The Humanities in the World at Large

Through the last half-century – a very short time – the Humanities have come to be held in lower and lower esteem in the eyes of the public and of the official representatives of the people; as though the Humanities can now be seen to be ineffectual, obsolescent, of slight relevance to modern circumstances.  Since by tradition the Humanities are the heart of a university, the universities have also come to be regarded with quizzical contempt, except as far as they provide training for “practical” or lucrative professions.  The respect – the almost superstitious veneration – for the Humanities that propelled me as a child into classical studies, even at a time when Greek had vanished from the schools and Latin was rapidly disappearing – that regard has turned into an attitude of condescension, the mild compassion we feel for a dying species.  The earlier respect was generated by persons of incorruptible conviction; often people of some cultivation, but by no means all of them.  If the history of education in the early development of this country tells us anything, it is that a desire for education, to be able to realize the self to its full capacity, was a powerful and disinterested groundswell among people of all sorts and conditions; education was not seen as a desirable ornament jealousy preserved by a privileged few.  The history of the foundation of Canadian universities confirms this; so does the biography of most of the Canadians who are remembered for their lasting contribution to the quality of life in this country.

In talking about the Humanities we are talking about education: the nisus formatives, the formative impulse, of social man.  For several centuries, and until quite recently, the Humanities – or humane studies, as I should prefer to say – were acknowledged as the foundation, source and propaedeutic, not only for school-teachers, scholars and professors, but for those who (whether or not they intended to do so) came to play an active part in the life of society, and particularly in those ways of life in which clear thinking, versatility, articulate speech and writing, and accuracy of judgment were essential – in public service, in government, the church, the law, and other once-learned professions; not least in that most “practical” art of preserving the vitality of education itself, fostering and transmitting the learning without which knowledge has little substance and no cutting-edge, without which humane studies fail to heighten the quality of perception and the capacity for sustained reflection.  In two world wars, humanists from many walks of life have demonstrated their skill in worldly matters, their adaptability, their courage, clear vision, firm judgment; have left the academy to become leaders and have often chosen to return to the academy, considering that to be a responsibility worth having fought for.  Persons educated in the Humanities have for a long time been sought out for their intellectual and moral qualities – as administrators and leaders in government and university, as directors in industry and finance, and in highly technical fields.  It would be very strange (and wasteful) if that was not so.

How pervasive the rejection of the Humanities may be is difficult to assess; that the rejection is pervasive is an observed fact.  It is also an observed fact that our governments show little inclination or concern to reverse that trend.  Perhaps that is understandable at a time when government is consumed with a desire to control and predict; for governments seem to have redirected their efforts from “the art of the possible” to “the technique of the manipulable.”  Anybody who “refuses to obey any injunction the basis of which cannot be verified” is an enemy of order, an anarchist; and anybody who insists upon being human – that is, upon exercising the energy and inventiveness of his mind – is by definition unpredictable.  Teachers and humanists tend to be of that nature – disturbing, potentially subversive.  Such people can be expected to have a rough time in a computer-controlled society.  No doubt changes in social expectations, and certain generalized considerations of “social justice,” have placed upon our educational system a confusing burden unprecedented.  I have no doubt at all that teachers, from their very nature, can deal with that burden if they are allowed to do so; for their resilience and ingenuity, and their devotion to values other than mere “usefulness,” are indomitable.

If we examine carefully the way the wave of neglect of the Humanities has mounted in recent years, and as a response to what forces and influences, we may be able to decide whether the Humanities are indeed an archaic convention that should now be allowed to pass quietly out of existence; or whether (as I suppose) society has lost the thread – or has been induced to lose the thread – and is in danger of doing itself a serious mischief if they do not pick it up again pretty quickly.  That would not be merely a matter of formulating policies, but of finding and affirming as a basis for any conceivable policy an image of man, and believing in it.  I think we can infer pretty accurately from current policies, trends of fashion, market forces and other implied affiliations of interest what the dominant images of man are at present.  On the whole, they seem to me less than admirable.  I prefer the humanist’s image, the image necessarily in his mind’s eye throughout his reflections – not a generalized view but, in the artist’s way, a particular image – in the way Bronowski, for example, thinks of “the kind of man I honour: dexterous, observant, thoughtful, passionate, able to manipulate in the mind the symbols of language and mathematics both, and also the visions of art and geometry and poetry and science.”

