Crisis in the Humanities I

Economic turndown hits not only business sector but education, and even worse in the field of humanities in particular. Even if the crisis did not strike on the economy, this topic has been, for decades and even centuries, so obsolete that I have heard almost day by day from my colleagues, friends and students.

After reading Allan Bloom's classic The Closing of the American Mind (1987), which I happened to flip through from my philosphy-major cousin's bookself nearly a decade ago, I again chanced to read a few more articles on this topic whilst browsing the journal New Literary History.

It might be true that the humanities are "with neither the urgency of the local nor the grand significance of the global" (Geoffrey Galt Harpham, "Beneath and beyond the 'crisis in the humanities'," New Literary History, vol. 36 (2005), pp. 21-36, p. 21). Below are excerpts from Harpham's article:

"humanistic scholars, fragmented and confused about their mission, suffer from an inability to convey to those on the outside and even to some on the inside the specific value they offer to public culture; they suffer, that is, from what the scholar and critic Louis Menand calls a 'crisis of rationales.'" (p. 22)

"If traditional rationale for humanistic study were to be condensed into a single sentence, that sentence might be the following: The scholarly study of documetns and artifacts prouced by human beings in the past enables us to see the world from different points of view so that we may better understand ourselves...the sentence contains three distinct premises, that the humanities have the text as their object, humanity as their subject, and self-understanding as their purpose." (p. 23. emphasis original)

"All texts are written from within some cultural tradition, and most groups or individuals look to the archive of the past for keys to their heritage and thus to their identity...texuality...is organized around the principle of universal communication across time and space, and constitutes a continuous and theoretically unbounded archive." (p. 25)

"[T]he humanities is defined by its concern with the subject of humanity. Humanists...treat their subjects...as self-aware individuals conscious of their existence. Humanistic knowledge is centered in texts (in the broadest sense of the term) produced by human beings engagedin the process of reflecting on their lives. At the core of the humanities is the distinctively human capacity to imagine, to interpret, and to represent the human experience." (p. 27)

"the humanistic approach begins with the assumption that the text requires multiple explanations, each of which might be an answer to a different question." (p. 29)

"under the presumption that human behavior and expression are bottomless in their depth, humanistic study produces not certain but uncertain knowledge, knowledge that solicits its own revision in an endless process of refutation, contestation, and modification. Humanists aspire to speak the truth, but none would wish to have the very last word, for sucha triumphant conclusion would bring an end not just to the conversation but to the discipline itself." (p. 30. emphasis original)

"humanistic study inculcates a heightened awareness of our power over the past...[i]n humanistic study, we confront not just our ancestors but also our own capacity for determining who our ancestors were, and thus for determining who we are or might become." (p. 31)

"Reading about people may enrich our imaginative experience, but reading words in search of the human presence behind them strengthens our imaginative capacity, forcing us to reenact in our own minds the drama of other minds and even to feel their thoughts and sensations as if they were our own." (p. 32)

"Humanists ought, I believe, to get in the habit of articulating the possible relations between the work they do and some purpose the nonacademic public can understand. There is, of course, no guarantee that the public will approve of that purpose or the means of achieving it, but if the case is not made, the public can hardly be blamed for its indifference or even its distrust...[t]he humanities should represent both the conservation and accurate transmissionof the past and the imaginative cultivation of the future." (p. 36)