The Uses of the Humanities

The Uses of the Humanities, Part Two STANLEY FISH, JANUARY 13, 2008

In a poem titled ―Matins,‖ the 17th century Anglican poet George Herbert says to God, If you will “teach me thy love to know . . . Then by a sunbeam I will climb to thee.” But the dynamics of the proffered bargain – if you do X, I’ll do Y– are undercut by the line that proposes it, and especially by the double pun in ―sunbeam.‖

―Sun‖ is a standard pun on Son; it refers to Jesus Christ; ―beam‖ means not only ray of light, but a piece of wood large enough to support a structure; it refers to the cross on which a crucified Christ by dying takes upon himself and redeems (pays the price for) the sins of those who believe in him. So while ―by a sunbeam‖ seems to specify the means by which the poem’s speaker will perform a certain act –―I will climb to thee‖ – the phrase undercut his claim to be able to do so by reminding us (not him) that Christ has already done the climbing and thereby prevented (in the sense of anticipating) any positive act man mistakenly thinks to be his own. If the speaker climbs to God, he does so by means of God, and cannot take any personal credit for what he ―does.‖ If he truly knows God’s love, he will know that as an unconditional and all-sufficing gift it has disabled him as an agent. This brief analysis of a line of poetry that simultaneously reports a resolution and undermines it is an example of the kind of work and teaching I have done for almost five decades. It is the work of a humanist, that is, someone employed in a college to teach literary, philosophical and historical texts. The questions raised in my previous columnand in the responses to it are: what is the value of such work, why should anyone fund it, and why (for what reasons) does anyone do it?

Why do I do it? I don’t do it because Herbert and I are co-religionists. I don’t believe what he believes or value what he values. I don’t do it because it inspires me to do other things, like change my religion, or go out and work for t he poor. If I had to say, I’d say that I do it because I get something like an athletic satisfaction from the experience of trying to figure out how a remarkable verbal feat has been achieved.

The satisfaction is partly self-satisfaction– it is like solving a puzzle–but the greater satisfaction is the opportunity to marvel at what a few people are able to do with the language we all use. ―Isn’t that amazing?,‖ I often say to my students. ―Don’t you wish you could write a line like that?‖ (In the colum n I used the word ―pleasure‖ to describe the reward of discussing and unpacking literary texts, but ―pleasure‖ is at once too narrow and too broad; it

is the very particular pleasure that attends cognitive awareness of an effect you not only experience but can now explain.)

Note that what we’re talking about here is the study, not the production, of humanistic texts. The question I posed in the column was not do works of literature, philosophy and history have instrumental value, but does the academic analysis of works of literature, philosophy and history have instrumental value. When Jeffrey Sachs says that ―in the real world‖ the distinction between the humanities and the sciences on the basis of utility does not hold because ―philosophers have made impor tant contributions to the sciences‖ and ―the hard sciences have had a profound impact on the humanities,‖ he doesn’t come within 100 miles of refuting anything I say. Whatever does or does not happen in the “real world” is not the issue; the issue is what happens in the academic world, where the distinctions Sachs dismisses do hold. It may be, as George Mobus maintains, that ―only in academia where you are supposed to be a specialist . . . do we parse the world into silos,‖ but the academic world is by defi nition parsed into silos and when the utility of one of them is questioned, it is not to any point to say that in some other world everything exists in some great big mix.

In general those who disagree with my assertions do what Sachs and Mobus do — slide (without acknowledgment or awareness) back and forth between the precincts of academia (which, to make the point again, are the precincts where the dispute is located) to the precincts, often larger, of some other enterprise. When I declare that the humanities are of no use whatsoever, I am talking about humanities departments(―the humanities‖ is an academic, not a cultural category), not about poets and philosophers and the effects they do or do not have in the world and on those who read them.

The funding of the humanities in colleges and universities cannot be justified by pointing to the fact that poems and philosophical arguments have changed lives and started movements. (I was surprised that no one mentioned ―Uncle Tom’s Cabin,‖ a book Linco ln is said to have credited with the starting of the Civil War.) The pertinent question is, Do humanities courses change lives and start movements? Does one teach with that purpose, and if one did could it be realized?

