'The Vital Signs of Human Experience'

President Rudenstine emphasizes the interconnectedness of knowledge

President Neil L. Rudenstine delivered the following remarks during Afternoon Exercises at last Thursday's Commencement rites:

The Barker Center for the humanities officially opened last fall -- marking an important moment in Harvard's intellectual history. It brought a large number of our humanists together for the first time in the modern era of this University, and it made a visible statement that the humanities are vital to our intellectual life.

The creation of this Center is significant far beyond Harvard. The humanities everywhere are today in danger of being eclipsed by the natural sciences and some of the social sciences. This danger is not, of course, new, but it has been persistent and intense for some time. The reasons are complicated, but they are -- at least partly -- attributable to the fact that the nature and power of humanistic knowledge is often misunderstood, and certainly, at the moment, it is undervalued.

Today I want to offer some thoughts on the challenging nature of the humanities, on their strong links to other fields of learning, and why they are essential, not only to any serious definition of education, but also to the health of society as a whole.

The humanities -- together with the arts -- are obviously not very tidy. They include all the known religions and philosophies, as well as languages, literatures, histories, and cultures, with their varieties of music, theater, dance, and visual arts. The kind of knowledge they offer us is not susceptible to elegant proofs, such as we find in mathematics; or to parsimonious theories together with verifiable data; or anything as neat as an econometric model or a rational choice decision-making tree; or even much in the way of game theory.

Instead, the humanities and the arts thrive on the pattern, texture, and flux of experience, where very little is provable or predictable. They are less abstract in what they consider to be knowledge than either the sciences or the social sciences. They prefer the audible, tangible, visual, and palpable. When we are reading Anna Karenina or Dubliners; when we are watching Othello or Riders to the Sea; wrestling with Thucydides, or reciting Keats, Yeats, or Seamus Heaney -- we know that we are about as close to the vital signs of human experience as any representation is likely to take us.

Obviously, there are exceptions. The humanities and arts have their own special forms of abstraction -- in philosophy and music, for example. And we know only too well that history, art history, literary history, and theory can all become as vivesectional and obscurantist as we care to make them.

Nonetheless, there is nearly always in humanistic and artistic fields a strong pull that ultimately leads us back to an original source -- a particular novel, painting, poem, or string quartet; or a great philosophical, historical, or religious text that can dramatize and reimagine life in ways that expand our vision and deepen our sense of what is possible, delightful, terrible, or impenetrable; in short, something that can enlighten us, move us, and genuinely educate us.

What does it mean to learn -- or to gain knowledge -- in this way?

The purpose is not so much closure along a single line of inquiry -- as we might find in the sciences. The search, instead, is for illuminations that are hard won because they can only be discovered in the very midst of life, with all its vicissitudes. If we are fortunate and alert, we may gradually learn how to see more clearly the nature and possible meaning of situations and events; to be better attuned to the nuances, inflections, and character of other human beings; to weigh values with more precision; to judge on the basis of increasingly fine distinctions; and perhaps to become more effective, generous, and wise in our actions.

As we think about these special characteristics of the humanities, however, we also soon discover that it's extremely difficult to draw a convincing or firm line between these particular fields and those of the social and natural sciences. It's not possible, for instance, to read very far into major humanistic texts -- such as the works of Aristotle, or Plato's Republic -- without being thrust into questions about political theory and practice; the role of law in human societies; civic as compared to moral obligations; physics as well as metaphysics; economics, cosmology, and even the nature of plants and animals. Great humanistic texts, in other words, lead us very quickly into other realms of knowledge; and conversely, great scientific work, if we really want to understand it, will lead us straight back into the domain of the humanities and the arts.

The great Harvard evolutionary biologist, Ernst Mayr, has recently reminded us of this point, suggesting -- for example -- that the biological sciences depend upon constructing and interpreting important concepts that bring them into close touch with major humanistic ideas, as well as with several fields in the social sciences. Biologists need to define and try to explain, for instance, complex processes such as development, cognition, and evolution, as well as communication, learning, "territoriality," and even altruism. All of these concepts connect many forms of animal life with human life -- and they all lie as much in the sphere of the humanities as the natural or social sciences. In fact, without significant contributions from the humanities, the hard job of clarifying, examining, and refining the meaning of these concepts cannot be carried out persuasively. Precisely the same point holds, of course, for concepts closely associated with the sciences themselves: "cause and effect," "determined behavior," and even time, space, or dimension.

So, the traffic must move in both directions. The humanities are essential to science and social science; at the same time, science and social science have obviously had a significant impact on humanistic thinking, especially since the 17th century, and no more dramatically than in the case of Charles Darwin. His ideas, as we know, had a profound effect on established religious beliefs, on metaphysics and philosophy of mind, and (by extension) on all the factors that we take into account whenever we think about the various perceptions, drives, motives, and values -- as well as the powers of reason, imagination, and memory that make up our idea of the Self--what it means to have a Self, or to be a Self. In short, although all knowledge may not constitute a unity, there is a very strong case to be made for its "interconnectedness," a different -- but far from trivial -- matter.

This interconnectedness means that the humanities cannot, in effect, be successfully subjected to any paradigm of knowledge imported from either science or social science -- any more than the reverse would be acceptable. When it comes to central questions about the nature and meaning of human life, neither the humanities, the sciences, nor the social sciences can be sovereign.