The spectacular series of discoveries in atomic physics in the early years of this century, following hard on the dislocation of beliefs in the later nineteenth century by “scientific” theories of the evolution of man, established an unprecedented esteem for pure science.  Evolutionary theories of the origins of man need have had no adverse effect upon religion, but they did; the theory of relativity and the theory of quantum mechanics should theoretically have strengthened the position of the Humanities, but they haven’t.  As the power of pure science declared itself, and the cleverness of technology swam in its wake, it seemed that science was a conquering idea that would presently encompass the whole field of knowledge.  The fact that pure science and the Humanities are interdependent and complementary did not interfere with the common view that they were so distinct as to be contrary – that as the one advanced, the other must retreat; and a common definition of the Humanities became “all those studies that are clearly distinguished in content and method from the physical and biological sciences.”

To show that such a view is not only irrational but damaging to both is a subtle matter requiring a little patience to unravel.  But it can be shown briefly through the history of the two words “humanities” and “science,” and by considering a little the dynamic constitution of the human mind – that the two embody, not two mutually exclusive activities, but two complementary ways of mind that we all partake of.

The term “humanity” or “humanities” came into English in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries by way of French and Italian to represent the Latin word humanitas in the sense used by Aulus Gellius, Cicero and others: “mental cultivation befitting a man, liberal education.”  For Cicero this involved the study of literature, effective utterance, and the cultivation of the qualities and inclinations proper to mankind – good manners, consideration, compassion – a backward glance at Plato’s Guardians and a foretaste of the qualities ascribed by Thomas Arnold to the “gentleman.”  In the early middle ages seven “liberal arts” had been recognized: four of them mathematical and three to do with grammar, rhetoric and logic.  (Mathematics as an essential component in a liberal education is a view still held at Cambridge.)  This form of study represented intellectual cultivation, the training that produced it, and the refinement of the instruments proper to that training.  By the sixteenth century the central university studies were directed to grammar, rhetoric, poetry, and especially the received classics in Latin and Greek.  By 1535 “Lectures in humanity, that is, in the classical literature, were established in all colleges” at Oxford, and the School of literae humaniores (“Greats”) “made its way under the well-deserved name of Humanity to the head of the Faculty of Arts.”  The singular word “humanity” is still used in Scotland, but referring only to Latin studies.  (There is some seamy history in the background of all this, but to keep the picture clear let’s pretend there wasn’t: it didn’t in the end make much difference.)

The plural form “humanities” seems in some sense to have been accidental, though reinforced in recent years by the tendency for fields of knowledge to diffract into lesser fields, and by the tendency of each of these fragments to call itself a “discipline” (although there are probably no more than four or five definable disciplines – i.e., ways of adjusting the mind methodically – to deal with the whole field of knowledge.)  The word “humanities” may seem to refer to a number of subject-areas – e.g., philosophy, literature, history, language, social institutions – together making up the whole field of humane studies; but these are rather facets of a broad and intimately unified field of inquiry, the identifiable “subjects” representing, not divisions of the field, but reconciliatory adjustments to variations in the field and to the typical intent of the inquirer.

The word “science” is the English form of Latin scientia, meaning simply “knowledge.”  In the middle ages the seven liberal arts were indifferently called the seven liberal sciences, and much later the word “science” was used to refer to that part of “Greats” that dealt with philosophy, logic and associated matters.  Not until the end of the eighteenth century, largely on the success of Newton and Laplace, did “natural philosophy” presume to the status of “science” – that is, came to be recognized as a genuine and reliable form of scientia, knowledge.  It took about a century for the word “science” to be disengaged unambiguously into the sense we now exclusively assign to it: observed facts systematically classified and more or less bound together by being brought under general laws, including trustworthy methods for discovering new truths within its own domain.

In his Advancement of Learning (1605) Francis Bacon (considered by some the father of modern science) recognized “three knowledges, Divine Philosophy, Natural Philosophy, and Humane Philosophy, or Humanitie.”  For Bacon, the central term was “philosophy,” embracing all knowledge – as it had been in the capacious and systemizing minds of Plato and Aristotle, and later, up to the middle of the nineteenth century, in the minds of the great heuristic virtuosi and polymaths – Leonardo, Dante, Erasmus, Vico, Bentley, Goethe, Coleridge (to mention only a few).  It appears, then, that “the sciences,” which now seem to be counter to, even in aggressive conflict with, the humanities, evolved from the same single (ill-defined) focus of systematic reflection as the humanities.  We can also see that the apparent split between humane studies and sciences represents, not a dividing up of the field of knowledge, but the application to an increasing range of that field, of the “scientific method” that had triumphed in astronomy and physics, and that helped, with increasing momentum, to refine and concentrate the practical applications of physical laws and processes.

