Don't devalue the insight or 'What are the humanities for?'

John Armstrong, philosopher in residence at the Melbourne Business School, argues that the answering of the question in the title above has serious implications for how the humanities are studied, how they are funded and how their success – or failure – is measured.
While the choice politically often seems to be whether to a) honour (and fund) the humanities for their own sake or b) demand that the humanities contribute something more tangible to society, Armstrong suggests that both sides have something to offer.
The mistake, says Armstrong, has been to look for a side benefit (e.g. studying Latin helps you to deal with abstractions) and then to try to justify a whole discipline on that slender basis.
Instead we should look to life's most difficult practical questions - 'What are we really trying to accomplish and why, in the long run, would it be so good to do that?’ - and at how a discipline helps us to answer those questions. What is it that is of intrinsic benefit?
The humanities, Armstrong concludes, become more practical not by disavowing their core concerns but by understanding them more clearly and by seeing them as being in the service of life, not in the service of academics.

Link to the full The Australian article