Editing Humanities (section)

===Pleasure, the pursuit of knowledge and scholarship===

Some, like [[Stanley Fish]], have claimed that the humanities can defend themselves best by refusing to make any claims of utility.<ref>{{cite web |author-link1=Stanley Fish |last1=Fish |first1=Stanley |url=http://fish.blogs.nytimes.com/2008/01/06/will-the-humanities-save-us/#more-81 |work=The New York Times |archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20090507015746/http://fish.blogs.nytimes.com/2008/01/06/will-the-humanities-save-us/#more-81 |archive-date=2009-05-07 |url-status=dead |title=Will the Humanities Save Us? |date=January 6, 2008 }}</ref> (Fish may well be thinking primarily of literary study, rather than history and philosophy.) Any attempt to justify the humanities in terms of outside benefits such as social usefulness (say increased productivity) or in terms of ennobling effects on the individual (such as greater wisdom or diminished prejudice) is ungrounded, according to Fish, and simply places impossible demands on the relevant academic departments. Furthermore, [[critical thinking]], while arguably a result of humanistic training, can be acquired in other contexts.<ref>[http://liu.english.ucsb.edu/the-laws-of-cool-knowledge-work-and-the-culture-of-information-catalogue-copy-and-table-of-contents/ Alan Liu, "''The Laws of Cool: Knowledge Work and the Culture of Information'' (Catalogue Copy & Table of Contents)", 2004]. {{Webarchive|url=https://web.archive.org/web/20130828143856/http://liu.english.ucsb.edu/the-laws-of-cool-knowledge-work-and-the-culture-of-information-catalogue-copy-and-table-of-contents/ |date=2013-08-28 }}.</ref> And the humanities do not even provide any more the kind of social cachet (what sociologists sometimes call "[[cultural capital]]") that was helpful to succeed in Western society before the age of mass education following World War II.

Instead, scholars like Fish suggest that the humanities offer a unique kind of pleasure, a pleasure based on the common pursuit of knowledge (even if it is only disciplinary knowledge). Such pleasure contrasts with the increasing privatization of leisure and instant gratification characteristic of Western culture; it thus meets [[Jürgen Habermas]]' requirements for the disregard of social status and rational problematization of previously unquestioned areas necessary for an endeavor which takes place in the bourgeois [[public sphere]]. In this argument, then, only the academic pursuit of pleasure can provide a link between the private and the public realm in modern Western consumer society and strengthen that public sphere that, according to many theorists,{{who|date=May 2012}} is the foundation for modern democracy.{{citation needed|date=May 2012}}

Others, like [[Mark Bauerlein]], argue that professors in the humanities have increasingly abandoned proven methods of [[epistemology]] (''I care only about the quality of your arguments, not your conclusions.'') in favor of [[indoctrination]] (''I care only about your conclusions, not the quality of your arguments.''). The result is that professors and their students adhere rigidly to a limited set of viewpoints, and have little interest in, or understanding of, opposing viewpoints. Once they obtain this intellectual self-satisfaction, persistent lapses in learning, research, and evaluation are common.<ref>{{cite web
 | url =https://www.insidehighered.com/views/2014/11/13/essay-critiques-role-theory-humanities
|url-access=limited
 | title =Theory and the Humanities, Once More
 | last =Bauerlein
 | first =Mark
 | date =13 November 2014
 | website =[[Inside Higher Ed]]
 | access-date =27 February 2016
 | quote = Jay treats it [theory] as transformative progress, but it impressed us as hack philosophizing, amateur social science, superficial learning, or just plain gamesmanship. }}</ref>