Who Decides What’s Good and What’s Bad in the Humanities?

In his recent Chronicle Review article, “The Humanities’ Fear of Judgment,” Michael Clune argues that the humanities in general, and literary study in particular, are in trouble because we don’t want to talk about value. Au contraire. Sit in on any English class and you’ll hear a lot about value — about the value of literature in pushing the boundaries of empathy; about the efficacy of poetry in encouraging thorough, expansive engagement, rather than minimal, uniform assessment; about the moral weight of fiction in a world that may be post-truth. Value is certainly front and center, but not the value that only belongs to a few initiates in a small, narrow sphere.

Clune approvingly invokes the early-20th-century literary critic I.A. Richards channeling the authority of the expert: “My taste is more refined, my nature more cultured, you will do well to become more like me than you are.” This is not the grounds for expertise vis-à-vis our students that we wish to claim. Rather, we’ve learned a style of self-awareness regarding our critical processes, and we encourage our students to do the same. Not to adopt our values, but to better articulate and support their own. Clune fears that under neoliberalism, market forces are supplanting expertise; we’re concerned, rather, to prepare our students to contend with some degree of success in the marketplace of ideas.

Liberal-arts education is not force-feeding: We are not telling our students to sit down, shut up, and eat their vegetables. (See! Poetry is good for you!) We are instead guiding our students in learning how to nourish themselves — and their communities — through feast and famine. Take the teaching that scholars of literature do. We encourage students to think aslant; to find both what seems clearly written in a text and what may be hiding just out of view. This is not a question of force-feeding. It is a practice of reciprocal thinking, questioning, and exploring perspectives very different from those you came in with. It is, as Henry Fielding wrote, about coming to a table that’s laden with many different foods and learning about hospitality, about culture, and about your own and others’ voracious need to understand.

It’s high time, Clune insists, that we acknowledge that literary value can be taught. His example, learning to admire a translated haiku, suggests that learning involves value instruction from an expert who can tell you how, and can teach you just how to DIY. The sentiment echoes that voiced by William Wordsworth in The Prelude: “… what we have loved, / Others will love, and we will teach them how.” The danger in such a position should be obvious — the suggestion that the goal of education is to reproduce our taste in our students, by setting them up to be challenged … in exactly the ways we were challenged. (After all, it was good enough for us: and just look at us!) It’s tantamount to forcing your students to sit and watch a movie with you — but it’s a movie you’ve already seen. And you’re going to ruin it for them.

Taking pleasure in something is a reliable sign of having found it valuable; but you can equally take pleasure without knowing why you value what you do. When Clune claims that he learned to take pleasure in something he didn’t initially find at all appealing, he is not saying what he thinks he is saying. It is not, as he seems to think, that he had to be shown the way. Rather, his anecdote points up the fundamental fact that people differ in their pleasures. He came to find pleasure where there had been only confusion. And just as individuals differ in our pleasures, we differ in our values and in how we prioritize them.

We learn what we value because pleasure points the way. We have eaten, and find it to be good. These pleasures aren’t fully natural, or inherited, or found — and certainly, they’re not universal. Those values, those pleasures — what Richards calls “taste” — are, to invoke the familiar cultural studies formulation, not natural but cultural. The expert, of course, has a vested interest in professing the dispassionate nature of his taste: There’s no agenda here — it’s just that some things are better than others. For sociologist Pierre Bourdieu, this gesture is symptomatic of the cultural field writ large, which has “an interest in disinterestedness.”

Hence the Olympian pronouncements of a figure like Matthew Arnold, the most influential English-language critic of the 19th century. In “The Study of Poetry” (1880), Arnold argues that the proper valuation of new poetry rests on its being compared (but how?) to poetic “touchstones,” “lines and expressions of the great masters.” And how are those touchstones themselves to be mined? On this Arnold is strategically vague, but the word “tact” does a lot of work — according to the Oxford English Dictionary, “a keen faculty of perception or discrimination.” We’re not far from Richard’s “taste” (which, in a telling substitution, he calls “nature” in the very next phrase). It’s not quite “I know it when I see it,” but it’s very close. And what if you don’t know it when you see it? Then, I’m afraid, you were probably never meant to see it.

