Rosenberg has three claims about why interest in "the humanities" (excluding the master disciple of philosophy, of course) is falling off, two of which are simply wrong. He also, as is typical of too many analytic philosophers, condescends to humanities scholars other than philosophers and more broadly to the study of culture (as opposed to the study of thought, I suppose) as such.
His first claim is "over the last two generations the humanities (except for philosophy) have lost faith with their callings as the bearers of a continuous cultural inheritance–a canon, for want of a better word." The result, according to Rosenberg is that "the 'boutique' courses [humanities profs] teach in their majors, the heavy doses of 'theory' they lay on in graduate classes, make it difficult to connect with their students in ways that would provide... purpose, meaning, appreciation of complexity, or recognition of adversity." The implication here that canon = accessibility is both unsupported and deeply prejudicial about which cultural artifacts, and thus which cultures, matter. It's also a picture that is completely alien to most English departments which have, if anything, only retreated to the "canon" in the post-Sokal hoax years.
Rosenberg's view may be colored by the fact that he's at Duke, which features a very theoretical English department, but even if he's right about how things work at Duke (and I have no evidence that he is), he's certainly deeply wrong about how English and other "traditional" humanities departments operate pretty much everywhere else. To say that "Philosophy has never surrendered its canon," while implying that other disciplines in the humanities have, is ludicrous. Rosenberg continues: "we [philosophers] are still teaching Plato, Hume, Kant, along with Amartya Sen, Judy Thompson and Ruth Marcus." Rosenberg might be surprised that this is just what goes on in literature and language departments too! Here is a short list of some courses, texts, and authors being taught here in my English department this winter quarter alone: Northanger Abbey, Frankenstein, poetry of Emily Dickinson, Huckleberry Finn, Billy Budd, A Winter's Tale, the poetry of Yeats, Eliot, Pound, Stein, Restoration comedy, "Marlowe, More, Sidney, Spenser, Shakespeare, Milton," a course entitled Political Shakespeare, "Blake, Wordsworth, De Quincey, Shelley, Keats, Dickens," Walden, Leaves of Grass, The Canterbury Tales, Clarissa, and a course called Renaissance English Poetry. I myself will teach The Bacchae, A Midsummer Night's Dream, The Tempest, Pygmalion and Waiting for Godot this quarter. Canonical enough for ya? All of this occurs "along with" "boutique" courses in German Fairy Tales, Latina/Latino lit, Asian-American lit and film courses, and an introduction to theory course. Since our student body is well over 60% non-white, the question of whether Latina/o or Asian-American courses can be accurately called boutique courses is another question entirely. Regardless, this is not quite the picture Rosenberg paints of the "other" humanities, to say nothing of the very questionable conclusions he draws from that distorted picture.
Clearly Rosenberg simply has no idea what really goes on in literary study (to say nothing of other humanistic disciplines), a field from which Anglo-American philosophy has entirely distanced itself. The none too subtle glorification of his own field must come at the expense of something, of course. So facts be damned, according to Rosenberg literature departments aren't canonical enough (!!) and as a result aren't accessible enough (!!!). Never mind that the central and even immanent complaint about Anglo-American analytic philosophy is that it often has so little to do with the world as we know it, at least on the surface, and that some examples are completely indecipherable to the average educated person.
His second claim is the only one that has merit. The fact is that tenured research scholars do not commonly teach introductory composition or foreign language or literary courses and this contributes to a number of problems. To compare "baby logic" to introductory literary courses or composition, though, is in bad faith.
First of all, the methodological approach of a logic course is closer to mathematics than it is to the interpretive disciplines of the humanities. In an introductory course on logic, students are taught a repeatable method that can be used to evaluate arguments and truth claims. This is not at all what occurs in a literature course. There are no hard and fast rules in literary study, despite what some profs would have you believe. As a result, in contrast to an intro to logic, an introductory course on literary study is not best done in large lecture halls. This is because the primary goal of instructors of literary study is not to impart to our students definitive knowledge or a stable methodology. In this respect, introductory courses in literary study more closely resemble upper division philosophy courses than they do intro to logic for the simple reason that the former concern themselves with the praxis of analysis more so than the latter.
But I have been speaking of literary study. What of composition? What Rosenberg forgets, of course, is that most of the students in the baby logic course--their first philosophy course--have been taught writing by a TA or instructor, perhaps for multiple quarters, before they land in baby logic. That is, the first course that students take in philosophy benefits from some basic prior instruction. Whatever writing or reasoning skills those students have when they hit intro to logic were fostered in composition, which of course is usually taught by grad students in literary study. So it appears that Rosenberg simply forgets what happens before he and his tenured colleagues ever see these students.
