tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1504450248519120128.post8910249242147131143..comments2023-02-18T03:43:47.175-06:00Comments on APT Virtual Reading Group 2011: Chapter 6: Cultivating ImaginationUnknownnoreply@blogger.comBlogger5125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1504450248519120128.post-9897592093348182462011-07-23T00:11:09.971-05:002011-07-23T00:11:09.971-05:00Thanks Ed. I am sympathetic to the general claim ...Thanks Ed. I am sympathetic to the general claim that there is nothing wrong with an instrumental defense. However, I think that the way you set the question is different from Nussbaum and that it is important to highlight the difference. The question that you ask is how to defend the humanities. while for Nussbaum the question is how to defend democracy. The humanities is not the entity to be saved but the saviour. When she talks about the silent crisis in chapter 1, the crisis is not that there is not enough humanities. Rather, it is that “[t[hirsty for national profits, nations, and their systems of education, are heedlessly discarding skills that are needed to keep democracies alive” (p. 2).<br /><br />In a sense, the discussion that you have (or don’t have) with the evangelical who comes to your door is already a positive development. You both engage in a discussion about the meaning of the good life. The crisis that Nussbaum seeks to address is that with the systemic focus on profit-making we don’t have enough occasions for such discussions.Amit Ronhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/16547602064420042225noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1504450248519120128.post-11502329590783860822011-07-20T15:48:52.245-05:002011-07-20T15:48:52.245-05:00[Part 3]
Lest this sound reductive, I want to be ...[Part 3]<br /><br />Lest this sound reductive, I want to be clear that identifying the value of a liberal arts education for external audiences does not require we abandon our deeper, more important commitments. I teach the humanities because I believe, to the depths of my soul, that they provide the best possible education for a human being. My experiences as a student and teacher confirm that faith over and over again. But I also believe that the humanities have tangible, demonstrable benefits for students, employers, and society that emerge as something akin to by-products of my “comprehensive” goals. I see no harm and much benefit in defining these benefits in ways accessible to those who don’t share my faith, nor do I see harm in making public arguments in defense of the humanities that foreground these practical benefits. To convince someone to join a church because it will bring them local business contacts, provide good childcare, and give them access to a great softball league might undermine the sanctity of the faith, especially if (as we see with some churches) the pursuit of what should be by-products corrupts and overtakes the place of worship. But the humanities are not a faith and their sanctity cannot be corrupted by demonstrating their practical benefits. One can make business contacts in church without being touched in any way by the faith, but one cannot earn the external benefits of a liberal arts education without actually earning a liberal arts education. I believe the most important results of humanities education are the intrinsic, longer term, transformative, sometimes undetectable benefits to individuals who will live more fulfilling, well-examined, self-critical, thoughtful lives. But they will also gain the more conventional benefits of becoming better citizens, better employees, better critics and protesters, better parents, and better human beings. They will only get the intrinsic benefits if they are attracted to the liberal arts in the first place, and then only if the liberal arts are still available. A compelling demonstration of the capacity of the humanities to produce the conventional benefits is the most plausible way to insure that desire and opportunity persists. And that demonstration requires evidence in order to be effective in a public sphere that doesn’t share our faith. <br /><br />I’ll post something on evidence, and thus assessment, later in the week. Hopefully in one post of less than 4,000 words. I may not be cut out for blogging...Wingenbachhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/01143270259755742156noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1504450248519120128.post-87036758589600019502011-07-20T15:47:29.768-05:002011-07-20T15:47:29.768-05:00[Part 2]
This is, as Nussbaum ought to recognize ...[Part 2]<br /><br />This is, as Nussbaum ought to recognize but seems to miss, a deeply Socratic position: one cannot know the good based on the descriptions of others but only be brought to see the good themselves. Once the good is known, it is its own warrant; if the good is not known I cannot persuade you of its benefits. To invoke a different comparison, the arguments we in the humanities find most personally compelling are much like those religious communities find most forceful. When an evangelical describes to another evangelical the centrality of God’s love to their own happiness, the intended audience shares this experience. When the evangelical comes to my door and tells me I will only be authentically happy once I have experienced God’s love, I find this argument utterly unpersuasive. My life seems already full of love and happiness, and my heart of hearts is warmed by art, literature, and philosophy. What need have I of God’s love? The evangelical and I have nothing to discuss here: her metaphysical