So, I posted this link on my Facebook a few days ago, and when I reread it, I got annoyed. Really annoyed. It's a discussion on the significance of the humanities in academia and in life, and what the justification for continuing to teach them is, if it's even necessary. Here's an excerpt:
"At one time justification of the arts and humanities was unnecessary because, as Anthony Kronman puts it in a new book, “Education’s End: Why Our Colleges and Universities Have Given Up on the Meaning of Life,” it was assumed that “a college was above all a place for the training of character, for the nurturing of those intellectual and moral habits that together from the basis for living the best life one can.” It followed that the realization of this goal required an immersion in the great texts of literature, philosophy and history even to the extent of memorizing them, for “to acquire a text by memory is to fix in one’s mind the image and example of the author and his subject.”
"...[Kronman] believes that only the humanities can address “the crisis of spirit we now confront” and “restore the wonder which those who have glimpsed the human condition have always felt, and which our scientific civilization, with its gadgets and discoveries, obscures.”
"...Kronman, however, identifies science, technology and careerism as impediments to living a life with meaning. The real enemies, he declares, are “the careerism that distracts from life as a whole” and “the blind acceptance of science and technology that disguise and deny our human condition.” These false idols, he says, block the way to understanding. We must turn to the humanities if we are to “meet the need for meaning in an age of vast but pointless powers,” for only the humanities can help us recover the urgency of “the question of what living is for.”
Okay. So the guy writing the article, a Professor Fish, argues that this is wrong. That the humanities are actual more valuable when you resist justifying them. That they really do serve no purpose. And that if you really did learn more about life from them, humanities scholars and professors would be the best people on earth. In short, he was incredibly short-sighted and narrow-minded and pretentiously intellectual about the topic as a whole.
Then, while the guy whose ideas he was demeaning, though some of his thoughts were interesting, he, too was short-sighted in his attack of science and technology. A friend of mine put it like this:
"...For me, the humanities are not concerned with mere emulation. The point of reading Hamlet is not to "be as Hamlet is." Art in general is not as utilitarian as that. No good literature, anyway, is as didactic as that, as preachy as having a concrete moral to take away and apply to your own life.
"But, nonetheless, there is definitely something enriching about it. The author of the article fails to distinguish between objective facts learned from literature and the skills that one learns from experiencing it. Rather than applying the 'morals' of literature to one's own life, the fact that you have read the literature (or experienced any other form of art) allows you to observe life itself in a far more complex manner."
In general, I don’t think there needs to be an obvious, didactic message in order for a person to take something away from any kind of art. I don’t think something has to have an obvious message in it in order to be beautiful, either - in order to have an impact on people. Hell, if you had to derive meaning from Jack Kerouac's poetry in order for it to have an effect, in order for it to move you, then most people are screwed - especially if it has to be his intended meaning. But his poems (though, I guess, some would also argue that it's not poetry) are beautiful.
The article bothered me a little in what at least some of the people who commented upon it mentioned – Fish only used a few specific examples, and it weakened his argument – to me, at least. He indirectly defined “humanities” as literature, philosophy, and history, when I feel like it’s a much broader term than that. In a way, I feel like you can’t talk about the “humanities” without talking about “art,” and though he makes a brief mention of it at the beginning, Fish completely abandons it throughout the rest of his article. That bothers me because literature is as much art as music and film and the other areas lumped under the “fine and performing arts.” Then, someone else commented upon the “social sciences” and how you can’t really completely separate humanities and science, and that makes sense too – which is why so many schools have interdisciplinary cores and general education requirements.
In reference to his comment about how literature and philosophy professors aren't actually better people, like with everything else, I feel like it just depends on the person you are. You can be a completely cold-hearted, unsympathetic humanities professor, yet still be able to teach the mechanics of literature, philosophy, the arts, etc. Unless you embrace whatever feelings you let them inspire, whatever understanding or ways of thinking or seeing things they encourage, the humanities are going to be useless to you.
Then Fish's ending, saying how justification "diminishes the object of the supposed praise", bothered me too. It just seemed like a cop-out - an avoidance of the question. Though I wouldn’t exactly call it their “meaning,” I’d say that art and the humanities are capable of nothing if not their ability to cultivate empathy and sympathy and new ways of seeing life – greater understanding of not the physical, but the more abstract. What good is a world where all that we understand is the physical nature of everything, where all we see is one perspective of the concrete?
I really should sleep. More another time maybe. It's a pity I'm only productive between the hours of midnight and 8 a.m.
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