True Impressions of Our Education, Pt. I
“If religious belief was available, that would surely be a better alternative.”
Elan Kluger is a 21-year-old writer from Michigan and editor of The New Critic studying intellectual history at Dartmouth College.
This is the first part of an essay dialogue between Elan Kluger and Rufus Knuppel on the value of humanities and the liberal arts.
Recently, over a delicious lunch in Dartmouth’s Pine restaurant with a religion professor, I demanded to know the value of the humanities. “He who has sufficient why can bear with any how,” says Nietzsche, and my tacit promise was that I would work much harder in theories of religion class if my professor could explain why I ought to.1 He offered standard answers like, “the humanities teach you how to think” and they help you “become a better citizen.” None of his answers satisfied me, and I had to brainstorm answers for myself.
This was not the first time I felt myself questioning the value of the humanities. I came into college with a breathtakingly narrow view of what my life would be: a career as an historian of diplomacy or of ideas. As to the origins of this view I am not sure, but I made my goals known. In my first meeting with my assigned advisor (an historian), I said that I would be a history major and soon a history professor. He recommended a course on early modern European intellectual history. I took it and loved it. I was in a senior seminar by the end of my freshman year. Because Dartmouth only offers an undergraduate program in history, I was soon scheming to take graduate courses at nearby universities.
It therefore came as a shock to everyone who knew me when I declared at the beginning of my sophomore year that I was switching my major to engineering. At the end of my freshman year, I had read Nietzsche’s On the Uses and Disadvantages of History for Life in a history seminar. After the class rotely listed the essay’s arguments, the professor motioned to continue on to another text we had read. I raised my hand. “Are we going to answer whether we agree with Nietzsche’s argument?” I asked. “Go to the philosophy department for that,” my professor joked. We did, however, end up considering my question. Various students responded to narrow points in Nietzsche’s text. They did not agree with his threefold explanation on the uses of history; they did not like his elitism. Then it was my turn to answer. I admitted I did not know if I agreed with Nietzsche, but I thought I did, and I thought that meant we were wasting our time in that class.
Soon after I realized I had been convinced by Nietzsche, I decided I should match my ideas to my practice and therefore abandon the humanities. I became an engineer. When I thought of the discipline of history, I looked around at the monograph writers that populated the profession and I thought of it as a gigantic waste of time. Who has opened a book of history and ever acted differently in their life? Kafka’s dictum that “we ought to read only the kind of books that wound or stab us… [or] wake us up with a blow to the head” has never been true about the study of history. History was useless, I thought.
I looked around for defenses of history and other humanities and was unsatisfied. Most defenses of the humanities are so weak that it would not shock anyone if one were to think of these disciplines as nothing more than a glorified set of pre-law majors. Defenders of the humanities are rarely persuasive, and they tend to preach only to the converted; often they speak in contradictions.
“The humanities teach you how to think,” some say. Yet clichés mark the absence of thought and this is a cliché par excellence. No better proof of the falsity of that statement than its ad nauseam repetition. It is as if they presume unthinking drones arrive in college, write 2,000-word essays about Theodor Adorno, and are magically transformed into thinkers. Do math majors not know how to think until they take a course on magical realism to balance their course load? Do engineers metamorphose into thinkers after reading Heidegger?
Other humanities publicists suggest that the humanities teach you how to write. This is not true, as far as I’ve seen. Barring one rather devoted professor, the most I have learned — if I have learned anything at all about writing — is an intellectual Gleichschaltung. “Write this way alone,” professors insist. This is not universally true, of course. But if a student doesn’t learn to write well and writing well is alleged to be the whole purpose of the humanities, I would hope that someone would slash these departmental budgets. Yet the bad writing instructors seem to continue teaching.
Some say that studying the humanities makes one a better citizen. This is yet another vagary that indicates the absence of thought rather than the presence of deep rigor. Who is this “better citizen”? What does that mean? How do papers on Latin American history help one become this? These arguments are not mine alone. Barack Obama once said that:
A lot of young people no longer see the trades and skilled manufacturing as a viable career. But I promise you, folks can make a lot more, potentially, with skilled manufacturing or the trades than they might with an art history degree.2
He’s right of course. Art history and the other humanities are not the degrees of strivers. Beautiful rhetoric about the value of the humanities is not the same as a paycheck. If anything, the humanities represent the closest thing to Thorstein Veblen’s The Theory of the Leisure Class — we study the liberal arts because they are useless, marking the economic surplus of a certain class. Barack Obama’s competitor in 2012, Mitt Romney, concurred:
I wonder whether you get information coming into college that says, you know, this course of study will lead to this kind of job and there’s a lot of opening here as opposed to — as you said, English — and as an English major I can say this...as an English major your options are you better go to graduate school, all right? And find a job from there.3
But these are less the beginning of arguments against the humanities than the end. He who has the checkbook in hand has declared something very different from the dialectician. The thinking of these politicians is practical. But we must look beyond the ledger and consider the humanities for ourselves.
