While I think this may be a good explanation for the course catalog boilerplate-ism of the personal accounts of why humanities academics do what they do, it seems to me to be the very opposite of where one would want to end up while discussing the defense of the humanities. That is, with this account, we’re either (a) off-loading the heavy explanatory lifting onto something we’re calling “love” or (b) declaring the subjective appeal of something we wish to remain widely available.

(The difficulty of (b) is that, while “subjective” is not opposite “widely available,” it is not always easy to think them together, i.e., to imagine a widely held subjective response merely brings us back to the first problem–what is “love” in the sense of falling in love with a discipline?)

I’m not thrilled with love as an explanation only because it begs the question, assuming that there’s something in our disciplines/fields/subjects worth that love in the first place. It may be a dirty little secret that humanities academics love what they do; but it seems to me that it’s a “dirty” secret only in the sense that it hides something else.

I think there’s more to be said about this distinction between new discovery, and exploring something that’s already familiar. (And I wish I could say it better…) In particular, about the interplay between those two, since your contrast with science made me wonder, Isn’t it always about “explain[ing] and explor[ing] the meaning” of something already familiar, maybe not “human life within the universe,” but something close.

I can see the argument much easier for math: We, as humans, start out with some basic notions of space and numbers; then in some sense all of math is some exploration/elaboration of that, rather than new discovery. Maybe number systems make a good microcosm, if we think of each extension (positive integers, then including zero, then all integers, then rational numbers, and real numbers, and complex numbers…and maybe generalizing the important properties and thinking about ‘rings’ or ‘fields’ abstractly) as only coming about to help us better understand the objects we were already thinking about.

But when a new concept has sufficiently demonstrated its usefulness, it starts to have interest in its own right, and we stop thinking about it as only elaborating the others. I suspect this is a process (which I think of as both personal and historical) that goes on in any discipline.

Maybe the sciences don’t quite go back to human experience in the same way that even math (and of course the humanities) does, but maybe there’s some commonality there too.

Even the arguments you raised in the post will eventually turn into boilerplate because in the end, humanities academics do what they’re doing because it’s what they love. And since we’re not allowed to say that–and the professionalization aspect of grad school trains you to curb your enthusiasm even amongst colleagues–we’re left with half-assed excuses to a society that doesn’t believe in what the humanities have to offer.

At least as an Africanist you’re able to say, “I can teach well-heeled white kids about Diversity, which will enrich their lives.” Of course, no one believes the Diversity stuff either, but–and this is a good thing, mind–no one’s able to out and out say so.

Maybe not with that exact term, mind you.

As I said in another venue earlier today, “All fields of study claim to contribute something to the human condition, and hope to improve society by promoting their particular method to truth, beauty, health, prosperty.” I don’t actually believe that the humanities have become so inbred that most of us can’t articulate that, though we don’t do it often enough, or cleverly enough, for sure.