David O’Hara and John Kaag lament the disciplines’ solitary, non-collaborative nature:
Academic life in the humanities still bears the form, if not the detail and substance, of the monastic life that shaped the modern university. Our offices and library cubicles are like cells, places to which we retreat so that we can “read, read, read, work, pray, and read again,” as the philosopher Charles Peirce put it back in 1877, quoting an old chemist’s maxim. Our graduate-school training habituates us in burying ourselves for long hours in solitary seeking, emerging only for the austere hours of communal liturgy, where most of us sit in silence while one chosen from among us stands and reads from the holy text. The main difference between us and the medieval monastics is that they, when they went into solitude, believed they were not alone. We moderns decidedly are.
They go on to argue that “[g]enuine communication, rather than personal notoriety or individual survival, should be the ultimate object of our work in the humanities”:
Cultivating a voice—one that is both sophisticated and understandable—takes an enormous amount of practice. And it requires more than a little humility (which both of us are still working on). We have to actually care when others don’t grasp our point. Miscommunication is not a function of others’ ineptitude, but a reflection of our own. That may not always be the case, but it is unequivocally possible. And we have the choice to consider this possibility seriously. Doing so might mean that we begin to collaborate and discover a voice that is worth being listened to. We cannot do this by ourselves. It is not good to be alone.
The Dish 