"On Responsibility and Relevance in Humanistic Disciplines"

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On Responsibility and Relevance in Humanistic DisciplinesAuthor(s): Leo TreitlerSource: Daedalus, Vol. 98, No. 3, The Future of the Humanities (Summer, 1969), pp. 844-852Published by: The MIT Press on behalf of American Academy of Arts & SciencesStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/20023915 .

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LEO TREITLEROn Responsibility and Relevancein Humanistic Disciplines

These are the thoughts of a commuter between two worlds thatoften seem to be fully exclusive of each other. They are the products of an earnest quest for standards that might serve a man inboth worlds.One of my worlds is the university, where daily we learn moreabout the impossibility of coasting along satisfactorily

on habitsand expectations formed earlier. In response there is an uncommon effort, uniting all disciplines, to find appropriate roles for theuniversity in contemporary American society; and there is a sharedfeeling that this effort must become even more intense.But in my other world?the field of musicology?we are quitesatisfied that the premises of our work are as correct now as whenthey were laid down. The difference has to be attributed to ourisolation from things contemporary and to the absence of any habitfor understanding even our distant objects in terms of their meanings for any society.I happen to be engaged in the study of medieval music, and itis from that vulnerable activity that I draw a perverse sense of

qualification to discuss the condition of the humanities and thenature of the charges that are now often leveled against humanists.In such areas of historical studies in the arts as mine, the questionswe continue to ask and the goals we continue to pursue representa notion of knowledge, learning, and scholarship that is appropriateto the collector of buttons and matchbooks, the fly fisherman andthe baseball fan. It is that kind of expertise, that pursuit of theexotic and rare, that love of detail liberated from any obligation tosay what is served by it, and that relaxing isolation from everyother concern. There is the same expectation that the products of844

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On Responsibility and Relevanceone's activities?the answers-?should be exactly specifiable, thatonce collected they remain fixed, and that the field grows by accumulating its products in this fashion. (These expectations havebeen transmitted to our students, and I believe that they have agreat deal to do with the gross malfunctions in higher educationabout which there is so much concern. I must return to that later. )But there is an alternative to this conception: the belief thatlearning begins with a concern and proceeds according to the needscreated by that concern?the idea that, as students or scholars, welearn in the most profound sense only what we need to learn.Our best work as scholars is done when we care about something intensely, even to the point of obsession and paranoia. Thatsort of deep concern leads us to the things that we shall have toknow about. Because such a concern provides us with so clear afeeling for the attributes that a solution to a problem must have,we are able to recognize the solution with certainty when it is presented to us. For scholars it is really very much the way it is forartists when they know what must be accomplished by a particular portion of their work even before it is realized in detail. Solutions are rejected until one is found that is recognized accordingto the artist's understanding of the need that must be satisfied. Inthe education of students, the critical things are to find where theycan be engaged?to create a self-perpetuating need for learning?and then to provide the freedom and the assistance they requirein order to pursue their concerns. (I believe that college curriculacan be deduced from this idea.) In learning on every level, then,the generating and unifying principle is not the discipline, but the

person.Now there is no satisfactory way of passing judgment on thevalue or importance of the initial concern, except by feel. And Ihave only a faith born of experience that a study which means todo more than reconfirm its initial presuppositions, no matter hownarrow initially, must eventually lead to a sharing of major concerns with other studies that began at points quite far away. If thisis so, the conclusions of the historian of medieval music will speaknot only to other historians of medieval music. I cannot write a

pamphlet on "Choosing a Career in Medieval Music." I can onlymake some suggestions about how the pursuit of such a careermight relate to present problems of much broader interest and ofgreat urgency.In the alternate view, disciplines become areas of common con

