Beruflich Dokumente
Kultur Dokumente
Reforming the Humanities
Frederick Turner
We are in the midst of a remarkable surge of interest in the classics: witness the crowds pushing
into Old Master art exhibitions, the craze for serious music, popular TV documentaries on the
Civil War and the West, the lines outside Shakespeare and Austen movies, the spread of huge and
profitable bookstores. Mercury, the Roman god of the market, seems to be demanding the goods
that the humanities have always shyly guarded. But at exactly the same time public support for
the academic humanities is dwindling. Institutions have no divinely appointed claim to
custodianship over the cultural resources they claim. In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries
the Anglican Church was the automatic destination for Englishmen with literary and intellectual
gifts; to "get a place" was the preoccupation of every young poet. Vast multivolume collections
of calfbound sermons were ranged in stately bookcases; universities took it as their prime
function to prepare budding clergy for their duties. But by the mid nineteenth century everything
had changed. In fifty years the Church somehow rendered itself intellectually and culturally
irrelevant; in another fity years the C of E vicar was a laughingstock; and in fifty more the
seemingly endless financial holdings of the Church had evaporated. I fear that the same thing is
going to happen to the academic humanities. Public support, not power, is what keeps an
institution vital, as the Soviet Union discovered in the eighties; and public support follows
whatever combines the imaginatively exciting with the practically relevant.
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Of course I am describing things at their worst; I am constantly amazed by the splendid scholars,
the live minds, and excellent human beings that I meet in the profession. But a visit to an MLA
annual conference will quickly convince any doubter that the humanities are in deep trouble, and
that there is a need for those who love them to figure out where we went wrong, restructure many
of our presuppositions, and justify our claim to guard and interpret the enormous riches of the
world's cultural heritage.
How we got here is not that important, and in any case is becoming fairly clear. Intellectually the
reduction of meaning to structure urged by the New Critics and Structuralists diminished works
of art to mere texts, orphaned of author and referent, and fatally vulnerable to the corrosive acids
of deconstruction. In their fragmented and relativistic state texts could now be interpreted only
in terms of the interests of the regime under which they formed themselves. These developments
coincided with the theories of speech acts, performatives, and language games in semiotics,
which in turn linked up with the idea of the closed hermeneutic circle to cut language off
altogether from any putative real world, and thus to isolate any discourse from the possibility of
outside criticism. We were confined to the episteme, the regime of power and knowledge, in
which we were programmed. But knowledge itself, declared the likes of Paul Feyerabend, was
just a reflection of the political interests of scientists and scholars. Power, in fact, became the
only reality in the humanities.
Now power is also the central idea of the scientific discipline of dynamics. For the
Enlightenment and the Industrial Revolution science was the realm of cause; force was the way
that cause operated, and power was what exerted the force. Cause was deterministic and one
way; in theory, a calculatorsuch as the Laplace Calculator, an ideal prediction machine
programmed with the positions and momenta of all particles in the universecould predict every
future event, including all human actions and thoughts. The humanities were instituted at the
instigation of such thinkers as Kant and Schiller, seeking to preserve a space for the discussion of
the uncaused, unpredictable, and freefor the playful, the aesthetic and the moral.
But since that time science has undergone a profound revolution. Though indeed dynamicsand
its statistical and timedependent version, thermodynamicsstill hold in isolated locations, they
are now seen as idealizations only partly fulfilled in a real universe that is fundamentally
unpredictable and free. Cause is now only one of a number of types of connection between
events, including quantum coherence and statistical wave harmonics, farfrom equilibrium
thermodynamic catastrophes, nonlinear bifurcation, evolutionary emergence, and self
organization within strange attractors. The world according to scientists is no longer one of
deterministic oneway power, in which A forces B to become C at the thermodynamic cost of D
units of loss to friction and E units of entropic decay. It is becoming one much more like the
realm of the traditional arts, of creative growth and emergence, of organically shifting frames of
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reference, of evolutionary development, mutual influence, and continuous retrospectively
intelligible but prospectively surprising change.