doctrine of human happiness brings her joy but is to me inexplicable, and the converse is true as well. If I were unhappy and confused, I might be willing to give the evangelical’s doctrine a try, and it’s not unlikely that similar arguments about the power of the humanities might convince some portion of the population to turn to philosophy for similar reasons. But to those who are already skeptical of or indifferent to the humanities, reiterating more loudly our comprehensive or metaphysical justifications of their value will make no headway at all. It’s as much or more likely to actively offend, especially when couched in terms of “human flourishing” and “real happiness.” It may well be that our comprehensive doctrine is true, and I’ve certainly lived my life as if it were, but insisting upon the superiority of one’s contestable comprehensive account of truth is more likely to get a citizen in a pluralist democracy branded an elitist, an authoritarian, or a zealot. None of which are likely to earn allies and support. <br /><br />So what’s our non-comprehensive, publicly accessible justification of the study of the humanities? In part it must be instrumental. Nussbaum isn’t wrong to try and associate the humanities with deeply held public values like democratic citizenship. So part of our argument depends upon our ability to articulate the skills and dispositions necessary to democratic citizenship, and then to demonstrate how an education in the humanities fosters these outcomes. That might be a book or two on its own, especially if the argument were developed with discipline and rigor. A plausible public argument might also appeal to the less elevated interests of the population by connecting the results of a humanities education to success in the marketplace or society. Nussbaum is willing to invoke this sort of claim when she declares that “again and again liberal arts graduates are hired in preference to students who have had narrower professional education” because such graduates are better prepared to succeed in the dynamic and creative world of work (112). That she offers no evidence to support this claim, and that salary surveys at least would indicate professional or technical education offer more immediate value to graduates, does not make the underlying impulse any less valuable. I’ve no doubt the elite liberal arts students Nussbaum encounters at Chicago and Harvard often get hired in preference to the professionally trained from lesser schools, but for those students at the vast majority of the thousands of degree granting post-secondary institutions outside the Ivies and their ilk, such a claim borders on ludicrous. It might, however, become true if we could demonstrate in compelling ways that a liberal arts graduate outperforms their professionally trained peers across the set of skills employers value.Wingenbachhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/01143270259755742156noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1504450248519120128.post-14129834164697449912011-07-20T15:46:04.461-05:002011-07-20T15:46:04.461-05:00[I wrote out a post in response in word, but it ex...[I wrote out a post in response in word, but it exceeds the blogger character limit. Rather than edit, I'm going to post three connected comments...]<br /><br />Thanks for the thoughtful comments, Alisa. I want to use your post as an opportunity to make some remarks less directly related to Nussbaum and more focused on the broader issue of defending the humanities. As I’ve been watching the debates in the comments, I became interested in discerning the different types of arguments we might offer to defend and extend the study of the humanities, and which arguments are best suited to which audiences. As I traced various types I began to think that the defenses really fall into one of two camps: metaphysical and pragmatic. Most of us devoted to humanities education derive that dedication from deeply held comprehensive and/or metaphysical commitments. We have faith in the power of the humanities to transform human beings because we have experienced it ourselves and have helped others experience it as well. But this sort of argument is not well-suited for the type of debates Nussbaum hopes to influence. Appeals to the intrinsic value of the humanities, to the “buzzy excitement” of intellectual inquiry, to self-examination as the condition for happiness, will persuade only those already in our camp. What we need instead are pragmatic arguments that those who do not share our commitments might nevertheless endorse. In a democratic society we need to be able to communicate to those who do not and may never share our faith that they should nonetheless devote collective resources to our passion. I think it worth mulling this distinction a bit, and I think (despite my serious reservations about his work) Rawls can provide a helpful frame for that consideration. I also think such an analysis will help clarify my concerns about assessment (not, I insist, and will insist later, testing or quantification: only piss-poor assessment insists on that type of simplistic methods).