The Promises and Pitfalls of a ‘Global Humanities’

Once again, there are signs of deep trouble for the humanities in higher education — in the Western world, if not the world as a whole. News of closures trickles in relentlessly. At New Zealand’s Victoria University, ancient Greek, Latin, and Italian were all given the ax. Michigan’s Cornerstone University, in Grand Rapids, reduced and merged its humanities programs. Leaders at the Duksung Women’s University, in Seoul, South Korea, have proposed closing the institution’s German-literature and French-literature departments. In such circumstances, opinion pieces lamenting the fate of humanistic education have understandably proliferated.

These trends offer an important opportunity to ponder the place and purpose of the humanities. One promising effort to do so is spearheaded by the Society for the History of the Humanities, an organization established in the last decade. Its journal, History of Humanities, began publishing in the spring of 2016. The journal’s inaugural editorial announces in its bold title “A New Field: History of Humanities.”

In keeping with the spirit of multiculturalism that has influenced much scholarly and curricular energy in American higher education since at least the early 1980s, many of History of Humanities’ articles highlight the role of humanities disciplines in non-Western societies. The fall 2020 issue of the journal, for example, includes Wang Hui’s “The Humanities in China: History and Challenges”; Margaret Mehl’s “From Classical to National Scholarship: Konakamura Kiyonori’s History of Music in Japan (1888) and Its Foreign-Language Prefaces” appears in its spring 2023 number. Along similar lines, the spring 2024 issue of History of Humanities includes a symposium on “comparative global humanities.”

As a scholar whose writing has focused on humanistic history, I welcome such a broadened approach to this subject. My book The Battle of the Classics: How a Nineteenth-Century Debate Can Save the Humanities Today (2020) argues in favor of a multicultural humanism and proposes a core curriculum that avoids overreliance on the Western canon. If the spirit of humanism is to thrive in higher education, we must fight against the choose-your-own-adventure course of studies championed by the anti-humanists of our colleges and universities, while moving beyond an approach to general education dominated by authors associated with the Western tradition. Works of rich intellectual, aesthetic, and moral significance are linked to a wide variety of human civilizations, and a proper humanistic education should introduce students to many of them.

All the same, it would be foolish to conclude that multiculturalism on its own will prove a panacea for the humanities. Yet the History of Humanities’ symposium on the comparative global humanities seems to assert just that.

In their introduction, the Sinologist Wiebke Denecke, the classicist Alexander Forte, and the historian Tristan Brown eschew definitional clarity; indeed, they seem to reject the need for definitions at all. The very task of defining the humanities, the authors opine, “is of course not a solution, but part of the problem.” Instead, historians must move beyond “asking what the humanities are, to what they can do.”

There is something amiss with an approach to the history of the humanities that belittles the foundational query “What are the humanities?” It should strike readers as wrongheaded to disregard the origins of the humanistic movement and to ignore its original aims and goals. How can we justify the continued existence of the humanities in higher education if we don’t even know what they are?

Likely due to their avoidance of this essential question, Denecke, Forte, and Brown provide a vision of the humanities that treats them chiefly as a handmaiden of the sciences. Among recent developments in humanities scholarship, the authors highlight “environmental” and “medical” humanities as especially important. These subfields can allow scholars of the humanities to speak to scientific concerns that our institutions of higher learning — and contemporary culture as a whole — invariably deem more pressing than the perennial humanistic questions the authors ignore. What does it mean to be a good person? What is justice? How should I live my life? To the authors, such quintessential humanistic concerns should be swept aside in favor of producing scholarship that Denecke, Forte, and Brown believe will “create more equal societies in the present.”

Unsurprisingly, given their impatience with prior attempts to unearth the raison d’être of the humanities, the authors direct much ire toward earlier work on the history of the subject, which they paint as culpably Eurocentric. Authors of fine studies on the humanistic tradition in both Europe and the United States such as Anthony Grafton, Lisa Jardine, Robert Proctor, and Christopher Celenza come in for criticism for writings that purportedly “cleave to European traditions, in terms of both historical (re)imagination of disciplinary formations and humanistic protreptic” (this last phrase refers to arguments for the humanities). Denecke, Forte, and Brown consider it unfortunate that Grafton et al. are interested in such earlier phases of the Western humanist movement as Roman antiquity and Renaissance Italy. They dismiss this scholarship as “a largely Euro-American exercise in navel-gazing.”

