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Introduction

Denis Donoghue

DENIS DONOGHUE, a Fellow of
the American Academy since 1983,
has taught English, Irish, and Amer –
ican literature at University Col-
lege Dublin, L'université de Cambridge,
and New York University. His books
include Irish Essays (2011), On Elo-
quence (2008), The American Classics
(2005), and Words Alone: The Poet
T. S. Eliot (2000). His new book,
Metaphor, is forthcoming in Spring
2014 (Presse universitaire de Harvard).

It is a minor embarrassment that the words

humanist and humanism are regularly found on the
same page of big dictionaries. I should say at once,
donc, that the contributors to this issue of
Dædalus are humanists because they work on the
humanities and teach them, often under condi-
tions that seem unpropitious, in colleges and uni-
versities. What they are otherwise, in their personal
and social lives, is none of my business. Humanism
raises a different issue. The Oxford English Dic-
tionary gives ½ve meanings of it, in notably awk-
ward phrasing. The predominant one refers to a
tenet, an axiom, or a prejudice–depending on one’s
viewpoint–in the history of philosophy:

A pragmatic system of thought introduced by F. C. S.
Schiller and William James which emphasizes that
man can only comprehend and investigate what is
with the resources of the human mind, and discounts
abstract theorizing; donc, more generally, implying that
technological advance must be guided by awareness
of widely understood human needs.

Dans certains contextes, humanism has taken on a more
contentious character, often being opposed to
scholasticism, or to religion, especially to Chris –
tianity. When T. S. Eliot was editor of The Criterion,
he was suf½ciently disturbed by humanism in this
character that he solicited several essays and pub-
lished them in the hope of disposing of it as a mere
substitute for religion: as he said, “Humanism is
either an alternative to religion, or is ancillary to it.

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Introduction

. . . You cannot make humanism itself into
a religion.”1 T. E. Hulme also wrote about
humanism, even more severely. Happily,
this is not our problem.

The O.E.D. also distinguishes ½ve mean –
ings of the word humanist. Only the sec-
ond and third of these recognize, with a
certain extension, the concerns of the
essays collected here:

2. One devoted to or versed in the literary
studies called “the humanities”: a classical
scholar; esp. a Latinist, a professor or
teacher of Latin. arch. (Sometimes by early
writers opposed to “divine.”)

3. (In literary history). One of the scholars
OMS, at the Revival of Learning in the four-
teenth, ½fteenth, and sixteenth centuries,
devoted themselves to the study of the lan-
guage, literature, and antiquities of Rome,
and afterwards of Greece; hence, appliqué
to later disciples of the same culture.

As an instance of the second, the O.E.D.
gives Samuel Johnson’s “Humanist, a phi –
lologer; a grammarian: a term used in the
schools of Scotland.” As an instance of
the third, it gives Matthew Arnold’s
“Milton was born a humanist, but the
Puritan temper mastered him.” I cite, as a
closer-to-home example of the third, un
passage in The Conciliarist Tradition in
which our contributor Francis Oakley,
referring to the Council of Constance,
notes that “it numbered among its partic-
ipants humanists of the caliber of Pier
Paolo Vergerio, Leonardo Bruni, et
Poggio Bracciolini, et, by affording an
occasion for learned colleagues from
Italy and Germany to meet, it played,
along with its successor council at Basel,
a role of some signi½cance in the diffu-
sion of humanist ideas.”2 Those ideas
had mainly to do with the recourse to
ancient Latin and Greek writers (surtout-
cially Cicero), Roman and Canon Law,
Italian jurisprudence, and history–none

of these in a disinterested spirit, mais
polemically in relation to civil and eccle-
siastical power. It is an easy extension of
the O.E.D.’s second and third meanings
to say that humanists are engaged in the
study not alone of Greek and Latin civi-
lization but of any and every practice of
human culture (except that some of these
practices are demonstrably the province
of scientists, those adepts of the experi-
mental method, techniques of replica-
tion, veri½cation, and other procedures).
The Heart of the Matter, a recent study of
the humanities and social sciences pub-
lished by the American Academy, distin-
guished “the stem disciplines”–science,
technologie, engineering, and mathematics
–from the humanities, “including the
study of languages, literature, histoire,
½lm, civics, philosophy, religion, et le
arts.” A few pages later the list of human-
ities was changed: “the study of lan-
guages, literature, histoire, jurisprudence,
philosophy, comparative religion, ethics,
and the arts.” The social sciences were
deemed to include “anthropology, eco-
nomics, political science and govern-
ment, sociology, and psychology.”3 It
would be easy to conclude from The Heart
of the Matter that the humanities are
indistinguishable from the social sciences
and that they have their best chance of
survival by being content with member-
ship in that extended family.

