Practicing the Humanities – Amanda Anderson

If you’ve ever taken to the serious pursuit of the humanities (literature, philosophy, history or any of their classic buddies), you’ve no doubt been reminded as I have, on countless social occasions, of the noble yet useless tenor of such passions.

Still in hot pursuit of classical letters, I’ve begun to take note, of late, of voices from academia rising to defend the old ideals of liberal education. In fact, I’ve discovered a fringe debate on the Internet, where Defenders of the Faith gather to heap praise on the humanities, even if their stance is largely defensive.

For lovers of the humanities looking for reassurance, the “apologetics” (defense speeches) you can find on-line often provide articulate responses to the charge of the humanities’ “irrelevance” in today’s global economy. Yet, what I have found has been for the most part what I would call ‘soft’ defenses of the humanities. Defenses that touch on some essential feature of the humanities – the development of critical, moral and ethical thinking faculties, for example – but in the final analysis end up capitulating to the dominant utilitarian view of knowledge, i.e. ‘here’s how the humanities can be useful’.

In other words, it seems that too few people who state the case for the humanities are actual defenders of the humanities, in that they avoid the radicality contained in the humanities’ practice, and legacy.

Amanda Anderson, is one such rare person. In this brief TED talk, Anderson, a professor of English at Brown University, reviews contemporary arguments about the humanities’ “relevance”, and makes a compelling case for why we need to look at the nature of the humanities in order to make the case for life-long investment in their study.

Let’s summarize the talk, and try to encapsulate Anderson’s central argument.

Anderson begins her presentation by asking the question: “In the past few decades, the humanities have been under increased pressure to justify what they do, to defend and explain themselves. Why?”

She notes three main factors that underpin this trend:

1. The questioning of the practical and economic value of humanities degrees, i.e. will a humanities degree translate into career skills and opportunities.
2. The funding structures of the university in North America. The humanities are not grant-based, like the natural and (policy-geared) social sciences. The fact that they derive their departmental funding from universities’ internal budgets produces the perception that the humanities are ‘dependent’.
3. The concern that the humanities having become overly-specialized. If nobody minds specialized discourse in the sciences, jargon in the humanities seems to rub a lot of people wrong.

According to Anderson, the response of humanities scholars to these concerns boils down to two basic lines of defensive argument, rhetorically framed as the humanities’ ‘value-propositions for the 21st century’:

1. The critical thinking skill-set benefit, which:

…emphasizes that the humanities have a unifying method, that involves the imparting of a skill that is portable, and can be taken to any discipline, and any profession: critical thinking. That is, through the primary activity within the humanities – which is the interpretive analysis of documents and other cultural artifacts – one learns this skill, which can be taken anywhere, in any professional context.

2. The moral education benefit, which:

…claims for the humanities a special capacity to cultivate moral and civic character. Through a vast exposure to a range of cultural expression that come from individuals differently-situated historically, geographically, and culturally, one gains a certain kind of intercultural awareness, and intercultural fluency. This is good for democracy, this is good for international relations, and it has the added benefit of being good for your moral character. We desperately need this kind of education, in a globally interconnected world, where misunderstandings, esp. those of religious and political difference, can have such damaging effects.

These two approaches – critical thinking and moral education – are often seen as intertwined: if critical thinking helps one gain distance from one’s cultural assumptions, the resulting ‘moral awareness of the other’ also helps in further honing one’s critical thinking skills.

The Humanities: in Letter and Spirit

Unfortunately, the weakness of these responses to the charge of the humanities’ ‘irrelevance’, lies in the simplistic nature of the defenders’ arguments. According to Anderson:

The critical thinking approach partakes of a certain science envy, in its emphasis on method. The moral education approach can start to make the humanities classroom sound a little bit like church, as if going to a humanities class is a way to attend to your ‘civic soul’.

Anderson then addresses the limitations of these two approaches.

First, in its emphasis on unifying method, the critical thinking approach does not acknowledge some of the fundamental traits of contemporary knowledge.

1. There are a multiplicity of methods used in the humanities.
2. Every knowledge discipline – practical or theoretical – relies on critical thinking. On what basis can a ‘special claim’ be made in favor of the humanities, if ‘critical thinking’ is employed in every knowledge discipline?
3. The emphasis on a skill, a portable skill, according to Anderson, “buys in to the technical and pre-professional emphases of our current culture”.

As for the moral education approach: the so-called moral benefits of the humanities can start to sound pious and sentimental, as though the humanities will “make you a better person” (a gospel often heralded from humanities pulpits). More critically, this appeal also “plays into the fear that individual humanities professors are using the humanities classroom to inculcate their own preferred values”.

In the wake of this critique, Anderson’s drives her main point about the importance of the humanities:

The humanities do not directly impart value. they open one up to an appreciation and an understanding of the centrality of questions of value to the human experience, and they help one the begin to grapple with such questions. […] Individual works in the humanities do project values, but the humanities as a whole do not. They in engage in what Max Weber called ‘clarification’. In assessing works in the humanities, one comes to a better understanding of what one values, and, given what one values, how one can make any given number of practical and ethical decision, decision that come up in any life, in any profession, and in any society. […] So the humanities don’t impart any specific skill. [Rather] they help one to develop, and to integrate a fundamental practice into one’s life.

In other words, if the ability to question what is of value in our lives remains accessible to anyone, those who devote themselves to the study of the humanities can expect to deepen their awareness of value in their everyday life, and to make this their core social contribution.

Conclusion

Anderson’s critique of the limited view of humanities advocates is my main take-away from her talk. More important to me however, is the extension of this ‘practice of the humanities’ outside the university. Though the university (and the liberal arts segment of our education system) will remain the bastion of the humanities in the future, it will be important to “externalize” the various traditions of humanities in intellectual life outside the Ivory Tower.

Why? Without social advocates for “ultimate questions of value” in the cultural mainstream, we can expect that debates about the fate of our civilization, in our current anti-intellectual climate, will all but disappear, or be relegated to ideologues. And because of the undisputed reign of philosophically liberal assumptions in both conservative and progressive strains of public discourse, it may well be that humanities advocates outside the university will remain, in the foreseeable future, relegated to dissident circles on the Internet.

As a way out of this impasse, I would like to offer my own definition for the humanities, writ large: the humanities are any form of knowledge rooted in the expression and analysis of human experience. To come full circle – that is what I meant above, when I proposed that the humanities were radical (i.e. rooted) in their approach to knowledge.