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Wednesday, February 08, 2012
Geoffrey Harpham: In Praise of Pleasure
Posted by Bill Benzon on 02/08/12 at 10:49 AM
For the past few years the National Humanities Center has been running an online colloquim on the relationships between the humanities and various sciences. That colloquim is coming to an end with a defense of pleasure and the autonomy of humanistic inquiry by Geoffrey Harpham, director of the center. Here’s a paragraph from his essay:
But I confess that I have developed a stubborn resistance to the cause of the unification of knowledge and would be disturbed if that cause were advanced as a consequence of all our work. One of the few convictions I have that has been hardened rather than softened as a consequence of “On the Human” and its progenitor ASC [Autonomy, Singularity, Creativity: The Human and the Humanities] is that the difference between the various disciplines enables rather than hinders the advance of knowledge, and that the humanities in particular represent a precious resource that must not be subordinated to an imperial science. This view has had some support among those who have participated in ASC and OTH, but it has not been a majority position. My immediate predecessor in this space, Alex Rosenberg, has just published The Atheist’s Guide to Reality, and in this and other writings, he has taken a very hard pro-scientific line, arguing that science produces the only knowledge worthy of the name, and that the humanities contribute little more than tissues of meretricious fantasy that might yield some distracting, momentary, and decidedly mere “pleasure,” but are, as he says at the end of his (in my view misguided) Guide, “nothing we have to take seriously,” nothing that qualifies as “knowledge or wisdom.”
There’s a list of colloquium essays here. Here’s a direct link to my own contribution, which is about cultural evolution.
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