At the same time, Rosenberg is also guilty of a false comparison when he equates baby logic with composition. Philosophy does not have a disciplinary equivalent to composition. Comp is essentially a remedial course, or at the very least a quasi-vocational one. As a result, it has very little to do with literary study even if the two are housed in the same department. So to say that that honorable philosophy professors teach intro courses while lazy "other" humanities professors do not is true on the factual level, but this is only so because there is nothing like composition (or a language course) in philosophy. If there were, I guarantee the tenured philosophy faculty would have nothing to do with it.
At the same time, Rosenberg is also guilty of a false comparison when he equates baby logic with composition. Philosophy does not have a disciplinary equivalent to composition. Comp is essentially a remedial course, or at the very least a quasi-vocational one. As a result, it has very little to do with literary study even if the two are housed in the same department. So to say that that honorable philosophy professors teach intro courses while lazy "other" humanities professors do not is true on the factual level, but this is only so because there is nothing like composition (or a language course) in philosophy. If there were, I guarantee the tenured philosophy faculty would have nothing to do with it.
The third claim Rosenberg makes is that "the abdication of the humanist’s traditional role has been combined with an attempt to compete on the terrain of the sciences, an attempt that sometimes make the humanist a laughing stock among scientists and their students." There is a modicum of truth to this. The "other" humanities have been vexed by the research paradigm of the sciences which now more than ever dominates the academy. Analytic philosophy has less of this problem for the simple reason that it has, as a discipline, abdicated its roots in the humanities for a more positivistic model. But Rosenberg then goes on to refer to the title of noted plagiarist, sciences major, and poor man's Malcolm Gladwell Jonah Lehrer's Proust Was a Neuroscientist as a putative example of how the humanities are struggling to jibe with the research paradigm of the sciences. The example, of course, has very literally nothing to do with the "other" humanities as they are practiced in the academy. It's a red herring, just as is his apparent allusion to Michael Chwe's (a political scientist, not a humanist!) Jane Austen, Game Theorist. Rosenberg thinks that "[t]he humanities must surrender the pretension of competing with science on its own explanatory turf" then, but he offers no proof that this is actually happening. This reason for this is simple: what Rosenberg thinks is happening is simply not happening. By way of example, a quick glance at the MLA 2014 convention program will suffice. In fact, when I searched that program for "neuro" with a wildcard, I got nine sessions. There are 810 sessions in this year's convention. ("Cognitive" came up with fifteen hits, some repeats of the nine.) The point is twofold. The first is that in literary studies there is no significant movement to claim that Proust was a neuroscientist or anything of the sort. The second is that while the problem presented by the current paradigm of research in the academy to the "other" humanities is real, it has nothing to do with the humanities trying to make quasi-scientific claims. Instead, it is the research model that presents the problem. Humanistic research simply doesn't map well onto genre of the science paper, social or physical. Literary study does not, at the end of the day, produce findings. And findings are the metric of academic work in present era--for better or for worse.
Rosenberg knows this, of course. He realizes that unlike analytic philosophy, the rest of the humanities endanger themselves if they try to mimic the paradigm of the sciences. But despite the fact that self-identifying analytic philosophers are often hyper-territorial about who can and may "do" philosophy, they are very rarely willing to cede the same sort of respect to other humanistic disciplines. So Rosenberg predictably graces us with his view of what literary study should be and do. Unfortunately, that view is both dull and problematic. "[A]t their best," Rosenberg writes, "the humanities are in the business of moving us emotionally." There are all sorts of problems with this sentence (one might start with the rather infelicitous use of the term "business"). Most crucially, Rosenberg seems to make no clear distinction between culture as such and the study of culture. He is a smart man, so he is aware of this. In order to shore up his claim, then, he must argue that there is no distinction: "After all, great literary scholarship can guide and sometimes even create the kind of human response produced by the art it seeks to valorize. In Less than One, Joseph Brodsky offered an analysis of W.H. Auden’s poem, 'September 1, 1939' [sic]. Those 50 pages were an act of artistic creation, informing and moving the reader as much as the poem they come to grips with. Brodsky’s Nobel Prize in literature was deserved as much for his criticism as his poetry." So apparently the business of humanities scholarship is little more than providing enjoyment.
