The Place of Humanities in Our Universities

Mrinal Miri

• Publisher: Routledge India
• Year: 2017
• Print ISBN: 9781138106383
• eBook ISBN: 9781351252485
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education General

This volume examines the critical role of the humanities in universities in India and attempts to redefine its place, meaning and function in education. Bringing together distinguished scholars in the country, it debates the status and predicament of the humanities in the academic programmes within universities. The issues raised here touch upon the entire gamut of problems that a university faces in finding an adequate, rightful and wholesome place for the humanities in its academic curriculum. It discusses the difficulties in the specific identity of disciplines classed under the humanities, the powerful reach of the sciences and technological inroads in the teaching and practice of all disciplines, the relative academic balancing of disciplines in different universities in India, the culture, value and the idea of the university, digitisation of the humanities and online access and their specific impact on research in the concerned disciplines. The volume also presents an instructive debate on the so-called appropriation of traditional social science concerns by other departments.

This book will interest those in education, humanities and social sciences, governance and public policy, and South Asian studies.

1 The humanities in the English-speaking West

Akeel Bilgrami

There is, understandably, widespread boredom with the topic of the ‘Humanities in Crisis’. In the Western world the crisis has been declared repeatedly for over half a century (perhaps from even much earlier – ever since the rise and consolidation of modern science). Anything so chronic cannot properly be described as a ‘crisis’. So, a new rhetoric is needed every decade or so to uplift us from the boredom the topic induces and to make it seem as if it is acute rather than chronic.

One kind of incoherence lies in the fact that even as the overwhelming domination of STEM is protested, there is also a simultaneously voiced alarm that universities are not filling the seats in their Engineering schools because in the last quarter century or so the weight of emphasis in the economy has shifted from industrial capital to finance capital, so students are flocking to Business schools instead. That takes the E, possibly some of the T, out of STEM. And for a longer period than this, especially during the years of the dominance of computer science prior to the obsession with the finance industry, there has been protest about the neglect of the more purely theoretical aspects of Mathematics and Science. So there you have it – every letter in the acronym is in varying degrees both asserted and denied at the same time in describing our anxieties. Why, then, should we address this incoherently understood ‘crisis’ at all?

The more interesting question would be to look not at the allegedly destructive neglect of the Humanities, but rather at the internal trajectories within the Humanities in the last many years, and ask: Is there health in what we find?

If one steps back some distance to ask what large transformations have occurred in the Humanities in the last half century, one couldn’t help noticing something conspicuous roughly around the creative turmoil in universities in the 1960s. What many student activists were protesting in that period, apart from a criminally waged war in Vietnam, was really the capitulation both of the natural and the social sciences in their universities to an increasing link that had grown during the cold war between the intellectual pursuits of these disciplines on the one hand and the interests of governments and the corporations that governments by and large serve in the United States, Europe, and countries such as Canada and Australia. This subservience of the academy had the effect not only of turning the most highly funded research in these fields towards profit-oriented ends, nor only of turning many scholars into aspiring advisers to the prince, or those in power, but, even when not worldly in this debased sense, the equally striking effect of almost completely evacuating in research and in the curriculum, the conceptual, the historical, and, above all, the value-oriented aspects of the social and natural sciences. (The great excitement generated by the publication of Thomas Kuhn’s book The Structure of Scientific Revolutions in this period flowed from the fact that it reminded us just how much values, and politically and socially normative and institutional considerations in particular, affect the otherwise illusory appearance that science is a value-free form of inquiry.) What all this did to the Humanities is of no small importance.

One way to understand the very specific kind of centrality that English and Comparative Literary studies came to have in the decades after the 1970s is that they began to pick up the slack created by this abdication by the social sciences of the value-oriented aspects of their disciplines. Questions of identity based on race and gender and sexual preference that came to dominate literary intellectual pursuits and the rise of politically driven ‘cultural studies’ were all symptoms of this recovery within ‘Criticism’ of what was being ignored by the social sciences.

