The Epistemic Goals of the Humanities

Abstract

The sciences aim to get at the truth about the nature of the world. Do the humanities have a similar goal—namely, to get at the truth about things like novels, paintings, and historical events?¹

For some, the idea that the humanities aim to get at the truth about such objects seems strange and mistaken, even off-putting. As Michiel Leezenberg and Gerard de Vries put the idea in their recent book, History and Philosophy of the Humanities:

In the humanities, it is not so much ‘truth’ that is sought after, but rather explications of the ‘meaning’ of texts, works of art, or cultural artefacts … Whereas striving to discover the truth is an activity with a clear end goal—the Truth—interpretation is in principle a never-ending undertaking. When interpreting something, we are not concerned with recovering the uniquely correct hidden meaning of a literary work of art, for example, but rather with adding new meanings to already existing readings. At stake is not a competition over truth claims but instead a proliferation of interpretations. (Leezenberg and de Vries 2017, p. 24)

On this way of thinking, the aims of scientific research and the aims of humanistic research are distinct. While the sciences aim to get at the truth about the world, the humanities aim at something different, perhaps something along the lines of ‘explications of meaning’ or ‘new interpretations’, where these things can be more or less satisfying or maybe more or less interesting, but not exactly true or false.

I acknowledge that there is something attractive about this view. Looking for ‘the’ true interpretation of a Bach fugue, or the Dao De Ching, or the ‘Quiet Revolution’ in Quebec does seem like a mistake. At the same time, it seems clear that scholarship in the humanities pervasively searches for the truth. It is hard to doubt, for instance, that when we inquire about the following that we are hoping to find the truth about our questions, for instance:

Art History: Whether Vermeer used a camera obscura in developing his paintings.

Linguistics: Whether the elements contained in words (morphemes) and the elements contained in sentences (words or syntactic constituents) follow the same principles of combination.

Theology: Whether St Paul authored the Epistle to the Ephesians.

History: Whether there were more plague deaths in eighteenth-century India than in the seventeenth.

Musicology: Whether ragtime influenced the early development of jazz.

Naturally, questions like this have an element of vagueness. For instance, what counts as a plague death? And what counts as ‘influenced’? But we can grant all this and even more—that the truth in these areas is often hard to find, for instance, and that there are often ongoing disputes about whether a certain answer is true—and yet still hold when we pose questions of the form ‘Whether p?’ in the humanities that the truth is our goal, and that we sometimes, indeed often, achieve that goal.

Note, after all, that the truth is often hard to find in the sciences too, and that they are often arenas of ongoing dispute. They also frequently deal with vague concepts: What counts as ‘a death from Covid-19’? Does the virus simply need to be present in a person’s system, or is more required? Yet it would be a large claim indeed to say that truth is not the goal of the sciences and that they do not sometimes, indeed often, achieve it. The humanities are therefore in good company in this respect.

I

Different Questions. Often scholars in the humanities do not just ask questions of the form ‘Whether p?’ Sometimes scholars ask questions of the form ‘Why p?’, and in cases like this there is often not a cut-and-dried correct answer. For instance, to the question, ‘Why did the Quiet Revolution occur in Quebec in the 1960s and 1970s?’ it seems like a mistake to say that there is one true, correct answer. Rather, there are a variety of factors that contributed to the event: for instance, a growing disillusionment with the Catholic Church’s influence on education and culture, a realignment of politics into federalist and separatist factions, and so on.

But while it is a mistake to suppose that there is one, true, correct explanation of the Quiet Revolution, some factors nonetheless genuinely had an impact on the Revolution (the ones just noted, for instance) and others did not. ‘The price of tea in China’ at the time, as the saying goes, did not affect the Revolution, nor did the number of horses being born in Buenos Aires. So correctly identifying the factors that had an impact—call these ‘the contributing factors’—and those that did not is still a guiding aim of this research, even if identifying ‘the’ (singular) truth about why the Revolution occurred is plausibly not an aim, and indeed is plausibly a will-o’-the-wisp, a fiction that does not exist in reality.

Note that this pattern holds outside of the humanities as well, as when we try to answer a question like ‘Why did the car crash occur?’ Suppose the crash occurred on an icy road, when visibility was poor, when the driver had been drinking, and when the brakes on the car were worn down and overdue for a checkup.² Someone who claimed that the icy roads were ‘the’ cause of the crash would be making an important mistake. The icy roads were part of the story, and they contributed to the crash. But the roads were not the whole story, and they were not ‘the’ story.

