Keeping Track of Our Humanity through the Humanities

Below is an excerpt of a talk, “Getting Our Priorities Straight: Humanities and the Art of Living,” delivered May 1, 2022 before the Nature Coast Unitarian Universalists, in Citrus Springs, Florida.

Excerpt: The Humanities and the Art of Living

Philosophy and its pioneers of critical thinking have long taught us to be wary of common sense, and seek out clear, cogent justification for even the most prominent and seemingly “obvious” of claims. Common sense, after all, is just a name for beliefs endorsed by popular opinion, dominant cultural tradition, and the beliefs of those in power. The humanities emphasize the thinking skills and cultural knowledge that enable us to critically assess these beliefs and practices.

A crucial component of this endeavor is the recognition that living a life of excellence requires extraordinary effort and skill. We all know that it requires great skill to fly an airplane or conduct surgery. What is less well understood is that living a good human life also requires skill. Fromm eloquently summed up what it means to understand life as an “art”—a skill—in his book Man For Himself, when he wrote:

“...not only medicine, engineering, and painting are arts; living itself is an art--in fact, the most important and at the same time the most difficult and complex art to be practiced by man. Its object is not this or that specialized performance, but the performance of living, the process of developing into that which one is potentially. In the art of living, man is both the artist and the object of his art; he is the sculptor and the marble; the physician and the patient.”

The point that he is making here is that human beings are filled with potential, but this potential is not realized through passivity or resignation. Fulfilment, Fromm reminds us, does not simply come to us nor can it just be given to us. It is, rather, an achievement resulting from knowledge and effort.

A chief aim of my teaching and the Humanities in Revolt project is to proactively advocate for the humanities as essential during crisis. For too long the humanities have played defense as lawmakers and academic trends continually undermine the fundamentally human in our education and institutions.

The most ardent advocates of cupidity—the love of money—and abandoning the common good seize upon social precarity to advance their agenda: cutting government funding for anything that is not deemed profitable or advantageous to their narrowly conceived political-economic interests. College humanities’ programs have become one of the favorite targets of such political efforts.

The humanities are irrelevant, impractical; and, most damning of all, we are told, the humanities are not profitable! In 2017, then South Dakota Governor Dennis Daugaard recommended students in his state choose “realistic” courses of study and avoid philosophy.

“I don’t think we need to direct kids where they should go, obviously we want kids to follow their dreams, but they can’t be too dreamy…. So they should follow their dreams with their eyes open so that if you’re going to take a philosophy degree at the end of the day the job opportunities for philosophy majors are relatively few and probably don’t pay very well.”

That same year, then Kentucky Governor Matt Bevin urged colleges to steer students toward away from majors with he claimed had poor job prospects.

“If you’re studying interpretive dance, God bless you, but there’s not a lot of jobs right now in America looking for people with that as a skill set.”

These critics almost never supply any support for their claims about the poor job prospects for humanities and liberal arts majors. We are expected to take their claims as self-evident. (The evidence, as it turns out, does not support their dire assertions.) The humanities’ emphasis on critical thinking prepares us to more adeptly recognize and then critically examine such rhetoric.

The other important point is that they presume that economic gain is the only rubric by which to evaluate an education. Merely calling into question the emphasis on economic gain as the primary purpose of education raises eyebrows in many. They seem to be asking, “you mean, you don’t agree that employment is the goal of schooling?”

Of course we want to be gainfully employed. But if we are gainfully employed with a lack of critical thinking ability, existential insights into the human condition, and full understanding of what it means to be intellectually and politically self-determined participants in a free and democratic society, then our otherwise lucrative education will be quite impoverished.

In 2015, in the lead-up to the Republican Presidential primary, Florida Senator Marco Rubio criticized institutions of higher education that failed to produce graduates with degrees that translated into clear job opportunities. He highlighted philosophy as a prime example of a major without reliable job prospects.

“So you can decide if it's worth borrowing $50,000 to major in Greek philosophy. Because after all, the market for Greek philosophers has been very tight for 2,000 years.”

Apparently, the joke went over well with audiences as Senator Rubio told it at more than one campaign spot. The joke lands differently with those familiar with the father of Western philosophy, Socrates.

In the first place, Socrates distinguished himself from the Sophists, intellectuals who marketed their services and received payment, by not being for hire. Socrates was a retired military man who practiced philosophy for free, in the service of what he believed was a value far greater than economic gain: truth and moral excellence.

From Socrates’ perspective, the aim of knowledge and life was not a job or money, it was virtue. Far from being a “career,” Socrates’ philosophical practice of interrogating common sense beliefs and the assertions of those in power and privilege earned him a death sentence. How’s that for closing the job market on philosophy! Perhaps this fact would have only confirmed Rubio’s worse fears: that philosophy not only threatens your economic future, it puts you at risk of death!

In fairness to Senator Rubio, it must be added that, in 2018, he admitted that his criticism of philosophy was uninformed.

“I made fun of philosophy three years ago but then I was challenged to study it [oh, that’s not a bad I idea, study something before you critique it], so I started reading the Stoics. I've changed my view on philosophy. But not on welders. We need both! Vocational training for workers & philosophers to make sense of the world.”

More important than his acknowledgement that philosophy has value was Rubio’s recognition that value is multidimensional. His reassessment implies a recognition that not everything in our educational lives must translate into economic productivity to be of value. Through humanistic study of his own he has arrived at the view that making “sense of the world” is also important.

The humanities offer us grounding in the most important questions that human beings have to ask ourselves. Questions like, what do we really value above all else, what do believe to be intrinsically value, an end unto itself? And what is secondary, of extrinsic value—a means, never to be confused with the end?

There is a profound stupidity in cupidity precisely because it confuses the means and the ends of life. Within the pages of the humanities we find that many of the great thinkers and spiritual leaders remind us, again and again, that we must not forget the difference between the means and ends of life. For in confusing that order of priority, we lose track of our very humanity.

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