But if you remove the pretentious and the abstract jargon, there is stuff in there that I’ve found very, very useful. I don’t think that postmodernists are the cause of all of the problems of academia.

One of the problems of academia are incentive systems that lead to dysfunctional outcomes. Much of the reason postmodernists use such abstruse language is that they are afraid of losing their power if people understand what they are saying and can use their arguments against them.

And it’s not that I don’t use theory and deconstruction as tools. But I recognize too that the postmodernists are the cause of all the problems in modern academia as well.

I do agree completely that ideas are tools used by the rich and powerful to keep themselves rich and powerful. Where I disagree with anti-capitalist leftists is that I don’t see this as particularly a bad thing, and its a better system than anything they’ve been able to come up with.

It’s really sad. If you go back a few decades and look at leftists, you see a lot of bright, passionate people wanting to change the world and thinking that they can. Their ideas were is some cases horribly wrong headed, but there is still something about wanting to change things for the better that is ennobling. Tragic how dreams became nightmares. Even sadder that few in academia seems to dare dream big dreams and think big thoughts any more.

Further, one could set up humanities courses that are more than “let’s find the word repetitions to see how meaning is made” and deconstruction of texts to “prove” they are about nothing more than power structures. When we set them up this way, as they have been in our universities, we get what Fish says the humanities give us: nothing. Sure, we learn how the text means, but we have given up on what it means, and how we can transform our lives with it. Give me a class (and nobody seems willing to do so precisely because this is what I would do), and I will have a class where we learn something from humanities texts that will in fact transform our lives. If we see stories as “what if” scenarios, we can learn something from them that will help us in our lives. Teach people logic, and they will become more logical. Teach people ethics, and they will become more ethical. But we have to teach ethics believing in ethics. Let me conduct an ethics class the way I think it should be conducted, and it will come alive, and people will leave there changed by the experience. Instead, philosophy classes teach ethics as a deal subject, a historical curiosity — when it’s taught to anybody at all.

It’s a shame Stanley Fish has the influence he has. He’s ruining my field. Worse, his and the influence of other postmoderns is what is keeping me from teaching in my field as well. No department will hire me because of my views, because I disagree with their contentless educational system and theories, and because of the fact that their departments are shrinking precisely because the universities are taking them seriously when they say there’s no value to what humanities professors do. If that’s true, why waste money on them?

Well, on that latter part I do agree. Te universities should fire everyone who thinks what they do doesn’t have any value.

I do think that the humanities and the liberal arts are of tremendous use.

If it were true, the most generous, patient, good-hearted and honest people on earth would be the members of literature and philosophy departments, who spend every waking hour with great books and great thoughts….

Well no…. As Aristotle points out in his Nicomachean Ethics and Confucius points out in the Doctrine of the Mean, virtue lies in moderation between extremes. If you use these ideas as a guide to life (as I do), one would expect people that spend all of their time with great books and great ideas to be less virtuous than someone who leads a more balanced life.

Lit studies, like philosophy and political economy, have been colonised by various fads and fashions that have sustained careers without necessarily contributing to the growth of knowledge or wisdom. You need to have the good fortune to encounter (say) Wellek and Barzun, Popper and Bartley, Mises and Hutt, before it is too late. As someone has written (possibly too many times) we don’t live by science and technology alone but by the myths and mores of our cultural heritage, which includes literature and art of all kinds. http://www.the-rathouse.com/

So there are deeply personal reasons for getting into art and literature (and there is no guarrantee that formal studies will help). There is also the pursuit of learning for its own sake (and again the academies hinder as much as they help). And to make intellectual progress where the way is blocked by problems of a philosophical and metaphysical nature there is a need for a critical approach to some of the great metaphysical programs that are a bit like the tectonic plates of civilisation. But don’t expect the positivists or the logical empiricists to helpl.

Talking of the humanities in general I think Fish is wrong, at least in the sense he is quoted in this blog post. The humanities might not teach people directly of what is right and wrong, but it identifies theories of right and wrong and makes explicit the arguments and assumptions supplied in the classic texts. Studying e.g. Kant’s categorical imperative might not make you adopt this view, but it makes you appreciate and understand the argument - and thus you will learn either how to defend this position (if you agree) or how to attack it (if you don’t), which in either case means that you as an individual person learns and adds to the collective knowledge of mankind.

Furthermore, I fail to realize where people writing such things as Fish is writing believe knowledge comes from. The scientific methods we have today are the result of centuries of thinking, rethinking, philosophizing, and trial and error experiments. There is no one superior objective scientific method that was given to mankind by a Creator (or aliens) that we use and have to use because it is Right. We have discovered the scientific methods through logical reasoning and through iterative testing and remodeling through millennia.

The scientific methods of the future will be much better than the scientific methods of today, just as the scientific methods of today are better than the scientific methods used some hundreds of years ago (I’m simplifying, of course). This discovery process of human knowledge creation is not only pioneering work, it is also to some degree rediscovering what very intelligent people discovered and realized long before us but that is since long forgotten. (Cf. the re-emergence of Aristotelian thought during the Renaissance in Italy.) Here literature studies (just one example) are important in order to understand and re-interpret old texts and make use of the knowledge in them - not only scientific studies, but fiction as well.

It seems to me comments such as “this is a waste of time” (as Fish seems to say about the humanities) assume we are at the height of human knowledge and that we have already all the tools and methods we need. So many have claimed this in history, and all of them have been totally wrong.

Is Fish implying that “real science” is only the hard facts of the natural sciences and those social sciences that have adopted a rather mathematical approach to research? Is he saying Comte’s positivism is the only true definition of science (along with Popperianism, perhaps)? If he is, then I totally understand his view that the humanities is a waste of time - after all, Fish himself won’t learn from further theoretical development since he has already adopted a dogmatic view of science. (I admit that I might be exaggerating a bit.)

I have a much more humble approach to science and human knowledge and knowledge creation.