Funding is a Function of Meaning:
Reform the Humanities by
Recapturing their Utility

Editorial by Ersin Y. Akinci, Editor-in-Chief

Pray tell: what is the future of the university system and the departments in which the humanities are studied and taught?

An endless stream of professors and pundits has debated this question in our national publications with dramatic articles bearing quasi-apocalyptic titles such as “The Last Professor” and “End the University as We Know It”. At times, the fracas seems like a night at the theater. From stage left comes in the raucous protagonists brimming with ideas of how to extend benefits to adjuncts, establish long-term non-tenured contracts, and even abolish the departments. From stage right enter the antagonists under a sundry collection of banners, often contradictory but mostly opposed to changing the status quo, and embroidered on their flags are slogans: “Scholarship is for its Own Sake”, “Professors Against Academia, Inc.”, and my personal favorite, “Problems? What Problems?”

As engrossing as the scene is, the pundits never resolve the central dramatic tension, namely the inability of humanities departments to prevent their budgets and thus their ability to hire young scholars from shrinking. Yet the funding crisis is in fact a twofold problem that encompasses not only the aforementioned logistical and labor issues, but also the less discussed deep and ongoing doubt among scholars and intellectuals over the humanities’ worth and meaning. Ultimately, the fate of humanities departments will be determined by the market’s demand for their scholarship and teaching, and unless scholars themselves can convincingly address the worth of their academic pursuits, the public and those who allocate the budgets will not see the critical need for their services.

The connection between the logistics and the meaning of scholarship more generally reflects the debate between how to study and teach the humanities and why we do so. That discussion goes back at least to the great eighteenth-century Italian humanist scholar and professor Giambattista Vico (1668-1744), who was one of the first to argue that the study of human nature and institutions could not be performed with the same Cartesian method at the heart of modern experimentalist science. Yet when Vico wrote in his On the Ancient Wisdom of the Italians (1710) that “to introduce geometrical method into practical life is ‘like trying to go mad with the rules of reason,’” he was not merely criticizing the improper application of any specific method. It was his aim to establish the main condition for any future method that sought to attain certain knowledge of humans and society, which was that the study of human nature must be in line with its variability and must not “[attempt] to proceed by a straight line among the tortuosities of life”. He formulated such a method in his New Science (1725), in which he advocated an eclectic and humanistic mixture of practical wisdom with erudition, especially the study of history, myths, symbols, art, music, language, and rhetoric.

The fact that today’s scholars can hardly claim to know anything about human nature means that, in an absolute sense, Vico’s optimistic project failed. Nevertheless, his ethical argument that any method should deal with the “capriciousness, temerity, opportunity, and chance” by which human affairs are ruled, and thereby help us progress, still rings true today. This Enlightenment goal of improving the human condition through scholarship was a central part of the culture wars of the 1980’s and 1990’s with intellectual “conservatives” as the most visible defenders of the progressive ideal. However, their defense had a critical weakness in their rejection not only of the principles of postmodern criticism and its offshoots, but also in refusing to accept the postmodernists’ conclusions. It is one thing to reject, for example, the principle that the self is a fictional construct, but it is quite another to continue defending history as useful for edifying the self with exemplary values for personal conduct. If the latter were true, then the West, which propagated those exemplary values through the studia humanitatis it invented, would not have spawned two World Wars and the horrors of the Holocaust and Stalin’s purges. To ignore this reality is simply reactionary.

Nonetheless, although previous modes of scholarship and sets of values have failed to make us “better”, this does not necessarily mean that the project is flawed in principle. There may be no “better” in the traditional universal and absolute sense, but the utility of knowledge does not always depend on universality or absoluteness. For instance, Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle, which establishes that we can never know certain pairs of attributes (e.g., momentum and position) of any given particle at the same time with perfect precision, has rendered the physical world, in the most absolute sense, unknowable. Yet that unknowability has not prevented us from using physics to explain physical phenomena, building bridges, and making cell phones. Why can’t the humanities be similarly useful and reliable in the face of relativizing events? By using the example of Heisenberg, I do not mean to imply that modern physics can necessarily be equated with “progress” (although perhaps there is a strong case for it), but at least the concreteness of that field’s utility is virtually beyond question, which is more than can be said for the humanities at this point.

Ultimately, however, if we tie the debate over the worth of the humanities to the manifold of senses in which words like “wisdom”, “progress”, and “better” can be used, then today’s professors are committing the same error as their scholastic counterparts. Medieval scholars, too, debated how words have multiple or “equivocal” meanings and senses depending on context, such as how “bark” might refer to a tree’s skin, a dog’s sound, or the verb “to bark”. By reconciling these definitions they hoped to uncover the quiditas (literally the “whatness”) of things, or the universal essence of bark as it were. The postmodern apprehension to declare any insight into human nature assumes that in order to become wise, first one must claim to have found an immutable quiditas of man, or the soul in the traditional Western sense. I do not contest the impossibility of doing so. However, it may still be possible to gain insight and wisdom into ourselves through scholarship without perfectly knowing a universal and absolute soul just as science has illuminated the world around us despite our inability to know the physical world with arbitrary precision. Perhaps we have been asking the wrong questions. Wisdom, for instance, might not be the answer to “What is happiness?”, but rather “How am I happy?” or “How does happiness occur?” Progress might also be possible even though we do not really know what progress means, just as we make most of our decisions without consciously thinking of what they are, yet we still say that they affect us for better or for worse. These considerations leave us open to the Vichian hope that the humanities could improve our world and ourselves.

If all this sounds suspiciously pragmatist, it’s because it is, or at least in part. While reflecting on a lecture that he had given at Johns Hopkins in a letter to his eldest brother James Mills dated October 4^th, 1882, Charles Sanders Peirce (1839-1914) wrote that he “spoke of our time as an age of method and said that the highest honors could no longer be paid to the scientific specialist but to those who adapted the methods of one science to the uses of another.” This father of American pragmatism was then engaged in finding a principia methodorum, or “method of methods”, that would help find the right path to knowledge for each field, which is a far cry from Vico’s deliberately unscientific and exclusively humanistic and historiographical ideas. What they did share in common, however, was that they both worked from the example of modern science, and indeed this commonality cannot be boiled down to ideology or coincidence. As the English philosopher Francis Bacon (1561-1626) argued in his Novum Organum (1620), it is the utility of our concepts that establish the truth of their definitions, and by setting the gold standard for utility the modern scientific method which Bacon helped to seed has set and continues to set our standards for truth. Yet humanities scholarship has frequently inverted the relationship between utility and definition by first mandating structures and then expecting the world and its texts to follow. As long as we continue to follow such an approach, truth and wisdom will remain elusive and the world will have cause to ask what the humanities are really worth.

Now if only we could find the right method!

As scholars have been unable to do so, they have taken to self-criticisms in our public sphere that reflect the personal crisis each scholar faces: What is the value of my work? Accordingly, the answer to the question stated at the beginning regarding the future of the humanities in academia cannot just be an impersonal set of stage directions for a new mise en scène festooned with pension plans and pedagogies. It must be a scholar’s vision, probably a method, of what their work should be, not as a fixed and essential definition but rather as a thought of how we should engage in scholarship in order to achieve our abandoned goal, even if that goal defies precise (or any) definition. Critically, the vision must actually work, either superseding or supplanting the failed models of the past. If it does and if it is nurtured and marketed well, then the world will recognize its concrete worth and funding will surely be more forthcoming from alumni, institutions, governments, and other patrons of research.