The Ethics of Humanistic Scholarship: On Knowledge and Acknowledgement

© Koninklijke Brill NV, Leiden, 2013 DOI: 10.1163/18722636-12341254

Journal of the Philosophy of History 7 (2013) 266–298 brill.com/jph

The Ethics of Humanistic Scholarship: On Knowledge and Acknowledgement*

Isaac (Yanni) NevoDept. of Philosophy, Ben-Gurion University of the Negev

[email protected]

AbstractMy aim in this paper is to characterize the professional good served by the human-ities as various academic disciplines, particularly in relation to the general aca-demic good, namely, the pursuit of knowledge in theoretical and scholarly research, and to evaluate the public and ethical dimension of that professional good and the constraints it imposes upon practitioners. My argument will be that the humani-ties aim at both knowledge of objective facts and acknowledgement of the human status of their subject matter, and that there are facts (and truths) about human life and society that are inaccessible except through such humanistic acknowl-edgement. As such, the humanities require the adoption of evaluative, other- oriented points of view, and they serve the public by advancing a reflective view of the very conditions of the public’s own constitution. In short, the humanities incorporate the view that practical and evaluative wisdom is not only essential for the full pursuit of truth, but that it is also an essential public good in any well-ordered society, especially in contemporary democracies. The discussion proceeds by examining various examples of both the professional and the public good in question, and focuses particularly on cases of excessive acknowledgement in the

*) The author wishes to thank Prof. Rivka Feldhay of Tel Aviv University, and the partici-pants in a summer workshop entitled “The Future of the Humanities and the Order of Aca-demic Disciplines” that took place in September 2012 in Jerusalem under the sponsorship of The Minerva Humanities Center at Tel-Aviv University, the Forschungzentrum für Histo-rische Geisteswissenschaften, Johann Wolfgang Goethe Universität, Frankfurt Am Main, The Van Lear Jerusalem Institute, and the Zentrum für literature und Kulturforschung, Berlin. An earlier draft of this paper had been conceived and presented in the framework of this conference. Special thanks also for Naveh Frumer, Gal Hertz, and Guy Finklestein for their role in organizing and facilitating the workshop.

I. Nevo / Journal of the Philosophy of History 7 (2013) 266–298 267

form of uncritical apologetics and excessive objectification in various forms of reductionism.

Keywordshumanities, professional ethics, academic values, knowledge and acknowledge-ment, objectification, radical evil

Scholarship as a Vocation: The Normative Space

Within the institutional setting of contemporary academe, the humanities are practiced as professional, service-providing disciplines, involving, besides the knowledge, the skills, and the social trappings of a profession, a conception of the good for which they are designed (the professional good), as well as an understanding of the public value of that professional good, the virtues it requires, and the rights and obligations it confers upon prac-titioners (the public good). The public dimension of any profession con-sists in the ways in which its professional good harmonizes or conflicts with other values in which the public has an interest, particularly social and ethical values, and of the remedies to be taken when conflict, rather than harmony arises. A professional practice is, thus, a tacit code of ethics, or social covenant that places its own activities within a public-normative space. Academic disciplines, generally, and the humanities, in particular, are no exception. The professional good they have on offer lies within a larger space of public and normative scrutiny.

It might be objected that the construction of scholarship as a civil pro-fession cannot do full justice to its larger promise as a source of learning and wisdom. As a contribution to human knowledge, scholarship had pre-ceded its current forms of institutional academic professionalization, and some of its greatest achievements have been accomplished outside the frameworks of modern universities (though often within older institutional forms such as monasteries or princely courts). Some would further argue that contemporary forms of professionalization, e.g., quantitative (“scien-tometric”) excellence measurements, currently fashionable in academic management circles, are perhaps more harmful than beneficial for scholar-ship itself, and that they might even have a stifling effect on the originality or the profundity of scholars. As professionalism grows, so it is complained, mass production replaces creative individuality, disciplinary normalization

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takes over, and genuine revolutionary breakthroughs become fewer and rarer. Nevertheless, academic professionalization in the humanities involves not merely institutional and bureaucratic pressures, but also a conception of the good, professional and public, that such professional bureaucratization is meant to serve. As such, it is an enabling condition, not just a constraint, and it requires careful analysis and reflection.

What is, then, the professional good served by the academic profession of the humanities and what is the public value of the existence of such a profession? My aim in this paper is to discuss the relative place of knowl-edge and acknowledgement in forming the professional good of the human-ities as academic disciplines, and how, given the mutually qualified place, within these disciplines, of both these values, the public good is served. While knowledge, depending on truth, requires an objective viewpoint, the humanities are, in fact, constituted by a prior acknowledgement of human subjectivity, i.e., of the human status of their subject matter as conscious, intentional, and active beings, or products thereof. Given these seemingly antithetical perspectives, I shall analyze the professional good in question as the outcome of a humanly-qualified pursuit of knowledge and truth, i.e., a pursuit of these epistemic goals as balanced by an acknowledgement of the human status of the subject matter, and by the interpretive and evalu-ative viewpoint, on the part of the scholar, that such an acknowledgement requires.

In this respect, the humanities differ from other academic disciplines. In the natural sciences, for example, knowledge (even about human subjects) is traditionally pursued from a point of view that aims at being fully theo-retical and objective, subsuming all relevant facts to the control of com-pletely general laws (deterministic or statistical). In the humanities, by contrast, we give ourselves a license, while still searching for knowledge and truth, to engage in a more particular or restrictive viewpoint, a view-point that acknowledges, prior to inquiry, the human origins of the subject matter, namely, of the texts, the thoughts, the cultures, or the histories under consideration, and seeks to explain them in terms commensurate with that condition. More specifically, we give ourselves a license to view the “objects” of our concerns not merely as objects, but also as agents and subjects that enjoy a level of dignity and autonomy that we seek to respect while finding out the truth about them. And just as our subjects are not mere objects, humanistic scholars are not mere observers or theoreticians.


Scholars stand to the subjects they observe and describe in a multitude of other relations as well. They are participants in their social lives, critics of their practices, speakers on their behalf, judges of their failures, or media-tors between their worlds and the worlds of others.

Consider the following example. Israeli literary critic and scholar of sex-uality, Amalia Ziv, responds, in an introduction to her latest book (Ziv, 2013), to the charge that an earlier paper of hers, reprinted in the book, which focuses on the images projected by the trans-sexual singer Dana International, has robbed the singer in question of her subjectivity, reduc-ing her to a mere set of stereotypes. Ziv’s writings are specifically designed to combat “hetero-normativity,” to undermine what she calls “sciences of (sexual and gender) oppression,” and to encourage acknowledgement of the marginalized humanity of sexual minorities. These goals are to be accomplished by the quintessential methods of the humanities, namely, the reading of texts, the interpretation of symbols, and the creation of (alternative) knowledge by means of a humanly qualified perspective. Ziv sympathizes with her critics, admitting to the danger of reduction and of the failure to see the human reality behind the objectifying screen of theo-retical ciphers. Nevertheless, she rightly argues that the charge against her is misdirected. The very idea of turning an interpretive-theoretical look at what had previously been dismissed as a freak phenomenon, observing Dana International’s own play with the images directed at her, already humanizes the subject and turns her back into an agent and a member of society. Ziv highlights her own role as a participant-scholar, an observer within a community to which she self-consciously belongs, a documenter of social developments towards which she adopts an evaluative as well as an interpretive stance. The multiplicity of her scholarly roles mirrors the complex status of her human subject matter as both objects to be described and subjects to be engaged with. The professional good she serves is an understanding of a life, i.e., a comprehension of a level of reality that can-not be (adequately) understood from more reductive perspectives. The public is served by being reconstituted so as to include those lives and that level of human reality. Scholarship in this case is a call for inclusion, and to the extent that it is published and read, it is already an inclusive measure on the part of the public.