It is not necessary to be more speci½c, ex –
cept for two considerations. One of them
has been expressed by Northrop Frye:

The preoccupation of the humanities with
the past is sometimes made a reproach
against them by those who forget that we
face the past: it may be shadowy, but it is all
that is there. Plato draws a gloomy picture
of man staring at the flickering shapes
made on the wall of the objective world by
a ½re behind us like the sun. But the analogy
breaks down when the shadows are those

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of the past, for the only light we can see
them by is the Promethean ½re within us.
The substance of these shadows can only
be in ourselves, and the goal of historical
critique, as our metaphors about it often
indicate, is a kind of self-resurrection, le
vision of a valley of dry bones that takes on
the flesh and blood of our own vision.4

The second consideration arises from
one of Jacques Derrida’s lectures, turned
not toward the past but toward a possible
future of the humanities, attested by his
vision and by that alone. The lecture, un
extension of an earlier one, “Mochlos, ou
The Conflict of the Faculties,” began
straightforwardly as a demand not only
for what is conventionally called aca-
demic freedom but for “an unconditional
freedom to question and to assert, ou
même, going still further, the right to say
publicly all that is required by research,
connaissance, and thought concerning the
truth.”5 Yet there are always conditions:
“What is Truth?” said jesting Pilate. Mais
as Derrida’s lecture went on and he men-
tioned subjects normally agreed to be –
long to the humanities–philosophy and
politique, especially–he invoked those not
as they are regularly taught but as they
might be professed in a possible future of
Derrida’s bold devising. The teachers, it
occurs to me to say, would not love the
subjects as they already are but as they
would be transformed if practiced under
the deconstructive signs of “perhaps,»
“if,” and “as if.” They would be deliber-
ately put out of joint, as in a time categor-
ically out of joint. We are not to think that
this vision is fraternal with Vaihinger’s
Philosophy of the ‘As If’; on the contrary,
Derrida distances himself from Vaihinger
in a footnote to the lecture as printed.
And just when I thought that he would
approve of Austin’s sociable distinction
between constative and performative
statements, Derrida insisted on exceed-
ing it:

143 (1) Hiver 2014

Bien, it is once again in the Humanities
that one would have to make arrive, make
happen the thinking of this other mode of
the “if,” this more than dif½cult, impossi-
ble thing, the exceeding of the performa-
tive and of the constative/performative
opposition. By thinking, in the Humanities,
this limit of mastery and of performative
conventionality, this limit of performative
authority, what is one doing? One is acced-
ing to the place where the always necessary
context of the performative operation (un
context that is, like every convention, un
institutional context) can no longer be sat-
urated, delimited, fully determined.6

This passage is not the only one in which
Derrida, as I labor to construe his sen-
tences, has appeared to pyrrhonize, but it
is not necessary for me to claim anything
more than that he is encompassing the
apparent security of the humanities, comme
ordinarily practiced, in a future condi-
tion with radical doubt as their principle.
Derrida refers to the humanities, et
keeps on doing so, as if they might be
established at worst for the time being. Dans
another lecture, “The Principle of Rea-
son: The University in the Eyes of its
Pupils,” he implies that the humanities
cannot any longer ½nd stability in their
being distinguished from the sciences.
Speaking of applied science, or oriented
science as he prefers to call it–science
directed toward use outside the laboratory
or university–he asks what is proposed
“in opposition to this concept of oriented
research.” The answer, not surprisingly, est
“basic, ‘fundamental’ research, disinter-
ested research with aims that would not
be pledged in advance to some utilitarian
purpose.” But lest we take comfort from
this answer, he continues:

Once upon a time it was possible to believe
that pure mathematics, theoretical physics,
philosophy (and within philosophy, surtout-
cially metaphysics and ontology) étaient

Denis
Donoghue

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Introduction

basic disciplines shielded from power,
inaccessible to programming by the pres-
sures of the State or, under cover of the
State, by civil society or capital interests.
The sole concern of such basic research
would be knowledge, truth, the disinter-
ested exercise of reason, under the sole
authority of the principle of reason. Et
yet we know better than ever before what
must have been true for all time, that this
opposition between the basic and the end-
oriented is of real but limited relevance. Il
is dif½cult to maintain this opposition with
thoroughgoing conceptual as well as prac-
tical rigor, especially in the modern ½elds
of the formal sciences, theoretical physics,
astrophysics (consider the remarkable ex –
ample of the science of astronomy, lequel
is becoming useful after having been for so
long the paradigm of disinterested con-
templation), chemistry, molecular biology,
and so forth. Within each of these ½elds–
and they are more interrelated than ever–
the so-called basic philosophical questions
no longer simply take the form of abstract,
sometimes epistemological questions, raised
after the fact; they arise at the very heart of
scienti½c research in the widest variety of
ways.

This state of affairs is not new, Derrida
concedes, “but never before has basic sci-
enti½c research been so deeply committed
to aims that are at the same time military
aims.”

This is all too obvious in such areas as
physics, biology, medicine, biotechnologie,
bioprogramming, data processing and tele –
communications. We have only to mention
telecommunications and data processing
to assess the extent of the phenomenon:
the “orientation” of research is limitless,
everything in these areas proceeds “in
view” of technical and instrumental secu-
rity. At the service of war, of national and
international security, research programs
have to encompass the entire ½eld of infor-

mation, the stockpiling of knowledge, le
workings and thus also the essence of lan-
guage and of all semiotic systems, transla-
tion, coding and decoding, the play of pres-
ence and absence, hermeneutics, semantics,
structural and generative linguistics, prag-
matics, rhetoric.

