Humanities more than just a word

Simon Haines | April 29, 2009

Article from: The Australian

JOHN Armstrong ("Transform into friends of society", HES, November26, 2008) says the humanities in Australia need to "transform themselves into friends of society" and to be "in the service of life", not just ofacademics.

A return to "core concerns" with notions such as civilisation would dissolve that false dichotomy of value, between the intrinsic or noble and the instrumental or practical, that bedevils university and government resourcing of the sector.

If such "important things buried within the disciplines" could re-emerge, our "economic anxieties would recede".

Like Armstrong, I went along hopefully to the speech by federal Innovation, Industry, Science and Research Minister Kim Carr on why the humanities matter for innovation and was not disappointed by his reference to the"intrinsic value" of works such as PeterTemple's Broken Shore and John Bell's latest Hamlet.

True, an intrinsic property is inward or essential, while value is conferred from outside, so the phrase is uneasy. Actually the dichotomy of value that concerns Armstrong is already buried in the 14th-century origins of the word, lying in conceptions of esteem on the one hand and of measurable worth on the other. But I took the minister to mean that such works of art are ends in themselves, rather like Kantian persons.

Reading them is therefore, in Armstrong's terms, a civilising activity. No problem there.

My main worry about the speech was from an advocacy point of view: its use of the word humanities. Carr is not alone in running the term together with creative arts and social sciences. I suspect many vice-chancellors, let alone premiers and other funding agents, have trouble distinguishing them.

But this is half our trouble and it goes to the heart of the dichotomy.

Our two sets of humanities and social sciences colleagues can tap into much more intuitive public senses of value than we can: one utilitarian, quasi-scientific, instrumental, Australian Research Council-friendly; the other deriving from still-powerful romantic notions of genius, of an unmeasurable, spontaneous, quasi-religious wellspring of creative vitality.

But what about the humanities, somewhere in the middle, in some no-man's-land between the creative and the scientific?

It turns out that even the Australian Academy of the Humanities hasn't so far produced a working definition of the humanities, although it is working on one now.

And it's in good company: the mighty National Endowment for the Humanities in the US doesn't have one either. (The ARC? Don't talk to me about the ARC.) Instead, conscious of variety and evolution, they have discipline lists. These usually include history, philosophy and (studies of) literature as the perennial central three (some remaining trace of the medieval trivium here), together with classics, linguistics, religion, archeology, and the history and theory of music and art. So maybe the humanities is just whatever all those people and their assorted humanistic fellow-travellers collectively do?

To return to Armstrong: Are there any core concerns here? We badly need to be able to articulate some. If we, of all people, can't say or show what they are, how can we expect any kind of public or private recognition?

The Germans have a word for it, of course, as Armstrong doesn't need me to tell him.

Even though the Geisteswissenschaften overlap significantly with our social sciences, we could usefully profess ourselves as scholarly custodians and promulgators of the knowledge or knowing activity of geist, the human spirit, human being in general.

For some more materialist types that's all a bit Hegelian, but presumably better than friends of civilisation, which would put them in mind of the worst excesses of Kenneth Clark, or Alec Hope's "chatter of learned fools". Yet the first humanists, in the Renaissance, thought of themselves as scholars of classical civilisation, as opposed to theology and divinity. Hegel's trick was to merge the two: knowledge of civilisation is knowledge of spirit.

Still too, well, German? What about turning to language itself (and an Italian)?

In an unpublished paper, Defining the Humanities, Anna Wierzbicka reminds us of Giambattista Vico's "fundamental distinction between studying things and studying people", his "New Science" being a precursor of Geisteswissenschaften and the humanities.

Crucially, it includes the study of ourselves as people, not as things. This is knowledge "from within", as Isaiah Berlin put it, knowledge of ourselves as made by ourselves.

Vico, a post-Renaissance humanist as much as a pre-romantic historicist, saw this kind of knowledge as an essential counterbalance to Cartesian and other scientific models of knowledge. He thought this self-making knowledge was gained specifically in language, and that language was itself fundamentally poetic and metaphorical - and hence also evaluative, estimative - before it was conceptual or logical. (Though the old struggle between metaphor and concept goes back to Plato and is itself deeply constitutive of human being in language.)

So can we venture a definition of the core humanities as qualitative rather than quantitative ("What sort of thing is this?", not "How do I measure this?"), evaluative rather than empirical ("Was this a good life/society", not "What happened in this life/society?"), seeking understanding rather thaninformation ("How was it to be this person?", not "who was this person?"), linguistic rather than symbolic, imaginative rather than scientific - but still methodical, scholarly and interpretative, still philosophical and historical, rather than artistic, creative or performative?

Yes, I know, a performance of Hamlet is also an interpretation; but I'm getting at the way Armstrong read an extract from Tolstoy in his second piece, or Carr used Temple and Shakespeare at the Press Club, or Iain McCalman used Joyce's Ulysses in an earlier landmark speech at the same venue. They were all working in the humanities as they did that, not the creative arts or social sciences: seeking a reflective and evaluative, a philosophical and historical, understanding of human being as constituted in language.

And why shouldn't we take this show on the road, as Armstrong suggests? Why leave it all to Carr? The audiences may well be receptive, not philistine. Clare Morgan and Ted Buswick, of the Boston Consulting Group in Britain and the US, have devised Poetry in the Boardroom, an exercise in which a poem is chosen by senior executives together with a literature professor as the focus for a boardroom discussion about complex decision-making, risk, leadership and power.

Evaluating a complex poem turns out to be a superb model for complex judgment.

The Lowy Institute for International Policy has encouraged speakers with humanities backgrounds to address its largely business and public service lunchtime audiences on issues such as the link between good manners and politics or between Milton's Satan and the received model of a terrorist.

The school of humanities at the Australian National University, with the Centre for Human Values at the Chinese University of Hong Kong, recently held a symposium on Measuring Thought in the Humanities (one outcome was Wierzbicka's paper).

Two of the best contributions came from IBM executives, who saw humanities people, able to combine analysis with imagination, as integral to the company's flexibility. Which raises another point about outreach: never underestimate our undergraduates. If you teach 100 a semester, you can reach 5000 minds in an average career, far more directly (as Socrates saw) than in your writing. Some of those are going to be in influential positions in society, but all of them could have richer lives as a result of what you are teaching.

Spread the word, I think Armstrong is saying; remember why this career chose you.

But remember, too, that if you mainly want to make society suspicious of itself, of its values, if you see that as your proper stance, then ultimately you must live with its reciprocating suspicion of you.

If on the other hand you mainly want to help it understand itself and its virtues and vices confidently, as a self-making community of value, as, indeed, a civilisation, then it still may not pay you much but at least it will recognise that you have some value, too.

Simon Haines is professor of English and deputy director of the Research Centre for Human Values at the Chinese University of Hong Kong. Formerly he was head of the school of humanities at the Australian National University.

Source: The Australian