In defence of the humanities: Why studying philosophy in a world where welders earn more still makes sense.

In defence of the humanities: Why studying philosophy in a world where welders earn more still makes sense.

By Robert Fulford, National Post (on Books), November 14 2016

Indian poet and writer Rabindranath Tagore is shown while in Berlin, Germany. In 1913, Tagore became the first non-European to win the Nobel Prize in Literature for what the Swedish Academy described as "his profoundly sensitive, fresh and beautiful verse." Tagore played a pivotal role in popularizing Indian culture in the West through such works as "Gitanjali: Song Offerings."   (AP)

“We need more welders and less philosophers,” said Marco Rubio. A Cuban-American lawyer from Miami, he ran in the Republican presidential primaries this year but had to settle for a return to the U.S. senate last week.

Rubio has no known prejudice against philosophers. He was just one more among many politicians appealing to voters who believe education should be clearly practical and focussed on the job market. He favours vocational study. “I don’t know why we stigmatize vocational education,” he said. “Welders make more money than philosophers.”

In the last decade or so, governments have been edging away from philosophy and all the other subjects that we cluster under the term “humanities.” Governments, when they subsidize universities, favour science, math, engineering and other courses that promise good job prospects and, with luck, stimulate the laggard economy. Governor Scott Walker of Wisconsin has proposed funding universities only in proportion to their roles as pipelines into Wisconsin’s economy.

When politicians think that way, and public universities heed them, post-secondary education loses its unique qualities and its special glory. Traditionally, the humanities (history, literature, art, philosophy, etc.) have provided a place for broadening life in the democracies. Today universities have become a site for a bitter struggle between no-nonsense job training and the grander possibilities of the imagination.

Martha Nussbaum, who teaches in the University of Chicago law school and its philosophy department, has become a champion of the humanities. She’s a prolific author whose books include Sex and Social Justice (1998), Women and Human Development (2000) and Liberty of Conscience: In Defense of America’s Tradition of Religious Equality (2008).

In 2010 she wrote Not for Profit: Why Democracy Needs the Humanities (Princeton University Press). She imagined it would interest only a few people, mainly academics. Instead it became a world-wide hit, going into a dozen translations. Since then, defending the humanities has become central to her career. This month Princeton has produced a paperback edition of Not for Profit with a new preface by the author and a foreword by Ruth O’Brien hailing Nussbaum’s “far-reaching and expansive book.”

For a work of 168 pages, Not for Profit is indeed expansive. She touches in some way every part of the humanities, and throws light on all of them.

Why should students spend time studying literature? Nussbaum notes that citizens cannot relate well to the world around them by factual knowledge and logic alone. They need also what she terms “the narrative imagination.” This means knowing what it’s like to be in someone else’s shoes, seeing the world through another person’s eyes.

Literature is the obvious road to that kind of intuitive awareness. Studying literature in university plunges you into the power of storytelling in all times and places. There’s a special thrill serious readers enjoy when a story, poem or drama introduces them to an insight never known or heard about before. A fresh understanding floods the brain.

Storytelling, and the imagination it engenders, will prove powerful in many aspects of life, from corporate management to baseball. A student taking a course on the Bible from a follower of the late Northrop Frye of the University of Toronto, for instance, could learn a dozen aspects of narrative from the Book of Job alone.

Nussbaum is well known among students for her intense interest in narrative: She tells stories in her lectures and listens carefully to stories students bring her. “You can’t really change the heart without telling a story,” she says. Learning the layers of meaning beneath that remark is a crucial spect of the humanities.

In this regard, the humanities have lost much of their stature. A generation or two in the past, it was often suggested that the English literature department should be the core of a university, but no one would raise that idea today.

Making her case, Nussbaum often surprises the reader. It’s refreshing to encounter her discussion of Rabindranath Tagore, the great Bengali teacher and poet (Nobel Prize winner in 1915), a figure seldom mentioned in connection with education in the West. Nussbaum describes Tagore’s success with an arts school intended to produce world citizens. She draws on the ideas of Donald Winnicott, an English paediatrician and psychoanalyst, who studied the effects of play on adults as well as children.

She impresses me most when she explains what the humanities, in this case philosophy and literature, can tell us about articulating ideas and policies. “Thirsty for national profit,” she says, “nations, and their systems of education, are heedlessly discarding skills that are needed to keep democracies alive.”

Properly applied, the humanities teach us how to formulate our views, articulate them and defend them. Reading about that in Nussbaum, I kept returning to Canada and one current issue, proportional voting.

We seem to have agreed that this idea, already applied in many places, is worth at least considering. But how to do it? Few of us know where such a change might lead us. As a people, we’re not good at constructing powerful arguments and we have only a few ideas about our future. We have opinions, not conclusions, and we don’t know how to get from the first of those to the second. We can’t imagine what such a dramatic change could bring about. We are deficient, that is, in what the humanities can teach us.