I take the title of this post from a much-discussed 2008 blog post, "Will the Humanities Save Us?" written by Stanley Fish for the New York Times. In the post, Fish critiques Anthony Kronman's Education's End: Why our College and Universities Have Given Up on the Meaning of Life. In this book, Kronman argues that great works of art, literature, and philosophy provide the foundation for understanding the human spirit. Without such understanding, we're left with 80-hour work weeks, empty relationships, and Facebook.
For Kronman, the insights gained from the study of great works of art and literature transfers to other domains in one's life. The transfer may be neither immediate nor easily achieved, but it can and does happen. For Fish the study of great works helps one to, well, study more great works. The humanities, he writes, "don’t do anything, if by 'do' is meant bring about effects in the world. And if they don’t bring about effects in the world they cannot be justified except in relation to the pleasure they give to those who enjoy them."
First impressions...
ReplyDeleteThe humanities save *us*? According to many scholars in the humanities, they can't even save themselves. Take, for instance, Frank Donoghue's September 2010 piece in the _Chronicle of Higher Education_, entitled "Can the Humanities Survive the 21st Century?" (http://chronicle.com/article/Can-the-Humanities-Survive-the/124222/). He offers a cognitive leaping and needlessly far-reaching answer to his own question: "The humanities will have a home somewhere in 2110, but it won't be in universities." Less fatalistic than that may make him sound, Donoghue assures readers that the humanities will "do quite well" as a freelance-type industry, but he doesn't make a convincing case as to why these fields will necessarily be cast from the ivory tower. According to the National Center for Education Statistics (I have the specific reference at home), in 2008 almost a third of the nation's bachelor's degrees were awarded to majors in the humanities. Do we have good reason to believe that this number will drastically shrink? It's not an exaggeration to pronounce "80-hour work weeks, empty relationships, and Facebook" a reality for many people in the USA, factoring in commuting and preparing time, but salvation from this scheme may be exaggerating the humanities' role in the picture. I like the binary of savior vs. narcissus (let's get a mythological hero to pose vs. Narcissus: Jason? Achilles? Odysseus?), but in order to do what one should do with binaries, to deconstruct it.
Mythological heroes with analogical potential with which to counterpoint Narcissus. I like Prometheus or Hector to symbolize the humanities. Please add or comment.
ReplyDeletePrometheus - a titan who stole fire and gave it to mankind, consequently tortured perpetually by Zeus (Greek)
Jason - a mortal who led the quest for the Golden Fleece, which would seat him rightly upon a throne (Greek)
Achilles - the nearly invulnerable Greek moral hero of the Trojan war (Greek)
Hector - the courageous, tragic mortal prince of Troy who nearly save that city from falling (Greek)
Odysseus - the resourceful, tenacious, mortal veteran and journeyer home (Greek)
Hercules - the divinely aided mortal charged with great feats of strength to atone his divinely prompted filicide (Roman)
One point of clarification: In getting to Narcissus, I was a bit ahead of myself. Fish's model isn't really Narcissus based, it's pleasure-based. So Dionysius is the better comparison here.
ReplyDeleteI do feel that Narcissus is still valid for this list, however, because the humanities (indeed, the liberal arts, generally) has a well-established history of self-perpetuation and self-reflection. Both Scholes, _Rise and Fall of English_ and Menand's recent book provide evidence here.
Dionysus versus The Crucified...maybe the unfortunate truth is that the best mythological avatar for us here is Sisyphus; the contrast then becomes the meaning of suffering. Does the humanities suffer the ignorance and disdain of dominant cultural power as part of and prelude to the Grand Passion Play of Salvation, or is it just pushing the damned rock to nowhere? When the leg muscles get tired, is the story that we tell ourselves that we're climbing a mountain, or exercising on the stairmaster?
ReplyDeleteOn the subject of mythology: perhaps we are saying that the Humanities needs a new foundational myth, now that the old presuppositions of its purpose and value are shaky at best. Question: What would this myth look like?
ReplyDeleteA brief digression: as we are inevitably involved in engaging with at least some approach to disciplinarity, I think its worth making explicit the ways in which we all have experienced the Academy from the multiple perspectives of entrenched (albeit fading) discipline of English, as well as the unsettled, perpetually emerging field of Comp. While both can seem quite similar in their whiny cultures of complaining, there seems to me a difference between the defensiveness of scholars who bemoan their loss of power and prestige, and those who are constantly engaged in trying to attain even a small bit of the kind of traditional authority of the "real" disciplines. One is the guy who strikes out because he's past his prime and won't admit it; the other is the desperate guy who can't stop talking about why the increasingly plain girls he's hitting on should (and rarely do) go home with him.
ReplyDeleteIt might depend on how far we go back in determining lost prestige. In the 19th century and before, rhetoric enjoyed a prevalent place in the college curriculum. That was before enrollment diversity and the "shit work" (Scholes?) of grading tons of papers, though I'll note that even the faculty teaching this stuff back then was mainly comprised of part-timers (clergy in training).
ReplyDeleteThe labor of grading papers notwithstanding, I don't think that characterizing humanities scholars as Sisyphean in their suffering would win us much agreement or respect in the public eye (and comparisons to Christ would certainly earn us a disdaining earful). That's because life inside the academy will always seem cushy to those outside it, who don't give a fig about our contingency crisis because they're all contingent employees! But if we do go down that road, let's not forget Sisyphus's neighbor in Hades, Tantalus, who might represent composition scholars in particular: ever reaching out and near-missing the tantalizingly close, delectable sustenance of disciplinarity.
If we've not become too tangential in seeking our mythological avatar, then I'll say I like the look of Hector as humanities prof, who's already become heavily winded circling the walls of Troy (did that city have ivory towers by any chance?), which are about to fall to Readings-like ruins. It begs the question: what's the Achilles heel of the globalized corporate machine? But if we bear out the myth, we must remember that both heroes and many other lives are lost, basically for the sake of a pretty face. What's the equivalent of that face in real life: profit, tenure, freedom, the good life? Does the analogy fail because the humanities are too inept to ever be considered at war with the forces of degeneration?
Hey check out this article, just out today: http://www.insidehighered.com/views/2010/10/14/edelstein. Basically: the outrageous cost of higher ed is a detriment to the humanities, since students feel they need to major in a subject that will give them a return on their investment. Not a particularly new idea, I know, but it's nice to have a recent incarnation of it.
ReplyDelete