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The humanities and mass democracy have never and will never go hand in hand down skipping down the lane.

The common man is not suited to philosophy nor has he ever had a true interest in it.

Philosophy is by and for an elite.

The best we can do is to recall the last few lines of Dover Beach.

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It seems to me that the humanities don't go hand-in-hand with any other form of government, either. They emerge in different ways in different places to respond to timely and untimely situations alike. They are a natural extension of our situation as human beings. To that extent, I think every person is doing philosophy to some degree in their lives. Not everyone has to be world-historical about it for it to remain valuable.

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I see your point . . . Even under Stalin there were Russians who retained what you speak of, maybe more so given the oppression. But their number was small, as it is ever.

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This is a bit late to the war. You can't defend the humanities after they are already dead.

Don't you know they have only cared for math and science for the last century. The humanities died in the 1940s at the hands of the Robber Barron's of the 1920s/30s. When they opened the teacher's retirement fund to teachers who used their disgusting child conditioning curriculums.

Your should be writing to resurrect the humanities. Which is my goal. But the masses are so brainwashed. I had to start with marginalized and the young.

The older ones only scoff. Those idiots gave up their humanity for mass produced trinkets and there is no way to change that now.

You can't teach old dogs new tricks because they were conditioned so profoundly it destroyed the world.

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I don't view it quite like this. The humanities are much older than even our established / accredited institutions of education, and they have always been at risk, and they are always being renewed. It's in their nature to exist on that edge, but they persist wherever we are thinking with them, working with them, institutions or not.

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Of course you do. You are a man. As a woman who was made to lay down so a man could view the birth of my child even though it was more dangerous for me and the baby you will never really how much the humanities has been destroyed in your favor.

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Good one. I like where you end up. Are you aware of a variation of that argument for being in touch with reality, and perhaps a bolder one by Jeffrey Kripal. He argues that the survival of the humanities depends on ‘the flip’, namely to see consciousness as an ontological primary that is irreducible to matter and then the corollary is to treat *that* as the subject/object of inquiry. If so, what do you make of it?

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Thanks! I am familiar with Kripal’s work, and I appreciate it quite a bit (we share a certain California intellectual lineage). I guess if I’d adjust anything about what he is doing it’d be only to say that it’s only to a particular (~modern) audience that he has to adjust his rhetorical appeal in terms of “the flip” or the “superhumanities” or what have you. I think from a more steeped perspective we could say that his humanities just are what the humanities have been, traditionally (and I doubt he’d disagree).

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Excellent essay. You're essentially marshaling a Voegelinian argument that philosophy aligns one with the order of the cosmos, with Being. Voegelin doesn't get enough press, but that's changing.

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Hey thanks—definitely some Voegelin-inspired thinking in there.

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