Reflections on the Crisis in the
Humanities
Richard Wolin
Introduction
In the late 1990s, George Steiner published a thought-provoking study on “The
Humanities—At Twilight?” At points, his tone was veritably Spenglerian. Steiner’s narrative, as prefigured by the title, surveys a cultural landscape suffused with loss, decline,
and stagnation. “There has also been a ‘down-marketing,’ a vulgarization of culture
on an unprecedented and now ever-accelerating scale,” Steiner laments. Heretofore,
the humanities were predicated on a quasi-theological linkage between signifier and
signified, word and meaning. Today, Steiner argues, that nexus has been permanently
severed. We now subsist in an aleatory discursive universe in which “dissemination”—
a random proliferation of signification—has triumphed at the expense of “real presences”: transcendent instances of value and meaning, impervious to both the ravages
of time and the seductive blandishments of fashion. As a method of interpretation,
deconstruction, Steiner continues, “demonstrates the…endlessly mobile, self-ironizing
texture of propositions; it points to the abyss of nonmeaning across which metaphor
and symbol…would span their bridges.” In conclusion, we are instructed in the values
of remembrance in anticipation of an enigmatic “homecoming” and informed that it is
the humanities’ mission “to instruct us that there can be, even in the unknown, there
perhaps above all, a homecoming.”1
The crisis in the humanities today has been borne out by a mass of statistical data.
Today higher education is taking on an increasingly vocational, pre-professional caste.
Between 1967 and 1987, at North American universities the percentage of business
Richard Wolin is Distinguished Professor of History and Comparative Literature at the
CUNY Graduate Center. His books include The Wind from the East: French Intellectuals,
the Cultural Revolution, and the Legacy of the 1960s, which has recently appeared with
Princeton University Press. His articles have appeared in Dissent, The Nation, and The
New Republic.
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and management majors doubled to 25 percent. During the same period, the number
of English majors declined from 7 percent to 3 percent. During the 1960s, approximately 18 percent of students were humanities majors. As of 2007, this percentage
had shrunk to 7 percent. According to figures provided by the Modern Language Association, in the
Like all of life today, the
past two years the number of positions available in
contemporary university is a
English Departments has fallen 44 percent, from
2
1,800 to 1,000—the lowest number in 35 years.
plaything of larger social forces.
Yet it would be misleading were we to construe
the crisis as a strictly intra-university affair. Like all
of life today, the contemporary university is a plaything of larger social forces. More
generally, the ever-escalating pace of social acceleration adversely affects the condition
of democratic political culture, which is the crucible in which a humanistic education takes place. Both democracy and democratic education are predicated on communicative openness and the, at times, painstaking and laborious process of mutual
understanding. Conversely, under conditions of the “high-speed society,” the dizzying tempo of technological change, electronic communications, and air and rail travel
combine to accelerate temporality and “shrink” social space in unprecedented ways.3
These transformations threaten to render the discursive core of democratic political culture—including the communicative preconditions for humanistic study—obsolete. It
is as though the relentless augmentation of technological innovation has left democratic
political culture standing still.
Ideas take time to ripen. Literature that aspires to be more than pulp fiction takes
time to compose. To read and assimilate significant literary works requires ample quantities of what the ancient Greeks called scolē or leisure time. Today, however, we live
in a culture of the instantaneous, the momentary, and the fleeting. Sociologists have
coined the term “liquid modernity” to describe the ephemerality, the inconstancy, and
the fluidity that pervades contemporary social relations. As the French poet Paul Valéry
observed nearly 100 years ago:
Interruption, incoherence, surprise are the ordinary conditions of our
life. They have even become real needs for many people, whose minds
are no longer fed…by anything but sudden changes and constantly
renewed stimuli…. We can no longer bear anything that lasts. We no
longer know how to make boredom bear fruit.4
Suffice it to say that the sociological predicament so well depicted by Valéry is not conducive to the patience, the concentration, and the meditative focus that are required
for significant humanistic achievement. And if we lack devoted humanists, our commitment to the humanities will prove impossible to sustain.
