Monday, June 3, 2013
Wieseltier on the Humanities
Leon Wieseltier delivered the commencement address at Brandeis a few weeks ago. Here's a bit, sent to me by a correspondent (The full address is available at The New Republic, here):
For decades now in America we have been witnessing a steady and sickening denigration of humanistic understanding and humanistic method. We live in a society inebriated by technology, and happily, even giddily governed by the values of utility, speed, efficiency, and convenience. The technological mentality that has become the American worldview instructs us to prefer practical questions to questions of meaning – to ask of things not if they are true or false, or good or evil, but how they work. Our reason has become an instrumental reason, and is no longer the reason of the philosophers, with its ancient magnitude of intellectual ambition, its belief that the proper subjects of human thought are the largest subjects, and that the mind, in one way or another, can penetrate to the very principles of natural life and human life. Philosophy itself has shrunk under the influence of our weakness for instrumentality – modern American philosophy was in fact one of the causes of that weakness -- and generally it, too, prefers to tinker and to tweak.
https://mirrorofjustice.blogs.com/mirrorofjustice/2013/06/wieseltier-on-the-humanities.html
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I wonder if we’ve, by and large, abandoned these bigger questions not because we cannot find answers, but because we find too many answers, too many contradictory answers.
If our reason has become instrumental, pursuing small values like utility, speed, efficiency, and convenience, perhaps it’s because that’s where we are actually able to make a difference. Small differences, perhaps. But still small differences are better than no difference.
And as small as utility, speed, efficiency, and convenience are, these values can improve lives (at least a little). They are not worthless. Practical questions produce practical answers; larger questions of “meaning” seem only to raise disputes about which meaning is the right meaning.
sean s.