Humanities

I have always understood the need for theology based on the
admonition of Paul’s Epistles, but I have come to prefer the translation
“salutary teaching” to “sound doctrine.” The former translation conveys,
rightly in my view, the interrelationship between the health of the teaching
and its capacity to bring health to the student.

The purpose is to underscore what ancient philosophy had
understood about itself and the purpose of the liberal arts. At their best, the
humanities should lead to human flourishing. As Augustine discovered when he
read Cicero’s exhortation to philosophy, his heart was profoundly changed so
that he became a genuine lover of wisdom. In the words of Paul, salutary
teaching produces piety or godliness, which gives rise to a moral life grounded
upon the intrinsic social nature of human existence. Piety concerns the proper
relational bonds between humans and creation, one another, and God. This is the
basis upon which Christians could embrace the humanities and the liberal arts.
The humanities contribute to human flourishing by adjudicating between
approaches to the moral life and opening the person up to transcendence.

I thought of this recently as I re-read Harvard’s report on
the humanities “Mapping
the Future” in light of the debate over academic freedom that Peter
Lawler addressed. Faced with the difficult task of reviving student
interest in the humanities, the committee chose to focus on defining them in
terms of preparing students to engage in the liberating transformation of life.
This is the meaning of liberal in the
liberal arts or the humanities. The result has led to a strong tension in the report
that, as Thomas
Lindsey notes, translates into Harvard wanting “to have its relativist cake
and eat its academic freedom, too.”

The report describes the liberating effect of the humanities
as instilling the capacity to critique from a disinterested perspective—the Enlightenment
contribution to education. There are three traditions derived from the humanities
that inculcate this capacity, according to the report. The first is a tradition
of criticizing errors in texts and approaches to historical periods
commensurate with Renaissance humanism. Like their forebears, classicists must
practice a “suspicious hermeneutic.”

The second is a tradition of “disinterested, artistic
enjoyment” that moves beyond the ideological content conveyed by any work of
art to an appreciation of the beauty and form of the piece. Art can be
re-appropriated for its aesthetic value once freed from the ideology it
conveys. The third is a tradition that seeks to re-appropriate the past in the
service of identity politics. Through the lens of gender, race, and sexual
orientation, the past can be re-read in a way that creates “communities of
resistance,” which can become “liberating, transformative social movements.”

For “Mapping the Future”, the idea of the humanities as promoters
of human flourishing—their value as a humanism—seems entirely negative. The humanities
only teach us how to peer beneath the surface and find the ideological thread
or how to enjoy art and literature without the negative side-effect of forming
a positive moral self. The only self that is formed by the humanities is one
that can “withstand the mesmerizing, often dehumanizing force of powerful
institutions.”

In the latter half of the document, “Mapping the Future”
makes an interesting turn to talk about how the humanities can aid culture-formation
or destabilize it and asserts that the humanities must be employed responsibly
toward a better future. One gets the impression from this part of the document
of the need for a more integrationist model of the humanities in which
interdisciplinary studies become the means of constructing a holistic vision.

With its concern for historical truth and invocation of the
need to facilitate the cultivation of the human person and society, “Mapping”
at this point comes tantalizingly close to this vision only to fall back into
statements that “the fundamental sources of value in a culture are neither
necessary nor universal.” It cannot make up its mind as to what kind of person
the humanities should cultivate: a person who criticizes in pursuit of the
truth or an unmasker of ideologies who has given up the quest for truth and
settles for constantly unmaking and remaking the world.

What is needed is a teleology to bring the tradition of
critique together with the tradition of a holistic vision of life in the
service of human flourishing. It is unfortunate that “Mapping the Future” seems
so concerned with preserving post-1970s approaches to unmasking ideologies that
it takes precedent over “salutary teaching.” Why not develop a vision of the humanities
that seeks veritas through the
particularities of life? It is in this context that academic freedom finds
meaning—it supports a plurality of voices and traditions (past and present)
when debating what vision of human life maximizes flourishing, which is the
ongoing project of any society that seeks to perpetuate itself.

Without a teleology that sees justice, truth, and beauty as
more than human constructs, could this view of the humanities produce a Martin
Luther King, Jr. whose final speech at Mason Temple in Memphis offered a vision
of a promised land for African Americans and the American experiment as a whole? Without a teleology, has such a view
of the humanities relegated art and music to mere pleasure-producing?

While arriving at what is true, good, and beautiful occurs
through the particularity of human constructs, those transcendentals are not
reducible to such constructs. If educators want students to become interested
in the humanities again, they must reclaim this goal for any genuine humanism.