In “The Metropolis and Mental Life” (1908), Georg Simmel portrays the modern
urban denizen’s imperviousness to affective considerations—the emotional requirements of human intimacy—via the figure of the “blasé” attitude. According to Simmel,
the pervasive shock-experience of the modern city yields a condition of mass neurosis—
a veritable “neurasthenia” pandemic. In Simmel’s tragic view of life, the fragmentation
of experiential wholeness characteristic of modernity results in the “death of personal9
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ity” in the substantial, Goethean-Burckhardtian sense: the eclipse of the capacity for
rich, profound, and enduring cultural achievement.
The consciousness of the modern subject is no longer, à la Simmel, merely indifferent
or impervious. It seems positively fragmented or decentered. Paralleling the challenges
of globalization and the hyperreality of a digital age, social differentiation—the process
whereby social roles are subdivided into progressively finer increments—has accelerated
correspondingly. As Tzvetan Todorov has pointed out in The Imperfect Garden:
The new forms of communication and information do not necessarily
facilitate human interaction: everyone is seated alone in front of his
computer screen, and even when several of us are watching the same
program together on television, our gazes remain parallel and have no
chance to meet…this increasing solitude, this social autism does not
lead, as we might have expected, to a greater differentiation between
individuals…. Liberty is illusory when behaviors take the same forms
and seek to conform to the same images.5
Today a wide range of decisions and life choices that in traditional societies were
more or less habitual now of necessity become objects of explicit attention. Individuals
must now consciously decide where to live, what career to pursue, how to dress, what to
believe, how and whom to worship, what to consume, the sexual orientation they wish to pursue,
Does the contemporary crisis of the
and so forth.
Traditionally, the virtue of the humanities has
humanities portend a
been their capacity to counter the stultifying spesituation where we are at risk,
cialization that pervades modern life, and instead
to provide an overview of the scope and expanse
quite literally, of losing our souls?
of life as a whole. Thus, whereas the natural and
social sciences instruct us in the prerequisites for
technical world mastery, the humanities focus on questions of “ends” (in Greek, telei):
an evaluation of the pathways and modalities that make life intrinsically meaningful.6
The humanities’ mission is to provide an answer to Tolstoy’s existential interrogative:
what should I do and how should I live? In a late essay, “Science as a Vocation,” Max
Weber observes that, strictly speaking, science is meaningless insofar as it is incapable of
providing an answer to Tolstoy’s question concerning how we might choose a fulfilled
or meaningful life. The prerogative of science, in the sense of Wissenschaft or technical
scholarship, is the domain of instrumental or formal reason. Science determines the
most efficient, rational means to achieve a given end. As to whether such ends themselves are intrinsically worth pursuing, science is agnostic. It consigns such queries to
the reverie of poets on starry nights.
In light of the discourse of twentieth-century German Kulturkritik, in which the
question of the “soul” figures so prominently, we are justified in posing the question:
does the contemporary crisis of the humanities portend a situation where we are at risk,
quite literally, of losing our souls?
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The Republic of Letters
What aspects of the human condition do we risk sacrificing or distorting should
we allow humanistic study to flounder in the face of the imperatives of globalization:
the ever-expanding quest for the accumulation of wealth and technical expertise? We
can obtain a preliminary assessment of the potential losses and gains by reviewing the
attributes of the early modern Republic of Letters, for this was the context in which our
modern conceptions of literature, learning, and the vocation of “man”—as distinct from
the study of theology or nature—crystallized into an intelligible and meaningful whole.
