Description
"For Humanism" develops a fresh, useful view as to how to teach the humanities. It defends the idea that a liberal arts education should be a quest for truth, which means a quest for usable beliefs. Such truth ought to be transforming. Students, and teachers as well, should be changed by reading, discussing, and writing about major works. This kind of teaching revolves around what have been called final vocabularies. A final vocabulary is made up of the terms that people use to describe and justify their convictions. One's final vocabulary is where your values lie; it may be Marxist, Freudian, Christian, or it may be an amalgam of various disconnected, perhaps contradictory languages. "For Humanism" shows that teaching the humanities means first of all helping students become articulate about their final vocabularies, the values they bring to the classroom. The work of interpreting texts that follows is not, accordingly, an end in itself. The objective is to understand the vision of the world that the work at hand presents. But once that vision is manifest, the goal is to allow students to measure their own visions of experience--their world views--against that of the author, and try to understand which is best, which, that is, is more conducive to the good life. Teaching the humanities, it argues, might profitably revolve around three ostensibly simple, but in fact quite demanding and complex questions. What do you (the student, the teacher) believe? What does the work in front of you unfold? (What vision of experience does it endorse? What final vocabulary does it offer?) Then, finally, which of the truths on the table, yours or the work's, is to be preferred? Which will bring you, and the community in which you find yourself, closer to the good life?
