Over the last couple of decades, the humanities have often been defended. Too often. Those defenses have been most useful when they have segued into what has also become a thriving field over the same period, a field with much to tell us still: the history of the humanities.
Yet historians of the humanities have a habit of setting to work without inquiring into what the humanities actually are. So here I want to offer a neutral analysis of the humanities as they are and as they have been, and, more essentially, to reflect on the various difficulties that face such an analysis.
To begin with, there is no adequate “idea of the humanities.” There is instead a humanities world: a loosely linked conglomeration of practices, interests, comportments, personae, moods, purposes, and values, and the various settings which these practices, interests, and so on inhabit. This world is both open ended and limited. It is open in that from inside the humanities world one doesn’t see clear boundaries. But it is limited because we, as if intuitively, know that the humanities are distinct from other worlds — from the worlds of science, sport, business, and so on — even if, on reflection, we can see that these worlds and the humanities sometimes overlap. By “world,” I mean, then, that the humanities has a sense of itself as a contained, practical, and historical enterprise.
But first: Why ask these questions now? There are at least three reasons. A good part of the answer is, of course, that the humanities are currently under financial and ideological pressure. This has had the effect of flattening them, so that the humanities are often no longer regarded as a suite of specialized disciplines but rather as a distinct formation. When politicians, businesspeople, and university administrators worry that the humanities are insufficiently geared toward training students for the workplace, for instance, they usually don’t distinguish among history, philosophy, archaeology, and so on — it is simply the humanities that are in their sights. We might say, therefore, that the humanities are becoming a “meta-discipline.” But a concept of the humanities that transcends or overflows the established disciplines is a beast that has been vaguely denoted rather than concretely apprehended.
This flattening of disciplinarity is congruent with organizational shifts inside the university system. In many parts of the Anglophone world, the administrative structure established around the time of the First World War, in which distinct disciplines were housed in their own departments, is being replaced by a structure in which schools or faculties house a number of disciplines or subdisciplines or “studies,” and which may also contain centers and institutes based on particular, usually interdisciplinary, research programs. At this institutional level the disciplines that we have inherited from the past — some, indeed, from antiquity — are becoming dispersed and etiolated.
Disciplines inherited from the past are becoming dispersed and etiolated.
Second: If, in thinking through “the idea of the humanities,” we aim to be true to what they actually are, then certain traditional understandings — for instance, that the humanities are primarily about interpretation, critique, or value — are decreasingly adequate. The humanities have long done all kinds of other things as well. They may, for instance, as in some medical-humanities centers today, engage in clinical work. They may, as in some digital-humanities projects, process data to test hypotheses. They may just “curate” (as Rita Felski has put it) or re-enact — reconstructing ancient habitations by way of an archeological dig, for instance. They may articulate themselves through art — in “fictocriticism,” for example, of the kind we find already in François Fénelon’s Telemachus (1699), a sequel to the Odyssey which made a significant contribution to political theory. They may just teach creative arts as such. In sum, the humanities, never contained by a single approach, are becoming increasingly disunified in their methods and expressions, in ways that make their history’s complexity and variety more apparent. At the same time, they are also merging — or flattening.
Third, the humanities have always thrived outside the university as well as within it. Even if we confine ourselves to Europe, many of its most significant works were written outside the academy — just think of Machiavelli, Montesquieu, Rousseau, J. S. Mill, and Nietzsche. Indeed, beginning with the emergence of humanism as such in the Italian quattrocento until the later 19th century, the university system was routinely at odds with currents that have most powerfully shaped the humanities as we now know them.
Outside of the university, what I have elsewhere called “the extra-mural humanities” remain strong even as the humanities within the university suffer. One consequence of this is that the forces producing a meta-humanities within the university are also flattening out differences between the academic and extra-mural humanities. The importance given to “impact” in Britain and Australia is one indication of this; the popularity of the “public humanities” in the United States another.