This reductive characterization stems from a failure to recognize the disparate purposes of scholarship on the history of the humanities. Scholars have typically approached this subject in two main ways. The first — dominant until the last decade or so — focuses on the humanities principally as a moral, pedagogical, and curricular tradition. This tradition, highly influenced by ancient Greek perspectives on elite education, received its first extant theoretical articulation in the works of the Roman statesman Cicero in the first century BCE and was reshaped and revivified centuries later by various Italian humanists. Scholars who approach the humanities in this manner thus naturally turn to the classical world for its origins, just as scholars of communism as a self-consciously political ideology turn to Karl Marx. Other scholars in this tradition highlight the crucial changes to the common understanding of the humanities that appeared in early Renaissance Italy or the diminished role for the humanities that accompanied the professionalization of Western academe in the 19th century. Such scholarship often underscores the perceived purposes of humanistic education — from Roman antiquity to the present.

The second approach, which is favored by Denecke, Forte, and Brown, focuses on how subjects currently associated with the modern humanities, such as literature, history, and philosophy, have been studied in different contexts. Arguably the most prominent example of this school of thought is A New History of the Humanities: The Search for Principles and Patterns From Antiquity to the Present (2014), a work composed by Rens Bod, the current president of the Society for the History of the Humanities and one of History of Humanities’ editors.

Bod’s book has much to recommend it. In four lengthy chapters, it introduces readers to humanities scholarship on topics such as linguistics, historiography, musicology, and poetics from antiquity, the Middle Ages, the early-modern period, and the modern period. Its impressively erudite author does not confine his investigations to the Western tradition; he is also attentive to China, India, the Islamic world, and elsewhere.

But A New History of the Humanities gives short shrift to the moral, pedagogical, and curricular dimensions of humanism, focusing instead on “how scholars, from the ancient world to today, have explored humanistic material — language, texts, music, literature, theatre, art, and the past — and what insights they have gained from it.” This myopic focus on the humanities solely as a tradition of scholarship leads Bod to propose an insufficient — even tautological — definition of the humanities: “The humanities are the disciplines that are taught and studied at humanities faculties.” Such a definition — or rather, the evasion of a definition — cuts the humanities off from their past, prior to the advent of the modern research university.

Bod’s inattention to the historical goals of the humanist movement encourages readers to perceive the humanities as indistinct from the sciences. Indeed, in his preface to A New History of the Humanities, Bod asserts that his mission is to offer an “overview of the history of the humanities” akin to those focused on the history of science. He seems irked that humanities scholarship has not received its due for innovations that have ultimately influenced the natural and social sciences. Not for nothing did one of Bod’s reviewers note a species of science envy in the book; according to the scholar of English literature Dustin Mengelkoch, A New History of the Humanities is based on a “we are science too” theory. Ultimately, Bod’s book, for all its awe-inspiring learnedness, risks becoming a mere miscellany.

Despite its commitment to a more inclusive history of humanities, the scientistic approach to the humanities favored by Bod, Denecke, Forte, and Brown can prove surprisingly exclusive, demonstrating a presentist bias that erases essential dimensions of the humanistic movement.

Here is a simple example of this ahistorical oversimplification: In their introduction, Denecke, Forte, and Brown refer vaguely to the word humanities as “an old European protean noun.” More specificity is in order. Our term humanities stems from the Latin word humanitas. Cicero, who argued in favor of an educational program he often called the studia humanitatis (“the studies of humanity,” or “the studies of civilization”), is properly credited as the formative philosopher of humanistic education. Interest in Cicero’s pedagogical vision should not be belittled as narrow-minded “navel-gazing”; on the contrary, it’s central to any proper understanding of humanism at its point of origin.

Overall, Denecke, Forte, and Brown demonstrate little interest in the ideological and pedagogical dimensions of either ancient Roman or Renaissance humanism. Theirs is a humanities shaped by the modern research university. Readers will scour their introduction in vain for a discussion of the historical goals of humanistic education. For them, the heart of the humanities isn’t the classroom experience but the academic books and articles that contemporary faculty members produce. The notion — key to the humanistic tradition for millennia — that the study of the humanities involves the improvement of the individual receives no mention.

Without any references to the crucial importance of moral philosophy to humanistic education, Denecke, Forte, and Brown’s heralding of a comparative global humanities can come across as un-humanistic — even anti-humanistic. At one point, the authors enumerate what they take to be “the greatest challenges we face” in the contemporary world, which scholarship on the history of the humanities can purportedly help remedy: “drastic global economic and social inequality, various species of fundamentalisms and atavistic nationalisms, and the dauntingly destructive social pressures emerging from climate change, refugee crises, and mass migration.”

