The Read: Eric Hayot, Humanist Reason: A History. An Argument. A Plan.
Friday's Child is Loving and Giving
Why did I get this book?
I saw several social media conversations about it, I knew of Hayot’s work but hadn’t read it before, and the book sounded incredibly useful to me both for helping me to think about and explain the specific reluctance of historians to generalize and in giving me a richer way to explain what “humanistic thought” is and why it should be valued.
Is it what I thought it was?
Oh my yes. Very much so. I was happy as a clam right off the bat when Hayot describes unhappily sitting in an audience while an economist describes trying to construct an elaborate, epistemologically jury-rigged research framework to explain something that humanists have been thinking about and explaining for almost two centuries as if none of that vast amount of work exists. I’d be rich if I had a nickel for every time I’ve been in an audience resignedly tolerating the same thing.
What continuing uses might I have for it?
I have a dream that I could hand this book to colleagues in more positivistic social sciences and natural sciences and they’d finally get why Hayot—or I—might be feeling so distressed sitting in one of those audiences, and that from there, we could move on to a real discussion of the epistemologies and aspirations that undergird our respective forms of knowledge production and engagement with the world.
I at least have a dream that I could hand some people the book and try to summarize and explain Hayot’s interpretations and arguments for them. I think it’s pretty accessible but I concede that the philosophical density of the first half might prove challenging.
I also think it would help humanists when they get together in forming a more assertive, insistent and forward-looking vision of why humanistic thinking matters in academic institutions rather than the defensive crouch most of us instinctively fall into (or the pity parties we sometimes throw when it’s just us in the room talking bitterly about the status quo). So maybe the more realistic dream is reading it together with folks who might (or might not) respond to Hayot’s positive description of their ways of thinking and working.
Quotes
“I am sitting in the audience, feeling a little bit like I am losing my mind. All of this work to prove that cultural differences affect how groups of people share the proceeds of their innovation and wealth? Something that historians, sociologists, and scholars of literature have spend centuries trying to explain, and around which they have built tremendously influential economic, political and socioeconomic models and theories? Something that everyone in my field already knows?”
“Humanist work done to disprove the truth of any proposition does not count, if you are an economist, as in any way true. All those books, those conference talks, those months and years in archives, the sentences that put those ideas together: all these are, from a certain perspective…just some ideological gabble.”
“In the humanities today, the assertion that one is saying true things, or attempting to, is likely to be met with a great deal of suspicion. Why? Well, for good reason: thanks to a broad sense of historical and interpersonal relativism, most humanists believe there is no such thing as ‘the’ truth; rather, there are only multiple, historical contingent truths that operate in particular cultural contexts and shape the truth regimes that form there. The fact that economists don’t think that humanist knowledge produces truth is pretty good evidence for such a claim, but so are the vast number of ways in which the people of the past or of other places confront us with beliefs that seem to us impossible, unreasonable, outrageous, and so on, and present us with worlds that we have been trained not to judge on terms derived entirely from our own situation or our own epistemological self-satisfaction.”
“The reason to explore humanist reason, then, is not just that dominant theories of reason and truth tend to dismiss the work of the humanities (though they do); neither is it only that such an exploration might give humanists more ways to creatively organize their teaching and scholarship, or even to profoundly reimagine it (though it will). It is also, much more simply, that the currently dominant theory of reason is unreasonable.”
“The so-called crisis in the humanities, a crisis which, in epistemological and social terms, dates quite clearly back to the late 1800s…has taken an especially grim institutional turn since the 2008 financial crisis…I do not ever intend to suggest that the wounds suffered by the humanities today…are either self-inflicted or the product of this epistemological problem. They’re not…That said, the history of humanist-generated metadiscourse about the humanities—by this, I mean language about how the humanities work that is produced by humanists themselves—has boxed humanities institutions and scholars into a rhetorical and political corner that has not served them well.”
“The division of the disciplines by the ontologies of their objects turns out to have had a remarkable, Diltheyian staying power. The idea that certain objects demand certain kinds of methods, and vice versa, continues to be fundamental to the organization of our institution, and to our professional self-understanding. What does such an idea imply? At the bottom, that nature and the mind are fundamentally different orders of things, and that the differences that lie inside them and belong to them as such produce a set of epistemological demands…It is not just that the methods correspond, in some strong sense, to their objects, but also that the difference in the objects produces—or seems to produce—the dichotomized difference in the methods needed to understand them.”
“At some level, the collapse of the nomothetic/idiographic distinction, or its rewriting as a sliding scale, permits a fairly radical reimagination of the task of a ‘historian’ or ‘biologist’: we could imagine an idiographic biologist working on the unique history of a single cell, or a nomothetic historian analyzing theories and problems of the longue duree.”
“Just put together three things: 1) Kant’s description of the very process of reflecting judgment as proceeding ‘artistically,’ 2) Windelband’s claim that the task of the humanist scholar is ‘similar to the task of the artist,’ and 3) the more general humanist principle that one ought to borrow one’s methods from one’s objects and treat them on their own terms. Together, these describe a kind of cognition that not only thinks about things, but through them. And all of them have a strong tendency to find, as a model for that kind of thinking, the kind of experience that humans have when they look at—or make—art.”
“Reason is, simply, a subjective procedure for producing objective, shareable knowledge.”
“My assumption is that the participants in reason come to that conversation in a wide range of differently embodied forms, and with a wide range of historical experiences, forms of knowledge and experiences of power and powerlessness, oppression and dominance, ability and disability. Reason as I understand it does not require participants to shed their identities, become purely ‘rational’ and ‘unemotional’ (as if!), or to abandon their bodies at the door. The participants in any conversation will necessarily be different, which does not mean that they cannot treated equally.”
