On “the human sciences”

Dear Editor:

According to the Post, the first award of a new prize for achievement in what are called “the human sciences” goes to a certain anti-communist philosophy professor (Style, Nov. 5). The prize is meant to honor fields which are left out by the Nobel Prize. This particular recipient’s principal achievement appears to be that, in the words of the grantor, Librarian of Congress James Billington, he “made clear from within the Soviet system the intellectual bankruptcy of the Marxist ideology.”

However, in the first place, the view that Marxism is obsolete is opinion, not science. There are plenty of people who believe that what went wrong in the Soviet Union was precisely that it deviated from Marxism. The alleged obsolescence has not, for example, disbanded the Communist Party of France, which leads Europe’s arguably strongest labor union movement and was even in the government just a few years ago.

Secondly, the concept of “the human sciences” is what is bankrupt. Anyone who has pursued both scientific research and humanities scholarship, as I have, will tell you that they are very different endeavors. Among other points, the former asks nature relatively narrow questions while being guided by an agreed upon intellectual framework, whereas the latter asks about human artifacts or activities in either a narrow or a broad way, usually while being guided by the scholar’s own point of view in the absence of consensus on how such probing should take place. The notion of humanities as science has produced such boondoggles as anthropologists at the beginning of the last century claiming they could predict criminal behavior from skull features.

To be sure, we live in a time when science is considered so much more important than the humanities that English professors at a typical university have three times the teaching load of their counterparts in physics, and scientific results are reported on the front page but those in arts and humanities in the Style section. (Leonardo da Vinci, among others, must be turning over in his grave.) Thus the notion of competing with the Nobels is certainly admirable.

Still, one would not like to repeat their controversies. (The Peace Prize has gone to candidates some consider war criminals, and the Physics Prize commonly omits other people whose names were on the paper announcing the discovery for which it was given.) A sure way to do that would be to elevate the significance of the new award to say that it honors a scientific demonstration of something which turns out to be false.

Sincerely,

(11/6/03)

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