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'Constant revolutionizing of production, uninterrupted disturbance of all social conditions, everlasting uncertainity and agitation distinquish the bourgeois epoch from all earlier ones ... All that is solid melts into air, all that is holy is profaned.' Marx

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May 11, 2003

In an interesting response to this post by Invisible Adjunct on the status of the humanities Archidamus-on-the-Web makes the following comment. It is stated that:

"As for all the concerns about a dearth of intellectual community in the humanities, I've always thought the humanistic disciplines focused more than anything else on the cultivation of the individual. Even the most social of our activities--teaching--is focused (at least in my view) on individual students. Sure, the job market stinks, academic politics are petty and pathetic, but for now at least, my "job" is to sit around and read books. It'd be nice if I can make a career of it, or I might decide to do something else. But whatever I prefer, do I really have the right to complain if no one's willing to pay me to just sit around and read books and teach students information of questionable use?"

Are the humanistic disciplines focused more than anything else on the cultivation of the individual? Well, many liberals would say yes. We cultivate ourselves to make us better people (self-realization) than the engineers and the accountants. The culturvation of the mind is how the humanities understood themselves within the two cultures debate in the twentieth centur.

It was a plausible defence of the humanities once. But it would go down like a lead ballon in Canberra when philosophers hitched a ride on Virgin Blue to plead their case for more public funds for philosophy in the forthcoming budget. The politicians would like to hear something along the lines of the humanities as creative industries. I would not advise any philosopher trying to make that defence unless they wanted to get a bit of pleasure in being treated with contempt by those who tacitly understand Australia to be a nation of Hobbesian shopkeepers located in a space of mutual, unsociable antagonism.

Can we give a better defence of the humanities? One that sounds plausible? Here's one based on the aesthetic that comes from German philosophy. Its got legs as they say in politics. It is derived from salvaging what is usuable, viable, valuable, from a shipwrecked, liberal humanist tradition that once stood resolutely and proudly against instrumental reason of science.

The humanities speak of the humane, the concrete, particularity and humane subjectivity within a common world of everyday life. This stands in contrast to the formalism and abstraction of modern theory represented by the mathematical equations and computer modelling of modern economics. (Philosophically this division can be traced back to Aristotle contra Plato). So the aesthetic refers to sensuous human perception and emotion; it refers to a lived life with its sense of belonging in a common world.

This way of talking can be given a materalist twist by reading humane, concrete, particularity in terms of the sensuous human body. It is the body versus the theoretical. As embodied beings we are in the world as experiencing organisms not objects; and so we act in the world in terms of sensusous self-actualising activity.

We can then talk about the powers and capacities of the body and connect this to autonomy and self-referentiality as a mode of being. As embodied creatures we live a certain sort of life and require certain conditions to enable us to live a flourishing life. (Reading the 18th century understanding of aesthetic throught the Aristotlian tradition). Hence we have a certain kind of subject in early modernity: sensitive, passionate and individualist linked by fellow feeling and bodiy affection.

That bodily life is lived within a social order of modernity and it is shaped by habits, pities, customs, sentiments, affections, opinion (what Hegel called Sittlichkeit or concrete ethical life) as well as public law and abstract right. Within that liberal social order the particularity of bodily desire is educated or encultured (Bildung) through practice within a world of social bonds, sentiment and civic virtue.

Those of a lefty persuasion would then say that the creative capacities of the body are inscribed by law and mutilated by social structure, and so we have the suffering human body and a damaged life. Hence we have an emancipatory politics that has its roots in a rebellious, desiring body that recoils from the hegemony of the theoretical.

This justification has got legs. It goes without saying that asking for lots of public funds for a critique concerned about the suffering of others cause by the market and the state would not receive a good hearing from the educational reformers and bureaucrats in Canberra. You might get something if the argument was phrased in terms of a community of sensibility (need another word for sensibility) and mutual solidarity.

| Posted by Gary Sauer-Thompson at 12:56 PM | | Comments (2)
Comments

Comments

I actually don't think that such an extreme form of individualism was ever (until fairly recently) offered as a defence of the humanities. Or perhaps there was one strain that focused on individuality (what Mill called "experiments in living"), the cultivation of genius (in its post-romantic sense), and so on. But for the most part, the "humane" had to do not only with the development of the self but also with the self in relation to society (moral culture, civic virtue, and so on).

Yes I was thinking of J.S. Mill in the postt. But I was also was thinking of Leavis and a close reading of the literary canon making you more discerning and better.

But I reckon Leavis connected that moral improvement of the subject through becoming cultured (Bildung) to the critique of a rising mass culture.

Did this apply to the modernist New Critics in the US?--They were seen as formalists from memory.Is that right?

If reading literary texts was connected to moral culture and civiic virtue then my comments in the latter 'Academia: it is a miserable place' post apply. The language of moral culture and civic virtue etc has been hollowed out (reading that in terms of Nietzsche as the process of nihilism).

What I would add to that is that the humanities have lost their value, worth, and significance in a liberal social order. Hence their marginalisation. Technoscience has its hands on the throat of the humanities.