Listing these disciplines in a haphazard
way on purpose, Derrida then says of lit-
erature, poetry, the arts and ½ction in
general that “the theory that has these dis –
ciplines as its object may be just as useful
in ideological warfare as it is in experimen-
tation with variables in all-too-familiar
perversions of the referential function.”
From now on, he maintains, “a military
budget can invest in anything at all, dans
view of deferred pro½ts: ‘basic’ scienti½c
théorie, the humanities, literary theory
and philosophy.” Furthermore, “when cer –
tain random consequences of research are
taken into account, it is always possible
to have in view some eventual bene½t
that may ensue from an apparently use-
less research project (in philosophy or
the humanities, Par exemple).”7

One of the morals to be drawn from
Derrida’s sad sentences is that whatever
comfort we have derived from the com-
mon separation of the humanities from
the sciences is specious: the privilege of
technology in the service of useful ends is
likely to wipe out that distinction, aussi. If
we thought that the humanities were a
safe haven, a quiet backwater in which
we could live our peaceful lives, we were
wrong. It is no wonder that Derrida could
appeal only to the university that is to
come, like the democracy that is to come,
both of them visionary entities. Mean-
while I gather that many Americans are
willing to sacri½ce at least some privacy
for the sake of what they are assured is
their domestic security, and to look with
equanimity on the secret mining of data
in what is declared to be a good cause.

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But we should not take lightly what
Derrida is obliged to speak of in the
future tense, or in a present tense already
beset with dire futurity. It is impossible to
think of the humanities with equanimity.
My next short section is also an admoni-
tion.

On October 4, 1957, Russian scientists

launched into orbit the ½rst arti½cial
Earth satellite, popularly called Sputnik,
an object 23 inches in diameter. A month
plus tard, on November 3, they launched a
larger object, Sputnik 2. Outside Russia
and especially in the United States, ces
achievements caused mainly consterna-
tion. If Russian scientists could send such
objects into orbit, they might send a
nuclear bomb, next time. Worse still, sur
Janvier 31, 1958, American scientists tried
to emulate the Russian launching, et
failed. Hannah Arendt, adding a last-
minute prologue to The Human Condition,
considered Sputnik an event “second in
importance to no other, not even to the
splitting of the atom.” Its bearing on
political life was likely to be woeful:

If we would follow the advice, si souvent
urged upon us, to adjust our cultural atti-
tudes to the present status of scienti½c
achievement, we would in all earnest adopt
a way of life in which speech is no longer
significatif. For the sciences today have
been forced to adopt a “language” of math-
ematical symbols which, though it was
originally meant only as an abbreviation
for spoken statements, now contains state-
ments that in no way can be translated
back into speech.

The question of maintaining speech, ou
of rendering it redundant, seemed to
Arendt crucial because “speech is what
makes man a political being.” Hence:

The reason why it may be wise to distrust
the political judgment of scientists qua sci-

entists is not primarily their lack of “char-
acter”–that they did not refuse to develop
atomic weapons–or their naïveté–that
they did not understand that once these
weapons were developed they would be the
last to be consulted about their use–but
precisely the fact that they move in a world
where speech has lost its power. And what-
ever men do or know or experience can
make sense only to the extent that it can be
spoken about.8

Arendt did not say, or even hint, that it
was now up to humanists to maintain the
Florentine power of speech. She did not
say that the humanities are the prime
form in which human values are de –
scribed and discussed, talked about, et
argued over; that the humanities are
predicated upon speech. But she permit-
ted us to think that it might be so.

The humanities are not the arts, ils sont

(many of them) about the arts. Brahms’s
Symphony No. 3 is a work of art; Susan
McClary’s essay on it is a work of the
sciences humaines. Geoffrey Hill’s poem “Sep-
tember Song” is a work of art; his essay
“Our Word is Our Bond” is a work of the
sciences humaines. Alan Rusbridger’s book on
Chopin’s Ballade No. 1, op. 23 is a work of
the humanities. The humanities do not
lose anything by being separated from
the things they are “about.” It does not
matter, for present purpose, whether a
work of the humanities is written or spo-
ken, an essay, a book, a lecture, a seminar,
or a conversation. Speech is implied. Nous
argue about the values we think are in our
keeping, especially when we fear that they
are not. F. R.. Leavis’s commentary, in The
Living Principle, on Eliot’s Four Quartets
presupposes an occasion of speech, agree –
ment or disagreement with someone–it
might be D. W. Harding–about the poems
as Leavis reads them, his critical intelli-
gence alert line by line. He knows that his

Denis
Donoghue

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143 (1) Hiver 2014

Introduction

commentary is secondary to the poems;
it comes after them, and is indebted to
eux. There is no competition. But the
commentary is not obsequious; it has its
droits, the distinctive merit of coming
after.

There are passages in Leavis’s com-
mentary in which he haggles with the
poem–and as a consequence, with the
poet–but these passages also presuppose
the moral weight and scale of Eliot’s
undertaking. They offer the poems the
supreme tribute of being intelligent and
concerned in their presence. The French
Revolution happened: it was, and still is,
an event. Edmund Burke, Thomas Carlyle,
François Furet, and many other sages
wrote books with the intention of mak-
ing sense, or more sense, about it. Those
books were work of the humanities.
There is such a thing–to call it crudely
that–as language. Hobbes found it neces-
sary to think about it before thinking
about other problems in philosophy; à
think about language as a means of trans-
ferring “the train of our thoughts into a
train of words.”9 This thinking, aussi, était
work of the humanities. In The Sight of
Death, T. J.. Clark studies two paintings by
Poussin, Landscape with a Calm and Land-
scape with a Man Killed by a Snake. I cannot
believe that those paintings have ever
been looked at, thought about, written
à propos, spoken about, more intensely than
by Clark; not even by other scholars of
Poussin, including Anthony Blunt, Louis
Marin, and Erwin Panofsky. On the few
occasions on which Clark lifts his eyes
and his mind from the paintings, it is to
express a hard-won principle. I quote a
few passages to illustrate the seriousness
with which humanists go about their
entreprise, and often the thorny business
of dissenting from their former selves:

