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© Equinox Publishing Ltd. 2008, Unit 6, The Village, 101 Amies Street, London SW11 2JW

[Expositions 2.1 (2008) 005–006] Expositions (print) ISSN 1747-5368  
doi:10.1558/expo.v2i1.005 Expositions (online) ISSN 1747-5376 

Overheard in the academy

Stanley Fish on the Humanities

BErNArd G. PrUSAk

Villanova University

“How does one justify funding the arts and humanities?” This is the 
question put by Stanley Fish toward the beginning of a characteris-
tically provocative column of his published in January 2008 on the 
New York Times’ online “Op Extra” page. From this bread and but-
ter question, Fish quickly derives the much more speculative ques-
tion that serves as the column’s title, namely, “Will the Humanities 
Save Us?” His answer is no. For the study of the humanities does 
not make us “good and wise.” Moreover, it is not “the business of 
the humanities” to save us anyway. In his words, “The humani-
ties are their own good. There is nothing more to say, and anything 
that is said…diminishes the object of its supposed praise.” (See  
http://fish.blogs.nytimes.com/2008/01/06/will-the-humanities-save-us/.)

This line of argument is not new from Fish, and it will no doubt 
reach many more readers once Fish’s new book on higher education, 
Save the World on Your Own Time, due in 2008, is published and widely 
reviewed. despite Fish’s claim, there does, however, seem to be “more 
to say” on the value and justification of the humanities; and so Exposi-
tions has asked several teachers and scholars of the humanities to reply 
to Fish’s argument.

Fish makes his case through criticism of Anthony kronman’s book 
Education’s End: Why Our Colleges and Universities Have Given Up 
on the Meaning of Life (Yale University Press, 2007). kronman advo-
cates, in Fish’s summary, “[e]ntering into a conversation with the great  
authors of the western tradition”—Western or Eastern is irrelevant for 
what interests Fish—in order “to recover the urgency of ‘the question 
of what living is for’ ” and to escape from “ ‘the corrupting powers of 
time.’ ” To which Fish says: “It is a stirring vision that promises the 
highest reward to those who respond to it,” but “there is no evidence 

http://dx.doi.org/10.1558/expo.v2i1.005
http://fish.blogs.nytimes.com/2008/01/06/will-the-humanities-save-us/


6 Overheard in the Academy

© Equinox Publishing Ltd. 2008

to support it and a lot of evidence against it.” Fish’s evidence against 
it consists of “the members of literature and philosophy departments” 
whom he has come to know over his forty-five years in academia. In 
his experience, “Teachers and students of literature and philosophy 
don’t learn how to be good and wise; they learn how to analyze literary  
effects and to distinguish between different accounts of the founda-
tions of knowledge.” They have “disciplinary knowledge,” not the vir-
tues, or for that matter competence in what Fish calls “ministry.”

The conclusion that Fish draws is that “[i]t is not the business of the 
humanities to save us”—for they can’t, or in any event in his experience 
haven’t—“no more than it is their business to bring revenue to a state 
or a university,” recalling the question with which his column began, 
“How does one justify funding the arts and humanities?” According to 
Fish, the humanities “don’t bring about effects in the world,” other than 
“the pleasure they give to those who enjoy them.” Can they then be 
justified? (Should they then be funded?) Fish is confusing on this criti-
cal point. On the one hand, he claims that “[t]he humanities are their 
own good,” suggesting that they can be justified internally, in terms of 
the good of pleasure that people devoted to them discover within them. 
But, on the other hand, Fish also claims that “the only honest answer” 
to the question, “[O]f what use are the humanities?” is “none whatso-
ever.” He goes on: “And it is an answer that brings honor to its subject. 
Justification, after all, confers value on an activity from a perspective 
outside its performance. An activity that cannot be justified is an activ-
ity that refuses to regard itself as instrumental to some larger good.” To 
which it might be countered: Surely justification is not only for “out-
siders”! Surely there is room, as well as reason, to reflect from within a 
practice on its value! Further, let it be granted that the humanities are 
not instrumental “to some larger good”; but can they not be justified 
in terms of intrinsic goods other and perhaps larger than pleasure? Just 
to begin with, can they not teach sensitivity to and appreciation of nu-
ances, complexity, and ambiguity? Or perhaps what needs attention is 
that pleasure is always the pleasure of this or that activity, and that the 
activity of engaging in the humanities yields pleasures of diverse kinds 
that human life would be diminished without. One way or the other, it 
seems clear, to reiterate, that there is “more to say” here.