If the humanities do not share a single setting, method, or form of expression, then how can we figure out what they are? We can go about it from various directions:
We can think of the humanities as defined by their objects. On this view, the humanities are usually concerned not with what is natural or divine but with what the human species has created. This is a perspective associated with Giambattista Vico (1668-1774), who famously argued that human beings can understand only what they have made. But on consideration, it is impossible to entirely accept this: After all, the humanities ask questions like, “What’s the nature of time?” or, “What’s the relation between mind and matter?” — questions that don’t focus on things that man has made. We must allow that the humanities can potentially focus on anything at all: things, texts, actions, performances, natural forces, individuals, animals, concepts, artworks, moods, money, beliefs, social structures, and so on.
We can think of the humanities as united by some single purpose. The most familiar formulation of this purpose was offered long ago by Joseph Addison (1672-1719) in The Spectator. Addison claimed that his version of “Philosophy” would appeal to those interested in both the “wearing out of Ignorance, Passion, and Prejudice” and in forming “a right Judgment” of the agencies at work in the world. Addison’s remarks epitomize a will to improvement and enlightenment that has indeed motivated significant sectors of the humanities. But it is by no means universal. The humanities have also been home to profoundly anti-progressive aims — think of Burke, Nietzsche, T.S. Eliot, Leo Strauss, or Lewis Namier. And what is true for the spirit of progressive enlightenment is true for all other purposes too. So, for instance, the humanities are not just involved in Bildung (that is, the cultivation of the socialized self), or in humanism (that is to say, the effort to maximally develop the species’ ethical and epistemic capacities) — to name two once-popular candidates. In sum, just as the humanities cannot be defined by reference to a limited set of objects, they cannot be defined by a single purpose, either.
We might think of the humanities as comprising forms of knowledge unified in their difference from other forms of knowledge — from science on the one side and religion on the other. And indeed, the humanities have often defined themselves in this way. The humanities, unlike the sciences, routinely produce knowledge that is not testable and rulebound, while, unlike religion, they do not claim to be supernaturally empowered, and they are constitutively wary of revealed knowledge’s authority.
But these distinctions are not absolute. As Rens Bod has insisted, the humanities have indeed produced falsifiable knowledge: Is Champollion’s transcription of the Rosetta Stone accurate? Was the Donation of Constantine a forgery? Finding true answers to these questions was historically important in securing the humanities’ prestige. More important, on certain of their edges the humanities shade into the social sciences. In such zones of ambiguity, science (of a kind) and the humanities (of a kind) lose their differences.
Likewise with religion: If the humanities make no claim to supernatural support or inspiration, their early history at least is deeply intertwined with the promises and difficulties involved in reconciling Christianity with Judaism on the one side and with ancient Greek philosophy on the other. Historically they emerged in support of, rather than in antagonism to, religion.
More important still, the humanities can appeal to faith. This was recognized clearly enough at a decisive moment in their history — when it seemed to some that they might be able to replace religion as a spiritual and intellectual driving force. Early in the 19th century, for instance, the philosopher and university administrator Johann Gottlieb Fichte drew up a plan for a Prussian “national education,” which would demote theology from its place at the pinnacle of university study and allow secular, philosophically educated intellectuals to take a leading role both in modern society and in the moral development of the human species. His plan was based not just on the creative imagination, not just on self-sacrifice, but most of all on a hope for the future. If that disposition, which mimics the Christian hope of salvation, is not formally religious, it is not rigorously irreligious either.
And so we come to a fourth possible way of establishing the humanities’ distinctiveness, the claim that they entail a particular ethos or set of dispositions. In my view, the humanities do have a basis in at least two dispositions, which are linchpins of their world.
As Bernard Williams suggested in Truth and Truthfulness (2002), they are committed to secular truthfulness, defined as a “respect for truth” enacted in the “virtues” of accuracy and sincerity. This is to say that when the humanities produce propositions, analyses, and arguments rather than judgements, they do not play games with us: They aren’t ironic, for instance, nor do they just make up stories or reasons.
At an abstract level, this commitment to truthfulness connects the humanities to the sciences. More concretely, it distinguishes the humanities from a discursive domain that is today expanding — the domain of hype, political lying, fake news, and bullshit, for all of which truthfulness does not matter. This is worth emphasizing because it poises the humanities against powerful discourses by virtue of a basic ethical constitution, and it helps us to see why, today, the humanities are so politically vulnerable.