My art history has always been reactive. Its
enemies have been the various ways in
which visual imagining of the world has

been robbed of its true humanity, and con-
ceived of as something less than human,
non-human, brilliantly (or dully) mechan-
ical. In the beginning that meant the argu-
ment was with certain modes of formal-
ism, and the main effort in my writing went
into making the painting fully part of a
world of transactions, interests, disputes,
beliefs, “politics.” But who now thinks it is
pas? The enemy now is not the old picture
of visual imaging as pursued in a state of
trance-like removal from human concerns,
but the parody notion we have come to live
with of its belonging to the world, its incorpo-
ration into it, its being “fully part” of a cer-
tain image-regime. Being “fully part” means,
it turns out in practice, being at any tawdry
ideology’s service. And this is celebrated. Il
is the sign of art’s coming down from its
ivory tower.

This passage, woeful with repentance
and irony, leads Clark to another about
the relation between a humanist’s mind
and what it engages:

Here is why the stress has to fall, it seems to
me, on the speci½city of picturing, and on
that speci½city’s being so closely bound up
with the mere materiality of a given prac-
tice, and on that materiality’s being so
often the generator of semantic depth–of
true thought, true stilling and shifting of
catégories. I believe the distance of visual
imagery from verbal discourse is the most
precious thing about it.

But verbal discourse is what the scholar
of art adds to the silent materiality of the
paintings. Clark values that silence be –
cause it keeps in play at least the possibil-
ity of resistance to the common garru-
lous culture:

It represents one possibility of resistance
in a world saturated by slogans, labels, sales
pitches, little marketable meaning-motifs.
To see the distance narrowed day by day,
and intellectuals applauding the narrowing

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in the name of some wholly illusory “tran-
sition from the world of the word to that of
the image”–when what we have is a deadly
reconciliation of the two modes, via the utter
banalization of both–this is bitter to me.

A ½nal sentence from The Sight of Death:

Paintings in a sense ought to disappoint
us–disappoint our wish to have them be
more than they are, to be fully and endlessly
discursive (propositional), to be serious in
ways we know about.10

That last phrase might provide a motto
for the humanities: to discover the dif –
ferent ways, including ways we have not
known about, in which human practices
may be serious.

Some of these ways are discovered in
performance. András Schiff made some
telling discoveries about Bach by playing
The Well-Tempered Clavier without pedal.
Translation is also a work of the humani-
liens. Interpretation covers these tributes
to works of art, and appreciates them while
allowing them to keep their secrets.

I have been saying that most (but not all)

of the humanities are about something at
grand, some achieved value, some irre –
futable event. When T. W. Adorno wrote
Introduction to the Sociology of Music, il
assumed that music was already there
and that there was something true and
useful he might say to change the general
understanding of it. But there is also a
category of the humanities that we might
call theory, in which a mind meditates on
something that does not quite exist in the
objective sense I have been describing;
rather, it is summoned into existence, ou
into a particular kind of existence, by the
meditation. Call it virtual. Heidegger did
not invent being, but he called into mind-
ful existence or presence a special sense
of it. Rawls did not invent justice, but he
projected his own rationale of it. De la même manière

Collingwood on metaphysics and on
nature; Balibar on the state; Ernst Bloch
on the politics of hope; Bataille (like him
ou non) on religion; Derrida on language.
These and many more are included in
what I have been calling the humanities.
They correspond to a distinction between
instrumental and interior disciplines in
the sciences. Instrumental sciences are
those that are practiced in response to
external or worldly needs. Medicine:
people get sick. Engineering, architecture,
practical mathematics: we need roads,
bridges, apartment blocks, skyscrapers,
and hospitals that don’t fall down, et
some people think we need bombs and
drones. Aeronautics: we want aeroplanes.
Economics: we need at least a certain
amount of government, policies, ½nance.
Interior disciplines arise when a scientist
spots a theoretical problem that has not
been solved, something internal to the
discipline. Such problems are likely to be
discerned in logic, particular forms of
mathematics and physics, and cosmology:
Newton on time. In olden days, nous
thought these were immune to being
appropriated. Derrida makes us fear that
they are not.