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D DALUScerns and common modes of study, marked off for the sake ofconvenience and intelligibility, but without any expectation thatthe boundaries should be ultimately right of unchanging. Withindisciplines there are hard regions and soft, regions where there isa consensus that matters are secure, and regions that are unexploredor controversial. The soft regions absorb the major activity; theyincorporate not only the determination of facts, but also questionsof value and method?especially questions about the bearing ofvalue and method on the determination of facts. The distributionof hard and soft regions is never itself hard or fixed. We softenhard areas in that we redetermine facts, we change values, wecreate new conceptual structures. And the student or scholar maytravel over the landscape according to his needs.I believe that this conception of learning and of "discipline"offers a way of dealing with the challenge that is thrown againstcontemporary humanistic scholarship. We are reminded by ourcritics that we once claimed special competence to educate theyoung about the important and the beautiful?about value. Butwe have gone off the

track anddisqualified ourselves,

it is said;more accurately, we have remained on the same track while historyhas gone off in another direction. It is feared, on one hand, that weare fiddling while Rome burns; on the other, that we are, in anycase, fiddling the wrong tune. Joseph Kerman has observed that thegreat majority of musicologists are preoccupied with music before

Monteverdi, whereas for the young today music that is earlier thanMozart does not sing.1 But I argue that the substance constitutesno proper ground for rejecting the activity. If the study of medieval music now looks unreal and inhuman, it is not because tasteshave changed and the music no longer appeals. It appealed in itsown day, but?let us face it?we have had better for a very longtime. Nor is it because we cannot learn from it how to cope withsocial injustice. That sort of criterion, as I shall suggest shortly, istaken only by default. No, it is for reasons that would make thestudy of Folk Rock and Soul Music as deadly as the study of oldtime music has been. And if I want to find standards that willserve me in both of my worlds, I must try to learn something of

what those reasons are.One way of looking for the answer is suggested by an insight

of Thomas Kuhn: A field's paradigms are normally reflected mostfully in its elementary textbooks. They enter the literature of advanced research only when they become controversial. The prin846



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On Responsibility and Relevanceciple applies as well to those general survey courses so typical ofthe humanities through which we represent our disciplines, let itbe remembered, to beginners. I want to sketch an analysis to suggest that ifwe are failing to make human contact, the reasons havedeeper roots than the administrative articulations of our disciplinesor our choice of subject matter. They are rooted in the question ofwhat we teach when we teach any subject or, reflectively, what weconsider worth learning about any subject.The surveys in the arts to which I have reference are designedfor "general education," the supposed compromise that emergedfrom the struggle between the interests vested in the liberal arts andin vocational training. General education is, in fact, not such acompromise; rather than giving a little bit of the former, it merelyguards against too much of the latter. What the general educationprinciple has always ignored is that the liberalizing and empowering aims of a liberal education are attainable through the right pursuit of any specialized concern. That is central tomy argument.Two axioms have supported the general education principle:that a well-educated man is well rounded?which is to say that heis conversant with the whole range of our fields of knowledge; andthat he is the conscious heir of the traditions of Western culture.

Both axioms call for the transmission of great wealths of material,and the second calls for a historical orientation. This is why historical surveys have come to be the prevailing mode of generaleducation, so far as the arts are concerned. It is in their ways ofapprehending their material, in their version of the historical principle, and in the place they accord to such a principle that oursurveys reveal the controlling concepts of the fields they represent.

The intention to present a cultural history of Western man does notalone entail a commitment to those concepts. But they have cometo dominate nearly all such presentations more or less. That itselfis a central fact of our recent history.It requires only a moment's reflection to recognize that the realsubject of historical surveys in the arts is not artworks, but theprocesses that are thought to produce them and through which theychange. The individual artwork is related to the process?to history?much as a single frame is related to a film (ante-Marienbad) : Itssense depends on its context, on what has preceded it and whatfollows it. Conversely, if a single frame is cut out of the film, thesense of the whole is disrupted. In music surveys, one does notpresent Schoenberg without showing his roots inWagner and his