Our understanding of the crash grows, however, as we learn more about the contributing factors, and as our ability to answer ‘What if things had been different?’ questions increases.³ What if the visibility had been significantly better, and all of the other factors remained the same? Would the crash still have occurred? And what if the road had been slightly less icy? Someone with a better understanding of the crash and its conditions will have a superior ability to answer questions like these, and their understanding will improve as their ability to answer these questions grows.

Someone could also have a flawed understanding of the crash if they point to factors that did not make a difference. Suppose Jupiter was aligned with Mars at the time of the crash, and suppose (taking a risk here) that the alignment had nothing to do with the crash. If you think that the alignment was a contributing factor, you would be mistaken. You would have a flawed understanding of why the crash occurred, because the factor to which you pointed was actually irrelevant.

Returning to the question of truth in the humanities, we can therefore say: if someone were to claim that truth is the goal of inquiry in the sciences and everyday life, but something other than truth is the goal of inquiry in the humanities, we should make sure that we are comparing apples to apples. In the humanities, just as in the sciences and everyday life, when scholars pose questions of the form ‘Whether p?’ they are typically looking for a true or correct answer to the question, and plausibly they often find it. Further, when scholars in the humanities pose questions of the form ‘Why p?’ there is often a complex story to tell as an answer, with some scholars emphasizing one set of factors and others emphasizing another, and we are often hard-pressed to identify ‘the’ factor that explains it all. But it seems that we can grant this point, acknowledging that there is often no single, correct answer to a ‘Why p?’ question, and still hold that getting to the truth about the factors that contributed to p is our aim when we pose questions of this form—in the sciences, in the humanities, and in everyday life.

II

Understanding Domains. So far I have focused on questions in the humanities that take relatively narrow forms, namely, ‘Whether p?’ and ‘Why p?’

But sometimes inquiry in the humanities is more wide-ranging and general, where the goal is not simply to answer a particular question, but to come to understand a whole topic or subject matter.⁴

The topics or subject matters we try to understand can be more coarse-grained or more fine-grained. At a coarse-grained level we can try to understand things like:

But they can also be more fine-grained, as in:

What does it take to understand domains like these? Here I make a few general observations:

1. Understanding in these areas comes in degrees. Someone’s understanding of the history plays of Shakespeare, for example, can become richer and deeper over time.

2. Growth in understanding is tied to ‘knowing one’s way around’ these domains.

3. It is fruitful to think of these domains as constituted by ‘possibility spaces’—that is, as spaces with elements that depend upon and relate to one another in various ways, and where changes in some of these elements will lead (or fail to lead) to changes in others.

4. Growth in understanding is thus tied to ‘knowing one’s way around’ these possibility spaces.

5. The possibility spaces of the humanities are constituted by elements invested with intentionality, meaning, and value.

Focus for a moment on claim 5. Some have argued that because the objects of the humanities are invested with intentionality, meaning and value, the sort of understanding achieved in the humanities is fundamentally different than the understanding that is achieved in the sciences. On this view, especially associated with the nineteenth-century German philosophers Wilhelm Dilthey and Gustav Droysen, the fact that the humanities have these distinctive objects means that understanding in the humanities is an entirely different beast. Indeed, so distinctive is the sort of epistemic accomplishment we see in the humanities that according to this tradition it merits its own word, Verstehen (understanding), and the epistemic accomplishment achieved in the sciences merits its own word, Erklären (explanation).⁵

While I take this Verstehen approach to possess significant insights, and while I do in fact believe there is something important and distinctive about understanding in the humanities,⁶ I also believe that the differences between understanding in the sciences and the humanities have been greatly exaggerated. A crucial thing to see is that understanding in the sciences and understanding in the humanities both share traits 1–4 above, and on our view traits 1–4 constitute the heart of understanding. The fact that the objects of the sciences and humanities differ (with the latter concerned with intentionality, meaning and value) means that ultimately we do indeed find different species or kinds of understanding in these areas. But I submit that it is important to emphasize the deep similarities that exist because of shared traits 1–4, before turning to the differences.⁷

Thus note, to begin with, that the topics or subject matters that we try to understand in the sciences can again be more coarse-grained or more fine-grained. For instance, we can attempt to understand:

Clearly too, our understanding of (say) the limbic system of the brain can grow and improve, as we learn more about the different elements of this domain and how these various elements depend upon and relate to one another—that is, as we learn more about the possibility spaces that constitute the domain.

We can also try to make these claims more precise. How exactly does our understanding of these domains grow and improve? And how can we cash out the metaphor of ‘knowing one’s way around a possibility space’?

