Involved Knowing: On the Poetic Epistemology of the Humanities

Abstract

The humanities represent a type of knowledge distinct from, and yet encompassing, scientific knowledge. Drawing on philosophical hermeneutics in the tradition of the Geisteswissenschaften, as well as on the Latin rhetorical tradition and on Greek paideia, this essay presents humanities knowledge as “involved knowing.” Science, in principle, abstracts from the subjective, psychological conditions of knowing, including its emotional and willful determinants, as introducing personal biases, and it attempts also to neutralize historical and cultural contingencies. Humanities knowledge, in contrast, focuses attention on precisely these subjective and historical factors as intrinsic to any knowledge in its full human purport. In particular, poetry, which historically is the matrix of knowledge in all fields, including science, deliberately explores and amply expresses these specifically human registers of significance. The poetic underpinnings of knowledge actually remain crucial to human knowing and key to interpreting its significance in all domains, including the whole range of scientific fields, throughout the course of its development and not least in the modern age so dominated by science and technology.

Notes

Acknowledgment: This essay was delivered as a Plenary Address at the 12th International Conference of the International Society for the Study of European Ideas (ISSEI), Cankaya University, Ankara, Turkey, 4 August 2010. I am grateful to Ezra Talmor and Cem Karadeli for this invitation.

1. Similarly, in introducing a special issue of Daedalus 138 (2009) dedicated to “Reflecting on the Humanities,” the editors Patricia Meyer Spacks and Leslie Berlowitz write: “The essays assembled here enact as well as reflect the humanities” (5).

2. This contrast between the experience of truth in the humanities and methodical knowing in science is the fulcrum for Hans-Georg Gadamer's humanities-based “hermeneutic” philosophy in Wahrheit und Methode (Tübingen: J. C. B. Mohr, 1960); Truth and Method, trans. Joel Weinsheimer and Donald Marshall, 2d rev. ed. (New York: Crossroad, 1989).

3. The Complete Poetry and Prose of William Blake, ed. David W. Erdman (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1982).

4. That truth and goodness unite in beauty is a seminal idea in “The Oldest System-Program of German Idealism,” which is attributed variously to Hegel, Schelling, and Hölderlin: “Finally the idea that unites them all, the idea of beauty, this word taken in its higher Platonic sense. I am now persuaded that the highest act of reason, the act in which it comprehends all ideas, is an aesthetic act and that truth and goodness are kin to each other only in beauty” (“Zuletzt die Idee, die alle vereinigt, die Idee der Schönheit, das Wort in höherem platonischen Sinne genommen. Ich bin nun überzeugt, daß der höchste Akt der Vernunft, der, indem sie alle Ideen umfaßt, ein ästhetischer Akt ist und daß Wahrheit und Güte nur in der Schönheit verschwistert sind”). Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, Werke, vol. 1 (Frankfurt a. M.: Suhrkamp, 1979), 235. For further elaboration in a lyrical vein, see especially Hölderlin's Hyperion. Here and throughout, translations not otherwise attributed are my own.

5. In line with this conception and practice of reading, Alan Jacobs, A Theology of Reading: The Hermeneutics of Love (Cambridge, MA: Westview Press, 2001) proposes that books and authors should be “understood and treated as neighbors” (13).

6. See, for example, the keynote address by Edward O. Wilson, “How to Unify Knowledge,” with its argument that “all of knowledge … can be united by a continuous skein of cause-and-effect explanation,” in Unity of Knowledge: The Convergence of Natural and Human Science, ed. Antonio R. Damasio (New York: New York Academy of Sciences, 2001).

7. Pierre Hadot's Exercices spirituels et philosophie antique (Paris: A. Michel, 1981; 2002); Philosophy as a Way of Life: Spiritual Exercises from Socrates to Foucault, trans. Michael Chase, ed. Arnold I. Davidson (Oxford: Blackwell, 1995; 2007), represents a seminal effort to recuperate this ancient approach to knowledge. Hadot is joined in this endeavor by Giovanni Reale, Sagezza antica: Terapia per i mali dell’uomo d’oggi (Milan: Raffaello Cortina, 1995), Jean Greisch, Expérience philosophique, exercices spirituels et thérapie de l’âme (Paris: Institut Catholique de Paris, 1996), André-Jean Voelke, La philosophie comme thérapie de l’âme: Etudes de philosophie hellénistique (Paris: Cerf, 1994), and Martha C. Nussbaum, The Therapy of Desire: Theory and Practice in Hellenistic Ethics (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1994).

