Democracy and the Humanities

More Than the Three Rs

When he was running for President in 2015, Secretary of State Marco Rubio claimed that: ‘Welders make more money than philosophers. We need more welders and less philosophers’. He was wrong on the facts. The median income for welders at the time was $40,000 (now $49,000) and for philosophy teachers $70,000 (now $79,000) (Sola 2015) (He was also wrong on the grammar. ‘Less’ should have been ‘fewer’.) We might dismiss Rubio’s remark as just so much populist pandering. But it is part of a larger, increasingly dangerous phenomenon. In 2023, 4240 separate books were challenged in U.S. public and school libraries – up from 2,571 the year before (ALA 2024). ² The Republican right has engaged in a sustained campaign against higher education (which is allegedly brainwashing undergraduates) and public schools (which they want to replace with vouchers and charter schools in the name of school choice). President Trump is mounting an aggressive attack on elite universities, withholding federal research money while demanding policy, curricular, and administrative changes. Elsewhere, the Central European University, founded to foster democracy and open societies in the former Eastern Bloc, was chased out of Hungary by Orbán’s government in 2019. Those who seek to rule over others recognize the humanities’ subversive quality.

A nation ‘ignorant and free’, Thomas Jefferson (1904) remarked, ‘never was and never will be’. If citizens are to be self-governing, they need the knowledge and discernment to deliberate about and choose among different policies and courses of action. Something more than basic information is needed. ‘The notion that the “essentials” of elementary education are the three R’s mechanically treated’, Dewey (2018: 205) warns, ‘is based upon ignorance of the essentials needed for the realization of democratic ideals’. For Dewey, democratic education calls for greater ambition. It requires ‘the intention of improving the life we live in common so that the future shall be better than the past’. (204) It should seek ‘the enlightenment and discipline which come from concern with the deepest problems of common humanity’. (205) The humanities are not just a list of specific subjects such as art, literature, history, and philosophy. They are a mode of understanding that centers critical engagement with what makes us human. ³

‘Democracy’, John Dewey (1939a: 124) notes, ‘has always been allied with humanism’. Later, we will examine Dewey’s characteristically penetrating explanation. At the outset, we can identify several reasons the humanities are important to a properly functioning democracy. The most common have to do with knowledge, reasoning, and compassion for others. Part II considers those conventional justifications for the humanities and explores both their lessons and limitations. But, as Part III elaborates, the value of the humanities is not merely instrumental. It is fundamental. The humanities reveal the radical role of contingency in human affairs. ⁴ It is only with the questioning of necessity and the recognition of contingency that political self-governance and collective, democratic agency become imaginable.

A Knife’s Edge

A contemporary version of the argument for the humanities, perspicuous in Martha Nussbaum’s work, is that they teach the critical thinking and empathy necessary to democratic life. ⁵ This defense of the humanities has intuitive appeal. But, it operates within too narrow and conventional a compass. Nussbaum identifies critical thinking with the rigorous logic of Plato’s Dialogues. Empathy, in her account, largely corresponds with contemporary notions of diversity and inclusion. Both the limitations and implications of this account are worth attending to because they set up the broader argument to follow.

Nussbaum adopts Gregory Vlastos’s distinction between the historical Socrates and the Platonic Socrates of the later dialogues, who was an opponent of democracy and a supporter of aristocratic rule. The ‘historical Socrates’, Nussbaum (1997: 26) claims, ‘regards democracy as the best of the available forms of government’. His ‘distinctive contribution’, she says (1997: 20), ‘was to bring sustained unrelenting philosophical argument to bear’ on issues of common concern. Socratic critical thinking insists on ‘a coherent, contradiction free account of some central political or legal concepts … such as equality, justice, and law’. (1997: 21) She offers as an example an exchange early in The Republic. Cephalus defines justice as telling the truth and repaying one’s debts. Socrates counters with the example of a person who asks for the return of the knife he lent you. You know he is mentally ill and is likely to use it to do harm. The lesson, Nussbaum explains, is that ‘a morality that defines duties narrowly, without regard to their consequences, may be inadequate to guide us in a world in which the consequences of our acts matter’. (1997: 240).

