[book post] Humanist Reason by Eric Hayot
Feb. 3rd, 2022 03:35 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
queenluaLike, I imagine, most of my peers, I entered college with a rather fuzzy idea of what the humanities are for. I wasn't a STEMlord, mind; I was pretty well equally divided in my interests between the natural sciences, social sciences, and humanities, and a coin flip could've pushed me in any of those directions. But if you had pressed me on what, exactly, was the value of an English degree versus a molecular biology degree, I probably would've echoed some of the vague university rhetoric about all subjects being equally good for "learning how to think," and, if pressed, I would've had some fuzzy notion that the sciences were more "empirical", and the humanities were more interpretive/personal/"artsy" (with math, our majestic queen, sitting upon some divine throne solidly in-between).
But I am not sure I would've used the word "true" to describe, say, the papers I wrote for my literature seminars, and that's a big problem, according to Hayot.
Hayot's thesis, in brief, is that the humanities matter not for fuzzy reasons like "learning how to think," nor for moral/ethical/aesthetic reasons (diversity, inclusion, becoming "cultured", etc), but because they are a systematic way of producing true knowledge, and thus we defund and underinvest in them at our own epistemic peril. Ergo, humanists should emphasize that when they describe the value of the humanities.
And, I should note, Hayot's positing his thesis with a specific goal in mind. Hayot attributes the decline of humanities in the academy (falling enrollments, fewer tenured job positions, etc) to, among other things, an inability on the part of humanists to persuasively articulate their own value. The target audience for this book really seems to be fellow academic humanists, as a sort of rallying cry.
"Hey Lua, you're not an academic humanist. Whatcha doin reading this book?" Look, I am just some curious rando, and this writeup is just my thoughts as a curious rando, take it or leave it :P
* * *
Anyway. I'm sympathetic to Hayot's thesis in general and interested in the particulars. He starts off at a solid clip, bringing forth two anecdotes in his introduction:
1) One time, Hayot went to a presentation by some Econ Guys, who were researching a question: does culture affect the way new technologies are transmitted and shared? They came up with some very econ-y way to answer this question—they found some groups of people, and they quantified their cultures and scientific-transmission-rates in various ways, yada yada—and these economists concluded that, yes, culture has an effect on this thing.
Hayot, sitting in the audience, just about tore his hair out, because, oh my god, all this work, and all this data, just to prove something that humanists have known for ages—why haven't they listened to the voluminous humanist writing on this topic? he asked one of the speakers. "Because you're all Leninists," was the econ guy's reply, which, lmao.
I get what Hayot's frustrated about, and there's a whole bucketload there that could be unpacked about the negative effects of political factionalism in modern universities, and the marginalization of fields that do not have obvious economic outputs, and so on.
But, setting those issues aside for a moment, as Hayot did, to focus on the question at hand—why would an economist "waste" his time in this way?—I actually think there's something complicated to unpack here.
Like, look, it's true these econ researchers' approach is a little silly. And their approach may well be ridiculously myopic and foolish; God knows there's plenty such economists to go around.
But one could imagine an economist who is aware of the humanist body of work, but is interested in proving or analyzing it through a different lens, right? Like, in mathematics, writing a proof in a different way from someone else, using tools or theorems that seem awkward and ill-suited for the task, is sometimes an indication that the author is simply fumbling about and doesn't know the better method is sitting right there—but! sometimes, it's a cool way to affirm connections between disparate subfields of math in interesting and beautiful ways. (Spoiler alert: it me; I always had a great time deliberately writing totally goofy-yet-valid proofs if I could get away with it.)
This tension between "utilizing different ways of knowing" versus "just ignorantly wailing on a thing with a hammer when clearly you need a screwdriver" is one I've seen come up time and again, in these sorts of discussions, and I was interested if Hayot was going to press on this a bit more. It'd be very useful to have heuristics for when you're using the right tool for the job.*
Alas, this isn't examined in depth; the anecdote's merely meant to serve as an example of other fields being ignorant of humanist reason. But onto Hayot's second anecdote, which is treated in more detail.
* I have a highly-related-yet-opposite annoyance in "ways of knowing" discourse, actually. You ever been at a meeting for, idk, Some Environmentalist Group Of Some Note? And they talk about how they plan to include/incorporate/respect Indigenous knowledge when making their plans for How To Do An Environmentalism? But then if you ask for particulars about how that knowledge has enlightened or steered their stewardship, you get a lot of vagueness in reply, and you realize, oh wait, they haven't actually meaningfully engaged with those sources, they're just sort of waving a wand that says "you are valid" and then going about their day? I dunno, man, if I think a group has a perspective worth hearing, I think it's worth actually engaging with it, and treating their ideas with rigor? Like, obviously don't be douchey about it; dismissing someone else's knowledge just because it doesn't 1:1 match the processes/methods/etc that you're familiar with totally sucks, as the past couple hundred years of history will tell us... but I think not even bothering to engage because you're worried about doing anything more adventurous than "you are valid" is an even bigger dismissal?