Both represent the increasing power of our abstractive capacities, and the specialization of each of the two phases or modes that all our minds exhibit, two ways of mind: the contemplative and the practical, the central process of the one being “synthesis” and of the other “analysis.”  Both ways of mind are the properties of all our minds; without the analytical mode the humanist could not refine and give substance to his reflection; without the synthesizing mode the physicist would not be able to make the imaginative leap that seizes the visionary possibilities of his glimpse of a luminous relation, a conceivable hypothesis, a possible law.  For it is clear that in no mind can mere facts or data generate the laws that order them.

In the interaction of the two modes we see the identity of intellect and imagination.  And the complementarity of the two modes is shown in the way poetry strives towards the condition of music, and science strives towards the condition of mathematics.  Yet music and mathematics, though apparently inseparable in the mind of Pythagoras, are not the same; and there are specific differences between humane studies and science because they proceed through different orders of abstraction – the one moving in one such order of abstraction towards something like “pure intellect,” the other more towards the physical specificity of perception.  That specific difference is a large one.  For the one (the scientist) is preoccupied with the world of nature; the other (the humanist) is preoccupied with the world of man.  All we know is that the two are bonded together in the nature of mind itself.

I should like to unfold that difference a little, by placing the emphasis on what I know best – the world of the humanist.  One of the distinctive marks of the humanist is his insistence upon handling everything “philosophically” in order to secure the integrity of the matter under inquiry, his central “facts” being not phenomena but “facts of mind.”  Through facts of mind and the reconstruction of facts of mind, he seeks to disclose and affirm the unifying vision that is the distinctive function of the mind.  In the face of the explosive disintegration of “knowledge” as “things-known,” and the apparent disintegration of the whole field of what is knowable into an infinity of mere facts of observation, his central reality is that remarkable integrative power for which we reserve the word “imagination,” seeing it as our principal means of making ourselves real, and of holding to the conviction that though knowledge is manifold, truth is one.

Let me illustrate the quality of mind that seems to me to represent well the humanist.  Listen to Paul Valéry, poet, man of action, as much a polymath as Goethe, a man of refined scientific instinct – reflecting upon the Greek genius for pure intellectual discovery.

Greece founded geometry.  It was a mad undertaking: we are still arguing about the possibility of such a folly.

What did it take to bring out that fantastic creation?  Consider that neither the Egyptians nor the Chinese nor the Chaldeans nor the Hindus managed it.  Consider what a fascinating adventure it was, a conquest a thousand times richer and actually far more poetic than that of the Golden Fleece.  No sheepskin is worth the golden thigh of Pythagoras.

This was an enterprise requiring gifts that, when found together, are usually the most incompatible.  It required argonauts of the mind, tough pilots who refused to be either lost in their thoughts or distracted by their impressions.  Neither the fraility of the premises that supported them, nor the infinite number and subtlety of the inferences they explored could dismay them. ... They accomplished the extremely delicate and improbable feat of adapting common speech to precise reasoning; they analyzed the most complex combinations of motor and visual functions, and found that these corresponded to certain linguistic and grammatical properties; they trusted in words to lead them through space like far-seeing blind men.  And space itself became, from century to century, a richer and more surprising creation, as thought gained possession of itself, and had more confidence in the marvellous system of reason and in the original institution which had endowed it with such incomparable instruments and definitions, axioms, lemmas, theorems, problems, porisms.

Valéry, who at the age of twenty-two wrote an essay “On the Method of Leonardo da Vinci” that still makes the hair bristle to read, also wrote a memorable record of his reflections upon a sea-shell.  In this he says something startling about ignorance, the matrix, the mothering confines of our knowing: that “Ignorance is a treasure of infinite price that most men squander, when they should cherish its least fragments; some ruin it by educating themselves, others, unable so much as to conceive of making use of it, let it waste away.  Quite on the contrary, we should search for it assiduously in what we think we know best.  In the matter of snails, I did my best to define my ignorance, to organize it, and above all to preserve it.”  He meditates upon a sea-shell.  He knows that, although he has no reason to question the foot-thick substance of the physical world, it is not actually the world he is getting to know, but his mind trying to look at the world, and his mind trying to look at his mind trying to look at the world.  That is the sort of thing Kant had been saying systematically, in his own way, starting with “Pure Reason”; and that is what Werner Heisenberg, the constructor of quantum mechanics, tells us is forced upon our recognition by modern atomic physics.  One is not surprised to find that Valéry was a friend of Einstein (who was also a class II violinist) – the man who (as Bronowski put it) changed Newton’s God’s-eye-view of the universe to the relativist’s man’s-eye-view of the universe.  Here again we encounter, in the physicist’s laws of probability and complementarity, the translucent impenetrability of the human mind as a marvellous instrument of knowing – for a long time a truism to the humanist.

