The humanities everywhere are today in danger of being eclipsed by the natural sciences and some of the social sciences. The reasons are complicated, but I believe they are--at least partly--attributable to the fact that the nature of humanistic knowledge is frequently misunderstood, and certainly, at the moment, it is undervalued.

Today I want to offer some thoughts on the challenging nature of the humanities, their strong links to other fields of learning, and why they are essential, not only to any serious definition of education, but also to the health of society as a whole.

The humanities are obviously untidy. The kind of knowledge they offer us is not susceptible to elegant proofs, such as we find in mathematics; or to parsimonious theories together with verifiable data.

Instead, the humanities and the arts thrive on the pattern, texture, and flux of experience, where very little is provable or predictable. They are less abstract in what they consider to be knowledge than either the sciences or the social sciences. They prefer the audible, tangible, visual, and palpable. When we are reading Anna Karenina, watching Othello, wrestling with Thucydides, or reciting Keats, we know that we are about as close to the vital signs of human experience as any representation is likely to take us.

What does it mean to learn--or to gain knowledge--in this way?

The purpose is not so much closure along a single line of inquiry--as we might find in the sciences--but illuminations that are hard won because they can only be discovered in the very midst of life, with all its vicissitudes. If we are fortunate and alert, we may gradually learn how to see more clearly the nature and possible meaning of events; to be better attuned to the nuances, inflections, and character of other human beings; to weigh values with more precision; to judge on the basis of increasingly fine distinctions; and perhaps to become more effective, generous, and wise in our actions.

As we think about the characteristics of the humanities, however, we also quickly discover that it is difficult to draw a convincing line between these fields and the social and natural sciences. It is not possible, for example, to read very far into Aristotle, or Plato's Republic, without being thrust into questions about political theory and practice; the role of law in human societies; civic as compared to moral obligations; physics as well as metaphysics; economics, cosmology, and even the nature of plants and animals. Great humanistic texts, in other words, lead us very quickly into other realms of knowledge; and great scientific work leads us straight back into the domain of the humanities and arts, as well as the social sciences. When it comes to central questions of the meaning of human life, neither the humanities, the sciences, nor the social sciences can be sovereign.

*

I want to touch very briefly on one more critical role of the humanities: that is, the fundamental contribution that the humanities can and must make to the health of democratic societies, and to international cooperation in the world today.

If the humanities and the arts are the realm where experience is encountered directly and dramatized, as well as filtered and evaluated, and where values are clarified and modified under the pressures of existence, then we also need to remember they are also the spheres in which different values can collide or clash: sometimes amicably, sometimes acrimoniously, and often tragically. We do not have to describe particular examples in order to remember the nationalistic, religious, racial, ethnic, and social conflicts of this century--all conflicts of values. Here, the humanities can help us to cultivate a respect for the more modest but vital values of tolerance, restraint, compromise, and a readiness to entertain the possibility that we may often be wrong.

The late Isaiah Berlin, in his wonderful book The Crooked Timber of Humanity, held out the hope that these inevitable clashes and collisions of value "even if they cannot be avoided, can be softened." "The first public obligation," Berlin wrote, "is to avoid extremes of suffering....The best that can be done, as a general rule, is to maintain a precarious equilibrium that will prevent the occurrence of desperate situations, of intolerable choices--that is the first requirement for a decent society."

Isaiah Berlin understood that important values are given meaning and expression by the force of strong convictions. But he also knew that strong convictions, if carried forward with unmitigated ferocity, can literally destroy human values.

There is, alas, no easy way to inject such wisdom into the world at large. But it is just such wisdom, grounded in a respect for human rights and human values, that the humanities and arts can offer. This wisdom may or may not prevail, but without great and humane minds to articulate such a vision, we would have absolutely no chance at all.