ANYWAY. This is all to say, I think "how to meaningfully engage with Unfamiliar Stuff without getting out over your skis" seems like it'd be an important part of the humanist reason Hayot describes, important enough that I'd expect Hayot to touch on it in this book... but, alas, that's not particularly covered, either.
2) Hayot describes a time when he was working on a manuscript that he expected to make nationalists on both sides of a Chinese-Western divide uncomfortable. He included a sentence to the effect of, "I'm writing about this not because it undermines nationalist narratives, but because I'm trying to understand what's historically true, and the undermining is a happy accident." One of his colleagues pulled him aside and said: do you really want to be using that t-word? Truth?
Hayot's sympathetic to his colleague's concern—humanists, he says, tend to be nervous about words like truth because they seem to imply absolutism, the Final Word TM, and so on. But Hayot still insists on his phrasing, because, if we don't think we're arguing something true, even if that truth is circumstantially-contingent and perhaps mutable, then what's the point?
I'm banging on about the introduction at length because I think Hayot does an excellent job of framing the problem: what's at stake, what interesting questions fall out from that, and so on.
What follows next is: a detour into intellectual history!
* * *
Which is the kind of shit I love, so I had a great time. Basically, Hayot uses (1) the philosopher Wilhel Widelband's 1894 Rectorial Address, and (2) a lengthy selection from Kant, in order to describe the origins of The Discourse TM around the humanities-sciences divide. The tl;dr is, Widelband argues that humanities versus science shouldn't be seen in a difference of objects of study—physical realities versus pieces of art, or some such—but more as a difference in the kind of attention one gives to an object. The humanities, Widelband asserts, are idiographic: they focus on particularities, on singular instances of a thing, and otherwise rigorously argue that things cannot be treated as mere instances of a theory or trend. Science, by contrast, is nomothetic: its focus is on groups of things that can be recognized in generalizable ways, and have general laws applied to them (atoms, hot and cold weather fronts, etc).
Hayot is sympathetic to what Widelband's trying to do here—Widelband's own intellectual climate bears a striking resemblance to our own, with the humanities being eaten, not by 21st century whiz-bang technolust, but instead by the popularity of social Darwinism and the impressive advances of the industrial age. And thus Widelband's attempt to distinguish humanities in this way is a reasonable defensive move.
But the move is incorrect, Hayot asserts. Both science and humanities, viewed rightly, are capable of being either idiographic or nomothetic. Indeed, they are always, inescapably both—by choosing some object of study (Tolstoy's novels, classical mechanics), you are necessarily being particular by leaving a lot of stuff out (other Russian novels, quantum mechanics), and general by making some general statement about what you leave in (Tolstoy has some self-consistent "style", classical atoms behave in a particular way). Even if you wanted to do an entirely "idiographic" study, you are bound by things that are technically achievable within a human lifespan—it would be impossible to give e.g. a rigorous, particularist account of every single novel published between 1800 and 1900, because there are literally not enough hours in a life to read that many novels, let alone give them the kind of close attention that that kind of analysis requires. Therefore, "general" vs "particular" isn't a science vs humanities thing.
(This whole analysis is way more fun than I'm making it sound here; Hayot brings in all kinds of delightful arguments and evidence and recountings from all kinds of intellectuals that made me think a lot.)
So: the humanities are not about "broad generalizable theories" versus "close loving attention"; all fields contain both things, whether they like it or not. So, what are the humanities about?
* * *
Here's where I started having to periodically turn back pages and squint a bit, because, for all Hayot argued what the humanities are not, I was struggling a little to find his argument for what they are.
He tries to state his case more plainly in the penultimate chapter, by outlining his "articles of reason," which include bullets like:
* All human activity is context-embedded, but not context-determined.
* Human life does not follow disciplinary boundaries; neither does scholarship.
* Historical causality includes nondeterministic and indirect forces operating at multiple scales.
Which generally feel more like... useful things to keep in mind, when doing scholarship, rather than an explicit statement of What This Scholarship Is? I was underwhelmed with this bit.
