The horrifying events of Sept. 11 and their aftermath have given new urgency to the study of the humanities and to liberal arts education. People have turned to poetry, music, photography, writing, religious ritual and public forms of mourning and remembrance for comfort and understanding. Members of the Cornell community have sought analysis from experts in international politics, scholars of Islamic culture, historians of the Middle East, philosophers and scholars of U.S. culture. The complexities of this historical moment require a breadth and depth of knowledge few, if any, of us have. Liberal arts education and scholarship in the humanities cannot provide any one of us with all the knowledge we need at moments like this, but they can develop our capacity for analytic thought, moral imagination, emotional generosity and creative expression -- the tools we need in order to acquire, integrate and make good use of knowledge.
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| Assistant Professor of English Mary Pat Brady leaves Goldwin Smith Hall and walks out onto the Arts Quad in the early evening of Oct. 9. Robert Barker/University Photography |
Humanities fields deserve credit for broadening our outlook beyond ourselves and our traditional definitions of culture. Courses on Western civilization now attend to the racial, ethnic, sexual and gender differences that have shaped our cultures despite accounts of our history that exclude them. Scholarship and teaching in humanities fields emphasize the many different cultural landscapes across the globe and their impact on one another across long periods of time. Literature, music and art departments have become more interdisciplinary, broadening the study of culture to include not only canonical works, but also everyday interactions, popular culture and conscious and unconscious beliefs. Literary and cultural theorists have refined traditional tools and developed new critical methods for investigating how cultural meanings are constructed, deployed and changed, at what cost as well as with what benefits. By expanding our perception of ourselves and of others, humanists have given us not only a greater breadth of knowledge for its own sake; they have been catalysts for change.
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| Provost Biddy Martin leads a small discussion group in Court North on Guns, Germs and Steel: The Fates of Human Societies. The book was required reading for all freshmen this year. Charles Harrington/University Photography |
While humanists at Cornell and other major research universities have been engaged in work with evident social and ethical significance, they also continue to explore and preserve the less obviously instrumental, even the anti-instrumental, value of language, art, music, literature and philosophy. Humanities research and writing are not only of their time but often at odds with it, valuing and analyzing aesthetic and intellectual achievements that have no one proper time, providing critiques of the self-evidence or familiarity that cultural objects acquire with use. Humanist scholarship traces the history of different cultural media, examining their constraints and exploiting their possibilities. Non-instrumental approaches to the making and interpretation of culture enhance what composer Steven Stuckey has called "aesthetic intelligence," opening up the potential for apprehending the world more fully, for thinking differently and for understanding in unfamiliar and, ultimately, more complex ways. Literature is heterodox; it is marked by analytical reasoning and by imaginative leaps. The imaginative has its advantages over scientific ways of knowing, not because it is anti-logical but because it has its own ways of engaging the emotions and pushing the limits of the logical so we can render intelligible that which has not yet been thought. Ultimately, the instrumental and non-instrumental uses of the arts fold into one another and complicate the distinctions we try to draw between them.
As a major research university, Cornell has long had strong programs in the arts and humanities and these programs remain at the center of university life. Many of these programs pursue time-honored methods of understanding languages and cultures. Some have made interdisciplinary work on culture a priority. Still others preserve our long-standing strengths in literary and aesthetic theory. Cornell is also developing new approaches and new modes of scholarship that will bring the strengths of humanistic thought to the complex issues we now face. The effort to build the Program in Ethics and Public Life is one example of an opportunity to provide educational and research opportunities at the intersection of a number of disciplines while bridging the gap between analytical and practical approaches to ethical questions. Scientific developments engage ethicists as well as other humanists interested in the significance of moral reasoning for developments in the sciences and technology and in the implications of scientific discovery for our definitions of what it means to be human.
We invite you to learn more about Cornell's work in the humanities through this special Cornell Chronicle series.
-- President Hunter Rawlings and
Provost Biddy Martin
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