In Response To Stanley Fish’s “Will The Humanities Save Us?”
(x-posted to The Valve)
Bill Benzon calls our attention to a new blog entry by Stanley Fish, posted by The New York Times here.
It is easy to imagine how, after a lifetime of dedicated scholarship, an emeritus professor like Fish might react in frustration against the platitudes in Education’s End, a new book by professor of law Anthony Kronman. Kronman has little to offer us; his vision of college as a place for the “nurturing of those intellectual and moral habits that together form the basis for living the best life one can” is a rhetorically tepid, repackaged version of a pedagogical philosophy shared by many earlier authors, including Matthew Arnold and Michel de Montaigne. Montaigne figures prominently in Alexander Nehamas’s book The Art of Living, which is entirely devoted to the enormous history of this idea within the Western philosophical tradition alone, to say nothing of history, literary studies, or the other constituent disciplines of the humanities.
That said, the banality of Kronman’s prose is no excuse for what Fish has written. Fish ends his post thus:
To the question “of what use are the humanities?”, the only honest answer is none whatsoever. And it is an answer that brings honor to its subject. Justification, after all, confers value on an activity from a perspective outside its performance. An activity that cannot be justified is an activity that refuses to regard itself as instrumental to some larger good. The humanities are their own good. There is nothing more to say, and anything that is said – even when it takes the form of Kronman’s inspiring cadences – diminishes the object of its supposed praise.
The crux of Fish’s argument against literature as an agent of moral self-fashioning goes like this:
If [Kronman's position] were true, the most generous, patient, good-hearted and honest people on earth would be the members of literature and philosophy departments, who spend every waking hour with great books and great thoughts, and as someone who’s been there (for 45 years) I can tell you it just isn’t so. Teachers and students of literature and philosophy don’t learn how to be good and wise; they learn how to analyze literary effects and to distinguish between different accounts of the foundations of knowledge.
It my sincere belief that this argument is worthless. I hope, when I am finished, that it will be ashamed to show its face again. It is hardly original with Fish; rather, it is everywhere, since it makes scholars in the humanities feel humble and forthright, and it makes people hostile towards the humanities rejoice.
***
To begin with, there is no universal standard of behavior to which Fish can appeal in order to prove his point. Instead, one of the foundational principles of much study in the humanities is the idea of incomparability: we give up trying to decide whether one individual, or one culture, is essentially superior to another. Look at the description he chooses: “generous, patient, good-hearted and honest people.” Such an account of the supposed purpose of literary studies would have sickened Friedrich Nietzsche, who wrote:
The oppressed, downtrodden, outraged exhort one another with the vengeful cunning of impotence: “let us be different from the evil, namely good! And he is good who does not outrage, who harms nobody, who does not attack, who does not requite, who leaves revenge to God, who keeps himself hidden as we do, who avoids evil and desires little from life, like, us, the patient, humble, and just.” (Genealogy of Morals, 1.14)
Nietzsche also described honesty as the virtue of those afraid of what secrets others may keep from them. Of course, nobody has to take Nietzsche at his word, but there is value in confronting him with sympathy, or with hatred. Here Kronman hits the mark. He writes about students considering “which alternatives lie closest to their own evolving sense of self,” and, presumably, which others lie furthest away. There is no reason to assume that engagement with texts produces a certain type of person, least of all a person who could equally belong to a Christian ministry.
Fish makes the ministry his standard for a justified moral vocation: “Teachers of literature and philosophy are competent in a subject, not in a ministry.” In fact, ministers are also engaged in interpreting and teaching texts. Their proper subject is theology, and they are just as prone as other human beings to moral and ethical lapses. This fact has not yet extinguished religion, or forced it to withdraw into a sterile self-regard. Fish attacks the humanities but not other forums for moral education and reflection. He writes as though he had never read Chaucer, or, more to the point, as though he were a stranger to Milton.
Fish’s sample consists of “the members of literature and philosophy departments.” That is, his sample of the human population bears absolutely no relation to the actual participation of thinking people in what we might call “the humanities.” Artists, lay readers of all kinds, and students — to name only three of the many constituencies of the arts and human sciences — are excluded here, along with any thought of the purposes the humanities serve outside of the academy. Fish also imposes judgment from the outside; while he vastly overvalues his own anecdotal observations, he leaves no space for personal accounts of a profound experience of an intellectual work. I know, from reading an earlier blog post, that Fish has been an ardent admirer of Frank Sinatra for most of his life, and that he sees Sinatra as a symbol of “single-minded dedication to craft.” Craft is, of course, the most reflexive virtue of a work of art, but it is a virtue nonetheless, and not the only one a reader, interlocutor, or listener may choose to admire. The idea of devoting oneself to a craft is precisely the sort of moral valuation that opens out onto many human enterprises, including scholarship, and endows life with resonance and meaning. Fish will have his Sinatra, but deprive us of ours.