Hayot's at his most explicit in the very last chapter, where he outlines a Wikipedia-style description of "humanist reason," modeled after the Wikipedia-style description of the "scientific method" that we all learn in elementary school. This outline is nice, but I wish it'd be introduced earlier on, and also, I wish he'd really delved into specifics—what it looks like in practice, what its boundaries are, when it's useful, and so on. He is, for example, in his high-level treatment of things, taking it for granted that all forms of humanist analysis have equal validity—the kind of close-reading that the English department folks do is treated as the very same kind of thing that ethnographers are doing, that historians are doing, and so on. Yet in my own experience as an undergrad, the sorts of things that seemed to qualify as good scholarship seemed to vary wildly between the various humanities departments, and I would've liked some kind of accounting of that.
So, for the book as a whole, like, I dunno. I liked the intellectual history involved: I now know lots of random stuff about the intellectual climate of late-1800s German universities, and also some petty debates between contemporary academic geographers, and a couple new great dunks on Spengler, and so on. And I liked Hayot's discussion because it made me, personally, think harder about the various kinds of attention we can give to things—all kinds of things—and what that tells us about the world. I've got several pages in my notebook with some choice quotes from the book & my half-baked musings on them. But as a fully convincing account of what humanist reason is, I think Hayot's book falls short.
Obviously I am Some Curious Rando rather than the actual target audience, so I checked some other reviews to make sure I didn't have some super-obvious blind spot. Critical Inquiry is even harsher than I am; LA Review of Books raises some interesting points about the sort of ambient diffusion of 80s-90s humanities-theorylanguage into popular discourse and what that means. Take 'em for what you will.
also this writeup was really annoying because this book's index is frustratingly non-comprehensive grumble grumble
But I am not sure I would've used the word "true" to describe, say, the papers I wrote for my literature seminars, and that's a big problem, according to Hayot.
Hayot's thesis, in brief, is that the humanities matter not for fuzzy reasons like "learning how to think," nor for moral/ethical/aesthetic reasons (diversity, inclusion, becoming "cultured", etc), but because they are a systematic way of producing true knowledge, and thus we defund and underinvest in them at our own epistemic peril. Ergo, humanists should emphasize that when they describe the value of the humanities.
And, I should note, Hayot's positing his thesis with a specific goal in mind. Hayot attributes the decline of humanities in the academy (falling enrollments, fewer tenured job positions, etc) to, among other things, an inability on the part of humanists to persuasively articulate their own value. The target audience for this book really seems to be fellow academic humanists, as a sort of rallying cry.
"Hey Lua, you're not an academic humanist. Whatcha doin reading this book?" Look, I am just some curious rando, and this writeup is just my thoughts as a curious rando, take it or leave it :P
Anyway. I'm sympathetic to Hayot's thesis in general and interested in the particulars. He starts off at a solid clip, bringing forth two anecdotes in his introduction:
1) One time, Hayot went to a presentation by some Econ Guys, who were researching a question: does culture affect the way new technologies are transmitted and shared? They came up with some very econ-y way to answer this question—they found some groups of people, and they quantified their cultures and scientific-transmission-rates in various ways, yada yada—and these economists concluded that, yes, culture has an effect on this thing.
Hayot, sitting in the audience, just about tore his hair out, because, oh my god, all this work, and all this data, just to prove something that humanists have known for ages—why haven't they listened to the voluminous humanist writing on this topic? he asked one of the speakers. "Because you're all Leninists," was the econ guy's reply, which, lmao.
I get what Hayot's frustrated about, and there's a whole bucketload there that could be unpacked about the negative effects of political factionalism in modern universities, and the marginalization of fields that do not have obvious economic outputs, and so on.
But, setting those issues aside for a moment, as Hayot did, to focus on the question at hand—why would an economist "waste" his time in this way?—I actually think there's something complicated to unpack here.
Like, look, it's true these econ researchers' approach is a little silly. And their approach may well be ridiculously myopic and foolish; God knows there's plenty such economists to go around.
But one could imagine an economist who is aware of the humanist body of work, but is interested in proving or analyzing it through a different lens, right? Like, in mathematics, writing a proof in a different way from someone else, using tools or theorems that seem awkward and ill-suited for the task, is sometimes an indication that the author is simply fumbling about and doesn't know the better method is sitting right there—but! sometimes, it's a cool way to affirm connections between disparate subfields of math in interesting and beautiful ways. (Spoiler alert: it me; I always had a great time deliberately writing totally goofy-yet-valid proofs if I could get away with it.)
This tension between "utilizing different ways of knowing" versus "just ignorantly wailing on a thing with a hammer when clearly you need a screwdriver" is one I've seen come up time and again, in these sorts of discussions, and I was interested if Hayot was going to press on this a bit more. It'd be very useful to have heuristics for when you're using the right tool for the job.*
Alas, this isn't examined in depth; the anecdote's merely meant to serve as an example of other fields being ignorant of humanist reason. But onto Hayot's second anecdote, which is treated in more detail.
