Saturday, October 15, 2022

ANOTHER

On April 22, 1989, a symposium was held at Yale on the humanities. I was there in a subordinate role, commenting on a paper by Martha Nussbaum. Here is my comment.  I also have her paper, which I will reproduce if anybody is interested. 


Have the Humanities betrayed their legacy? 'Betrayal' is the language of revolution, of conspiracy. To those of my generation, it conjures a corrupt or cowardly breach of faith with endangered comrades, a complicity with the SS, not a sterile scholasticism masquerading as Philosophy. Have humanists betrayed their legacy? Martin Heidegger surely did, and Paul de Man most probably did. But the very singularity of those cases suggests the inappropriateness of the question

Professor Nussbaum, with a generosity of spirit which does her credit, represents her fellow philosophers, and mine, as having been seduced from a life of moral urgency and political engagement by 'the pressures to publish in certain journals at a certain time' and 'the terrible tyranny of philosophical fads and conventions,' but that implies an original intention for which there is scarcely any evidence. I cannot speak for the entire profession, of course, but when I reflect on those American philosophers whom I have known personally I confess that I can recall no indication, however faint, of an inclination to live the examined life.

Indeed, during the Vietnam War, when the Modern Language Association, and the American Political Science Association, the American Economics Association, and the American Anthropological Association were split by genuinely political disputes, the American Philosophical Association developed an ugly and trivial rift over pseudo-methodological issues which bore no connection to any serious issue. of morality or public policy, and looked, to many of us, to be - in the words of the REPUBLIC - the Yale Philosophy Department writ large.

The call to this Symposium invites us to 'assess the charge that the humanities have turned away from the transmission of values recorded in the great traditions of Western thought and literature.' What can it possibly mean, ‘to transmit values’?

When Martin Feldstein returned to the Harvard Economics Department from the Reagan Administration, he resumed directorship of the enormous Introduction to Economics somewhat quixotically titled Social Analysis 10. The course is taught in discussion sections, with an occasional guest lecture to the thousand or more enrolled undergraduates, and in Feldstein' s absence, the practice had been adopted of permitting several young Instructors to teach sections in which they offered a Marxian alternative to the standard neo-classical synthesis. Feldstein summarily terminated the practice. When asked why, he replied: 'The purpose of this course is to teach students that the market works.' Not how the market works, mind you, but that the market works. That is the transmission of values, and I for one want no part of it.

The call for a return to the transmission of values is a thinly disguised demand for political indoctrination. The call issues from the right, and beneath the scrim of superficial erudition, it is a desperate defense of established authority. That is why so many of those who are joined in this effort share a shameful longing for religious orthodoxy of one sort or an- other. Ironically, their crackpot counterparts among what they themselves would consider the Great Unwashed have identified the enemy as Secular humanism, which perhaps says as much as need be said about the authenticity of their appeal to the humanist tradition.

On occasion, the invocation of the humanities takes the form of a territorial defense of an established canon - a sacred roster of epics and tragedies, plays and poems, treatises and meditations, deviation from which will cause blindness, or stop the rains from coming. Recently, there has gone up a cry for a return to the teaching of values - a proposal as intellectually corrupt as it is grammatically confused.

But always, lurking just below the surface, is the political message: support your local police. It is the defiance of established authority, not the challenge to received textual interpretation, that terrifies the self-appointed champions of the humanities. That is why they are infinitely more agitated by a group of intellectually orthodox students who have set up light housekeeping in a university administration building than they are by a properly dressed professor who proposes an utterly revolutionary reading of Aristotle's METAPHYSICS.

It is scarcely original to observe - indeed, I am here merely echoing Professor Nussbaum's precisely apposite remarks that most of the truly great texts in the western humanist tradition are, in one form or another, challenges to the religious, intellectual, political, or economic authority of the societies in which, and for which, they were written.

How, then, can we remain true to the legacy of the humanities? How can we encourage our students to embrace that legacy as their own, and transmute it - not transmit it - by their own living? The answer lies not in what we say, but in what we do. It is our own willingness to enter into the political life of our society, to fight for justice and economic equality, that most effectively teaches the legacy of the humanities. There is nothing quite so liberating for a student as the sight of a professor being arrested by the police.

