What does it mean to be human? We inhabit a world that is commonly, and lazily, dubbed ‘post-human’. Indeed, in recent decades, an anti-humanist rhetoric has emerged – largely as a response to the palpable failure of humanism, which is seen as hypocritical (‘humans’ are being tortured and killed in order to save humanity) or mistaken (based on an unrealistic celebration of human consciousness and freedom) or obsolete (scientific shifts have blurred any clear notion of a human-animal border, and have substantively broadened the physical possibilities of human action).
It is this shift that has profoundly disorientated many of us who mass under the flag of the Humanities, rendering us vulnerable to the swaggering philistinism of management scientism as well as the bruising confidence of the sciences. Yet, in many ways, we share similar intellectual enthusiasms. In the twenty-first century, proponents of nearly every form of institutionalised knowledge (from biology and chemistry to history and literature) have become obsessed with defining, categorising, and identifying what constitutes Life-itself. But many practitioners within the Humanities have been tempted to raise the white flag, deferring to the knowledges created by the social and natural sciences. While many sciences, also, lack immediate social impact (astrophysics, mathematics, cosmology, evolutionary science, to name a few), they are significantly less defensive when it comes to standing up for their disciplines to assorted accountants, trustees, and governments. In contrast, many in the Humanities have accepted demands to provide a particular kind of serviceability to business and the economy. Some can even be heard spouting a Taylorist ideology of efficiency, productivity, and utility, which are profoundly not conducive to our intellectual discipline. Emperor Charles I spoke Spanish to God, French to his Mistress, and German to his horse. Today (as Michael Bérubé put it), we have been reduced to ‘serving as one of the service disciplines, dedicated to servicing the service economy, perhaps by means of English for Technical Writing, French for Finance, or German for Engineering’. We risk becoming complicit in our own trouncing.
A negative politics that claims that researchers in the humanities produce cold-facts out of a hat with as much cunning and cleverness as any white-cloaked scientist – or that we write as ‘disembodied observers’ of objective truths – leaves us with no room for anything save the paradox of purchasing our intellectual freedom through self-immolation.
Part of the problem lies in how we define the ‘humanities’. There are three major ways of doing this: the ‘Three-Ws’, of Whip, Worship, and Worry. The ‘whip approach’ defines the humanities according to the clustering of academic disciplines, such as Classics, Philosophy, History, Literature, Languages, Ethics, Comparative Religion, and Criticism. Sometimes, this definition simply means: ‘not science’. As one purportedly keen-humanities advocate put it, defined in narrowly disciplinary terms, the academic-humanities resembles
a musty place filled with tombs, monuments, libraries, and talkative old guides who stroll around with their hands in their pockets, wearing glasses and out of touch with reality, conducting you for a small fee to the graves of Beethoven, Shakespeare and Sophocles. [with such friends…].
Ironically, in Europe (and we must remember that the Humanities according to this definition is very much an American edifice) when these individual disciplines do group themselves together under the flag ‘Humanities’, they do so largely for pragmatic or managerial reasons. Thus, my own department of History is not in the Humanities Faculty, but that of the Social Sciences, even though the research of most of my colleagues clearly follows a Humanities model. In other instances, the creation of Humanities departments/schools/institutes is driven by the very managerial culture they purport to distain. In other words, they emerge through a managerial culture that seeks to create ‘economies of scale’, in conjunction with a grant-driven ethos that insists on the clout wielded by claims of interdisciplinarity and a RAE/REF evaluative culture that flays about in an attempt to imitate the marketplace.
If the disciplinary approach circles around a rather melancholic marketplace, the second – ‘Worship approach’ – is more like a brashly-adorned altarpiece celebrating Narcissus. It heralds a rather vain humanism that embraces ‘whatever influences conduce to freedom’ (Ralph Baron Perry), or, even more grandiosely, the study of ‘the sum total of human activities’. As another scholar raved, the Humanities chart ‘greatness, monumental scale, fineness of artistic sensibility, and deep insight’, exploring ‘the nature of human experience as an object of awareness, and the nature of human acts as both content of awareness and events observed’ (Richard Kuhns). The rhetoric reminds me of John Casper Lavater exclamation in 1804:
Behold the human!... Unity in variety! Variety in unity! How are they there displayed in their very essence! – What elegance, what propriety, what symmetry, through all the forms, all the members! How imperceptible, how infinity, are the gradations that constitute this beauteous whole!.... The likeness of God!