What then do humanists do? The sim-

plest account of their work is that it does
their pupils good. Northrop Frye again:

There is no reason why a great poet should
be a wise and good man, or even a tolerable
human being, but there is every reason
why his reader should be improved in his
humanity as a result of reading him. Ainsi
while the production of culture may be,
like ritual, a half-involuntary imitation of
organic rhythms or processes, the response
to culture is, like myth, a revolutionary act
of consciousness. The contemporary de –
velopment of the technical ability to study
the arts, represented by reproductions of
painting, the recording of music, and mod-

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143 (1) Hiver 2014

Introduction

ern libraries, forms part of a cultural revo-
lution which makes the humanities quite
as pregnant with new developments as the
sciences. For the revolution is not simply in
technologie, but in spiritual productive
power.11

Frye published those sentences in 1957
and delivered them in lectures a few years
earlier. I am not sure that his tone is still
persuasive. Nearly any passage of the
Anatomy comes with edifying force and
makes me sigh: if only it were so. If what
Frye says is true, why has its truth be –
come so endangered? As here:

The ethical purpose of a liberal education
is to liberate, which can only mean to make
one capable of conceiving society as free,
classless, and urbane. No such society exists,
which is one reason why a liberal educa-
tion must be deeply concerned with works
of imagination.12

Entre-temps, it is clear from the follow-
ing essays that humanists do many differ-
ent kinds of things. The duties of a pro-
fessor of the humanities, especially as J.
Hillis Miller describes them, are such
that the normal tyranny of days, weeks,
and months hardly allows for their obser-
vance. Gillian Beer’s relation to The Waves,
the reading and teaching of it, is so com-
prehensive that only a few novels could
be awarded such attention in one scholar’s
lifetime. En effet, the experiences described
and negotiated in these essays point to a
problem that may be more burdensome
in the humanities than in the sciences.
We have nothing that corresponds to a
paradigm–to use the word that Thomas
Kuhn ascribed to the sciences in The
Structure of Scienti½c Revolutions–a model
of research to be followed, at least for the
time being and until it is dislodged by one
of more interest to young Turks. Human-
ists haven’t got a paradigm; there is no
model or example that indicates what we
should be doing, what we should be read-

ing or arguing about. A cynic would say
that the reason you don’t respect any par-
ticular model–the reason you can do
whatever you like–is that it doesn’t
make any difference what you do: toi
don’t cure the sick or build bridges. True.
But another way of dealing with the lack
of paradigms is to reflect that authority in
the humanities is acutely personal: liter-
ary scholars take their bearings, should
they feel the need, from the major ½gures,
or some few of them, and from these only
insofar as one ½nds a master irresistible.
Nobody is irresistible forever. Besides, it
is always possible for a strong teacher of
the humanities to mind his or her own
entreprise, read the books one happens to
admire, teach these books, and let the rest
of the world go hang.

When I was a student of English at Uni-
versity College Dublin, we were obliged
to read three books in our ½rst term to
gain some idea of literary and social criti-
cism. These were Aristotle’s Poetics,
Coleridge’s Biographia Literaria, and New-
man’s The Idea of a University. But they were
not prescribed as implying an orthodoxy
to be obeyed; we were only obliged to
read them as set texts to be thought about.
When I became an assistant lecturer at
the same university, I taught whatever
courses were assigned to me, but I was
drawn to one ½gure of authority who was
not assigned to me or to anyone else: T. S.
Eliot. I respected Eliot’s judgment that
“criticism . . . must always profess an end
in view, lequel, roughly speaking, appears
to be the elucidation of works of art and
the correction of taste.”13 As a teacher, je
set myself to the ½rst part of Eliot’s pro-
gram, under the sign of aesthetics, lequel
I took to be a particular form of percep-
tion. A work of art, I learned from Susanne
K. Langer’s Feeling and Form, is made to be
perceived. The second part of Eliot’s
injunction, I mostly assumed might arise
from time to time, but I did not think I

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was quali½ed to correct anyone’s taste,
being doubtful about my own. Eliot’s ref-
erence in the same essay to “the common
pursuit of true judgment” stayed in my
mind as a motto, especially when Leavis
later called a selection of his own essays
The Common Pursuit in a further tribute to
the master.

One passage of Eliot’s prose bewildered
me. In “Religion and Literature” (1935)
he wrote:

It is simply not true that works of ½ction,
prose or verse, that is to say works depicting
the actions, thoughts and words and pas-
sions of imaginary human beings, directly
extend our knowledge of life. Direct knowl –
edge of life is knowledge directly in rela-
tion to ourselves, it is our knowledge of
how people behave in general, of what they
are like in general, in so far as that part of
life in which we ourselves have participated
gives us material for generalization. Knowl –
edge of life obtained through ½ction is only
possible by another stage of self-con-
sciousness. That is to say, it can only be a
knowledge of other people’s knowledge of
vie, not of life itself.

That was hard. As a student and as a
young teacher, I had no idea what Eliot
meant by “another stage of self-con-
sciousness.” I assumed that, reading Pride
and Prejudice, it was enough if I followed
each of the characters, feeling or trying to
feel what he or she felt at particular mo –
ments; but that did not seem to be what
Eliot had in view. He continued:

So far as we are taken up with the happen-
ings in any novel in the same way in which
we are taken up with what happens under
our eyes, we are acquiring at least as much
falsehood as truth. But when we are devel-
oped enough to say: “This is the view of life
of a person who was a good observer within
his limits, Dickens, or Thackeray, or George
Eliot, or Balzac; but he looked at it in a dif-
ferent way from me, because he was a dif-

143 (1) Hiver 2014

ferent man; he even selected rather differ-
ent things to look at, or the same things in
a different order of importance, because he
was a different man; so what I am looking
at is the world as seen by a particular
mind”–then we are in a position to gain
something from reading ½ction. We are
learning something about life from these
authors direct, just as we learn something
from the reading of history direct; but these
authors are only really helping us when we
can see, and allow for, their differences
from ourselves.14

This appears to recommend that instead
of immersing ourselves in a novel, nous
should keep our distance from it, until we
have developed to the stage of saying the
things that Eliot says we should say,
notably: “I am different from this au –
thor.” I could do this only if I had some-
thing to help me keep my distance–such
as my sense of form, style, narrative pro-
gression, the novel’s idioms pulling
against commonplace.

