PART II
Part II covers historical and contemporary views of the arts and humanities and their relation to human flourishing. Historical analysis reveals that human flourishing is at the root of the arts and humanities, and there is a growing recognition of the need to return to this initial interest. These chapters also describe the conceptual and operational definitions of engaging in the arts and humanities, providing clarity on how we can assess behavioral engagement and exploring how such engagement works in multiple life domains, such as education, work, leisure, and health. Finally, given that arts and humanities outcomes authors discuss are often contrasted with STEM outcomes, authors discuss the importance of STEAM, in which the arts (A) are integrated with STEM.
CHAPTER 3
Darrin M. McMahon
Abstract
The effort to encourage a eudaimonic turn in the humanities marks less a turn, than a return, to the emphasis on human flourishing that was once a central feature of the liberal arts and the humanities as they developed in the West. Though eclipsed for much of the twentieth century, this long-standing emphasis is currently being rediscovered and revived for the conditions of the twenty-first century. Just as psychologists and other social scientists have taken a positive turn in recent decades, humanists and practitioners of the liberal arts are now poised to reconnect their discipline to their foundational interest in human well-being.
Key Words: humanities, human flourishing, happiness, liberal arts, eudaimonia, eudaimonic turn, negative turn, negative bias, history
The effort to encourage a eudaimonic turn in the humanities marks less a turn, than a return, to the emphasis on human flourishing that was once a central feature of the liberal arts and the humanities as they developed in the West. Though eclipsed for much of the twentieth century, this long-standing emphasis is currently being rediscovered and revived for the conditions of the twenty-first century. Just as psychologists and other social scientists have taken a positive turn in recent decades, humanists and practitioners of the liberal arts are now poised to reconnect their disciplines to their foundational interest in well-being (Pawelski & Moores, 2013; Pawelski, Chapter 2 in this volume).
The Origins of the Liberal Arts and the Humanities and the Art of Living Well
The liberal arts, as they were conceived and developed in the Western tradition, were devoted explicitly to the goal of enhancing human flourishing. This was true of the Greeks, who thought of education as education for life, and who defined the “circle of wisdom” (enkuklios paideia; εγκυκλιος παιδεια) as encompassing those subjects that cultivated virtue, freedom, and happiness. It was equally true of their Roman successors, who imbedded the connection to freedom explicitly in the Latin terms they used to replace the Greek, and that we have since adopted as our own. The artes liberales or studia liberales were those, in short, that befitted the free man (homo liber) and they helped in turn to uphold his liberty, seen as the essential precondition of genuine human flourishing. As such, they were concerned in the first instance with matters of public speaking, argument, and presentation that enabled free male subjects to participate actively in public affairs in the agora and in the assemblies. Hence the centrality of grammar, logic, and rhetoric as primary foundations for the education of those who were for the most part free of the obligation to work for survival and so did not generally concern themselves with the “illiberal arts,” whose primary function was to earn money, or the manual or “mechanical arts” (artes mechanicae) that required work with the hands. Along with the three subjects of grammar, logic, and rhetoric, geometry, mathematics, and astronomy also featured in early accounts of the areas deemed appropriate to the education of the free, giving one the tools to measure and situate oneself in the world, along with music to instill harmony and balance. Over the centuries, these studies congealed into the core of the secular educational programs offered at the first European universities, where the trivium, the essential introductory three subjects of grammar, logic, and rhetoric, were complimented by the remaining four of the quadrivium (geometry, mathematics, astronomy, and music) to comprise the seven liberal arts. These were thought of collectively as comprising the essential preliminary course of study prior to advanced training in the “practical arts,” such as law or medicine, or the highest study of all, theology.
