I find myself in the absurd situation of defending the value and use of what Stanley Fish does against Stanley Fish himself. In a followup article to the one I commented on, Fish first narrows down his definition of the humanities to just include commentators on the arts and philosophy, but then expands it to include poetry again, at the end.
The gist of the article is that Fish claims people didn't understand him. I find it problematic that a humanities person and a teacher of such note can't communicate better than he claims he did, especially when he implies he meant almost the opposite of what he said, with the exception of what he said about his own work. So who am I to argue that Fish doesn't know what he's talking about regarding the value of his own work?
Fish doesn't think anyone should "subsidize my moments of aesthetic wonder." I agree. But that's not what humanities departments and universities do. They pay him to teach and publish. And what does a humanities professional publish? Works that inform their readers of new ways of understanding a work of art or philosophy. In other words, they educate others. People who work at universities are educators. They educate in the classroom, and they educate their peers. The research they do, no matter what the department, is of no use unless there is a published work. Now, with the humanities, the published work is supposed to help people to understand what the analyzed work in question means, including what different meanings it may or could have.
Now it may in fact be the case that Fish is not publishing anything of any value in that vein. He may not be contributing to anyone's understanding of works of literature. But somehow, I doubt it. He and others who explicate texts of various kinds help others to understand those texts better, so that they may in fact get more out of those texts. That can help in other areas of life, or it may just enrich the person's life by giving them insights into texts and helping them learn to love the arts. Fish does come around to agreeing that the arts can change peoples' lives for the better, so it makes no sense for him to argue that helping people understand and love literature would not be of value or use.
He also makes a distinction between philosophy and criticism that really doesn't hold up. Where do you draw the line? It Aristotle's Poetics philosophy or criticism? The insights potentially gained from either are the same, especially in regards to access to other arts and philosophies. But in the end, the problem is that Fish forgets that the humanities have something to do with humans, and thus they cannot be an end to themselves, but must be of some use and value to humans.
2 comments:
"Fish doesn't think anyone should 'subsidize my moments of aesthetic wonder.' I agree. But that's not what humanities departments and universities do. They pay him to teach and publish. And what does a humanities professional publish? Works that inform their readers of new ways of understanding a work of art or philosophy. In other words, they educate others."
What do you mean by "educate" here? From what you say, being educated is being told what to think (albeit in "new ways"), but I could be wrong.
Everyone has to be told "what" to think before they are able to learn how to think. You have to have objects of thought. However, in this particular case, a scholar's job is to provide you with his insights about what something means. You then have the option of agreeing or disagreeing -- if the first, then you have gained an insight; if the second, then you have been prompted to think. Both are educational. In either case, you have been exposed to an insight and a way of thinking about or seeing something you did not have before. In any and all of these cases, you are informed and, thus, educated.
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