There are two problems with Nussbaum’s argument: one historical, the other theoretical. Outside some questionable negative evidence, ⁶ there is no affirmative evidence that Socrates supported the democracy and some reason to think he did not. ⁷ According to Vlastos (1991: 48), while the Platonic Socrates ‘has an elaborate political theory whose ranking order of constitutions places democracy with the worst of contemporary forms of government’, the historical Socrates ‘has no such theory’. Although Socrates ‘says that he prefers the city with her laws to any contemporary state’, Vlastos points out that ‘he leaves the rationale of the preference unexplained’ and is ‘harshly critical of political goings-on in Athens’. In the passage in Apology (Plato 1984: 30E-31A) upon which Nussbaum relies, Socrates says a lot about truth and virtue, but nothing about democracy. ⁸ Indeed, Socrates emphasizes that he never spoke in public or before the Assembly on policy matters. ‘For there is no human being who will preserve his life if he genuinely opposes either you or any other multitude and prevents many unjust and unlawful things from happening in the city’. (31D-E) Vlastos (1991: 240–41) concludes that Socrates was basically apolitical. ⁹

No one disputes that good democratic decision-making requires critical thinking. But, it is not clear that the Socratic version is best suited for that purpose. Socratic method is deductive, premised on the law of noncontradiction. ¹⁰ It seeks analytic truth; it intends to uncover the meaning of moral concepts such as piety, virtue, and justice. Some public policy questions (such as abortion, euthanasia, or affirmative action) can benefit from conceptual analysis of this sort. But many moral and policy questions (such as the role of climate change in exacerbating extreme weather, the safety and efficacy of vaccines, or the effect of tariffs on the economy) turn on the assessment of complex facts. And, as Vlastos (1971: 16) notes, ‘Socratic knowledge has all too little interest in facts’. This deficit, Vlastos suggests, often led him astray: ‘[O]f the other way of knowing, the empirical way, Socrates had little understanding, and he paid for his ignorance by conceit of knowledge’.

Indeed, Nussbaum’s example – whether the borrower should return a mentally ill person’s knife – shows that even questions of justice require an appreciation of context and consequences. This is yet more apparent when one contrasts it with Nussbaum’s (1997: 24–25) others example, the case of a doctor deciding whether to tell the truth to a terminally ill patient. It was once common to withhold such information on the view that the patient would be better off not knowing. Today, such behavior is widely seen as violating the patient’s autonomy. Nussbaum (1997: 25) argues that Socrates’s example clarifies this result because it helps us distinguish ‘patients’ rights from patients’ interests’. The distinction is useful, but it neither decides the knife case – which, I think, calls for a white lie – nor explains the result in the patients’ rights case. The difference in intuitions arises neither from a principle requiring truthfulness nor from the distinction between rights and interests, but from a different assessment of the relative weight of those two considerations.

Critical thinking, in other words, takes multiple forms. Socratic questioning is not the obvious fit for the normative and practical problems faced by a democratic polity. As Benjamin Barber (1996: 365–66) notes: ‘In politics, to seek a “best policy” is not a matter of disclosing a cognitive truth, but a matter of recognizing adversarial interests, of forging common values, in deciding what to do in common at the very moment that we cannot agree on the “truth” or even on whether there is such a thing’. Nussbaum (1997: 27) identifies Socrates with deliberative democracy. Barber’s point is that deliberation is not deductive; it is about constructing normative values through the exercise of collective reason.

Practical problems of policy, on the other hand, would seem more amenable to a Deweyan experimentalism. Dewey (2018: 202) argues that the scientific method provides ‘the best tools which humanity has so far devised for effectively directed reflection’. Experimentalism of this sort is not trial and error, which is ‘at the mercy of circumstances’, but the ‘discovery of the detailed connections of our activities and what happens in consequence’. (2018: 154–55) It entails responsibility – that is, ‘the disposition to consider … probable consequences’ and ‘what further things one is committed to by acceptance’ of those findings (2018: 190).

At its core, though, Socratic thinking has one vital thing in common with these less blinkered approaches. It affirms the agency of the decision-maker: In pressing his interlocutors with questions, Nussbaum (1997: 25) explains, ‘Socrates shows them that the demand for reasons has a bearing on what they will actually choose’. In this way, she (30) says, ‘it produces people who are responsible for themselves’. ¹¹

The humanities also offer the perspectives of diverse others and promote our capacity for empathy. ‘Habits of empathy and conjecture’, Nussbaum (1997: 90) argues, ‘conduce to a certain kind of citizenship’. Strikingly (though perhaps not surprisingly), this citizenship takes a liberal form in which the separateness, privacy, and freedom of others is respected. (Ibid.) Literature, in particular, achieves this by asking us to assume the lives and perspectives of characters unlike ourselves in situations (including poverty and discrimination) that may be alien to us (94–99).