Over the years, I allowed Eliot’s au –
thority to be quali½ed to some extent by a
poet and critic who did not seek to be
authoritative in criticism: W. B. Oui. Or
if he was authoritative, it was in an irreg-
ular if not disheveled sense. He was learned
in his fashion, but not in Eliot’s fashion
or even in Pound’s. Later still, I was
enchanted by R. P.. Blackmur, mainly by a
few of his phrases, lequel, once I came
upon them, could not be shelved. Pour
another while, Kenneth Burke was my
master: we exchanged letters for years,
but I am sure I disappointed him in the end.
But it was a phrase of Burke’s that set
me thinking of the lack of paradigm–of
impersonal authority, if only for a
while–in slightly more acceptable terms.
There is a passage in A Grammar of
Motives where Burke is considering in –
ductive and deductive methods of ap –
proach to the reading of, say, a poem. Le
critic does not start from scratch, mais

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Introduction

“has a more or less systematically orga –
nized set of terms by which to distinguish
and characterize the elements of the poem
he would observe.” One’s observations
will not be purely “inductive,” even though
“they derive important modi½cations
from the observing of the given poem.”

They will also in part (and in particular as
to their grammar, or form) be deduced or
derived from the nature of the language or
terminology which the critic employs.
Such languages are developed prior to the
individual observation (though one may
adopt the well-known philosophic sub-
terfuge: “Let us begin simply by consider-
ing this object in front of us, just as it is.”).
. . . [UN] given vocabulary coaches us to look
for certain kinds of things rather than others.

Ordinarily, as Burke concedes, “we see
somewhat beyond the limits of our fa –
vorite terms–but the bulk of our critical
perceptions are but particular applica-
tions of these terms.”

The terms are like “principles,” and the
particular observations are like the judicial
casuistry involved in the application of
principles to cases that are always in some
respects unique.15

The phrase that caught my attention was
“judicial casuistry.” The O.E.D. gives a
more negative account of it than I would
have thought necessary, quoting some
anonymous ½gure as saying that it re –
solves cases of conscience by quibbling
with God. I hope it includes the work of
defense counsels in court, doing the best
they can for their clients. In literary criti-
cism, the question of casuistry would be:
will my principles, honorably applied,
cover all I have to say about the poem, ou
can I stretch my arms beyond them? Le
further question is: how did I get those
principles in the ½rst place, given the lack
of an urging paradigm? Did I just subside
upon the principles nearest my hand, ces

being Eliot’s in my case, as they might
well have been Valéry’s or Mallarmé’s or
Leavis’s? It is too late for me to answer
that question.

To resume: what are the humanities

pour? When I was a young teacher of En –
glish in Dublin, this question never arose
in my hearing: it was taken for granted
that it was a worthy thing to spend one’s
life reading literature and teaching it to
large classes of undergraduates. I spent
the ½rst three-and-a-half years of my
working life as a junior administrative
of½cer in the Department of Finance, un
job that had all the merits of security and
pension but, to me, no other grati½cation.
It was a moment of great joy when Pro-
fessor J. J.. Hogan offered me a job as an
assistant lecturer in his department.
There was nothing better I could be
faire. I had enjoyed the experience of
reading for an arts degree, as it was
called. The merit of it was self-evident,
and since it was never called into ques-
tion, there was no need to develop a theory
in its favor. We lived by the customs of a
liberal education. The word liberal did not
need to be de½ned. The distinctive char-
acter of a liberal education was that it did
not lead to any of the professions–law,
medicine, engineering, architecture, et
such–and was entirely independent of
pragmatic need.

Dans 1968, we had what was called “the
gentle revolution,” in which students
demanded a voice in the governance of
departments and faculties, and soon lost
interest in the meetings they gained the
privilege of attending; but they did not
challenge the division of the university
into departments and faculties, or even
the choice of books they were required to
read. Even when I came to teach at New
York University, I never heard the ques-
tion raised, why students were obliged to
spend some part of their time reading

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certain books. Nor has my choice of texts
ever been questioned. I have assumed,
without being especially intelligent about
it, that my aim in teaching English, Irish,
and American literature is to put students
at least in the vicinity of memorable
achievements. Ideally, I would put them
in the full presence of such works. J'ai
not been called upon to be more speci½c.
When I included “Song of Myself” in a
graduate course on modern poetry, no one
disputed the choice. Only recently, je
gather, has the teaching of literature
ceased to be a self-evident good.

But we are now required to give reason

for doing it. It won’t suf½ce any longer to
say: “I read and teach literature because I
peut, because I like it, I enjoy it, it is my
version of intelligent pleasure, like listen-
ing to Arturo Benedetti Michelangeli
playing Chopin’s Ballade No. 1 in G
Minor.” Not enough; these are mere sub-
jectivities, proclaimed. The problem–the
trouble–is that we live in a predominantly
instrumental culture. Reasons must be
given. In our time, the only accredited
value is that something leads to some-
thing else. We are obliged to show not
only cause but consequence. The human-
ities are vulnerable because they do not
lead to anything: they do not cure a dis-
ease or build a bomb.