The humanities, in short, seek a form of knowledge that does not fully objectify the denizens of our lived world, and in which the objective pursuit


of knowledge and truth is inseparably interwoven with interpretive and evaluative attitudes towards the subject matter. This morally pregnant license to subordinate theoretical knowledge to respectful acknowledge-ment is of clear public value, beyond the knowledge it uniquely supplies. The public value in question has to do with the importance to the public (certainly, the democratic public) of autonomous individuals whose agency and subjectivity are acknowledged and respected. Indeed, there is a clear public benefit in an academic profession that promises such ethically qual-ified knowledge, for not only are there facts that cannot be known in any other way, these facts are of particular relevance and importance in the constitution of the public itself as a functioning social body, within which necessary transactions of power are to be received and modified. If the public is the medium through which relations of power are regulated in a given society, and there are better and worse ways of organizing such rela-tions, society is clearly benefitted by scholarly disciplines in which the terms of these power relations are subordinated to a critical study, and in which the human reality of such power relations is expressed and clarified in a participatory, non-objectifying manner.

Objectification of human subjects need not always be morally offensive, since among other things humans are material bodies, living organisms, and so many processes that are fruitfully studied from the fully theoretical perspective of the natural or social sciences. To the extent that human beings are (also) objects, they are not “objectified,” in any problematic sense, by being studied as such. However, objectification is morally objec-tionable when taken to exhaust the truth about humanity, and when taken to control our extra-theoretical orientation to ourselves and others. The public value of the humanities derives from the non-objectifying perspec-tives they make possible by pursuing their professional good as academic disciplines committed to knowledge, as well as acknowledgement, along-side the other sciences. Natural or social scientists need not fall into any totalizing trap merely by adopting a fully theoretical outlook regarding their human subjects. In studying human beings, they need not view the “objects” of their study as being exhausted, theoretically or practically, by the descriptions they supply. What the ethics of science does require is that scientific objectification will not be taken as an exhaustive description of humanity, i.e., as a total framework for thought and action which excludes the viability of less objectifying perspectives (theoretical or practical). An


adequate ethics of science would leave room for a humanistic perspective that does not fall under its own scope.

In the Humanities, by contrast, acknowledgement of humanity comes much earlier, namely, not just in those dimensions that are excluded from the theoretical work itself, but already in the construction of the subject matter. This makes the humanities ethically relevant in a deeper sense; they share a perspective that’s constitutive, on most views, of the moral point of view, and in this rests both their professional good and their public value (beyond the knowledge they supply). Yet, the license to maintain such a perspective is also fraught with problems that are both academic and ethical. How far does it go? Does it not risk suppression of theoretical knowledge? Does it not preclude forms of criticism – the slaughtering of sacred cows – which might be found threatening or disrespectful (by the human subjects under consideration)? What, indeed, is the proper relation between the obligation to pursue the truth and the license to do so within a prior acknowledgement of a moral status? Balancing knowledge and acknowledgement, as well as the professional and the public good, scholars inevitably come up against such questions and dilemmas.

Consider another example. The Israeli historian Israel Jacob Yuval (2000) has argued that a Jewish practice of self-sacrifice, which included sacrific-ing children ahead of forced conversion to Christianity during the first cru-sade, has been a factor in the subsequent formation of a virulent anti-Semitic stereotype, operative in many subsequent blood libels, regarding the sacri-ficial killing of Christian children by Jews. The observation of one kind of sacrificial killing, positively viewed by Jews as kidush hashem (sanctifica-tion of God’s name), has apparently led to a wide spread belief in another kind of sacrificial killing on the part of the Jews, which fed into the anti-Semitic hatred of them. In Yuval’s own language: “Focusing on the meaning of kidush hashem in the self-consciousness of the Jews of Ashkenaz and placing it at the center of their confrontation with the Christian environ-ment has led me to examine the similarity between the practices of Jews committing ritually-characterized murder and the accusation that became prevalent about one generation after the first crusade, that the Jews are committing ritual murders of Christians out of a messianic tendency and for purposes of advancing their redemption. . . .” (2000: p. 12; my transla-tion). Yuval’s thesis has met with stern denunciations by older academic hands offended by the partial reasonability (and consequent legitimacy)


that the thesis confers upon the infamous stereotype. Here is not the place to assess the truth of Yuval’s thesis. My aim is to point out that if true, Yuval’s thesis increases our understanding of an obscure historical tradi-tion (blood libels) by rationalizing its basis to some degree, thereby acknowledging the humanity of the historical agents behind it. Clearly, this constitutes a contribution to knowledge which could not be arrived at in any other way. The alternative, apparently favored by some of Yuval’s critics, would have been to replace humanistic understanding with (con-tinued) demonization, and free academic exchange with suppression of research findings. The pursuit of truth is dependent, in this case, on an interpretive and evaluative stance towards the historical subjects, and the license to adopt such an orientation is not without public and ethical consequences that in this case some have viewed with alarm. Indeed, Yuval touched a raw nerve but in so doing he has advanced the public’s self-understanding.

Thus, the fundamental issue is as follow. Both knowledge (of truth) and acknowledgement (of humanity) are constitutive of the professional good for which the disciplines of the humanities are designed. Indeed, both con-stituents are essential. Academic disciplines generally cannot be under-stood except in terms of knowledge and truth, and there are truths that cannot be reached except by means of a humanistic perspective. It would be an exercise in futility to attempt a natural scientific basis, e.g., a basis in biology, brain science, or chemistry, for Yuval’s hypothesis regarding the place of Jewish self-sacrificial practices in the development, a generation later, of an anti-Semitic stereotype such as the blood libel.1 Similarly, acknowledgement of the human status of the subject matter is essential. Without such an acknowledgement it would not make sense to inquire into reasons and motives, beliefs and desires, thoughts and intentions, as

1) Certainly, no practically obtainable amount of natural-scientific data would suffice for determining or refuting Yuval’s hypothesis, which is a factual hypothesis none the less. As for Laplace-type ideals (Laplace’s demon), regarding an intelligence in possession of a com-plete physical description of the universe at a single point in time, being thereby in posses-sion of complete knowledge of the universe, it must be said that the counter-factual in question is just too large and remote for any definite conclusions along these lines. More to the point, having detected the full microscopic physical details involved in blood libel activ-ity, Laplace’s demon would still lack the conceptual resources to understand them as cases of libel, reasonably motivated or otherwise. For this understanding, a humanistic perspec-tive is essential.


scholarship in the humanities requires. However, these two components of the professional good may sometimes conflict with one another, thereby creating dilemmas for scholars to resolve. In particular, acknowledgement can be overstretched, encompassing in the form of respect for subjects’ values and beliefs aspects of their humanity that could and should be criti-cized. Similarly, knowledge can be overgeneralized in the service of reductive or objectifying perspectives. The professional good of the human-ities is a careful balance between these perspectives, and the public benefit of this balancing act is, among other things, the expansion, through better understanding, of the public body itself.

Consider some philosophical examples. G.E. Moore (1942) famously said that the world has never presented a philosophical problem to him; rather, philosophical problems have risen for him only in relation to what other philosophers have said (which for the most part he has found to be in defi-ance of “common sense”). Notice the ethical dimension of Moore’s philo-sophical problematizing. By questioning philosophy rather than the world, Moore aligns himself with the pre-philosophical public and its implicit knowledge claims and understanding of the world. He criticizes the theo-retical insularity of philosophers, their tendency to set themselves and their problems apart. He, thus, humanizes a discipline that has long prided itself on forms of transcendence that appeared to leave all human perspectives behind. Regardless of the intellectual value of his results, these are ethical, as well as epistemological positions. Bringing humanity back into the (phil-osophical) picture, Moore sets limits to the philosophical tendency to efface humanity, to idealize the world excessively or, correlatively, to place the epistemological subject on such a high pedestal – the God’s eye-view – so as to lose all contact with our knowledge of ourselves. These are wel-come reminders of our responsibility, even as philosophers, to acknowledge our own human limitations while seeking to establish how the world is (as a whole), or what we can know about it. Much philosophy consists in the attempt to transcend (or ignore) such human limitations, but often the result is an alienated view that cannot do justice either to the world or to our sense of ourselves.

