Monthly Archives: May 2012

Rethinking the Humanities

1 Reply

My chapter entitled “An Ethical Turn for the Humanities” has just been published in Rethinking the Humanities: Paths and Challenges, edited by Ricardo Gil Soeiro and Sofia Tavares. This volume originated in a Lisbon conference at which David Damrosch (Harvard Comp. Lit), Richard Wolin (History, CUNY Graduate Center), Cândido de Oliveira Martins (Catholic University of Portugal), José Pedro Serra (Lisbon), and António Sousa Ribeiro (Coimbra) presented papers that are now chapters. Rounding out the book are reprints of important recent essays by Paul Ricoeur, George Steiner, and Marjorie Perloff. My own chapter begins:

The original and fundamental purpose of the humanities is moral argumentation. Humanists are scholarly contributors to public discourse about matters of value. If there is a “crisis in the humanities” today, it arises from a general reluctance or inability to contribute to public ethical debate. The reasons for this reticence include widespread moral relativism or skepticism, envy of abstract theory, alienation from the public sphere, and a refusal to engage morally with stories, even though ethical interpretation of narrative is the characteristic contribution of the humanities.

Two recent developments are heartening and point to a revival. First, although philosophy in the English-speaking world was preoccupied for a generation with highly abstract and abstruse methodological questions, prominent Anglophone philosophers have lately resumed interpreting narratives and paying close attention to their literary qualities. Recent examples include Richard Rorty on Nabokov and Proust, Bernard Williams on the classical tragedies; Colin McGinn on Shakespeare; and Martha Nussbaum on many texts. Rorty recommended a “general turn against theory and toward narrative.”

Second, an “ethical turn” in literary studies mirrors the literary turn in philosophy. It has never been hard to find implicit moral judgments in literary criticism; and certain important moral topics (such as racism) have been close to the surface of criticism for 30 years. But it is a recent trend for literary critics to embrace the full range of moral issues and to defend explicit moral argumentation as a mode of criticism. In her influential 2006 book, The Way We Argue Now, Amanda Anderson announces: “We must keep in mind that the question. How should I live? is the most basic one.” This bold premise associates her, she says, with the “general turn to ethics.”

The ethical turn in literature and the turn to narrative in ethics converge. These trends are desirable because valid moral reasoning depends upon the telling and interpretation of stories. In turn, stories are necessary because ethical reasoning is largely particularistic, not categorical. It is about particular people in particular situations, not about abstract concepts.

In this respect, ethical judgment is like aesthetic judgment. A large patch of red paint may contribute to the beauty of a painting by de Kooning, but it would utterly ruin a Van Eyck. Patches of red paint are not the right unit of aesthetic judgment; paintings are. Likewise, we can make valid moral judgments about overall situations described in narratives, but not about their qualities or aspects when taken out of context.

In the fifth century BC, the Greek sophists developed a pedagogy based on the telling and interpretation of rich, particularistic stories. In the hands of some Sophists, this style of discourse may have been a mere tool for persuading audiences of the speaker’s goals, reflecting doubt that there was any moral truth or any need to be morally responsible. But for others, notably Protagoras, a method of describing particular circumstances seemed the best way to ascertain the moral truth and to participate responsibly in the public deliberations of a republican city state.

Almost two thousand years later, in the little republics of Renaissance Italy, authors like Lorenzo Valla again defended the telling and interpretation of concrete stories as an alternative to scholastic theoretical philosophy. They again celebrated active engagement in public life (the vita activa) as an alternative to monastic contemplation. They revived the sophists’ pedagogy by emphasizing the trivium (grammar, logic, and rhetoric—ancestors of philology and literary criticism) instead of the abstract, theoretical disciplines of philosophy and theology that had crowned the medieval educational system.

The first people to call themselves “humanists” were independent tutors who provided advanced undergraduates with instruction in grammar and rhetoric. They taught what they called the “studia humanitatis” on the side, while the university’s formal curriculum emphasized logic and theology. Parents paid for this “humanistic” instruction because they wanted their sons to learn eloquence to succeed at court or in the law. Humanist pedagogy consisted of reading and imitating ancient narrative authors, with attention to style and form, plot and character. Humanists like Thomas More, Erasmus, and Machiavelli also wrote books that we rightly classify as “philosophy.” But these texts were not treatises. They were literary works, self-conscious about character, context, voice, irony, and plot and meant for readers who understood such issues.

From the time of the Sophists and the Renaissance humanist to the present, defending the humanities as the best source of moral judgment has always required a critique of ambitious versions of moral theory (whether the theory of the time happens to come from Plato, from scholasticism, or from analytical philosophy). Moral theories are profoundly diverse and they yield a wide range of positions, from moral skepticism to Kantianism and utilitarianism. But all have one feature in common: abstraction. …

Philip Larkin, Aubade

1 Reply

Larkin’s “Aubade” begins:

I work all day, and get half-drunk at night.
Waking at four to soundless dark, I stare.
In time the curtain-edges will grow light.
Till then I see what’s really always there:
Unresting death, a whole day nearer now,
Making all thought impossible but how
And where and when I shall myself die.

