History & Human Flourishing

 A recent review in the New York Review of Books drew my attention to an anthology of essays carrying the title  History & Human Flourishing. I found the presence of the word "flourishing" interesting in itself, and the review underscored the fact that the essays it contained focused their attention in various ways on how our lives can be nourished by the study of history, beyond the often useful but always limited range of prosecutorial investigations of the past. It's not the kind of book that's likely to show up any time soon in a remainder catalog or on a sidewalk bookstall, however, so I took a chance and forked over the $29 to buy a new copy—the last of the birthday money I'd received recently from Hilary's mother.

The first essay I read made it all worthwhile. The author, a Princeton professor named D. Graham Burnett, takes us through his own agonized development as a scholar in an effort to explain why so  much of what goes on in academia today, and perhaps especially in the humanistic fields, is either polemical or remote, dry, and lifeless. If I were to reiterate his position in a single sentence, I would say that in Burnett's view, the vitality and interest of the humanistic disciplines lies in their ability to evaluate events, artifacts, and cultural movements. The best work relies, in other words, on personal judgment. For the most part the university experience is driven by the need to avoid or obscure such judgments in an attempt to provide a veneer of detachment and universality to its pronouncements.

Early on in the piece Burnett describes how much he enjoyed reading the volumes in the I Believe series edited by Clifton Fadiman during his undergraduate years. Why? Because, as he described it, they brought him "relief" from the unwillingness of most scholars to actually reveal what they thought about the subjects they were investigating.

He hastens to add:

"There were, of course, in those years, bold voices exactly making brave statements of commitment—on race, gender, sexual identity, and preference; on the need for new forms of academic prac­tice. And a few years later, the tragedy of 9-11 would produce a pained spasm of “seriousness” among historians and humanist intellectuals more broadly ... But all I can say is, in the course of my own graduate formation in History, I had been led to focus on the mastery of a large, intricate, and contentious secondary literature, and I had been assiduously tutored in the tournament of anxiety that is life as a neophyte scholar. I had gotten essentially zero sense that actually deciding what one thought about things—and stating that clearly—was part of the project."

Burnett wasn't unduly perturbed by the situation because the scholars he admired were professionals who saw little purpose in blatantly advancing their personal views blatantly. Still, something was rubbing him the wrong way.

"I harbored a (sublated) sense that to be a historian was to be an 'intellectual' and that to be an 'intellectual' was to have some substan­tive conception of life that was integral to one’s account of one’s work."

The question arises as to where the foundation for such personal judgments lies. By way of answering that question, Burnett introduces us to the work of the mid-nineteenth century thinker Auguste Comte, who figures in intellectual history as the father of sociology and a lifelong proponent of positivism, a movement dedicated to bending the study of human life to fit the methods of the hard sciences. Burnett goes into some detail describing Comte's career, most of which he finds misguided and often silly, but he highlights one of Comte's ideas as worth considering: that the discoveries of modern scholars perform the same social function as that of the religions they have largely replaced. 

"If it is legitimate to speak of 'wisdom traditions,' [he writes] I would define this notion as pre­cisely that set of practices and beliefs, stories and rites, habits and concepts that equip human beings to confront pain—to take it in, to feel and experience it ... and to do something other than pass it along to others ... For me, for better or worse, the humanistic scholarly enterprises only really make sense as thinly (and, I believe, imperfectly) “secularized" efforts to do work once done in explicitly religious settings."

Burnett is arguing, quite rightly I think, that the purpose of historical thought, and of the humanities more generally, is to expand and deepen our values and our sense of the richness, sacredness, and interconnectedness of life. Historians often do this by means of the narratives they shape. Only the most eminent  among them step out from behind their material to explain in personal terms why they believe their "take" on the past is important.

One reason may be humility. Another might be simply that such a rhetorical strategy would be too crude and "unprofessional." But Burnett draws our attention to an important essay, "Science as a Vocation," that Max Weber published in 1918. He lauds it as "an exceedingly rich and historically specific text" but notes that Weber limits the scholarly vocation to one of knowledge-production, leaving no room for problems of "meaning" or "life."

"The problems may be real, but university professors have no special claim on them, and Weber is caustically dismissive of any residual conception of the university that trades on the promise that academic study will address such matters—which, in his view, it absolutely cannot (and must not). It is exactly a reconstruction of the humanistic domain on Weberian “scientistic" grounds that has, in my view, substantially deprived that domain of its pri­mary reason for being and rendered it increasingly impossible to defend in contemporary life."

I was pleased to see that Burnett sees only limited value in causation and the search for origins, preferring to place an emphasis on "recovering human experiences." He notes, astutely, that

"As a practicing historian, I tend to be basically wary of causal/explanatory history—not because I think it is impossible or invidious, exactly, but because I think there is plenty of work to be done in a different key ... I feel that there is basically an infinite amount of history to be done that works to recover human experi­ences (i.e., to resurrect and translate their immediacy), and that, on balance, this work does more good in the world (is more needed) than more history that tries to assign blame for various things—which is basically what causal/ explanatory history always finds itself doing, in the end.

 As the essay draws to a close, Burnett begins to draw in his wings, however. He shies away from the major issues his train of thought has raised and retreats into a safer realm, where the main purpose of historical inquiry is merely to "see a time from elsewhere." Gone is the religious foundation, gone is the emphasis on value and judgment.

