and administrative power’…And that antiquity reserved a prominent place for rhetoric as the art of political persuasion. But none of these writers [Arnold, Mill, Newman, Ruskin, Pattison] thought that the arts and humanities had a privileged, let alone primary, role to play in training people for civic responsibility, though they reserved a vital place for them in the pursuit of happiness…William Morris, an exception, did argue for a ‘society with equality of condition for its basis’ and accented the artisanal aspects of a humanistic education much more strongly than the intellectual. I select Mill because he is the most egalitarian of the major
Victorian thinkers in his views on democratic representation. Neither Plato nor Socrates, as the Apology ought to remind us, was an admirer of democracy. …if privileged access to education by class is removed from the picture, we are dealing with meritocracy, not guardianship. As Bourdieu and others have told us: Does not education conceal the reproduction of social class with an illusion of democratic openness? …it is a story of the philosopher-critic supervening over the political space, from a higher plane of social judgment rather than involved in its deliberations on terms of equality of status. Collectively we cannot all be gadflies, Annette Baier has warned, or we run the risk of being no better than a ‘plague’. Intellectual practices pursued by the Humanities: deliberation, criticism, advocacy, evaluation, mediation of ideas with respect to norms of representation. Common ground: critical reason. Removing the democratic claim from the humanities wouldn’t leave the institution without important things to do (and some still political). More to the point, many will have to be content with unimportant things: just careful, or scholarly, or fanciful, or pleasurable but not particularly consequential. In the end, Humanities claim for validity does not require a state of emergency. CH5 –
For it Own Sake The problem is, is that the art and value of studying ‘meaning-making’ (the humanities) cannot be simply justified by having the attributes of the humanities wrapped up in objects and activities. Richard Rorty’s provocatively banal defense of philosophy as an autonomous discipline: ‘somebody’s got to read these difficult books, and it takes a lot of time’. While Ruskin attempted to defend intrinsic value as the self-contained ‘power’ or ‘worth’ of a thing, others understood it as ‘at best a promissory note, at worst a semantic relic to ward off the evil eye of commodity’ (the exchange value in the unstable marketplace of language and ideas). There is no possibility of a non-metaphysical defense for the intrinsic value of the humanities. In Philosophy, ‘Doing Something for its Own Sake’ (1987), T.S. Champlin claims ‘for its own sake’ looks like a philosophical cheat, where the problem lies with appearing to present something as the means to its own end. …when Wilde and other late 19th century aesthetes adopted the phrase ‘Art for art’s sake’ they were not ‘divorcing art from life’; they were insisting that ‘the artist is not in the service of religion, conventional morality, party politics, diplomacy, patriotism, the state or any of the other forces which try to reduce art to a means to their ends and try to rob art of the status of an end in itself’. In the ‘The Function of Criticism’ (1923), T.S. Eliot writes, “I do not deny that art may be affirmed to serve ends beyond itself, but art is not required to be aware of these ends, and indeed performs its function according to various theories of value, much better by indifference to them. Criticism on the other hand, must always profess an end in view…’ Eliot is telling us that there is a distinction between our valuation of the objects of our study and our valuation of the effects of studying them: a distinction between intrinsic and non-intrinsic value. Up to this point Eliot’s claims for art have been
conventionally aetheticist, in the sense that he wants art to be answerable only to itself…Like Arnold, Eliot wants
to oppose the idea that writing literature is just a matter of ‘doing as one likes’. He wants to be able to
say ‘what is right’, and to recognize a standard of authority ‘outside oneself’. [ ‘Art for art’s sake’ = “the very definition of modernism” (‘Knife in the water’, Roman Palinsky) ] ‘Knowledge’…is more of a component in what literature departments teach than we have sometimes been willing to say – a point true also for philosophy, languages, the arts….interpretation, judgment, and the performance of the scholar’s own style are often deemed to be of more importance. When asked ‘what is the end of University education and of the Liberal or Philosophical Knowledge?’, John Henry Newman famously answered, “Knowledge is capable of being its own end. Such is the constitution of the human mind, that any kind of knowledge is its own reward”. By way of a strong recasting of Newman for the present day,
John Guillory (2003) urges the humanities to be less dismissive of their claim to knowledge: The order needs reversing: those who desire knowledge as good in itself will do so because they think that is good, not that it is good because they desire it.
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