The rest is here. It doesn’t need annotation, except that an “aubade” is a song or poem spoken by a man to his forbidden lover at daybreak, when he must flee her bed. (Yet there’s only one person in this bed.)

Also, it might be relevant that the man who published this poem was a 55-year-old Englishman, single, reputed to be grouchy and alcoholic; an academic librarian in the Northern industrial city of Hull who would publish just a few more poems before his early death. Knowing that information, we might be tempted to place the “room [that] takes shape” as “light strengthens” in Yorkshire in 1977–rather than, say, Boston in 2012. In fact, we may think we can identify the room as the one behind the upstairs window in this building, which was Philip Larkin’s home:

105 Newland Park, Hull

I was a small American boy in England around that time. My family lived in a series of furnished, rented homes and stayed in bed-and-breakfast hotels and friends’ houses, so I recall many English bourgeois homes in those years. I can picture the “curtain-edges” and room “plain as a wardrobe” that are named in the poem and can supply other details left unmentioned: the thickly-painted electrical wires stapled to big baseboards, the framed prints of village life, the hinged windows, and the aroma of cigarettes, mothballs, and rising damp.

But look: this isn’t really the statement of a “half-drunk” middle-aged Englishman, talking to us from his bed as dawn breaks on an overcast day in 1977. He would have no means to communicate his morbid thoughts to a global audience 35 years hence. What we are actually reading is a poem, very carefully constructed over many hours or perhaps months and published in the Times Literary Supplement. Fear didn’t really make “all thought impossible,” because the author conveyed subtle thoughts in intricate verse. Despite the overwhelming volume of poems published in journals like the TLS, this one remains a staple of anthologies and seminars not because it reports the early-morning panic of a middle-aged bachelor, but because of its form.

The poem is written in a consistently natural, vernacular voice, yet it fits neatly in five 10-line stanzas with the rhyme scheme ABABCCDEED. The A, B, and C lines are of ten syllables each: regular iambic pentameter. The D lines of each stanza have 9 syllables, and the E lines are of irregular length to emphasize a phrase that occupies a whole line in each stanza: “Of dying, and being dead,” “Not to be anywhere,” “Nothing to love or link with,” “Lets no one off the grave,” and “Work has to be done.”

Reading those five lines in order reveals that work is of almost equal weight to death in the poem, which begins “I work all day,” and ends with postmen going from house to house. The real Philip Larkin worked as a senior university administrator, so he may have had one of those “locked-up office[s]” where “telephones crouch, getting ready to ring.” The telephone is an instrument of human connection–potentially a tool “to love or link with”–but for a bureaucratic worker, it mostly threatens chores, complaints, and orders.

Yet the real Philip Larkin also worked as a poet. Unlike the narrator of the poem, the author had a gift, an audience, and a life mission. It cost him labor and care to write and publish verse that used familiar forms to report common experiences. When he refers in “Aubade” to “what we know,  / Have always known, know that we can’t escape,” he is addressing a group, a “we.” He is building a community to which he will also belong. Although the telephone and the postman convey the messages of an “uncaring / Intricate rented world,” the poem demonstrates care and demands sympathy.

The narrator mixes two rhetorical modes: confessional (“I … get half-drunk at night”) and didactic. Sometimes he sounds like an atheist preacher, insisting that religion is just “That vast moth-eaten musical brocade / Created to pretend we never die.” But this isn’t a sermon or a treatise about the fear of death in a godless universe. It matters that “brocade” rhymes with “afraid,” and “die” with “try.” (Notice the contrasting senses of each pair.) The depressed doctrines of a grouchy old man would hardly matter, but it took skill and hope to turn those thoughts into an intricate and coherent poem.

education and research for democracy need not be democratic

1 Reply

Moving in the circles that I do, I often hear claims that education for democracy must be democratic–and that research that serves citizens must be conducted in collaboration with citizens. These views reflect some wisdom and experience, but they are not logical truths.

Many leaders have been deliberately prepared in disciplined, authoritarian educational settings to serve democracies. Consider, for example, how Martin Luther King Jr. portrayed his father:

Martin Luther King, Sr., is as strong in his will as he is in his body. He has a dynamic personality, and his very physical presence (weighing about 220 pounds) commands attention. He has always been a very strong and self-confident person … He never hesitates to tell the truth and speak his mind, however cutting it may be. This quality of frankness has often caused people to actually fear him. I have had young and old alike say to me, “I’m scared to death of your dad.” Indeed, he is stern at many points.

I assume this portrait was a bit euphemistic, because the elder King was very much alive to read it. “Daddy King” was not one for engaging children as equals in democratic discussions, yet he set MLK Jr. on a path to genuine democratic leadership.