I propose that there are at least three different ways in which our understanding can improve, or three different ‘dimensions’ along which growth in understanding can occur.⁸

Dimension A. Our understanding of a domain improves as we get a better sense of the ‘furniture’ of that domain—that is, as we get a better sense of the different elements or constituents that make up the domain.⁹

Thus note that one way in which fMRI scans improve our understanding of the brain, or massive telescopes improve our understanding of the far reaches of the universe, or deep-sea exploration crafts improve our understanding of the oceans, and so on, is simply by improving our sense of what is there or what is ‘out there’. Even when we are largely in the dark about what particular elements of a domain are (their character, their nature), or what they ‘do’, or how they relate to one another, our understanding improves simply as we learn more about the furniture of the domain, the elements that make it up.

Note too that we might be mistaken at this step, and identify things as elements of a domain that might not ‘really’ be there. Students of the brain, for example, might at one point have said that there are various ‘humours’ in the brain, or ‘vapours’ in the brain, and that these humours or vapours interact in various ways with other elements of the brain. But there are no such elements, and someone postulating these elements would have flawed understanding of the brain because they do not get the furniture right—they appeal to elements that are not really there.

Further:

Dimension B. Our understanding of a domain improves as we acquire a better sense of what the different elements of the domain are capable of—that is, of the various ways they might be and the various things they can ‘do’.

Imagine walking into a kitchen of a deeply unfamiliar culture, filled with fruits and vegetables and roots and herbs you have never seen before. Even if you correctly note all of these different elements, one crucial part of understanding the domain (here, the kitchen) will still be lacking: namely, your understanding of what those various elements can ‘do’, or what their powers and capacities are—that is, which are bitter, which are sweet, which are poisonous, which nutritious, and so on. The same is true for growing in understanding of the brain, or the far reaches of the universe, or the deep sea, I believe.

Finally, note an additional dimension along which we can grow in understanding:

Dimension C. Our understanding of a domain improves the more we learn about why some of these capacities are realized rather than others.

For instance, given that that the amygdala can be certain ways rather than others, what is responsible for its being this way rather than that? In a typical case, it will plausibly be a variety of things that are responsible for, or that contribute to, this situation. Our thought is that the person who ‘knows their way around’ the limbic system, of which the amygdala is a central element, will be able to answer a variety of ‘What if things had been different?’ questions related to this system, or to the possibility space that constitutes this domain. For instance: what if contributing factor F had not been present, or had been a little stronger, or a little weaker? Would the amygdala still have these properties? Understanding more and more about the possibility space is tied to a growing ability to answer these questions—that is, it is tied to appreciating how the various elements in the domain depend upon and relate to one another, and how changes in some of these elements will lead (or fail to lead) to changes in others.

I realize this is all a bit abstract, but the abstraction is necessary to appreciate what growth in understanding of a domain looks like generally, and how this is tied to knowing one’s way around a possibility space. It also helps to undercut the idea that, from an epistemic point of view, growth in understanding in the humanities looks radically different than growth in understanding in the sciences. Again, while I do believe there are important differences between understanding in the humanities and in the sciences, if we fail to appreciate the overlaps, we will not appreciate how scholarship in both areas is embarked on a common quest, the quest for understanding.

III

Case Studies in the Humanities. I will now apply this general framework about understanding to scholarship in the humanities. My view is that scholarship in the humanities yields understanding of its domains (for instance, novels, poems, artworks, historical events, buildings, musical compositions, and so on) by helping us to know our way around the possibility spaces that constitute these domains. In particular, I will consider two case studies from the humanities to illustrate these points:

• From history, Tyler Stovall’s 1996 study of African Americans in twentieth-century Paris (Stovall 1996).

• From musicology, Susan McClary’s 1987 study of Bach’s Brandenburg Concerto No. 5 (McClary 1987).

I note upfront that there is a serious element of arbitrariness in the examples I have chosen. One (Stovall) is a scholar known to me, the other (McClary) was recommended by a trusted friend. Still, my bold (foolhardy?) hope is that this framework can be applied to illuminate the nature of understanding in the humanities wherever it might occur.

IV

Study 1: History. Tyler Stovall’s subject in Paris Noir: African Americans in the City of Light is the experience of African Americans in Paris during the twentieth century. It is a topic that includes the striking successes of performers such as Josephine Baker in the early twentieth century, as well as the wide-ranging impact of African American writers such as Richard Wright and James Baldwin in the 1950s and 1960s.