But it is too late now to be drawing morals, and who are we to judge the grand humanistic
savants of the nineteenth century? The task now before us is to rescue what we can from over a
century of largely misguided theoryand thus partly tainted researchin the humanities, and put
the field on a sound footing; so that we can bequeath to the future public an institution in better
shape than we found it.
Let us admit openly, then, that our field is in trouble, and that its chief problem is a loss of
contact with reality. We are a nation of laws; as citizens we subscribe to the legal system.
Reality is legally defined as what is scientifically verifiable; hence we teach evolution in high
school biology, not scientific creationism. The humanities, however, are now teaching that reality
is entirely relative to the culture and gender of the knower; our humanist professors are thus as far
removed from fact as the most "biblical literalist" sect. That loss of contact with reality is also a
loss of contact with the publica failure to perform the mandate, bought and paid for fair and
square by the people of our states and nation, of educating and civilizing the young, and acting as
the repository and conduit of the cultural heritage. If we wish to do something else, we should
not take the public's money, and it is actually dishonest and immoral to do so. In the process we
have suffered a decay of standards and of the empirical and logical canons of scholarly proof; the
average MLA paper is a tissue of nonsequiturs and assumptions of what it wishes to prove.
I propose that we refound the humanities on the sciences. There are various routes by which we
might recover the connection. The first is the anthropological path, retracing the roots of human
arts and other activities through the oral tradition, folklore, crosscultural anthropology,
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performance theory, ethnodrama, the study of human and animal ritual, archeology and human
evolution. The second is the neuroscience route, the study of the neurobiological foundations of
esthetic experience, language, meaning, perception, experience, etc. The third is the chaos
theory route: using the powerful new sciences of complexity and nonlinear dynamics, we might
develop a general vocabulary of creative emergence. The fourth is the information theory and
cybernetic route: learning from the extraordinary difficulties and successes of computer science
in modeling the human mind, we might develop a deeper theory of literary meaning. This
approach might include game theory, and the information theory of Claude Shannon and John
von Neumann. The fifth is the ecoscience route: the study of the humanities as a complex
ecological system, recently emergent upon the planet, in the context of other living organisms,
especially domesticated plants and animals.
Of course such a refounding would be fraught with difficulties. Perhaps the greatest would be
simply professional pride. It is hard to eat crow and acknowledge that Naturwissenschaft had a
better path to the workings of the human spirit than did Geisteswissenschaft, that the study of the
neurobiology of perception tells us more about our experience than does the humanistic field of
phenomenology. But the rewards are enormous and we have little left to lose.
If we seek for scientific foundations, there are those who would raise theoretical and political
objections to foundations and foundationalism. The answer is that all contemporary
antifoundationalisms, however poststructuralist, are already foundationalisms in disguiseoften
good enough to fool themselves. It is part of the orthodoxy of contemporary avantgarde thought
that one should claim to be "antifoundationalist." Antifoundationalism is the claim that there is
no prior presence or authority or transcendental signified to base our ideas and actions onand
that one can therefore think and do what one likes. The postmodern humanities have tolerated,
under the broad umbrella of antifoundationalism, a variety of positions whose radical
contradictions are starkly revealed when we consider them together.
Let us briefly list some antifoundationalist positions. One maintains that since everything we can
know depends on how we see it, there is no fundamental reality (phenomenology). A second
reminds us of Wittgenstein's dicta: "whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must remain silent"
and "the limits of my language are the limits of the world," ignoring the subtle and deliberate
selfcontradictions in both aphorisms, and maintains therefore that since everything we say
depends on how we say it, there is no fundamental reality (linguistic philosophy, deconstruction).
