The question of "justifying" the activities of the humanities is one over which ink, real and virtual, continues to be liberally spilled. I admit, I don't know much about what "the humanities" are supposed to be or how to justify them, but I do know a little bit about the activity of philosophy as it is practised in the modern english-speaking world.
Here are the facts: When all the costs come in, an average institution will probably spend at least $250,000 to train a person for a PhD in Philosophy. Tuition, wages and insurance 'aint cheap. In many cases, much of this money will be public, or tied to the public coffers in certain important ways. My contention is that when it is viewed in isolation, this expenditure cannot possibly be justified for the average PhD. There is simply no way that the average (or even the above-average) trained philosopher will give enough back to society in order to justify this kind of support.
No, really, it's worth dwelling on this point: the average Philosophy PhD thesis is called something like "Motivational Holism and the Third Man Problem: From Plato to Strawson to Foucault and Back Again." Even an intelligent and well-intentioned taxpayer is perfectly justified in looking at this title and saying something to the effect of "what?". Furthermore, they will be perfectly justified in asking why tax money goes to support this obscurantism. I want to suggest that the actual answer will probably not be completely satisfactory.
We need to consider the possibility that the public resources consumed by the discipline cannot possibly be justified at the level of the individual. In other words, there will simply be no answer to the question "why philosophy?" at this level. For the individual, the answer will simply be: "because I like it and I'm good at it". It is impossible to definitively tie the obscure, scholastic reflections of a particular upper-level philosopher to the public good in a way that justifies the public support they recieve.
So I want to resist justifying academic philosophy at the individual level. I also want to resist the reductionism that permeates this debate, one which will have us assume that the sorts of reasons provided to justify the activities of philosophers must be of essentially the same type as those offered in support of welding, farming or stock-trading. There may be benefits of an abstract and esoteric kind that philosophy provides which other disciplines cannot, and there may be no way to reliably compare these various kinds of benefits.
Indeed, this seems undeniably true when we consider what the world might now look like without Marx, Plato, Locke, Kant, Confucious or Lao-Tzu. Few of us could honestly admit that some value we cherish has not been both delineated and promoted by some major philosopher. Pick your chosen social-political orientation and there is a philosopher who both defined and energized it; a philosopher who began his or her career as a brilliant, scholastic recluse surrounded by other brilliant, scholastic recluses. A philosopher whose work was, by all appearances, esoteric, strange and difficult.
The benefits provided by these thinkers are nearly impossible to articulate because they defined the terms in which we now articulate benefits. They helped to forge our worldviews, our values, our priorities. They fought tooth and nail to enshrine what now seems commonsensical. We can only express a kind of humble gratitude that they did, one which bears more resemblance to the dumbstruck admiration of a profound work of art than the careful tallying up of a ledger-sheet.
All of this suggests that we should be commited to the continued existence of an intellectual class, one which must remain mysterious and strange to that average person. This class must be allowed total intellectual freedom, and it must be comprised only of highly creative and intelligent people. We cannot expect to be able to measure the benefits provided by this class of persons over any stretch of time. For their task is, in large part, to refine and re-define what we think "benefits" are.
Crucially, no matter how esoteric and bizarre a particular thinker may appear, there is no way to tell in advance if their work will lead to this kind of paradigm-shifting result. To establish this about one philosopher would itself be the life's work of another philosopher, one who would require just the same kind of public support we are trying to justify. We can only make sure that they are very smart, very passionate, and free to study what they want.
No, really, it's worth dwelling on this point: the average Philosophy PhD thesis is called something like "Motivational Holism and the Third Man Problem: From Plato to Strawson to Foucault and Back Again." Even an intelligent and well-intentioned taxpayer is perfectly justified in looking at this title and saying something to the effect of "what?". Furthermore, they will be perfectly justified in asking why tax money goes to support this obscurantism. I want to suggest that the actual answer will probably not be completely satisfactory.
We need to consider the possibility that the public resources consumed by the discipline cannot possibly be justified at the level of the individual. In other words, there will simply be no answer to the question "why philosophy?" at this level. For the individual, the answer will simply be: "because I like it and I'm good at it". It is impossible to definitively tie the obscure, scholastic reflections of a particular upper-level philosopher to the public good in a way that justifies the public support they recieve.
So I want to resist justifying academic philosophy at the individual level. I also want to resist the reductionism that permeates this debate, one which will have us assume that the sorts of reasons provided to justify the activities of philosophers must be of essentially the same type as those offered in support of welding, farming or stock-trading. There may be benefits of an abstract and esoteric kind that philosophy provides which other disciplines cannot, and there may be no way to reliably compare these various kinds of benefits.