The celebratory approach to the Humanities is much too starry-eyed. Philosopher Martha Nussbaum claimed that the Humanities are ‘one key to dispelling barriers of hatred and ignorance that divide people the world over by class, caste, race, sex, and religion’, but it is entirely unclear how she thinks this will happen. Conservative American historian Wilfred McClay similarly notes that
The distinctive task of the humanities, unlike the natural sciences and social sciences, is to grasp human beings in human terms, without converting or reducing them to something else: not to physical laws, mechanical systems, biological drives, psychological disorders, social structures, and so on. The humanities attempt to understand the human condition from the inside, as it were, treating the human person as subject as well as object, agent as well as acted upon.
And yet, neither Nussbaum nor McClay go far enough. After all, the vaguely worded ‘understand[ing] the human condition from the inside’ and treating the human as ‘subject as well as object’ take us no further than familiar Liberal individualism based on a fully conscious cogito that decides freely about her life-plans and expresses a kind of limp sympathy for the sufferings of others.
The humanistic eulogy faces great problems. The humanities are not only compatible with autonomy, but also atrocity. In the words of George Steiner,
We now know… that the formal excellence and numerical extension of education need not correlate with increased social stability and political rationality…. In other words, the libraries, museums, theatres, universities, research centers, in and through which the transmission of the humanities and of the sciences mainly takes place, can prosper next to the concentration camps…. Men such as Hans Frank who administered the ‘final solution’ in Eastern Europe were avid connoisseurs and, in some instances, performers of Bach and Mozart.
If Whips (the Disciplinary approach) and Worship (the celebratory one) to the Humanities are flawed, what about the conception of the Humanities as fulfilling the job of ‘Worrying’ society. As Barbara Johnson put it in her English introduction to Derrida’s Dissemination, critique involves reading backwards
from what seems natural, obvious, self-evident, or universal in order to show that these things have their history, their reasons for being the way they are, their effects on what follows from them and that the starting point is not a (natural) given but a (cultural) construct, usually blind to itself.
This Humanities help develop a critical, questioning attitude towards the world, questioning (a la Socrates) the commonsense of its time. In my view, the Humanities is about more than simple knowledge-acquisition (being about to discuss analytically the role of nature/culture in the context of La Fontaine’s cat, of which more soon). It is more than emotional discernment (when Kafka’s ape – Red Peter – was catapulted from animality into humanity by uttering an intoxicated ‘Hallo!’, was he merely internalising the bars of the cage?). It is fundamentally about critique of the given, and resistance to what makes life unjust and ugly.
In this context, I want to address two important questions. First, who and what exactly is ‘the human’, the subject and object of the humanities? Secondly, what does a humanities education offer the human, however defined? The two questions are linked, because they force us to recognise that at the heart of the Humanities lies a political labour. Let me take these in turn.
1) What is ‘the human’ that so interests scholars in the humanities?
As we all recognise, the concept ‘human’ is a very volatile one. Like La Fontaine’s cat in ‘The Cat Metamorphosed into a Woman’, definitions of human and animal can shift with disconcerting abruptness. For those of you not familiar with the fable: Through ‘prayer, and charm, and spell’, a male-lover transformed his cat into a woman, whom he promptly marries. All was well until, while the amorous couple were ‘plying their pleasure on the mat of natted straw’, some mice turned up for a nibble. What happened next grieved the husband:
Up jumps the wife, unthinking….
Lunges… Misses her prey…. But when the mice
Return, as soon they do, she stands in wait,
And they, undaunted by her cat-free state,
Are leapt upon and, in a trice,
Done in: for they, thereby, excite
The more milady’s appetite.
The message is clear: ‘nature’ has ‘such power, such strength’ that it cannot be changed, although a person might ‘flail… with lash and pitchfork’:
Slam shut the door: without ado, it
Opens the window and climbs on through.
La Fontaine seeks to question the pliability of ‘human nature’ and ‘animal nature’. It is ‘natural’ for the Woman to respond to her husband’s gentle caresses, and she enjoys ‘coddling’ him in return; equally, the Cat’s ‘natural’ appetite for mice cannot be sated. On closer inspection, however, the unyielding ‘nature’ in the poem turns out to be extremely subtle. Who decides whether the female protagonist is human or animal? The mice recognise her as a woman because of ‘her cat-free state’; the young husband grieves because her eagerness to play with, and eat, mice proves that she remains a cat ‘by nature’. The Woman herself is silent.
