Hayot 57: "How humanists like you and me see the world"
"the work of the humanities [...] describes a vocation, a calling, a task whose socially sacred or deeply political necessity is a matter not just of thinking, of scientific knowledge, but of feeling, of--let's just say it--a political commitment to the protection of certain forms of being from the rapacity of the state, or of capitalism. The metadiscourse of humanist reason expresses and ethos, and that ethos has been the source of a great deal of the humanities' moral, pedagogical, political, and epistemological energy."