The Republic of Letters was genuinely international or, at the very least, pan-European. Its denizens favorite locations
included Strasbourg, a cosmopolitan and tolerant border town; Leiden
and Amsterdam, the Dutch trading centers in which Catholics and
Calvinists, Anabaptists and Jews rubbed elbows in mutual tolerance,
and where all joined to reject what they called “the Genevan Inquisition”
when doctrinaire preachers tried to carry out an ideological cleansing;
and, of course, Basel, where Erasmus and other irenic souls found a
spiritual home in a city ever hospitable to Christian refugees from
oppression in their native countries.7
Unlike today what motivated its partisans was not trade or commerce, but a selfless
devotion to classical texts. As such, the dominant spirit entailed a veneration of antiquity and the spirit of inquiry it embodied. It was an allegiance based on the conviction
that these texts contained insights that were
intrinsically elevated and noble: the most exaltWhat aspects of the human
ed ideals that humankind had contemplated or
condition do we risk sacrificing
conceived. To disseminate and preserve them
was perceived as the ultimate calling. At stake
or distorting should we allow
was the question whether cultural and civic
humanistic study to flounder
life would be suffused with higher ideals of
in the face of the imperatives of
virtue or whether it would instead be allowed
to languish in a type of indigent and uneventglobalization: the ever-expanding
ful immediacy—a condition aptly described
quest for the accumulation of wealth
by Hegel as “the prose of the world.”8
The Republic of Letters was explicitly egaliand technical expertise?
tarian. It refused to discriminate on the basis
of class, nationality, or gender. Throughout the
capitals of Europe, its members provided refuge for one another, in keeping with the
time-honored maxims of hospitality. They also engaged in lively and vigorous epistolary exchange, thereby sharing their latest intellectual discoveries and archival findings.
Representative in this regard was Erasmus, widely acknowledged as the Republic’s primus inter pares [first among equals], whose correspondence runs to twelve volumes. Of
this network of letter-writing, Renaissance scholar Anthony Grafton notes:
The vast series of letters that fill dozens of volumes in every great
European library are the relics of a great effort…to create a new kind
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© Images.com/Corbis/Jim Frazier.
of virtual community that was
sustained not by immediate,
direct contact and conversation
so much as by a decades-long
effort of writing and rewriting.9
The qualification for admission to
the Respublica litterarum was a principled devotion to arts and letters and
a concomitant desire to ensure their
advancement and diffusion. For these
impassioned humanists, a commitment
to letters mandated an aversion to specialization. As a rule, the best and the
brightest among them were proficient
in Greek and Latin, as well as several
modern languages. In this regard, narrow specialization—the constricted
mentality of the modern Fachmensch
[specialist], so well exposed by Weber—
was not only anathema; it was virtually
unknown. In the course of their apprenticeships and training, the humanists regularly mastered a wide variety of disciplines:
philosophy, rhetoric, history, classics, as well as developments in natural philosophy and
the sciences. During an age of turbulent religious and political conflict that coincided
with the cataclysmic dislocations of the Reformation and Counterreformation, via their
devotion to letters, humanistic scholars were able to safeguard and conserve prospects
for a cosmopolitan European future, thereby offering a glimmer of hope in dark times.
What would we be missing should the humanistic ethos of the Republic of Letters
be eclipsed? In the opening pages of Worlds Made by Words, Grafton provides a wonderful example. He describes the founding of an independent learned society in the early
years of the sixteenth century, the Venetian publisher Aldo Maurizio’s New Academy.
Its seven members made a solemn vow that they would only speak Greek in each other’s
company, agreeing to pay fines should they slip up. In a Socratic spirit, the sum of these
proceeds was devoted to a lavish banquet, modeled after Plato’s symposium, where wine
flowed freely and the oratory was inspirational. As Grafton observes:
Long before the age of the Enlightenment “public sphere,” long before
Immanuel Kant identified the work of the scholar who addressed the
entire reading public as the preeminent example of the public use of
reason, learned Europeans used the systems of communication at their
disposal—above all, their letter writing and print—to bring new public
worlds into existence.10
In many important respects, these representatives of the early modern Respublica litterarum were vital precursors of the salons, the reading groups, the café societies, the
literary cenacles, and the correspondence societies of the age of Enlightenment.
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Renaissance Italy
The crisis we are experiencing in the humanities today was preceded by an analogous
crisis in Renaissance Italy. The similarities between these two watershed moments in
the history of Western humanism are worth examining insofar as the Renaissance crisis
helps us to understand the origin and significance of humanism’s appropriation in the
modern world.