If the answers to these questions are (as I contend) ―no‖ – one teaches the subject matter and any delayed effect of what happens in a classroom is contingent and cannot be aimed at– then the route of external justification of the humanities, of a justification that depends on the calculation of measurable results, is closed down. The fact that some commentators, including a few of my former students, report life-changing experiences as a result of their studies is heartening (although I am sure

that the vast majority would report something quite different), but it hardly amounts toa reason for supporting the entire apparatus of departments, degrees, colloquia etc. that has grown up around the academic study of humanistic texts.

Some who posted put forward a negative reason for supporting the teaching the humanities. They say things like, if only ―the cabal running or government . . . had known a bit of history, we might not be in

Iraq‖ and ―Would the neoconservatives really believe that the world is a battlefield of good versus evil, or were they to expand their minds to include a more complete knowledge of history and human nature?‖ But the neoconservatives these respondents no doubt have in mind – Wolfowitz, Pearle, Kristol, Huntington – are as widely read in history, philosophy and the arts as anyone, and they participate in deeply intellectual discussions of important texts in theLiberty Fund seminars and elsewhere.

Assuming that if they had been schooled in the right texts (Paul Krugman rather than Milton Friedman, Cornel West rather than William Buckley) they would have devised better policies is a fantasy, and indeed, it is the same fantasy the neoconservatives buy into when they argue that if we were to introduce radical Muslims to the writings of Jefferson, Madison and J.S. Mill, they would learn to love freedom and stop wanting to destroy us. The truth is that a mastery of literary and philosophical texts and the acquisition of wisdom (in whatever form) are independent variables.

All of this should not be taken to mean, as it was by some, that I am attacking the humanities or denigrating them or declaring them worthless. I am saying that the value of the humanities cannot be validated by some measure externalto the obsessions that lead some (like me) to devote their working lives to them – measures like increased economic productivity, or the fashioning of an informed citizenry, or the sharpening of moral perceptions, or the lessening of prejudice and discrimination.If these or some other instrumental benchmarks –instrumental in the sense that they are tied to a secondary effect rather than to an internal economy – are what the humanities must meet, they will always fall short. But the refusal of the humanities to acknowledge or bow to an end they do not contemplate is, I argue, their salvation and their value. As Stacia says in words more precise than mine, ―The subject of these studies are not to be used as tools to achieve something else . . . they are the achievement.‖

Of course, this does not mean that anyone will pay for them. In fact, as several posters observed, my argument (and it isn’t only mine) that the humanities are their own good and aren’t much good for anything else can be used to

justify turning humanities departments into service departments and cutting funding for humanities research.

I still remember serving on an all-university committee at Johns Hopkins University and hearing one of my fellow committee members say that he would happily support the English department because his wife very much enjoyed seeing plays. When I told him that the department never put on plays, and at that moment did not even have a faculty member who was interested in plays, he was amazed and asked the obvious question: What then do you do? When I replied that we research things like medieval astrology, Renaisssance iconography, 18th century political satire and romantictheories of the imagination, and then share our findings and interpretations with students, his puzzlement grew.

Had he asked the next question – but what can you do with that? – I would have had to say, not much of anything except, perhaps, entice a few people to join the same esoteric enterprise. He was more polite than another colleague, a friend, who announced one day that members of English departments were ―parasites on the carcass of literature.‖ A medical doctor, he was also a lover of literature and just didn’t see why a world that already had poets and novelists and playwrights needed an army of people feeding off them.

His sentiments were echoed by those respondents who complained that humanities departments are narrowly professional and concerned largely with reproducing themselves. ―A father‖ reports the ―repugnant truth‖ that ―the humanities is study of a discipline. Mastery of the discipline qualifies you to profess it.‖ Qjiang observes that ―there are Shakespeares and Shakespeare’s interpreters‖ and ―Humanities nowadays… largely and unfortunately refer to the latter.‖

That’s right. What is in need of defense is not the existence of Shakespeare, but the existence of the Shakespeare industry (and of the Herbert industry and of the Hemingway industry), with its seminars, journals, symposia, dissertations, libraries. The challenge of utility is not put (except by avowed Philistines ) to literary artists, but to the scholarly machinery that seems to take those operating it further and further away from the primary texts into the reaches of incomprehensible and often corrosivetheory. More than one poster decried the impenetrable jargon of literary studies. Why, one wonders, is the same complaint not made against physics or economics or biology or psychology, all disciplines with vocabularies entirely closed to the uninitiated?

