The humanities again

Alex Rosenberg lays into the non-analytic-philosophy humanities here (h/t Brian Leiter). It's unfortunate that just when he talks about people losing credibility he misspells both 'Virginia Woolf' and 'lose' in the same line. But never mind. What does he actually say?

His claim is that few students want to major in the non-philosophy humanities because they don't believe that doing so will help them become better leaders or better at dealing "with the human condition in a way that matters to them." And he gives three reasons for this:

1. too much multiculturalism (or too much sacrificing of attention to canonical works and figures in order to make room for others) and "theory"
2. too little attention to the basics, such as composition (which is rarely taught by senior professors)
3. attempts by humanists to "compete on the terrain of the sciences," which inform us scientifically while the humanities move us emotionally

The solution is for humanists to get back to helping people appreciate and create art.

It's hard to agree. Learning to appreciate or create art won't make anyone a better leader. Or at least offering to teach such appreciation will not attract large numbers of students whose primary goal is to develop leadership skills. There is no clear connection between leadership and art. 

What about those who want to learn to deal with the human condition in a way that matters to them? I'm not sure such people exist, because I'm not sure that either the human condition or ways of dealing with it exists. Perhaps that's silly. Part of the human condition is that we die (so there must be such a thing as the human condition, if it has parts), and there are surely ways of dealing with mortality, of coming to some terms with it. Perhaps. But do large numbers of students want to major in this kind of thing? Surely not. There are students who want to major in something that matters to them, that seems important. Pretty much all students want that, even those who reluctantly major in something that seems trivial but practical to them. So perhaps there's a problem of perceived importance in the humanities (by which we seem to mean literature). 

One problem, then, seems to be that not many students care enough about literature to major in it. There is something sad about this, but I'm not sure how much it matters. If they love to read but care even more about finding a cure for cancer, for instance, then that's not a shame. And there certainly are some students who love literature enough to want to major in it. If the number has gone down I suspect this is partly because of new media (people read more stuff online and watch more movies than they used to, and correspondingly read fewer books) and partly because professors of literature themselves seem to have lost interest in literature. At least the more you talk about theory and science (although I'm not sure how much of the latter really goes on) instead of literature, the less your students are likely to think you care about literature. And apathy is contagious. 

As for composition, it's not something I really believe in. I'm not sure that composition instructors really believe in it either. Those who specialize in rhetoric and composition generally present themselves as something other than champions of proper spelling and grammar. And students can learn how to write in courses whose primary focus is on something else, such as philosophy or literature. They won't go from illiterate to literate in one course, but they can improve if they have to read and write well written stuff throughout their education. Learning foreign languages is likely to help too. As Rosenberg notes, though, the incentives in place favor devoting time to research rather than to teaching. (And "good teaching" often means engaging teaching rather than challenging teaching, which is another thing I would change if it were up to me. Not that engagement is bad, but it's not the only good.)        

Part of the problem, surely, is that the education we offer is too largely based on the choices of the uneducated. If we offer a major in money-making they will sign up. If we offer a major in doing one's duty they won't (unless they are especially self-righteous). This is why people major in business. As long as we only let people study things that are worth studying, and require them to study things that ought to be required, then there's no problem. A core curriculum of something like two literature courses, two history courses, two philosophy, one religion, one art, and two psychology (for instance) should do the trick. (I'm not convinced that college-level math and science courses for those who won't use them have any value, although something on what science is (not "just a theory") might be worthwhile.) Other courses could be required depending on the major (math for scientists, languages for humanists, for instance). We wouldn't necessarily have lots of people majoring in the humanities, but that's OK. 

Reasons and knowledge

Jean Kazez posts an interesting passage from Derek Parfit's On What Matters:

It is sometimes claimed that we have reasons to enjoy, or be thrilled or in other ways moved by, great artistic works. In many cases, I believe, this claim is false. We can have reasons to want to enjoy, or be thrilled or moved by, these artistic works. But these are not reasons to enjoy, or to be thrilled or moved by, these works.  We do have reasons to admire some novels, plays or poems, given the importance of some of the ideas that they express. But poetry is what gets lost in the translation, even if this translation expresses the same ideas. And we never have reasons to enjoy, or be moved by, great music.   If we ask what makes some musical passage so marvellous, the answer might be ‘Three modulations to distant keys’. This answer describes a cause of our response to this music, not a reason. Modulations to distant keys are like the herbs, spices, or other ingredients that can make food delicious. When someone neither enjoys nor is moved by some great musical work, this person is not in any way less than fully rational, by failing to respond to certain reasons.

