Do the Humanities Create Knowledge? (& III)

The problems of the humanities today

As we have seen in the previous installments of this review (here and here), according to Chris Haufe, disciplinary knowledge is ultimately based on the mastery of a number of exemplary works, which are those that define a discipline and constitute the basis of the knowledge that matters. This condition of existence of disciplinary knowledge does not only affect the humanities. The natural sciences, in substance, do not differ from this model.

In recent decades, however, academic practice in various fields of the humanities has undermined the foundations of this disciplinary knowledge. This weakening has had its origin in deviations from the model of disciplinary knowledge outlined in the first two installments.

Many practitioners of these disciplines have chosen to free themselves from the heavy constraints of epistemic work, and have moved strongly in the direction of what seems much more like self-expression than scholarly inquiry. By this the author does not mean that in the humanities there should be no place for self-expression, even academic self-expression, but that disciplines are not needed to do so. And, as a consequence, groups of humanists often seem to qualify as disciplines in name only. But that is not enough. It takes more than a set of intellectuals to create a discipline.

In humanities fields where disciplinary communities have disappeared or weakened, the author takes precedence: his or her mind is the native environment of the work he or she produces. In the natural sciences, however, the discipline is that native environment; the author is the messenger who brings information (knowledge) from nature that enriches the disciplinary environment.

In those disciplines where the knowledge that matters is defined on consensus among its practitioners the intellectual communities cultivate the causal link between interest and importance of research topics. For it is not the individual, but the disciplinary community that decides what is important.

That community is endowed with a structure that houses the cultural facts that define the discipline, a structure inherent in what we normally call cultural norms, traditions, or practices. Different sets of traditions facilitate the development of other traditions, forming something like a cultural "scaffold" on which the existing set of subsequent possibilities for future cultural expression is grouped.

Probably the vast majority of cultural norms persist through cultural osmosis, being absorbed unconsciously as a by-product of immersion in a given environment. The diffusion of practices through direct instruction creates communities whose members are united by a shared understanding that the relevant practice is diffused because it should be.

However, contemporary human disciplines generally lack the substratum of cultural norms to distinguish between self-interest and disciplinary relevance. In the current disciplinary culture, academic research is conceptualized as an act of self-actualization or self-expression. The goal of an act of self-expression is to create an external representation of personal value commitments. Within this framework, the distinction between something that is important and something that is ‘important to me’ evaporates. For, in the context of self-expression, my highest priority is to produce a representation of something I hold dear. Only by doing this can I successfully express myself. The most important thing in this context is anything that is of value to me.

According to the author, the problem is that blurring or collapsing the conceptual boundary between interest and importance has its costs. Apart from the obvious disadvantage of undermining the ability to conceive of a variety of important research whose scope extends beyond one's own feelings, it has fundamentally weakened the ability to make lasting contributions to human culture. Relatedly, it has inhibited –perhaps even erased– the ability of groups of scholars to function as disciplinary communities.

When the selection of research topics is driven not by a sense of importance whose source is external, but by the individual's own internally cultivated sense of interest, it undermines the ability to develop the kind of shared understanding of importance that can support the development of deeper research.

It is far from clear that, at present, a system of cultural norms can exist in the humanities. The difficulty is not simply that these disciplines lack consensus on a variety of important issues. In fact, it is much deeper than this. The difficulty is that, to the extent that a sense of how to detect a kind of importance that is not reducible to mere self-expression is conveyed, it is through the pursuit of novel topics solely for the sake of their novelty. Humanists tend to consider a research project highly significant if, and only if, it is highly original.

A conception of scholarly significance focused predominantly on self-expression and novelty is incompatible with the existence of a disciplinary culture capable of transmitting a substantive sense of community-defined significance to future generations of researchers.

But if novelty is the dominant norm, its sense of importance comes to be associated with a departure from the very constellation that defines the intellectual community as a discipline. As scholars seek to detect new deviations, they weaken the disciplinary fabric, degrading and ultimately destroying the constraints that, historically, have proven highly generative for all kinds of intellectual communities. Novelty is the anti-norm.

Highly productive academic communities actively resist the introduction of gratuitous novel research topics, and it is not hard to see why. Acquiring a truly deep understanding of a phenomenon, whether natural, mathematical, philosophical, moral, or literary, requires successive generations of a community of scholars to devote all their energy to developing a picture of the phenomenon that is capable of achieving widespread ascendancy within the community.

Because of the many profound challenges facing attempts to elaborate a satisfactory relationship between theory and nature, the process of theory refinement generally requires the efforts of an entire community of researchers, spanning several generations. For this reason, theoretical novelty is generally rejected unless it offers great immediate benefits of some kind. Outside of these very particular circumstances, novelty tends to disrupt the process of theory refinement; it promotes diffusion of the cognitive effort of the community when increasing depth requires rather that it be highly concentrated.

On the other hand, on a purely practical level, it is also not plausible to think that an academic community of finite size can exercise genuine expertise in an endlessly proliferating field of research topics. In this context, any effort to exercise the kind of community-level scrutiny necessary to produce genuine knowledge or understanding will necessarily be pathetically superficial, if it exists at all.

Methods are used in the service of producing knowledge and understanding. And for that to happen, there needs to be community-level recognition that these methods produce epistemically acceptable results, that they actually result in deeper understanding: that they are legitimate.

If we care about insight and understanding, we must take seriously the possibility that genuine insight –the kind of insight we consider the signature of humanistic research– can only be achieved through the concentrated efforts of a community, of researchers spanning several generations.

With each gratuitous novelty, whether of problem or method, we loosen the ties that bind us as scholars in a shared world. More importantly, we transform the very nature of research. Under these conditions, it no longer makes sense to imagine refining one's judgment in a shared world, so that deeper knowledge and understanding are actually possible. That world has evaporated.

The desolation of the disciplinary world in the humanities is not the only casualty of the search for ever more obscure forms and subjects of inquiry. The further we move away from the canonical neighborhoods upon which the great traditions of humanistic inquiry were built, the more difficult it becomes to engage with the broader non-specialist public whose investment in those great traditions enabled them to define civilizations. But when we insist on straying further and further from the boundaries of genre and discipline, we deprive non-specialists of the opportunity to be affected by them.

Conclusion

The author argues that intellectuals in the humanities have not been sufficiently attentive to their duty to distinguish between important and unimportant research problems, and are not imparting to their students a faculty of discernment.

They have been increasingly lax in their responsibility to bring clarity to complex and nebulous problems that fall within their purview as humanists. They have come to increasingly favor novelty over depth, because it is always easier to meet vague and underdeveloped standards for good work on a new topic than to meet well-developed standards for good work in a well-developed area of inquiry. It is not always laudable to ask a question that no one has asked before. Some questions are simply not worth asking; or, at least, not worth asking in the context of research.

Humanists need to return to the level of intellectual rigor and seriousness that has defined the humanities since antiquity. For their distinctive contribution to human culture to be valuable, an intellectual standard must be maintained that only experienced specialists can attain.

Title: Do The Humanities Create Knowledge?

Author: Chris Haufe

Ed. by Cambridge University Press, 2023.