Hacker News Reader

Comment by pasabagi | Hacker News Reader

I think there should be a footnote to all of this: the crux of the argument is as old as the humanities itself. He's disingenuous to pretend that political concerns were implanted into the humanities 30 years ago, when the truth is, the role and position of politics in the humanities is basically the inaugural concern of the entire field.

What's more, it's also disingenuous to characterize the scholarship of three decades ago as 'rigorously defined' - especially in comparison to contemporary stuff. New Criticism / Formalism etc. are in theory 'rigorously defined', but the reason why their 'rigorous definition' has been broadly abandoned was because it was nonsensical and arbitrary. Humanities scholarship is much more rigorous than it was in previous decades - it's just a shame that so few read it.

View on HN

I don't think the rigorous definition of the field is the important bit, rather the kind of area one has expertise in. These days people will develop expertise with a set of "tools" and then apply them to whatever area they'd likem. We get feminist critiques, Focauldian critiques, deconstructive arguments, LGBT critiques, etc., that take on political and social issues in a very slanted manner because they analyze the issue in terms of a this framework. Instead of being experts on feminism, for example, we get experts on everything from a feminist perspective. It's good to have this perspective, the problem is that the perspective is overwhelming. The point is to analyze the issue from this perspective, but we've lost a focus on the relative importance of this perspective and the issues it raises. Moreover, sometimes the issue itself is obscured because it is contorted to be analyzable by this framework.

I will say, the problem he delineates doesn't seem to plague all of the humanities, only certain areas. Analytic philosophy departments and history departments seem to not suffer from the same problems.

I don't know if I'm living in a bubble, but I don't think I've ever come across a Foucauldian critique in the wild, as it were. Occasionally I've come across a moral panic over some careless tweet an assistant professor wrote. It is true that a lot of humanities faculty are pretty far-left, but that's just one end of the broader trend in academia, exacerbated by the fact that so few artists, philosophers, or writers find much to like in capitalism.

As for analytic philosophy, I like some of the work - but I think you've pointed at something like a nice cover over a dirty secret when you mention its apoliticism. Analytic philosophy essentially restricts philosophy to a very small subset of its traditional topics, which are emphatically non-political. That's part of why it's tended to survive and dominate in countries that have regular panics about professors having the wrong political opinions. It hasn't done well out of the strength and clarity of its arguments - often they are orthogonal to the concerns of French and German philosophers. It has done well out of the conservatism and cowardice of university administrations, and embattled accademics.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com