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consequences inWebern. And one does not ask students to comprehend Wagner and Webern without the mediation of Schoenberg. This much alone shows the underlying commitment to thosebeliefs about what is necessary in order to understand something,which Karl Popper discussed in The Poverty of Historicism. Thepoint is that no other basis for the comparison of artworks has beenconsidered so important as the chronological-genetic one. As a consequence, artworks derive their meanings primarily from their location in a sequence, and many of the primary categories of artcriticism are series-bound. (For example, the terms "atonal," "nonrepresentational," "pre-classical," and "mannerism" tell things aboutartworks that are worth knowing only when they are compared toearlier and later artworks. )Such critical categories provide a special criterion of artisticsignificance?the criterion of historical significance?which substitutes for standards of artistic value and which, indeed, offers refugefrom the challenge to derive meaning in any other sense from individual artworks of the past. I shall shortly suggest why studentscan

perfectlywell be

expectedto find this substitution and evasion

unpersuasive, to say the least.The present obsession of humanistic disciplines with the historical process results, on the introductory level, in an underminingof the very purposes of liberal education. This is certainly unintentional, but it is nevertheless easily observable. I should like toillustrate with a passage from a student essay?one written, in fact,by a high-school student. The members of the class were asked tojot down their impressions of an Indian raga as compared to a medieval Latin song, recordings of which were played for them. Here iswhat one sophomore wrote: "The Latin song was written basicallyto entertain. To achieve this objective, poetic language and tempowere employed. A new idea had been introduced: melody, and thedoors were ready to be opened for harmony. The first step towardthe symphony had been taken." The passage is incoherent, andthat is important for it shows that whatever story he meant to re

produce, he had not got the details of it quite right. But in connection with that observation it is even more important that, insteadof telling simply?as he was asked to do?what chords in him responded to those melodies, he produced, with characteristic babypomposity, a crude parody of someone else's regimentation of experience.The lesson is that the most memorable things to the young stu848



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On Responsibility and Relevancedent are the structural paraphernalia through which we present

material; the details are easily forgotten. And the apparatus liesthere in his mind, ready to integrate every new experience as aconfirmation of something he already knows. Clearly this can produce nothing but rigid and servile minds. The alternative is to openthe very apparatus itself to inquiry. This means education not limited to the hard areas of disciplines, but pointedly exploring andcreating a tolerance for the soft ones as well, and as early as possible. The student must be led through the grounds of knowledgein order that he not be deluded about the nature of it. He shouldsee knowledge as a human product: made and clung to, not pluckedfrom some garden of eternal verities. Otherwise what is called education ismore accurately regarded as indoctrination.And it surely is indoctrination, for we transmit the fixed andeternal assumptions and goals of our fields without asking whetherstudents can care enough about them to internalize them and makethem their own. We do not ask whether they constitute the propercontext of need in which students will hungrily acquire the knowledge that we wish them to have.I believe that there tend to be two prevailing patterns of response to this situation among students. Some, like my young

high school student, become obedient and unquestioning, almostzombies. They are passive about learning, and they assume thatwhat they learn is a direct function of what we teach. They expectus to deliver, of course, and their evaluation of their education ismade in terms of the quality of the delivery. They become angry?even experience emotional crises?when they are confronted by ateacher who makes confessions about his humanity and the softness of his field. Of course, it is entirely inappropriate that weshould expect them to be inventive later on.Students who are not given to such passivity have tended latelyto measure their education against the motivational context that ismost prominently available, the socio-political context. They demand "relevance," but their embracing of that criterion is a consequence of our failure to provide any others that can have meaningto them. It is merely a further neglect of our responsibility to become converted to that criterion ourselves. Needless to say, theseopposite tendencies are often mixed in the same person.

But if indoctrination is the effect, it is not the initial intent.What occurs at the lowest level merely reflects the conditions atthe highest Our disciplines are conducted with little awareness of849



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DAEDALUStheir theoretical bases. The conventional dogmas through which weorganize things?historical development, evolution, Zeitgeist, and soforth?either operate below the level of consciousness altogether orare treated as facts once verified and no longer open to question.Only one principle is recognized as a guide to the formation ofhistorical knowledge: objectivity, objective reporting of data, deductive reasoning from the data to conclusions. The scholar as an active knower, feeling, judging, forming commitments, is in the picture only through compromise with objectivity. The indoctrinationof the student reflects the self-deception of the scholar.His mind preoccupied with the process of history, the studentis likely to wonder what makes it go. In some degree, elementaryexpositions usually satisfy his curiosity with some hints of an explanation, no more than hints, however. Historians do not usuallyoffer fully developed explanations, as Carl Hempel observed in afamous essay.2 The most important hint is the insistence upon following chronological order, for that places direct causation at thecenter of the historical process. And this, in turn, is a clue to thetendency