Renaissance humanism developed in opposition to the perceived ossification of the
classical tradition at the hands of St. Thomas Aquinas’s scholasticism. The lines of conflict were established as early as the Trecento [fourteenth century] when the battle cry
had become: Padua vs. Florence. In the humanists’ eyes, Padua signified a bastion of
scholastic orthodoxy. Florence, conversely, had become a vital locus of neo-Platonic
innovation—a hub of learning in which all things classical were cherished and revered.
Renaissance humanism was a reaction against the scholastic view that “first philosophy”—that is, metaphysics and ontology—represented the keys to understanding the
human condition: the misplaced assumption that human affairs could only be explained
via reference to a series of transcendent, other-worldly truths. What Leonardo Bruni
and company valued about Plato was less the theory of the forms, which they found
speculative and abstruse, than the dialogical process itself. In his dialogues Plato showed
that philosophical inquiry had an ineffaceable practical side—that philosophy was not
a matter reserved for specialists, but addressed questions of everyday life. Hence, Plato’s
colloquies and debates took place chiefly in
quotidian settings: the marketplace, the seaThe crisis we are experiencing in the
port, a chance encounter, a banquet gathering.
humanities today was preceded by an
His favored protagonist, Socrates, would, in
an egalitarian spirit, eagerly debate all comers:
analogous crisis in Renaissance Italy.
nobles, merchants, politicians, as well as rival
philosophers such as the Sophists. Moreover,
the topics of the dialogues focused predominantly on this-worldly, ethical, and practical
considerations: above all, what it meant to live a life in accordance with virtue or right
reason. The relationship between philosophy and ethics, insight and human practice,
was epitomized via the Socratic maxim: the unexamined life is not worth living.
For the Florentine humanists, the Socratic love of conversation and the corresponding desire to make philosophy worldly stood in marked contrast to scholasticism’s sterile disputations as well as the Stagirite’s (that is, Aristotle’s) predilection for didactic
treatises, in which truth seemed to be ontologically frozen and which thus displayed
scant attention to the ambiguities of the human condition.11 The Nichomachean
Ethics famously ended with praise for the bios theoretikos, or contemplative life, as the
path to the “highest life.” From a humanistic point of view, the shortcoming of this
approach was that it renounced worldliness: the variegated richness of lived experience. Conversely, Renaissance humanists stressed that knowledge was rooted in the
virtues of human sociability rather than isolated, monastic introspection. Renaissance
thought embraced the Platonic Socrates and the dialogic spirit in the hope of humanizing ancient wisdom, rendering it serviceable for the ends of “man.” In this way, the
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humanists challenged the Schoolmen’s purported monopoly on truth, thereby democratizing and pluralizing knowledge: constructively exposing thought to the disciplines
of history, rhetoric, and philology. This new focus on the practical side, or use-value,
of wisdom also helps account for the transition from Latin to the vernacular: a crucial
way-station in the democratization of knowledge.
The result was the birth of modern humanistic study. Those of us who teach in
humanities departments today are the direct and fortunate heirs of this reconceptualization of the goals of human knowledge. The Florentine humanists sought to promote
the establishment of “an ideal republic in whose soil our spiritual life strikes roots and
finds its nourishment.” It was for this reason that they stressed that “civic and political
discourse are prepared, illuminated, and sustained through culture.”12 In opposition
to the type of humanistic scholar who defended [monastic] withdrawal
on the double ground that it was apt to minimize his contacts with the
inferior modern world and could serve him as a bridge to religious contemplation, there was henceforth to be a type of humanist who found
the crucial subject for his studies in history, politics, and [literature],
and who, following the ancient model, was expected to be not only a
man of culture but also a better and more useful citizen.13
It is important to keep in mind that Renaissance Florence was much more than
a disembodied crucible of classical learning. It was also home to a robust city-state
that, in the eyes of many, had become republican virtue incarnate—a reincarnation
of the Republica Romana. In this way Florentine humanism reflected a fundamental
conflict over the meaning and direction of humanism: whether humanism’s basic values were contemThe study of history allows
plative—that is, wedded to a disinterested love of
us to come to terms with the
learning for its own sake—or whether they were
necessarily tied to the republican ideals of the city;
achievements as well as the
in other words, whether the ends of humanism
depredations of our collective
were ultimately scholastic or civic. The Florentine
cognoscenti rightly feared that, should the goals of
past so that we might experience
humanistic study become overtly separated from
a future that is free of injustice.
worldly purposes—should the pursuit of humanistic ideals turn its back on practical life and become
narrowly self-referential—human excellence would suffer correspondingly. It would
be tantamount to a betrayal of the relationship between self-knowledge and human
flourishing that, since the time of Socrates, has been integral to the humanities’ selfunderstanding.