I am inclined to think that the Venn diagram for democratic education looks like this (below). “Education for democracy” is any practice that increases the odds that children will turn into active, ethical, and effective members of communities. “Education that is democratic” is any pedagogy that emphasizes students’ voice in choosing topics, debating issues, and making things together. The two circles overlap in practices like “Action Civics,” which have been frequently found effective. But there can be good education for democracy that isn’t democratic (see “Daddy King,” above), and some democratic education doesn’t produce good citizens. That can be because it isn’t sufficiently political or because it simply isn’t good–kids waste their time.

Likewise, I think the Venn diagram for research looks like this (below). “Knowledge of value to citizens” means knowledge that we can use to improve the world. For example, a cure for cancer would be excellent, but it would not be useful for citizens unless it gave us something to do. Meanwhile, “knowledge produced collaboratively by citizens” includes the fruits of practices such as Participatory Action Research, Community Based Participatory Research, Popular Education, etc. Professors may be central players in this work, but they act as peers of fellow citizens.

Again, knowledge of value to citizens need not be produced collaboratively by citizens. Game theory, for example, has yielded many insights about how small groups work most effectively. Citizens should learn from game theory even though they did not co-produce it. Meanwhile, some knowledge produced collaboratively by citizens is not useful to citizens, because the results are incorrect, or partial, or too narrow and instrumental.

I happen to love the overlapping parts of these two Venn diagrams. At CIRCLE, we are completing a year-long and very ambitious evaluation of YouthBuild USA that we conducted with YouthBuild alumni as our co-investigators. My favorite educational programs use democratic pedagogies. But I do not assume that the circles above coincide, so that democratic education and research are always and exclusively valuable for citizens.

Rather, the core reason for my preference is ethical and pertains to means, not ends. I would rather treat children democratically (unless that actively harms their life prospects) because I think they deserve such treatment in the present. Likewise, I would rather treat a community partner as a co-investigator than a research subject because we are moral equals in the Kingdom of Ends. But I think the empirical questions–whether and when democratic processes yield good democratic outcomes–deserve more critical attention.

moral propositions are true or false; the problem is method

1 Reply

(Washington, DC) Moral propositions are true or false. For example, “Genocide is evil” is a true statement. If you disagree with it, you’re wrong. So I believe, and so do most moral philosophers. This assumption violates the fact/value distinction that we teach kids as early as elementary school. We teach them that values are opinions, in contrast to facts. But I as little doubt that genocide is wrong as I doubt Newton’s laws of motion or the existence of the chair on which I sit right now. If the chair turned out to be an illusion, I wouldn’t be thoroughly crazy. If I started to favor genocide, I would be.

So what leads people to the theoretical view that moral propositions are mere opinions, neither true nor false? The problem is one of method.

We believe in natural facts because from our earliest days, nature is obdurate. Fire burns, and we form a solid belief that the fire has caused our pain. The same sensory perceptions and logical premises that we use to reach such simple conclusions also underlie scientific method, which extends our knowledge vastly, pays practical dividends, and sometimes generates counter-intuitive findings that turn out to be correct. We are almost all naturalists now, believing that science (broadly defined) yields truth, and that what is true is what science yields.

With morality, we also draw firm impressions about vivid cases. Even if you are skeptical about moral truth (in theory), you will feel with virtual certainty that it is wrong to kill someone in cold blood for one’s own amusement. You may have convinced yourself that “wrong” is just an opinion, or just an instinct inbred by natural selection, but you will oppose cold-blooded murder with as much certainty as you believe in cause-and-effect or the persistence of objects in nature.

But many other cases are more ambiguous. We know that our moral knowledge is unreliable, because we disagree with one another and because our assumptions have changed over time. For many centuries, virtually everyone (female as well as male) believed that men were superior to women in many respects. Now I and many others are sure that was wrong. But if I had been born 200 years ago, I would have been mistaken about gender. If I had been born a gentile German around 1900, I assume that I would have supported Hitler in 1939, because almost everyone did.

When we study nature, we also face ambiguity and commit errors. Like moral views, scientific theories change. It’s just that with morality, we lack an agreed-upon method for addressing uncertainty and correcting error.

That is not to say that we lack methods altogether. Philosophers often propose them. For example, John Rawls proposed developing the rules of a just society while imagining that one does not know one’s own circumstances. Putting oneself behind an imaginary “veil of ignorance,” as Rawls suggested, is a method.

But the reception of Rawls is characteristic of philosophy. Critics quickly said that too many moral assumptions were built into his method. You had to be a liberal individualist, they said, to endorse the method that led Rawls to his liberal conclusions. Moral methodology doesn’t seem separable from substantive moral views.

I acknowledge that problem, and I don’t think we are likely to find a moral method that wins consensus and  solves one controversy after another. But it doesn’t follow that morality is mere opinion. Alas, moral propositions are true or false and yet we have no agreed-upon way to know which is which in a range of ambiguous situations.