Indeed, this seems undeniably true when we consider what the world might now look like without Marx, Plato, Locke, Kant, Confucious or Lao-Tzu. Few of us could honestly admit that some value we cherish has not been both delineated and promoted by some major philosopher. Pick your chosen social-political orientation and there is a philosopher who both defined and energized it; a philosopher who began his or her career as a brilliant, scholastic recluse surrounded by other brilliant, scholastic recluses. A philosopher whose work was, by all appearances, esoteric, strange and difficult.
The benefits provided by these thinkers are nearly impossible to articulate because they defined the terms in which we now articulate benefits. They helped to forge our worldviews, our values, our priorities. They fought tooth and nail to enshrine what now seems commonsensical. We can only express a kind of humble gratitude that they did, one which bears more resemblance to the dumbstruck admiration of a profound work of art than the careful tallying up of a ledger-sheet.
All of this suggests that we should be commited to the continued existence of an intellectual class, one which must remain mysterious and strange to that average person. This class must be allowed total intellectual freedom, and it must be comprised only of highly creative and intelligent people. We cannot expect to be able to measure the benefits provided by this class of persons over any stretch of time. For their task is, in large part, to refine and re-define what we think "benefits" are.
Crucially, no matter how esoteric and bizarre a particular thinker may appear, there is no way to tell in advance if their work will lead to this kind of paradigm-shifting result. To establish this about one philosopher would itself be the life's work of another philosopher, one who would require just the same kind of public support we are trying to justify. We can only make sure that they are very smart, very passionate, and free to study what they want.
This proposal may seem elitist: it is not. Elitism is the view that a certain class of persons is exempt from having to justify their activities to other classes. Under this proposal, the activities of a philosopher-class are not automatically justified or immune from criticism. We may perfectly well accuse philosophers of stifling their own creativity, of having low standards, of simply re-stating the same kinds of ideas over and over again. Indeed, these are criticisms that may well be levelled at much of the discpline as it now stands. The average person has a jusitification for supporting philosophy, it is just not the sort of justification that can be fed into a balance-sheet, nor can it help the average person to understand why a particular philosopher does what they do. The particular philosopher can only say: "I like it and I'm good at it". This must remain their final response, even if that response offends against certain egalitarian sensibilities.
4 comments:
Do you allow for any other type of value short of instrumental economic value for justification? I only ask because the question of justifying a philosophy PhD is given and assessed only in the monetary cost to a public university (not withstanding that there are also private universities too) with gestures not to get into other area issues.
A sociologist by the name of Richard? Arum at NYU just published a comprehensive study of 24 universities. In the study, he assessed different college majors from their first and second years at university and how well they advanced in university competency skills. The soft business majors that now account for 1 in 6 American college students showed the worst improvement over the two years while traditional liberal arts and engineering students performed the best. Now, let us assume there are about half a million university students in the United States. Around 80,000 of them are wasting more resources than people in other disciplines that can think. Remaining at the level of teaching a philosophy BA, it can marginally be thought that there is justification enough once a comparison might be drawn that those that cannot improve in writing and reading at the university level are being more of a waste than a philosophy PhD.
So, there is a prima facie pro tanto justification to support harder majors given the set of skills that are actually valuable for living a human life in general.
I would bet my left nut that PhDs in Business do not compare to me. If your read more about the article, a plausible reason for the soft major business students not succeeding might turn on the fact that business students work mostly in groups. The emphasis on group work follows that most management practices occur in a team setting, and as such business professors assign coursework in that way.
The question about value is an interesting one, but I maintain that a $250,000 investment is a lot. I am skeptical that this allocation of resources can be convincingly tied to the public good.
The information about business majors is not suprising, and is backed by all kinds of data on literacy, logical and mathematical skill.
However: I don't think this helps you to make your case that there is a kind of pro tanto justification for humanities majors buried in the data. There is no way that a PhD education in any field supplies "the set of skills that are actually valuable for living a human life in general". Countless human societies have functionned just fine without an educated elite of this caliber. We need to look elsewhere, to forms of value that may not be so easy to characterize.
So just to understand, your criticism is only
a) conceiving of this problem with respect to how pubic goods are allocated by resources to realize them.
b) there might be forms of value that can supply justification that are not so easy to characterize as we can with a) (public goods).
Do I have you right?
That seems like a good basic summary of one of my suggestions, yes. Though I don't know about "pubic goods". :D
But I take myself to be doing more here. I'm not just gesturing to some spooky value that philosophy has, I'm tying it to the (abstract, indeterminate) value of paradigm shifts in thought. Furthermore, this abstractness and indeterminacy makes it impossible to say whether a particular philosopher (or a particular department, or group of philosophers) will produce anything that turns out to be very important. So, searching for such a definitive justification may be fruitless.
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