Clune’s phrase “pathologies of expertise” — by which he means the exclusions wrought by the prejudice of experts — is striking. But he seems to think that simply by uttering it, he’s vanquished it. We’re not so sure. Plenty of evil has been done by experts in the name of expertise, even in the relatively “harmless” realm of literary criticism. Harold Bloom, perhaps the most celebrated critic of his generation, has used his expertise to promulgate and shore up canons that largely exclude women and writers of color, betraying a callous indifference to difference. In his most comprehensive and best-selling statement on these questions, The Western Canon: The Books and School of the Ages (1994), he uses the second sentence of the 500-plus-page tome to proclaim that “aesthetic value” is “sometimes regarded as a suggestion of Immanuel Kant’s rather than an actuality, but that has not been my experience during a lifetime of reading.” Bloom can’t define art, but he knows it when he sees it. And he doesn’t see it in, for instance, Toni Morrison, or Maya Angelou, or Adrienne Rich.

So we are arguing, in part, that value is both situated and multiple, in stark opposition to Arnold’s transcendental Value. When it comes to the liberal arts, then, what are we doing? Are we teaching pleasures? Are we teaching value? Perhaps what literary scholars can help us to understand is why we value what we value. They can teach us to make room for others’ views, values, and pleasures alongside our own. And to acknowledge that our own can change — even teachers’. Call it aesthetic empathy.

We don’t care whether our students value what we value. We’re both people of faith: that faith provides the bedrock value system in our lives. We don’t try to teach that to our students — we would never so presume. But we do want them to be deliberative about their own values, and to be ready always to give an answer for them. To paraphrase Wordsworth, what’s central is not what we have loved, but how.

The popular-music writer Carl Wilson’s short book on Céline Dion is a great example of this kind of aesthetic empathy. Wilson seeks to understand his own powerful dislike for Dion’s music, but also to understand the powerful emotional pull she exerts on millions of others. Wilson never comes to appreciate the soundtrack to Titanic— but that wasn’t really the goal of the project (which he subtitles, tellingly for our argument, “a journey to the end of taste”). Rather, he comes to appreciate the fans’ appreciation, to understand some of what this music, so meaningful to so many, means for them.

The disciplines of the liberal arts teach disciplinary procedures and habits of mind. We can’t enforce them, ensure that they’re followed (Enjoy Shakespeare! And James Baldwin! And Zora Neale Hurston! And James Joyce! NOW). We can show you new pleasures and new ways of valuing things — we can embody them — but we can’t make you feel them. We model a style of engagement, of critical thought: we don’t transmit value.

Teaching and learning in what we call the liberal arts matter because they help us approach some seemingly universal truths about what it means to be human. But that universality encompasses a heck of a lot of difference. And if you learn one thing in the liberal arts, it’s that you need to be a student of difference. You need to recognize the divergences among us and the diversities we bring to life. You need, one might say, to value them. The liberal arts don’t teach value — they teach us to value values.

Our disciplines aren’t primarily important for teaching their rules, whether they are the rules of English, politics, or neuroscience. The liberal arts are good because disciplined thinking (a.k.a. “critical thinking”) is transferable across domains. Clune quotes Agnes Callard approvingly, arguing that a teacher “tr[ies] to give students access to a distinct domain of aesthetic, scientific, or literary value.” We’re surprised to read that description of our vocation — if that’s what we’re supposed to be doing, we’ve been doing it badly. When Silicon Valley types say they want to hire humanities majors, it’s not because they want coders who know Gwendolyn Brooks poems. It’s because they want to hire lively and curious minds with analytical skills that transcend the occasion of their teaching. Very few would have used Brooks as an example 50 years ago, and we are proud to say it loud: Thanks to real struggle, this year marks the 50th anniversary of Africana studies and Chicana/o and Latina/o studies at our institution.

What we teach matters because the substance counts. Indeed, we teach metacognitive skills — and we teach them to people. Both historically and in our present moment, institutions of teaching and learning have not always fully acknowledged the breadth of humanity. It matters that the canon has changed from what Bloom and others envisioned, because we seek to be true to the breadth of human experience.

So while we may be teaching a set of rules that reflect disciplinary values (science is progressive, accumulates knowledge, and disputes it; humanistic inquiry is divergent, proliferates knowledge, and argues the heck out of it), that’s not the ultimate value of liberal education (the Aristotelian end or good, as opposed to, for the picky among us, the Kantian end or good that Clune embraces). No. The liberal arts — and our beloved humanities — are good because we help students learn that values are discovered through disciplined thinking. And pleasure draws us endlessly on. That’s worth something.