Let me take a fresh nip and see whether, against the background of what looks like sweet reason, we can trace the way humane studies have fallen into contempt, overshadowed by “science” in public esteem.  Here we intersect with an easily recognizable world, in which special interests and politicians are at work, and in which the fallibility of human judgment is not far to seek.

A while ago, when the Russians put up the first sputnik, a notable wave of panic swept through the non-Russian world: everybody must be trained in “science,” and all national resources must (as far as possible) be redirected to that end.  This drastic, though no doubt politically plausible, piece of sail-trimming had a secondary effect that was probably never intended or foreseen in the corridors of power: the public dutifully lined up behind the latest policy, neglecting (as usual) everything but the punch-line: and the Humanities were thrown into the shade.

One of the most interesting peripheral manifestations in that era was the appearance in a not-very-widely-circulated English paper of a journalistic article: it was called “The Two Cultures.”  In no time at all it was a topic of earnest and tedious debate all around the world.  The interesting thing is that the author, whose prestige as a scientist was not of a particularly high order, set the cat amongst the pigeons by seeming to exalt the virtues of “scientists” above the virtues of the “humanists,” when he was in fact saying something quite different.  He made no serious attempt to examine or discuss the fundamental differences between science and the humanities as modes of inquiry or ways of mind; nor did he examine – in terms, say, of cognitive theory and human experience – the relations that might obtain between them.  What he was actually doing was launching, on a wave of sentimental rhetoric, a class action on behalf of “scientists” (honest and harmless moujiks he represented them as being, innocent of intent though wearing ragged clothes) against the alleged arrogance and obfuscation of a complacent and privileged upper class – the “humanists.”

The transmission of ideas has its own dynamics and its own laws, which, though empirical, seem to be absolute in contemporary society.  The First Law is “If what is said is bad enough it must be true.”  According to this law, Snow’s tirade – “One up for Science” – was bound to stick like a burr, especially when it was reinforced by the Second Law: “Indecent exposure is better than no exposure at all.”  For a time, the Third Law was operative: “If anything is repeated often enough it will certainly be taken for truth.”  After a while the Fourth Law (also known as the Nixon parallax) supervened: “If something is repeated often enough it will nauseate the hearer.”

The phrase “The Two Cultures” passed out of currency (as all vogues happily do), and now has something of the melancholy savor of a shameful overindulgence; but in its brief heyday it did a good deal of damage, some of it probably irreparable.  What was in fact a social and class issue was generally received as though it had metaphysical or epistemological substance.  An extremely subtle, profound and important distinction (between science and the humanities) was taken for a black-and-white division that implied that a chasm lay across the whole field of learning, marking one kind (or class) of person from another; technology – the great anti-humanist reaction – came to be confused with “science” and even to be called by the name “science” (although it is well known that a pure scientist or a mathematician is a person a humanist will dance a farandole with any day of the week).  In the universities all “disciplines” (i.e., distinguishable areas of study) were considered to be of equal educational value, and all claimed the right to equal exposure in the academic supermarket; and the word went round that the Humanities were obsolete, a relic from a dark age, and could no longer survive in the dry light of the modern age.  All these dangerous confusions, singly or in combination, are now pretty firmly established by the Third Law – truth by reiteration – even though the academic supermarket seems to be trying to change itself back into a village general store again, pot-bellied stove and all.

I venture to formulate yet another law – a Fifth Law: “The quality of an idea depends upon the quality of the mind that holds or transmits it.”  Corollary: a banal mind will reduce everything it touches to banality.  Conclusion: we are in danger, as a society, of feeling most comfortable in a Reader’s Digest world in which nothing is fit to be received into the field of attention until it has been predigested to that level of banality at which it can be readily absorbed, without effort, by a person of very modest intelligence.  The clear symptoms of the operation of this law are to be seen in the exaltation of journalism, and in the notion that the prim ingredients in modern intellectual activity are “information” and “entertainment.” 