Developing alongside, and in tandem with, these liberal arts was a program of study that the Roman statesman Cicero described in the first century BCE as the studia humanitatis. Cicero used that expression loosely in an oration given in defense of his Greek mentor and teacher, Archias, entitled Pro Archia Poeta. But when a manuscript version of the oration was recovered in a monastery in Liège by Petrarch in 1333, the term was gradually picked up and developed in circles that, fittingly, acquired the name “humanist.” Humanistic studies—what we would now call the “humanities”—were rarely as precisely defined as the trivium and quadrivium, but they tended to expand on the core of liberal studies by including poetry and the literary arts, moral philosophy, and history. Deemed further “ennobling” and “improving,” these subjects were thought to impart wisdom and virtue to guide one throughout life from youth to old age. As one early theorist of humanistic education, Pier Paolo Vergerio, observed in the early fifteenth century, still employing the older medieval term:
We call those studies liberal, then, which are worthy of a free [liber] man; they are those through which virtue and wisdom are either practiced or sought, and by which the body or mind is disposed towards all the best things.
(Vergerio, 2002, p. 25)
Vergerio included literature, moral philosophy, and history among the subjects worthy of a free man, and he contrasted their pursuit with the dissipation wrought by a hedonistic life of pleasure. For his part, Tommaso Parentucelli, the future Pope Nicholas V, could explicitly define the studia humanitatis in 1438 as the study of grammar, rhetoric, history, poetry, and philosophy. Others might include music, drawing, or the plastic arts. And history was invariably considered central to the studia humanitatis from the fifteenth century onward, understood as a kind of practical illustration of the moral and ethical virtues taught by philosophy. In the oft-invoked phrase of Cicero, history was “magistra vitae,” the teacher of life, the witness to the times, the light of truth, and a font of ethical examples that could be used to illustrate the moral triumphs and failings of humanity (De Oratore, II, 36). What it taught was how to live. For although history, strictly speaking, was the record of the dead, it was the record of the dead as they had lived in flesh and blood, and so was an examination of the fortunes and trajectories of lives, whether happy or ill-starred. For ancient historians, and then for their Renaissance imitators and admirers, history was a kind of ethics in action and so very often biographical, a record of the exemplary and illustrious lives that served to impart the virtues of character by example, or caution against the sins and dissipations that spelled the downfall of the corrupt (Grafton, 2012). Generations of elite young men learned about courage or forbearance, magnanimity or friendship from the pages of Plutarch, whose celebrated Lives served as a primer of good living, just as the lives of the saints or viris illustribus of illustrious men provided paragons of Christian and pagan virtue. This was history as lived experience, philosophy by example, and as such it was invariably eudaimonistic, teaching that the good life entailed a life well lived in accordance with virtue.
Living life well in accordance with virtue was of course the explicit goal of another of the central liberal arts, philosophy, as it had been practiced in the West since at least the time of Socrates. “What being is there who does not desire to live well (eu pratein),” Socrates asks his companions in Plato’s early dialogue, the Euthydemus. “Well, then, … since we all of us desire to live well, how can we do so? That is the next question” (Euthydemus, 278 E, 279 A). For Plato, as even more explicitly for his greatest student, Aristotle, living well—flourishing over the course of a lifetime—was the very definition of happiness (eudaimonia), which Aristotle memorably defined as a “life lived in accordance with virtue.” Philosophy’s aim was the cultivation of eudaimonia, and it would be brought about not only by the cultivation of reason, but even more importantly by extensive practice. Achieving happiness, Aristotle insisted, was an “activity,” and like all activities that one hoped to master, living well required constant training, so that good choices and habits became second nature. Happiness, we might say, was habit-forming, or at least the consequence of habitual behavior learned and instilled from a young age. Education, with philosophy and the liberal arts at its heart, was crucial to the formation of flourishing lives.
What was true for Aristotle was true for the other major schools of ancient philosophy—from Epicureanism to Stoicism—which alike conceived of their offerings as education—or in stronger metaphors that were widely received, as “medicine” or “athletic training”—for the soul (Nussbaum, 1984; Pawelski, 2021). To excise sickness and suffering, like a doctor, and to promote flourishing and health, like an athlete in training, were philosophy’s overriding aims. Ancient philosophers sought at once to remove impediments to human flourishing and to optimize flourishing’s pursuit.