There is much here with which to agree (See Winter 1989: 2277; Winter 2001: 122–38, 206–13). Still, this account is both anachronistic and reductive. Theater, we know, played an important role in democratic Athens. ‘The tragic festivals of the fifth century B.C., Nussbaum (1997: 93) reports, “were civic festivals during which every other civic function stopped’. These festivals were not about individualism in its modern form, but were reflective of a particular moment in Greek political development (Vernant & Vidal-Nanquet, 1990: 7, 29). At the same time, there is something askew in an account that reads Euripides’s Medea as a play about ‘the possibility of being abandoned by one’s husband and in consequence totally without social support’. (Nussbaum 1997: 94) One suspects, rather, that Athenians were being called on to judge the pitiless actions of both Jason and Medea and draw the appropriate lessons from the tragic consequences of Medea’s rage at the injustice she suffered. As Nussbaum (1997: 20) says earlier in the argument: ‘The tragic poets depicted scenes of reasoning about central moral issues that imitated, and in turn shaped, the evolving culture of public debate in the democratic assembly’. Just so, as Vernant and Vidal-Nanquet (1990: 23–29) explain: Greek tragedy plumbed the dynamics of moral agency in the face of the uncertainties introduced by the transition from a culture of religious and heroic myth to a regime of self-governance through the law of the polis.

Good democratic decision-making does require empathy and compassion; though, more particularly, it depends upon mutual recognition and respect (Winter 2012). It is true, too, that literature helps cultivate what Nussbaum (1997: 93) calls ‘narrative imagination’. But this comes only on a foundation of the ordinary ‘moral imagination’ that makes moral reasoning possible in the first place. ¹² Moral reasoning, Mark Johnson (1993) explains, requires more than empathy; it requires the ability to play out in one’s imagination multiple scenarios to assess the range of possible actions, the effects of one’s choices on others, and their attendant ethical implications. ¹³ We can see this process at work in Socrates’s example of the borrowed knife. To know what to do requires the moral imagination to understand the mental state of the lender and to foresee that he might use the knife to harm himself or others. Imagination of this sort is an everyday capacity that we take for granted. These capacities were lacking in the parents of Ethan Crumbley, the troubled Michigan teen who in 2021 killed four schoolmates with the handgun his parents had bought him. But we do not think to ourselves, ‘if only the Crumbleys had read more literature’. (The converse, however, is true. If the Crumbleys were people with empathy and insight, they probably would have been more avid readers.) Moral imagination, Johnson (1993: 199) says, is a matter of ‘refining our perception of character and situations and of developing empathetic imagination to take up the part of others’. It is enriched by literature, but it must be learned early in life though social interaction first in the family and then on the playground and in the classroom.

The classic tragedies enlarge our sensibilities in another, equally critical way. Antigone, Medea, and Oedipus Rex still speak to us (or, at least, those of us who still read them) because – despite our technological advancement and notwithstanding very real differences of language, culture, and values – we humans remain mortal, vulnerable, and interdependent. As Nussbaum (1997: 93) notes, the tragedies ‘are obsessed with the possibilities and weaknesses of human life as such’. We are, in Vlastos’s (1991: 109) elegant phrase, ‘creatures of time and sensuality’. The tragedies, as Nussbaum (1997: 91) says, confront us with ‘our common vulnerability…. [H]uman beings are needy, incomplete creatures who are in many ways dependent on circumstances beyond their control’. Just as Socratic questioning highlights the responsibility we bear for our choices, literature reflects back to us the fact of our finitude, fallibility, precarity, and mortality.

Not Past nor Foreign

The Czech philosopher Jan Patočka (1996: 139–44) offers the provocative thesis that politics and history begin with the emergence of philosophy. For prehistorical humans, he explains, religion and the natural world present life as ‘self-evident and given’. (141) Only with Socratic questioning of the nature of things does ‘the radical question of meaning based on the shaking of the naïve, directly accepted meaning of life’ arise. (143) Philosophy gives rise to politics and history, on Patočka’s account, because it opens up ‘the realm of human possibilities’ in which freedom is understood ‘explicitly as something that is to be carried out, as a possibility we can accomplish, never just accept’. (142).

