Seemingly Useless, Yet Indispensable

Seemingly Useless, Yet Indispensable

Humanities, Imagination, and What Universities Are Really Meant to Cultivate

I. Science versus Humanities

A claim appears again and again on social media platforms such as Facebook and Threads:

“Professors in the humanities should not be paid as much as those in science and engineering.”

Whenever this sentence appears, the response it most strongly invites is not anger, but recognition.

The claim itself is never only about salary. It reveals something far more fundamental: how value is measured, how “knowledge” is understood, and how the very purpose of the university is imagined.

In fact, the persistence of this belief is itself evidence of why humanistic training remains necessary.

Those who make such claims do not necessarily despise the humanities, nor do they lack good intentions. More often, they are articulating a way of thinking that has been reinforced so consistently by society that it no longer feels like a choice at all.

Within this logic, the value of knowledge is judged by whether it can be directly converted into economic output. Effort is considered legitimate only if it can be immediately verified. Compensation is deemed justified only if the market is willing to pay for it.

Under such assumptions, science and engineering appear “useful,” while the humanities appear elegant but dispensable.

The problem, however, is that this logic is neither natural nor inevitable. It is a value framework; one that has been used for so long that it is often mistaken for common sense.

A closer look reveals a deeper hierarchy at work, even within the humanities themselves.

Fields such as philosophy, law, education, business, sociology, and political science are often granted a degree of legitimacy because they appear rational, demonstrable, applicable, or replicable.

By contrast, literature, the arts, theatre, and creative research are frequently dismissed with harsher labels: impractical, unconcerned with results, insufficiently rigorous, excessively subjective, or merely personal expression.

This form of marginalization often runs deeper and operates more quietly than the familiar opposition between the humanities and the sciences.

Creative humanities are not unrigorous; rather, their rigor does not appear where scientific and technical disciplines expect it to appear.

Philosophy demands logical coherence in concepts and arguments. Social sciences emphasize data, models, and verification. Literature and the arts, however, undertake a different kind of difficult labor: capturing experience with precision, rendering emotion honestly, constructing forms capable of holding contradiction and complexity, and testing whether language and structure can withstand repeated reading and viewing. They also insist on asking an additional question: whether other possibilities might exist.

This work is often mistaken for disorder or arbitrariness. In reality, it requires a high degree of control over ambiguity, nuance, and what cannot be easily measured. It produces no single correct answer, and for that reason it is frequently judged as lacking rigor. Yet ambiguity, contradiction, and emotional complexity are precisely what saturate human life–unless one imagines a world of purely mechanical labor, absent dissatisfaction, reflection, or conflict.

II. The Discomfort of Creation

Creative work is unsettling precisely because it does not promise immediate usefulness, instant verification, or uniform outcomes. But this is not a flaw–it is the reason such work exists at all.

Human memory, trauma, desire, identity, and ethics do not converge on a single answer. When a society recognizes only deliverable, quantifiable, immediately profitable outcomes, it is quietly declaring that certain difficult and unsettling questions will simply be left unaddressed.

This connects to the issue that humanistic research is often criticized for producing “no results.” This criticism rests on a narrow understanding of what a result must look like–as a conclusion, a data point, or a directly applicable solution.

More often, the humanities produce something subtler yet more enduring: a transformation in how the world or something subtle is seen or discovered.

Before certain philosophical ideas were articulated, before certain works were created, many experiences went unrecognized. That animals might possess forms of emotional relation akin to human ones; that emotional manipulation often arises not from malice but from self-justification; that bullying frequently begins not with intent but with incremental power imbalances; that life within repetitive, empty spaces raises urgent questions about meaning and happiness – these experiences did not suddenly come into existence. They simply had not yet been named or understood as problems.

Humanistic inquiry and creation are what allow such realities to surface.

Another common criticism of the humanities is that “everyone says something different.” But this plurality is not a failure; it is the discipline’s mode of operation.

Even closely aligned positions diverge through differences in questions posed, angles adopted, or even unconscious choices of language. These divergences are not defects. They are the traces of intellectual trial, revision, extension, and recomposition.

Progress in the humanities does not come from a single correct answer. It emerges from countless incomplete understandings that gradually deepen, widen, and refine how the world is perceived.

Many of the perspectives taken for granted today did not emerge spontaneously. Feminism, race studies, gender and sexuality studies, existentialism, structuralism and post-structuralism, psychoanalysis, philosophy of science, environmental thought, and critiques of capitalism and socialism all arose through prolonged engagement with experience – through literary and artistic experimentation, sustained observation of political and social life, and rigorous theoretical inquiry.