Generally speaking, philosophy responds to both a desire for transcend-ence, a wish to contain the whole of reality within a single perspective, and a contrary desire for immanence, a need to locate the philosophical subject within the world as given. The former philosophical desideratum leads


ultimately to a view of the world as fully contained within a rational or subjective totality, and of reason, or the subject, as setting the limits of what can be real. Correspondingly, the “merely” particular, individual, or contin-gent become devalued; taken to be less than real, they inevitably appear also to be less than important. By contrast, the latter philosophical desid-eratum leads, perhaps more modestly, to a view of the human subject as contained in a larger world which has to be ultimately accepted as given, i.e., as a brute, unmediated fact. From this perspective, the tendency of philosophy to question the world unendingly, without limit, is seen as an intellectual weakness, a failure to acknowledge the world as setting limits to human reason. Thus, on the one hand philosophy may lead to an alien-ated view of humanity as submerged in a grand metaphysical totality, and on the other to an anti-intellectual rejection of reasoning and questioning in favor of an over-extended conception of the factual or the “positive.” Equi-librium between these different desiderata may not be easy to come by.

Reminiscing about his own movement away from monistic idealism, Bertrand Russell (1959) supplies the following description of this alterna-tive as he experienced it:

But it was not only these rather dry, logical doctrines that made me rejoice in the new philosophy. I felt it, in fact, as a great liberation, as if I had escaped from a hot-house on to a wind-swept headland. I hated the stuffiness involved in supposing that space and time were only in my mind. I liked the starry heav-ens even better than the moral law, and could not bear Kant’s view that the one I liked best was only a subjective figment. In the first exuberance of libera-tion, I became a naïve realist and rejoiced in the thought that the grass is really green, in spite of the adverse opinion of all philosophers from Locke onwards. I have not been able to retain this pleasing faith in its pristine vigour, but I have never again shut myself up in a subjective prison. (Russell, 1959: p. 48).

As Russell is hinting, there are ethical implications, or dimensions, to this large philosophical distinction. The submerging of the world in a rational totality may be felt as the imprisoning of the individual subject, and a con-sequent denial of her status and importance. Philosophy has often been led down this path, with large scale social consequences. On the other hand, the “exuberance of liberation,” on the part of the individual, may lead to an anti-intellectual “naïveté,” i.e., an overly expansive acceptance of the world (or aspects thereof) as “given,” and a corresponding shrinking of intellec-


tual autonomy. This tendency, too, can have unfortunate social and cul-tural consequences. Indeed, philosophy is an arena where the task of finding equilibrium between knowledge and acknowledgment is particu-larly challenging, but the absence of such equilibrium may lead, through the impact of philosophy, to ethically unhappy consequences.

A word of caution is here in order about ethical criticism of scholarship. The aim of such criticism is not to declare forms of scholarship “unethical,” or to consign them to scholarly oblivion. No simple dichotomy of the ethi-cal vs. the unethical can do justice to the complexities at hand. Scholarly-ethical failures on the part of scholars are failures committed within the liberties of thought and expression and conscience. Such failures are rarely of immediate social consequence so as to merit regulation, or public inter-vention, and even so, the liberties of thought and speech, particularly in academic settings, should protect scholars from illiberal interventions. Nevertheless, significant ethical criticism is relevant in assessing scholar-ship, mostly in the form of uncovering moral failures of outlook on the part of the scholars, or moral vices in their attitudes and relations to others. Furthermore, such failures and vices are compatible with epistemic strengths and accomplishments, and so a moral assessment of any piece of scholarship should be weighed against its intellectual contribution. A humanly-qualified pursuit of knowledge and truth involves both moral constraints on outlook, and intellectual constraints on moral criticism. The point is precisely to bring the moral and the intellectual into a productive relationship with one another.

Some “scholarship,” however, may overstep these boundaries. Many consider holocaust denial on the part of scholars such as the British histo-rian David Irving to constitute a counter example to the above statement, and indeed holocaust denial has been criminalized in a number of Euro-pean countries, and penalized in various ways in others. Clearly, a willful distortion of well-established, irrefutable, historical facts, in the guise of academic research and “open minded” revisionism, is morally offensive. Where such distortion is calculated to cause pain and suffering on the part of past victims, or when it is conducted in the service of ideological causes, or outright racist biases, the moral offense is multiplied and intensified. In terms of the ethical framework developed in this paper, these cases are to be accounted for in terms of a gross failure to acknowledge the humanity of one’s subjects resulting in an equally gross failure to pursue knowledge


and truth. The extent to which such failures should be criminalized is open, however, to question. A question arises as to the extent of free speech liber-ties, and specifically of academic freedom. Kenneth Lasson (1997) raises these questions in a pertinent manner:

Must writers and speakers who deny the Holocaust be guaranteed equal access to curricula and classrooms? Should responsible libraries collect and classify work born of blatant bigotry? Have survivors been injured when their victim-ization has been repudiated?

More profoundly, Can we reject spurious revisionism and still pay homage to the liberty of thought ennobled by the first amendment? Should the people have the power to suppress the misrepresentation of historical fact when it is motivated by nothing more than racial animus? Are some conflicts between freedom of expression and civility as insoluble as they are inevitable? Can His-tory ever be proven as Truth? (Lasson, 1997: 36).

These are, in fact, not simple questions to answer. History need not be proven as Truth (with a capital T), for fake scholarship to be denounced; the preponderance of carefully evaluated evidence is quite sufficient. Nevertheless, suppression by means of the criminal law may not be the right answer, at least not unless imminent violence is likely. Tactically, such criminalization may be a mistake in so far as it allows the offenders to pres-ent themselves as victims of democracy, or as the only true democrats. The result is a harmful muddying of the water. But more profoundly, the inter-ests of historical truth are better served, certainly in the long run, by open academic discourse than by criminal courts. University professors will have ample opportunity to critically evaluate and dismiss the sham scholarship that goes into Holocaust denial, allowing the academic system to legiti-mately rid itself of such scholars, and an alert public will have similar opportunities to follow their lead in popular venues such as the media and the Internet. Academic freedom and first amendment rights (free speech) do not mandate supplying Holocaust deniers academic (or other) plat-forms, since critical judgment and regulation is required of professors, edi-tors, and other providers of public and academic access. So the academic system of scholarship can protect itself (as can the responsible public media). Doing so carefully and responsibly is likelier to be successful in combating Holocaust (and other genocide) denial in the public mind, than putting the occasional denier behind bars for some limited period of time.


Truth and the Humanities: Between Absolutism and Constructivism

As noted, the very idea of humanistic scholarship, as distinguished from natural-scientific inquiry, involves an ethically relevant stance towards its human subject matter as autonomous sources of value and perspective.2 In the humanities we choose to abandon the fully general and theoretical per-spective regarding our subject matter, characteristic of the natural sciences, and opt for a more internal, humanizing perspective. In doing so, knowl-edge is still our goal, for there are facts that could not be fully understood in any other way, facts about the intentions, motives, perspectives, feelings and consciousness of fellow human beings. However, for this type of knowl-edge to be possible, engagement, both critical and affirmative, with the val-ues and perspectives we encounter must also be involved. The humanist inquirer has to participate in the affairs of the world and cannot assume a fully detached theoretical viewpoint. In Gadamer’s terms, hers is a form of wisdom that involves Phronesis, as distinguished from pure theoretical Sophia, a wisdom that incorporates a practice of interpretation and evalua-tion, of placing the observer in the “shoes” of the observed while attempt-ing to switch over to her point of view.

Let us now look into the possibility of such ethically engaged knowledge (and the conception of truth it requires), for clearly, a philosophical analy-sis is called for in this regard. The possibility in question will be denied both by absolutists and relativists; the former claiming that objectivity precludes humanistic claims to knowledge, since objective knowledge requires a fully independent viewpoint, one in relation to which the world can be seen as it “really” is apart from human accretions and biases; the latter claiming that an internal, observer-relative point of view is all that their subject matter permits, and that consequently respect for their subjects should lead humanist scholars to abandon any claim to objective knowledge and truth. Arguing against both these positions, prevalent in science and

2) The social sciences occupy an interim position regarding this distinction. Traditionally conceived as applying scientific, i.e., quantitative and statistical methods to human behav-ior and social phenomena, these sciences still depend on identifying behavior as “human” and phenomena as “social,” and in these identifications a humanist residue is retained. This humanist residue is often ignored, sometimes through idealization, as in economic theory, and sometimes through causal reductionism of various kinds. Nevertheless, the humanist aspect of the social sciences resurfaces when social-scientific findings are applied to partic-ular cases, or across cultural barriers.


humanities faculties respectively, should leave us with some conceptual space for a third alternative, which might be called, so far as knowledge, truth and objectivity are concerned, the engaged viewpoint.