Fish writes that the humanities are their own good, and believes in studying them for their sake. I believe in studying them for our sake. But I do not mean for the sake of the salvation of mankind, understood in some grandiose manner. There truly is a difference between the evangelist and the reader. Humanism is not, as Fish seems to think, a substitute for Sunday school. It is the emergence of a reflective capacity within human culture, and so represents the possibility of a truly self-determined culture for individuals and collectives alike. The humanities are an archive of reflective modes of encounter and expression: close reading, historical reconstruction, artistic making, anthropological study, and so on. The arts and human sciences do not make us better people, according to some a priori moral standard that Fish, despite himself, cannot help bringing to bear upon them. Instead, they make witnesses and authors of us. They make us responsible, and free.
Joe – Apologies that I don’t have much time to post at the moment – grounded until I get a bit more writing done. Just a quick comment that I very much like this image:
Don’t forget that the Fish post you respond to is basically a p.s. to his earlier one on the New York State Commission on Higher Education. When read in that context, his latest post seems to amount to throwing up his hands at the humanities ever getting substantial funding. I’m taking on the funding side of the question over at CitizenSE this year. Sorry to go against your “no more series” suggestion!
I think the “crux” of Fish’s argument which you take issue with is simply that the study of literature and philosophy in an academic context doesn’t necessarily make for better people. You seem to agree with this insofar as you don’t think the humanities do improve people according to an “a prior moral standard”.
When Fish says that the humanities are of no “use”, he is of course rejecting the authority of an instrumental or utilitarian rationality to decide the value of something like the humanities. I think this too is to some extent compatible with your claim that the humanities “make us responsible, and free” – if that is taken to mean “self-legislating” in the Kantian sense.
Nice post. What N. Pepperell said.
profacero, nice to see you!
The Constructivist, I agree with you and am really delighted that you’re tackling the issue of how to justify funding. It is particularly frustrating that Fish is making this argument at a moment when it is capable of practical harm.
NP,
Your comment made me smile because that moment in the post was an explicit reference to Hegel. I was thinking both of his accounts of development and emergent properties, and, in view of what Fish says about the humanities “for themselves,” his sections in the Logic on “self-subsistent” Being producing its own negation and passing over into relational being.
Excellent post. I meant to comment on Fish’s article as well. It saddens me that, at a time when the humanities are under such threat, a prominent representative like Fish could promote the view that the humanities are purposeless.
Thanks for some interesting reading. I agree that Fish’s comparison to the ministry is peculiar, though not for the reasons you suggest exactly. After professors of humanities, the ministry is often to taken to be a profession without justification. What exactly does it do?
I don’t really think Fish is quite operating with a simplistic moral basis of comparison as you seem to suggest. In his essay he does dismiss claims about other things–that English will prepare you for a good job, for instance. The real problem, though, is that I think Fish has a narrow and problematic sense of the notion of justification. I go in to this more in my own blog post earlier today. It seems to me that justification is mostly usually a multi-form process of argument and narration, rather than resting simply on a straightforward form of utilitarianism, as Fish seems to think it does.
Peter,
Do you have a link I can follow? I’m interested to see where we differ, if in fact we do.
Andrew,
I actually don’t agree that literature does not affect people — usually, in their eyes, for the better, and usually so from my perspective as well. But I can certainly imagine how an external standard for goodness such as Fish is employing here would render the work literature performs invisible.
Your Kantian term, “self-legislating,” is immensely helpful here. I’m bound to point out that Fish specifically references Kant’s categorical imperative as an example of a failed attempt to communicate a relevant ethical idea.
Fish does distinguish between literature and the study of literature:
“The texts Kronman recommends are, as he says, concerned with the meaning of life; those who study them, however, come away not with a life made newly meaningful, but with a disciplinary knowledge newly enlarged.”
As for Kant, Fish disputes that the following holds:
“Understand Kant’s categorical imperative and you will not impose restrictions on others that you would resist if they were imposed on you.”
Why should refuting such a naive view be controversial? I think Peter Singer somewhere quotes Himmler invoking the categorical imperative to justify mass murder. In any case, rational autonomy is not identical to understanding. Autonomy as self-legislation cannot be taught.
(I expand further on what I believe Fish’s argument to be in the other place.)
Joseph, just wanted to let you know that I found myself channelling Fish (and hopefully challenging him) in my (opening) contribution to FACE Talk’s Why I Teach meme.
why did you quote that excentric fuck-up Nietszche? OF COURSE engagement with texts produces a certain type of person.
so much for ‘incomparability’ when you conclude we in the humanities are superior! responsible! free! jesus!
A complete misreading of the article.
Dicetumbler,
A complete misreading of the post.
A complete misreading of the article, because it confounds Fish’s arguments with Kronman’s.
How so?