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.