As an historical matter, the claim about the priority of philosophy to politics is problematic. The democratic reforms of Cleisthenes – enlarging the Boule from four to five hundred and moving the selection of its members from the clans to tribes organized around the demes or local administrative districts – occurred in 507-08 B.C. ¹⁴ (Ostwald 1986: 24–25; Aristotle 2002: 20–21) Neither Protagoras nor Socrates had yet been born. ¹⁵ The polis, moreover, emerged centuries earlier largely in response to external military threats (Patočka 1996: 41–44). Patočka’s point, I think, is not meant to be descriptive. It is a conceptual claim about the epistemological preconditions for democracy.

Indeed, Greek tragedy emerged as the public form in which the implications of contingency and agency were worked out. Vernant and Vidal-Nanquet (1990: 25–26) explain that ‘the true material of tragedy is the social thought peculiar to the city-state; in particular the legal thought that was then in the process of being evolved…. It takes as its subject the man actually living out this debate, forced to make a decisive choice, to orient his activity in a universe of ambiguous values where nothing is ever stable or unequivocal’.

As long as events are understood as the product of fate, divine plan, or the natural order of things, there cannot be true politics. One responds to the gods or fate with propitiation, not initiative. Politics entails taking responsibility for the consequences of one’s actions. It ‘is possible’, Patočka (1996: 148) argues, ‘only with the conception of bestowing meaning on life out of freedom and for it…. Humans can be that only in a community of equals. For that reason, the beginning of history in a strict sense is the polis’. As Ellen Meiksins Wood (2008: 43) explains:

In order to question the existing arrangements, there must, at the minimum, be some belief in humanity’s ability to control its own circumstances, some sense of the separation of human beings from an unchangeable natural order, and of the social from the natural realm. There must be … an idea that history involves conscious human effort to solve human problems.… Such a view … [is] associated with some direct experience of social change and mobility, some practical distance from the inexorable cycles of nature, which … come[s] with urban civilization.

Democratic politics and history as we know it depend on this understanding. Which is not to say there were no histories prior to 5th century Athens. History as chronicle or sequence of events was practiced throughout the Middle East, Asia, and elsewhere. But, while these early narrative histories understood ‘the past as something important for the successful future’, their function was to provide ‘ritualistic writings, cultomatic records, observations of what is fortunate and unfortunate in events and acts’. (Patočka 1996: 29) The Bible introduced a clear vision of the nation as the bearer of history. (139) But, these histories still worked ‘as a drama that unfolds before our eyes’. (49) It is only with the recognition of contingency – that events are not ordained by gods or the fates – that political self-governance and history as a product of human agency become imaginable.

What changes in Greek thought is an understanding of freedom and meaning as themselves the product of human action. Hence the surviving first sentence of Protagoras’s treatise On Truth: ‘Of all things the measure is man: of those that are, that they are; and of those that are not, that they are not’. Protagoras warns against taking the argument literally (Plato 2009: 166A). Rather, he ‘takes his systematic point of departure in human knowledge precisely insofar as it is human’. (Oehler, 2010: 213; see also Schiller 2016. Values are humanly constructed: For Protagoras, the laws of the polis are what make citizens wise by laying down the guidelines for living (Plato 2009: 326D). Concomitantly, ‘the true aim of education is not the acquisition of learning but the training of the citizen’ (Gillespie 1910: 470; Plato 2009: 166B). Thus, Patočka (1996: 43) says: ‘Humans … become wise only when they themselves act, accomplishing their deeds in the atmosphere of freedom ensured by the laws of the polis’.

Dewey (2018: 65) credits Hegel (though we should also mention Edmond Burke!) with the rediscovery of the Greek idea ‘that great historic institutions are active factors in the intellectual nurture of mind’.

The weaknesses of an abstract individualistic philosophy were evident to him; he saw the impossibility of making a clean sweep of historical institutions, of treating them as despotisms begot in artifice and nurtured in fraud. In his philosophy of history and society culminated the efforts of the whole series of German writers … to appreciate the nurturing influence of the great collective institutional products of humanity. For those who learned the lesson of this movement, it was henceforth impossible to conceive of institutions or of culture as artificial. It destroyed completely – in idea, not in fact – the psychology that regarded ‘mind’ as a ready-made possession of a naked individual by showing the significance of ‘objective mind’ – language, government, art, religion – in the formation of individual minds. (64–65) ¹⁶

Effective action is collective action (Arendt 1958: 245). So, too, reason and agency depend on infrastructures of culture and history. Democracy and humanistic knowledge are not separate practices, but one integral process.

