Humanism and the virtue of anxiety

[17.01.08: This post could be taken as a response to Kugelmass' riposte to Stanley Fish's reply to Anthony Kronman's expression of defeat in the face of nearly everything—a riposte, it might be added, that will not be written for almost four months. Fish says the same again. Kugelmass says the same again. Mark Liberman weighs in. 02.11.08: Kugelmass again, on a related subject. nihil sub sole novum, etc.]

Last year, at dinner with a spitzer of art-history graduates, I suggested—perhaps that is too polite a word—that art-history, and in fact the rest of the humanities, were useless disciplines. (I was bored!) Sure enough, it was a rock broke in a byke, and the graduates swarmed up angrily in defense of their occupation—they attacked a sterile ‘world without art’, said they were learning about ‘humanity’—one even used the word ‘redemptive’. The problem with these responses was that I was not proposing a world without art, not even a world without art-history. I was merely observing that art-history served no particular function, unlike, for instance, cancer research. Whether that uselessness is grounds for termination is another question. I posed the problem out loud to a tableful of graduates—but really, as you no doubt already suspect, I was posing it to myself. I wanted a good answer to the question—I hoped they might have some idea. And so I was disappointed with the whobub of inarticulate responses.

Now it is obvious that, when one attacks, or seems to be attacking, another’s professional work, and moreover the basis of her values, that person will get angry. But I heard too the note of anxiety. Frankly I can’t imagine the same heated outquarks from a party of scientists. The point of their work would be transparently obvious to them, and would require only a patronising lecture, like C. P. Snow’s ‘Two Cultures’, to communicate. There might be contempt in their voices, but not likely anxiety.

This episode seemed to me a microcosm of the last fifty years in humanist academia—and more broadly of the entire history of humanism, from the Greeks onward. What is the point of studying literature and history? As I began to think again about the issue, other questions crowded in on me, each clamouring for attention. They may be answered, or may to an extent have already been answered, on these pages. But the most general question of all was: For what should we be fundamentally striving?

*

The humanist’s traditional defence of his discipline is that it cultivates virtue. This is what the proto-humanist Gorgias says to Socrates, although he later comes a-cropper when he admits that his students can go on to use their rhetorical training for evil.

The more subtle modern reflex of this idea is that studying the humanities cultivates self-awareness and self-knowledge. Distinction is made between a kind of learning that tells us facts, and a kind of learning that changes who we are—a study that informs and thus transforms us. The terms differ—one speaks of useful as opposed to liberal knowledge, another of information and understanding—but the core idea is common. This distinction was first clearly formulated by the Victorians, although its roots are in the German notion of Bildung, ‘cultivation of the self’. As Bill Readings observes, Bildung was at the heart of the German university-project in the early nineteenth century; and so it is only natural that Cardinal Newman, who provided the first major modern formulation of an ideal university in England, should put Liberal Knowledge—that is to say, humanist learning—at the heart of the university enterprise. But where the Germans explicitly associated Bildung with classical arete (virtue), Newman explicitly dissociates them:

To open the mind, to correct it, to refine it, to enable it to know, and to digest, master, rule, and use its knowledge, to give it power over its own faculties, application, flexibility, method, critical exactness, sagacity, resource, address, eloquent expression, is an object as intelligible. . . as the cultivation of virtue, while, at the same time, it is absolutely distinct from it.

On the other hand, Matthew Arnold, that apostle of late Victorian paedagogy, reassociates humanist learning with virtue, which he calls our ‘sense for conduct’. He describes ‘specialist’ scientific knowledge, rather clumsily, as:

knowledge not put for us into relation with our sense for conduct, our sense for beauty, and touched with emotion by being so put; not thus put for us, and therefore, to the majority of mankind, after a certain while, unsatisfying, wearying.

