Against Knowledge in the Humanities

A common argument in defense of the humanities is that they help us understand human experience and ultimately teach us what it means to be human. This argument, however, is both pretentious and too limited. Since poets, musicians, and artists often assert that they do not know what they are doing, it may be presumptuous for humanists to claim to know better. Artists’ experiments with natural and animal materials as well as their engagement with chance, spontaneity, and emotion have frequently produced works that evaded or exceeded attempts to understand them. These works exerted their own agency beyond human involvement; sometimes they acquired untranslatable or inexpressible qualities that could only be alluded to in terms of an unfathomable je ne sais quoi. Such observations cast new light on two key tenets in the history of the humanities: Vico’s belief that we can only know what we have made, and Dilthey’s assertion that the humanities, in contrast to the natural sciences, serve to understand the products of the human mind. Rather, the works of human creativity are just as inaccessible as natural phenomena are and may be even farther beyond the reach of knowledge.