A third points out that because everything is dependent on its context within a structure, there is
no fundamental reality (structuralism). A fourth sardonically points out that whenever anyone
says anything, they are naturally following their socioeconomic interests, partly crystallized into
the form of cultural values, and that therefore there is no fundamental reality (Foucauldian
discourse analysis, neomarxism). A fifth reminds us that everything that is said is said in a
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determining historical context, and thus there is no fundamental reality (the new historicism). A
sixth insists that the psyche that says anything is an illusory construction anyway, and that
therefore there is no fundamental reality (the neofreudianisms of Lacan, Deleuze, and Guattari).
A seventh denies the objectivity of science, because science is made up of a society of persons
with ideological and economic interests, and therefore there is no fundamental reality (the
scientific antifoundationalism of Kuhn, Feyerabend, and Habermas). An eighth points out that
whoever says anything has a sex and a gender, usually male, that irremediably distorts what is
said, and therefore there is no fundamental reality (feminist epistemology). And so on; and we
can now add a ninth, that maintains that all human views of reality are only human views, and
that since we cannot know how Nature sees things, there is no fundamental reality: the view of
the radical Greens and Deep Ecologists, such as Arne Naess and George Sessions.
Of course the secret of all these antifoundationalisms is that they are really foundationalisms in
disguise. Number one really says: sensation is the foundation. Number two says: language is the
foundation. Number three says: the logic of structure is the foundation. Number four says:
economic power backed up by coercion is the foundation. Number five says: history is the
foundation. Number six says: psychological development is the foundation. Number seven says:
the sociology of legitimation is the foundation. Number eight says: sex is the foundation.
Number nine says: nature (excluding human beings) is the foundation.
Once we see the unspoken foundationalist assertion in each position, two things become
immediately obvious. One is that a sort of competition is going on between specialized
disciplines, conducted in rather peculiar terms: each delegitimizes the others by asserting the
groundlessness of all assertion, while tacitly excepting its own point of view. It is is like
contemporary political election campaigns, which do not so much assert the virtues of the
candidate as the dishonesty of his or her opponent. A cynic might speculate that the motivations
are not dissimilar, and that what is really at stake are tenured chairs, graduate fellowships, and
fulltime faculty lines; but this would be to fall into the neomarxist view. . . .
The other obvious conclusion is that stated in their positive form these positions do not
particularly contradict each other. In theory, if the candidates did not impugn each other's
honesty, they might all be honest! And this conclusion might lead us, by an odd but perfectly
legitimate turn of logic, to the positive assertion that all these implied foundations are indeed
foundationalsensation, language, structure, power, history, psychology, legitimation, sex, and
nature, and that probably there are dozens of other foundations as well. Foundations, then, need
not be mutually exclusive; and the interesting thing might be to work out how all these
foundations are related to each other. A universe crammed with partial foundations, that have not
ceased to interact, and that thus leave open a huge future space where they are unpredictably
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going nextthis is what we see if we escape the feverish loyalties of a particular ideological
camp.
We might as well declare ourselves foundationalists, since we cannot avoid being so. But this
does not answer the political objections to foundationalismthat it is authoritarian, restrictive,
totalizing, etc. Is it really, though? Consider a view of the world which is anchored, relatively
fixed, and unitary at one end, and openended, changeable and multiple at the othera tree
structure. This would give us the benefit of a common deep language and a protean and creative
surface language. This is what I proposea past that is relatively fixed and knowable, though
never absolutely, and a future that can grow in whatever direction we and all other desiring and
imagining beings may desire or imagine. Such a world is free enough for me; perhaps it is not
free enough for you.
Let us reexamine the tenets of scientific realism, correct and modify it in the light of the germane
modern and postmodern criticism, and adopt it as the basis for a renewal of the humanities. By
realism I mean the position that there is a real world upon whose nature there can be reasonable
agreement. Why realism? Why should this position, of all those available, meet our
requirements? For various reasons. The first is that realism contains the assumption that there is
such a thing as truth, and that truth can be legitimately sought and sometimes, in part, found.
