PARTISAN REVIEW
519
for no other reason than that in them the teaching function is ex–
tremely intimate and peculiarly vital. We may hence ask what is the
essential role of the humanities in the production system of a tech–
nobureaucratic order whose dominant values are characteristically ex–
pressed in forms of utilities and commodities? What is their essential
or overriding role in the culture of such an order?
Clearly that role is still custodial and transmissive and has largely
to do with activities of education. These activities tend to differ in aim,
quality and effectiveness at the different levels of our system of higher
education; but at all levels they are profoundly influenced by social
changes and decisions of every kind. The massive Federal support of
higher education in America provides us all with unavoidable in–
stances of such decisions. Federal policy decisions, in this context, are
tantamount to interventions and have a profound effect on particular
disciplines, institutions and even larger parts of the system. I think it is
fair
to
say that in this context humanists have not begun to do their
homework, and that most work in the humanities continues
to
go on
without self-reflection on this and related scores.
Yet even in this state certain pertinent questions are beginning
to
be asked.
If
the humanities comprise those disciplines in which
values-along with language and history-are central and inseparable
from the problematics of the disciplines themselves, then what is the
value of such values? Can they be reduced to easily exchangeable
units of satisfaction, such as dollars-as they can be in such monolithic
social systems as armies or large business organizations? After all,
humanistic research does not produce "results" that are comparable
to those arrived at in applied science, social science or technology. Nor
does humanistic education produce "results" in the sense that techni–
cal training or preparing students for employment normally does.
Nevertheless, it seems to me unavoidable that humanists
will
have to
prepare themselves in the near future to answer with some adequacy
the questions that the foregoing assertions fend off and negate. Can
training or education in the humanities be compared to preparation
for employment or technical training--can such training and educa–
tion be, as it were, commodity-weighted? If not, then what are the
functions of the humanities, the humanistic disciplines-in terms of
our current actuality, in terms of the role they are now being asked to
play, and in terms of the role that we think they should in point of fact
