Humanities beyond the Crisis
To adapt William Gibson’s famous line, the nineteenth century is here—it’s just not very evenly distributed. Its persistence is particularly noticeable in our current discussion about the state and fate of the humanities. Or so goes the most startling implication (if not the precise thesis) of Paul Reitter and Chad Wellmon’s thought-provoking new book, Permanent Crisis: The Humanities in a Disenchanted Age. If one pays a modicum of attention to higher education take-havers, Reitter and Wellmon’s tour through the advent of the “modern humanities” in nineteenth-century Prussian, and then German academia can approximate one long, slow case of déjà vu. All of the greatest hits of present handwringing make an appearance: the fragmentation of knowledge, the putative evacuation of meaning by natural science, the subordination of education to capitalistic and/or technocratic instrumentalism, and the loss of a deep tradition reflecting on “the human.” There is even an adjunctification crisis! Although Reitter and Wellmon are clear that their book “is not a call to action,” this does not make it a work of quietism. Rather, this sense of repetition—of just how persistent the titular state of “crisis” in the humanities has been—gives one pause. It is in the space of this pause that their criticisms may land with force.
A conviction that the modern humanities have formed themselves not merely “in response to a perceived crisis,” but “also made crisis a core part of the project of the humanities” makes up Permanent Crisis’s proper thesis. Reitter and Wellmon trace this crisis-driven and crisis-constituted formation process back to the institutional, political, and economic circumstances of nineteenth-century universities in the German and Prussian Empires. To that end, the book does a fine job of not just looking at what figures like Schleiermacher, von Humboldt, Nietzsche, Dilthey, and Weber had to say about the state, nature, and aim of the humanities, but also at the historical context of those views and lesser-known thinkers who were part of these same conversations.
But in their retrieval of each figure, we see the same themes. Can knowledge be unified? Should education be forming employees, citizens, souls, or specialized researchers? Can the humanities be scaled up and rendered egalitarian as universities expand, or are they there to cultivate unique human genius? If the humanities have their own rigor, in what does it consist, and how does it match up to the putative exactitude of the natural scientist? These are the permanent crises of the humanities, and they “can lead to a state of endless repetition” in which those of us invested in them “fall back on inherited and instinctive values in an effort to cope.”
Reitter and Wellmon generally make their point through the accumulation of historical data, and it is not until the conclusion that they fully offer their normative judgment about “permanent crisis” in the humanities. On their view, the general crisis regarding the unity of knowledge and specific crises about the field boundaries of the humanities (especially as they abut the natural or social sciences) create arbitrary boundaries around them that are at odds with a fundamental intellectual liberty to follow one’s research questions where they lead, boundary-policing be damned. Crises around Bildung, training, specialization, as well as the social, cultural, or even spiritual contributions the humanities need to make invite “over-promising.” On both points, Permanent Crisis’s approach is Weberian: scholars in the humanities should work to ask and answer their questions with intellectual integrity, and in the classroom to model this integrity for their students, but not more. The modern humanities need not concern itself with forming students in a robust nexus of virtues, whether civic, professional, or otherwise. Intellectual virtue should suffice. If the modern humanities can hew to this narrow vocation, then they may hope and even have a kind of disenchanted faith that (so to speak) all those other things will be added unto the society that facilitates such study and learning.
Artist's Despair Before the Grandeur of Ancient Ruins by Johann Heinrich Füssli
Speaking of Weber, Reitter and Wellmon do us the favor of spelling out explicitly how Weber conceived of “disenchantment.” Certainly, it involves displacing the central role played by the “supernatural,” or what Bernard Lonergan termed “myth and magic,” in modern society’s sense of how the world is ordered. But Permanent Crisis makes clear what moves in to take its place—namely, a belief in the rational agency of fellow human beings to order the world. I may not know how the streetcar or my smartphone or (more troublingly) the global economy works, but surely someone does. As that last example indicates, this belief may turn out to be no less spurious than ancient trust in the haruspex, but its object is radically more immanent. The disposition of a sheep’s liver is arranged by the gods, but algorithms are the work of human hands.
Enter Reitter and Wellmon’s most important Weberian commitment. Correcting what they take to be a mistranslation and mis-construal of the notion, they argue “value freedom” in the humanities should not be understood as the evacuation of values from scholarship and teaching, but rather a recognition that the humanities cannot be the masters of the human values that fuel our “disenchanted age.” Values always prove too deeply held and too various for the humanities to claim responsibility for them without scandalously overpromising. Value freedom, on their read, means allowing students and scholars to arrive already value-laden to the humanities. The humanities invite us to refine their understanding of and arguments for various and deeply held commitments. Certainly this is a service that the humanities provide to the democratic negotiations that proceed beyond the university campus, but by insisting that it’s a service only they can provide, the humanities generate the constant distraction of “permanent crisis.”
The Seven Liberal Arts (From Regia Carmina by Convenevole Da Prat)
In the end, Permanent Crisis exhorts scholars and commentators to resist our temptation to enliven and defend the humanities with calls to the barricades of crisis. On Reitter and Wellmon’s view, we would do better to recommit ourselves to the scholarly slow boring of hard boards (to borrow another Weberian notion from The Vocation of Politics). They indicate how this modest purpose requires that stoic asceticism which refuses to manipulate the humanities’s institutional, social, and cultural position through crisis discourse. I share their judgment that the humanities will be best served and serve best in keeping such narrow, intellectual purposes. Nothing is so practical as good theory and nothing so perpetually needful as more adequate understanding. Perhaps counter-intuitively, though, I think they are too optimistic about the sufficiency of Weber’s stoic intellectual asceticism. If disenchantment means, at least in part, valuing the rationalization of our common human projects, the material and spiritual deprivations that a narrow devotion to the life of the mind will demand of scholars—those very deprivations which provide so much evidence for the plausibility of crisis narratives—must eventually appear too unreasonable to sustain. In other words, I fear a contradictory situation looms for the modern humanities in the wake of Permanent Crisis: only the irrational would continue to pursue rationalization. Though I risk revealing my priors as a Catholic philosopher and theologian, I am convinced a post-crisis path forward in the humanities will reveal itself not to a secular, Weberian faith, but only to that faith which has both hope and charity as its companions. That requires, however, that we think of our disenchanted age as nonetheless suffused with a no doubt very different “supernatural.”
Jonathan Heaps, PhD, draws on twentieth-century Catholic philosophy and theology to write about cognition, embodiment, and pluralism. Recently, he has been exploring what contemplative prayer practices can offer the verification crisis in the humanities.