When looking back on the past hundred years of higher education, the most saddening thing has been the effort in the humanities to frame its value in those metrics which it could never dominate: wealth, power, and progress.
Wealth, the paramount aim of capitalist societies, because, as Harvard president Charles Eliot discovered in the 19th century, any prestigious university needed large, consistent financial backing. In America, that meant appealing to the nouveau riche who sought to recruit those trained in industry, manufacturing, and management. The humanities thus had to claim they were similarly capable of creating prodigious wealth.
Power, the panacea of every state, because, as military innovation and industry became a better predictor for a nation’s success than the genius of its generals, governments have increasingly propped themselves up on the shoulders of the industrialists who supply their oil and their armalites. The humanities thus had to denigrate the role which organized violence played in the ascent of modern states compared to the role of transformative ideas (such as human rights, double predestination, and the unfolding of the Weltgeist).
Progress, the sine qua non of the liberal mind, because the natural sciences have awed the universities with measurable, sustained growth and discovery. The humanities, by contrast, have specialised its disciplines to avoid uncomfortable questions, such as whether moral philosophy has progressed since Kant, or Confucius, or (if you like) the Sermon on the Mount.
What makes it so saddening is that, by reassuring uncertain undergrads about the use of the humanities for making money, gaining power, and achieving progress, the promoters of the humanities make it seem as if these were the principal pursuits of education in general.
In “The Idea of a University”, English cardinal and founding rector of the Catholic University of Dublin (now University College Dublin) John Henry Newman claimed that the purpose of a university is the enlargement of the human mind, and the pursuit of knowledge as an end in itself. It is true that by the middle of their careers philosophy graduates do better at corporations than Master of Business Administration holders, but the point of philosophy is surely not to climb the corporate ladder, even if that is a nice plus. (There is a selection bias here; philosophy majors tend to come from more privileged backgrounds that allow them to pursue disciplines without a high and rapid rate of return).
Artificial intelligence today is transforming what most people, just a few years ago, envisioned in the future of the job market. A degree in computer science (CS) used to be the best bet for landing a high-income job out of college; now, the “hard skills” in a typical CS degree are not as immediately beneficial in a field heavily disrupted by AI-streamlined programming and software development.
An easy intuition would say that this suggests the humanities may be more useful in the job market today. I spent some time this summer working at the American Philosophical Association, and I vividly recall that in its publications there is a deafening emphasis on philosophy as a means to ascending in the financial world. One archived New York Times article reads “To Beat the Market, Hire a Philosopher”, sharing the story of American investor (and philosophy PhD) Bill Miller, who apparently draws on Jorge Luis Borges’ metaphysical imagery “to illustrate a point about price-to-earnings ratios” and William James’ pragmatism “to justify why America Online (AOL) is a value stock”. (Unfortunately for Bill Miller, this article shortly preceded the burst of the dot-com bubble, delivering a crushing blow to the William Jamesian theory of the value of AOL).
Palantir CEO Alex Karp is one figure who has staunchly argued the opposite position: “[AI] will destroy humanities jobs”, he said at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, “hopefully you have some other skill”.
The irony people have pointed out is that Karp himself received his PhD in social theory from Goethe University Frankfurt. The AI world is in fact filled with humanities students, including but certainly not limited to early investor and board member of OpenAI Reid Hoffman, who also co-founded LinkedIn, with a philosophy master’s from Oxford; Anthropic president Daniela Amodei (sister of CEO Dario Amodei) with an English lit Bachelor of Arts from UC Santa Cruz; and Microsoft AI CEO Mustafa Suleyman, who briefly studied philosophy and theology at Oxford.
As a philosophy student myself, I have tempered my parents expectations that my degree will take me, someday, to being a CFO at a Fortune 500 company; perhaps it is a failure of imagination, but I have never been able to translate my knowledge of the ontology in the early Wittgenstein to a ruthless business sense or a proficiency in generating seed capital.
Further problems which AI poses to the humanities, even if soft skills may help people rise the ranks at these new companies, is the ability of AI to synthesise knowledge and then summarise Victorian novels, explain Bourdieu’s conception of habitus, or even (as we have seen with the latest iterations of Claude) emulate Chopin’s nocturnes.
But rather than putting a damper on the zeal to study the humanities, this should reinforce the notion that the purpose of the humanities was never about merely wealth, power, or progress. For it is firstly doubtful that the success of humanities majors at big AI companies is due primarily to what they studied (before Karp co-founded Palantir with Peter Thiel, he planned to use his funds to survive as an unemployed writer in Berlin). It is secondly inevitable that consistent social critics and ethical teachers will come into conflict with the established powers of any age. And, lastly, it is a well-known truth that the moral progress of humanity has lagged behind its scientific progress.
If the humanities helped AI moguls navigate a volatile market, that is certainly a use. But, in general, the “use” of Shakespearean sonnets or Cartesian meditations is not anything outside of itself. One does not need a min-max graph to appreciate Haydn’s string quartets or a return on investment for one’s time engrossed in studies of Cézanne; the aesthetic and intellectual experiences are in themselves an adequate justification.
At the end of the day, vibe-coded B2B SaaS platforms are not all there is to human life. As long as people long for inexhaustible life, and not mere living, the humanities will be here to stay.