toexplain history

as alogical process,

as a series of stagesthat follow as conclusions follow from premises. There are all sortsof manifestations of that: the "mainstream" attitude that disregards whatever does not obviously follow from or lead to something else; the related appeal to an evolutionary concept that isLamarckian (orthogenic) rather than Darwinian3; the frequent references to what is implied for the future by a given stage and the

willingness to take the next step?talk of "anticipation" and even of"what had to be." This last step is important to recognize, for itshows that the construction of history as a logical process leadsdirectly to a notion of historical necessity.Of course, the stringing together of histories on this principle isitself an exercise in logic. The task to which it addresses itselfshould really be stated this way: "How can I arrange works andstyles along a continuum so that each will appear to follow in a logical way from the preceding?" Now sometimes that exercise is carried out in amost persuasive way. But nearly always there is a pointat which an epistemological switch occurs. Whereas in fact thehistorian has aligned things according to a certain model, he nowpersuades himself that he has puzzled out what happened and why?perhaps even that he has understood the forces of history. Heoperates for a time as a human intellect, trying this and that, piecing things together, creating structures; then he denies that he has850



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On Responsibility and Relevancedone so, claiming instead to have performed only acts of observation and deduction under the rule of objectivity. What is significantin the light of the model is now believed to be significant in fact.Conversely, what has been left out of the narrative because noplace could be found for it in the chain of cause and effect is nowunimportant and not worthy of study.The greatest exclusion of this sort has been Oriental art, ofcourse. It is always an embarrassment because to force Orientalart into such patterns is far more obviously distorting than it iswith

Western art. The responses have been varieties of provincialism:total exclusion, or inclusion as an early stage that has becomefrozen. (Lately there has emerged a new accommodating view thatWestern art is becoming frozen, with all stages simultaneouslypresent, just as inOriental art. )When the history of art is explained as a logical process, thehistorian compliments not only himself for his objectivity, but theartist as well. The artist seizes upon the implications of what hispredecessors have done and carries them out. He is often seen, infact, as working

at "theobjective

tasks ofhistory."

Artists are oftenquite neutral figures in historical narratives, not much more thanvessels. Artistic influence is treated in the manner of virus disease.The historian has only to show that the artist was in the rightplace at the right time in order to conclude that the latter was infected, quite apart from any effort of his own. Like the historian,the artist is relieved of any responsibility for what transpires, aslong as he has been objective.These explicit or implicit beliefs in the logic and necessity of

history are everywhere detectable in talk about modern art: in thejustification of particular styles or movements as the next logicalstep, in the testing of works and styles against a celestial calendarin order to determine whether they have arrived on schedule orhave missed the boat, in interminable claims and counterclaimsabout the mainstream and where it is heading, in the description ofthe history of twentieth-century art in terms of the successive strip

ping away of the layers of the post-Renaissance tradition.What is all this but that pernicious old doctrine Das Aktuelleist vern?nftig? And why should we expect it to persuade those whobelieve in neither the necessity nor the reasonableness of things asthey are?Here is a kind of answer tomy initial questions: We play a gamein a box. We say the box is the whole world, and the object and

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D DALUSrules of the game are the only ones open to rational men. We teachour young how to enter the box and how to play the game. Butwhen these pretenses lose their persuasiveness (as seems now to behappening), we should respond not just by building new boxes andinventing new rules. We can learn?and teach?how boxes and rulesare made and how people use them. Then the humanities wouldagain be the province of human beings, contrary to the puristichope reflected in the myth of objectivity. And as long as this is evenimaginable, there is still reason to think that we do not neglect ourlarger roles in continuing to follow our callings.

References1. Joseph Kerman, in an unpublished memorandum prepared for the D dalus

December, 1967, Conference on the Condition of the Humanities.2. Carl Hempel, "The Function of General Laws in History," Journal of Phi

losophy, Vol. 39 (1942).3.

JamesAckerman discusses the distinction and its importance for art history

in "Art and Evolution," in The Nature and Art of Motion, ed. Gyorgi Kepes(New York, 1965).

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