Pampered Oakeshottean Pets?
Way back in January of ’09 Stanely Fish wrote a jarring little essay, in which he endorsed a vision of the culture of learning attributed to Oakeshott:
“There is an important difference between learning which is concerned with the degree of understanding necessary to practice a skill, and learning which is expressly focused upon an enterprise of understanding and explaining.”
Understanding and explaining what? The answer is understanding and explaining anything as long as the exercise is not performed with the purpose of intervening in the social and political crises of the moment, as long, that is, as the activity is not regarded as instrumental – valued for its contribution to something more important than itself.
Fish worried openly that such an undertaking, “in today’s climate,” hasn’t “a chance” — because in today’s climate science is better for life than the humanities. That value judgment, “rooted in an “ethic of productivity” and efficiency,” has “already won the day;”
and the proof is that in the very colleges and universities where the life of the mind is routinely celebrated, the material conditions of the workplace are configured by the business model that scorns it.
So, in Frank Donoghue’s words,
all fields deemed impractical, such as philosophy, art history, and literature, will henceforth face a constant danger of being deemed unnecessary.
Unnecessary to what? Defending a practice as necessary or unnecessary reveals, or at least begs, the instrumentalism Fish decries. An Oakeshottean account of what MacIntyre calls the goods ‘internal to’ learning should concede that those goods are unnecessary, external to the practices that produce them in virtue of being them! Indeed, this is Fish’s own position. But Fish’s endorsement of Donoghue’s prophecy suggests that the practicing Oakeshottean always already puts him or herself at risk. “Unnecessary, therefore we keep doing it” runs somewhat unawares into “unnecessary, therefore we pull your funding.”
Yet there is an even more serious danger for the Oakeshottean — Unnecessary, therefore you keep your funding only in your capacity as a trophy and indulgence, as a jester, a pampered pet, as a ‘holy’ fool. Fish’s definition of instrumentality leads readily into a defense of learning for learning’s sake; but the aim of reducing a flourishing culture of Oakeshottean learning down to an exotic bird in a gilt cage is not only compatible with but strengthened by the celebratory tokenism of “learning for Learning’s sake” — or exoticism for Exoticism’s sake, etc.
L’art pour l’art means: ‘the devil take morality!’ — But this very hostility betrays that moral prejudice is still dominant. […] Art is the great stimulus to life: how could it be thought purposeless, aimless, l’art pour l’art?
What? Replace ‘art’ with ‘learning’, and we go from Nietzsche to Oakeshott? But I don’t know whether Oakeshott really takes the enterprise of understanding and explaining to be ‘the great stimulus to life.’ Fish seems to concede that Oakeshottean learners will always wake up one day to discover they are being bred out. Do they actually discover they have been bred in? How is an Oakeshottean to avoid becoming too pampered a pet? Does it matter, instrumentally speaking, that this crisis is always ‘of the moment’? Why do you, practicing Oakeshottean, put yourself at such an extremity of risk?
Well…..vulgar evo psych and evo theory of culture dictate that art, music and dance are hardwired along with religion.
There was some selective advantage or fitness benefit, or some benevolent linkage in the EEA.
Consider cooperation and altruistic behavior in chimps….also …..waterfall displays.
— matoko_chan · Feb 17, 03:51 PM · #
Really? This is the more serious danger? Perhaps I’m reading this wrong, but I fail to see how this is more dangerous than losing funding for the “unnecessary” humanities altogether. Better a ‘holy’ fool than a dead fool…
— E.D. Kain · Feb 17, 08:42 PM · #
Serious as in more real?
— James · Feb 18, 01:06 AM · #
Is it ever possible to do anything for that thing’s own sake? On scrutiny, “art for art’s sake” seems always to mean “art for the sake of the pleasure or delight or satisfaction I take in contemplating it.” The notion of any activity having “intrinsic value” strikes me as nonsensical. Things or acts are always valuable in relation to some implicit or explicit account of human flourishing. This is why MacIntyre doesn’t just talk about the goods intrinsic to practice, but also defines a practice as an activity we engage in “with the result that human powers to achieve excellence, and human conceptions of the ends and goods involved, are systematically extended.” No practice is self-justifying or, in any strict sense, intrinsically valuable.
Therefore, when Fish decries an instrumental model of study in the humanities, maybe what he means is that he is perfectly content to have no answer to the question, “Why is this kind of thing worth doing?” (Except maybe a shrug, or “It just is.”) But I think it’s more likely that he means that the humanities are completely unjustifiable if we see them as instruments to achieve goods — transformation of the political order, say, or the acquisition of great wealth — that they are manifestly unsuited to achieve. Certainly I would see that as a more defensible stance to take. And I think I would be a poor practitioner of my chosen field if I could come up with no explanation at all of why what I do, as a teacher and scholar, is worth anyone’s time.
— Alan Jacobs · Feb 18, 02:47 AM · #
“Why is this kind of thing worth doing?” — to enrich the life of the mind. I mean, right?
Let’s be wary of ignoring the most advantageous advantage — for utility’s sake, if nothing else.
— JA · Feb 18, 03:47 AM · #
Odd reading this now. Last week, on a whim I looked up the phone number for the physics professor I had some twenty years ago, called and left a message that twenty years later I still remember his class fondly, and still feel its effects on the work I do today.
He called back a few days later and we chatted a while, and we both agreed that one of the most awful things that has happened in higher education is dominance of the humanities in what it means to be “educated” while art (me) and science (him) seem to be more and more viewed as technical specialties. (My favorite example being that “educated” people frequently boast of the ignorance of science or incompetence in arithmetic, but people will go to great efforts to conceal the fact that they haven’t read the “right books” or difficulties with spelling.)
From where he and I are standing, if art and science couldn’t justify themselves with some measure of utility, they would disappear entirely from the intellectual landscape, leaving behind only the theorists, debaters, and other humanist.
— Tony Comstock · Feb 18, 04:16 AM · #
Okay, let me respond to Donoghue first.
First, let’s concede these disciplines are not necessary from the perspective of Leviathan. But who can say what’s necessary (or less rigidly, what’s meaningful) to a mind curious about (stricken by?) the twofer insults of apparent purposelessness and inevitable death.
It’s decidedly unimaginative, especially when advocating the Machine, not to anticipate the proven idiosyncrasies of the cogs you want to build it with. To answer simply: the more life is filled with procedure, the more a mental escape hatch is necessary.
Work hard, play hard go together for a reason. The humanities is play, and no less important for that.
— JAq · Feb 18, 04:25 AM · #