On Defending the Humanities

HT Bill Benzon (yet again he's right on the money). This post on Martha Nussbaum's latest defense of the humanities barely manages to stifle a yawn. This kind of humanities is already far too reactive to current “realities” (the dominance of STEM education, for instance), to be of service. Nussbaum boxed herself into an anti-utilitarian corner quite a while ago with her not so progressive defense of the aesthetic.

If you want a truly spirited defense of the humanities these days, you should really talk to a theoretical physicist. At least those guys have the guts to defend the critical thinking you learn in humanities classes—they believe their students benefit from it, and they think it's unique to humanities education. So some of the commenters on the Nussbaum post who assert that they've experienced it outside of the humanities had better read some of the assaults on the SUNY Albany admin. in Nature.

What we need, as Bill points out in an email, is fresh thinking. He taps into something when he adds:

it seems to me that the defense of the humanities genre is pretty much owned by people who want to stave off the creation of new whole-cosmos discourses...

OOO to the rescue (how did you know I was going to say that?!). What we need is not some scientistic shadow of science—that's already done better by, you know, scientists. What we need are not more endless bland assertions of how studying languages and literatures and so on makes you a better person. Last time I checked you can be quite mean and an art lover—Hitler take a bow. (John Carey provides the most devastating assault on this line of thinking.)

Nope. What we need is some real vigor in the house. What we need is to know that when you study the aesthetic dimension, you are not simply making yourself into a nice guy (you aren't really doing that anyway), or studying some nice candy on the basically mechanical surface of life.

What you are doing when you study the aesthetic is, you are studying causality. This is the subject of Realist Magic, and of my next couple of talks (upcoming at two art institutions of note). I'm afraid you'll have to wait a little before I spill the beans. But in nuce, the OOO reason why to study art and language and so on is that in so doing you are studying how reality operates at the causal level. This happens to be in line with the last two revolutions in contemporary physical theories of matter. Which is a good start.