Stovall’s account begins in the First World War, where roughly 200,000 African Americans served in France as part of the United States army (Stovall 1996, p. 5). Most were assigned strenuous ‘supply’ positions—especially in the ports, unloading and loading ships—but some served in combat roles and fought in decisive battles.

Upon returning to America after the war, many soldiers hoped that their service would lead to a new sense of respect and recognition. But this was largely not the case, as new laws were introduced to prevent ‘mixing’ between races, and as the number of lynchings in America actually increased between 1918 and 1919, from fifty-eight to seventy-seven, including ten black veterans in 1919 (Stovall 1996, p. 27).

Alongside these events in America, Stovall notes the slow increase in the number of African Americans who emigrated from the United States to Paris in the late 1910s and 1920s. What spurred this movement to Paris? Given the violence and discrimination African Americans were experiencing in America, a natural thought is that the movement was driven by a desire to escape these dangers. According to Stovall, however, while that was part of the reason, overall it was not the main impetus: ‘Many came to Paris accidentally, not as self-conscious refugees from Yankee discrimination’ (Stovall 1996, p. 26). Indeed, the most compelling of the ‘accidental’ reasons seemed to have been economic ones—in particular, many were offered good, paying work as jazz musicians, dancers and singers.

Stovall notes that across the board, once there, African American expatriates were indeed startled and impressed by the lack of bigotry they encountered. By and large, the white French citizens they met seemed to treat them with dignity and respect, and they were able to enter shops and eat at restaurants without harassment. Even behaviours that were particularly volcanic in America were discovered to be possible, such as having romantic relationships with people ‘across the colour line’. Further, the community continued to grow because of the extraordinary French appetite for the services many were offering, fuelled in general by a growing fondness for American entertainment and popular culture, especially Hollywood movies. Finally, Stovall claims, the growing sense of community among African American expatriates contributed to the growing population: they tended to live around the same area of Paris, Montmartre, and formed friendships and relationships of mutual support.

With all this in mind, I can now offer an account of how Stovall’s study enhances our understanding of the African American experience in Paris in the twentieth century, and in particular how it helps us to know our way around the possibility space that constitutes the domain.

At a basic level, I believe it does so by telling us more about the elements of that space—the furniture that makes it up. Recall that we are thinking of ‘elements’ broadly, so that it can include things like events, attitudes, people, and more (later I will talk about ‘themes’, and so on).

So at the very least we now understand more about the domain when we learn that it is constituted by these different elements (with a left-to-right timeline) (Fig. 1).

Figure 1

Elements of domain

Open in new tabDownload slide

But again, as we saw earlier, our understanding grows when we learn more about how the various elements of the domain relate to and depend upon one another.

So, let us magnify our focus on the third element above, and note several of the factors that apparently contributed to the increasing number of expatriates in the 1920s (Fig. 2).

Figure 2

Possibility space

Open in new tabDownload slide

We could perhaps expand this chart by including not only the elements that were plausibly contributing factors but also (as with the earlier map) those that were not (the price of tea in China, and so on). In this way again our sense of the possibility space would be enhanced, as we learn more not just about the factors that plausibly contributed to the growing number, but also about the factors that did not.¹⁰

I hope it is obvious enough that are no ‘maps’ like this in Stovall’s book. That is not how historians work. Rather, this is my attempt to articulate the various factors that Stovall highlights that ‘help explain’ (Stovall 1996, p. 33) various elements of the domain. If the map were fancy enough, I could also try to articulate how these different elements work in concert with one another, or how they cut against one another.

Even in this crude version, however, I believe that someone coming across a map like this could acquire at least some understanding of the domain. They would appreciate that the French love of American popular culture contributed to the growing number of African American expatriates, for instance, in a way they might not have appreciated before.

But this now leaves us with a crucial question: if we have a tidy ‘possibility’ map like this, why read Stovall’s 326-page book? Why not ‘take in’ the map and be done with it? What further or richer understanding is afforded by working through this narrative?¹¹

My claim is that by working through the narrative we get a sense of the relative power or strength of these different factors, and it is by getting a sense of the relative power and strength of these factors that we are better able to know our way around this possibility space. In particular, we become better able to answer the ‘What if things had been different?’ questions that lie at the core of understanding.

For instance, Stovall argues that the gradual formation of a community contributed to the increasing numbers of African American expatriates in Paris from roughly 1920 to 1960. But how strong was this community, exactly? What were the relationships like, and was conflict intermixed with friendship? We need to hear more about this because of course not all communities are the same. And indeed Stovall offers detailed accounts of many of these relationships, allowing us to get a sense of the strength and importance of the community.

