Comments on: In Praise of Pleasure http://nationalhumanitiescenter.org/on-the-human/2012/02/in-praise-of-pleasure/ a project of the National Humanities Center Mon, 13 Feb 2012 19:42:46 +0000 hourly 1 By: alex rosenberg http://nationalhumanitiescenter.org/on-the-human/2012/02/in-praise-of-pleasure/comment-page-1/#comment-8999 Mon, 13 Feb 2012 19:42:46 +0000 http://nationalhumanitiescenter.org/on-the-human/?p=3146#comment-8999 I’m glad to be taken to task by Geoffrey Harpham in so indulgent and learned a manner. Pleasure, enjoyment, enrichment, the rewards of reading, listening, watching and looking, are no less important than wisdom and knowledge. Our age has ceded higher priority to knowledge than to enjoyment, and so tempted humanists to try to provide knowledge instead of what the narrative and the plastic arts (and the non-narrative ones for that matter) can offer. The distraction that has tempted so many humanists in no way reduces the importance of the humanities. It only reduces their audience and their impact, to every one’s disadvantage.

]]> By: Bill Benzon http://nationalhumanitiescenter.org/on-the-human/2012/02/in-praise-of-pleasure/comment-page-1/#comment-8974 Wed, 08 Feb 2012 12:43:23 +0000 http://nationalhumanitiescenter.org/on-the-human/?p=3146#comment-8974 Well, it’s one thing to argue that, for example, the newer psychologies and other developments are relevant to humanistic inquiry and ought to be taken into account. It’s something rather different to argue that they’ll enable a clean sweep of the humanistic stables and the consilient triumph of science. Though I’ve pursued these newer disciplines as ardently as any humanist, and longer than most, I’m deeply skeptical of consilience happy-talk.

But enough of that.

Graham Harman has a recent post giving us a glimpse into a new book by Bruno Latour. The English title is An Inquiry Into Modes of Existence and it’s scheduled, I believe, for 2013 at Harvard UP (the French will be out later this year). Judging from what Harman says, it points to another way of conceptualizing these matters:

Instead of everything being part of a big flat network, there are different and incompatible networks, each with its own modes of veridicition, its own “conditions of felicity and infelicity.” … One example, for instance, would be that law doesn’t have the same truth-conditions as scientific reference. Law links together chains of documents and other evidence and comes out with a result that one hopes is something like justice. Law does not function on the basis of a correspondence theory of truth.

A different mode of veridicition, that seems right to me.

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