I recently had to apply to graduate school so I could pursue the profession of nursing. The first paragraph of my personal statements for these applications said this:
“Elizabeth Barrett Browning, through the voice of Aurora Leigh, wrote that “…It takes a soul/ To move a body…”. To summarize (without turning this personal statement into a literary analysis) Aurora Leigh is arguing that it takes someone with empathy for the human condition to compel the physical actions of another’s body. I think that the skill of empathy, or ‘soul’, is especially important to utilize when working in any profession that entails ‘moving bodies’, as in healthcare, and specifically, in nursing.”
This is the best articulation of why I feel my humanities education is beneficial for my future. (And evidently my top choice thought this was permissible— because I got in!). But for the purpose of this journal post, I will elaborate.
First I’d like to use this quote from Brody’s piece:
The tension is magnified by belief that the humanities have both instrumental and intrinsic value. I doubt any teacher would deny that a course in the humanities will convey certain thinking skills that are applicable to other human activities or that these skills are of value to the student. But teachers also believe quite devoutly that these instrumental uses of the humanities do not exhaust the value of their disciplines.
Howard Brody, “Evaluating the Humanities”
The humanities is, in fact, the perfect place to consider moral and ethical arguments. In fact, without having taken bio-medical ethics I think I would be woefully underprepared for the types of decisions I’ll have to make as a nurse. Especially as I’m considering going into Emergency medicine, I’m going to need to have my ethical mind tuned while in triage— sometimes, I will have to prioritize someone’s chance at life over another’s. The humanities gives me the skill to process this— through either literature or my own moral discourse. Sure, I haven’t learned explicitly how to do this in the humanities— but that’s not the point of undergraduate education. Rather, my english degree has given me the skills, and I’ve chosen to employ them in this way. Professor’s don’t need to be exhaustive (in fact that would be impossible) because the options for application are endless.
I think that this is supported by Clune, when he writes:
Our work is to show students forms of life and thought that they may not value, and to help them become the kind of person who does.
But this stance is incoherent. It’s impossible to cordon off judgments about value from the practices of interpretation and analysis that constitute any viable model of literary expertise. If I judge that a certain poem contains a historical insight that can’t be captured by a history textbook, or that a particular novel knows something about political dynamics that a student can’t get from a work of political theory, then I’m making a literary judgment. I’m saying that it has value, not just for me, but for everyone. This belief is what justifies my requiring students to read it. If I think students can get the same insights from a history or economics or sociology or philosophy course, then why should they bother with my class at all? Even a project as ostensibly value-neutral as a study of the material composition of the paper that composes a Shakespeare folio is indirectly dependent on our sense of the value and interest of Shakespeare’s writing.
Michael Clune, ” The Humanities Fear of Judgement”
There is something significant about deriving understandings about the real world from aestheticized, sometimes fictional, almost always theoretical world of the humanities. As Wordsworth says, it is the poet’s job to “see into the life of things”— this cannot be done without the humanities. The humanities allow a lens into the inner workings of life in a way that other academic disciplines do not.
The fact that there are TWO passages from 19th century British lit in this post is…..well, heart-warming. It takes a soul, indeed. What most interests me about this discussion (the value of the humanities) is how hard it can to describe what the value is when often those values (for beauty, for empathy, for connection (to the past and other cultures), to a process of working through one’s thoughts/feelings, etc.) are dissociated from formal education. Of course a person can encounter art/literature/history on their own, but part of what Brody and Clune are asking is what will function as the guide or interlocutor of that work? Just the market? (Note: I’m not suggesting Academic is removed from the market; just think of the anthologies we bought in order to read those poems and how those poems made it into them.) Even if we allow that having time to study formally and to be guided by experts (per Clunes) is valuable, the argument frequently turns to thinking of that practice as a “luxury,” something for elite schools and folks with money to burn. To be continued (with Nussbaum).