A second panic has now set in – this one financial and economic.  Everything must now be turned to commerce, industry, finance, anything that will “attract investment” and “create jobs.”  A little cash may be spared for the fine arts because they produce objects and spectacles that can be put on display; otherwise all available funds must be withdrawn from any activity that can be classed as “unproductive.”  By definition, the Humanities can expect no mercy, because it is not their business to make things that can be put on display.  (Would you like to watch a professor reading a book?  Or listen to him giving a lecture?  On national television?)  It is their duty to teach people to think – whether through teaching or writing – and to help individuals to discover themselves and to realize the extent of their capacities; but all that is too imprecise and subversive a “goal” to merit a productivity rating.

In the first panic – the Snow-job – the humanist, though endangered, was still regarded with whimsical affection, as an endangered species, a duck-billed platypus or a whopping crane.  In the second panic, except for a few atavists who mutter about the importance of “basic education,” the Humanities are thought to be utterly irrelevant.  This attitude is more ruthless and far more dangerous to society than the first.  As university enrollments drop, and the chances of graduates getting any sort of jobs diminish, the brighter kids are moving away from the Humanities into medicine, law, commerce, economics.  I would not suggest that there is anything particularly brutish about training in any of those professions; and it is the case that you can’t escape into law or medicine without at least a smattering of the humane studies.  But I do suggest that there are some very important matters that fall outside the field of any of those professions, that need to be very carefully thought about if we are to avoid a descent into barbarism.  One question is whether economic determinism is the best net to get caught in if it’s swimming or flying we’re interested in.

In the crude mechanics of the “practical world,” where almost everything has to be done at the wrong time and without cool consideration, and fineness of intent is obliterated by the coarse-grained and rough-hewn results that usually accrue, the apparent outmaneuvering of the Humanities – cock of the walk for several centuries – looks like a pretty heady advance for modernism.  What it actually shows is the now well-known process of “politicization” – the confusion of terms in the rhetoric of expediency.  As Philip Guedalla once observed: “You can take any stigma to beat a dogma” – a variant on my First Law.  As long as any activity can be represented, or misrepresented, in the current jargon of politics, no matter of what color: Liberal, Conservative, Socialist, Marxist – it can be quickly shown to be either on the side of the angels, or ready for the outer darkness of neglect.  You can tell: when they take away your telephone, you know it’s time to take up bird-watching.

What I’m trying to do is to sketch out the process by which the public has come to its present attitude of neglect and apathy towards what has traditionally been the rock on which our education was built.  It’s hard not to be seeing enemies, even though the real enemy is the idle and uncritical mind.  It may sound as though I am establishing three categories: Humanities (good), pure sciences (different from humanities, but good – though of little direct human import); and between them technology (the worst of both worlds).  Let me modulate that scheme a little.

None of those three terms is entirely stable; nor are the bounding lines between them distinct – especially when we consider that all can be, and not infrequently are, encompassed by a single mind.  As I see it, the source of impatient misunderstanding is in the middle zone, only one aspect of which is properly speaking “technology.”  Technology at best provides instruments, tools and toys that are of neutral value until we begin to use them; at worst it provides devices and concoctions of such destructiveness or futility that, although they may be readily marketable, it is unwise even to contemplate using them at all.  Pure science, art, humane studies – those are all gratuitous, non-utile; technology is nothing if not useful.  But there is a curious inversion to the logic of technology: the logic that constructs usable variations on the principles of pure science automatically precludes the inferences that might secure their beneficent use, or the inferences that might determine the limits of their beneficent application.  In its designedness becoming almost a parody of pure science, technology seems to me rather like a monstrously ingenious idiot playing successfully with a very complex Meccano set.  (I happen to love complex machines, delicate instruments, triumphs of engineering.)  The sheer brilliance of some of the physical and chemical contrivances beguiles us into thinking that their uses are as benign as their ingenuity is elegant: it would not take much effort to call up examples – but I refrain.