He goes on to argue that if faced with the choice between natural science and ‘humane letters’, the ‘great majority of mankind’ would be better to choose the latter for study: ‘Letters will call out their being at more points, will make them live more’. This core distinction remained very common in the twentieth century. Robert Hutchins, the controversial president of the University of Chicago in the 1940s, asserts that ‘the aim of education is not to gain more and more detailed knowledge of the world but to understand the world and ourselves in it’. Hutchins again, ten years earlier: ‘if the aim of education is the communication of useful information, we may as well abandon the enterprise at once’—and ‘the primary object of institutions with this aim will be the cultivation of the intellectual virtues’—and ‘Education is the deliberate attempt to form human character in terms of an ideal’. Allan Bloom: ‘the impression that our general populace is better educated depends on. . . a fudging of the distinction between liberal and technical education’. Mortimer Adler calls for a ‘philosophy as everybody’s business’—a ‘humanistic and philosophical learning of the generalist, learning which belongs to everybody and should be the common culture in which everybody participates’. So, too, Frank Leavis, insistent that the ‘creation of the human world’ is prior to scientific knowledge, and keen to make the university ‘a centre of human consciousness: perception, knowledge, judgment and responsibility’. And so on, through the whole canon of modern cultural conservatism. R. S. Crane, who pushes this line back to Vives and Philip Sidney, observes:

The great defect of all these attempts to define the humanities in terms of the lofty ends they may be made to serve is their persistent vagueness about the means by which these ends are to be accomplished in the everyday affairs of education.

This is true—though I go further. It is not just that these texts are vague about the way humanist learning leads to ‘cultivation’ or ‘consciousnesss’: the problem is with ‘cultivation’, under all its many names, itself. It is intangible, immensurable, indefinable—a secular sort of tao or holy spirit. It is just what ‘we all know’ to be important—for who would want to lack, or be thought to lack, understanding, or judgement, or sagacity, or taste, or responsibility, or flexibility, or a sense for conduct and for beauty?

One cannot help but feel that these are words made up by humanists to defend their discipline, catchphrases that sound significant but in fact conceal only an emptiness, and an anxiety. In modern academia, another such word is ‘excellence’. Newman writes that the object of Liberal Education is ‘nothing more or less than intellectual Excellence’. R. S. Crane, after criticizing woolly accounts of the humanist project, concludes that the humanities are simply those studies having as their objects ‘those human achievements, like Newtonian or modern physics, the American Constitution, or Shakespearean tragedy, to which we agree in attributing that kind of unprecedented excellence that calls forth wonder as well as admiration’. Excellence becomes a catch-all word denoting superiority in any discipline; and Readings devotes a hilarious chapter—probably his best—to the use of this word in today's academy, as an empty currency of general value, equivalent to 'Total Quality Management' in the business world.

*

A witty young skolastikos sold his books when short of money. He then wrote to his father, 'Congratulate me, father, I am already making money from my studies!' — Philogelos, fourth century AD.

Imagine three brothers going off to university—Alfred to read Business and Finance, Bertrand to read Biochemistry, and Gerald to read Literature. After eight years they reunite in the family home over sherry, and compare notes. Alfred drives up in his Ferrari, fresh from a holiday in the Bahamas. Bertrand waxes lyrical about the tremendous progress his department is making towards the manipulation of enzymes, with important repercussions for various problems in contemporary medicine. And Gerald. . . well, Gerald says proudly that, despite his own penury and the lack of professional and/or governmental interest in his research, he is at least more human than his two brothers—or perhaps he will say, more modestly, that he has a better grasp of the ‘human condition’—or else simply that his ‘intellectual virtues’ have been thoroughly ‘cultivated’. Alfred and Bertrand will just laugh in his face! And they’ll both have whiter teeth in those broad grins, to boot.

*

Is it possible to rescue some aspect of character as a defence of humanism? As a defence I think not. Still, we must talk about character. When I was at university, I met students in all disciplines, and I noticed a pronounced—though not a precise—divide of character, between those in the sciences and those in the humanities. My library experiences aside, I found I could talk comfortably with the latter, but not with the former. This was not merely because I knew more about Shakespeare than about the Casimir effect: it was moreover because the humanists wanted to talk about their work. They did not see their studies as a 'job', whereas the scientists did. For the scientists, what they learnt was merely the means to an end, and after five o'clock they preferred to wind down over a pint and talk about the football results. When, therefore, I tried to talk to one about zero-point energy, the discussion went nowhere. But the humanists—well, more of the humanists—continued thinking about their studies after hours, and were happy to discuss them. Some even believed that what they were reading had relevance to their life.