That general focus of philosophy, the core subject of the ancient studia humanitatis, was also the focus of many other wisdom traditions of the so-called Axial Age, that prolific period in human history corresponding roughly to the first millennium BCE that saw the simultaneous emergence, on several continents, of the world’s major religious and philosophical traditions (Jaspers, 2010; Bellah & Joas, 2012). Encompassing classical Judaism, Confucianism, Daoism, Buddhism, Zoroastrianism, and the teachings of the Upanishads, among others these traditions explicitly set out to address the root causes of human suffering and to offer remedies that would promote human flourishing (McMahon, 2018). Their prescriptions varied tremendously, though all tended to call into question “received understandings of human flourishing” associated with wealth, fame, power, or worldly prosperity, positing a “higher happiness” in their place (Taylor, 2012). To be won by superior virtue, along with wisdom, piety, and divine favor, this higher happiness was invariably imagined as a rare and special achievement, the product of supreme devotion and cultivation. The Buddhist case is instructive in this respect. All might have the capacity for enlightenment and happiness, Buddhists believe. But the great majority of human beings live, nonetheless, lives of ignorance and suffering out of failure to apply themselves. The wisdom traditions of classical Greece and Rome were no different. Stoics might posit that all had access to universal reason (Logos) and thus the capacity to cultivate virtue. One of their greatest teachers, Epictetus, was a former slave. But the rigorous program that he and others offered to cultivate virtue was only ever the preserve of a rarified elite. The happy, in this respect, were the “happy few.”
Although the current chapter focuses primarily on the liberal arts and the humanities as they developed in a Western setting, the example of the Axial traditions highlights the straightforward point that the religious and philosophical movements of other regions of the world also concerned themselves centrally with questions of human flourishing. This is undoubtedly the case, as well, for the traditions of art, poetry, music, literature, and history that flowed from them. The Asian philosophical tradition, to take one broad example of many, is clearly a rich repository of reflection on human flourishing (Ivanhoe, 2013), and much the same could be said of indigenous analogues to the humanities and liberal arts as developed in Africa, the Near East, and other parts of the world. Those traditions, too, will need to be examined closely by specialists with an eye to seeing how their content connects to questions of human flourishing both in relation to, and in departure from, Western varieties.
If the example of the Axial traditions, then, highlights the basic point that many parts of the world have contributed richly to the patrimony of knowledge about human flourishing, it also calls attention to the originally restricted nature of much of the knowledge and practice that flowed from these same traditions. To achieve “enlightenment,” that is—whether in a strictly Buddhist sense or more broadly—was conceived as the achievement of those whom Max Weber famously called “virtuosi,” elite practitioners (monks, sadhus, sages, and holy men) who were able to devote themselves completely to the cultivation of the highest flourishing, both in theory and in practice. In a similar way, the traditions of higher learning that flowed from these traditions were often restricted, if not in theory then in practice, to the cultivated few. This was certainly the case in the West, where the liberal education of free men (always, in itself, a highly restrictive category) that was conceived as the basis of the studia humanitatis in classical Greece and Rome continued long thereafter to serve as the essential program of education for elites. Indeed, as the studia humanitatis cohered in the Renaissance, and gradually began to carve out a quasi-secular space independent from religious studies and theology, the study of its core subjects—including philosophy, history, rhetoric, literary studies, and also music and art—was explicitly designed as a program of study for young aristocrats and gentleman (Grafton & Jardine, 1986; Grafton & Rice, 1994). Count Baldassare Castiglione’s Book of the Courtier (1528) provides a case in point. Among other things, the work was a breviary of the ideal education to be sought by those who would navigate the halls of power with sprezzatura and grace. Deep training in the humanities, the work makes clear, is part of the requisite polish of men and women of court—for women, too, might be included in these rarefied circles. Leonardo Bruni’s celebrated essay on the benefits of the study of literature and the liberal arts is addressed to a woman, Lady Battista Malatesta, the daughter of the Count of Urbino, before whom Castiglione’s courtiers did their courting. Recommending the study of poetry, literature, history, and rhetoric for the lady, Bruni (2002) sang the virtues of philosophy, too, which were vital to human flourishing and happiness:
