We Don't Know What the Humanities Are - Is That A Problem?

The identity crisis of the humanities has been long fretted over, as a special commission at Harvard did just over a year ago. What is the role of the humane disciplines in a changing world? How do we maintain our relevance in an environment of skyrocketing tuition? Should students major in the humanities or in something more immediately technical and lucrative? What is the value added of a humanities education? blah blah blah.

There is an unmistakable hollowness to these questions - in essence, they all seem to boil down to 'I was lied to, but it turned out alright - is it ok for me to lie to students and deans, and hope for the best?' The fact is that most humanities scholars really, truly have no idea what the humanities are. They know what their own discipline is, and they generally know which departments or faculties are contained in a humanities division. But knowing the accidental collocation of a number of disciplines in one administrative unit will never lead one, in Platonic fashion, to any notion of the idea of the humanities.

Take for example this pithy summary of that 2013 report by Diane Sorensen, the head of Harvard's humanities division:

The Arts and Humanities are the realms in and through which we define values, form relationships, express our thoughts, feel, imagine, process, and create.

Actually - with the possible exception of defining values - this is a description of the arts, not the humanities. Compare that with the notion of Rens Bod, in his recent book A New History of the Humanities - a glance at his subtitle will show you what he thinks of his subject: The Search For Principles and Patterns From Antiquity to the Present. Bod begins with a pragmatic definition of the humanities - one more intellectually honest than that of the Harvard report, though just as useless and unhelpful - the humanities are the disciplines studied in contemporary humanities divisions. Hence, since many European unviersities have separate schools of theology and philosophy, neither count as part of the humanities, nor of course would the fine arts be included. In short, everything Diana Sorensen imagines as the essence of the humanities - which is almost explicitly reduced to art and philosophy in the 2013 report - Bod excludes prima facie from the discussion.

Bod's humanities include, I jest not, "linguistics, musicology, philology, literary studies, theatre studies, historical studies (including art history and archaeology), as well as more recent fields such as film studies and media studies." Note again the perfect mirror image of the Harvard report - that report emphasizes the primary function of the humanities, that is, as creative of value, meaning, relationships, things; Bod's humanities are exclusively secondary - if the sciences study the world, the humanities study human constructs and creations. And in that narrow field, what Bod's humanities really accomplish is just finding, identifying, and classifying patterns - every humanist is really Pythagoras, snooping with their ear at the door of the blacksmith's shop, hoping to catch some regularity which can be qualified, defined, and made into a rule. And if that's the case - what would be the master discipline of the humanities, the purest representative? Linguistics, obviously! All humanists really just wish they were linguists, particulary say, computational linguists - such as, for example, Professor Bod himself.

There is little point engaging in casuistry or point-by-point comparison and critique of these two definitions -  all I would suggest is that these two opposite descriptions by eminent scholars and institutions respected the world over suggests an incoherence that reaches to the very heart of the modern humanities.

Students are told all sorts of things about why to study the humanities - and many of them, as William Dersiewicz pointed out in a recent jeremiad really boil down to technocratic qualifications:

Elite schools like to boast that they teach their students how to think, but all they mean is that they train them in the analytic and rhetorical skills that are necessary for success in business and the professions. Everything is technocratic—the development of expertise—and everything is ultimately justified in technocratic terms.

But I don't think that I would blame students for wanting to know what good the sophists soliciting their attentions have on offer. If you tell them, 'Well, it's all about the search for patterns, you know - linguistics, media studies, you name it,' you probably won't see stunning enrolment numbers. Then again, if you tell them that they are going to 'define values, feel, imagine, process, and create,' you undoubtedly will catch a few fish, though not I would guess the best specimens. Neither of those descriptions seems likely to convince your dean, newly hired from the University of Phoenix, not to cut a line or two from your department.

 What about the liberal arts? Can't we just go back to the trivium and quadrivium? That's a question for another day.