The concept of a truth that must be cooperatively inquired after, and which involves a submission
of one's private will to evidence and reasoning, is in itself ethically beneficial. It would be so,
paradoxically, even in a universe with no inherent reality, subject totallyas in the view of
poststructuralismto individual and group perceptions of it, since it would encourage the self
doubt that breeds tolerance and accomodation. If I believe, as for instance the Nazis evidently
did, that there is nothing either good or bad but thinking makes it so, then in Dostoyevsky's words
everything is permitted. Rorty's and Habermas's notion of a conversation without any belief in a
reasonable conclusion about the truth of the matter requires a temperament, like theirs, which is
already morally civilized by habit; it has no incentive to continue but for the eccentric pleasure
some academics have in exercising their rather rare talent for discourse, and no way of defining
moral evil but for the academic's fear of losing an interesting conversational partner. If I were a
Jew in a French village in 1942 when the S.S. arrives, whom would I trust to hide methe
neighbor who believes as Rorty does, or the Jehovah's Witness whose belief in an absurd truth is
absolute? I'd pick the Jehovah's Witness.
But realism is superior to relativism on logical and cognitive grounds as well as moral ones. In
evaluating different philosophical positionseven if we assume they have different canons of
acceptability for their propositions, different axioms and different standards of proofwe are in a
similar case to that of Gödel, confronted with the proposition "this statement is unprovable." We
can, in fact, with logical consistency declare the statement true but unprovable, thereby solving
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the paradox; but the solution requires the idea of truth itself. Thus it is reasonable to ask which
of two positions is true, even if neither can prove that truth within its own system of axioms. If
one systemrelativismcontains an axiom that there is no such thing as truth, it will always
rightly lose any contest for legitimate acceptance with a system in which truth is a possible
termeven a system of absurd beliefs! Relativism is the only philosophical system that on its
own admission must be less true than any other.
A third reason for the adoption of scientific realism is aesthetic. The universe as revealed by
scientific inquiry is so beautiful and so remarkable that a discipline of the humanities which
ignored it would be wretchedly impoverished. No cycle of cosmogonic myths, no tribal
cosmology, no religious theology of creation, no totemism or animal fiction or artistic Peaceable
Kingdom or courtly civilized game by itself can match it in majesty, subtlety of detail, splendor
of general design, fractal depth and selfsimilarity, or gripping suspense of narrative. Speaking
as a poet, there has never in the history of the world existed so rich and so unexploited a store of
artistic materials as the present body of science. The myths, the cosmogonies, the theologies, the
totemisms, the fictions, the utopias, the gamesall those cultural worlds studied by the
humanitiestake on in fact a wildly richer and deeper significance when placed within the
scientific narrative; their partial illuminations and local delights resonate into greater grandeur
and pathos within the larger spaces of the real.
Indeed, a fourth reason to adopt realism as our foundation is, paradoxically, precisely to protect
the integrity of the fantastic, the counterfactual, the surreal, the "imaginative." If there is no
distinction between reality and art, no dividing line between the regimes of power and knowledge
and the inventions of the text, then nothing is safe from the totalitarianisms of the right and the
left. Only if we accept the existence of the real can we permit the strange and subversive fictions
of art. If a real act and an imaginary one are ontologically indistinguishable, then we should
punish imaginary crimes just as severely as real onesor not punish real crimes, and thus permit
them. The present trend toward the evaluation of texts for political correctnesswhich, despite
the opposition to it by principled intellectuals and the ridicule of the general public, continues
apaceis not only the result of mediocrity's hunger for power and philanthropy's wellmeaning
attempt to legislate human nature. It is also, more fundamentally, the symptom of a sort of
cultural psychosis, the inability to distinguish fantasy from reality; and the humanities must share
the blame for trying to deligitimize reality. True fantasy can only exist where there is an open
frontier, a realm where the writ of the real does not run; but that fantastic "state of nature," that
dreamland, absolutely requires that there be a country of waking reality from which we can
escape and to which we can return to tell the story.