Absolutists object to the humanist’s abandonment of the fully independ-ent or “objective” viewpoint as being either entirely superfluous, or at best transitional, i.e., practically necessary but ultimately to be replaced by a more accurate “scientific” perspective. W.V. Quine (1960) famously argues that while the intentional idiom has its practical uses, “limning the true and ultimate structure of reality” requires shifting to a fully extensional lan-guage that knows only “the physical constitution and behavior of organ-isms.” (Quine, 1960: p. 221). Somewhat inconsistently, Quine also believes that the basis of such physicalism is to be found in “our own total evolving doctrine” (ibid., p. 25), without the benefit of any transcendent notion of truth, nor the perspective of a “cosmic exile.” (ibid., p. 275). The tension between these various positions goes to the heart of the problem. Quine’s “true and ultimate structure of reality” leaves little room, perhaps none at all, for the attitudes underlying “our own evolving doctrine,” namely, beliefs and desires on the part of the practicing scientist, on which alone the “ limning” of reality is supposed to rest.

As normally understood, objectivity requires taking further and further distance from any observer’s viewpoint, and philosophers have articulated notions of maximal such distance as required for complete objectivity in various ways, e.g., as viewing the world sub specie aeternitatis, taking the “view from nowhere,” (Nagel, 1986) adopting a “God’s eye-view,” (Putnam, 1981) etc.3 No such view, however, is genuinely possible, as Quine’s own ironic image of the cosmic exile suggests. The world cannot be seen just from the world’s own point of view, effacing the conditions of the observer. It follows that objectivity can only be pursued as a regulative ideal; it doesn’t go all the way to the objects themselves (or as they are “in themselves”). Thus, an intentional residue of an observer’s viewpoint remains as a pre-supposition even in relation to the most objective science. Quine’s failure to give that residue some cognitive status, some remaining role in the con-struction of knowledge and science which is not merely practical or transi-tional, betrays a remaining “dogma,” or “dualism,” in his empiricism,

3) Both Nagel and Putnam are, of course, highly critical of the idea of an absolute view of the world that is both objective and complete. The position here articulated is close to aspects in both their views.


namely, the dualism between the cognitive and the practical, facts and values, the world and our engagement in it.

If such a maximally detached view is impossible, one has to contend with the consequence that no single view of the world is ultimate, not even that of physics, which many tend to identify with the absolute truth. Physi-cal theory itself is a finite human product, constructed by an amalgam of human observation and (epistemic) evaluation. The attempt to apply phys-ical theory to itself, thereby losing the observer as a source of judgment and evaluation, is an abstraction that cannot be sustained. It still leaves a ghostly observer at some unacknowledged background. A more sustainable view is that physics, or any other claimant to a God’s eye-view, cannot be exhaus-tive of human knowledge, not because there are super-natural facts but rather because there are ways of addressing the world for which the vocab-ulary of physics (and the natural sciences, generally) is insufficient. While each fact may be ultimately physical, not every way of addressing, or describing it need be translatable into physical (or natural scientific) theory, and some such facts may be completely inscrutable to the natural theorist’s point of view. No purely natural scientific theory would uncover the role of Jewish self-sacrificial practices in the development of anti-Semitic stereo-types, though each such sacrificial killing was a physical event, and each such stereotype was (at some stage) someone’s neurological state. Another language is needed altogether, but it is not, for all that, a non-descriptive (non-factual) language. In short, the limits of objectivity, i.e., the impossi-bility of an absolute viewpoint, in physics or any other natural scientific theory, leaves room for, indeed, necessitates, the humanities (as well as the social sciences) as an irreducible supplement.4

Notoriously, facts may be variously described in languages that are irre-ducible to one another. That the world is, metaphysically speaking, one does not imply that there is a single over-riding description of it in all its dimensions. Knowledge, in particular, is not confined to one such dimen-sion or language. To see how this is possible, let me invoke a distinction of Davidson’s (Davidson, 2001 [1970]) between homonomic and heteronomic

4) This is even more dramatically so, if we go along with the abandonment of an absolute viewpoint in physics itself, as suggested in quantum mechanics, and by the view that there is a non-eliminable, though highly paradoxical, “cut between the observer and the system observed,” so that the effects of observation cannot be neutralized. For both the power and the paradox of this view, see Putnam, “Realism with a Human Face” (Putnam, 1990).


generalizations, where heteronomic generalizations are generalizations of which the positive instances exemplify a strict law only when re-described in a different and unified (physical) language. By contrast, homonomic generalizations exemplify strict laws without such re-description (they are already formulated in such a language). Heteronomic generalizations involve mixed vocabularies, partly physical and law-like, partly intentional and evaluative, and following Davidson I shall describe inquiry as hetero-nomic when it is conducted by means of such mixed vocabularies. Human-istic inquiry is heteronomic in principle, involving inherited but irreducible vocabularies, and so are the truths (generalizations) it aims at uncovering. Indeed, the heteronomic status of humanistic generalities (and truths) har-monizes with many of the special features of humanistic inquiry, particu-larly its participatory character and its dependence on interpretive and evaluative viewpoints. Nevertheless, the truths it uncovers could (in princi-ple) be re-described so as to admit of a strictly nomological science.

This raises the following question. Is humanistic inquiry merely transi-tional inquiry, awaiting better physical descriptions of mental events that would render heteronomic generalizations and truths superfluous? I shall argue that this is not the case. Inquiry in two keys, homonomic and het-eronomic, is a permanent feature of knowledge. The humanities are here to stay.

The point of Davidson’s distinction is to allow sameness of substance (materialism) through (irreducible) differences of vocabulary (anomaly). Heteronomic (psycho-physical) generalizations are causal statements, exhibiting (like all causal statements) strict laws, but only by re-descrip-tion, i.e., by switching from psychological to physical descriptions. Having physical descriptions, mental events are shown to be identical to physical events, though the identity in question is not type-identity (an identity of general kinds), but merely token-identity (an identity of particular events). But some knowledge is sensitive to types and does not survive re-descrip-tion. Indeed, natural scientific typology may not contain the conceptual resources needed to formulate the complex descriptions required for understanding mental or social phenomena. Nevertheless, these descrip-tions may contain genuine knowledge not otherwise accessible, and the facts or events they describe are not mere epiphenomena that could be safely ignored.


A fully nomological science of everything, if such was possible, would have to switch all psycho-social descriptions to physical descriptions of the same token events. But although every heteronomic truth has a homon-omic re-description, it is far from clear that there could be a homonomic theory (a single one) for all heteronomic truths, i.e., a fully comprehensive, strictly law-like, science of everything, from which all particularity of view-point could be expunged. Such a theory would have to apply to itself, among other things, thereby re-describing its own intensional relation to its sub-ject matter in terms of the features and properties of the subject matter (physics). It is far from clear that the result of this operation would leave us with anything deserving of the title “theory.” Indeed, it is doubtful whether even Laplace’s demon, to use an older image, would be in a position to describe its own relation to the world it claims to exhaust; it certainly would not be in a position to assess the truth of the counterfactual conditional on which its own claim to universal knowledge is based. And beyond this resi-due of self-reference, other aspects of the world would simply not be cap-tured by the conceptual resources available to a purely homonomic theory, even though the facts covered under these aspects are all facts that could (in principle) be homonomically re-descried.

Homonomic generalities and truths belong to closed theoretical sys-tems, but closed theoretical systems cannot be exhaustive, or fully compre-hensive. As noted above, theories are human products involving a distinction between content and viewpoint, a duality that cannot be elimi-nated within any single theory or closed theoretical system. The notion of a theory that is both comprehensive (in the metaphysical sense of including everything that is real), and human (a product of human intentionality) is chimerical. A metaphysically comprehensive theory cannot be a human product. It would require a view from “nowhere” to which human beings cannot aspire.

Hence, room will always be left for what the humanities do, and only the humanities can achieve, namely, a non-comprehensive, participatory and heteronomic account of the limited viewpoint accompanying every theory, however closed and homonomic. Such a theory, too, could ulti-mately be replaced by a closed homonomic re-description, but that too would not close the gap between reality and the perspective from which it is viewed.