Or consider another element noted on the map: the ‘relatively enlightened’ racial attitudes of the French. How enlightened were these attitudes, exactly, and how different were they from American attitudes? Here again, the details of Stovall’s narrative help us get a sense of things.

For instance, on the French side, Stovall notes that while attitudes towards African Americans were generally open and generous during the 1920s, it would be a mistake to say that the French were ‘colour-blind’— as some have suggested.¹² Rather, Stovall point outs ways in which the French viewed African Americans through a gauzy ‘haze of stereotypes’ (Stovall 1996, p. 17). For instance, one writer for the newspaper Paris Midi reported on ‘The Revue Negre’, a successful ‘vaudeville-style’ show in the 1920s with a largely African American cast, saying,

[E]verything we’ve ever read flashes across our enchanted minds … plantation landscapes, the melancholy songs of Creole nurses, the Negro soul with its animal energy, its childish joys, the sad bygone days of slavery … (Stovall 1996, p. 70)

In light of passages such as this, Stovall argues that it is misguided to say the French in the 1920s were ‘colour-blind’, even though the absence of overt discrimination and harassment was conspicuous.

By comparison, what were American racial attitudes like during the 1920s? In a general way, we can say something like ‘awful’, and that would be correct. But that general characterization does not give us a full, rounded view of things, and hence does not give us a sense of the particular power of American racism at the time. Again, the details from Stovall’s narrative help. Thus consider that while African Americans largely enjoyed a life free from discrimination in Paris in the 1920s, the exceptions generally involved encounters with other Americans visiting Paris, namely, white Americans. Stovall notes that

Josephine Baker tried to avoid her white countrymen in Paris, for fear of being insulted, and described an incident in a restaurant in which a white patron protested her presence, claiming that in the United States Baker would be in the kitchen. The proprietor responded by asking the white American woman to leave. On another occasion, a white American stormed out of her hotel after learning that a black woman was staying there, exclaiming, ‘I could never think of using the same bath as her’. Responded the hotel owner, ‘What did you fear, madame, that the colored lady would stain the tub?’ (Stovall 1996, p. 73)

These details thus help us to get a better sense of the virulent depth and power of American racism in the 1920s. Although there is perhaps a variety of racism that is active ‘at home’ or in familiar surroundings, that draws back when in another culture, Stovall’s narrative helps us to see that American racism at the time was not like that. It was the ‘extra strength’ sort that travelled. The details of Stovall’s narrative thus help to move the reader from a ‘notional’ or ‘thin’ appreciation of the awfulness of racism in the U.S. during this time to a more ‘real’ or ‘thick’ appreciation.¹³ It helps the reader to recognize the depths and nuances of the awfulness in a way that the mere word ‘awful’ might not reveal.

From an epistemic point of view, the point I want to emphasize is this: it is through coming to learn narrative details like this that we come to know our way around the possibility space better, because we are in a better position to answer ‘What if things had been different?’ questions. For instance, the more we learn about the relatively weak bonds of the African American community that existed in 1920s Paris, and the more we come to appreciate the contrast between French racial attitudes in the 1920s and American racial attitudes, the better position we will be in to answer questions like ‘Suppose the bonds of the community had been very weak indeed. Would African Americans still have continued to live in Paris?’ Or ‘Suppose a love of Hollywood movies had not primed Parisians to be receptive to American popular culture. Would jazz performers like Sidney Bechet still have been as warmly received and enjoyed as much success?’

Even though the level of complexity in cases like this can become exceedingly high, we believe that the good answers to these questions track the truth about how things really are. That is, they track the truth about how these contributing factors interact with and relate to one another, and about how, say, changing the character of one of these factors will lead, or fail to lead, to changes in another. In these ways, our understanding in such domains is responsible to the world, to the truth about how things really are.

For those who might be sceptical, consider again our car crash. If the road had been less icy, or not icy at all, but the other factors remain the same—the drinking, and so on—would the crash still have happened? Presumably it is often hard to say, but the important thing to see is that there seems to be something in the world that settles the correct answer to this question, or at least settles the range of possibly correct answers, and rules out others.

V

Study 2: Musicology. My second study is from musicology: Susan McClary’s ‘The Blasphemy of Talking Politics During Bach Year’ (McClary 1987). McClary analyses two of Bach’s pieces in her article, Bach’s Brandenburg Concerto No. 5 and his cantata Wachet auf. I will focus particularly on McClary’s account of the concerto.