Let her broaden her interest in secular studies as well. Let her know what the most excellent minds among the philosophers have taught about moral philosophy, what their doctrines are concerning continence, temperance, modesty, justice, courage, and liberality. She should understand their beliefs about happiness: whether virtue in itself is sufficient for happiness, or whether torture, poverty, exile, or prison can impede our progress toward it. Whether, when such misfortunes befall the blessed, they are made miserable thereby, or whether they simply take away happiness without inducing actual misery. Whether human felicity consists in pleasure and the absence of pain, as Epicurus would have it, or in the moral worth, as Zeno believed, or in the exercise of virtue, which was Aristotle’s view. Believe me, such subjects as these are beautiful and intellectually rewarding. They are valuable … for the guidance they give in life. (p. 107)
Bruni was more “liberal” than most. Well into the nineteenth century, the majority of commentators sought to restrict the program of female education considerably, emphasizing music, poetry, and art over history, philosophy, and ancient languages. To be sure, the former subjects were believed to contribute to human flourishing as well. Why else would one learn to refine the ear and the eye but to enhance the quality of experience? The answer seemed self-evident, in need of little elaboration. A woman who could improvise on the harpsichord or recite verse or adorn the drawing room with beautiful objects was thought to contribute to the happiness both of herself and her family. But with respect to those subjects requiring a full measure of reason and rationality, such as history and philosophy—women, even elite women, were less often encouraged to do more than dabble. The “free” arts, in short, for much of their history, were not really free and open to all.
That remained broadly true into the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, when the opening up of access to general education and, in the United States, the expansion of university enrollments in the aftermath of World War II meant that greater numbers of people than ever before were exposed to the riches of the liberal arts as efforts were made to bestow the humanities on their rightful owner, humanity itself. But by that point, ironically, the humanities and the liberal arts’ original mission as an explicit conduit of human flourishing had been largely set aside, forgotten for the most part in favor of other goals that subsumed it.
The Displacement of Happiness in the Humanities and the Liberal Arts
The story of how that happened is a complicated one, and the details differ from discipline to discipline. But the broad trajectory is clear. Gradually, over the course of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, the humanities and the liberal arts moved away from their foundational focus on human flourishing.
This is perhaps clearest in the case of philosophy, a discipline whose foundational question and point of departure—what is the good life?—continued to occupy practitioners well into the nineteenth century. In late Antiquity and the Middle Ages, for example, St. Augustine, Boethius, and St. Thomas Aquinas wrestled with the question of true happiness and how best to obtain it, as did Erasmus, Thomas Moore, and many others during the Renaissance. In the eighteenth century, the great philosophes of the Enlightenment tended to agree with Voltaire, who opined in a letter in 1729 that “the great and only concern is to be happy” (Voltaire cited in Craver, 2005, p. 258). They devoted considerable energy to exploring new ways to further that end. And even in the nineteenth century, leading lights such as John Stuart Mill, Henry Sidgwick, and William James continued to grapple with philosophy’s long-standing concern.
But then something happened. Already by the end of the nineteenth century, Friedrich Nietzsche could declare that power, not pleasure, was human beings’ ultimate end. Happiness, he felt, was tepid water on the tongue—the goal of English merchants, perhaps, but not of questors of truth and lovers of fate. In the twentieth century, philosophers for the most part followed him in turning their backs on the good life. They analyzed language; they worried about alienation; they probed hegemony, oppression, and nothingness—but with the end result that centuries of thinking about happiness were largely set aside in favor of a more intense focus on the panoply of human ills.
