In Defense of the Humanities

"The paradox is that the stronger the case made for the utility of the humanities, the weaker the case for their support."

I return to concerns closer to home: higher education generally and academic freedom specifically. These columns are written under the shadow of the (perennial) “crisis of the humanities,” a crisis to which humanists have responded by mounting ever more elaborate (and unconvincing) justifications of the humanities as a practice that will save democracy, if not the world. These justifications, wittingly or unwittingly, have the effect of implying that the humanities have nothing to say for themselves, that any defense of them can only be instrumental. An instrumental defense of the humanities is a defense that rests everything on the humanities’ usefulness to some other project—a robust economy, the realization of democratic principles, a peaceful world. The question posed to the humanities is “What are you good for?,” and the answer is assumed to issue from a measure of “good” that the humanities do not contain. The answer given in the columns reprinted here is that the humanities are good for nothing, for that is the only answer that preserves the humanities’ distinctiveness.If humanistic work is valued because of what it does politically or economically or therapeutically, it becomes an appendage to these other projects, and in a pinch it will always be marginalized and perhaps discarded when its instrumental payoff fails to arrive, as it always will. The paradox is that the stronger the case made for the utility of the humanities, the weaker the case for their support. In order to be truly healthy, at least in an internal way, the humanities must be entirely disassociated from the larger world of political/ social/ economic consequences, must, that is, be appreciated for their own sake and for no other reason. Although the phrase “ivory tower” is often used in derision, it is one that humanists should embrace, for it is only by embracing it that the humanities, and liberal arts education in general, can be distinguished from the forces that are always poised to turn them to foreign purposes, to purposes not their own. The distinctiveness of the humanities and liberal arts education rests on their inutility, on their fostering a mode of thought that does not lead (at least by design) to the “practical” solution of real-world problems but to a deeper understanding of why they are problems in the first place and why they may never be resolved. That distinctiveness is compromised whenever the liberal arts dance to the tunes of politics, economics, citizen-making, or anything else. Moreover, it is only in the context of an enforced purity of motive—we do contemplative analysis; that’s our job, and we don’t do anyone else’s— that a defensible account of academic freedom can be formulated. If the work of the liberal arts is narrowly conceived as the search for knowledge, the freedom to pursue that work in a manner unimpeded by external constituencies that want inquiry to reach predetermined conclusions is an obvious and necessary good. 

Stanley Fish (2015). 

Think Again: Contrarian Reflections on Life, Culture, Politics, Religion, Law, and Education (p. xvii).  

Princeton University Press. Kindle Edition.