Thinking and thanking: reflections on Humanities Watch’s second anniversary, and on human ingenuity.

“From the word thought, attended in its essence, at once speaks forth the essence of what is named by the two words that come to us easily when we hear the verb thinking: thinking and remembrance, thinking and thanking.”1

Thinking, thanking, and remembrance: this triad is at the heart of these reflections. November marks the second anniversary of the site’s publication. In the past year, the site has focused on the conversation, extended or abridged, between the humanities and the realms of science, business, technology, and health care. Readers have sent ideas for articles and submitted comments. These exchanges have challenged the site to sharpen its focus and to consider more thoughtfully the fragile but essential place of the humanities in our contemporary culture.

One popular theme in the year’s postings has been “artificial intelligence” or AI. The term itself has a vague provenance and range of meaning, and is often understood as the way computing technology enhances, abets, or even replaces the calculations of our unaided faculties. Organizations, for instance FullAI, have dedicated themselves to exploring the ethical implications of AI, as have university programs. The questions for humanities’ thinking, more generally, have been: what new avenues of awareness does AI open up, and what does it close down? What can our experiences with AI tell us about human ingenuity?

For advocates of AI, the sky, it seems, is the limit. AI offers comfort to the housebound, business opportunities to the illiterate, higher and more affordable degrees of health care to those in need. Nonetheless scientists and inventors such as Stephen Hawking and Elon Musk have warned of more baleful consequences. If we foster AI with our ingenuity, will it exceed our expectations in ways we do not imagine, even those created by our current dystopian fascination?

For even while we give praise to futurists and visionaries, we are given to pessimistic ponderings of our lives before us: we imagine various worlds of limited freedom, of violence, and of scarcity, compensating for our equally insecure optimism. The humanities appear excluded from these cultural drives. What could be, in fact, the place of historians, poets, or philosophers in a future or present that is shaped by AI, for better or worse? Ethicists will demand a role in the conversation, but will their voices be heard amid the clamor for more and greater technological ingenuity to solve our problems?

I argued earlier this year that the humanities show their worth in their apparent uselessness. They remain fundamental, if unrecognized; they shape the landscape of futurists and the horizon of the visionaries. How so? Primarily in their role as guardians of language, by attending to the way our speech colors and conditions our understanding. We overlook the humanities first of all because they keep watch over the ground of human ingenuity in language, from which rise all spectacular flights of creative fancy. The humanities are basic, now humble, in the shadow: but without them, we diminish – or lose – our capacity to listen and learn from our own resources.

The site’s motto is “Quis custodiet ipsos custodes? / Who watches the watchmen?” The humanities watch over our technological culture and its fascination with progress. They understand its debt to the past, its place as one culture among many. They also appreciate its singularity as sign and symbol of the human condition, which, over time, still has the same needs and wants, desires and drives, in the awareness of our common mortality. Thus we owe much to the past, and one another, despite our differences.

But the question “who watches the watchmen?” must also be turned toward the humanities’ themselves. They are at odds not only with the sciences – the “fuzzies” versus the “techies” – but more fatefully with themselves. Here I am not referring to academic humanities competing among themselves for ever-scarcer university resources. The larger and more critical problem is the estrangement of the humanities from the current cultural climate. Academic humanities can measure their declining fortunes quantitatively, as Rob Townsend has so expertly charted. Scholars in these fields rightly value their research, for without this research we know, and appreciate, far less. But this scholarly research resonates only feebly, if at all, outside the academy. The greater public, and its political and journalistic spokespeople, know and appreciate the humanities from a distance, indeed, if they even know what the humanities are. In their discourse they can label the humanities as “elitist,” rather than understand them as fundamental – and they do so even with the support of humanities scholars. Interest and funding, from the NEH and others, have turned to the “public humanities,” in which history, literature, and philosophy address wider audiences in exhibitions and other public events. Yet academic scholars generally stand apart from these efforts. The public is watching them, the humanities professionals, and asking about their relevance.

The challenge they face – we all face – is to give voice to the humanities’ place in our cultural life. Cultural humanities – call it the third way, or meeting ground, for academic and public humanities – require our attention. Cultural humanities can demonstrate the worth of history, philosophy, religious studies, literature, and above all language for how we feel, know, and think. Through their sense of beauty and knowledge, carried in language, they reveal new facets of finance, science, and technology, and how these fields, too, can enhance the humanities.

Thinking, thanking, and remembrance. I’ll close with a note of gratitude to the 16th-C. novelist François Rabelais. As doctor, friar, and renegade monk, Rabelais would have cared little for our cultural divisions and rather have subjected them to satire. In the last book of his novel, his hero Pantagruel and his crew travel from the Island of Ignoramuses, where people follow everything without explanation, to the Kingdom of the Quintessence, where the sick are cured by the healing power of music. The port to this Kingdom, Rabelais says, is called Mataeotechny – the Home of Useless Knowledge or Skill. May we think about our place on this allegorical path in the coming year.

1. Martin Heidegger, Was heißt Denken? / What is called “thinking”?↩