Again I suggest that the notion of a possibility space helps to illuminate the kind of understanding we receive from working through McClary’s analysis. At the same time, McClary’s article pushes us to ask new questions about the ways in which different ‘readings’ of things like concertos (or novels, or buildings, or paintings, and so on) can be considered better or worse, or correct or incorrect.

(Before moving forward, I urge you, kind reader: please take ten minutes and listen to the first movement of the Brandenburg Concerto No. 5.¹⁴ While historical events of the sort we saw in the first case study can be briefly summarized so that one gets the ‘gist’, it is very hard to summarize a piece of music in this way—at least, I lack the skills to do it. While listening, I also advise: keep your ears open for the harpsichord.)

McClary begins her piece by noting that there are two competing ways to interpret a figure like Bach. On the one hand, there is a ‘Pythagorean’ approach, which takes a composer like Bach to have special insight into abstract, timeless relationships between ‘harmonious tones and musical proportions’. The job of the musicologist is then to try to describe what Bach ‘saw’ when he looked into this Pythagorean realm, and to clarify how he worked with these tones and proportions to produce various results.

On the other hand, there is a socially and politically grounded approach, one that tries to make sense of compositions as arising from a time and place. This approach sees a composer’s work as ‘an articulation of a set of social values’, and the project is then to ‘connect his particular eclectic mode of composition with his thorny social and professional relationships and even with his situation with respect to the broader political context’ (McClary 1987, p. 19). McClary notes that this approach, the approach she adopts in her article, is regarded as ‘blasphemous’ (recall the title of her piece) by many Bach scholars, because unlike a lesser composer like Telemann,¹⁵ whose work may indeed have been influenced by his social and political context, Bach’s music is so extraordinary, so otherworldly, that it rises above such factors.

As part of her socially grounded approach, McClary sketches the musical context within which Bach was working. She notes that there were at least three ‘tonal traditions’ he was familiar with, where a tonal tradition is one that relies on the interaction between ‘background progression’ and ‘surface strategies’ (McClary 1987, p. 21), and where (in McClary’s words) the background progression is responsible for the overall coherence of the piece, and the surface strategies are concerned with ‘sustaining dramatic tension’ and ‘continually imply[ing] what the next cadence in the background ought to be’ (McClary 1987, p. 22).

In particular, McClary argues that Bach was working with the following ‘menu’ of tonal traditions: (i) the music of the German Lutheran sphere, based on traditional chorale melodies, (ii) French baroque music, which had a ‘braking quality’ that attempted to ‘appropriate the rational power of tonality while constantly draining off its energy’ (McClary 1987, p. 22), and (iii) the Italian tradition, made fashionable by Vivaldi, that organizes musical time around the projection, and then fulfilment, of large-scale tonal goals.¹⁶

From among these possibilities, Bach adopted the Italian model as ‘his principal tongue’, yet at the same time sought a reconciliation of the three models, incorporating elements of the German and French frameworks into the Italian model. Thus he often combined

in a single composition the on-rushing goal orientation of the Italian opera or concerto with the more sober, static, contrapuntal ideal of the German Lutheran repertory and the motion-arresting graces of French dance to produce at times a highly conflicted procedure. (McClary 1987, p. 20)

McClary argues that this approach was highly unusual at the time, a period when other composers aligned themselves more or less completely with one of the dominant options and wrote specifically for that market. That Bach did not take this approach spoke to his desire, among other things, to ‘cling fiercely to his own German heritage’; and yet at the same time, his ‘de-centred position’ as a German allowed him the freedom to move between styles in a way that Italian and French composers, for example, could not.

Now, the information from the last few paragraphs may seem like an unremarkable bit of ‘context-setting’ for a scholar like McClary to offer. But for our purposes it is critical to pause here and note just how important this context-setting is for enhancing our understanding of the concerto being considered, and for appreciating its possibility space.

To see this, consider a parallel example from everyday life. If we learn that a friend has chosen an apple for an afternoon snack, the choice is, usually, entirely intelligible. She chose the apple because she is hungry, because the apple is nutritious, because she loves fruit, and so on. But suppose we then learn that there were other fruits on offer: strawberries and bananas, say. Then her choice of the apple becomes more interesting, and to use McClary’s apt word, ‘significant’ (McClary 1987, p. 21). We want to know why she chose the apple rather than the strawberries or the bananas, and it will no longer do to say she chose the apple for the reasons above (her hunger, the nutritiousness, her love of fruit). We want to know what seemed choiceworthy to her about the apple that the other fruits lacked; alternatively, we want to know what was not choiceworthy about the other fruits.

