an
international and interdisciplinary journal of postmodern cultural sound, text
and image
Volume 3, January 2006, ISSN
1552-5112
The Humanistic
Intellectual: Eleven Theses[1]
Richard Rorty
1. We should not try to define “the humanities” by asking
what the humanities departments share which distinguishes them from the rest of
the university. The interesting dividing line is, instead, one that cuts across
departments and disciplinary matrices. It divides people busy conforming to
well-understood criteria for making contributions to knowledge from people
trying to expand their own moral imaginations. These latter people read books
in order to enlarge their sense of what is possible and important—either for
themselves as individuals or for their society. Call these people the
“humanistic intellectuals.” One often finds more such people in the
anthropology department than in the classics department, and sometimes more in
the law school than in the philosophy department.
2. If one asks what good these people do, what social
function they perform, neither “teaching” nor “research” is a very good answer.
Their idea of teaching—or at least of the sort of teaching they hope to do—is
not exactly the communication of knowledge, but more like stirring the kids up.
When they apply for a leave or a grant, they may have to fill out forms about
the aims and methods of their so-called research projects, but all they really
want to do is read a lot more books in the hope of becoming a different sort of
person.
3. So the real social function of the humanistic
intellectuals is to instill doubts in the students about the students’ own
self-images, and about the society to which they belong. These people are the
teachers who help insure that the moral consciousness of each new generation is
slightly different from that of the previous generation.
4. But when it comes to the rhetoric of public support
for higher education, we do not talk much about this social function. We cannot
tell boards of trustees, government commissions, and the like, that our
function is to stir things up, to make our society feel guilty, to keep it off
balance. We cannot say that the taxpayers employ us to make sure that their
children will think differently than they do. Somewhere deep down, everybody—even
the average taxpayer—knows that that is one of the things colleges and
universities are for. But nobody can afford to make this fully explicit and
public.
5. We humanistic intellectuals find ourselves in a
position analogous to that of the “social-gospel” or “liberation theology”
clergy, the priests and ministers who think of themselves as working to build
the
6. We are still expected to make the ritual noises to
which the trustees and the funding agencies are accustomed—noises about
“objective criteria of excellence,” “fundamental moral and spiritual values,”
“the enduring questions posed by the human condition,” and so on, just as the
liberal clergy is supposed to mumble their way through creeds written in an
earlier and simpler age. But those of us who have been impressed by the
anti-Platonic, anti-essentialist, historicizing, naturalizing writers of the
last few centuries (people like Hegel, Darwin, Freud, Weber, Dewey, and
Foucault) must either become cynical or else put our own tortured private
constructions on these ritual phrases.
7. This tension between public rhetoric and private
sense of mission leaves the academy in general, and the humanistic
intellectuals in particular, vulnerable to heresy-hunters. Ambitious
politicians like William Bennett—or cynical journalists like the young William
Buckley (author of God and Man at Yale) or Charles Sykes (author of Profscam)—can
always point out gaps between official rhetoric and actual practice. Usually,
however, such heresy-hunts peter out quickly in the face of faculty solidarity.
The professors of physics and law, people whom nobody wants to mess with, can
be relied upon to rally around fellow AAUP members who teach anthropology or
French, even if they neither know nor care what the latter do.
8. In the current flap about the humanities, however,
the heresy-hunters have a more vulnerable target than usual. This target is
what Allan Bloom calls “the Nietzscheanized left.” This left is an anomaly in
9. Another reason this left is a vulnerable target is
that it is extraordinarily self-obsessed and ingrown, as well as absurdly
over-philosophized. It takes seriously Paul de Man’s weird suggestion that “one
can approach the problems of ideology and by extension the problems of politics
only on the basis of critical-linguistic analysis.” It seems to accept Hillis
Miller’s fantastic claim that “the millenium [of universal peace and justice
among men] would come if all men and women became good readers in de Man’s
sense.” When asked for a utopian sketch of our country’s future, the new
leftists reply along the lines of one of Foucault’s most fatuous remarks. When
asked why he never sketched a utopia, Foucault said, “I think that to imagine
another system is to extend our participation in the present system.” De Man,
and Foucault were (and Miller is) a lot better than these unfortunate remarks
would suggest, but some of their followers are a lot worse. This
over-philosophized and self-obsessed left is the mirror image of the
over-philosophized and self-obsessed Straussians on the right. The contempt of
both groups for contemporary American society is so great that both have
rendered themselves impotent when it comes to national, state, or local
politics. This means that they get to spend all their energy on academic
politics.
10. The two groups are currently staging a sham battle
about how to construct reading lists. The Straussians say that the criterion
for what books to assign is intrinsic excellence, and the Nietzscheanized left
says that it is fairness—e.g., fairness to females, blacks, and Third Worlders.
They are both wrong. Reading lists should be constructed so as to preserve a
delicate balance between two needs. The first is the need of the students to
have common reference points with people in previous generations and in other
social classes—so that grandparents and grandchildren, people who went to the
11. Philosophers of education, well-intended committees,
and governmental agencies have attempted to understand, define, and manage the
humanities. The point, however, is to keep the humanities changing fast enough
so that they remain indefinable and unmanageable. All we need to keep them
changing that fast is good old-fashioned academic freedom. Given freedom to
shrug off the heresy-hunters and their cries of “politicization!,” as well as
freedom for each new batch of assistant professors to despise and repudiate the
departmental Old Guard to whom they owe their jobs, the humanities will
continue to be in good shape. If you don’t like the ideological weather in the
local English department these days, wait a generation. Watch what happens to
the Nietzscheanized left when it tries to replace itself, along about the year
2010. I’m willing to bet that the brightest new Ph.D.’s in English that year
will be people who never want to hear the terms “binary opposition” or
“hegemonic discourse” again as long as they live.
an international
and interdisciplinary journal of postmodern cultural sound, text and image
Volume 3, January 2006, ISSN
1552-5112
Notes