Hayden White, the philosopher of history whose classic Metahistory (1973) has had an enduring influence on the humanities, died last year. In a career spanning half a century, White, whose appointments included Stanford University and the University of California at Santa Cruz, provoked, alarmed, and invigorated professional historians and lay readers alike. In Metahistory and elsewhere, White insisted that “facts do not speak for themselves. The historian speaks for them, speaks on their behalf, and fashions the fragments of the past into a whole whose integrity is … a purely discursive one.” Because such fashioning of fragments is a kind of storytelling, White believed that historians need a theory of literary narrative, a way of grasping their work’s adherence to the laws of tragedy, comedy, and farce. Though influential, this fundamentally interdisciplinary position remains controversial, as the dust-up around a recent Chronicle Review essay extolling White demonstrated.
Such literary concerns inevitably turn on questions of scholarship’s purpose and ethos. What is the point of historical writing? What kind of author is a historian? What is education good for? In a never-published 2008 interview with Robert Pogue Harrison, a professor of literature at Stanford University, White reflected on a topic of particular urgency in 2019: the purpose of the humanities. The conversation was recorded for Harrison’s radio show, Entitled Opinions, and transcribed here for the first time. As departments shutter and enrollments plummet, White’s thoughts on professionalism, vocation, and love are more relevant than ever.
I tell my graduate students never work on anything you don’t love. Failing love, work on something you hate.
Harrison: A few weeks ago, Stanley Fish posted an article on The New York Times titled “Will the Humanities Save Us?,” which got a lot of attention. Would you like to begin by telling us the gist of Fish’s argument and why you think it is so misguided?
White: Fish, who likes to be provocative, insisted that the humanities have no practical utility at all, that it is merely a matter of taste whether one wanted to either teach them or practice them. I don’t know how you could practice them exactly without teaching them. As far as I’m concerned it’s not a matter of utility versus pleasure, but a matter of practicality. The humanities are eminently practical and belong to the practical life, by which I mean the ethical life.
Harrison: So it sounds like you still want to keep the link between the teaching and learning of the humanities with some sort of moral mission. “Ethical,” as you say. But let’s go back here to Stanley Fish’s point for a minute where he says that the humanities cannot live up to this expectation. He says that in his experience, 40 years of teaching, there’s no indication that people like you and me and our colleagues in the humanities are any better than anyone else.
White: Well, I don’t know whether individuals are made better by studying the good. One can study the good without being good. And many people who have studied the good effectively are not particularly good themselves. Saint Augustine, as you recall, felt that his training in the humanities helped him to appear to be good even when he wasn’t. And when he really became a devotee of the good, he had to put aside his profession as a teacher of rhetoric. Stanley Fish is not a good example of the teaching of the humanities as being edifying of the person who teaches them.
Harrison: When I think about the purpose or role of the humanities, I don’t see it primarily in ethical terms; I see it more in terms of enrichment. One can either remain an orphan of history or one can become the heir of a linear tradition in the plural. Greek and Roman antiquity, world cultures, the medieval Christian culture, modernity. The more one engages in the study of the past, the more one becomes an heir to it all. And why would one not want to become an heir?
White: Your metaphor is a little skewed. You can only be an heir if someone puts you in their will. And it’s not true that everything inherited from the past or that comes down to us from the past is intended for us all. It may be selective in the way that Jesus told us that parables are. When he’s asked by his disciples, “Why do you speak in parables when we ask you a question?” he tells them another story. And they say, “Well, why do you tell us another story?” and he says, “Well, you have to realize that in telling a story the aim is to distinguish between those who can hear and those who cannot.” It’s a way of selecting people who are prepared for very difficult truths and those who are not.
Harrison: Isn’t education precisely the means by which we force ourselves into the position of inheritance? You came from a certain background before going to college.
White: A working-class background.
Harrison: A working-class background that didn’t necessarily predispose you or legitimate you to be the heir of the humanist tradition of the Italian Renaissance. You forced your way in there and demanded your rights to citizenship in that ideal republic.