Taking nothing away from Brodsky, the real problem here is that Rosenberg's understanding of the value of the aesthetic, apparently only a concern in "canonical" high culture, is an uncritical one. In fact he assumes that A) it is the goal of art to move us emotionally, which certainly not always the case and is also certainly a view of art that first appears in early modern Europe, and B) that moving us emotionally is good in itself. This latter is the familiar view of the aesthetic we get from Schiller, Emerson, and Matthew Arnold among many others. Through the pleasure of art, we ostensibly learn. We are supposed, as a recent study has posited, to have an emotional experience with art that makes us better people. How this actually happens is not so clear. The study in question argues that literary fiction allows us to escape the trap of narcissism by exposing ourselves to the (imaginary) experiences and feelings of others. As a result of this we are supposed to be better people when we read fiction. Leaving aside the problem the other arts pose to this theory (how does listening to Bach make me a better person?), the question begged here is why this simply isn't true. Empirically speaking, to be well-read is not to be a good person. Exposing ourselves to the worlds of others, imaginary or real, has no reliable track record of making societies or people "better." As another great literary critic, George Steiner, wrote: "We come after [the Holocaust]. We know now that a man can read Goethe or Rilke in the evening, that he can play Bach and Schubert, and go to his day's work at Auschwitz in the morning. To say that he has read them without understanding or that his ear is gross, is cant. In what way does this knowledge bear on literature and society, on the hope, grown almost axiomatic from the time of Plato to that of Matthew Arnold, that culture is a humanizing force, that the energies of spirit are transferable to those of conduct?"
In fact, the assumption that our relationship to art and culture is a simple one of emotion and empathy is deeply dangerous. The thing about art, and I realize this too is a cliche, is that it doesn't work the way Rosenberg wants it to. It cannot be relied upon to give us pleasure in every case, much less to "teach" us how to be better humans in any reliable way. It may be objected that this standard for art is too high. Why should art have to be epistemologically or emotionally or pedagogically reliable? In the pragmatic sense, it doesn't. It doesn't matter too much if my interpretation of Hamlet differs from Stephen Greenblatt's. But the very fact that those interpretations differ is what, at the end of the day, makes Hamlet art (rather than a textbook, say) in the first place. The moment we begin to preclude sufficiently evidenced interpretations in favor of a "moral to the story," we have gone from the art world to the world of a fable or a parable. The fact that any decent artifact of culture can support many interpretations (Is Lolita definitively against pedophilia? Is Heart of Darkness definitively racist?) is precisely what makes it interesting. It is when we think that interpretive work is finished and closed off by a definitive statement of meaning that we have failed to see the crucial fact that what the recently deceased Arthur Danto called the artworld is--at a very fundamental level--predicated on art's failure to be reliable in any of the senses mentioned above. The claim that the purview of art is to move us emotionally, which it certainly can do, is itself an example of that failure to see. Like Matthew Arnold, Rosenberg seems to think that being moved per se is something that can improve us. This assumption, although Rosenberg's version is no doubt more subtle than my phrasing of it, is nothing less than a theory of the moral or social usefulness of art as such. And as such, it is far from an original proposition. More importantly, though, it is an uncritical one. There's a reason this view is appealing to someone like Rosenberg, and it's not just that it is his personal experience of art. On such a view, we wouldn't need the "other" humanists in the first place, or at least not so damned many of them. We could simply assign the book, the student would have an emotional experience and be improved by it, and we could all have a group hug at the end. Maybe for very difficult works an expert interpreter would be needed, but in the majority of cases a reasonably intelligent reader could simply enjoy the book and therewith improve herself. Problem solved!
But the critical study of culture--as separate from culture itself--is not "in the business of moving us emotionally." Instead its goal is to ask how and why a given artwork moves us (or moved others), or fails to move us, and perhaps most importantly what it means to be moved by "art" at all. While humans as a species experience common emotions, what triggers those emotions is not common. This is true from person to person, but far more so from culture to culture and from era to era. What this means is that we should be especially skeptical of art that moves us. When we are moved, our critical sense is often subsumed. That is not to say we should not be moved, not at all. But to be moved is only the first step, if a crucial one. The next step is to think about why we are moved, how it happened, and what it means to be moved in this way. These questions are precisely what separates literary study from a book club or from a casual reader, and they are the often uncomfortable ones that academic literary study should, if not always does, ask. (An excellent example of someone who did this kind of work is Edward Said.)
It should be clear why these questions are so important to ask from reading Rosenberg's essay. He is a very smart man who doesn't appear to understand the critical potential of art or the importance of a critical assessment of the aesthetic. His view of art is, in Socrates' (or is it Plato's) term, unexamined. Perhaps he could benefit from taking an introductory course in literary study.
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