Well, I don't blame him. Such issues are complex and difficult to untangle in the course of a few pages. This might also explain why philosophy, both analytic and continental, has descended so often to trivialities and technicalities in our times. Yet the bulk of Burnett's essay was devoted to history and the humanities as inspirational disciplines. The history of art, for example, exposes us to many varieties of beauty, and helps us to see their value. Economic history underscores the difference between enterprises that "work out" and those that "fall flat" and therefore disappear from view, though their merits may be worth re-examining. Underlying all of this is a concept that once went by the name of progress. In the introduction to this volume, the editor gives a convincing account, I think, of why the word "flourishing" better conveys what an understanding of history often contributes to.

A generation or two before Comte appeared on the scene, Hegel made use of the word "spirit." Dialectic was the concept, spirit provided the energy, the result was development.

A generation or two after Comte, the Italian philosopher and historian Benedetto Croce refined and improved Hegel's notions, retaining the dialectic while dispensing with Hegel's meta-historical scaffolding, his teleological speculations, and his interest in the Absolute. The overhaul was so thorough that it would make more sense to call Hegel a pre-Crocean than to call Croce a post-Hegeliam.

Few read Croce these days, as far as I can tell, though the University of Toronto came out with a slim volume titled A Croce Reader a few years ago. Croce wrote sixty or seventy  books, so such an anthology can take us only so far. Serious students might prefer to look back to the anthology published by Oxford in 1966 that runs to more than a thousand pages. Even in his own day, when he stood as a beacon of liberal opinion in the midst of his country's Fascist regime, Croce's philosophy was largely misunderstood even within Italy. 

At the center of Croce's world lies is the concept of spirit. In common speech that's a simple word, and we all know what it means. If I read that a football team made a spirited defense of its title, the meaning is clear.  If I describe someone as being dis-spirited, no one will mistake the meaning. If my piano teach tells me to put more spirit into my rendition I'll know what she means.

Spirit differs from Heidegger's Being, to take a more popular post-modern concept, in that it is indwelling, animate, questing, and almost invariably incomplete. A moment of expressive power or a shrewd conceptual leap toward coherence may be deeply moving, and the artistic expression or historical or logical insight it produces will endure as a cultural artifact. But new urges and issues will invariably develop in the wake of such creations. To paraphrase Hegel himself: "The act never [quite] produces the desired result." Hence the restless urge to "go beyond" that fuels the historic process we call "living."

Spirit is what the young Burnett and his fellow grad students were studying, and seeking to cultivate, and hoping to transmit to a new generation, before they were ground down by the academic system. Philosophers of an analytic bent almost invariably criticize the concept as vague, wishy-washy, or "metaphysical." But such judgments are merely the result of lazy thinking. Consider the example I mentioned a few minutes ago of Comte. Burnett spends several pages outlining the man's career and his influence on his contemporaries. It's not hard to discern what Comte was reaching for: a more precise understanding of things. His advocacy of the scientific method, which was working so well in other fields, is easy to understand, though such methods proved inappropriate to the subject. (As Paul Valery once quipped, "History is the science of what only happens once." A century earlier Novalis had further limited the reach of the sciences when he remarked: "Novels arise out of the shortcomings of history.")

But in Burnett's judgment, Comte did have one good idea—that for many, the humanities now play a role once played by religious institutions. Burnett could easily have advanced this as his own insight and saved the reader some time, but the historical precedent is significant. It fleshes out the insight. Burnett paints the scene, establishes the context, and highlights the spirit—the living part—of Comte's work. The historical echoes and reverberation are enriching. But there is nothing vague or wishy-washy about the spirit involved. The historian must answer the question, at least implicitly, why we ought to take an interest in this, rather than that. He or she must identify where the value lies.

The concept of spirit only becomes vague when it's posited as being opposed to matter. To the historian, spirit animates events and in so doing, it transforms matter, lives, institutions. Hegel's term for these things is "objective spirit." The study of history and the humanities is, or ought to be, inspiring. Referring to the students who continue to pursue a career in these fields, many of whom he has taught, met with, and advised, Burnett writes:

"They must feel this, since it would be inconceivable that they would decide to pursue a PhD in the humanities in the hopes of getting a 'good job'—of, somehow, making their way in a promising 'profession.' Given the career-placement statistics for humanists with doc­toral degrees, that would be completely crazy."

The academic environment Burnett describes isn't much different from the one I experienced in the mid-1970s, during my years in grad school at the U of MN. My advisor expressed the hope more than once that I was having a good time, because he thought it very unlikely I'd ever land a job as a historian. During my last year of study twelve students in the history department were in line to receive PhDs. Only one of them had a job waiting in academia.

 I was having a good time. College didn't cost much in those days. I enjoyed my work as a T.A., and I also worked part-time as a parking lot attendant, which helped to finance my education and gave me lots of time to read.

I was reading the wrong things, however. I enrolled in a seminar on Victorian England but found myself reading Burckhardt's history of the Italian Renaissance. I took a class in the French Revolution but got distracted by Robert Kuttner's Economists at Bay. Too many scattered interests. Meanwhile, it was becoming evident to me that grad school was, as the saying goes, a process of learning more and more about less and less.

When I'd exhausted my tenure as a T.A., I dropped out. (I was offered a job full-time by the university parking service. I declined.)

I suppose if everyone dropped out, we wouldn't have brilliant books like History and Human Flourishing to read. That would be too bad. But a glance at any issue of the New York Review of Books—not only the reviews, but more especially the university press ads touting their latest publications—make it clear that plenty of fascinating material is still coming down the pipe from academia.

 Laymen like me would probably find much of it unreadable. It would take a lot of work to extract and ponder and share the spirit within. And all for what?

Well, how about enlightenment?