A more serious aspect of the “middle zone” is represented by the para-sciences – those activities in which an attempt is made to apply scientific and statistical method to areas of inquiry into human matters that humanists have traditionally considered in a qualitative manner: psychology, certain kinds of history, politics, and economics; linguistics; that curious hybrid sociology; anthropology; and some others.  I have already suggested that these attempts do not constitute an invasion of territory or a take-over from the Humanities.  Yet there are no grounds that I know of for considering that “scientific” inquiry into our “inner goings-on” or into the state of society is so clearly superior to a philosophic approach that everybody but “scientists” must withdraw from those fields.  Much of this work is still at a rudimentary level, working from limited, even bizarre, hypotheses; but there is no reason why they should not have a contribution to make; and indeed valuable contributions have been made, and continue to be made.  But scientific method – with its exclusion of value judgments, its attempt at “objectivity” (i.e., the theoretical exclusion of a human observer), and its limited assumptions about fact and causality – does not look like the most promising instrument for exploring the complexities of perceiving, knowing, feeling, recognizing, interpreting, judging.

Be that as it may, what concerns me most of all is the way the philosophical nature of humane studies has suffered attrition from within its own ranks, presumably under the pressure of the success of “science”; with the implicit assumption (seldom if ever uttered) that the study of literature (for example) should become “scientific” so that its results will be “cumulative.”  I can think of no other reason for the narrowing of the field of inquiry as I see it in the study of literature: with the exaltation of the “specialist,” the suspicion of the generalist, the retreat from inquiries that necessarily intersect in the study of literature – philosophy, psychology, epistemology, ethics.  If it is the case that the true humanist is free from the absolutes equally of the philosopher, the scientist and the artist, then a drift of humanists towards a parascientific specialization is a disturbing manifestation.  Certainly it produces some very unlovely writing, and presents to the world an uncouth image of the humanist.

Another troublesome symptom is the way the CBC has been forced from its founding intention to a steady diet of “news, reviews, and interviews”; and the way the Canada Council has been divided up with a shift of directive authority that suggests a shift of intent from disinterested to interested.  I refrain from comment on the CBC because I have always admired its best work.  And I pass by the splintering of the Canada Council in silence – except to object to the subordination of the Humanities to the Social Sciences, and to the use of the word “research” as an inadequate term for the humanist’s reflective activity.  My worry again is over “politicization” – by which I do not mean the intrusion of politicians into areas where their omniscience might be ill at ease; but the use of a fallacy so old that Aristotle had a name for it: metabasis eis allo genos “the clandestine passing over from one kind into another kind.”  In both cases the command is to give society what they want, and to be economically productive.  It seems to me that, within the current jargon of conflict, competition and compromise, the notions of “productivity” and of the wishes of “society” are both equally meaningless when we direct them towards the institutions in question, the CBC and the SSHRCC: for the Humanities are an educative discipline, that is not designed for making things (except for the overflow of their reflection into scholarly and reflective writing – which is something society has never to my knowledge asked for); and the CBC is an institution educative and instructive that was never conceived as fulfilling its destiny by competing in the manufacture of a neutral (if “entertaining”) carrier-wave for advertizing.  Both moves are ostensibly in the name of “sound economic principle” – to which the reply may be that an economy is not a society.

If it is complained that humane studies are outmoded because they are not sciences, I can only reply that (for reasons already given) it is the business of the Humanities to be unlike the sciences, being complementary to them; as it is the business of the Humanities to see that that difference, essential to a sane society, is not obliterated.

In such a context the word “culture” usually swims to the surface.  Is it not the case (it will be said) that government “backs culture”: buys Canadian paintings, sends poets hurtling from Inuvik to Litovsk to read their verse; provides subventions for publishers; supports symphonies, ballet companies, and theatrical groups; commissions compositions, dispenses awards?  That is well.  If it goes on for long enough, “culture” in that sense might become as much a part of our lives as breathing is.  The Humanities, however, are a “culture” in the biological sense – the surround that supports and nourishes life.  Nothing will grow except in a suitable culture.

From the humanist’s point of view, certain things must be made accessible to us, especially in education; the possibility can be enjoined, but not the outcome; the desired end must in some way be implicit at the beginning, the various phases of the process bearing to each other the same prophetic relation that the parts of a work of art bear to the whole work.  The way of sustaining such a process is called “method” – not technique, and not a progress according to formula towards a predefined end.  Coleridge has written eloquently and incisively about method, likening the growth of the intellect to the growth of a child.