The Florentine ideal of humanism was existentially bound to the early modern
Italian city-state. Today, this conception needs to be expanded outwardly in a cosmopolitan direction. Cosmopolitanism softens the latently intolerant contours of ethnocentrism and provincialism, thereby facilitating what Kant referred to as the capacity
for “enlarged thought”: an aptitude for unprejudiced thinking that derives from our
ability to “think from the standpoint of everyone else” and thus to attain the sublime
plane of universality.14 The production of this “enlarged mentality” is in many respects
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© Images.com/Corbis/Dave Cutler.
the raison d’être of what Goethe referred
to as Weltliteratur. As such, world literature is a continuing exercise in de-provincialization. In learning about the mores,
habits, and aspirations of different cultures
via the vessel of literary form, I defamiliarize my own culture, thereby gaining
valuable insight into its narrowness, limitations, and eccentricities. The path to
world citizenship is achieved by working
through and surpassing the constraints of
national identity. In this process, world literature plays an invaluable role by helping
us to surmount the boundaries of ethnic
and regional belonging in the direction of
cosmopolitan citizenship.
Autonomy, Fortuna, and Virtú
The debate over the ultimate mission of humanistic education is, of course, one
that has remained very much with us today. The civic and practical goals of humanistic
learning are necessarily related to the project of human autonomy, for there can be no
autonomy apart from the provisos and attributes of self-knowledge. And this is precisely what a humanistic education provides: the tools of self-mastery that allow us to
live a self-directed life, a life that transcends the contingencies of fate. Humanistic study
is an antidote to the temptations and seductions of fatalism: the externally imposed
constraints of history, nature, or providence. Since its inception, humanistic learning
has provided us with mechanisms of self-understanding that permit us to surmount the
trammels of a blind and meaningless destiny. It does this by nurturing the virtues of
human intentionality, by furnishing us with the means of endowing fate with human
purposes.
The study of history allows us to come to terms with the achievements as well as the
depredations of our collective past so that we might experience a future that is free of
injustice. The study of rhetoric furnishes us with the capacities of linguistic self-expression in order that we might persuade our fellow citizens about the worth of our most
cherished beliefs and convictions. The study of literature introduces us to imaginary
worlds and new experiences, so that our conceptions of human possibility transcend
the boundaries and limitations of what was heretofore conceivable. The study of philosophy instructs us in the virtues of reasoning and moral judgment: how to distinguish
the substantive from the superficial, what is cogent from what is slack, the convincing
from the merely suggestive, the just from the unjust. Through these examples we can
see that the ideal of education toward autonomy has functioned as the raison d’être of
humanistic learning then and now.
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A contemporary representative of the humanist tradition has aptly characterized its
meaning and purport as follows:
The term humanist has several meanings, but we can say in a first approximation that it refers to the doctrines according to which man is the point
of departure and the point of reference for human actions. These are
“anthropocentric” doctrines, just as others are theocentric, and still others
put nature or tradition in this central place. The term humanist figures,
perhaps for the first time in French, in a passage by Montaigne in which
he uses it to characterize his own practice, in contrast to that of the theologians…. The specificity of human affairs (in contrast to those that relate
to God) is therefore the point of departure for humanist doctrine.15
Renaissance humanism’s preoccupation with the value of autonomy echoes clearly
in one of the key debates of the quattrocento: the conflict between virtú and fortuna.