* I have a highly-related-yet-opposite annoyance in "ways of knowing" discourse, actually. You ever been at a meeting for, idk, Some Environmentalist Group Of Some Note? And they talk about how they plan to include/incorporate/respect Indigenous knowledge when making their plans for How To Do An Environmentalism? But then if you ask for particulars about how that knowledge has enlightened or steered their stewardship, you get a lot of vagueness in reply, and you realize, oh wait, they haven't actually meaningfully engaged with those sources, they're just sort of waving a wand that says "you are valid" and then going about their day? I dunno, man, if I think a group has a perspective worth hearing, I think it's worth actually engaging with it, and treating their ideas with rigor? Like, obviously don't be douchey about it; dismissing someone else's knowledge just because it doesn't 1:1 match the processes/methods/etc that you're familiar with totally sucks, as the past couple hundred years of history will tell us... but I think not even bothering to engage because you're worried about doing anything more adventurous than "you are valid" is an even bigger dismissal?
ANYWAY. This is all to say, I think "how to meaningfully engage with Unfamiliar Stuff without getting out over your skis" seems like it'd be an important part of the humanist reason Hayot describes, important enough that I'd expect Hayot to touch on it in this book... but, alas, that's not particularly covered, either.
2) Hayot describes a time when he was working on a manuscript that he expected to make nationalists on both sides of a Chinese-Western divide uncomfortable. He included a sentence to the effect of, "I'm writing about this not because it undermines nationalist narratives, but because I'm trying to understand what's historically true, and the undermining is a happy accident." One of his colleagues pulled him aside and said: do you really want to be using that t-word? Truth?
Hayot's sympathetic to his colleague's concern—humanists, he says, tend to be nervous about words like truth because they seem to imply absolutism, the Final Word TM, and so on. But Hayot still insists on his phrasing, because, if we don't think we're arguing something true, even if that truth is circumstantially-contingent and perhaps mutable, then what's the point?
I'm banging on about the introduction at length because I think Hayot does an excellent job of framing the problem: what's at stake, what interesting questions fall out from that, and so on.
What follows next is: a detour into intellectual history!
Which is the kind of shit I love, so I had a great time. Basically, Hayot uses (1) the philosopher Wilhel Widelband's 1894 Rectorial Address, and (2) a lengthy selection from Kant, in order to describe the origins of The Discourse TM around the humanities-sciences divide. The tl;dr is, Widelband argues that humanities versus science shouldn't be seen in a difference of objects of study—physical realities versus pieces of art, or some such—but more as a difference in the kind of attention one gives to an object. The humanities, Widelband asserts, are idiographic: they focus on particularities, on singular instances of a thing, and otherwise rigorously argue that things cannot be treated as mere instances of a theory or trend. Science, by contrast, is nomothetic: its focus is on groups of things that can be recognized in generalizable ways, and have general laws applied to them (atoms, hot and cold weather fronts, etc).
Hayot is sympathetic to what Widelband's trying to do here—Widelband's own intellectual climate bears a striking resemblance to our own, with the humanities being eaten, not by 21st century whiz-bang technolust, but instead by the popularity of social Darwinism and the impressive advances of the industrial age. And thus Widelband's attempt to distinguish humanities in this way is a reasonable defensive move.
But the move is incorrect, Hayot asserts. Both science and humanities, viewed rightly, are capable of being either idiographic or nomothetic. Indeed, they are always, inescapably both—by choosing some object of study (Tolstoy's novels, classical mechanics), you are necessarily being particular by leaving a lot of stuff out (other Russian novels, quantum mechanics), and general by making some general statement about what you leave in (Tolstoy has some self-consistent "style", classical atoms behave in a particular way). Even if you wanted to do an entirely "idiographic" study, you are bound by things that are technically achievable within a human lifespan—it would be impossible to give e.g. a rigorous, particularist account of every single novel published between 1800 and 1900, because there are literally not enough hours in a life to read that many novels, let alone give them the kind of close attention that that kind of analysis requires. Therefore, "general" vs "particular" isn't a science vs humanities thing.
(This whole analysis is way more fun than I'm making it sound here; Hayot brings in all kinds of delightful arguments and evidence and recountings from all kinds of intellectuals that made me think a lot.)
So: the humanities are not about "broad generalizable theories" versus "close loving attention"; all fields contain both things, whether they like it or not. So, what are the humanities about?