And yet against all cynicism, I am a history major, a student of the humanities. And I have less than no desire to become a lawyer. So how do I defend my major? To do so requires new thinking.
Part of understanding the humanities is understanding what they aren’t. They don’t have a deep commitment to their own values and they don’t have a dedication to teaching because they deal with two lies: a belief in political neutrality and a commitment to professionalization.
Humanities courses attempt to hold some sense of neutrality regarding the ultimate questions of politics and morality. Scholars largely follow the distinction drawn out from Max Weber’s separation in “Science as a Vocation” between fact and value. 4Values are for others, for the church — the classroom deals in fact, they say. This rather liberal part of the liberal arts is open to critique from anti-liberals of the right and left.
Right-wing anti-liberals often say that an institutionally neutral view regarding religion means not fairness to all but an adoption of a secular, materialist worldview instead, which is a dogma of a hidden kind. The historian Brad Gregory writes that the tacit assumptions of most academic historical writing on religion is
theologically atheistic, metaphysically materialist, and culturally relativist, framed by the postulates of the natural sciences, and historically derived from the unresolved doctrinal disputes over Christian truth in early modern Europe.5
There is little neutral about such a position. Most professors, and likely most students, adhere to such a worldview, but that does not make it impartial to not believe in God, to fail to contemplate anything transcendent, and to consider no culture better than others.
Left-wing anti-liberals, by contrast, often say that institutionally neutral views act as a cover for the inequality and economic exploitation already underway in these institutions. There is never a “neutral” political environment — a neutral university means signing up for the status quo. The social theorist Herbert Marcuse argued that:
tolerance is extended to policies, conditions, and modes of behavior which should not be tolerated because they are impeding, if not destroying, the chances of creating an existence without fear and misery.6
Political toleration or neutrality, if accepted prior to the realization of ideal social conditions, means for Marcuse the toleration of intolerance.
Anti-liberals on the right and left have lucid and insightful analyses. Yet most other institutional organizations would be recipes not for study, but for more conflict. A truly Catholic institution (not one enmeshed in pseudo-Jesuit secularity), were it to have Protestant students, would entail real strife. A social-justice university would either involve full-time activism, which of course requires no university, or would be the site of sinecures for failed critical theorists. We have to thank the relative neutrality of the university for safeguarding both the Brad Gregorys and the Herbert Marcuses of the world in similar institutions.
But their broad critique is correct: neutrality is a value system. Yet eschewing that fact has in practice meant that humanities professors remained uncommitted to what they teach. These professors say they are only accumulating facts about the world — never values. Yet secularity has values — or can, at least. Its value is to fully realize the human. And yet the posture of neutrality has meant a lack of commitment to the inculcation of the values latent in the humanities.
As long as the humanities instructors model their jobs on scientific research professors — if only for Chaucer instead of Chlorophyll — they shall remain uncommitted to the values in what they study. Their defenses of their practice will seem tepid at best.
I have sat through classes with professors committed to the insane idea that studying history is for the sake of “knowledge production” — whatever that is. I have had professors wary of discussions of the relation students have to great works of philosophy out of a sense that this would enter the realm of personal values. But this neutrality is a value.
A couple months ago, I read Saul Bellow’s Ravelstein as part of an extracurricular reading group run by the Hertog Foundation. I read the text at a time of great change in my life, and we discussed the book not as a neutral text through which to accumulate knowledge but as a vehicle for something approximating mysticism. There was no political valence to the discussion, but our instructor remained committed to wanting us to love the novel. No neutrality was involved.
Alongside the pseudo-neutrality of pretending that there is not a real value stake in the humanities, there is the other problem of professionalization. Humanities professors and classes ought to be devoted to teaching.
There is little necessity for professors who are top in their fields of study regarding the production of research. Literature classes ought to be less about accumulating knowledge over time than spreading the infectious joy in reading the best novels. The ability to produce recondite papers on clothes in Tolstoy does not necessarily correspond to teaching Tolstoy well.
Professionalization follows from fact-value distinction. Humanities professors, in failing to own up to their implicit values, have made a fetish of fact accumulation, instead of teaching the humanities.
So the humanities should not have a posture of neutrality and should not be as professionalized. But wherein lies the value? What do the humanities provide?
