Why Study Humanities - 2444 Words

I want to take this occasion to address one of the most prominent criticisms of the humanities today. I am not referring to criticism of more recent vintage, which takes to task the humanities for a supposed excess of political correctness; this complaint we can set aside as the ideologically motivated lament that it surely is. Rather, I’m speaking of the more long-standing critique that takes the humanities to task for its inconsequence, its uselessness. The presumption that underwrites this critique is simple: its claim is that we do not learn anything by attending to the objects of humanities research. These objects – a poem, a film or play, a piece of music, or what have you – do not furnish our minds with information we can use.†¦show more content†¦Even if we are not prepared to go quite so far as Plato did, and denounce the poet for actively obstructing the search for truth, we may still need to answer to the charge that the objects of humani ties research – I’ll follow Plato in taking poetry as the paradigmatic example – teach us nothing. We need to ask then: what does the poet, or what does the humanist, know? I now want to turn to two poems of the British Romantic period that offer perspectives on this very question. We will recognize that in neither case is an unequivocally affirmative answer provided to the question of what the poet knows. Indeed, both poems would seem to confirm the premises of Plato’s criticism, inasmuch as they give expression to a type of knowledge that can barely be called knowledge as such, since it remains necessarily speculative, provisional, and incomplete. As I’ve suggested, this has been the ground on which the humanities has long seemed weakest in the eyes of its critics. Whereas Plato regards this kind of poetic thinking as useless and worse, however, we find in these poems a qualified defense of not-knowing, and a concomitant claim on behalf of what the poet John Keats called â€Å"half-knowledge.† Both poems make a brief for the importance of attending to thoughts principally characterized by their incompletion and open-endedness; they embrace a kind of thinking that pointedly does not resolve into determinate knowledge. And bothShow MoreRelatedThe Humanities And Its Impact On Education Essay1750 Words   |  7 Pagesinstitutions are cutting the humanities from curricula. 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