For the humanities, the lesson to be taken from these observations is that the license it seeks to view its subject matter from a less than fully theoretical viewpoint is grounded in the very limits of objectivity. The license in question is not a special privilege, granted on a transitory basis, which could be removed as knowledge increases and theoretical science gradually replaces speculation and indeterminate interpretation. Rather, it is a necessary concomitant of objective theoretical study that such a license will be needed. If there is no God’s eye-view, there must be human perspec-tives that cannot be assimilated to a perspective-less world, and must be studied in a way that acknowledges their humanity. That such perspectives are human in the further sense of being autonomous sources of value that call for respect is an immediate corollary of this point. Human beings are worthy of special moral respect partly because they are also autonomous possessors of non-eliminable viewpoints and perspectives. Had they been eliminable as autonomous subjects with their own perspectives, their moral status as respect-worthy subjects would appear to rest on even shakier grounds.

Let us now look at the other side of the camp (or campus). Within the humanities it is customary to defend scholarship by dismissing truth, or objectivity, altogether. As Rorty (1982) puts it “. . . there are no constraints on inquiry save conversational ones – no wholesale constraints derived from the nature of the objects, or of the mind, but only those retail con-straints provided by the remarks of our fellow inquirers.” (Rorty, 1982: p. 165). According to Rorty, to think otherwise is to attempt a hopeless tran-scendence over and above the limits of humanity. Whereas the absolute viewpoints discussed earlier efface the human perspective in an attempt to view things from “nowhere,” or from the viewpoint of the things “ themselves,” the constructivist viewpoint (Rorty dismisses the charge of “relativism”), attempts to efface any external constraint, any reality not made up within some “conversation” or other. But just as it is questionable whether an absolute viewpoint could be a viewpoint at all, so it is question-able whether inquiry, or even “mere” conversation, could be what they are except with reference to external constraint. Short of a distinction between getting it right or wrong, inquiry does not seem to be an intelligible prac-tice. Similarly, without a distinction between understanding one another or failing to do so, i.e., without some shared reference and truth, the notion of “conversation” seems equally unintelligible. The attempts to dismiss the


external leave us without sufficient grasp of the internal, so we are left with nothing to replace the external with.

In many scholarly circles, however, even this modest acceptance of truth is likely to be met with skepticism and resistance. Following sociological analyses, it has become customary to sever knowledge from truth. Knowl-edge “production” remains acceptable as the goal of humanistic inquiry, while truth is thought of as requiring an illusory transcendence beyond the culturally relative realms of discourse and interpretation. A philosophical version of this view has knowledge identified (reductively) with power, while truth is thought of as a spontaneous disclosure of “Being,” not the responsibility of scholars who cannot aspire to the requisite objectivity. However, a social constructionist view of knowledge to the effect that knowledge is anything produced by scholars, namely, a subjective imposi-tion, regardless of truth, presupposes a reductive view of (academic) schol-arship as a knowledge-mill, a kind of factory whose products are socially identified as knowledge, but without any claim to authority, or special sta-tus, relative to common opinion. Alternatively, knowledge is viewed as thoroughly political; a form of power that does not admit of independent standards of truth. This view leaves entirely unaccounted for both the spe-cial epistemological authority of scholarly work, and the special responsi-bilities, both epistemological and social, such an authority confers on those who assume it. In addition, the regulatory function of the academy within which such “production” takes place is also left out of the account, namely, its function in reviewing, replicating, or selecting the better and eliminat-ing the worse, but it is hard to imagine a form of scholarship that does not take these functions seriously. The academy is not a factory; it is a commu-nity of scholars held together by normative standards, and these can hardly be accounted for except in terms that leave some room for truth. We may, of course, be mistaken in our truth claims, but that possibility only but-tresses our dependence on an independent standard of truth, without which we remain at the mercy of arbitrariness.

While there are many versions of this view, enough has already been said to point out its inadequacy. Let me move on to describe in more detail the interim position I wish to defend, namely, an account of objectivity and truth which makes humanistic scholarship possible. Such an account pro-ceeds by assuming, in light of all the considerations above, that neither reality nor humanity are eliminable from any adequate account of our


cognitive practices. However, from the fact that humanity, i.e., a human perspective, is not eliminable from such an account, it does not follow that we never have reality “as it is in itself ” in our vision, for there is no such thing as “reality as it is in itself.”5 The very notion of the thing in itself, the ding-an-sich, is an incoherent attempt to cross over to a viewpoint that can-not be had. On the other hand, from the fact that reality is not eliminable from any adequate account of our cognitive practices, it does not follow that the human subject is reduced to copying it, or passively representing it, as if from purely a spectator’s point of view. The very notion of a purely spectatorial viewpoint is incoherent, for any spectator must be embedded in a fully human environment, a striving, suffering and interest-laden body, which is part of a natural and a social environment.

Where does this view leave us regarding the notion of truth? It is cus-tomary to describe truth as a “predicate of sentences,” rather than, presum-ably, a relation of correspondence between linguistic and non-linguistic entities. As such a predicate, it holds of a sentence ‘p’ just in case p, and theories have been constructed (Tarski, 1944) such that for every sentence ‘p’ of a language L that satisfies certain constraints (the object language) a truth condition can be derived for it in another language (the meta- language), which is carefully separated from the object language (though it may contain it as a part). The truth condition is of the form T: ‘p’ is true in L if and only if p, where ‘p’ is quoted (or structurally described) on the left-hand side of the bi-conditional, and used in translation to the meta- language on its right-hand side. Presupposing the notion of translation (namely, sameness of meaning) such a theory captures the extension of the predicate True-in-L, for it shows all true sentences of L to be members of that extension. Unfortunately, however, the theory cannot, on pain of con-tradiction (the liar paradox), be generalized to all languages, and cannot capture a univocal, language-transcendent concept of truth, for the object-language and the meta-language have to be strictly separated. Regarding the pre-theoretical language-transcendent concept of truth, it can either be dismissed as contradictory and useless (as for example Quine suggests), or accepted as primitive, too basic to be defined, but serviceable (as Davidson suggests) in defining meaning in terms of truth-conditions. (Utilizing Tarski’s definition in reverse: rather than presuppose “translation” and

5) This way of putting the matter is derived from Putnam. See, in particular, “Was Wittgen-stein a Pragmatist?” Putnam, 1995, p. 29.


define truth, one presupposes truth, in its full generality, and defines trans-lation, or meaning, by means of it.) A consequence of the latter move is that the primitive notion of truth, so conceived, cannot be accounted for as a “predicate of sentences” merely, where “sentences” are taken to be items of formally constructed languages. A different conception of its role has to be offered.

Here’s an account suggested by Davidson. The notion of meaning as truth conditions, systematized in Tarski-type theories of truth for particu-lar languages, but taken in reversed priorities as above, gives us not a defini-tion of truth but an account of its role in human language and cognition. As Davidson (1984) puts it, “. . . while Tarski intended to analyze the concept of truth by appealing (in convention T) to the concept of meaning (in the guise of sameness of meaning, or translation), I have the reverse in mind. I considered truth to be the central primitive concept, and hoped, by detail-ing truth’s structure, to get at meaning.” (1984: p. xiv). Thus in his role as a humanistic scholar (trying “to get at meaning”), Davidson acknowledges, prior to inquiry, our ordinary, universal, concept of truth as indispensable for any account of our cognitive capacities. Truth, in other words, is presup-posed in our linguistic understanding, and to the extent that such linguistic understanding enters our propositional attitudes, truth is presupposed in our having such attitudes, particularly belief. While truth cannot be defined as “correspondence to reality,” any cognitive orientation to the world, lin-guistic or doxastic, presupposes a pre-theoretical concept of truth.

Let me spell out how and why this conception of truth is helpful for understanding the humanities. To accept the concept of truth as “primi-tive,” i.e., undefinable and yet not eliminable, is to accept the language in which it is embedded, namely, ordinary language (without any precon-ceived regimentation), as discursively basic. In other words, it is to accept that the various predicates “true-in-L” have something in common which cannot, on pain of contradiction, be captured in formally constructed lan-guages, but which ordinary language does at least suggest. Admittedly, this is contrary to a lot that Davidson says regarding language and truth theory, for despite his recognition of the primitive status of truth he opts for a formalistic conception of language as governed by truth theories, namely, formal theories of the predicate “true-in-L” as theories of meanings for nat-ural languages. There is a mismatch between Davidson’s (2005 [1986]) insistence on language as a formal truth-theory, which leads back to


Quinean theories of “radical interpretation” and linguistic instrumentalism (“there is no such thing as a language . . .” (Davidson, 2005: p. 107)), and his acceptance of truth as a pre-theoretical and primitive concept.6 The latter acceptance is an acknowledgment of precisely the kind of language, in which that concept has a natural home, that Davidson’s linguistic instru-mentalism denies, namely, language as something “to be learned, mastered or born with.” (2005: p. 107). It is this ordinary conception of truth, presup-posed by Davidson, that’s needed in order to make sense of humanistic scholarship as oriented to truth, on the one hand, while shying away from both absolutism and relativism, on the other.

