Perhaps many are not too familiar with Josef Pieper’s The Philosophical Act. I’ll admit that a lot of the insights and points of this essay will be derived from that reading. However, what I hope to do is to extend his ideas to our context in college. I want to talk about the School of Humanities and its degrees.
It’s simple. The most objective measurement for utility is the capitalist model, as in how much is the service or product of a certain practice. This primarily revolves around the world of means and ends, by which the skills of a course serve as means while the product with utilitarian value defines ends. The discussion might veer towards a comparison of the other schools at this point, but I limit this only to the humanities. There should not be comparisons; we take the humanities as they are.
Nevertheless, we consider that all means and ends can be rooted in basic, survival needs. Anything practical helps us to work, and we work for salary, for money. We need money for food and bills, the expenses of shelter, so that we may live another day. Even the exorbitant serves to enhance basic needs. Mansions provide improved amenities for our basic need for shelter. Expensive cars improve the quality of our trips to work and back, made more convenient by the privacy added to regular transportation. Anything is useful as long as it enhances the routine tasks that sustain us for another day.
The conundrum of the average Joe is to derive meaning out of living life simply as it is; that in doing nothing beyond the daily routine, we are somehow more significant in the grand scheme of things. This is what we call “romanticizing.” Inherently, there’s nothing wrong with asserting meaning to our own lives for ourselves this way, so long as it is for ourselves. However, the danger rises in imposing upon others to find that same meaning from our lives instead of their own. This standardizes routined life, propagating a pseudo-transcendence within a status quo.
Now, we think of artists (to save a mouthful, we label all involved in the humanities as “artists,” for they concern themselves with creation, in one way or the other). We easily realize that what they do can be learned and practiced by anyone. They’re disposable, their outputs objectively not worth much. For example, we need designers so long as they can elicit some projected need with just the right palettes and aesthetics. In the same breath, the writer does nothing more useful than to describe something such that a utility is expanded beyond truth. We can do without them after that.
What value, then, would we find in a visual artist’s masterpiece? What need is there for novels to be written? What worth would their outputs be if not for tangible ends?
And yet they persist. They write all sorts of pointless narratives. They form all kinds of inconceivable monstrosities on canvas and marble. They read texts that teach nothing practical to the daily, and then reflect on invisible hallucinations of the mind that somehow bring people to tears. They ignore logic, reality, fallacy, and practicality, for the sake of the theoretical and the creative. They wonder.
Why would the sky be anything but blue? Why come up with stories that couldn’t possibly happen in “the real world?” Why argue God’s existence? Why would I be more than who I already recognize myself to be? Why read about all these useless things? Against all odds, the artist dares to. Beyond the questions, they dare to answer with impossibilities and impossibility itself.
The humanities are useless, and necessarily so. So long as they deal with the beyond, they will be impractical. They won’t make more money. They won’t make more sense. They won’t do anything else for our natural necessities, and we must keep it that way. The Humanities must be useless. Once the Humanities are made useful, we lose all of wonder.
Matt Rodriguez is currently a senior in the BFA Creative Writing program and has been the School of Humanities Representative since 2019. He may be reached at carl.rodriguez@obf.ateneo.edu.