Whether or not humanist studies do have relevance and importance outside of humanist studies is a significant question; but it is also significant whether or not a person has that attitude. Sometimes it is the existence of a belief, not its accuracy, that we want to evaluate. And so if humanists do not have a better character than non-humanists—if, in other words, they are no more virtuous, no more 'cultivated'—they do at least have a different character. That has been the case in my experience; and I hasten to add that it is a statistical, not a categorical, generalisation.

Humanists may be less brilliant, and certainly will be less rich, than their non-humanist brothers at university, but I warm more to their character. I don't think that their character is shaped by their choice of subject, but rather the reverse—they have chosen the humanities because of who they are. One of the best things about humanists—about the best humanists—is their anxiety. Upon reflection I began to admire the inarticulacy of the art-history graduates in their attempt to justify themselves, or rather, I admired what it revealed about their character. Those who are not anxious, reason; those who are anxious, attempt to persuade. The attempt to persuade—rhetoric—is at the heart of the humanist enterprise, and thus, so is anxiety. You can read the texts of the Snow-Leavis controversy and conclude that Snow had better arguments than Leavis—I think it is a difficult matter—but powerfully clear to me is Leavis's superior character. Snow is smug and self-assured—a 'smiling, jovial face' in Roger Kimball's words—where Leavis is impassioned and righteous (if not self-righteous), but also rude, unsettled, even anxious behind his rhetorical thunder.

Now, while some will regard anxiety as a failure of character, I regard it as a strength. It is, I would say, a more authentic, a more emotionally-realised form of the erotetic questioning, and especially self-questioning, that has been at the heart of philosophy since Socrates. The humanist who is anxious is better than the humanist who (like the scientist, or anyway the ideal scientist) questions dispassionately, because his emotions are better integrated with his reason, his intellectual quest. He is, we might say, more whole. Unashamedly, it is an aesthetic criterion. To me, dissatisfaction and unease are better signs than any other that I will like a person.

What I would like to have done with the art-history graduates is make their anxiety more explicit. One of the problems with academia, present and past, is that it tries to bury anxieties in a nest of imposed truths, for instance that of the Great Books, on which I intend to write a post soon. Such an attempt is, naturally, unavoidable in any institutional setting. Nevertheless, there is at least an inherent level of resistance, however small, among those characters drawn to the humanities; less present, I think, in those who pursue science or business. And character is so much more important than brains.

*

This does not yet offer us a reason to study the humanities, nor a reason to support the existence of humanist disciplines. After all, my preference for intellectually anxious characters cannot be an objective criterion upon which to build an argument! I am certainly not arguing that the humanities are superior to the sciences because the character of those who pursue them is a better one. I am not even saying that humanist characters are better at all.

But I do think that one argument for the support of the humanities, and for the pursuit of humanistic disciplines by those who are instinctively drawn towards them, is simply that their existence allows likeminded persons—specifically, those of a similarly anxious character—to meet and interact at a common level. I support liberal arts programs for the same reason that I support Alcoholics Anonymous, or BDSM clubs, or the Esperanto Society. It goes back to the problem of camaraderie, dismissed so lightly. And it is one reason I blog: not purely for the pleasure of writing, for the pleasure of the text—though there is that, undoubtedly—not even to put my thoughts in order; but for the opportunity to mingle with the likeminded, to feel not alone, and best of all, to be challenged where my convictions are strongest. They are not strongest on this matter, but then—that is the nature of the problem.

This is not my only response to that problem. But to my earlier question—For what should we be fundamentally striving?—the answer 'camaraderie' is not a bad one. Not an answer, certainly, to be ashamed of.

Update: Caressing the lovely face of the humanities, with The Nonist.