In this predicament there are two atti-
tudes that may be adopted. One is to
assert that the humanities train their stu-
dents to be more alive, more intelligent,
more critical than they would otherwise
être. Hillis Miller quotes, with approval,
the passage in “The Resistance to Theory”
in which Paul de Man writes:

What we call ideology is precisely the con-
fusion of linguistic with natural reality, de
reference with phenomenalism. It follows
que, more than any other mode of inquiry,
including economics, the linguistics of lit-
erariness is a powerful and indispensable

143 (1) Hiver 2014

tool in the unmasking of ideological aber-
rations, as well as a determining factor in
accounting for their occurrence.

Denis
Donoghue

A sentence further:

Those who reproach literary theory for
being oblivious to social and historical
(that is to say ideological) reality are merely
stating their fear at having their own ideo-
logical mysti½cations exposed by the tool
they are trying to discredit.16

An obvious question: how do we know
an aberration when we see one? Aberrant
by comparison with what? How is the
ground established on which we can
remove the masks? If “social” and “his-
torical” are alike “ideological,” how do
we adjudicate the ideology or the ideolo-
gies? I assume that by an ideology we
mean the set of values that at a particular
time is taken for granted, without its
being known as merely taken for granted.
Roland Barthes wrote of ideologies as
laws of culture that are quietly enforced as
if they were laws of nature. On the theme
of bringing to the fore such Bohemian
qualities as destroy great practical enter-
prise, Kenneth Burke said that the motto
for this endeavor might be: “when in
Rome, do as the Greeks.”17 Common to
these aphorisms is the idea that literature
“is no more than an interrogation of the
world.”18 It is the aim of the humanities
to consider how the interrogation is
effected, and the qualities of mind pro-
moted in the exercise. In brief, we make
our students more alert than they were
before they took our courses. In Miller’s
termes, they become more sensitive to the
lies they hear on TV.

The second attitude has more trouble
in making its way. I have found the best
expressions of it in Lionel Trilling’s
Beyond Culture and Stanley Fish’s Save the
World on Your Own Time.

In “On the Teaching of Modern Litera-
ture,” Trilling expressed a feeling of exas-

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Introduction

peration that could hardly have been of
merely a moment’s weariness when he
wondered:

if perhaps there is not to be found in the
past that quiet place at which a young man
might stand for a few years, at least a little
beyond the competing attitudes and gener-
alizations of the present, at least a little
beyond the contemporary problems which
he is told he can master only by means of
attitudes and generalizations, that quiet
place in which he can be silent, in which he
can know something–in what year the
Parthenon was begun, the order of battle at
Trafalgar, how Linear B was deciphered:
almost anything at all that has nothing to
do with the talkative and attitudinizing
présent, anything at all but variations on
the accepted formulations about anxiety, et
urban society, and alienation, and Gemeinschaft
and Gesellschaft, all the matter of the aca-
demic disciplines which are founded upon
the modern self-consciousness and the
modern self-pity.19

Stanley Fish, aussi, speaks of a student’s
years at college as an oasis, time-out,
years in which to learn new skills, enjoy
the experience of being at a distance from
the other world. He maintains that “the
job of someone who teaches in a college
or a university is to (1) introduce students
to bodies of knowledge and traditions of
inquiry they didn’t know much about
before; et (2) equip those same students
with the analytical skills that will enable
them to move con½dently within those
traditions and to engage in independent
research should they choose to do so.”
Plus loin:

You know the questions: Will it bene½t the
economy? Will it fashion an informed citi-
zenry? Will it advance the cause of justice?
Will it advance anything? Once again the
answer is no, Non, Non, and no. A un certain niveau,
bien sûr, everything we ultimately do has
some relationship to the education we have

received. But if liberal arts education is
doing its job and not the job assigned to
some other institution, it will not have as
its aim the bringing about of particular
effects in the world. Particular effects may
suivre, but if they do, it will be as the unin-
tended consequences of an enterprise
lequel, if it is to remain true to itself, must
be entirely self-referential, must be stuck
on itself, must have no answer whatsoever
to the question, “what good is it?»

Why should a society pay good money
to support such an institution, “an acade-
my that puts at the center of its opera-
tions the asking of questions for their own
sake?”20 Why indeed? Fish has no ready
answer except to say that professors and
administrators, in their dealings with the
sources of funding, should explain with-
out apology what they are doing and why.
The moneyed people will understand, ou
pas. It remains that a liberal education
seeks knowledge for its own sake; c'est,
independent of any sequel–“desirable
though nothing come of it,” a phrase I
recall from Newman many years ago.