We cannot, therefore, really understand her choice unless we can appreciate the full range of alternatives available to her—unless we can appreciate the possibility space she was working with. Or better, we can have some understanding of the choice when we identify some of what made it desirable, but we understand more—our understanding grows—when we have a fuller appreciation of the ‘menu of possibilities’ that was available at the time.

Returning to the Brandenburg Concerto No. 5, we can therefore say that in order to make sense of Bach’s tonal choices we need to identify factors not just in favour of his mixed approach, but also factors that favour the mixed approach over the approaches that were possible for him or available to him. And while a ‘Pythagorean’ approach might have things to say on this score (perhaps only a mixed approach produces the beautiful effects Bach was trying to achieve, and here is why …), McClary’s account aids our understanding because it points to the social and political factors that were also plausibly part of the mix: again, factors like Bach’s desire to keep the German vocabulary on the table from cultural pride, his desire to please the Lutheran authorities of his day, and so on.

McClary’s account, however, does not stop there. For one of her central claims is that Bach’s work ‘enacts’ or ‘articulates’ (her words) the bourgeois values that were newly emergent in the eighteenth century and which moulded Bach’s sense of what was worthwhile and important. In particular, she cites the following traits as central to the ‘bourgeois ideology’: ‘its goal orientation, obsessive control of greater and greater spans of time, its wilful striving, delayed gratification, and defiance of norms’ (McClary 1987, p. 58). She further argues that a central preoccupation of Bach’s eighteenth-century bourgeois environment was how to reconcile the ambition of the individual with the concerns of the group.

McClary claims that with this in mind we can see the first movement of the Brandenburg Concerto No. 5 in a new light—namely, as ‘enacting’ these bourgeois values. Thus McClary notes that the Brandenburg Concerto No. 5 is composed in the concerto grosso framework popularized by Vivaldi, which features two principal contributors, the ‘large, collective force (the concerto grosso—literally, the “big ensemble”) and one or more soloists’ (McClary 1987, p. 23). Typically, the solos were performed by violins or flutes—two ‘sweet-tempered’ instruments—with the harpsichord playing a supporting, background role.

But this is not what one finds in the Brandenburg Concerto No. 5. Rather, shortly after the violin and flute begin their solos, the harpsichord begins to assert itself. Soon, it takes over and ‘hijacks’ the piece (McClary 1987, p. 28),

unleash[ing] elements of chaos, irrationality, and noise until finally it blurs almost entirely the sense of key, meter, and form upon which the eighteenth-century style depends. Finally, it relents and politely (ironically?) permits the ensemble to re-enter with its closing ritornello. (McClary 1987, p. 36)

McClary notes that the suddenness of this domination by the harpsichord unearths deep concerns in the listener:

What happens when a genuine deviant (and one from the ensemble’s serve staff yet!) declares itself a genius, unconstrained by convention, and takes over? We readily identify with the self-appointed protagonist’s adventure (its storming of the Bastille, if you will) and at the same time fear for what might happen as a result of the suspension of traditional authority. (McClary 1987, p. 40)

McClary thus concludes that in the concerto Bach not only ‘articulates’ the tension between individualism and social cohesion among the eighteenth-century bourgeois but also raises it to a new pitch, pointing to the possibility of an individual who does not want to be reconciled to the group, and perhaps tears down everything.

This is a fascinating reading of the piece; as a side note, the description of the harpsichordist as a deviant genius is itself a bit of genius. But here again, our driving question is: how, if at all, does McClary’s reading help us to understand the concerto better? As I foreshadowed earlier, a central issue lies in how we should think of the key terms ‘articulate’ and ‘enact’, as when she claims that ‘Bach thus articulates very powerfully precisely the dilemma of an ideology that wants to encourage freedom of expression while preserving social harmony’ and ‘Bach is here enacting the exhilaration as well as the risks of upward mobility’ (McClary 1987, p. 41).

What might it mean for Bach to ‘articulate’ or ‘enact’ themes like this, which McClary takes to be emblematic of a bourgeois ideology? A strong version of the claim is that he explicitly intended to manifest this ideology in his music. In other words, that he explicitly (consciously, with full awareness) adhered to the bourgeois values of his time (things like ‘wilful striving, delayed gratification, and defiance of norms’) and explicitly (consciously, with full awareness) tried to express these values in his work, especially the Brandenburg Concerto No. 5. A more moderate version of the claim is that the values were simply ‘in the air’ at the same, that he more or less passively took them for granted, and that these subconscious influences found their way into his work. If either of those claims were true, then they would indeed help us to understand the piece, because there would be a direct dependence between the elements of the concerto and Bach’s psychological states. At the same time, the difficulty confronting readings like this is that they are empirical. They make claims about Bach’s psychological states that it is hard to assess from the armchair, or without doing significant archival research (letters, diaries, statements of other kinds) that reveal his psychological states. And while McClary does make some reference to such documents,¹⁷ for the most part she seems simply to take it for granted that Bach endorsed a bourgeois framework of values, either consciously or subconsciously.

