The Long Agony of the Humanities (original) (raw)

For July 2021 the University of Chicago Press has promised the publication of Paul Reitter and Chad Wellmon's Permanent Crisis: The Humanities in a Disenchanted Age. I have not seen it, but in anticipation, old and new critiques of the sorry state of education come to mind, along with not a few fatidic vaticinations about the future of the humanities. Most vividly, perhaps, young Nietzsche's conferences at the University of Basel, "On the Future of Our Educational Institutions" (1872), an exasperated and desperate diatribe about the state of Germanic education back in those days. Here is a sample from the second conference: "And he who regards 'scientific education' as the object of a public school thereby sacrifices 'classical education' and the so-called 'formal education,' at one stroke, as the scientific man and the cultured man belong to two different spheres which, though coming together at times in the same individual, are never reconciled." (Translated by J.M. Kennedy, 1910) Thus, we have two polar opposites in Nietzsche's view[1], the scientific mind and the cultured mind, "never reconciled." Isn't that an extreme position, hard to justify? For after all, Goethe had shown a mind masterfully at ease in both science and poiesis. Pascal, long before, had identified (at least) two classes of mind, l'esprit de géométrie or geometrical mind and l'esprit de finesse or the tactful, intuitive mind, but he had refrained from concluding that they are never reconciled; for that would have implied negating his own existence. Perhaps Nietzsche had experienced the incompatibility of the two sorts of mind among his fellow students at Schulpforta, the famous gymnasium (high school). The historian Leopold Ranke, born almost fifty years before Nietzsche and, like him, a graduate of Schulpforta, asked, I don't remember on what occasion, "How to justify the humanities within a university system that is based upon the Enlightenment ideals of critical reason and rationality, and no longer on authority, tradition, and theological canon?" To which Wilhelm Dilthey, a colleague of Nietzsche's at Basel and Ranke's sometime student in Berlin, provided a temporary