<br /><br />As most readers here will know, in Political Liberalism Rawls distinguishes the comprehensive moral doctrines of citizens from the publicly held conception of justice which rests upon no deeper metaphysical assertions (I find this distinction problematic, but that’s not relevant to this post). Citizens of liberal democracies hold a wide variety of contradictory comprehensive moral doctrines, justified by an equally incommensurable diversity of metaphysical commitments. Since no comprehensive doctrine can claim adherence from all under conditions of reasonable pluralism, the conception of justice regulating public life must be one that all can affirm, and thus it cannot invoke any sort of metaphysical claims for its own justification. Should such a conception come into being, presumably because people find the benefits of living in a well-ordered society compelling, citizens will also come to recognize that public arguments about political matters cannot invoke private comprehensive or metaphysical beliefs, as other citizens will not find such claims legitimate. Instead public reason demands that citizens articulate justifications that might appeal to all, regardless of their incompatible comprehensive doctrines. <br /> It seems to me the defense of the humanities I hear most often from my peers appeals to a comprehensive moral doctrine. This defense depends for its power upon the audience sharing the faith of the proponents, and tends to invoke the benefits of the humanities that “we all know” accrue but are difficult to explain to those without our experience. To take one example, the argument that authentic happiness requires living an examined life can only be persuasive to those who’ve lived both an examined and unexamined life and thus know the former is superior. But those who believe they are truly, deeply happy living a shallow life of convention are likely to find this claim odd, nonsensical, or insulting. To accept the argument one must already share the metaphysical commitments undergirding it.Wingenbachhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/01143270259755742156noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1504450248519120128.post-16131770328015417012011-07-19T16:58:55.820-05:002011-07-19T16:58:55.820-05:00Thanks to Ed for a great post. He provoked a lot ...Thanks to Ed for a great post. He provoked a lot of thoughts, but I was reading Ross Corbett’s response to Rehfeld’s “Offensive Political Theory” yesterday, and their disagreement about where political theory fits within political science reverberated (for me, at least) with many of the issues Ed raised in his post. Among other things, Ed called for improved assessment of the humanities in order to convince those who are not already sold on the idea of the humanities that the humanities are worthwhile. I think this sounds exactly right from a strategic point of view, if we want to convince non-believers that humanities education is relevant and worthwhile. <br /><br />But it is problematic, if it suggests that humanities education is only valuable if it can be measured. This gets at the heart of a question that I’ve struggled with for some time now: are the humanities, which (we hope) inspire some kind of critical, expansive, and transformative thinking, conducive to measurement or “assessment”? <br /><br />We live (well, I live, anyway) in a world where the answer is that ALL learning is conducive to assessment , and we teachers are left trying to figure out how to assess a kind of learning that is often blurry, delayed, and frustrating for students. Indeed, I value this kind of learning precisely because it is so complicated, and I think that students don’t often understand that they are learning. And maybe I’m too quick to suppose that this is unquantifiable because I don’t really want it to be quantifiable. I can’t imagine that most analytics can capture the spirit of the hard thinking we want our students to do (how do you assess a student’s capacity to think critically about how free s/he is? About what justice means? About how they determine which states are legitimate and which aren’t?). Honestly, I don’t even give tests in my classes because I’m more interested in students learning to make sustained arguments than I am in whether they remember the difference between Locke’s and Rousseau’s social contracts. At the very least, I would say that way I evaluate my students (which, I think, mirrors the kind of assessment that would indicate that I am achieving my pedagogical objectives) requires a very complicated scheme of determining whether they can understand abstract ideas, make arguments, draw distinctions, etc. I don’t know how to assess that. It’s not that I think it’s impossible, but I don’t think that those who call for assessment want anything more than a table of stats to prove that our students are actually achieving A, B, and C. Easy answers. <br /><br />And maybe that’s a problem—people want quick, easy stats to tell them that education is working (think of the standardized accountability mechanisms of No Child Left Behind). The irony is, the very thing that might convince these folks that it is all a bit more complicated than that (that there are not always easy answers) is reading something in the humanities—some Aristophanes, maybe, or some Foucault--that challenges them and convinces them that the world is much more complicated than certain kinds of quantifiable data would have us believe. Which is to ask, how do we convince people that the humanities are important if they have already rejected the idea that the world revealed by the humanities—a complicated, convoluted world—even exists? <br /><br />I’m not trying to say that quantifiable, empirical approaches to knowing are unimportant. I think they are important and invaluable. But they are also different from other approaches to knowing, and we might be doing ourselves a disservice by trying to find ways to suggest that all approaches to knowing are the same. <br /><br />AlisaAlisahttps://www.blogger.com/profile/15977565091786458078noreply@blogger.com