Accounting for the causes of this “negative turn” in philosophy, as in other disciplines, is beyond the scope of the present inquiry, although elsewhere I have called attention to the issue (McMahon, 2013). In part, the turn reflects a broad disenchantment with the explicit focus on human happiness that was a central feature of the Enlightenment, and a recovery and reinvention of the preoccupation with human suffering that has deep roots in Jewish and Christian culture. Without question, suffering had particular resonance in the Age of Catastrophe that was the first half of the twentieth century and its painful aftermath. But it is also the case that the issue is to some extent one of semantics (Pawelski, 2016a, 2016b). A concern with slavery, say, or oppression, alienation, or power can of course readily be construed as a means of coming at the good life from the other way around. And there is no question that professional philosophers in the twentieth century took up a number of such questions—from being to becoming to liberation—that ultimately have a crucial bearing on questions of human flourishing. And yet as a broad generalization—one that, like all generalizations, certainly admits of exceptions—there is truth to the assertion that the focus of philosophy for much of the twentieth century was less on the positive than on the negative, less on enhancing human flourishing than on removing the many impediments (from racism to oppression to alienation) that might stand in the way of its emergence. Just as Marx famously devoted the bulk of his energies to analyzing and understanding human oppression while paying relatively short shrift to what would ensue once the struggle was complete, the philosophers who came after him tended to focus, like surgeons, on the causes of our ills rather than working to imagine and improve the causes of our health.
Something of that same “negative bias,” along with the forgetting or rejection of an earlier focus on human flourishing, has attended other disciplines in the humanities and the liberal arts as they developed and expanded since the nineteenth century, extending well beyond the original seven subjects that once comprised the trivium and quadrivium. Consider history, which, like philosophy, had been bound up with questions of happiness from the start. The subject features centrally in what is generally considered the first major work of history in the West, The History of Herodotus, set down sometime in the fifth century BCE. There, Herodotus reflects at length on the elusive nature of human happiness and the qualities and conditions necessary to secure it (McMahon, 2006). And although it is true that the world the work describes is one of war and ubiquitous suffering, the virtues that Herodotus extolls aim to equip human beings with the ability to flourish in such harsh environments. In this respect, it is a model of the kind of didactic work that would follow, providing, through the illustration of exemplary lives, models of how to live as best as one could. History aimed for many centuries thereafter to be life’s teacher, even if the conditions of life itself were assumed to be bleak, as they very often were. Both Christians and reborn classicists shared that sentiment, treating the world as a place of struggle or pilgrimage, whose outrageous fortunes, slings, and arrows needed to be assumed and then borne.
Addressing those conditions themselves with an eye to critical improvement was not taken up in earnest until the long eighteenth century, when fledgling attempts were made to use history to understand not just the conditions of individual flourishing in a hostile world, but to think about how the world itself could be transformed for the betterment of the greatest number. As part of the general will to happiness that attended the European Enlightenment, historians of the age undertook the task of examining the social, economic, and political conditions that might make it possible. In 1772, for example, the French marquis and man of letters Francois-Jean de Chastellux published in two volumes his De la Félicité publique, ou Considérations sur le sort des hommes, dans les différentes époques de l’histoire, which purported to be, and arguably was, the world’s first history of happiness. “After so many centuries of light,” the work begins, “in which human beings have followed one another in the most ingenious and painstaking forms of [historical] research,” it was time to “fix their attention on a new subject” (Chastellux, 1772, I, p. i). Public felicity or well-being was that subject, and so history was made to furnish insight beyond simply the examples of virtuous men nobly tolerating the intolerable. Chastellux proposed to focus, instead, on those practices and institutions that best served public happiness, providing the necessary context and conditions in which human beings could flourish.