Here, fortuna signifies the prevalence of arbitrary fate—of accident and chance—
whereas virtú connotes the capacities of intellect and will to bend destiny to human
purposes. This opposition between virtú and fortuna is one of the central leitmotifs of
Machiavelli’s oeuvre. A gifted interpreter of Machiavelli’s oeuvre has characterized its
relevance to the humanist tradition as follows:
[Virtú] denoted the fundamental quality of man which enables him to
achieve great works and deeds. In the ancient world man’s virtus was
placed in relation to Fortuna; virtus was an innate quality opposed to
external circumstance or chance. Virtú was not one of the various virtues which Christianity required of good men, nor was virtú an epitome
of all Christian virtues; rather it designated the strength and vigor from
which all human action arose. In his writings Machiavelli used this
concept to reflect the insight…that political success depends not on
the righteousness of the cause nor on the use of intelligence, but that
victory could come “against all reason” to those who were inspired by
single-minded will-power or by some indefinable inner force.16
Yet, by the time Machiavelli composed his Discourses on Livy (1513), the terminological opposition between virtú and fortuna had forfeited much of its intricacy and
subtlety. In fact, the passage just cited betrays a distinctly late-Renaissance resignation.
Moreover, at this point virtú had become colloquially associated with virility, with
martial prowess and the ability of human will to master hostile external circumstance.
In the work of the quattrocento humanists, conversely, virtú conveyed a more
nuanced set of attributes related to the ancient Greek ideal of prudence or phronesis:
the capacity for acting circumspectly in keeping with the provisions of right reason.
Leon Battista Alberti, brimming with self-confidence, wondered aloud whether, when
all was said and done, fortuna was really so powerful in human affairs. Instead, it was
assumed that, “man himself [was] the cause both of his misfortunes and of his good
fortune [and that] virtue always defeats fortuna.”17 Thus virtue and effective action were
associated with humanitas:
a humane, prudent, wise and virtuous form of behavior, which, thoughtfully planned, can be adjusted by subtle intuition to fit into the play of
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all earthly forces…. [Virtú thus] signified human deeds in the fullness
of their moral and political value.18
The crisis of Renaissance humanism in the late quattrocento reflected the fear that
knowledge for its own sake—a learning that was self-referential, unworldly, and thus
divorced from the needs of the city—could give rise to a new scholasticism and thereby
yield a new complacency. The Florentine humanists realized that scholarly learning
must take place as the critical appropriation rather than as the passive fetishization or
glorification of Great Texts. It seems that one could apply the same insights and criticisms to the nineteenth-century humanistic ideal as promoted by the age of German
classicism. Under the guise of Bildung, the new conception of humanism celebrated not
the Renaissance idea of the citizen-scholar but the refined personality or Kulturmensch,
whose virtue consisted in his or her serene detachment from the ends of the city. This
was the conception of personality glorified by titans of Weimar classicism such as
Goethe and Schiller. It was the same ideal praised by Jacob Burckhardt in his landmark
study on the Civilization of the Renaissance in Italy. It was brought to its logical, if disturbing, conclusion by Burckhardt’s Basel colleague, Friedrich Nietzsche, who in the
Genealogy of Morals expressed the view that,
“mankind in the mass sacrificed to the prosThe Florentine humanists realized
perity of a single stronger species of man—
19
that would be an advance.” One might
that scholarly learning must take place
even go so far as to say that the tragedy of the
as the critical appropriation rather
German Bildung ideal lies in the alienation
of the Kulturmensch from the modern city.
than as the passive fetishization or
In this respect, too, the virtú-doctrine of the
glorification of Great Texts.
Renaissance humanists has much to teach us.
Autonomy and Education
In our postmodern times, Enlightenment-bashing has become something of an
intellectual blood-sport cum academic fashion. Yet, as the eighteenth century drew to a
close, Kant made an important attempt to redefine the meaning of humanism via the
prism of the Enlightenment. His efforts still resonate today.
One of the great virtues of Kant’s “Answer to the Question: What is Enlightenment?”