Here's where I started having to periodically turn back pages and squint a bit, because, for all Hayot argued what the humanities are not, I was struggling a little to find his argument for what they are.
He tries to state his case more plainly in the penultimate chapter, by outlining his "articles of reason," which include bullets like:
* All human activity is context-embedded, but not context-determined.
* Human life does not follow disciplinary boundaries; neither does scholarship.
* Historical causality includes nondeterministic and indirect forces operating at multiple scales.
Which generally feel more like... useful things to keep in mind, when doing scholarship, rather than an explicit statement of What This Scholarship Is? I was underwhelmed with this bit.
Hayot's at his most explicit in the very last chapter, where he outlines a Wikipedia-style description of "humanist reason," modeled after the Wikipedia-style description of the "scientific method" that we all learn in elementary school. This outline is nice, but I wish it'd be introduced earlier on, and also, I wish he'd really delved into specifics—what it looks like in practice, what its boundaries are, when it's useful, and so on. He is, for example, in his high-level treatment of things, taking it for granted that all forms of humanist analysis have equal validity—the kind of close-reading that the English department folks do is treated as the very same kind of thing that ethnographers are doing, that historians are doing, and so on. Yet in my own experience as an undergrad, the sorts of things that seemed to qualify as good scholarship seemed to vary wildly between the various humanities departments, and I would've liked some kind of accounting of that.
So, for the book as a whole, like, I dunno. I liked the intellectual history involved: I now know lots of random stuff about the intellectual climate of late-1800s German universities, and also some petty debates between contemporary academic geographers, and a couple new great dunks on Spengler, and so on. And I liked Hayot's discussion because it made me, personally, think harder about the various kinds of attention we can give to things—all kinds of things—and what that tells us about the world. I've got several pages in my notebook with some choice quotes from the book & my half-baked musings on them. But as a fully convincing account of what humanist reason is, I think Hayot's book falls short.
Obviously I am Some Curious Rando rather than the actual target audience, so I checked some other reviews to make sure I didn't have some super-obvious blind spot. Critical Inquiry is even harsher than I am; LA Review of Books raises some interesting points about the sort of ambient diffusion of 80s-90s humanities-theorylanguage into popular discourse and what that means. Take 'em for what you will.
also this writeup was really annoying because this book's index is frustratingly non-comprehensive grumble grumble
no subject
Date: 2022-02-04 04:45 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2022-02-04 10:53 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2022-02-07 07:40 am (UTC)I feel a mild duty to quote Hayot a bit, just to let him speak for himself about what he thinks he's saying when he describes things like "truth", since he caveats himself quite a bit (read: I want to make sure I'm not totally misrepresenting him!):
So, I take this to mean, he's uninterested in the idea of "objective" truth that adheres exclusively to natural laws and algorithms and such, but he is interested in the kind of "historically contingent, subject to multiple interpretations, allowing contradictions to coexist" kind of truths you can get from humanist scholarship. (His bit on "empiricism" is similar; he uses the word broadly to describe "beliefs based on observation," but those observations can be reading primary/secondary sources, talking to people, and so on, and not only the kinds of thing that the hard sciences would describe as "empirical.")
Strongly agree that the design of social networks really could use some thinking from outside the weirdly monolithic-thinking folks who seem to design these things nowadays, and also
even making the division between the humanities and the sciences is dangerous, because it encourages people to only care about one or the other
^ The book has lots of interesting thoughts on this in particular!
Anyway, would be curious for your thoughts when/if you do get around to peeking at the full thing :)
no subject
Date: 2022-02-05 05:29 pm (UTC)I dunno, man, if I think a group has a perspective worth hearing, I think it's worth actually engaging with it, and treating their ideas with rigor? Like, obviously don't be douchey about it; dismissing someone else's knowledge just because it doesn't 1:1 match the processes/methods/etc that you're familiar with totally sucks, as the past couple hundred years of history will tell us... but I think not even bothering to engage because you're worried about doing anything more adventurous than "you are valid" is an even bigger dismissal?
This is something that always bugs me - you can even miss valuable truths by forgoing rigor as if that's doing the perspective a favor. Similar to your point about the econ guys analysis, I find it frustrating when people get mad at those "water is wet" studies.
no subject
Date: 2022-02-07 07:41 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2024-06-13 12:51 pm (UTC)The idiographic/nomothetic distinction reminds me of this recent Math With Bad Drawings post, which I don't think is quite right about the nature of math -- I don't know about history, I've taken enough history classes to know that I'm not a Real Historian -- but does pin down the nature of the conflict between mathematicians vs. historians over math history.
no subject
Date: 2024-06-13 10:15 pm (UTC)