So here’s the connection with what has already been said. Just as a human point of view is not eliminable from any claim to objective cogni-tion, contrary to absolutist ideals, so a socially grounded and public lan-guage is not eliminable, contrary to formalist claims, from any reasonable account of truth and meaning. As Wittgenstein (1953) puts it, “when I talk about language (words, sentences, etc.), I must speak the language of every-day . . . In giving explanations I already have to use language full blown (not some sort of preparatory, provisional one). . . . .” (Wittgenstein, 1953: #120). The language of everyday, with its mixed vocabularies, mental and physical, descriptive and evaluative, is the framework in which the human-ities inhere, and which grounds, indeed, necessitates, the “license” they seek for an engaged viewpoint. A pre-theoretical concept of truth is part and parcel of that language. It is the starting point of all inquiry, however theoretical, and in relation to this starting point humanistic scholarship has an indispensable role to play. The legitimacy of humanistic scholarship as knowledge resides in the fact that no theoretical scheme can fully replace ordinary language and the point of view it involves, since in the end every theoretical scheme presupposes it.

6) I have argued elsewhere that Davidson’s approach is vitiated by a fallacious inference from a weak compositional principle (WCP) to the effect that for every sentence S of a lan-guage there is a finitely axiomatic theory such that an interpretation for S is derivable in that theory, to a strong compositional theory (SCP) in which the order of the quantifiers is reversed, namely, there is a finitely axiomatic theory such that for every sentence S an inter-pretation of S can be derived by that theory. The latter principle is presupposed in David-son’s theory of radical interpretation and much that follows from it, including his view of language as a theoretical construct governed by a formal theory and his denial that lan-guages “exist” in any pre-theoretical way. See my “Linguistic Epiphenomenalism – Davidson and Chomsky on the Status of Public Languages,” (Nevo, 2010).


The Ethics of Scholarship: Principles and Cases

Having identified the professional good of the humanities with a particular kind of knowledge, or the pursuit of a particular kind of truth, namely, the kind of knowledge and pursuit that involve acknowledgement of the human status of the “objects” of inquiry, I shall now consider the normative space, and possible conflicts, created by these dual requirements. In particular, I shall discuss principles and cases involving objectification, i.e., excessive objectivity, or lack of sufficient acknowledgement, in the pursuit of truth, on the one hand, and principles and cases involving uncritical, excessive, acknowledgement, or sympathy, regarding the subjects under inquiry. While the former vice may involve an alienated viewpoint, the latter vice may sometimes involve apologetics and suppression of criticism. The pub-lic good, it goes without saying, is seriously harmed by both these violations of the professional good.

The Principle of Non-Objectification

Let us note, to begin with, that non-humanistic studies of humanistic sub-jects are possible within sciences that continue, without limitation, to seek maximal objectivity regarding human affairs. Neurological studies of psy-chological phenomena, for example, are indeed highly informative, as are evolutionary studies of human and social conduct. The question is whether such studies, conducted from a purely objective viewpoint, are sufficient for a complete understanding of human phenomena. The claim that they are indeed sufficient, while very popular, is not only an epistemological failure, namely, a failure in grasping distinctive features of human con-sciousness and agency as these are displayed in society, history, and cul-ture, it is also an ethical failure, a failure in the way human beings are treated. In particular, it is a form of objectification, i.e., of treating human subjects as if they were mere objects, losing sight of their distinctive auton-omy and dignity. Let us look more closely at the nature of that offense.

Human beings are, among other things, material objects. They are bod-ies in physical space, organisms in processes of evolution, physiological mechanisms in continuous action. There is no ethical offense in pointing out these facts, and subjecting them to rigorous scientific study. Objectifi-cation arises (in an ethically offensive sense) only when these facts are taken to be, in principle, exhaustive and (scientifically ) exclusive. For the


claim of sufficiency (for a purely external, natural-scientific viewpoint regarding the human), besides being epistemologically dubious, amounts to undermining the point and the possibility of any ethical attitude towards a human subject. Undermining the possibility of morality is a moral (not merely an intellectual) failure, even if pursued for the sole purpose of gain-ing a fully objective view of the world. The specific moral failure in this case is a failure to recognized limits to objectivity, limits that are inscribed in the very search for objectivity on the part of a cognitive subject. From this, the larger failure ensues, namely, the failure to recognized human beings as autonomous sources of value and perspective, in which the objectification of human beings consists.

The distinction between legitimate science and illegitimate, objectify-ing, “scientism,” is subtle, and the failure to draw it has occasionally resulted in unhelpful battles. Consider, for example, the debate over sociobiology, where charges of “biological determinism” have led to a polarized division between supporters of scientific truth who were (unjustly) associated with earlier forms of biologically inspired atrocities, on the one hand, and sup-porters of humanism and ethics, who were (unwisely) drawn into a politi-cized interpretation of science. In 1975, E.O. Wilson published Sociobiology: The New Synthesis, which applied methods of population genetics to the study of social behavior in humans and other social animals. In particular, it sought to explain altruistic behavior in terms of gene distribution in ani-mal populations, using such hypotheses as kin-selection to account for the possibility of apparently non-adaptive behavior on the part of individual organisms. Opponents of biological determinism sounded alarm bells regarding the biological understanding of social phenomena. In a letter to the New York Review of Books (13 November, 1975), members of the “Socio-biology Study Group,” formed within an activist group called “Science for the People,” have associated biological determinism with various historical atrocities, claiming such determinism to have been the basis for American policies of sterilization and restrictive immigration, as well as Nazi policies of eugenics and extermination in gas chambers. In his own defense, Wilson charged his opponents with “vigilantism,” which he explained in terms of judging scientific findings by political standards. Without going into a blow by blow account of this highly acrimonious debate,7 let me focus on the ethical dimension of the charge of biological determinism.

7) For a short review of the historical facts, see W.R. Albury, “Politics and Rhetoric in the Sociobiology Debate,” Social Studies of Science, Vol. 10 (1980), 519–536.


Biological determinism is an ambiguous phrase. It could just mean causal determinism as detected in biology. It could also mean something like causal-biological exclusivity in a particular domain, e.g., the explana-tion of human social behavior. Exclusivity, in turn, would mean that only biological causes exist, or that only biological causes are relevant or signifi-cant. Let us call these two theses non-exclusive and exclusive biological determinism respectively. In the sociobiology debate, opponents charged Wilson with biological determinism and meant by that term exclusive bio-logical determinism, which they (rightly) deemed offensive. Wilson, for his part, continued to defend biological causation of social behavior (non-exclusive biological determinism), while denying biological determinism altogether. Perhaps, some of the venom of this debate could have been avoided, if the parties were more careful, and less equivocal, in their use of terms.

Non-exclusive biological determinism is simply causal determinism, and given that it leaves room for other, non-biological but still causal descrip-tions of human social activity, there is nothing offensive about it, but (very likely) a (metaphysical) pre-requisite of scientific theory in certain domains. It is a form of recognition of our bodily existence, which no sane observer would deny, and which does not constitute any illicit “objectification.” It does not treat human subjects as “mere” objects. To this extent, there is nothing particularly offensive in sociobiology, and the attempts to associ-ate it with biologically inspired atrocities is just the fallacy of guilt-by- association. These charges, however, stem from some real worries that have been richly exemplified in the history of the 20th century, however misdi-rected they may have been in the campaign against Wilson and sociobiology. Exclusive biological determinism has been advocated, and practiced, in eugenicist and racist doctrines and programs, and its objectifying perspec-tive has led to large scale immoral consequences. Clearly, objectifying blindness to the distinctively human can lead to dehumanizing practices of the worst kind (though perhaps the causal sequence holds in reverse, and it is the dehumanizing that leads to objectifying, exclusively determinist per-spectives). Such dehumanization, however, is not a necessary concomitant of science. Scientific (causal) determinism need not be blamed for the dehumanizing effect of an objectifying metaphysical doctrine.