In every period of history and every culture, commonsensical constructions of ‘the human’ exist, but the distinction is always being undermined and re-constructed. At various times in history, the Human has been defined according to intellectual ability, the possession of a soul, the ability to ‘apprehend God’, tool-making, private property, self-consciousness, sentience, and genetic inheritance. Language has long also been regarded as the important characteristic of The Human, according to people as different as Aristotle and Kafka. Thus, in Kafka’s ‘A Report to an Academy’ a captured and imprisoned ape called Red Peter is catapulted into humanity when, pissed out of his brain and all his senses reeling, he cried out a loud ‘Hallo!’ With this word, ‘Hallo!’, he
broke into human speech, sprang with this cry into the community of men, and felt their echoing cry: ‘Listen, he’s speaking!’.
More recently, xenotransplantation technologies and stem-cell research has muddled definitions even further. La Fontaine’s young lover wrought the metamorphosis of his beloved cat through spiritual mysticism, but modern magic is wielded by scientists. What is the ‘true nature’ of chimeras conjured up by white-frocked surgeons who transplant organs or stem cells from animals to humans? The genome project and emerging technologies for creating life-forms are shifting our understanding of ‘the human’ even more dramatically, promising that the debate about what constitutes ‘the human’ will be both contested and policed with even more energy in the decades to come. In complex and sometimes contradictory ways, the ideas, values, and practices used to justify the dominance of a particular construction of ‘the human’ over the rest of the cosmos helps create society and sustains a particular type of social life. Delimiting those territories not only involves violence, but inspires it. The boundaries between the human and lives defined as less human or inhuman turn out to be as entwined and indistinguishable as the inner and outer sides of a möbius strip.
2) But however we define ‘the human’, what does a humanities education offer?
There were, perhaps, happier times – times of greater optimism. In 1963, for instance, philosopher Martin Hoor (writing in The Journal of Higher Education) could boast about the fact that it was not only professors in the Humanities who were concerned about the ‘crisis of the Humanities’ but ‘also scientists, technologists, business executives, and even statesmen-politicians’. Post-Browne report, this statement is a joke, but even in 1960s, Hoor found it surprising. How could this be? Certainly, there had been no major shifts in subject matter not any ‘striking improvements in the methods of teaching’. Rather, it was due to a recognition that, in the previous decades, the Cold War had encouraged an ‘over-emphasis on the natural sciences’. By the 60s, however, there was a
realisation that men have been becoming more and more confused and insecure as a result of the increase in the number and importance and complexity of the problems of modern life. One by one, the traditional solutions – and escapes – have proved to be inadequate or unavailable.
His next statement is as appropriate today as it was when he was writing. He claimed that the renewed interest in the humanities was a
by-product of our recent experiences in foreign relations and of various domestic reverberations. The preponderance of unfriendly reactions on the part of nations that we sought to aid, the misunderstandings and criticisms which we encountered, the recurring accusations that we are materialistic and that our government and its representatives are ignorant of, or indifferent to, the cultural values of other peoples, and, finally, the charge that we will not even trouble to learnt the languages of either friends or enemies.
It is an observation that many politicians, business-executives, and administrators (even within the academy) might wish to take to heart. Indeed, in the twenty-first century, the Humanities are actually more important than ever and those who wield power – whether in politics or business – might be thought to have a particular obligation to verse themselves in the history of human thought, including a duty to understand other peoples, languages, and concepts. If we are to understand the modern world, with its transformative sciences, its terrorists, and its geopolitical upheavals, an education in the humanities is necessary to help us understand what it all means as well as how it means something.
Human cloning, genetic engineering, xenotransplantation, species melding: all these scientific innovations call for an understanding of the ways they change the way we live. In a period that has seen remarkable interventions in zoe, we need (more than ever) ways to address problems of meaning, value, and consequence. The sciences are simply not equipped to answer questions about the purpose of human life and desires; ends and actions. As poet and critic Susan Stewart argued in 2005, ‘If there is a ‘crisis in the humanities’ today, it is not because there is too little work for the humanities to do, but far too much’.