8. Among philosophers and scientists reconnecting science with humanities matrices are Jean-Marie Besnier, Hervé Le Guyader, Etienne Klein, Heinz Wismann, La science en jeu (Arles: Actes sud, 2010). Wismann argues that modern science, in abandoning substance for function, derives from Christian paradigms of Incarnation and Eucharist.

9. A guide throughout my discussion of the ancient and medieval tradition of the liberal arts is Ernst Robert Curtius's Europäische Literatur und Lateinsiches Mittelalter (Bern: Francke, 1948), 206; European Literature and the Latin Middle Ages, trans. Willard R. Trask (New York: Bollingen, 1952). I have profited also particularly from Roland Barthes, “L’ancienne rhétorique: Aide mémoire,” Communications 16 (1970): 172–223, and Henri Irénée Marrou, “Les Arts Libéraux dans l’Antiquité Classique,” Arts libéraux et philosophie au moyen âge (Montréal: Institut d’études médiévales, 1967).

10. Macrobius, Saturnalia (Stuttgart: Teubner, 1994), trans. Percival Vaughan Davies (New York: Columbia University Press, 1969), and Servius, In Virgilii Carmina Commentarii, eds. Georgius Thilo and Hermannus Hagen (Hildesheim: Georg Olms, 1961), in the fourth century are important sources for this view of Virgil. See Domenico Comparetti, Virgilio nel medioevo I (Livorno, 1895), rpt. ed. Giorgio Pasquale (Florence: La Nuova Italia, 1955).

11. The far-reaching destiny of this adventure is profoundly traced by Martin Heidegger, Early Greek Thinking (New York: Harper & Row, 1975).

12. Particularly feminist criticism has pointed in this direction. See, for example, Hilary Rose, “Hand, Brain and Heart: A Feminist Epistemology for the Natural Sciences,” Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society 9.1 (1983), and Discovering Reality: Feminist Perspectives on Epistemology, Metaphysics, Methodology and Philosophy of Science, ed. Sarah Harding and Merrill Hintikka (Dordrecht: Reidel, 1983). Along comparable lines, Kenneth L. Wilson and Florin Lowndes propound an “integrative epistemology” in “Heart-Thinking: An Archetypal Epistemology for the Humanities and the Sciences,” International Humanities Journal 1 (2003): 1–12.

13. An exemplary discussion of how passages like these can reveal the whole human condition in its deplorable dependency and ultimate, abject subjection to the arbitrium of “force” can be found in Simone Weil's The Iliad or the Poem of Force. She first published it as L’Iliad ou le poème de la force under the acrostic pseudonym “Emile Novis” in Cahiers du Sud 27 (December 1940), during the prostration of France to the Nazi regime.

14. Such theses are developed especially by phenomenological currents of thought and criticism in the wake of Edmund Husserl and Maurice Merleau-Ponty.

15. A peculiarly prescient philosophical reflection on this catastrophe is found in Martin Heidegger, “Die Frage nach der Technik,“ in Vorträge und Aufsätze (Pfulingen: Neske, 1954), translated as “The Question Concerning Technology,” in Basic Writings, ed. David Krell (New York: HarperCollins Publishers, 1993).

16. This paradigm of science, of course, is increasingly outdated and contested, even within the sciences themselves, beginning perhaps most vigorously from the life sciences. Some insights into the paradigm shift can be gleaned from David Ray Griffin, ed., The Reenchantment of Science: Postmodern Proposals (New York: SUNY, 1988).

17. Examples of how this is being rediscovered by critical theory in our “post-secular age” can be found in Mark Knight and Louise Lee, eds., Religion, Literature, and the Imagination: Sacred Worlds (London: Continuum, 2010). Overtly anti-religious works such as Nietzsche's The Antichrist or Freud's The Future of an Illusion attack specific forms of religiosity and propose alternative ways of envisioning and relating to life as a whole, and in this sense they are still, at least negatively, “religious” in their scope of vision. For a deeply religious reading of atheist philosophers Nietzsche, Marx, and Freud, see Merold Westphal, Suspicion and Faith: The Religious Uses of Modern Atheism (New York: Fordham University Press, 1998).