However, the humanities also produce not truths but “interpretations.” Their will to interpret meets the requirement of truthfulness nonetheless because, in the humanities, the difference between one interpretation and another is not that one is true and the other false but that both are true — both are committed to accuracy and sincerity — precisely as interpretations, that is, as anticipating dissension and alternative points of view. Otherwise put: “Interpretations” are a function of a particular disposition, a preparedness to entertain notions, to leave judgments of truth value “in suspense,” as Montaigne put it in arguing for the moral and epistemological importance of skepticism in “Apology for Raymond Sebond.” This capacity helped establish the modern humanities and is still widely called on, maybe today more than ever.
The dispositions nourished in the humanities are not limited to truthfulness or the ability to suspend validity claims. There is also the contemplative disinterest associated with the vita contemplativa, and, in the other direction, the driving curiosity associated with questions like, “Why did the French Revolution happen precisely in 1789?”; “Did industrialism cause more misery than happiness?”; or “Do we perceive the world as it really is?”
Finally, the humanities world straddles two competing modes: critique on the one hand and, on the other, what we might call “construction.” In the early 18th century, the humanities’ traditional method of disputio began to mutate into the critical analysis of social or cultural formations deemed to affront proper principles of justice and order. Yet, although critique became much more pervasive in the 1960s, it is by no means definitive of the humanities world we inhabit.
As to “construction”: The humanities can also be viewed as accreting knowledge and competence, as slowly developing their own institutional bases and channels of communication, and, in doing so, as helping to build the larger society and culture. In that way, they are not contemplative — rather they instrumentalize themselves. While the humanities’ current diminution and delegitimation may make it hard for us to take a Whiggish view of them, I’d suggest that they remain tied, if not necessarily committed, to their power to build and transform both themselves and the outside world. In doing stuff, they make stuff; they are instrumental whether they like it or not.
These apparently dissonant impulses — dissension and construction — are in fact joined. It may be banal to say that argument and critique push knowledge and institutions forward, but this conjunction does indeed help organize the humanities, even if it also does not cover everything they do.
In the end, the only way to figure out what the humanities are is to think about them historically — to tell their story. After all, this approach does not require one to commit to believing in an “idea of the humanities” at all. Nonetheless, the problems involved in defining the humanities do not just disappear when we set about historicizing them. In particular, questions concerning their borders and limits loom large.
Can there be a history of the humanities that reaches back before anything was actually called “the humanities”? It turns out that “the humanities,” in contradistinction to the studia humanitatis, the literae humaniores, the “liberal arts,” or just “the arts,” is a relatively recent name, confined to Anglophone nations. Without delving into a history that, despite some excellent scholarship, remains underresearched, it is enough to say that the humanities as such begin to replace the liberal arts in the 1920s and 1930s in the U.S., but the name became firmly entrenched only in the postwar period. The key motive for this transformation was, it seems, to open up the study of history, philosophy, vernacular literatures, and so on by detaching them from the authority of the Western classical era as well as from the aura of the gentlemanly scholar and the “cultured self.” The goal was to encourage a more inclusive pedagogy able to resist, in particular, totalitarianism. In the Anglophone world, the “liberal arts” became “the humanities” not to upset a longer lineage but to loosen and expand it.
The only way to figure out what the humanities are is to tell their story.
The most recent attempt to tell the history of the humanities is Rens Bod’s A New History of the Humanities (Oxford, 2013). For Bod, the humanities exist whenever certain practices — in the search for patterns and principles — are addressed to specific objects in any period, language, or place. Eight practices constitute the humanities for Bod: linguistics, historiography, philosophy, musicology, art theory, logic, rhetoric, and poetics. He finds them engaged in Europe, Asia, the Arab world, and elsewhere, beginning with Panini’s discovery that Sanskrit has a grammar circa 500 BC.