Related to this advantage is the fifth reason to adopt realism: it is the only worldview that has
produced an intelligible account of creativity. When nonrealist worldviews attribute all real
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creativity to God, they have no explanation or even language to express how he does it. Some
nonrealist worldviews, such as those of Parmenides, Plato, and some contemporary physicists,
deny the reality of time, thus rendering creativity impossible. Approaches such as Lucretius'
brand of atomism, existentialism, phenomenology, idealism or logical positivism are usually
either reduced to randomness as the only explanation of creativity, or else assert that everything
is determined and thus that nothing can appear in the universe that is not the causal result of what
went before. They thus, like the religious positions, turn creativity over to some original
unmoved mover. Realism, however, postulates an actual universe changing in time, and thus
made possible the theory of evolution, which, in its iterative feedback of mutational variation,
selection, and hereditary reproduction, can create new entities and species in the universe,
including those human productions that we now know to result from a similar evolutionary
process in the human brain. Evolution is the only intelligible account of creativity. Other
worldviews contain only one or two of the three necessary ingredients of evolutionthe
randomness of mutation, the determinism of selection, and the temporality of heredity; none of
them has the essential method of combining them, the feedback process of iteration itself. In
other words, realism is the only position which affords an explanation of how the subject of the
humanities, that is, human creations, could come to be.
The final reason for the humanities to adopt realism is what has driven philosophers away from
realism again and againprecisely those elements of heaviness, slowness, friction, clunkiness,
death, occlusion, and darkness that bedevil our lives. We would much rather have this world be a
miserable illusion from which we will wake, or be revealed to make a perfect inhuman sense
under the surface. Worse still, realism does not give us a completely meaningless and disordered
world eitherit is exactly the most annoying mix of charming emergent meaning and encroaching
mess one could imagine. The richest field of information is right where realism suspects it is:
between the completely random, in which each element requires its own individual description,
and the completely ordered, in which one formula describes them all. And that richness, that far
fromequilibrium condition, is generative of new forms of order, as Prigogine has shown.
Worldviews such as existentialism and many poststructuralisms, that accept the world as totally
meaningless, in urging us either to go with the flow of meaninglessness, or to assert our freedom
by means of random gratuitous acts, are just a more sophisticated kind of escapism. Our actual
experience always contradicts our revelations of the unity and simplicity of things; but it also
gives us tantalizing hints of a reconciling perfection in the very midst of the chaos, and so
contradicts any relaxation into the mess. Realism welcomes this most difficult of all possible
worlds, and thus gives us the purchase, the resistance, the genuine pressure of otherness, the
alienation that inspires the finest works of humankind. Morality requires dignity; there is no
waste in the death of what has no dignity. And dignity comes from the weight we accumulate by
the struggle to make meaning out of an only partly ordered world.
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But this call for realism is not meant to turn back the clock. Excellent as are their ambitions and
their political ethics, such bodies as the National Association of Scholars and the Association of
Literary Scholars and Critics have not absorbed many of the gifts of modern humanistic
scholarship. The only twentieth century achievement they have fully accepted is the technique of
close reading. But though individual members of these institutions may be exceptions, at the
institutional level these bodies are essentially reactionary in the intellectual sense. Here are some
of the things they have downplayed or would rather not think about in a systemic way.
The discovery of the categories of performative statements and speech acts.
Nonlinear logical systems, of the Gödelian type: selfreferentiality and iteration are not just forms
of infinite regress.
The powerful analogies between DNA and linguistic coding.
Chaos theory.
Information theory.
Neuroscience, endocrinology, immunology, neuropharmacology, and other humanistically
relevant human biological topics.
The study of human and animal ritual.
The neuroevolutionary basis of language and the arts.
Animal awareness.
Artificial intelligence.
Science fiction and SF criticism, the cultural effects of prolonged lifespans, space travel,
cyberspace, etc.