A weaker version of the ‘articulates’ or ‘enacts’ claim, one that does not turn on the truth of claims about Bach’s psychological states, is that bourgeois themes and values somehow found their way into his music. While this might seem a bit mysterious, in fact we think there is nothing particularly unusual about it. Thus it can sometimes—perhaps often—be illuminating to offer, say, an ‘existentialist reading’ of the Dao de Ching, or a ‘queer reading’ of Aeschylus’s Oresteia trilogy. Perhaps some might say there can be no existentialist themes or dynamics ‘at work’ in a piece before there were existentialists who officially embraced the label, or queer themes and dynamics before the advent of queer theory.¹⁸ But that seems like a mistake. Existentialist and queer themes might have been at work in a piece before these themes were properly named and identified, just as gravity was at work in the world before it was properly named and identified.¹⁹

What does this mean for the connection between understanding and truth? It might seem that in making space for these different ‘readings’ we are finally—after a fair bit of hemming and hawing and beating around the bush—agreeing with the Leezenberg and de Vries passage cited at the beginning of this paper, namely, that ‘In the humanities, it is not so much “truth” that is sought after, but rather explications of the “meaning” of texts, works of art, or cultural artefacts’ (2017, p. 24).

But I do not believe this follows. Thus recall that a crucial step on the path towards understanding a domain is giving an accurate account of the domain’s different elements, of its ‘furniture’. I have been, moreover, very open-minded about what counts as part of a domain’s furniture: it could be musical notes, or characters in a novel, or racist attitudes, and so on. I therefore see no reason why ‘themes’ could not count as part of this furniture: existentialist themes, queer themes, bourgeois themes, and so on. Our understanding of the domain will thus be improved the more we learn about the various themes that are present in the piece.

At the same time, some readings will be better than others, and some will simply be false. The case for a particular theme as present in a text—say, a post-colonial reading of ‘Good Night Moon’—might be, well, ridiculous. Further, even though a theme might be in some remote sense present in a domain, it might be doing little to no real work in the domain. Very little else, if anything else, might depend on it, and it might figure barely at all (if at all) into ‘What if things had been different?’ questions. Such a reading will therefore not be an illuminating one, precisely because it will say so little about the possibility space that constitutes the domain. In other words, it will not be illuminating, because it will capture so little of the truth about those possibility spaces.

Returning again to McClary and Bach: my sense is that McClary’s claim that the Brandenburg Concerto No. 5 ‘articulates’ or ‘enacts’ bourgeois values moves artfully among the strong, moderate and weak readings we explored above, not landing on just one. If it turns out that Bach was consciously attempting to articulate bourgeois values via the concerto, then appealing to these psychological states—to Bach’s values and preferences and desires—will help us understand why the concerto has certain features rather than others. If instead the claim is simply that bourgeois themes are (somehow) present in the concerto, whether this is an illuminating reading will depend on whether a good case can be made that these themes are in fact present in the piece, how much ‘work’ they are plausibly doing there, whether they are as significant as other themes that are plausibly in the piece, and so on.

VI

The Human Possibility Space. Finally, although I have mainly been trying to articulate how scholarship in the humanities enhances our understanding of its objects, I hope it is clear that it also offers a path towards self-understanding in us, as we think through the scholarship. Thus Stovall’s work will likely prompt us to look afresh at our own racial attitudes, and McClary’s work will likely prompt us to more be attentive to, and critical of, the social and political attitudes that shape us and sometimes limit our vision.

Scholarship in the humanities therefore naturally encourages self-reflection and (if all goes well) leads to self-understanding because the possibility spaces that scholars in the humanities explore are human possibility spaces. They are not the possibility spaces of unrelatable aliens from another galaxy, or crabs that live at the bottom of the sea. They are the possibility spaces of people who have hopes and fears and desires that at a certain level we all share as human beings, and it is by thinking about how we fit (or fail to fit) in these spaces that we can come to a better understanding of ourselves.²⁰

References

Footnotes