By turning the humanities into a scattered, globalized set of similar activities, Bod loses sight of their historical unity — he ends up, instead, with a disengaged history of dispersed activities. But as soon as one conceives of the humanities as a self-aware continuous unity — a world — one has to concede that they were established in Western Europe in those “early modern” centuries between 1200 and 1700, in which supernatural legitimation for intellectual activity was displaced; in which the planet’s oceans became available to European trade, spoliation, and colonization; in which states, open to advice and administration by educated men, became the standard structure of government; in which universities and colleges proliferated (partly in imitation of earlier Muslim institutions); in which non-Aristotelian classical philosophies, especially skeptical ones, were recovered across Europe (partly mediated through Islamic scholarship); in which print both stabilized and disseminated knowledge; in which a “republic of letters” gradually emerged; and so on.
This was, then, the period when Europe began to dominate most of the globe. The humanities expanded along with Europe’s power, gradually claiming epistemic control over non-European languages, customs, histories, and religions. By the late 19th century, the academic humanities’ formidable machinery had been subdivided into institutionalized professional disciplines, and by the late 20th century, the planet’s human society was constituted in independent nation-states each with its own university system, so that something like the professionalized academic humanities became global.
By this account, the contemporary humanities are a product of the West’s will to oceanic power. But one can, I think, maintain a sense of the humanities’ unity and European origins while minimizing the charge of Eurocentrism. Today universities constitute the most important, but not the only, nodes of a global humanities network that links, for instance, Oxford, Sydney, Singapore, Shanghai, Dubai, Lagos, Suva, Buenos Aires, Jerusalem, Mexico City, Bologna, Moscow, Copenhagen, and Seoul. This network isn’t spatially European. Inside it, epistemic control is no longer monopolized by the West, even if, by virtue of its history, the globalized humanities remain possessed by Europe’s spirit.
How to think of the humanities historically in these terms? We can consider the humanities to be an “inherited archive,” thinking of an archive, as Derrida does, as a lost and found, i.e., as a place where objects may disappear and reappear, and of an inheritance as a body of work that is intentionally delivered into the future and received from the past, but without necessarily constituting a tradition. Using John Guillory’s terminology, we can go further: The humanities exist as an archive which continually throws up “monuments”— works worthy of commentary — but no less continually demotes them.
Insofar the humanities are shaped by their sense of their own history, they can think of themselves as a tradition. But theirs is a tradition grounded in archives and processes of idolatry and iconoclasm that cannot themselves be contained by that tradition.
Let me end by offering an example to make my model clearer. One of the world’s great traditions of interpretation and philological scholarship was that carried out in China during the long reception of the authoritative Confucian texts, first during the Song era, with the canonization of the Four Books — the Great Learning, the Analects, the Mencius, and the Mean. In the wake of the Jesuits’ 16th-century arrival in China, this corpus became known in the West, but only gradually and partially. It never formed part of a European academic institutional network — the Confucian scholarly tradition itself having developed, of course, outside the linked Occidental transnational university system. But it slowly joined the West’s scholarly archive when the Jesuits distributed translations of, and reports on, Confucianism, and it became formative of intellectual work in the late republic of letters after a Latin translation of the Analects was published in Paris in 1687 and was taken up by thinkers like Bayle, Leibniz, Wolff, and Voltaire. In this instance, the old European world of erudition both absorbed and was formed by a non-European body of thought.
When the liberal-arts network became more substantively globalized in the later 19th century, and then again in the late 20th century, as Chinese universities began to join the global academic system, Chinese erudition (to an extent itself Confucian in orientation) also joined what I am calling “the global humanities” — not just archivally but also institutionally.
There remains a sense however in which the Chinese — or, for that matter, the French or the Germans — don’t quite have a “humanities” in the Anglophone sense. They have their own, cognate formations with different names, regimes, and meanings. This needs to be emphasized because it means that the Anglophone humanities world has living alternatives that, at least potentially, draw sustenance from the same archive as they do. It means further that, although the Anglophone humanities seem especially fragile at the moment, there exist other possibilities which don’t know themselves as “the humanities,” even inside the global academy itself.
That may help us recognize that thinking about what the humanities actually are rather than about what we would like or imagine them to be, thinking about their world’s extension and limits, is to step solidly toward whatever future (and it won’t be none!) awaits them.
