The Place of the Humanities: how the debates over the humanities often leave them behind.

Vienna, Cafe Sperl / May 2019

Dear Editor,

           The recent debates over the humanities published on your site have provided me food for thought and demand a reply. It is amusing – I should say seriously amusing – to read the essays by Adam Kirsch and by Andrew Kay and notice the urgent debates they have provoked. Kirsch proclaims the humanities alive and well outside the university. Kirsch is overly sanguine – one suspects he enjoys tweaking the plaintive professors who decry the decline and fall of their chosen fields – while at the same time eager to vaunt his own erudition, which, he would have us infer, he gleaned from the holding of a public library or from his other autodidactic enterprises. He writes with the certainty of an autodidactic, enjoying his own privileges of modern English while errantly dismissing, for example, the centuries of Neolatin that shaped both learning and the novel.

            Kay is aghast at the insensible insularity of academic tenure, whose chilly ranks skate on ever-thinner ice covering the depths of real crisis. That his heartfelt account should unleash charges against him of sexism and gender privilege is both predictable and also curious: if Puck, or an alien from the moon, not to mention Athena or Apollo, would observe this spectacle, each would discover more evidence of our mortal folly.

            Such a conclusion, being written from a comfortable corner of Cafe Sperl, will no doubt itself provoke objection – though now, I expect, in the time-honored form of academic silence. No matter. I have taken the time to write you and your readers with a few thoughts on the place of the humanities, thoughts you may accept or dismiss, as you like it, for that is very much in keeping with the place where I sit, a traditional Viennese coffee house, a place where artists and politicians debated matters at least as serious as the ones that may appear in the pages of the Wall Street Journal orThe Chronicle of Higher Education.

            In Sperl, military men, painters, actors, and architects rubbed elbows: there was an “artillery table” and a “genius table.” Archdukes Josef and Karl Ferdinand were regulars, and the artists – Josef Maria Olbrich, Max Kurzweil, and others – formed the nucleus of the Hagenbund and the Secession, which revolutionized the world of art.

            What I have been thinking is not so revolutionary, but rather provides context: it seeks to draw upon their creative, conversational legacy.

            I observe first of all from these debates that Kirsch, along with Kay’s critics, have become social scientists. They think according to types and categories: tenured professors, “elite” universities, men versus women, and so forth. Yet the humanities are at bottom uncategorical – paradoxically so, since, like diligent farmers, we are always raising fences around fields of study and “specializations.” But the humanities examine – here I paraphrase Kierkegaard – the existing individual, in his or her actual state of being, and reject type-casting of any sort. Lear is Lear, and not Macbeth, despite their common royalty; Cordelia can never be Ophelia. Anatol, in Schnitzler’s hands, is a Frauenheld (ladies’ man) of a singular sort, one that intrigued Freud; and Hofmannsthal’s Elektra owes its inspiration, but not conformity, to Euripides (genuine inspiration is never imitative). If this focus on the individual is obvious in poetry, it should be also for all fields of the humanities. Humanities mine the secrets of our inner lives, and remind us of the mysteries of our volition. Let natural scientists study the world outside our selves, and social scientists the tendencies of demographic groups. Of course our society finds that useful, for it has forgotten the individual, and even when we are alert to others’ emotional suffering, our public commentary still discusses the problem according to type.

            Why should it be otherwise for the humanities? Why is theirs a place apart from the general calculus that frames our vision? Facebook has developed algorithms to detect people’s emotional states, based upon the words they use in social postings. But algorithms cannot diminish or efface personality, which is unique, one-sided, inconstant, and always struggling for balance. Personality refuses to be set into categories or groups, and so it remains for the humanities to preserve, uplift, and celebrate its freedom. If humanities commentators, scholars, and spokespeople are not up to the task, let them find other work. They have left the place of the humanities, deserted its field, and battled on other terrain.

            The Kunsthistorisches Museum here is renowned for its collection of Breugel paintings and two of them come to mind.

Pieter Bruegel the Elder, Children’s Games

Children’s Games captures the kaleidoscopic play of our inner selves, in all its imaginative frenzy. Each action is singular, and in motion, and Bruegel not only displays this individuality but also shows it in its collectivity, so that each of us discovers the world through our unpredictable encounters with others. The humanities’ place is neither stable nor static, but dynamic and contingent, and for that reason both vulnerable and enduring.

            Can we imagine a world without play or without art? On the Secession building is the motto, “To each age its art; to art its freedom.”  We might forsake the imaginative realm of the humanities in our cerebral self-righteousness and our claims for objectivity, which transcend the clatter of coffee cups. But in the end, by thinking with such serious mien (whether this is genuine thinking may be questioned, just as the mien is also a mask), we lose the richness of life. Our language itself becomes more impoverished as it travels in the collective usages that in the end speak to people only like us, who too have left in shadow pieces of their personality.      

Breugel, Tower of Babel

            A second Breugel painting, The Tower of Babel, sums up our quandary and our greater crisis, beyond the numbers and figures so often cited. It shows us how humanities commentators strive, like Nimrod, to construct towers of argument to the skies with the best verbal engineering at their disposal. Every room in the tower is neatly proportioned, subordinate to others, and so useful. It is a statement of the energy of the collective, with each worker fading into insignificance. But if we look more closely, Breugel shows us that the tower is not upright, that it will topple at its height and create a greater confusion of tongues.

With cordial greetings,

Vesna Sremac

For other posts on the place of the humanities, see here.