The answer is that those disciplines are understood to be up to something and to be promising a payoff that will someday benefit even those who couldn’t read a page of their journals. What benefit do literary studies hold out to those

asked to support them? Not much of anything except the (parochial) excitement experienced by those caught up in arcane discussions of the mirror stage, the trace, the subaltern and the performative. (Don’t ask.) The general public, which includes legislators, trustees, and parents, is on the side of my colleague at Johns Hopkins. Let them put on plays.

Of the justifications for humanistic study offered in the comments, two seemed to me to have some force. The first is that taking courses in literature, philosophy and history provides training in critical thinking.

I confess that I have always thought that ―critical thinking‖ is an empty phrase, a slogan that a humanist has recourse to when someone asks what good is what you do and he or she has nothing to say. What’s the distinction, I have more than occasionally asked, between critical thinking and just thinking? Isn’t the adjective superfluous? And what exactly would

―uncritical thinking‖ be? But now that I have read the often impassioned responses to my column, I have a better understanding of what critical thinking is.

Taking as an example the concept of IQ, William Haboush saysthat while a scientist will use it, a humanist ―will ask what does it mean? Is it one thing or many? Who mad e up the questions used in measuring it.‖ This, then, is critical thinking – the analytic probing of formulas, precepts and pieces of received wisdom that too often go unexamined and unchallenged. This

skill, Warren Call claims, is taught in humanities courses where students

―analyze ideas, differing viewpoints, justifications, opinions and accounts‖ and, in the process, learn how to ―construct a logical assessment . . . and defend their conclusions with facts and lucid argument.‖

That certainly sounds like a skill worth having, and I agree that it can be acquired in courses where literary texts, philosophical arguments and historical events are being scrutinized with an eye to seeing what lies beneath (or to the side of) their surfaces. But it also can be, and is, acquired elsewhere. Right now millions of TV viewers are acquiring it when they watch Chris Matthews or George Will or Cokie Roberts analyze the current political moment and say things like, ―It would be wrong to draw any long run conclusion from Hilary Clinton’s victory in New Hampshire because in other states the voting population is unlikely to be 57 percent female and 97 percent white,‖ or ―If we are to understand the immigration debate, we must go back the great waves of immigration in the la te 19th and early 20th centuries,‖ or

―Homelessness is not a single problem, but a nest of problems that cannot be solved piecemeal.‖

You can hear the same kind of thinking on sports radio, where host and callers-in debate the ingredients that go to make up a successful team. And critical thinking is what tens of thousands of preachers encourage every

week in their sermons when they ask parishioners to slow down and reflect on the impulses, perhaps obscure to them, driving their everyday behavior.

So two cheers for critical thinking, but the fact that you can learn how to do it in any number of contexts means that it cannot be claimed for the humanities as a special benefit only they can supply. Justification requires more than evidence that a consumer can get a desirable commodity in your shop, too; it requires a demonstration that you have the exclusive franchise.

The second justification for studying the humanities that in my view has some force speaks to those of us who have been trapped in conversations with people who, after ―How about those Bears?‖ (the equivalent of ―hello‖ in Chicago), can think of nothing to say. EM observes that ―being exposed to great ideas from variety of fields . . . and learning how to think critically all make for a moreinteresting and informed person‖ and that ―lots of people want interesting and informed people as their friends, lovers and employees.‖ Amen. Count me as one of those who would welcome an increase in the number of those who can be relied on to enliven a dinner party rather than kill it (although I have seen dinner parties killed by the most erudite and sophisticated person at the table). But it won’t do as a defense society will take seriously to say, Let’s support the humanities so that Stanley Fish and his friends have more people to talk to.

One final point. Nguyen Chau Giao asks, ―Dr. Fish, when was the last time you read a poem . . . that so moved you to take certain actions to improve your lot or others?‖ To tell the truth, I can’t remember a sing le time. But I can remember countless times when I’ve read a poem (like Herbert’s ―Matins‖) and said ―Wow!‖ or ―Isn’t that just great?‖ That’s more than enough in my view to justify the enterprise of humanistic study, but I cannot believe, as much as I would like to, that the world can be persuaded to subsidize my moments of aesthetic wonderment.

