Lit Is More than Just an End in Itself

Alan PaskowAlan Paskow   

 

Yesterday I talked about how Alan Paskow (in philosophy) and I violently disagreed with a series of columns that Stanley Fish wrote on his New York Time blog about the humanities.  Fish was going after those who use the humanities “instrumentally”—as good for something else rather than as ends in themselves. 

 Alan, who has written a book on aesthetics (The Paradoxes of Art: A Phenomenological Investigation, Cambridge University, 2004), takes issue with Fish’s either/or, that either a work is an end it itself or it is being used for some other purpose.  Here is the response that Alan wrote to Fish’s New York Times blog, which he sent in late so it wasn’t published:

Stanley Fish makes a serious mistake in his essay, “Will the Humanities Save Us?,” similar to the one he made in an earlier reflection on the need to “academicize” the teaching of any subject.  His error has far-ranging consequences and that is why I’m taking the trouble to reply to him, if not for his sake, then, I am hoping, for the sake of readers who regard his essay sympathetically. 

Fish argues that the humanities should be viewed as worthwhile in themselves and therefore—here is the non sequitur—require no justification whatsoever.  You either “get” their value or you don’t, and no kind of rational support for this position is either possible or required.  In fact, the humanities would be demeaned by any argumentation for them.  You wouldn’t seriously ask whether personal happiness is a worthy goal, Fish might have said, rightly. 

But to say something is a good in itself does not end a conversation.  We can meaningfully ask:  if something is an end in itself, how is it to be graded with respect to other ends in themselves?  And this requires reference to a standard external to the activity in question.

Fish at first tacitly acknowledges this:  the humanities are valuable because they bring pleasure.  Right!  But not all pleasures are good.  Consider sadistic pleasure in torturing someone; that’s certainly not a good.  But after referring to pleasure as a justification for studying the humanities, Fish withdraws his statement: “To the question ‘of what use are the humanities?’, the only honest answer is none whatsoever.” It is an end in itself.

However, not all ends in themselves are of equal merit:  teaching a child to read is more worthwhile than tasting a piece of candy.  (You may disagree with my example, but that doesn’t matter. The point is that we all do grade so-called ends in themselves and make value choices every day.) Hence, it would not be at all unreasonable for a provost at a university to ask why the humanities are of importance or, more usually, why a particular area of the humanities should be part of the curriculum.  It is, or they are, ends in themselves? Well, so are lots of other activities and doubtless to many students (and some professors) of a much higher order, the provost might respond. 

Fish’s recourse should be (but was not): The humanities teach us things about ourselves and the world that enable us to achieve more complete and more humane lives, and they do this in ways that aren’t and cannot be directly done in studying the sciences or mathematics. (This is of course essentially the point in Anthony Kronman’s book, referred to by Fish and about which he is very doubtful.) In other words, the humanities are not simply goods in themselves; they are also and very importantly and necessarily instrumental goods. 

To state this is not to demean the humanities with some irrelevant, extrinsic justification. It is to acknowledge that we treat virtually all goods in themselves as relative in merit to one another as well as to some higher standard and as occasionally requiring justification, not simply as things we either perceive or are blind to.

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