These essential linkages among these broad fields -- the ways that they need each other and must work together -- are strikingly apparent in Harvard's inter-Faculty program called "Mind, Brain, and Behavior," which cuts across nearly all the schools and departments of the university, bringing the insights of neuroscientists and biologists into direct contact with those of cognitive psychologists and of scholars in law, business, government, religion, literature, and philosophy -- to name only a few.

Recent developments in magnetic resonance imaging and rapid advances in other technologies now allow scientists to observe and map neural activity in the brain with amazing accuracy, explaining much about how neurons transmit their signals and how the signals pass from one cell to another. But neuroscience cannot, on its own, explain how chemical signals somehow turn into human emotions, thoughts, and feelings -- or how they lead to self-conscious action and behavior, in all their complexity. Above all, neuroscience cannot, on its own, provide an understanding of the concept of "mind" with its "mental functions" -- functions that are obviously distinct from the chemistry, physics, and biology that make up that apparatus which we call "the brain."

The realm of the mind is, in fact, exactly the place where the humanities and the arts become crucial and indispensable. We cannot demonstrate exactly what a "mind" is, because we can neither observe it, nor account for it in strictly scientific terms. But we know that only a "mind" has consciousness, which in turn allows us to have a sense of Self, with its continuous identity and history, its capacity to think and arrive at conclusions, to make free choices, and to develop culturally -- long after the time when the brain has ceased, in any significant way, to evolve biologically.

It is also in this region of the mind -- of consciousness, of reflection in the light of experience, of choice and deliberate action -- that "values" are created. Whenever we reach a decision, or make a reasoned judgment, we do not express a mere preference: we create a value. And the humanities and arts are those fields which are most deeply and continuously engaged with probing, dramatizing, and clarifying values.

To do this, they must draw not only on specific fields of knowledge, but also on human experience: on encounters with the actual flux of life, where the mind attempts to make sense of what it is perceiving, of what meaning and value a particular incident or situation may have.

Henry James, in his great essay on "The Art of Fiction," captured in a very few words what it means to learn from -- and to write from -- experience that has been sifted and evaluated until it begins to take on meanings:

What kind of experience is intended, and where does it begin and end? Experience is never limited, and it is never complete; it is an immense sensibility, a kind of huge spider-web of the finest silken threads suspended in the chamber of consciousness, and catching every airborne particle in its tissue. It is the very atmosphere of the mind; and when the mind is imaginative... it takes to itself the faintest hints of life, it converts the very pulses of the air into revelations.1

When we talk about the humanities and the arts, among the things we surely have in mind are the enlarged capacities or powers that these fields can help us to develop, and that can make it possible for us to interpret experience with greater insight. For James, the important capacities were a constantly cultivated and finely tuned sensibility; a heightened consciousness, always on the alert; and an imaginative mind with its own "atmosphere" -- its own accumulated store of impressions and perceptions that have been filtered, named, and somehow organized so that new encounters with even small particles of experience can be registered so precisely that they yield "revelations" of significant meaning, so long as we are awake enough to see them and "convert" them.

Whether we believe that this is how an imaginative and powerful mind actually works is not so much the point. What does matter is that the passage can hardly help but illuminate something important about the quality of our interior life, as we experience it; about how consciousness can be tuned and even mobilized; about how we can learn enough to be prepared for revelations -- however small or large -- when they come. In short, the passage compels us to envisage the mind -- and how it works -- in new ways.

In closing, I want to touch very briefly on one more critical role of the humanities: that is, the fundamental contribution that the humanities can and must make to the health of democratic societies, and to international cooperation in the world today.

If the humanities and the arts are the realm where experience is encountered directly and dramatized, as well as filtered and evaluated, and where values are clarified and modified under the pressures of existence, then we also need to remember they are also the spheres in which different values can collide or clash: sometimes amicably, sometimes acrimoniously, and often tragically. We do not have to describe particular examples in order to remember the nationalistic, religious, racial, ethnic, and social conflicts of this century -- some of which have now been quieted, while others rage even as we speak today. Here, the humanities can help, not so much by stressing the importance of strong convictions and commitments, as by reminding us of our limitations and fallibility. They can help us to cultivate a respect for the more modest but vital values of tolerance, restraint, compromise, and a readiness to entertain the possibility that we may often be wrong.

The late Isaiah Berlin, in his wonderful book The Crooked Timber of Humanity, held out the hope that these inevitable clashes and collisions of value "even if they cannot be avoided, can be softened."

The first public obligation is to avoid extremes of suffering. Revolutions, wars, assassinations, extreme measures may in desperate situations be required. But history teaches us that their consequences are seldom what is anticipated; there is no guarantee, not even, at times, a high enough probability, that such acts will lead to improvement.... So we must engage in what are called trade-offs -- rules, values, principles must yield to each other in varying degrees in specific situations.... The best that can be done, as a general rule, is to maintain a precarious equilibrium that will prevent the occurrence of desperate situations, of intolerable choices -- that is the first requirement for a decent society....22

Isaiah Berlin was a humanist first, and a philosopher second: he understood that important values are given meaning and expression by the force of strong convictions. But he also knew that strong convictions, if carried forward with unmitigated ferocity, can literally destroy human values.

There is, alas, no easy way to inject such wisdom into the world at large. But it is just such wisdom, grounded in a respect for human rights and human values, that the humanities and arts can offer. This wisdom may or may not prevail, but without great and humane minds to articulate such a vision, we will have absolutely no chance at all of achieving our deepest purposes.