And finally, since to those of us who have chosen the academic life, the sheer play of words and ideas gives a pleasure that should not be denied, I should like to conclude by reading to you a portion of one of my favorite philosophical works, in which the author says, better than I ever could, just how he thinks we ought to receive his text, and, by implication, all the other texts that form our legacy. These words come from the final paragraph of the Preface to Kierkegaard’s PHILOSOPHICAL FRAGMENTS.

But what is my personal opinion of the matters herein discussed? … I could wish that no one would ask me this question; for next to knowing whether I have any opinion or not, nothing could very well be of less importance to another than the knowledge of what that opinion might be… But if anyone were to be so polite as to assume that I have an opinion, and if he were to carry his gallentry to the extreme of adopting this opinion because he believed it to be mine, I should have to be sorry for his politeness, in that it was bestowed upon so unworthy an object, and for his opinion, if he has no other opinion than mine. I stand ready to risk my own life, to play the game of thought with it in all earnest; but another's life I cannot jeopardize. This service is perhaps the only one I can render to Philosophy, I who have no learning to offer her, 'scarcely enough for the course at one drachma, to say nothing of the great course at fifty drachmas' (Cratylus.) I have only my life, and the instant a difficulty offers I put it in play. Then the dance goes merrily, for my partner is the thought of Death, and is indeed a nimble dancer; every human being, on the other hand, is too heavy for me. Therefore I pray, per deos obsecro: Let no one invite me, for I will not dance.

 

 

 

 


5 comments:

  1. That was certainly the most enjoyable thing I've read today. I'd be very interesting in reading how Nussbaum responded.--Off topic, but not off blog: as sort of requested by a commentator, here's Hans Sluga's long-awaited (at least by me) review of Geuss's Not Thinking Like a Liberal. (The chapter on the professor's The Poverty of Liberalism is not discussed, although I did discuss it briefly with Hans.) It's characteristically insightful and judicious, and gives a superb overall account of the book. Hans quite rightly (I think) treats the book as an enigma of three layers, with the criticism of liberalism, authoritarianism, and world-views as uppermost, then a deeper layer diagnosing the needs and interests served by those, then finally problematizing philosophy itself in its seemingly incurable optimism: https://www.truthandpower.com/blog/?p=1694

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  2. The legacy of the humanity?

    I had an obligatory freshman course called "Humanities" and we began with Homer and read works up to the 18th century.

    So what is the legacy of Homer? The Iliad is about the quarrel between two alpha machos, Achilles and Agammenon, over a slave girl. Not very politically acceptable these days.

    However, what strikes me in Homer is his incredible honesty about a very brutal world, about the fear and rage warriors experience, about the gore and death, etc. I'm not very likely to reread King Arthur and his knights, which is about a similar world, because it's pure mystification, while Homer does not mystify. I plan to reread Homer some day if I live long enough.

    We went on to the Greek tragedies. No mystification there nor in Thucydides nor in the best of Plato (the Apology, for example and parts of the Republic). We did read Augustine, who is a monument to intellectual dishonesty, but then we went on to Machiavelli, Montaigne and Shakespeare, all honest with themselves and with their readers.

    So how do professors or teachers transmit that legacy? First, by being honest with themselves and communicating that honesty to the students with the limits of whatever field they teach? We're not talking about professors of engineering here, but of the humanities and social sciences.

    I had a few high school teachers whom I recall as being honest and a few university teachers, but most of them limited themselves to transmitting whatever was the hegemonic orthodoxy in their field and in general, I don't recall much of what they had to say.

    As to whether professors should be activists? If they wish so, fine, but activism in the classroom can and will easily degenerate into political pep talks, which, I believe, are not the legacy of the humanities.

    Among the professors whom I recall as being honest with us and with himself, I note Edward Said, who was a distinguished Palestinian activist outside of the classroom, but never brought that cause into the classroom in the least.

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  3. my error:

    I meant "within the limits", not "with the limits".

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  4. By the way, I don't find that the Heidegger of Being and Time betrayed the legacy of the humanities, as claimed above.

    Perhaps that is true of the later Heidegger, Heidegger during the Nazi period or post World War 2, whom I find very difficult to read and to make sense of.

    However, Being and Time is clearly Heidegger's masterpiece and the work he is most known for.

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  5. I'd be very interested in reading Professor Nussbaum's paper- her ideas and yours certainly resonate with mine

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