Humanities Past and Present

I am slightly wary of wading into what appears to be a multi-part series by Dracontius before he finishes, but I have a few initial thoughts in response.  In general, let me note in passing that I find the idea of a "new courtliness" intriguing, and would like to see it developed more.  In the meantime, here’s a partially congruent, slightly different, and probably not very novel interpretation of the historical development:

(1) The "vertical" liberal arts of the Middle Ages obviously had as their end philosophy & theology.  The seven liberal arts were divided in to the "language" arts of the Trivium and the "mathematical" arts of the Quadrivium, the latter being higher than the former.  Of the arts of the Trivium, logic seems to have been the dominant/highest, right?  This makes sense both in that it is the most "mathematical" of the language arts, and therefore naturally leads to the higher arts of the Quadrivium, and also because it was the best propaedeutic for scholastic theology.

(2) The Renaissance seems to be when grammar truly dethroned logic among the Trivium.  That is, grammar was always prominent, but in the Renaissance logic was seriously downplayed, and grammar played up, by the humanists. This seems to be when we really shift from seven liberal arts to two (or, if you prefer, 1 1/2: grammar + a rump of rhetoric).

There are two possible causes for this, it seems.

First, the rise of the "New Science."  The arts of the Quadrivium are, of course, the more scientific of the seven, and with the surpassing of ancient science by modern science, the traditional method of teaching them (that is, both traditional in the sense of customary method, but also in the sense of teaching traditional scientific knowledge via received ancient texts) was swiftly supplanted.  Hence, no one really argues for restoring geometry (even in the Classical and Medieval sense, in which it was closely related to geography) to a prominent place in the Liberal Arts curriculum.  Why bother, when the scientists cover all this stuff much better?  Thus, four of seven are removed.

More cynically, one might also note that the scientific arts are no longer truly "liberal" in that they are now largely married to a mechanistic view of both the universe and the human person....

Secondly, the dethroning of philosophy and theology as the ultimate goal of education resulted in the atrophy of logic and its ultimate replacement as the most important of the Trivium by grammar.

This is what "humanities" were: an education founded on grammar and, to a lesser extent, rhetoric that did not aim at the divine.  And this is why, as noted previously, the liberal arts of the Renaissance become "horizontal": because they were not designed to direct the mind upward toward God, but rather toward the Classics.

(3) The Renaissance humanists initially wanted to study the Classics in toto.  But this was not to last.  Instead, the supplanting of sacred texts with secular and pagan texts in the curriculum simply led to a new set of disputes about canonicity.  Just as the early Church fought about what should be included in the canon of Scripture (although, let us acknowledge, not nearly so much as Ehrmann, Pagels, et al.  would have us believe), so the new curriculum gave rise to an endless series of fights about what should be included in, what anathematized from the canon of the humanities.

This fight, despite what many current culture warriors would claim, is not something new.  The first stage, as already mentioned, was probably the dethronement of the Quadrivium and with it the ancient scientific and technical texts with the rise of the New Science.  The Querelle des Anciens et des Modernes thinned the canon further, as many texts which did not meet the aesthetic criteria of the Early Modern era were effectively dropped.  Romanticism saw some further works removed (and a few restored or newly emphasized).  Etc.  But the general trend over history was toward an ever-narrower set of ancient texts, which were judged mostly on the basis of contemporary aesthetic, political, and philosophical criteria.  So, works which fell in disfavored periods ("Silver Latin," "Hellenistic Greek") were mostly excluded, and some ancient works which were among the most important and influential from Antiquity through the Renaissance in Western Europe (say, Ovid's Metamorphoses or Statius' Thebaid and Achilleid) barely register on standard "Great Books" curricula of the 20th century.

