Why Nobody Cares about the Humanities

As a humanist — someone who reads, teaches and researches primarily philosophy but also, on the side, novels and poems and plays and movies — I am prepared to come out and admit that I do not know what the value of the humanities is. I do not know whether the study of the humanities promotes democracy or improves your moral character or enriches your leisure time or improves your critical thinking skills or increases your empathy.

Agnes Callard, "I Teach the Humanities, and I Still Don't Know What Their Value Is"

Agnes Callard, who wrote this for the NYT a few weeks ago, is a professor of philosophy at the University of Chicago who wrote a highly touted book entitled Aspiration: The Agency of Becoming. This was a title inviting enough to motivate me to buy and read it. Well, I started to read it but gave up on it because it was a bore.¹ It struck me as an 'analytic' exercise akin to trying to prove that most trees are green. Perhaps some people, "specialists", need persuading of that. I don't. There are other, better, more interesting books to read. 

But I am more intersted in responding to what Gail Kern Paster, Director Emerita of the Folger Shakespeare Library, writes to the editor of the Times to object to Callard's essay when she says--

We humanists are the keepers and interpreters of our civilization, defined globally, and we are charged by tradition and consensus to evaluate that civilization in our teaching and scholarship. This is, of course, itself a conventional piety — but like many conventional pieties, it is a true one.

Because we have done so in the face of growing indifference and shrinking support, it is simply not helpful to have an academic colleague proclaim, even ironically, that she does not know the value of the humanities.

Ms. Paster also tells us--

Right-thinking humanists do not claim to make their students better people or even try to do so. Such a claim smacks of egotism and hubris. But we do claim to make students better critical readers, thinkers and writers — people better equipped as a result of studying complex texts to judge competing claims, to weigh evidence and to make better-informed judgments on a host of issues.

I’m sure Callard and Paster are fine people. But after reading both their statements, I can only think--No wonder the humanities are losing their funding. 

I assume it's Socrates' aporia, his "I don't know", his wise ignorance, that Professor Collard is echoing here when she claims not to know what the value of the humanities is. But is she really writing in the Socratic spirit? Maybe kind of^.2 But I didn't find it in her book--at least the Socratic spirit that I encounter when I read Plato. And as far as the hubris of wanting his students to become better people, clearly, according to Ms. Paster, Socrates fails as a “right-thinking humanist”.

Was he hubristic? By today's standards of dogmatic diffidence surely he was. It's unlikely he would find a place on the faculty at the University of Chicago, nor would he want to teach there. But he might hang out in the quad and buttonhole some of the more spirited students to engage them in some interesting conversation.

And those students would stop gladly to converse. Why? For one, he was a mensch--he exuded the humanity that we all should 'aspire' to embody. For two, they sensed in him the kind of personality with whom such conversation might change their lives. Heaven forfend that anyone would take courses in the humanities these days with such aspirations.