When these frameworks first appeared, they were almost universally criticized as excessive, overly theoretical, impractical, or detached from reality.

– Even How Love Is Understood Is Learned –

The influence of the humanities extends far beyond institutions and theory. It enters personal life itself.

How love, intimacy, marriage, commitment, and freedom are understood has never been purely instinctual. From ancient Greek tragedy’s depictions of fate and passion, to Shakespeare’s explorations of desire, power, and emotion, to Pride and Prejudice’s reimagining of love and marriage, to Toni Morrison’s profound examinations of love, trauma, race, and subjectivity–these works have shaped how societies come to recognize dignity, inequality, and emotional legitimacy within relationships.

Through generations of reading, debate, and reinterpretation, humanity has learned to love with slightly less cruelty. That progress is owed to those who worked through these questions in literature and art long before they could be lived more carefully in reality.

Still another enduring misconception within higher education is the belief that traditional humanities should be eliminated and replaced by market-driven disciplines.

Universities certainly must respond to economic and industrial change. Yet this does not imply that traditional humanities should be discarded – especially when student time is limited. What should be preserved are precisely those disciplines not designed to chase short-term trends.

– Forming a Person, Not Just a Skill Set –

Traditional humanities are not concerned with producing immediately marketable skills. Their aim is older and more fundamental: forming a more complete human being – one capable of bearing complexity in ability, character, and perspective.

This vision is hardly new.

Aristotle and Practical Wisdom

For Aristotle, education was never primarily about technical training. It was about cultivating the capacity to judge well in complex situations. He distinguished between technē (technical skill), epistēmē (theoretical knowledge), and phronēsis (practical wisdom). The humanities are concerned above all with this last form – wisdom that emerges only through time, experience, and reflection.

Literature, history, philosophy, and the arts repeatedly place individuals into the perspectives of others, training them to understand conflict and bear consequences.

Contemporary higher education policy increasingly recognizes only technē. Employment rates, industry partnerships, modularized skills, and learning outcome indicators dominate institutional language. These measures are not inherently wrong, but they almost exclusively ask whether students can perform tasks.

They rarely ask what kind of people students are becoming.

If universities return to their foundational purpose, it becomes clear that they were never meant to function as constantly updated skill catalogues. Their role is to accumulate, transmit, and continually develop humanity’s ways of understanding the world.

Markets change. Industries shift. Tools become obsolete. Only those capable of judgment, understanding, and responsibility can endure such change.

– Imagination –

Perhaps the most underestimated capacity within the devaluation of the humanities is imagination.

Imagination is not fantasy. It is a complete process: constructing possibilities that do not yet exist, entering into others’ experiences to form empathy, translating internal visions into communicable forms, and ultimately realizing them in the world. From major works of literature and art to large-scale public infrastructure, institutional design, and technological innovation, nearly all transformative achievements follow this path.

A society that values only engineering theory, material mechanics, and design principles while deliberately removing humanistic and imaginative training will tend toward a single outcome: minimalism – not because minimalism is inherently superior, but because it is the easiest form to sustain once value has been stripped away.

Removing the humanities does not remove ornamentation; it removes the capacity to understand plural values. A society lacking imagination struggles to tolerate difference.

Imagination is also the engine of problem-solving. Truly difficult problems are never resolved by a single discipline or formula. They require imaginative recombination of knowledge and skills, followed by experimental realization. This capacity – difficult to quantify – is precisely what humanistic training cultivates over time.

Perhaps most importantly, imagination sustains hope. Prisoners imagine life beyond confinement. Soldiers maintain connection through letters and journals when communication is restricted. These acts are not escapes from reality but ways of preserving the self under constraint.

Imagination is not exclusive to the humanities, but it follows the same rule as any faculty: it weakens when unused. The good news is that imagination can be trained. Life experience supplies its materials; practice gives it form.

When imagination is reactivated, life itself changes. Walking through forests becomes an epic; cities become sites of observation; workplaces become stages for disguised heroism. This is not childishness – it is a renewed way of seeing.

Imagination is not merely the source of creation. It is a source of vitality.

Bias as Evidence

When the humanities are dismissed as useless, when art is demanded to justify itself immediately, when creative work is reduced to personal indulgence, the response need not be defensive.

Such judgments themselves demonstrate why humanistic training remains insufficiently widespread.

The humanities have not failed. They have been quietly relied upon, taken for granted, and undervalued – even as they continue to sustain how people think, judge, imagine, and live.

That is precisely why, though they may appear useless, they remain indispensable.