Humanistic knowledge is a kind of knowledge that requires an attitude of recognition and respect toward the humanity of its subject. However, in cases of (apparent) conflict, where known truths seem to undermine the


requisite attitude of knowledge and respect, truth takes priority. Otherwise, as Wilson points out, knowledge is debased by politics. The point of the humanities, however, is that this need not be the case. First, some knowl-edge is enabled by the required attitudes (acknowledgement), which serve to uncover it. Secondly, cases of apparent conflict could be resolved, as in the case of the sociobiology debate, by more careful distinctions between the genuinely scientific and the superfluously metaphysical. The distinc-tion between exclusive and non-exclusive forms of biological determinism is a case in point.

This is not to deny that some scientifically-oriented objectification is ethically problematic in ways the humanities can serve to criticize. Con-temporary social science, for example, advances various forms of morally troublesome objectification. There is, for example, objectification by “top-down” idealization, as in economic theory, where individual human beings are imagined as ideal utility-maximizers and markets are conceived as perfectly competitive or nearly so, and where any deviation from these forced ideals is considered “irrational.” Objectification results, in this case, from replacing human beings, as we know them, with lifeless theoretical abstractions.

Consider economic idealization. One form that such idealization takes is the identification of (practical) rationality with utility maximization. But this identification is doubly fallacious. It is conceptually fallacious in so far as practical rationality is a matter of adapting means to ends, not of adopt-ing a single end, namely maximization of utility, as definitive of the whole field of rational conduct. It is also normatively fallacious in so far as it con-flates normative judgments (regarding rationality) with empirical observa-tion, thereby privileging one form of behavior as exclusively rational, while dismissing others, as if such a preference is some kind of an empirical find-ing. But utility maximizing does not cohere as a (human) life plan. It is much too narrow, and beyond certain limits and contexts it makes no sense. It is no accident that present day plutocrats, who have pretty much exhausted the maximization of corporate and personal utility, as measured in monetary terms, have turned around to announce their intention to “give back” to society most of what they have made. Beyond a certain point, making still more money loses its point as a meaningful end to pursue. Hav-ing far exceeded the limits of meaningful utility maximizing, such individu-als seem to opt for an entirely different course of action, namely, that of


optimizing significance in the ends they choose to pursue, their compre-hensive life-plan. Indeed, that is precisely the alternative that utility maxi-mizing as an exclusive economic ideal drowns out, with morally dubious consequences. Among these, the privileging of the profit motive as some-how more rational and of (certain types of ) economic considerations as somehow more “efficient” should count prominently.

This and other forms of illicit objectification are morally hazardous. The prestige of social science carries with it the false assurance that the per-spectives of the humanities are naive or superfluous. In this way, science threatens our knowledge and actually serves to diminish it. Scientifically impoverished knowledge – knowledge which is diminished by the exclu-sivist and objectifying tendencies of scientism – might have threatening cultural effects. As Horkheimer and Adorno (1986: p. 3) have it (somewhat hyperbolically): “the fully enlightened earth radiates disaster triumphant,” except that in the form of scientism the culprit is, rather, a truncated ver-sion of enlightenment not the genuine article. But the fully “scientized” or “objectified” world does radiate disaster in the sense that it leaves the rest of us bereft of humanistic forms of knowledge and consequently of the tools for making sound (and necessary) value judgments. The alienation that might come with culturally dominant objectification (and scientism) is not without ethical consequences of precisely the kind that humanistic scholarship is designed to overcome.

Acknowledgement of Humanity: Too Much and Too Little

The study of human evil offers polar “opportunities” for failure in point of acknowledging the humanity of historical agents. Scholars may take the requisite acknowledgement a step too far, and offer uncritical apologies in the guise of understanding. Generally speaking, to understand is not neces-sarily to forgive, since condemnation and criticism are not precluded by attributing reasonable motives or beliefs to wrong-doers. Evil is all the dif-ferent ways in which the pursuit of good may go wrong, and the wrongness of the outcome is not diminished by the goodness-in-view of its starting point. However, it is not uncommon for scholars to move from understand-ing to apology, suspending criticism at the very point where it is most urgent.

Consider the following example. During the famous historikerstreit of the Nineteen Eighties, the philosopher Jürgen Habermas (Habermas, 1989)


criticized the historian Ernst Nolte (and others) for attempting to relativize and contextualize the crimes of the Nazis, so as to glean an exculpating perspective on the Nazis themselves, a perspective from which they could be seen as potential victims, or at any rate as members of a larger group of war criminals that included some of their accusers. As quoted by Haber-mas, Nolte says: “[A] conspicuous shortcoming of the literature of national Socialism is that it doesn’t know, or doesn’t want to admit, to what extent everything that was later done by the Nazis, with the sole exception of the technical procedure of gassing, had already been described in an extensive literature dating from the early 1920s . . . . Could it be that the Nazis, that Hitler carried out an ‘Asiatic’ deed only because they regarded themselves as potential or actual victims of an ‘Asiatic’ deed?”8 Here, clearly, historical “understanding” comes at the expense of serious criticism regarding some of the most urgent moral questions of the 20th century.

As Habermas points out, Nolte engages in rhetorical apologetics on behalf of the Nazis, reducing the enormity of their genocidal crimes to “the technical procedure of gassing,” while at the same time attributing geno-cidal criminality to some “Asiatic” essence, in what must be the ultimate in racist orientalism. Norte achieves this apologetic stance first by denying any “uniqueness” to Nazi genocides, pointing out that (allegedly) similar “deeds” have been committed by others and earlier than those of the Nazi regime, and secondly by insinuating that Nazi crimes were somehow moti-vated by “regarding themselves as potential or actual victims,” presumably of a soviet threat. Both arguments are fallacious, and the rhetoric suggests that they are invoked in an exculpating, apologetic manner. The argument from non-uniqueness proceeds invalidly from an arguable premise regard-ing the comparability of other crimes of genocide to an unstated evasion of responsibility. Others have done it too, so the historical literature on National Socialism is guilty of anti-German bias to the extent that it singles out the crimes of the Nazis as a special case. The conclusion, of course, doesn’t follow, and the whole argument is a form of the fallacy of tuquoque. That others have committed similar crimes does not diminish the respon-sibility of any perpetrator of genocide, nor does it alter the evil character of the deed in any way. The argument from the “Asiatic deed” that Hitler had allegedly been threatened with, and understandably sought to remove by

8) Quoted in Habermas, 1989: p. 212. The quote from Nolte is translated from the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, June 6, 1986.


means of his own genocide, is a tissue of falsities that need not be answered. But the attempt to view perpetrator as victim is a telling sign of what Hab-ermas diagnosed as apologetic tendencies.

The issue of uniqueness vs. comparability can be lifted out of this unsa-vory context for a serious discussion. The present writer believes that com-parability is not affected by the enormity, or other unique features, of the holocaust (and other crimes) that the Nazies had committed. Notions of uniqueness and non-comparability are too obscure, intellectually speak-ing, to carry the moral burden that is placed on them, namely, to place Nazi perpetrators in a separate category of evil – a different “planet” – beyond redemption and exculpation. In part, these notions react to the worry that since understanding leads to forgiveness, and comparison yields under-standing, comparison should be morally and intellectually blocked. Indeed, Nolte reacts to this move by his attempt to “normalize” or “relativize” the evil, as if normalized evil is any less of an evil. In that lies his fallacy and moral failing. But the more appropriate response is to allow comparability, as indeed part of the scholars’ duty to understand human phenomena in general terms, while rejecting the alleged link between understanding and forgiveness. Indeed, there is no such link. We understand human agents, historical or otherwise, by rendering their conduct reasonable given their beliefs and desires, and we interpret their beliefs and desires, given their conduct, by assuming them to be mostly believers of truths and seekers of the good. Evil conduct is no exception. We understand evil by understand-ing the motives (namely, beliefs and desires) of the perpetrators, and it does not diminish the evil that we understand it in terms of the good-in-view for which it had been perpetrated. Human conduct is evil by way of failing to achieve the good, or failing to understand it properly, or failing to take account of its consequences. We do not seek evil for its own sake. But the goodness of our purposes does not mitigate the evil we accomplish. On the contrary, it serves as a basis from which we can judge our failures.