White: Well, that’s a good example of what you have in mind. But I became a medievalist because for me — once being introduced to medieval culture, coming from working-class Detroit during the Depression — this was so different from anything I’d ever encountered. And then I became fascinated about how a culture and a society develops over 1,000 years and sustains itself on the basis of such presuppositions as those that inform Roman Catholicism. It’s a conundrum, it’s a puzzle, it seems like some kind of paradox.
I worked in the Vatican library for many years and I found that a large number of the people there not only studied the Middle Ages, they believed in them. They were converted to them. I heard people praise the Inquisition. After studying the complexity of its organization, they had genuine admiration for it as an institution. Converting yourself to a cultural tradition is, again, studying it. But there’s a difference between studying it in a completely amoral and scientific way, where you’re only concerned with the question “What happened here?” and asking, “How does this affect me? How does this knowledge about a time and a place that I knew nothing about before force me to question my own?”
Harrison: There’s one element in the equation that almost no one that I know who engages in this endless discourse about the role of the humanities ever seems to mention. I call it love. The humanities inculcate a kind of love, a kind of allegiance to want to learn more about something.
White: I take your point about love. The idea was very common prior to the modern scientification of knowledge, that you could only know that which you love. And, conversely, you could only love that which you genuinely knew or saw into, right? I believe that’s true of a certain kind of erudition. It motivates people studying the most remote civilizations or cultures. We might be reluctant to raise it in the current scientific atmosphere, but I’m not.
Harrison: What do you do when there is a conflict between the claims of love on the one hand, and on the other a hermeneutics of suspicion?
White: I tell my graduate students never work on anything you don’t love. Why waste three or four years of your life on your dissertation doing something that you pick by chance? Failing love, work on something you hate. Because at least it will engage the emotions as well as reason and will.
People who begin, in their dissertations, to feel it’s heavy labor usually don’t last long, or become embittered and feel that they have been, in some sense, betrayed by the materials. They reach a certain age and they’ve forgotten why they went into this business.
Harrison: You have to be able to sustain or put up with a certain degree of disenchantment without letting it get to the core of the commitment.
White: I agree with that. It’s one thing to teach undergraduates, though, and another thing to teach pre-professionals. After all, one of the reasons that people go to graduate school, though they don’t know it, is that they think, “I loved reading as an undergraduate, so I’ll go to graduate school.” Then they find out that we’re interested in everything but reading — in that older mode of reverie. Sitting in a window seat curled up with a good book is about the last thing that we try to teach in graduate school. Maybe we should go back to it though.
But that would lead you back to the Fish doctrine about taste, and that teaching reading is teaching one to do tasteful reading. I think there’s something to that.
Harrison: Yes, but for Fish it’s just a set of techniques. There’s no emotional investment, there’s no moral, impractical or utilitarian. It’s just like a little science.
I think Jesus was the greatest teacher of all time.
White: When you learn a discipline, you learn a number of rules about what not to do for professional purposes, and not what to do. Because no one can teach you how to think creatively and write creatively, but they can tell you that when you write an essay like this, you violate some principle of professional performance. And you don’t want to do that if you want a job and want to practice the discipline, instead of just doing casual reading. So the enthusiasm for reading has to be translated into an enthusiasm for a whole range of learning experiences.
I believe that we teach undergraduates one way because we’re interested in producing citizens — I mean well-informed citizens. I still believe that my daughter would be much happier than she has turned out to be in her love life if she had read more novels.
Harrison: On the question of love, do you think Socrates was the greatest teacher in the history of the world? Because love was not only the medium that he used as a teacher, but he thought it was one of the foundational ingredients of philosophy.
White: No, I think Jesus was the greatest teacher of all time.
Harrison: Because of his doctrine of love?
White: Well, his doctrine of love is a very complex one, is it not? “Love your parents, but follow me.” His whole notion, at least as Saint Paul explicates it, that the fulfillment of the law is to recognize that love is the dominant principle in the quest for both knowledge and life.
Harrison: I was thinking more just specifically in terms of the process of learning.
White: I tell my students, “Look, we’re here to discuss the meaning of life.” The meaning of life is that I’m alive for the time being. I’m in a world which is making contradictory demands upon me. What do I do?