It was a novel undertaking. But, though others joined him in his quest, Chastellux’s example proved short-lived. For in fact the same critical eye that went in search of the impediments to the pursuit of human happiness in the past could easily fixate on the roadblocks and deviations. Already in the eighteenth century, many chose to survey history not for the paths to be pursued, but for those to be avoided, finding in the dark landscape of the past the detritus of superstition, barbarism, injustice, and prejudice. And by the nineteenth century, that view was widely confirmed. Happiness, if it could be found anywhere, it seemed, lay on the horizon—in the future, not behind us. Happiness was something to be made in with a better world. Hegel spoke for many when he observed, in his Lectures on the Philosophy of World History, that “[h]istory is not the soil in which happiness grows. The periods of happiness in it are the blank pages of history” (Hegel, 1975, p. 79).
For Hegel, as for his student and critic Marx, history had a purpose, and what Marx called (without describing) “real happiness” (wirklichen Glücks) might well be its final outcome. But the working out of that purpose was a painful and bloody affair. History was the history of class struggle in Marxist terms. Hegel was even more graphic. History, in his view, was a “slaughter-bench”—a long unfolding of conflict, violence, and destruction—on which the happiness of peoples had been repeatedly sacrificed in the service of the final freedom to come.
Although few professional historians today share the teleological assumptions that such views of history entail, they do tend to share the critical imperative that both Hegel and Marx developed as an extension of Enlightenment critique. That is to say that they often survey the past as a place of oppression—the site of racism, intolerance, slavery, injustice, misogyny, and exploitation—as, of course, it very often was. And although critique in this instance, as in philosophy or other disciplines, might well be considered the necessary prerequisite of future flourishing, and thus an attempt to liberate our own and ages to come from the demons that continue to haunt us, in practice the emphasis on human flourishing often gets lost in the relentless focus on the dark record of man’s inhumanity to woman, man, and child. For historians of the twentieth century, in particular, with its horrendous wars, genocides, racial conquests, and totalitarian oppressions, it is easy to understand why talk of happiness might have gotten lost. But whether that justifies the oft-repeated adage, first voiced by Walter Benjamin (1968), that “[t]here is no document of civilization which is not at the same time a document of barbarism” is another matter (p. 256). From that vantage point, if history is “magistra vitae,” its lessons are resoundingly bleak.
Literary studies provide another case in point. Surely, one of the central purposes of literature has always been to provide pleasure through entertainment and the deepening of our sense of the human experience. At various points in literary history that fact has been explicitly acknowledged (Kavanaugh, 2010). And yet the intuition runs in counterpoint to the long-standing judgment, first voiced by Aristotle in the Poetics, that tragedy is a higher form of art than comedy. Indeed, the view that tragedy is “in some significant sense superior to comedy” has long been the “received view” in critical circles, and arguably it tracks with a wider predilection in favor not just of tragedy as an art form and literary genre, but with the “tragic” more generally—that is to say, with those aspects of the human experience that encompass the broad register of negative emotions, from sadness to loss to pain (Kieran, 2013, p. 1). It is revealing that the study of emotions in literature, like the study of emotions in history, has displayed a marked preference for the study of negative emotions—and much the same can be said of the powerful movement in literary studies devoted to the critical study of affect, known as affect theory. When the American writer Rachel Kadish (2007) chose to satirize an English department at a fictitious Manhattan college in the 1980s in her novel Tolstoy Lied, she had her main protagonist, a young literature professor, observe that she struggles every semester to find just one book on the approved syllabus of American fiction “that doesn’t make you want to jump off a bridge” (p. 4). And she worries that talking about happiness in her academic circles is “career suicide.” The novel is satire, but it is funny for a reason. As other commentators have pointed out, a commensurate predilection for criticism and critique, often reinforced by theoretical writings intent on exposing and unmasking hidden oppression, made for a culture among literary critics characterized by the “hermeneutics of suspicion” (Felski, 2015; Pawelski & Moores, 2013; Pawelski, 2016c). At their best, such hermeneutical frames are critically revealing. At their worst, they are revealingly critical—fault-finding and crabbed—and the suspicions they fostered tended to crowd out space in the classroom for the consideration of more uplifting topics or even just the simple love of literature.