“This approach to an object, whether it sees to interpret it or explain it, will adopt a rich understanding of the sociohistorical situation and its various limits and affordances at multiple interpenetrating scales, each of which can be itself contextualized in relation to the others, and which accordingly can be the subject of further macro- or micro-contextualization"…That such meditation can never cease—that there can be no definitive resolution of the relationship between context and action (a totally determined context would have no action at all)—is not, humanist reason believes, a function of our contemporary lack of knowledge, and therefore a problem to be resolved by some future predictive system of history.”
“There is absolutely no way to either teach or write in the humanities today without drawing from a variety of institutionalized disciplines: minimally anthropology, literary criticism, art history, linguistics, political, social and economic history, history of science, philosophy, sociology, and psychology, not to mention knowledge developed in those fields primarily organized around topics—namely, ethnic studies, women’s, gender, or sexuality studies, and area studies programs of various kinds…to be a serious scholar in any of these fields requires some knowledge of all of them.”
“Remember the Chakrabarty test: If no one has ever known exactly what something means, if not one has ever taken something fully on its own terms, then you should probably not build your theory of reason around the demand that someone do so…you probably ought to account for the fact that despite the fact that this gap between what one person says and does and what another understands about it exists in every historical situation that has ever taken place, people seem to understand one another perfectly well enough to make friendships work; to make institutions work; to make jokes, novels and plays work; or to make, in general, the entire labor of the social so effective.”
[I could keep going: there’s a lot of memorable or interesting writing in the book.]
Commentary, asides, loose thoughts, unfair complaints
If any STEM scholar or more positivistic social scientist takes a look at the book based on this recommendation and bogs down hard in the first two chapters, I understand. Of the two, the first is more important for understanding his later explanations of “humanist reason”—he digs back into a key debate in late 19th Century German thought that gave us among other things the vocabulary of “nomothetic” and “idiographic”, loosely speaking the difference between looking for general laws that govern at a universal scale and looking to understand particular phenomenon in their own terms. If you do give the book a shot and you feel pretty wiped out after Chapter 1, give yourself permission to skip Chapter 2, which is an extended meditation on Kant’s thought in relationship to humanist reason. I appreciate why the book is structured this way, with that meditation in the middle of it, but it’s definitely the densest and hardest part of his argument, however key it may be to his conclusions. (In his final summation called “TL;DR” he goes out of his way to make Kant the point of origin for his final description of humanist reason.)
The third section, on the other hand, should be great for everybody, if they have some patience and willingness to really dig into what’s being argued—Hayot breaks it down into a series of “articles” (in the sense of a constitution: articles that compose ‘humanist reason’, in his view). For example, “Article 7” claims that “fuzziness, ambiguity and contradiction are socially functional” and that a humanist analysis shouldn’t treat them as problems to be resolved. The fourth section on academic institutions is also extremely useful for anyone, I think.
I am sure that many people whose starting orientation to knowledge work is always as concrete as possible will find Hayot’s philosophical and theoretical language very frustrating as it is frequently abstract. But it is the kind of abstraction that explains very well the kinds of concrete knowledge that humanistic scholars produce (including historians and cultural anthropologists) and why they are so intensely wary of strongly nomothetic kinds of scholarly work and teaching. If you want one example of that, keep following my “Good Enough Futures” columns—look at how I prepare the ground so that I can feel comfortable saying “If we were able to change certain things about our systemic understanding of crime and our systemic practice of justice, life would probably be better”. There are scholars as well as people outside the academy who would just cut to the chase and say “Here are my policy recommendations, based on the following general hypothesis about crime and law enforcement.” For me the question of who “we” are is important and can’t be finally resolved; what it means to “change” is important and can’t be finally resolved; whether or under what circumstances a “we” can “decide” to make changes and see those changes made in accordance with that intention is important and can’t be finally resolved; what it means to talk about “systems” of crime and justice as if they’re separate from systems of economic hierarchy or sovereignty is important and can’t be finally resolved. Etc. You get the point.
I once walked into a colleague’s informal presentation about an aspect of his work as an economist and I got hung up on all the propositions embedded in the idea of measuring inequality in terms of a standardized SES metric. I know that was annoying, and I was sorry afterwards, but humanists don’t mean to be either annoying or obscurantist in a trivial or needless way. We think the ways that we think because we think it’s important—and we think that all kinds of knowledge production and all kinds of teaching should have to take some forms of humanist reason on board. When I watch colleagues in STEM—or administrative colleagues—try to find a way to think about diversity, equity and inclusion concerns while wholly avoiding or disdaining humanist thinking on those subjects, it just drives me to despair. It’s not only a waste of a massive body of scholarly knowledge and available expertise, it’s missing out on the only things that can actually work to address those concerns meaningfully. Hayot says “humanist reason should be found everywhere in the university” and I think that’s fundamentally right.
(I also think he’s right in advising that undergraduate study in the humanities should not not be organized by discipline, but I’ve kind of given up making this argument in a serious way within any given institutional context because the resistance it produces from humanists themselves is a sign that this proposition is going nowhere. Moreover, the arguments that arise out of this proposition are mostly unsatisfying—a bad mix of paranoia, crude institutional instrumentalism, arbitrary declarations about the special conditions of a single discipline that apply to no other discipline, and various kinds of low-level gaslighting.)
Good economists take insights from "thick description" humanism, and ask "how often?", "how important?", & "how representative?" Bad economists... there are lots of bad economists...