Let me illustrate the point with a very specific and pertinent example. Something like this, I believe, explains the great interest generated in these recent decades by the work of Edward Said.

It should have been obvious to anyone that there is no understanding a vast variety of phenomena in modern and contemporary political economy (and society, more broadly) without coming to serious grips with the fact and long history of colonialism and its effects. But no Economics department made central, or really even passing, reference to colonialism in its curricular or research agendas. Nor do they now, with only the rarest of exceptions.

It took an exiled Palestinian literary critic who was moved by one of the few persisting colonialisms of our own time in his own land to bring to the attention of the Western academy the general importance of imperialism in shaping a wide variety of phenomena that the social sciences should have taken within their stride.

Their refusal to do so put Said’s work on the map, a map perused by all of the Humanities and by many frustrated and marginalized social scientists imprisoned in the narrow strictures of their discipline. (I should not exaggerate the point since I think some of Said’s main ideas had – long before him – surfaced in the field of Anthropology in the work of those who criticized some of anthropology’s assumptions when it travelled into distant fields for its research. But Anthropology has never had a central place in the social sciences in a way that English has in the humanities, and these critical attitudes needed that more conspicuous platform to catch fire.)

A further reason for the dominance of English in the Humanities is that it became a hospice for philosophical interests that went beyond the mostly arcane philosophical analysis that was done in Anglophone Philosophy departments. I don’t mean to suggest that what is done in these departments should not be done. Nobody should be deprived of being interested in interesting things. It is the overwhelming dominance of these remote forms of analysis at the cost of excluding other broader philosophical pursuits that I am lamenting.

For centuries, the subject of philosophy was entirely continuous with natural science and the study of political economy, politics, history, and intellectual history. But in the last many decades ever since the subject has been turned into a profession in universities, the careerism that this generated had the effect of making philosophy stand apart as a site of jobs with its own self-standing topics done in independence from the knowledge pursued and provided in other departments in the university; as a result Philosophy self-consciously developed its own irrelevance to the point now that hardly anyone reads the work of the central fields of analytic philosophy (metaphysics and epistemology, for instance) except for analytic philosophers. I don’t know of any subject in the Humanities and Social Sciences that are only read by their own practitioners. Historians read political scientists, sociologists read economists, but it is rare that anyone reads most of analytic philosophy except for other analytic philosophers. (A few exceptions like Rawls simply serve to prove the rule.) This will no doubt ensure that the few jobs there are in analytic philosophy in universities will be preserved for those doing that subject exclusively, uncontaminated by a knowledge of and interest in other disciplines; but this ‘professional’ development at the same time has ensured that this is a coterie discipline, with little reach of the sort it once had into public life and the variety of knowledges that ground public life. It is sometimes thought that Philosophy today does reach out to inform itself of psychology and cognitive science and natural science and so there is, after all, intellectual traffic between these disciplines. But the sad fact is that the traffic is all one way (again with a very few exceptions that serve to prove the rule). Philosophers may read and know some of these sciences, but hardly any scientists in those areas read these philosophers.

Such efforts as there are to make philosophy extend itself to a range of issues of public concern, therefore, tends once again to be done in the thematic refuge that is provided by English Departments.

Now, of course, we all ought to be grateful that a subject like English has stepped in to, as I put it above, pick up the slack created by the narrowing turn taken in the social sciences and philosophy, but a question arises as to whether this is an entirely healthy development since, at least prima facie, it would seem that it is not very likely that a subject’s wider relevance and its reflective concern for questions of value that affect its ideas, will be best pursued at a site so remote from its natural home.

Grateful as we must be to English, we cannot help noticing that the study of colonialism, to take one example, or of the issues of power and value as they affect our knowledge of society, would be better done if they were done rigorously by those more knowledgeable of political economy and politics and sociology, and more trained in philosophical analysis than literary scholars. Yet things have not turned out that way. Deprived of their natural home they are valiantly and generously, if often sloppily, pursued in a department, which is not their natural setting.

