We cannot count on the humanities alone to create better human beings. Stanley Fish is correct on this account in the first two parts of “The Uses of the Humanities” in the New York Times: http://fish.blogs.nytimes.com. We certainly cannot expect the common reader to view the pre-lapsarian Eden and the ensuing downfall of humanity in Milton’s Paradise Lost and find the value of uncritical adherence to authority and the dangers of worldly temptation. Milton’s reader has interpretive power that lies beyond any sort of authorial intention that he may have had as to the moral and spiritual implications of the work. A reader may readily accept the arguments of Milton’s sexy and rational Satan as the true key to worldly wisdom in the text. Readers likewise might cast aside Milton to find moral virtue in The Turner Diaries or discover fascist themes in Ezra Pound’s Cantos. Literature contains a multitude of ideologies and comments extensively on the human condition but is ultimately ambivalent to simple notions of right and wrong. Thus constructing the humanities as a “civilizing,” or “morally enriching” enterprise is fruitless activity.
Nevertheless, the humanities have certain value beyond the “athletic satisfaction from the experience of trying to figure out how a remarkable verbal feat has been achieved” that Fish proposes is the true worth of the study of literature. The humanities are a record of the ways in which people have constructed the “real” world, which is now attempting to value the humanities on their own terms. Both literature and attempts to interpret it belie the way people have imagined their world and their relationship to it. The humanities, in turn, are simultaneously an attempt to uncover those imaginations and a product of contemporary paradigms. This complex exercise, while never complete, constantly explores, revises, and chronicles the creation of our world, a social feat of imagination.
Take, for instance, the current interest in environmental studies in literature departments. The rise of ecocriticism is heavily enmeshed with current concerns of environment sustainability and the rise in political activity regarding environmental policy. However, exploring the environment in the textual world serves a very important function in the way that it uncovers how people have conceived of their relationship to the environment, and in participating in this critical inquiry, we can discover how we have constructed notions of our environment. An investigation of texts from the Western canon quickly show the anthropocentrism that has dominated our thinking about the environment, and the further exploration of poetry and prose from Native American and African cultures, for instance, offer new paradigms for confronting the environment. The world is how we imagine it to be, and the humanities study this imagination that lies behind monolithic narratives of rationalism and individualism.
Saying that the humanities cannot be assessed by any of the normal categories with which our culture confers value is just another way of shutting down thinking about the value of the humanities. Humanities departments can and must confront their role in contemporary society, and arguing that the humanistic enterprise is nothing more than end in of itself participates in an Aristotelian logic that privileges art for art’s sake. As Fish states, “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.” The humanities allow us to question the creation of those very values that it is being judged by. The interpretation of texts is not merely an athletic exercise but a way looking beyond the master narratives that organize our lives.
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