My Comments:

This article is closely related to the one ―Will Humanities Save Us?‖ in the textbook, with the same author. In this article, the author states his opinion in a sarcastic tone, that the pleasure or satisfaction gained from studying humanities has nothing to do with any external measures such as economic productivity, citizen informity or morality, etc., nor is it linked with the practical effects claimed by the humanities departments. Overall, the whole passage again emphasize the view ―humanities are their own good‖ stated in his previous article.

Vocabulary:

proffer:

to offer something to someone, especially by holding it out in your hands端给；递给

to give someone advice, an explanation etc提出〔建议、解释等〕

undercut:

to make something weaker or less effective削弱；使降低效率

pun:

an amusing use of a word or phrase that has two meanings, or of words that have the same sound but different meanings双关语，语义双关的俏皮话

unconditional:

not limited by or depending on any conditions不加限制的；无条件的

all-sufficing:

roundly satisfying全面满足的

co-religionists:

an adherent of the same religion as another 信奉同一宗教的人

verbal:

relating to words or using words与言辞有关的，用言辞的；文字上的

feat:

something that is an impressive achievement, because it needs a lot of skill, strength etc to do业绩，功绩，壮举

precinct:

an area of a town where people can walk and shop, and where cars are not allowed购物区/步行区

one of the areas that a town or city is divided into, so that elections or police work can be organized more easily选区；警区

pertinent:

directly relating to something that is being considered直接相关的，有关的heartening:

If someone is heartened by something, it encourages them and makes them cheerful. 鼓

舞性的

cabal:

a small group of people who make secret plans, especially in order to have political power

〔尤指企图获取政治权力的〕阴谋小集团

neoconservatives:新保守主义者，新保守派

respondents:

someone who answers questions, especially in a survey〔尤指调查中〕回答问题的人someone who has to defend their own case in a law court, especially in a divorce case〔尤指离婚案的〕被告

citizenry:

all the citizens in a particular town, country, or state全体公民，全体市民

esoteric:

known and understood by only a few people who have special knowledge about something

深奥的，只有内行才懂的

carcass:

the body of a dead animal动物尸体

reproducing:

If you try to reproduce something, you try to copy it. 复制; 再造

repugnant:

very unpleasant and offensive令人厌恶的，使人反感的

symposia:

A symposium is a conference in which experts or academics discuss a particular subject.

专题研讨会

dissertations:

A dissertation is a long formal piece of writing on a particular subject, especially for an

advanced university degree. (学位) 论文

decry:

If someone decries an idea or action, they criticize it strongly. (强烈)批评

jargon:

words and expressions used in a particular profession or by a particular group of people, which are difficult for other people to understand – often used to show disapproval

〔难懂的〕行话，术语〔常含贬义〕

uninitiated:

people who do not have special knowledge or experience of something

无某种专业知识[经验]者，外行，门外汉

parochial:

only interested in things that affect your local area – used in order to show disapproval

只关心本地区的〔含贬义〕

[only before noun,仅用于名词前] relating to a particular church and the area around it

教区的

subaltern:

a middle rank in the British army, or someone who has this rank

〔英国〕陆军中尉（军衔）

performative:

denoting an utterance that constitutes some act, esp the act described by the verb.

施事话语的

recourse:

something that you do to achieve something or deal with a situation, or the act of doing it

〔实现或解决某事的〕手段，途径；依赖；求助

superfluous:

more than is needed or wanted

多余的，过剩的，不必要的

impassioned:

full of strong feeling and emotion

充满激情的，激昂的

probing:

designed to find things out, especially things that other people do not want you to know

探究的；追根究底的

watching carefully and intelligently

〔观察〕专注敏锐的；仔细观察的

a nest of:一窝

piecemeal:

a process that is piecemeal happens slowly and in stages that are not regular or planned properly

零碎的，缺乏通盘计划的

callers-in:电话访客

parishioners:

A priest's parishioners are the people who live in his or her parish, especially the ones

who go to his or her church. 教区居民

franchise:

permission given by a company to someone who wants to sell its goods or services 特许经营权

enliven:

to make something more interesting

使…更有趣