18. Andrzej Szczeklik, Catharsis: On the Art of Medicine, trans. Antonia Lloyd-Jones, foreword by Czesław Miłosz (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2005) revives this outlook from within the practice of medicine today. The same challenge is taken up also by Edmund D. Pellegrino in his numerous works on medical humanities, bioethics, and the philosophy of medicine, starting from A Philosophical Basis of Medical Practice: Toward a Philosophy and Ethic of the Healing Professions, coauthored with David C. Thomasma (New York: Oxford University Press, 1981).

19. Martin Heidegger's analysis of human existence (Dasein, Being-there or Being-in-the-world) as based on relation to worldly beings’ readiness-to-hand (Zuhandenheit), or their being adapted to use, as prior to their presence-at-hand (Vorhandenheit), or their just being objectively there, provides a penetrating philosophical elucidation of this ontological condition. See Sein und Zeit (Tübingen: Niemeyer, 1927; 1963), 69–76; Being and Time, trans. J. Macquarie and E. Robinson (New York: Harper & Row, 1962).

20. This roster was established thanks especially to Martianus Capella's On the Marriage of Philology and Mercury (De nuptiis Philologiae et Mercurii, A.D. 439), which became a standard textbook in the Middle Ages.

21. John Marenbon, “Humanism, Scholasticism and the School of Chartres,” International Journal of the Classical Tradition 6, 4 (2000): 569–77. R. W. Southern, Scholastic Humanism and the Unification of Europe, I. Foundations (Oxford: Blackwell, 1995).

22. A powerful contemporary proponent of this philosophy is Ernesto Grassi, Rhetoric as Philosophy: The Humanist Tradition (University Park, PA: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1980).

23. Hugh of St. Victor, Eruditio Didascalica, in Patrologia Latina, vol. 176, ed. J.-P. Minge (Turnholti: Brepols, 1862). Bonaventure, De reductione artium ad theologiam, ed. Sister Emma Thérèse Healy, 2d ed. (Saint Bonaventure, NY: The Franciscan Institute, 1955).

24. John Milbank, Theology and Social Theory: Beyond Secular Reason (London: Blackwell, 1990; 2006), 6.

25. Vanderbilt University Catalogue (1991–92), 85.

26. See Martha C. Nussbaum, Cultivating Humanity: A Classical Defense of Reform in Liberal Education (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1997) for contemporary perspectives on the continuing value of classical education, as well as on the need for adaptations. A valuable internet forum addressing issues of the liberal arts and secular education in terms of recent theory and theology is “The Immanent Frame: Secularism, Religion, and the Public Sphere” (http://blogs.ssrc.org/tif/secularity-and-the-liberal-arts/).

27. See Werner Jaeger, Paedeia: Die Formung des grieschichen Menschen (Berlin: W. de Gruyter, 1934), trans. Gilbert Highet as Paedeia: The Ideals of Greek Culture (New York: Oxford University Press, 1939).

28. Augustine, De ordine, ed. Silvano Borruso (South Bend, IN: St. Augustine's Press, 2007).

29. Michael Patrick Foley, The ‘De ordine’ of St. Augustine (Ann Arbor, MI: UMI, 2006) emphasizes that Augustine's system of the order of knowledge gears it all consistently towards self-knowledge and intellectual “conversion.” The theological implications of this kind of knowledge are insisted on throughout the De ordine. Ilsetraut Hadot, Arts libéraux et philosophie dans la pensée antique: Contribution à l’histoire de l’éducation et de la culture dans l’Antiquité (Paris: Vrin, 1984; 2005), 101–36, recognizes the second book of De ordine as the first philosophical exposition of the systematic unity and progression of the seven liberal arts.

30. Augustine's seminal role in the comprehensive idea of education propounded here is further sounded in Augustine and Liberal Education, ed. Kim Paffenroth and Kevin L. Hughes (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2000), as well as in Henri I. Marrou, Saint Augustin et la fin de la culture antique, 4^th ed. (Paris: Boccard, 1958).