The creations of science are not the creations of abstract humans but of particular people in concrete societies. Abstract science is inadequate to deal with problems of social justice. In ‘The End(s) of Human Rights’ (2002), Costas Douzinas (the Director of the Birkbeck Institute for the Humanities) argued that
History does not teach anything; it is historians and journalists, intellectuals and politicians, academics and ideologues who turn historical events into stories and myths, and in so doing, construct ways of seeing the present through the lens of the past.
It is the duty of those of us in the Humanities to pay attention to the ‘unique, singular’ being ‘who has place and time, gender and history, needs and desires’.
Furthermore, the bankruptcy of a society focussed on science, materialism, and managerialism has been brought brutally to the fore in recent years, when the century’s great symbol of scientific and technological prowess – the aeroplane – came crashing into everyone’s consciousness in the West, a defiant reminder of the costs of our defiant provincialism. Again, this was not only a crisis of and for our times. More than half a century ago, the New Yorker published a cartoon by Peter Arno that adeptly made the point about the cultural ignorance (and arrogance) of many in the West. The cartoon showed a western man – sporting a Stetson-hat – leaning out of his racy roadster to speak to a turbaned Muslim, prostrate in prayer by the side of the road. ‘Hey, Jack’, he asked, ‘which way to Mecca?’ In a more serious vein, this was what Clifford Geertz meant when he asked, ‘Why do we teach Jane Austen, or Icelandic sagas, or Hindu funerals?’. His answer was direct: it was
to wound our complacency, to make us a little less confident in and satisfied with the immediate deliverances of our here-and-now imperious world. Such teaching is indeed a subversive business. And what it subverts is not morality. What it subverts is bluster, obduracy, and a closure to experience. Pride, one could say, and prejudice.
Or, in more prosaic language, to Worry society.
3) Finally, what we do in the humanities is profoundly political.
As will be obvious in the last two sections, what I am arguing is that the definition of the human is normative and, therefore, ideological and political. Performing this political work is our contribution to the world of learning. The Humanities are in danger when we cease confronting the moral dilemmas and conflicts that arise in the worlds of politics, science, economics, and culture. In order to do this, counterintuitive thinking is crucial. Literary scholar Hans Gumbrecht put it forcefully when he argued that
As we know from devastating historical experience in the twentieth century, we live better lives as long as out politicians and judges do not claim that their actions are based on new concepts of what it means to be human. But this makes it all the more important that there be one institutional context, at least, where – in isolation from immediate political consequences – such thought experiments can be undertaken. For it is obvious that in a larger historical perspective, key concepts of our self-understanding have undergone profound transformations and that these transformations have been for the better. So instead of ruling out a counterintuitive style of thinking, I feel that those humanists who never leave the dimension of the commonsensical (however far they may push the complexity of the commonsensical) are missing the single more important opportunity that society offers to them.
To Conclude
What we have been seeing here in Britain, and elsewhere, is a commercialisation of all aspects of society, including the university. Upton Sinclair made a similar observation as long ago as 1923 in a book entitled The Goose-Step, an expose of University education. He informed his readers that education
has been stolen…. a bandit crew have got hold of it and have set it to work, not for your benefit, nor the benefit of your sons and daughters, but for ends very far from these….. our 600,000 young people are being taught, deliberately and of set purpose, not wisdom but folly, not justice but greed, not freedom but slavery, not love but hate.
We must not be too apocalyptic, though: the battle for the Humanities has only just begun. In 2000, distinguished historian and Fellow of the BIH Sander Gilman penned a thoughtful lecture on the future of the Humanities in the twenty-first century. In it, he warned that the ‘gradual erosion of the status of the humanities’ has been a ‘passive undertaking’. ‘To be brutal about it’, he contended, ‘the humanities seem today much too unimportant to warrant’ any active conspiracy against it. Clearly, the days of passivity are at an end. In the words of Costas Douzinas,
The pressing moral and political task is to develop a Humanities of resistance. The stakes are no longer or exclusively the development of delicacy of discernment, the sharpening of hermeneutical aptitude or even moral edification.
In other words, a Humanities education that seeks merely to give citizens a ‘cultural gloss’, proving them with impressive banter about Sophocles, La Fontaine, and Kafka on the cocktail party circuit (the approach best catered for by the Whip and Worship definitions) is a tepid Humanities of serviceability. One that Worries, disturbs, disrupts, and critiques society and notions of justice is the only one worth fighting for.
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