Sociobiology and evolutionary aesthetics.
The theory and practice of interdisciplinarity in general.
Quantum uncertainty.
The observer effect, including the challenge of Kuhnian "paradigm" theory to all claims of
objectivity.
The interesting twentiethcentury merging of epistemology with ontology.
Indeed, the realism I am proposing here will have to be profoundly modified, relative to
traditional realisms. Since, as it appears, matter itself is a relatively late and not pervasive feature
of physical reality, our realism cannot be a materialism. That is, information structures are more
basic than matter; though the information structure that is matter is a prerequisite for any
advanced development of higher information structures. Moreover, information structures are
dynamic phenomena, and cannot exist except in a temporal medium provided by themselves and
by their context.
More important, the challenge of paradigm theory, the observer effect, speech act theory, and the
collapse of epistemology with ontology, which together have been taken to justify the presently
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dominant idea of the social construction of reality, is a real one. My suggestion is to accept the
idea of the construction of reality, but to insist that we not be speciescentered, or even carbon
basedlifeformcentered, in our qualifications for who or what gets to do the constructing. If
observers vote on the constitution of the world, I would simply extendor rather, recognizethe
franchise and observerhood of everything else in the universe, from animals and plants to atoms
and elementary particles. Thus for beings like ourselves who like to see things as texts, the
universe is to some extent a text, but there are many entities that do not experience the world in
those terms, and if we ignore them, we will come to grief. Feyerabend thought that humans
constructed atoms; I would reply, yes, and atoms construct us also. Indeed, there are cases, as
when Feyerabend's own worldconstructing activity entered into contest with that of his and the
world's molecules, when human observers lose the vote and must, tragically, die. Reality is
consensual, yes; but the consensus rather massively includes all the energy and matter in all the
stars and galaxies. Science is nothing more than the method by which we poll the vote of other
worldconstructors than ourselves; scientific knowledge is the sum of everything that has ever
surprised us by turning out different from what we expected.
Armed with such an epistemological realism, we will be able to renew the mission of the
humanities. And it is a muchneeded mission. Technology and the business economy
desperately need the guidance of the humanities, not just as a corrective to check abuses, but as
advice to improve their effectiveness and profitability. Huge changes, requiring the humanistic
vision, are on the horizon or already here: biotechnology, cyberspace, gene therapy,
neurotechnology, immortality, nanotechnology, the artificial enhancement of animal and human
intelligence, possible life on other worlds, the colonization of planets, and so on. Our present
linear conception of time itself is straining at the seams and may require to be modified by
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branchy or nonlinear additions, which have already been imaginatively explored by the artists and
poets.
Most important of all, the market, "MERX", the domain of the god Mercury and all his linguistic
progenymerchants, commerce, merchandise and the great free gift of Mercyurgently needs to
be rejoined with the realm of humanistic scholarship. All the statisms of socialism, communism,
fascism, even state liberalism, are dying. The new century will be the age of the market, and it
will be a market in which all mechanicallyproduced goods will have become vanishingly cheap.
Where the money will be is in all the activities and services by which human beings charm one
another or lead others to the great charms of the universe: cuisine, tourism, education,
entertainment, adventure, religion, sport, fashion, art, history, movies, ritual, personal
development, politics, the eternal soap opera of relationships. It will be an economy that is
noncoercive, merciful, wealthy, global, and unpredictable. The market, with its free nonlinear
continuous exchange of goods, ideas, and services, is the inheritor of natural evolution and shares
in the biological capacity for emergent ordered complexity.
Mercury, the bearer of the snakeentwined rod of the caduceus, the DNA double helix of life, is
not only the psychopomp who conducts us between life and death, the star at the threshold
between night and day, the metal that flows and glitters, and the god of messengers, thieves, liars,
and merchants. He is also, as Kit Marlowe and Shakespeare knew, the god of scholars and poets.
Let us invoke the realism of Mercury for the humanities of the twentyfirst century.
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