We are aware, that it is with our cognitions [i.e., the growth of our ways of getting to know] as with our children.  There is a period in which the method of nature is working for them; a period of aimless activity and unregulated accumulation, during which it is enough if we can preserve them in health and out of harm’s way.  Again, there is a period of orderliness, or circumspection, of discipline, in which we purify, separate, define, select, arrange, and settle the nomenclature of communication.  There is also a period of dawning and twilight, a period of anticipation, affording trials of strength.  And all these, both in the growth of the sciences and in the mind of a rightly-educated individual, will precede the attainment of a scientific METHOD.  But, notwithstanding this, unless the importance of the letter [i.e., Method] be felt and acknowledged, unless its attainment be looked forward to and from the very beginning prepared for, there is little hope and small chance that any education will be conducted aright; or will ever prove in reality worth the name. ... Alas! how many examples are now present to our memory, of young men the most anxiously and expensively be-schoolmastered, be-tutored, be-lectured, any thing but educated; who have received arms and ammunition, instead of skill, strength and courage; varnished rather than polished; perilously over-civilized, and most pitiably uncultivated!  And all from inattention to the method dictated by nature herself to the simple truth, that as the forms in all organized existence, so must all true and living knowledge proceed from within; that it may be trained, supported, fed, excited, but can never be infused or impressed.

After more than thirty years of what is oddly called “teaching” I find that this statement strikes straight to the heart of the matter – it is (in the Homeric phrase) a “winged word,” at once both arrow and bull’s-eye.  As humanists we train, support, feed, excite; we try to teach people how to read, so that they can enter directly into the activity of the most powerful and penetrating minds that we have record of, and so to find how miraculously complex, integrative and inventive the human mind is, and language too; and so to discover themselves by losing themselves.  We try to teach people how to write, so that their states of feeling, their sense of value, the quality and accuracy of their perception become clear and ordered, their awareness of all things heightened, their capacity for sustained reflection strengthened – recognizing that everybody has in the end to do his own work, has to work out his own integrity and destiny in solitude.  In the course of this we come to recognize how intermittent and excruciating our grasp of reality is, how hard-won and hard-sustained our integrity, how fugitive any profound occasion of knowing, how almost impossible it is to convey it to somebody else.  Hence the starting-point of this endeavor is delight, wonder, respect, quietness – and the sustaining of it calls for strong nerves, the rejection of short-cuts, the refusal to relax our tenuous grasp upon what matters most of all to us.

No wonder that in a university the results are unpredictable, even at short range, and even when candidates are carefully selected.  All are not equally endowed to succeed professionally in an enterprise that is about as complex as a five-dimensional chess-game and as delicate as handling gold-leaf with the bare fingers.  Yet because the work of the humanities touches constantly upon the central nervous system of the self, in the disciplining of language, intelligence, and feeling, the success of the enterprise is not to be measured simply by the number who become school-teachers, or scholars, or professors, or writers widely read or of wide influence.  Robert Frost once said that “When a good reader meets a good poem he suffers an immortal wound and knows that he will never recover from it.”  If it were not so, the humanities would have no just claim to stand at the heart of education.  (And Robert Frost also said, on receiving honorary degrees from Oxford, Cambridge and Edinburgh: “It is better to receive a degree from a university than an education.”)  To accumulate knowledge and to be able to repeat it is not the primary educational end for the Humanities; rather, the purpose (which is scarcely definable) is fulfilled upon the whole person, in the secret places of the mind and memory, and is to be seen in the integrity of perception, judgment, recognition; and in a quality of action that is recognizable, but neither definable nor predictable.  This process, though accelerated (if it can occur at all) in a university, can prosper anywhere; yet such is the fugitiveness of intent needed to sustain that possibility that some people devote their whole lives to it – living the values and relations that we seek to disclose, turning them over constantly in the mind, in the writing, in the critical devotion to the “monuments of its own magnificence.”

There are many other things that I should like to have discussed, but I am prevented.  Let me then venture to say what I take to be the business of humane studies; at the center of it always the human mind with its exquisite system of response and its flair for initiative.

