The Humanities and Human Temperaments, Part 1

C.P. Snow famously argued that almost all educated people in the modern era exist in one of two cultures—either the sciences or the humanities. These cultures are so different from one another that few people are able to understand both. Snow conceived of his thesis at a time when the humanities lorded it over the sciences. As anyone involved in higher education knows, the reverse is true today. This past year, for example, the philosopher and University of Chicago professor Martha Nussbaum wrote a virtual manifesto (Not for Profit, Princeton University Press, 2010) describing how support for the humanities is in crisis and passionately arguing the case for why they are necessary for a healthy democracy to survive. (I will return to what I think are some problems in Nussbaum’s argument in a subsequent post.)

The thrust of higher education, at least for the foreseeable future, is toward the useful sciences, where student achievement is objectively measurable, the endeavor clearly advances material life, and universities can hope to receive both government and grant monies. Support for the humanities, where student achievement is measured more subjectively, the endeavors do not lead to the advancement of material life, and grant money is limited, is in decline.

Higher education has now become tethered to utility—more particularly, to money. Many people now insist that its value be measured in terms of cost-benefit analysis—including how directly and rapidly a particular field of study leads to employment. Although by no means an irrational approach to education, the economics-driven model has its limits—even measured on its own terms (again, I’ll explore this in a subsequent post).

If we tweak C.P. Snow’s thesis to change it from a division of cultures to a division of human temperaments, we create a substantially different model that helps us understand the shortsightedness in forcing higher education into an economic model using utility and money as measures of value. Suppose that instead of conceiving the humanities and sciences as two separate cultures—two separate, human-constructed worlds—we think of them as two separate endeavors where different types of human beings, with fundamentally different natural temperaments, find their home. Such a division (whether caused by nature or nurture is irrelevant), would acknowledge that people’s temperaments differ. By the late teens, the temperament of a young person is already leaning strongly toward one or the other of two poles—what we might call “materialist” or “poetic” temperaments.

Materialists understand the world by analysis and reduction. They analyze what they see, figuring out how it works by taking it apart into smaller component parts. Most materialists derive deep satisfaction from this approach to the world, and several end up in careers where they get to probe and poke deeper and deeper into the world. They may not put it this way, but they’re all involved in a search to make nature reveal her innermost secrets. Certainly they feel pleasure and pride at discovering even the smallest revelations about the smallest things. It’s not that materialists can’t be moved by poetic or metaphysical interpretations of the world, or that they don’t have deep, ineffable feelings about meaning, beauty, or love. But their general outlook is to brush off those things in favor of remaining focused on trying to figure out how what they’re looking at “works.”

Poetic types, on the other hand (and by poetic types, I mean everyone whose interests incline toward any one of the humanities, ranging from history and philosophy to literature and painting) are extremely dissatisfied by materialist explanations of the world. They can’t shake off the longing for larger meaning. It’s not that poetic types necessarily deny the basic materialist truths (although some of them clearly do). Many of them juggle their poetic temperament with a fair amount of knowledge of what materialists work with, and can even describe such things as the Second Law of Thermodynamics. But they see the exquisite details of the world as indicators of something much larger—beyond the measurable and physical. They are convinced that the materialists’ methods aren’t enough, that they inexorably destroy the meaning of the whole that is studied. Figuring out the precise structure of the DNA of a particular person, for example, excites the materialist. It leaves those with poetic temperaments cold.

In Ivan Turgenev’s stunning and sharply prescient novel, Fathers and Sons (which takes place in the 19th century, at the start of the modern era), the character Bazarov is a calmly committed materialist. Despite his professed convictions that there’s a biological explanation for all human emotions, he finds himself suddenly and unexpectedly falling in love. In despair, he cries out, “A man’s capable of understanding anything—how the ether vibrates, and what’s going on in the sun—but how any other man can blow his nose differently from him, that’s what he’s incapable of understanding.”

That people’s inclinations tend to bend naturally more toward materialism or poeticism is not something with which everyone would agree. Yet as Horace succinctly put it, although you can drive out nature with a pitchfork, she’ll always come right back in. Even if materialists today, in their headlong rush to improve material conditions and earn money, are currently shoving poetic types to the side, the poetic type itself isn’t going to disappear any time soon.

A liberal-arts education requires that students study a breadth of subjects, and not narrow themselves either to the humanities or the sciences too soon. After all, even painters and lovers of novels must find gainful employment. Besides, college students need time to discover their inclinations and talents. Studying the humanities may or may not alter the outlook of those with materialist temperaments, or make them able to be moved by Plato. But for those with poetic temperaments—those who long to find in their education something other than a materialist understanding of life–the humanities are essential nutrients.

NOTE: This is the first of what will be two posts on the humanities.