(1784) is that the Königsberg sage perceived the essential correlation between autonomy and humanistic education. (The literacy rate in eighteenth-century France was a
mere 37 percent.20) It was in this spirit that Kant defined Enlightenment as the “emergence from self-incurred tutelage.” Here, “tutelage” means the inability to use one’s
reason without the guidance of another. As Kant explains: “If I have a book to have
understanding in place of me, a spiritual adviser to have a conscience for me, a doctor
to determine my diet for me, and so on, I need not make any efforts at all. I need not
think, so long as I can [enlist the services of others].”21
Kant’s text is an allegory for European politics in the age of absolutism—an era
of so-called Enlightened despotism. In this period, the idea of autonomous citizen17
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ship remained an abstraction, a delusion spawned by the overheated imagination of
philosophers. Instead of citizens, the peoples of Europe were primarily “subjects,” who
were regularly exposed to the whims and dictates of their rulers. Should persecution or
injustice occur, they had little legal or political recourse. As a philosopher of autonomy,
Kant realized that citizens who were deprived of the means of forming their own judgments were doomed to remain in a condition
of immaturity. They were predestined to lead
How might one best remedy the
truncated existences, with most options and
prospects a priori foreclosed. For Kant, the
constraints of a technologically
virtues of humanistic study were pivotal in
mediated society that abets social
educating citizens toward maturity and thus
conformity, cultural leveling, and the
countering the cultural deprivations resulting
from ignorance and superstition.
complacency of passive citizenship?
In Kant’s view, the interrelationship
between education and autonomy was crucial
insofar as a people kept in a state of immaturity are incapable of self-rule. They are also,
as a rule, systematically prevented from leading fulfilled public lives. Instead, the more
circumscribed happiness of private life was, in most cases, the only contentment they
would know. Humanistic learning furnishes citizens with the cultural and intellectual
prerequisites for both individual self-realization and collective self-determination. It
provides them with the knowledge of history, language, and logic necessary for them to
assimilate the past and to develop informed political opinions.
Conclusion
How might one best remedy the constraints of a technologically mediated society
that abets social conformity, cultural leveling, and the complacency of passive citizenship? The intellectual corollary to this society is “thoughtlessness”: an incapacity for
sustained, critical reflection. Such incapacity diminishes citizens’ ability to lead selfdirected and meaningful lives. They become instead the playthings of heteronomous
and impersonal social forces. And thus, the ethos of self-determination, one of liberal
democracy’s raison d’êtres, threatens to shrivel, to the point of self-caricature. Today,
all of us, including those who think professionally, are often enough
thought-poor; we all are far too easily thought-less. Thoughtlessness is an
uncanny visitor who comes and goes everywhere in today’s world. For
nowadays we take in everything in the quickest and cheapest way, only
to forget it just as quickly, instantly.22
Today, one of the essential roles of the humanities is to counteract thoughtlessness
and thereby to aid in replenishing the public’s capacity for sustained and intelligent
deliberation. One symptom of thoughtlessness is the decline of print journalism, which
has traditionally served as the backbone of the democratic public sphere. Instead, citizens increasingly turn to the internet and to the unedited, unregulated blogosphere as
their primary source of information. Humanistic study can restore integrity to the pub18
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lic sphere by resisting at every turn the reifying and banalizing temptations of the information age. Confronted with the simplifying tendencies of the high speed society, the
humanist’s task is to ensure that arguments and issues are reframed with the measure
of complexity and subtlety necessary to arrive at nuanced and considered judgments.
As a humanistic discipline, philosophy has a modest but no less indispensable role
to play. To be sure, it has forfeited the position of cultural primacy it formerly possessed as “queen of the sciences.” Despite Heidegger’s pretensions, philosophy can no
longer claim privileged access to Being or truth. Today, we live in a post-metaphysical,
post-Kantian age. Some two-hundred years ago, Kant declared that “the critical path
alone is open to us.”23 His assertion proposed that the age of philosophical dogmatism
had definitively come to an end. Henceforth, the insights of humanistic study must
be redeemed exoterically, via arguments and concepts—that is, publicly and democratically—rather than through linguistic bombast (one of Heideggerianism’s temptations) and unsupported declarations about the ultimate nature of Reality, as with the
Scholasticism of yore. Consequently, humanism’s judgments must be preponderantly
skeptical and critical. As an approach to wisdom, humanism aims to puncture and
deflate truisms, commonplaces, and idées fixes. It seeks to disrupt the sensus communis,
which is always in danger of congealing into an inflexible body of inherited belief. In
this respect the goals of humanistic study hark back to their Socratic origins in the
elenchus as a mode of critical interrogation. Philosophy—and the humanities in general—must ceaselessly challenge the received wisdom concerning truth, justice, and
piety in order to prevent the demos from succumbing to the lures of a technologically
administered somnabulence.