To secure and disclose to sustained and continuous reflection those forms and makings in which the image of man and of his remarkable capacities are embodied; at the same time encompassing with wonder and respect the images of the world and its creatures (for we too are voracious observers and watchers).  To remind us of the fragility and transience of intellectual achievement, how delicately achieved, how easily and brutally disrupted: (how we forget, and lose the thread, and have to start again, and how each one of us – as individual person or as poet or artist – has in some sense to start all over again from the beginning to discover how to see, how to think, how to make, how to discover our integrity and preserve it).  Further, it is the humanist’s business to remind us how nothing of value can be transmitted from one person to another without the receiver attaining the quality of mind in which the original was conceived; how in life, as in art, there are no classes for beginners – that we have to do all the most difficult things at the beginning; how we need to have before our mind’s eye, as the Chinese calligrapher does, almost as talismans, “excellent examples of the art” – the art of making, of speaking, of living; how not everything can be understood or explained under a single figure or analogy and that we corrupt our inquiry (and ourselves) when we suppose that they can; and how it is better to be determined not to misunderstand, than to be determined to understand (for the hypothesis or analogue or – in the modern jargon, the “model” – most convenient for purposes of measurement, prediction and control will probably not be the figure that pays most faithful attention to the reality of that complex).  It is also the humanist’s business to show how the premises from which an argument is to be evolved are already shaped by the ghost of the conclusion that we desire the argument to arrive at; how “objectivity” is a conventional assumption that holds only at a level that in human terms doesn’t much matter, and how the now-despised “subjectivity,” which we have always insisted was essential to our arts, is in fact the “relativity” that physics has been telling us about for more than seventy years – seeing the real world, not as a pattern of things, but as relations, in a qualitative mode; how nothing is achieved in poetry or in action without the loss of something that might otherwise conceivably have been included.  And finally; how at the roots of all this we find language, and the ways of language, and our ways of using language, not simply as an instrument of communication for sending messages, but as an inseparable component of our nature, indispensable to our individual development as human beings, and acting reciprocally upon us and our minds and feelings according to the reconciliation we can effect with it, the aim being fidelity to the object, and the integrity of the subject.

I affirm that I do not see in the modern world anything as humane or as daring as the philosophical virtues we have inherited from Plato and Aristotle through the long rich humanist tradition of Europe, seeking a grasp of mind that is at once enormous and minute; seeking illumination, and illuminating; trusting what we see with the armed vision and what we handle with the fingers of the mind; seeking in wonder (which is the beginning of philosophy) incandescent moments of knowing.  Whatever improvement there may have been – in methods of inquiry, in understanding the ways of language, and in interpreting the condition and capacities of man – we welcome these; but I cannot see that the constantly exploding universe of imaginative and intellectual materials alters in any way the nature or function of the humanist’s enterprise (though it may put some strain on him).  A mind “habituated to the Vast” is what Coleridge as a child knew was his sort of mind; and it is the childlike quality of mind that astonishes us about Newton and Einstein as it does about every artist worth his salt.  To reject the beguilements of a universe of “knowledge” made up of “little things,” and to seek a certain quality of “knowing” – this is the habit of mind of the generation of humanists of which I am a survivor; and because I believe it to be a vision as pertinent today as ever it was, I declare it to you here because we have come together to seek a new coalition.

No doubt we shall be asking for money – everybody asks for money these days, deflect our eyes though we may from the carnal impulses of this wicked world.  The Humanities are blissfully and unrepentantly counter to the present mood of society and to the present aspirations of government as we see them.  To us the position of the Humanities is perfectly clear; its educational function is, for a civilized society, indispensable.  I hope it does not seem arrogant to suggest that the question for society is not “Why the Humanities?” but “Why not?”

I don’t know what will do the trick.  Money in itself won’t; and turning the knobs on the promotional machines won’t – unless there are some strong and beguiling voices to be heard over the equipment.  Certainly the answer is not to be found in pretending that the Humanities are a form of “science” and that its practitioners are a species of specialist technician.

In one of the last poems he wrote before his death, David Jones – painter, poet, calligrapher – made a prayer against the imperative of the “rootless uniformities”:

                                    When they sit in Consilium

            to liquidate the holy diversities

                                    mother of particular perfections

                                    queen of otherness

                                    mistress of asymmetry

            patroness of things counter, parti, pied, several

            protectress of things known and handled

            help of things familiar and small

                        wardress of the secret crevices

                        of things wrapped and hidden ...

            empress of the labyrinth

                        receive our prayers ...

            When the technicians manipulate the dead limbs of our culture

            as though it yet had life, have mercy on us.

“The Empress of the Labyrinth, wardress of the secret crevices.”  Humane studies, at their obscure and subversive best – in the distant past and at this time – are a disease of sanity.  It is essential that we nourish and prize the culture in which that infection grows.  I cannot see how our society can be healthy unless we are deeply infected with the disease of wonder and respect.

I therefore ask you to listen, to be patient, to be subtle, to take care.