The dilemma here is vexing. On the one hand (horn) the social sciences and philosophy impoverish themselves and leave it to the Humanities and English and ‘cultural studies’ in particular to pursue aspects of their disciplines that reach wider than what is allowed by the quantitative and the arcanely analytical methods they have allowed to entirely dominate their subjects. And on the other hand, when these wider themes are taken up at a site so distant from their natural place, they are unsurprisingly very often pursued with a lack of rigour and a lack of full and knowledgeable understanding of the detailed issues at stake.

It takes a little reflection to notice that this dilemma is a symptom of much larger tendencies of modernity in which science came to be understood in a dichotomous relation with the humanistic disciplines, to the detriment of both. In a recent article protesting the critique of ‘scientism’ by humanists, Steven Pinker (2013) urges – sensibly enough – that humanists would do well to keep science, its methods and its results, constantly in mind as they address their own questions. There is no gainsaying that. It should be a banality. But the article shows little understanding of how much scientism in the social sciences was in fact responsible for the creation of the dichotomy he wants to rightly undermine. He describes those who think that there are no questions about the world (natural and social) that natural science cannot eventually tackle as ‘lunatic’.

But that position is not a lunatic fringe position of our time. It is a widespread outlook that has slowly congealed around both natural and social science (I emphasize that it is an outlook around science, not science itself) and it came to define ‘nature’ itself as ‘that which the natural sciences study’, thereby evacuating nature of all value properties. It is this outlook that is called ‘scientism’, and I daresay it is a superstition of modernity. By superstition, I mean that we take it on trust even though nobody knows when it was proved and certainly no one knows how it helps one to live better. So widespread is the superstition that the natural sciences have full coverage of nature (by full coverage of nature, I don’t mean that natural science has succeeded in explaining all the properties of nature, but rather that it is considered the business of natural science to seek to explain all the properties of nature) that if one were to deny it, one would often be described as ‘unscientific’.

But this is a grotesque non sequitur. One can only be unscientific if one contradicts some proposition in some science. And no science contains the proposition that science has full coverage of nature.

The outlook has had a tremendous effect on the nature of disciplinary pursuits in the academy as well as on public life generally – that is to say, on politics, political economy, and the environment. I won’t in a short opinion piece try and elaborate how this is so, but I will say this: it is smug and shallow to say that scientism is not all that bad on the grounds that humanistic concerns should be informing themselves of science. Of course humanistic concerns should be informed by science, but if they are not it is at least partly because natural and social scientific concerns came to be understood with an imperviousness to a wide range of properties of value, meaning, and power, which set up an abiding dichotomy between science and the Humanities – and whatever it is that resolves and removes this dichotomy, it will not be scientism, at least not the scientism that created the problem in the first place.

So to conclude and summarize these brief remarks: The literary Humanities and so-called ‘cultural studies’ today do far too much of what the Social Sciences and Philosophy should be doing and were the Social Sciences and Philosophy to return to doing it in a broad and humane (rather than scientistic) re-configuration of their disciplines, the literary Humanities could return to being their intellectual partners in what might emerge as a coherent and rational disciplinary layout in our academic lives – exploring within their rightful domain the substantial issues that emerge in literature and art and culture, but informed, as Pinker advises, by the methods and results of the natural and social sciences, so reconfigured.

Reference

Pinker, S. 2013. Science is not your Enemy. New Republic. https://newrepublic.com/article/114127/science-not-enemy-humanities

2 Re-defining the humanities

Place, meaning, function

Supriya Chaudhuri

In the twenty-first century, it is worth reminding ourselves that the definition of the humanities with which we have been accustomed to work is a loose collection of attributes and disciplines derived from Cicero’s notion of the studia humanitatis, added to by centuries of ‘liberal arts’ practice and pedagogy. Both have their roots in the Western academy, and in a certain idea of the ‘university’ as well as the ‘universal’. Within that institution, the concept of ‘humanism’ itself has come under attack, though the definition of the humanities disciplines has remained largely uncorrected. For us in our century, at our place and time, it is necessary to ask what the ‘humanities’ disciplines are, what function they perform, whether it is necessary to dismantle them, and what their future is. In this chapter, I will look briefly at the relation of the humanities with the human, and ask whether we need to make the definition of the ‘humanities’ broader or more restrictive.