It is not my privilege to adjudicate
between de Man and Trilling, or between
Hillis Miller and Stanley Fish. I report of
my own practice as a teacher. The demand
I make of students is implicit, I never say
the words. Toujours, it may be thought rea-
sonable or exorbitant. When I am teach-
ing, say, Antony and Cleopatra, I ask the
students to pay attention to what is going
on and, for the duration of the class, à
nothing else. When I quote a passage–

Sometime we see a cloud that’s dragonish;
A vapour sometime like a bear or lion,
A tower’d citadel, a pendent rock,
A forked mountain, or blue promontory
With trees upon’t, that nod unto the world,
And mock our eyes with air: thou hast seen

these signs;

They are black vesper’s pageants
(Acte 4, scène 14, lines 2–8)

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Denis
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I hope she was enchanted by it, as I was. je
was not inclined to say anything about it,
even to Emma. The pleasure was entirely
gratuitous, a gift of culture and genius. If
I were an art critic, I would be obliged to
be expressive in the vicinity of the sculp-
ture, but I am not. My themes in the Eras-
mus lectures were entirely other. I was
content, in the lectures, to speak, to say
whatever I had to say about the themes.
Standing in front of Golden Bird, I was
grati½ed not to have to be expressive, mais
to accept the gift as it was offered. j'ai gagné-
der, is that what T. J.. Clark meant when
he said, “I believe the distance of visual
imagery from verbal discourse is the most
precious thing about it”? Or has Hannah
Arendt the better part of the debate, quand
she comes back to speech that she has
never left?

–I want the students to be suffused with
it and to follow it as a conductor follows a
musical score, a little distant from it but
never away, never out of its reach. For the
time being, there is nothing in the world
but Antony losing himself, Shakespeare’s
words making him almost content with
his loss, nothing surviving but his ap –
palled sense of what he had been. Out-
side the classroom, people are living their
lives, or being lived by them; inside, only
the play, the scene, Antony, Eros listening
and answering with a word or two,
Antony giving up, Shakespeare letting
him loose from himself.

That is what I want as a teacher. Si
or not I can have anything more; si
or not I can ease the students toward that
other stage of self-consciousness that Eliot
wrote of, in which each of them might
say that “what I am looking at is the world
as seen by a particular mind,” Shake-
speare’s in the event: que, I cannot say.
But it would satisfy me if the students
could experience, now and again, what
Eliot intuited in his essay on John Marston,
“a pattern behind the pattern into which
the characters deliberately involve them-
selves; the kind of pattern which we per-
ceive in our own lives only at rare mo –
ments of inattention and detachment,
drowsing in sunlight.”21
A few years ago, I gave the Erasmus lec-

tures at Notre Dame. I was in the Univer-
sity for a month. On the ½rst Saturday, je
went into Chicago to visit the Art Insti-
tute, not to see anything in particular, mais
many things in a kind of generality. In the
event, I found myself stopped by Con-
stantin Brâncusi’s Golden Bird, going fur-
ther to look at other things, coming back
to the Brâncusi, and staying there for
twenty minutes or so.

The following Saturday, my daughter
Emma was with me, and I brought her to
Chicago. I wanted to show her Golden Bird.

143 (1) Hiver 2014

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Introduction

endnotes
1 T. S. Eliot, Selected Essays (1932; Londres: Faber and Faber, 1963), 475.
2 Francis Oakley, The Conciliarist Tradition: Constitutionalism in the Catholic Church, 1300–1870

(Oxford: Presse universitaire d'Oxford, 2003), 21.

3 Commission on the Humanities and Social Sciences, The Heart of the Matter: The Humanities
and Social Sciences for a Vibrant, Competitive, and Secure Nation (Cambridge, Mass.: Américain
Academy of Arts and Sciences, 2013), 9, 17.

4 Northrop Frye, Anatomy of Criticism: Four Essays (1957; Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University

Presse, 1990), 345.

5 Jacques Derrida, “The University without Condition,” in Without Alibi, éd. and trans. Peggy

Kamuf (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 2002), 202; emphasis in original.

6 Ibid., 235–236.
7 Jacques Derrida, Catherine Porter, and Edward P. Morris, “The Principle of Reason: Le

University in the Eyes of its Pupils,” Diacritics 13 (3) (Autumn 1983): 12–13.

8 Hannah Arendt, The Human Condition, 2nd ed. (Chicago and London: University of Chicago

Presse, 1998), 3–4.

9 Thomas Hobbes, Leviathan, Part I, ch. 4, quoted in Ian Hacking, Why Does Language Matter to

Philosophy? (Cambridge: la presse de l'Universite de Cambridge, 1975), 15.

10 T. J.. Clark, The Sight of Death: An Experiment in Art Writing (New Haven, Conn., and London:

Yale University Press, 2006), 122–123, 27; emphasis in original.

11 Frye, Anatomy of Criticism, 344.
12 Ibid., 347.
13 T. S. Eliot, “The Function of Criticism,” in Selected Essays, 24.
14 T. S. Eliot, “Religion and Literature,” in Selected Essays, 395–396; emphasis in original.
15 Kenneth Burke, A Grammar of Motives and A Rhetoric of Motives (Cleveland: World Publishing

Company, 1962), 471–472.

16 Paul de Man, The Resistance to Theory (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1986), 11.
17 Kenneth Burke, Counter-Statement (1932; Los Altos, Calif.: Hermes Publications, 1953), 119.
18 Roland Barthes, Critical Essays, trans. Richard Howard (Evanston, Ill.: Northwestern Uni-

versity Press, 1972), 135.

19 Lionel Trilling, Beyond Culture: Essays on Literature and Learning (New York: Harcourt Brace

Jovanovich, 1965), 5.

20 Stanley Fish, Save the World on Your Own Time (New York: Presse universitaire d'Oxford, 2008),

18–19, 55, 154.

21 Eliot, Selected Essays, 232.

Dédale, le Journal de l'Académie américaine des arts & les sciences

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