Endnotes
1
George Steiner, “The Humanities—At Twilight?” PN Review 25 (1999): 23–4.
2
These figures are taken from Peter Conn, “We Need to Acknowledge the Realities of Employment in the
Humanities,” Chronicle of Higher Education (4 April 2010): <http://chronicle.com/article/We-Need-toAcknowledge-the/64885/>. See, also, “What Is the Crisis in the Humanities?” The Common Review 8.4
(Spring 2010): 4–5.
3
See William Scheuerman, Liberal Democracy and the Social Acceleration of Time (Baltimore: Johns
Hopkins University Press, 2004).
4Cited
in Zygmunt Baumann, Liquid Modernity (Cambridge: Polity, 2005) 1.
5
Tzvetan Todorov, The Imperfect Garden: The Legacy of Humanism, trans. Carol Cosman (Princeton:
Princeton University Press, 2002) 229.
6
On this point, see Max Horkheimer, The Eclipse of Reason (New York: Oxford University Press, 1947).
7
Anthony Grafton, Worlds Made by Words (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2009) 19.
8
G. W. F. Hegel, Aesthetics, trans. T. M. Knox (New York: Clarendon, 1988).
9
Grafton 23.
10Grafton
1.
11Aristotle’s
treatises, of course, were compiled from notes dutifully taken by his students.
19
T he H edgehog R eview / S u mmer 2 0 1 1
12Eugenio Garin, Italian Humanism: Philosophy and Civic Life in the Renaissance, trans. P. Munz (New York:
Harper and Row, 1965) 40. Garin’s views have been contested by Paul Oskar Kristeller in Renaissance
Thought: The Classical, Scholastic, and Humanist Strains (New York: Harper and Row, 1961).
13Hans
Baron, The Crisis of the Early Renaissance (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1955) 451.
14Immanuel
Kant, Critique of Judgment, trans. James Meredith (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1961)
section 49. Kant was undoubtedly familiar with the following passage of David Hume’s Enquiry
Concerning the Principles of Morals: “Again suppose that several distinct societies maintain a kind of
intercourse for mutual convenience and advantage, the boundaries of justice still grow larger, in proportion to the largeness of men’s views, and the force of their mutual connexions. History, experience, reason
sufficiently instruct us in this natural progress of human sentiments, and in the gradual enlargement of
our regards to justice, in proportion as we become acquainted with the extensive utility of that virtue”
[(La Salle: Open Court, 1966) 25].
15Todorov
6.
16Felix
Gilbert, Machiavelli and Guicciardini: Politics and History on Sixteenth Century Florence (Princeton:
Princeton University Press, 1965) 179.
17Garin
62.
18Garin
62–3.
19Friedrich
Nietzsche, On the Genealogy of Morals, trans. Walter Kaufmann, Basic Writings of Nietzsche
(New York: Modern Library, 1968) 514.
20For
a discussion of this, see John Markoff, “Literacy and Revolt: Some Empirical Notes on 1789 in
France,” The American Journal of Sociology 92.2 (1986): 323–49.
21Immanuel
Kant, “Answer to the Question: What Is Enlightenment?” trans. Hans Siegbert Reiss, Kant:
Political Writings (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1991) 54.
22Martin Heidegger, “Discourse on Thinking,” Philosophical and Political Writings (New York: Continuum,
2006) 88.
23Immanuel
Kant, The Critique of Pure Reason, trans. Norman Kemp Smith (New York: Palgrave
MacMillan, 2003) A832 B860.
20