At the other extreme, some forms of evil, Nazi atrocities included, have been thought of as so extreme as to repel any attempt to understand them in terms of some misdirected pursuit of the good. In this line of thinking, rejection is sometimes offered in lieu of understanding, but it is question-able whether the humanistic pursuit of knowledge through acknowledge-ment – the professional good – is still being served. Thus, for example, Hannah Arendt (1951) described totalitarian evil as radical evil, not merely


in the sense of being extreme, or in the sense of being performed by politi-cal radicals, but also in the sense of being pursued for its own sake, or at least independently of comprehensible human motives. In Arendt’s termi-nology: “we may say that radical evil has emerged in connection with a sys-tem in which all men have become equally superfluous.” (p. 459). Arendt criticized Kant for having rationalized radical evil “in the concept of ‘per-verted ill will’ that could be explained by comprehensible motives.” (p. 459). Her attempt is, thus, to account for the phenomenon of totalitarianism in terms that exclude the understanding of perpetrators with reference to such comprehensible motives. Recently, Avishai Margalit (2010) has resorted to describing Nazi evil (as distinguished from Stalinist totalitarian-ism) in similar terms, i.e., as radical evil. He goes on to explain the notion of radical evil as the conscious attempt to eradicate morality by eliminating, practically as well as ideologically, the underlying assumption of (all) morality, which Margalit accounts for as the idea of a shared humanity. Indeed, eradicating morality as such goes well beyond Kant’s notion of radical evil and comes close to what Kant himself dismissed as a diabolical (i.e., non-human) possibility, namely, that of pursuing evil – the rejection of the moral law – for its own sake. Like Arendt in 1951, Margalit offers an account that seems to disconnect the phenomenon of evil from humanly comprehensible motives. Margalit’s description is as follows:

When it comes to Nazism there is no room for morality. At most we can find in Nazism a perverse hygiene, run by categories of filth. Filth is regarded as a degenerative disease, and thereby as the degeneration of the master race. Future humanity in Hitler’s fantasy is not humanity: the master race replaces the idea of humanity. This is radical evil, if anything is. . . . (2010: p. 197).

Interestingly, Arendt herself retracted the idea of radical evil in her later work. In a famous letter (dated 1963) to Gershom Scholem, who criticized her treatment of the “banality of evil” in Eichmann in Jerusalem (1963), she wrote:

You are quite right: I changed my mind and do no longer speak of ‘radical evil’ . . . . It is indeed my opinion now that evil is never ‘radical’, that it is only extreme, and that it possesses neither depth nor any demonic dimension . . . . Only the good has depth and can be radical . . . (1978: pp. 250–1).


In saying this, Arendt seems to fall back on the philosophical tradition she has dismissed in her earlier pronouncement, and to reassert the connec-tion between motivation and the good, or some aspect of the good, in com-prehensible human conduct. For the good to be radical and have depth is for human action to be always directed sub specie boni, and for human motives to be comprehensible only in terms pursuing the good under some conception or other of what it amounts to. It therefore precludes the pur-suit of evil qua evil within human action. Arendt’s retraction of the idea of radical evil is thereby also a reaffirmation of the scholar’s duty of under-standing, and an acknowledgement of the humanity of even the worst per-petrators of totalitarian crimes.9

Resting on a philosophical tradition that goes back to Plato and Aristotle, Immanuel Kant (1998[1793]) had rejected the possibility of an absolutely evil will. The sources of evil in human nature lie, according to Kant, in a radical perversity that is contained in the human heart. Thus, Kant says:

The depravity of human nature is therefore not to be named malice, if we take this word in a strict sense, namely as a disposition (a subjective principle of maxims) to incorporate evil qua evil for incentive into one’s maxim (since this is diabolical) but should rather be named perversity of the heart, and this heart is then called evil because of what results. (1998: p. 60; 6:37).

Kant analyses the depravity in question, which he also describes, in the title of Part One of his book, as “the indwelling of the evil principle alongside the good, or . . . the radical evil in human nature” (p. 45; 6:19), in terms of a cul-pable (yet natural) disposition, or “propensity” to evil, which comes in three grades; frailty, impurity, and depravity. For Kant, radical evil consists in various forms of failure to act purely from the moral law (even when the act itself is in accordance with the moral law). We either incorporate the moral

9) Unfortunately, Arendt added the (unhappy) judgment of banality to her retraction of the idea of radical evil, as if in the absence of an incomprehensible attraction to evil, which perhaps she expected to find in Eichmann, his conduct could only be entirely devoid of interest (banal). But evil is neither radical nor banal. Evil consists in the many different ways in which the human pursuit of (sometimes banal) goods may become horrendously bad. In themselves, these different ways, including psychological weaknesses, sociological divi-sions, economic constraints, and many other sources of failure, are not in any way banal. They are, rather, as wide as history and as deep as human psychology.


law into our maxim but fail to act accordingly due to a stronger inclination (frailty), or we incorporate not just the moral law into our maxim, but other incentives as well, e.g., the incentive of self-love (impurity), or, which is worst, we subordinate the incentive of the moral law to other, non-moral incentives (depravity). According to Kant, this propensity, particularly in the third degree, lies in human nature because human nature involves, inescapably, both a moral predisposition (the moral law) and a sensuous nature culminating in natural predispositions. But in so far as the propen-sity to evil lies in human nature, it is itself morally evil since it corrupts the power of choice as the basis of all other maxims. It is, in this sense, radical. Such a corruption goes beyond our mere sensuous nature, which at most serves to account for animal conduct and has no relation to evil. Neverthe-less, despite its relation to the free power of choice, the radical evil in human nature is not, and cannot be, grounded in reason itself. Grounding evil in reason would turn evil itself into the incentive of our maxim, for this is what reason supplies us with, in the form of the moral law, in its practical capacity. This would amount to pursuing evil for its own sake, evil qua evil, which Kant rejects as “diabolical” i.e. beyond the realm of human possibility. A faculty of reason acting in freedom relative to natural law, but not under the scope of the moral law, would be tantamount to “a cause operating without any law at all,” which is, by Kant’s lights, a contradiction. While allowing a “radical” origin for human evil in the corruption of our free power of choice, Kant rejects the possibility of malice, namely, evil for its own sake, as beyond human possibilities. As noted, Arendt began by criti-cizing Kant on this point for excessively rationalizing evil, only to come back to a similar view. Margalit, by contrast, appears to allow what Kant denies, namely, taking the very subversion of morality (the “moral law”) as the incentive for action.

The underlying issue is as follows. Is it not our role, qua humanistic scholars confronted with even the most horrendous atrocities, to offer an understanding of them that acknowledges their human origin, and relates them to comprehensible human motives? Or is it, rather, a moral duty on our part, when confronting unspeakable crimes, to avoid comprehension in the service of a more total condemnation, thereby avoiding also the risk that understanding might lead to forgiveness? As we have seen above, understanding does not imply forgiveness. Still, the extremity of such crimes encourages some to withhold the humanistic acknowledgement


necessary for the understanding of their nature and meaning, and to proj-ect a barrier to understanding such extreme forms of evil as if they occurred in “a different planet,” or beyond the sphere of comprehensible human motives. Understandable though this reaction might be, condemnation need not compete with understanding, and the acknowledgement of the (all too) human origins of the crimes in question, or the historical frame-work within which they have developed, does not come in the way of abso-lute and unforgiving condemnation.

In sum, humanistic scholarship consists in pursuing knowledge by means of acknowledging the humanity of its subject matter. In this combi-nation lie both the limits and the promise of such scholarship, analyzed above in terms of the professional and the public good of the disciplines in question. Of the various pitfalls, or vices, that scholars may fall into while pursuing this complex professional good, some may involve excessive demands on the part of objectivity, and some, excessive demands on the part of humanization. In pursuing the complex professional and public good of our scholarly disciplines, we are not pure spectators in pursuit of ideal objectivity, but human agents in complex relations to our subject matter, our heritage and our audiences, whose scholarly activities lie within an ethical horizon that calls for reflection.

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The Ethics of Humanistic Scholarship: On Knowledge and Acknowledgement

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