I will focus particularly on the fact that the ‘human’ itself is a complex collection of ideas, none of them unchallenged in a philosophical climate sometimes described as ‘post-human’. I will ask whether we should accept the lazy interpretation of the humanities as the ‘non-mathematical’ disciplines, or whether we need to investigate the term itself more closely. This will bring in the relation of the humanities with the liberal arts, which traditionally included the sciences. For it would clearly be a mistake to attempt a re-definition that simply widened or narrowed the scope of the term without actually asking questions of the disciplines that, for good or ill, have generally been thought to fall under this label. That is, it is not a terminological problem that we have to solve, though the term has a history: what we’re addressing is the question of what we should read and why, and how knowledge is constituted.

One might even say that the terminological problem by itself would be trivial, and of course that term (trivial) has a history too, one connected to the history of the humanities. In early modern Europe, the studia humanitatis ac litterarum (a phrase used by Cicero in his oration Pro Archia) (Ciceronis 1966: 3) came to be reduced to the first part of the liberal arts, those taught in the trivium, that is, grammar, logic, and rhetoric, as opposed to the more advanced disciplines of the quadrivium, that is, geometry, arithmetic, music, and astronomy. (The modern sense of the word trivial, for which Shakespeare is at least partly responsible, derives from this sense of juvenile pursuits). But Cicero himself, when he referred to the study that pertains to humanity, or, as he repeatedly suggests, forms one towards being human, did not exclude what we would, today, call the sciences. In fact, he seems to have viewed the whole of classical education as covered by this term. In De re publica, he cites a story told by ‘Plato, or someone else’, to the effect that after a storm had thrown him up on a deserted shore, he glimpsed geometric patterns on the sand and called out to his companions to be of good cheer, for he had seen the signs of men (Ciceronis 2006: # 1.29). Language and mathematics, then, figure equally in this classical view as being characteristically the property of human beings, and the universe of letters comprehends all those human arts by which, Cicero says, we come to know the infinity of things and of nature.

The reduction of the studia humanitatis to mean the arts of language alone took place during the Renaissance – which, when we were students, was called the victory of the trivium over the quadrivium. Not only did the profession of umanista, the teacher of the humanities disciplines of rhetoric and dialectic, emerge in late medieval universities, but the early Italian humanists – Coluccio Salutati, Pierpaolo Vergerio, and Leonardo Bruni – consciously re-defined the studia humanitatis in the interests of a new pedagogy, focusing on the study of poetry, history, moral philosophy, and the best models of Latin style. It was this that led to a split between the arts of language and those based on mathematics or physical observation. Galileo, at the start of another decisive shift in intellectual territory in the seventeenth century, went on to assert that mathematics is the language in which the book of nature is written (Galilei 1957: 238). I will not go into the long and complicated history of how, subsequently, the notion of the humanities comes to be still further reduced with the self-definition of the ‘social sciences’ in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. By the end of this process, after the sciences and the social sciences h...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Notes on contributors
• Preface
• Introduction
• 1 The humanities in the English-speaking West
• 2 Re-defining the humanities: place, meaning, function
• 3 The place of humanities
• 4 The predicament of the humanities: reading through Bill Reading’s The University in Ruins
• 5 Humanities in the age of their digital operability
• 6 The indispensability of humanities
• 7 Are we in for post-humanist post-humanities?
• 8 Some staccato observations on interactive studies
• 9 Imaginaries of ignorance: five ideas of the university and the place of the humanities within them
• 10 What humanities/social sciences can mean: transmuting the ‘two cultures’ idea
• 11 MOOCs: virtual but not virtuous
• 12 The place of humanities in university education
• Index