Session 6:What Kind of Knowledge Do the Humanities Produce?

Prof. Michel Chaouli
Director, Institute of German Studies, 

Adjct. Professor of Comparative Literature & Cognitive Science,
Indiana University, USA

We did note, in the last session, that there are two preoccupations in this course – one regarding knowledge production within disciplines, the other regarding interdisciplinarity, which has been read as comparison of methodologies between disciplines, methodological insights from one discipline that might impinge on how another is done, or the framing of problems in the space between disciplines, and in a different way from classical disciplinary work. The question of knowledge production per se too has come up in terms of contexts – whose knowledge, but the whose knowledge question has not always been officially tied to the how knowledge question … either a separate question in the domain of ethics etc … so that connection remains to be explored in its fullness, and perhaps today could be an effort in that direction. What we did in this session was introduce another kind of dialogue between two proposals – one for interdisciplinarity as a programmatic activity versus an interruptive one, and one for a robust exploration of the 2-cultures thesis. So we had Prof. Michel Chaouli making, at the outset, a clarification about his position on interdisciplinarity – good if accidentally occurring, but doomed if taken up as protocol. In some senses, he also touched one of the core concerns of this course, which has been seeking to explore the very meanings of interdisciplinarity as well as the current intellectual investments in the word – an exercise the goals of which are not fixed. He also clarified this point by stating that disciplines are not to be distinguished by their objects of study, but rather by their methodologies – the kinds of questions and concepts they cluster around. Sometimes, trying to do things in a programmatic way with multiple disciplines might result in a loss of sharpness of focus. Sometimes the difficulty is exacerbated in the case of disciplines that are closer to one another. Interdisciplinarity, then, might be an emergent phenomenon, not a programmatic one. Prof. Chaouli went on to offer perspectives on how disciplinary work is done in the parts of literary studies where interpretation is the chief enterprise, relating to the question of how interdisciplinary projects are connected to disciplinary projects.

“How do I speak about an experience that is fundamentally mine alone, in a way that it can become yours as well?” was the core question Prof. Chaouli began with. He offered the concept of exemplary normativity in Kant but different in range from Kant to make sense of this question. Kant suggests that beauty is a different mode of standing in relation to the world, than the cognitive and the moral. The kind of pleasure it gives is also different from that available from the body alone, or from the moral. Beauty cannot be derived from rules of reason, and thus fails to carry with it the scientific validity of scientific reason or the moral. It is particular, cannot appeal to a judgement outside. In literary studies, Prof. Chaouli observed, or in the non-natural sciences in general, while we have been insisting on the heterogeneity of our objects of study, we seem to think the subjects are as replaceable as the observers of natural science. From such an assumption is born “the reader”, “the viewer”. This is a giving up on the interpretative core of these fields, that relies on the fact that we are not detached observers. Kant goes on to make a difference between the subjective and the private, to state that while interpretation of beauty might be completely subjective, but not private. “He must not call it beautiful if it pleases only him.” This is a kind of subjectivity that is universal. Experience of the aesthetic is therefore irreducibly subjective i.e. not replaceable like an observation; it is not private or withdrawn; it is not a 3^rd person view, but not entirely a 1^st person account, but responsive to the presence of others – not merely in the sense of influence, but a recognition of their claim in their experience of the text that extends beyond them. In other words, I respond to a normative dimension in them .. this notion of subjective universality means that it is not constrained by particular contexts of the person experiencing them – pure in this sense. Of course this is also not driven by reason or born with us, but learned, cultivated. It is a particular kind of judgement because I do not know if I have fully fulfilled the conditions for its success.

Where, then, do the norms come from? How do they operate? The route leading out of this seeming conundrum for Kant is in the idea of exemplarity. The exemplar is a singular occurrence. It is not an example. In its very singularity, it gives rise to a rule. Not one that gives rise to future rules. It is an example of a universal rule that one cannot produce. Exemplary normativity, then, has the form of norm without its content. This asserts a claim that asks us to be responsive to it. Aesthetic experience is directed not to our reason but to our feeling of pleasure. Kant comes to a notion of the senses communis to mediate the felt claims of normativity as opposed to those articulated through concepts.

This notion of Kant’s, Prof. Chaouli proposed – of exemplary normativity – may also hold for our accounts of aesthetic experience – the kind of work that literary critics do – the work of aesthetic reasoning. It is produced discursively, ultimately, by force of example.

In the 2^nd half of the session, Prof. Chaouli went on to discuss, briefly, the three texts that had been put out – as texts that discuss a relation between the particular and the universal – on both the subject and the object side. Karl Popper’s notion of falsifiability is one such. Popper’s argument on induction, against Hume’s argument, suggests that you have a hypothesis – a conjecture – that you then take to the world; you do not work inductively. Dilthey suggests that both the human and natural sciences come about as achievements of abstraction; they are not just there in the world. The possible differences are in the exploration of the inner life of man in the human sciences, studying externalities in so far as they have a bearing on intentions, meanings. Gadamer’s text suggests that “method” is inadequate to what goes on in the humanities. He offers concepts of “personal formation”, sensus communis, judgement, and taste, as an alternative. These are rich alternate notions of producing agreement or disagreement that are not logically bound to an inductive or deductive reasoning. All four are ways of mediating the particular and the universal without concepts that will wedge the particular into categories given by the universal. Taste is a way of orienting yourself in the world based on exemplars. Gadamer thinks the mode of judgement Kant offers on the aesthetic actually pervades our entire life – moral and cognitive as well.