Humanities and the Public Good (original) (raw)
The old question of the humanities' relation to humanity continues to bedevil, bewilder, and bemuse. Intellectuals like Stanley Fish perform mental acrobatics to justify their lifepursuits. 1 Do art and the humanities tend to ennoble? Does immersion in them make moral, elevated, broad-minded, and empathetic? Does it give one a greater appreciation of "life's meaning," or greater understanding of other minds and cultures, or greater capacities for publicspirited and informed citizenship? Does it give one the mental habits and resources with which to live well and resist modern dehumanization? What, in the end, is the humanities' value at all? Or are the naysayers right that this sphere of study and creation is not only economically unproductive but also elitist, solipsistic, socially disengaging, and in general useless, even harmful? Given the age in which we live, it seems that a clear and forceful statement of the value of the humanities-if indeed we decide they have value-is in order. That creating and studying humanistic works need not make humane is shown by the caliber of so many people who create and study these works. "Humanistic" intellectuals are perfectly capable not only of being cultural decadents, contemptible narcissists, and personally immoral obscenities (pedophiles, sadists, abusers of women, whatever you want), but also of being enthusiastic fascists, Nazis, and semi-Eichmannian bureaucrats. The scholarship of Zeev Sternhell, for example, shows how the ideological seeds of fascism germinated in the fecund soil of alienated turn-of-the-century European intellectual culture. 2 George Steiner's thoughts are worth quoting at length: The simple yet appalling fact is that we have very little solid evidence that literary studies do very much to enrich or stabilize moral perception, that they humanize. We have little proof that a tradition of literary studies in fact makes a man more humane. What is worse-a certain body of evidence points the other way. When viewing the world, and it can even contribute to such things as democracy, civic engagement, and other populist values our society pretends to uphold. In particular, if their spirit is properly imbibed, the humanities can instill a healthy and moral disgust with capitalism, consumerism, arbitrary authority, irrational thinking, war, and all things inhumane. At their heart, art and the humanities are essentially moral, the very jewel of human creativity and moral awareness.
On the Utility of the Humanities
Research on Humanities and Social Sciences, 2013
Humanities have already been criticized for enclosing themselves in a self-referential world that needs to interact with other fields of knowledge in order to accomplish its original aim: to make human life meaningful. Based on The Magic Mountain by Thomas Mann and on the concept of Narrative Medicine by Rita Charon, this essay sheds light on the role of Humanities in the world today and the importance of discussing this issue.
AmeriQuests, 2012
What is the worth of humanities teaching and research? This collaborative report, based on meetings at McGill and Vanderbilt Universities, argues that humanities researchers and teachers help make an historical, public, meaningful world. It outlines the character of the relationship between the humanities on one side and artistic and political work on the other. It suggests several challenges facing the humanities and provides a short list of recommendations.
2013
Humanities have already been criticized for enclosing themselves in a self-referential world that needs to interact with other fields of knowledge in order to accomplish its original aim: to make human life meaningful. Based on The Magic Mountain by Thomas Mann and on the concept of Narrative Medicine by Rita Charon, this essay sheds light on the role of Humanities in the world today and the importance of discussing this issue.
There is hardly any sense of one’s own citizenship without a certain critical understanding of one’s own place within a texture of historical events, traditional texts, and normative ideals. Any attempt to reduce the condition of being a citizen to a mere legal status that enables our participation to a set of democratic procedures and juridical rules dangerously erodes the preconditions that are needed to actually willingly and consciously participate to those procedures and rules. Only some kind of reflective awareness of one’s own place within a pluralistic public square, with its history of struggles, paradigmatic representations and linguistic repertoires, can enable an enduring conversation. Being citizens, as Aristotle already noticed, requires to be able both to govern and to be governed, at the same time . In contemporary democratic theory, it is often said that citizens should not be subject to any norm whose rationale and justification is not universally accessible to their rational understanding. This understanding is often taken for granted or easily framed within some procedural notion of public reason. In complex, interconnected, pluralistic societies, though, this task of understanding has possibly become much harder than previously. It requires to be able to ri-elaborate our own traditions, to read historical events in their context, to understand what it means to interpret sacred and juridical texts, to re-discover ancient linguistic and symbolic repertoires, to grasp normative and descriptive distinctions, to connect and distinguish personal narratives and public discourses. These are all typical gestures of the humanities.
The Idea and the Ideal of Humanity in the Humanities
Smisao humanističkih znanosti. Eds. Filip Grgić, Ivica Martinović. Zagreb: Institut za filozofiju, 2017; , 2017
In my lecture, I ask what sense the humanities make today? Why does it or does it not make sense to study or do research in the humanities in today’s world? and what “use” the humanities have in today's world? in other words: what the humanities are “good for”? In recent years, policymakers in the area of research and higher education increasingly give the impression that the humanities are good for nothing . This point of view is underlined by growing emphasis on the economic value of college degrees, which manifests itself in a dual aspect: on the one hand, with regard to employability of college graduates in the humanities fields and, on the other, with regard to profitability of funding the humanities disciplines. The perspective on the humanities expressed in EU Policy on Research and Training, is taken as a case in point. Here, the humanities are last on the list of research areas and consistently grouped as a sort of stepchild together with and following after the social ...