When Dewey (1939a: 124) says democracy and humanism have always been connected, his immediate reference is to faith in the potentialities of human nature. In a parallel passage later that same year, Dewey (1939b) refers to ‘cooperative communication’, the free ‘interchange of ideas’, and ‘mutual respect and tolerance’. All important democratic values, to be sure. But they do not explain what Dewey thinks humanism offers to democracy.

For that, we must return to his earlier discussion in Democracy and Education. There, Dewey’s resolute non-dualism leads him to bring the two together in an interesting (though here truncated) way. In Athenian thought, Dewey (2018: 280–84) says, the separation of reason and experience served to mark off the aristocratic classes (who participated as citizens) from the artisans, laborers, and slaves (who did not). Enlightenment science reversed this polarity, breaking with the conceptualism of the ancient and medieval worlds to ‘find out what nature was really like’. (284) But, ‘the immediate effect of modern science was to accentuate the dualism of matter and mind, and thereby to establish the physical and humanistic studies as two disconnected groups’. (303) In later industrial society, this dualism was inscribed in the difference between ‘a leisure and a laboring class, … between those whose pursuits involve a minimum of self-directive thought …, and those who are concerned more directly with things of the intelligence and with the control of the activities of others’. (271) ¹⁷ Workers’ education thus concentrates on the skills and knowledge necessary to participate in the economy – Rubio’s welders. But the workers do so largely in isolation from the social aims of the enterprises in which they function. (Think of the call center or assembly line.) ‘In what is termed politics, democratic social organization makes provision for this direct participation in control; in the economic region, control remains external and autocratic’. (274–77) Separation of subject matter goes hand-in-hand with domination. There is, Dewey (308) concludes, ‘a close connection between science and industrial development on the one hand, and between literary and aesthetic cultivation and an aristocratic social organization on the other’. And it must be abolished, he says, ‘if society is to be truly democratic’.

The converse is also true. Humanistic studies facilitate agency – though in a less rationalist, more holistic way than we saw above.

For Dewey (306), ‘“humanism” means at bottom being imbued with an intelligent sense of human interests’. It is not enough to know how to do something; if one has no sense of purpose in the doing, it becomes mechanical. To be ‘vague and uncertain as to what is intended and careless in observation of conditions of its realization’ is to be, in a word, mindless. Mind, in Dewey’s (141) non-dualist view, ‘is a name for a course of action in so far that it is intelligently directed’. It is not separate from the action one takes or the material one works with. ‘We say of an interested person both that he has lost himself in some affair and that he has found himself in it’. (135) The opposite of thoughtful action is routine; it accepts things as they are and avoids responsibility for the consequences. ‘Reflection is the acceptance of such responsibility’. (155–56) Any study that ‘increases concern for the values of life, any study producing greater sensitivities to social well-being and greater ability to promote that well-being is humane study’. (306; see also 342) By promoting common aims, encouraging reflection and responsibility, and cultivating directed, mindful action, study of the humanities develops agency and thus citizens suited for self-governance.

Contingency, complexity, ambiguity, plurality, and uncertainty are what characterize the human condition as such. Both democracy and the humanities are adaptations to the uncertainties of mortal life. Democracy responds by providing a flexible mode of governance that – unless thwarted by a too-rigid constitutionalism ¹⁸ – allows for ever-revisable solutions to the problems of the day. This is the experimentalism of Dewey and William James. The humanities – history and anthropology, as well as literature – respond by recording how those who preceded us struggled with these basic human concerns. Their successes and failures widen and inform our collective understanding as we engage with one another in addressing current problems (Dewey 2018: 43, 79–82, 86).

The model of the sciences and the discourses of religion, ethnonationalism, and economics all preach a gospel of control. (Winter 2010: 108-13) Yet, young people can plainly see that their present – even, potentially, their survival through the next day of school – is uncertain. Their economic prospects are gloomy. The very future is made insecure by a harshly changing climate.

We owe it to them to double-down on the humanities. Study of the humanities offers the perspectives of diverse others, promotes our capacity for empathy, and teaches tolerance of and openness to uncertainty. But, more than that, the humanities teach knowledge of and compassion for ourselves. The struggles of Antigone, the anguish of Medea, the suffering of Oedipus speak to us in our finitude. We are not alone in our predicament. ¹⁹ Humans through history have struggled with epistemic uncertainty, moral ambiguity, physical precarity, loss, and emotional distress. The humanities provide us with resources for managing our finitude. We learn from them how to cope. The humanities, in short, serve as the user manual for us as humans.