Similar reflections could be extended to other fields in the humanities and liberal arts, which also experienced the consequences of negative bias. In this respect, they were no different from the social sciences. Economics, for example, despite its eighteenth-century origins among political economists who were deeply interested in questions of well-being and happiness, became by the mid-nineteenth century “the dismal science,” more concerned with the maximization of profits than of pleasure. Likewise, the study of politics: whereas, in the eighteenth century, an Enlightened individual such as John Adams could confidently declare that “[u]pon this point all speculative politicians will agree, that the happiness of society is the end of government,” a century later no such consensus was guaranteed (Adams, 1776). Political scientists studied many things. But the pursuit of happiness did not figure centrally. Still less could sociologists be counted upon to consider happiness for much of the twentieth century, whereas psychology, founded in the nineteenth century on the medical model of pathology, devoted itself first and foremost to combating illness and addressing disease.
Of course, in the social sciences, all that has changed dramatically in recent years. The much-vaunted rise of Positive Psychology, along with kindred efforts in behavioral economics, sociology, and political science, among other fields, has ensured that human flourishing and well-being are now central objects of inquiry in these disciplines, and many others besides (Seligman & Csikszentmihalyi, 2000). Proponents of the Positive Humanities counsel a similar reorientation and focus, working where possible with their colleagues in the sciences and social sciences on the assumption that they are “better together,” better able, that is, to contribute to the common goal of understanding human flourishing by drawing and sharing on their respective strengths (Pawelski and Tay, 2018; Pawelski, Chapter 2 in this volume). Future prospects are exciting, and they hold out the possibility, among other benefits, that psychologists can help measure and quantify the experiential effects of engagement with work in the arts and humanities (Shim, Tay, Ward, & Pawelski, 2019). Yet as the chapters in this volume testify, there are already encouraging signs that such reorientation and collaboration is underway. Humanists and practitioners of the liberal arts are rediscovering that their own disciplines are full of insights about how to live well. For indeed, as this chapter has sought to argue, the liberal arts and the humanities were once explicitly devoted to the cultivation of human flourishing and long served, self-consciously, in that capacity. In this respect, today’s positive turn is in some sense a return (Pawelski & Moores, 2013; Pawelski, Chapter 2 in this volume), although one that seeks to broaden the original audience, appeal, and extent of the humanities and the liberal arts well beyond the circles of the privileged few among which they began. Clearly, all human beings have a stake in human flourishing. And so there is every reason to resist attempts to limit the range of its inquiries in ways that would only privilege certain constituencies or confine its scope to certain areas of the globe. Both in their subject matter and in the forms that they take to reach their audiences, the humanities and the liberal arts must be broad.
But at the same time, it is vital to resist specious claims that the humanities and liberal arts are somehow luxuries we cannot afford. What a shame it would be if, after having prised the liberal arts from their restricted circles, we should restrict those circles once again. The Positive Humanities offer a way to broaden the appeal of the humanities and the liberal arts—reaching out to students and constituencies who have neglected them, or who have been put off by what they regard as the overly arcane or negative focus of its concerns. At the same time, they provide a crucial “unifying rationale” for their existence, making an explicit case to administrators, funders, and politicians for why the humanities matter (Pawelski, 2016c). That said, it is important to insist that a positive orientation in the humanities and the liberal arts does not, by any means, entail a rejection of the negative—still less, its denial. To attend fully to human flourishing necessarily means to attend to those forces—at once individual and social, personal and structural—that would impede it. But it also means to recall and cultivate those dimensions of the human experience—from hope and happiness, to kindness, humor, and joy—that humanists and practitioners of the liberal arts have for too long been inclined to overlook.
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