This seems an odd way to talk about literature. Let's say a novel expresses the idea that racism is evil. Is that a reason to admire the novel? If the book is badly written then I think it might be a reason to it, or at least not to be too harsh in our criticism of it. "Although the author plainly means well, I'm afraid that I cannot recommend..." Is that admiration? I think that what I admire in a case like this is the author's intention or sentiments, not the novel itself.

It's also an odd way to talk about music. We never have reasons to enjoy great music? I imagine that Parfit would agree we have reasons to listen to great music. What would a reason to enjoy it be? Maybe that is Parfit's point. But I think a reason might be "this bit" or "the bit with the flute" or "the way the guitar sounds like a bagpipe." Then Parfit might say that those are the reasons why someone likes the music, they are what someone likes in it, but they are not reasons for liking it or to like it. The bit with the flute, or the flute playing, is the bit you like best, just as someone might like the cilantro most in a dish of food. So "it's got cilantro in it" might be one's reason for liking a dish, but it is not a reason to like it. It is more like a cause than a reason in the relevant sense. I wonder though. Can I know what causes me to like things, necessarily? Or rather, is my knowing what I like about something the same as knowing what causes me to like it? It doesn't seem like it to me. You can know what you like without having a clue why you like it.

The important idea for Parfit, I think, is that it is not irrational to dislike cilantro or the flutey bit or whatever. But I'm not sure it is as simple as that. Is it rational to admire great ideas? Is it more rational to do so than it is to admire great musicianship or composition or cooking or any kind of artistry? Anyone who does not enjoy or feel moved by these things is missing something. If they are, say, deaf then this has nothing to do with their rationality, but otherwise I think it does. What the connection is, exactly, I am deliberately leaving vague. But I think there is one.

I was reminded of all this by Alex Rosenberg's piece in The Stone, in which he suggests that neither literary criticism nor fiction (nor history!) provides knowledge. He ends with an interesting use of what I will call the second-person 'we':

What naturalists really fear is not becoming dogmatic or giving up the scientific spirit. It’s the threat that the science will end up showing that much of what we cherish as meaningful in human life is illusory.

It is clear enough that Rosenberg does not exactly cherish the work he describes as "fun, but not knowledge." At least this is clear to anyone who reads the post and comments on this at New APPS. As Jon Cogburn says there:

Has Rosenberg ever even read the Times Literary Supplement or the New York or London Reviews of Books? When did this casual philistinism combined with such unjustified, blanket dismissals of the life works of others become acceptable enough for one of our brethren to manifest it in the New York Times of all places? Has he even ever seriously read an issue of the Sunday Times, which includes its fair share of literary criticism? How could, barring radical skepticism which would entail that science doesn’t deliver knowledge, one possibly say that the epistemic standards of these publications don’t deliver knowledge? And the same holds for the parade of intellectual bogeymen that precedes his idiotic statement about literary criticism. Shame!

My suspicion is that behind Rosenberg's apparent philistinism and Parfit's obscure thoughts (obscure to me, not having read his very long book in which, perhaps, he explains them very well) is a vestige of the old distinction between the cognitive and the emotive. So poetry, as Parfit seems to see it, can contain ideas, but these are expressible in prose and what gets lots in the translation is only the poetry, not the ideas. (He doesn't quite say that, but that's what I suspect he means.) And Rosenberg distinguishes science, which gives us knowledge, from the cherished fun of literature or rather what sounds an awful lot like continental philosophy (frighteningly referring to all the liberal arts while having the emotive meaning: Boooo!!!).

Here, as elsewhere, we seem to me to have the phenomenon of one group looking at the ends of the spaghetti (or the heads of the hydra) and seeing their obvious distinctness while another group looks further down, perhaps missing the ends or heads completely, and insisting that the distinction is illusory. Less metaphorically, there is an obvious difference between straightforward expressions of facts, on the one hand, and music or highly poetic language on the other, but seeing this difference should not blind us to the similarities and connections that might nevertheless exist and even matter. It might not even be possible to separate the two completely without killing the beast we want to understand.

Not getting a fact or not seeing is truth is missing something about the world. So is not seeing what is good about a piece of music. (And so is thinking you're hearing a flute when perhaps it's just a man going "woo woo".)