Postmodernism upended much of this, for both better and worse.  Worse, in that it exploded the idea of canonicity in its entirety.  But better, perhaps, in that works which had been excluded from, or which held only a marginal place in the early 20th-century canon are receiving renewed attention.  (I realize that in this framing, I am suggesting that the situation of, say, Silius Italicus or Apollonius of Rhodes is parallel to that of the Gnostic Gospel of Thomas.)  In any event, the Canon Wars of the latter 20^th century were partially a new thing insofar as there was an attack on the very idea of canonicity, but partially a continuation of a pattern in that we were once again fighting about what might be included in a notional canon mostly on the basis of our own aesthetic and (mostly) political standards.

(4) Until we come to these times, in which we can endure neither our vices nor their remedies....

So, why have I rehashed all this (pretty conventional) history?  I want to make two suggestions.

a) Ultimately "humanities," as an historic curriculum and as an educational idea, is a wholly traditional: its aim, both in its Renaissance origin and in its attenuated High-Modern-Canon form, was to receive knowledge from the author(itie)s of the past.  This is why we are scrambling for new definitions, and have ended up at incoherence.  The progressives are trying to salvage the name of a system which they and their forebears have always really rejected.  I suppose if there was any subject which might have been considered the telos of the Renaissance humanities curriculum, anything which the humanists put in the place of theology, it would have been history.  But what is the point of truly learning from history if you are a techno-progressive and have already surpassed it?

Perhaps the most coherent thing for the progressives to do would be to opt for the third of the Trivium, and to emphasize not the logic of the scholastics nor the grammar of the humanists, but rhetoric as their main curriculum.  If language has no fixed meaning, but is all about asserting power (as we learn from both the post-structuralists and from those who currently wish to use state power to redefine terms of cultural significance), then the key art for the ruling class to know should be rhetoric.  And we do see some small moves in that direction, both in terms of a new emphasis on rhetoric in the humanities and in the growth of jobs that might be considered “rhetorical” in a broad sense.  But the moment for rhetoric may have already passed.  Even this might be overly liberal, in the classical sense, for our data-driven times.  For if optimal policy outcomes are reached not by persuasion but by technocratic nudging, why bother even with rhetoric?  The unapologetic technologists (both conservative and liberal) have basically seen this and are mostly urging use to abandon the humanities, philosophy, and college as a whole, or even trying to replace the humanities outright with modern science, but then still somehow dub what they are doing “Humanities.”  In response, the internet is littered with defenses of the use of the humanities (I provide a few easily-Googled examples for all of this, but this exercise could easily be repeated almost ad infinitum), but we should be honest about our situation.  The liberal arts, as definitionally non-servile, will always lose a utility-maximization argument.  And, while I appreciate the defense of the humanities coming from many quarters of the left, the “progressive humanities” as a project have always been somewhat unnatural and incoherent as a development of the historical humanities curriculum.  And they are in serious trouble.

b) Cultural conservatives, and Christian conservatives in particular, should be far warier of the historical humanities curriculum and of the Great Books than they typically are.  In the first place, the canon has always been defined to some degree on the basis of contemporary aesthetic and political criteria.  So defending the canon as it existed in the postwar era is something we should do only if we accept the cultural and aesthetic beliefs that underpinned the postwar West.  1950s nostalgia is a powerful force on the American right (and left!), and there is something to be said for it.  But the era from 1945-1962, while admirable in many ways, was hardly the best of all possible worlds, and we should be wary of adopting its canon before examining the presuppositions which generated that canon.  (At the very least, we should question its aesthetic judgment.)

On the Christian side, it should be noted that this is a system which, ultimately, does not aim at the study of the divine and which enthroned a secular canon to serve as focus of study and cultural authority in place of the canon of scripture.  This is not to say that the two cannot be reconciled; certainly, the Church Fathers managed to do so.  But the standard list of Great Books as it existed in the 20^th century deliberately downplayed Medieval and Christian texts.  And Christianity and the Western Canon as it has come down to us have a more fractious relationship, and their reconciliation would be a more complicated process, than is usually acknowledged.