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.
In a piece I wrote a year ago entitled "Axiality and the Socratic Elenchus" I say--
The one thing that united all existentialists, following Nietzsche, was the rejection of Greek transcendental "essentialism", for which they blamed Socrates'--through whom, for Nietzsche, emerged the beginning of Western decadence. Socrates' overly rational dialectic and Plato's notions of an otherworldly world of ideas or essences were where all our problems started. Nietzsche and those who followed him were in effect rejecting the entire post-Axial project and its assertion of a transcendent, vertical dimension in reality that impinged on and sustained an immanent world. That rejection became axiomatic afterwards. It's something that is hardly ever challenged these days if you want to be an intellectual in good standing.
... It's astonishing to me that Socrates of all people should be considered a "decadent", and the only reason I can think of is that the intellectual avant-garde after Nietzsche became so captured by a form of Rationalist Materialism by the late 19th Century that they became incapable of responding to Plato's mythos. It would be like admitting you really like watching It's a Wonderful Life at Christmas. Intellectuals in good standing don't take such sentimental rubbish seriously. But really what they're saying is that they've become incapable of responding to truth that comes in the form of parables. They've lost the imagination for it, the vertical capacity for it.
...The vertical dimension in Plato is essential to his post-Axial project--for him it is all about overcoming alienation by becoming connected to the transcendent Living Real, but late-modern, educated elites captured by a Rationalist-Materialist metaphysical imaginary must reject the vertical in Plato as nonsense.The Greek proto-scientists--Thales, Anaxagoras, Democritus, et al--are the only Greeks that matter for contemporary Rationalist Materialists. Of course the Sophists like Protagoras matter for demagogues, propagandists, and advertisers.
Now it's pretty obvious to me that Socrates and probably Plato were mystics. Most thinkers in the ancient world who were influenced by them thought so.3 Nevertheless, I hesitate to use the word, because of its connotations of flakiness or associations with the New Age. But all I mean by it is experience of the Living Real on the vertical dimension. People have such experiences all the time that they used to recognize as experiences of the transcendent dimension breaking into ordinary consciousness in subtle or dramatic ways. The current fashion is to call them "aesthetic" rather than mystical experiences because that is more compatible with the hegemonic Rationalist Materialist imaginary.
But when Socrates talks about Justice, Truth, Beauty, and Goodness as transcendentals, he is not talking about abstract concepts, but about an encounter with the sacred. They are transcendentals because they, operating on the vertical dimension, intersect with the everyday horizontal experience. There is something about them through which the divine shines. They are numinous, and they inspire. If you have ever been deeply moved, perhaps even to tears, by an encounter with beauty or justice or someone speaking from a deep intuitive sense of the Truth in an inhospitable environment, you've had a mystical experience, an experience that comes shining through from the vertical dimension. There are all kinds of mystical experiences, but the experience of these transcendental archetypes is entry level for most people.
Is it an entry through which either Mses. Callard or Paster have passed? Maybe. I don't know them, and it might be unfair to judge them from the little that I've read of them. I would hope Shakespeare is such a portal for Ms Paster as he is for me. But I would be pleasantly surprised if what I have written above would be something that they could embrace without embarrassment.
Such is the state of the humanities today, and that's the real reason fewer and fewer people care about them anymore. They are products of, rather than challenges to, the flattened consensus reality that shapes elite culture these days.
Happy New Year, and More on the Taylor series later in the week.
1. My definition of a bore is one who answers questions people don’t have. This might sound harsh. I’m not saying Callard is a bore for everyone. Clearly she is not.
2. More in the sense of the Parmenides, which when I first read it I thought to be a sophisticated joke, a parody of logical dialectic gone off the rails. I will nonetheless admit that people a lot smarter than I am see something in Parmenides that I don’t, and I so will afford the same respect to Prof. Callard by saying that she does not answer the questions that I have. Perhaps those are questions that I should have. Maybe, but I think it’s fair to ask whether the genre of philosophy she’s doing is representative of what is aggravating the crisis in the humanities rather than helping to resolve it.
3. See Pierre Hadot, What is Ancient Philosophy?, Harvard University Press, 2004.