Because we have avoided the idea that there are no values in the humanities, we can borrow language from the description of religious experience. In The Varieties of Religious Experience, William James writes of mysticism as inherently ineffable. His description matches the humanities as well:
The subject of [mysticism] immediately says that it defies expression, that no adequate report of its contents can be given in words. It follows from this that its quality must be directly experienced; it cannot be imparted or transferred to others... No one can make clear to another who has never had a certain feeling, in what the quality or worth of it consists. One must have musical ears to know the value of a symphony; one must have been in love one’s self to understand a lover’s state of mind. Lacking the heart or ear, we cannot interpret the musician or the lover justly, and are even likely to consider him weak-minded or absurd.7
Such is the feeling inherent to profound experiences of literature, history, philosophy, and art. They don’t leave one with “facts” but with a stunning sense of encounter.
And James implies a role for the instructor. Rather than sitting alone reading Bellow — as one is wont to do — the instructor is a worker in the field of humanities appreciation. Their job is to communicate that sense of what it is like to hear the symphony or to fall in love (to use James’s examples). Even better, they don’t just model its possibility, they actively facilitate the process. They ask questions and assign writing that facilitate students through the process of clarifying their own confused experiences.
Eventually, students ought to have mystical experiences of their own in the humanities. And although they may find it difficult to articulate the meaning of these experiences, they nonetheless contain some knowledge — or, as Bellow calls them, “true impressions.”8
James calls this experience of transformative truth the “noetic.” He is describing “states of insight into depths of truth unplumbed by the discursive intellect…They are illuminations, revelations, full of significance and importance, all inarticulate though they remain; and as a rule they carry with them a curious sense of authority for after-time.”
But like a religious convert preaching to the unbeliever, it is difficult to articulate why we study the humanities without already having had an experience similar to mysticism.
In a 1915 poem, W.B. Yeats wrote of poetry scholars who, instead of using their love of poetry to write poetry themselves or to at least share their infectious enthusiasm for it, grow old writing scholarly editions.
Bald heads forgetful of their sins,
Old, learned, respectable bald heads
Edit and annotate the lines
That young men, tossing on their beds,
Rhymed out in love’s despair
To flatter beauty’s ignorant ear.
They’ll cough in the ink to the world’s end;
Wear out the carpet with their shoes
Earning respect; have no strange friend;
If they have sinned nobody knows.
Lord, what would they say
Did their Catullus walk that way?9
These poetry scholars, moved by the sublime works of these youth, instead of entering life themselves, “cough in the ink to the world’s end;/Wear out the carpet with their shoes.” These scholars are the humanities gone wrong. Instead we need the equivalent of secular priests. Bellow once wrote that:
The [church] fathers had sublime conceptions of God and man. If professors of humanities were moved by the sublimity of the poets and philosophers they teach, they would be the most powerful men in the university and the most fervent. But they are at the lower end of the hierarchy, at the bottom of the pile.10
Professors committed to the “sublimity” of what they teach can only raise the value of the humanities. I only lasted as an engineer for four weeks. My history advisor — and many friends and family members — reminded me of my love for the humanities, those mystical experiences that had me clutching to my history degree. I’ve burnt the midnight oil on Strauss versus Skinner. I’ve spent a restless term debating the proper interpretation of Machiavelli’s oeuvre with one friend and a professor. I even woke early on a Saturday (Shabbat morning) to read Martin Luther and John Calvin. This was for an intellectual history course, not a potential conversion, but I was left awed by their impact on the history of both Jewish and Christian thought. Great professors could induce the same experiences for others.
If religious belief was available, that would surely be a better alternative. William James meant to describe sincere religious conversion, not great times reading literature. But for some, religion is a dead option. So why study the humanities? It’s as close as you can get to religious experience in this fallen world.
Friedrich Nietzsche, The Gay Science
Barack Obama, “Remarks by the President on Opportunity for All and Skills for America's Workers,” https://obamawhitehouse.archives.gov/the-press-office/2014/01/30/remarks-president-opportunity-all-and-skills-americas-workers
Mitt Romney, roundtable discussion at Otterbein University in Westerville, Ohio, https://abcnews.go.com/blogs/politics/2012/04/dont-believe-everything-you-hear-romney-tells-students
Max Weber, “Science as a Vocation” in From Max Weber: Essays in Sociology
Brad Gregory, “The Other Confessional History,” https://www.jstor.org/stable/pdf/3874101.pdf
Herbert Marcuse, Repressive Tolerance, https://www.marcuse.org/herbert/publications/1960s/1965-repressive-tolerance-fulltext.html
William James, The Varieties of Religious Experience, https://www.gutenberg.org/cache/epub/621/pg621-images.html
Saul Bellow, “True impressions” Nobel Prize Speech, https://www.nobelprize.org/prizes/literature/1976/bellow/lecture/
W.B. Yeats, ‘The Scholars’
Bellow, It All Adds Up: From the Dim Past to the Uncertain Future
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