Readers would be forgiven for concluding that most of these problems are best and most fully addressed by scholarship in the natural and social sciences. Indeed, the dominance of the sciences in Western higher education that has accompanied the professionalization of our colleges and universities is one of the chief stumbling blocks to a resurgence of humanism. As the scholar of English literature Peter J. Stanlis noted in an essay from 1988, “The humanities have not humanized the physical sciences so much as the sciences have mechanized the humanities, and made them appear obsolete.” Nothing in Denecke, Forte, and Brown’s essay suggests a recognition of this fundamental problem.

Rather than disregarding previous figures in the humanistic tradition, we can learn from their attempts to enlarge the humanities beyond their occidental confines. Consider Irving Babbitt (1865–1933), a classically trained professor of French and comparative literature at Harvard University. As the leader of an informal movement of literary and social criticism often dubbed the New Humanism, Babbitt managed to broaden greatly our conception of the humanistic tradition, while remaining true to the spirit of humanism.

Unlike Denecke, Forte, and Brown, Babbitt recognized that far from being an exercise in insular navel-gazing, defining humanism is crucial to any proper discussion of the humanities. Toward the start his first book, Literature and the American College: Essays in Defense of the Humanities (1908), for example, Babbitt noted, “We are likely … to be arrested at the very outset of any attempt to clarify our notions about education, as Socrates was in dealing with the problems of his own time, by the need of accurate definition. The Socratic method is, indeed, in its very essence a process of right defining.”

Such “right defining” is especially crucial, thought Babbitt, in regard to the slippery term humanism. “To make a plea for humanism without explaining the word would give rise to endless misunderstanding,” he recognized. Many thinkers have championed themselves as humanists, though their vision of the term clashes notably with those of figures associated with the historical humanist movement.

Babbitt dilated on the meanings of the Latin words humanus and humanitas, which were crucial to the movement at its inception. Partly thanks to his careful study of such terms, Babbitt concluded that “the humanist … is interested in the perfecting of the individual rather than in schemes for the elevation of mankind as a whole.” In Babbitt’s view — a view bolstered by his deep knowledge of the history of humanistic education — the humanities’ focus on individual character development serves as the counterpoise to the sciences’ concern for improving the material conditions of humankind. For Denecke, Forte, and Brown, by contrast, the humanities have become scientized: They have no purpose unique to them.

But Babbitt was not interested in simply unearthing the original purpose of the humanities. On the contrary, he devoted much of his scholarly energy to an intellectually and morally serious expansion of the humanities, looking far beyond their classical and Western boundaries. A thinker with strong syncretistic impulses, Babbitt spied crucial correspondences between Eastern and Western thought on subjects related to humanism. In his book Democracy and Leadership (1924), for example, Babbitt wrote, “One is tempted to say, indeed, that, if there is such a thing as the wisdom of the ages, a central core of normal human experience, this wisdom is, on the religious level, found in Buddha and Christ and, on the humanistic level, in Confucius and Aristotle. These teachers may be regarded both in themselves and in their influence as the four outstanding figures in the spiritual history of mankind.” In fact, Babbitt was convinced that one can comb the literary, religious, philosophical, and artistic products of all human civilizations for traces of humanistic wisdom. He championed a multicultural humanism at least a century prior to the advent of the comparative global humanities — and did so in a manner consistent with the historical aims of humanistic education.

There are understandable reasons why scholarship on the comparative global humanities has proven attractive in recent years. It is intellectually appropriate and morally responsible to ensure that the humanistic curriculum to which students are exposed is far more representative of human experience than was standard in either the Italian Renaissance or in the Great Books programs that thrived in the United States during the interwar period.

But the chief problem for the humanities today isn’t their failure to be more inclusive, a vague term whose meaning is fleeting. Rather, the humanities are ailing principally because many faculty members do not have faith in the spirit of humanism: the crucial role that profound works of literature, religion, art, and philosophy can play in shaping our imaginations and allowing us to ponder life’s great questions in a manner that encourages us to live up to our higher potentialities. A long line of thinkers associated with the humanistic tradition (e.g., Cicero, Petrarch, Leonardo Bruni, Matthew Arnold, and Irving Babbitt) shared such faith. Without it, the humanities, whether or not they are sufficiently diverse by contemporary standards, will never revive.