Grice e Zubiena

Intellectuals and scholars, especially in German-speaking lands, seek to transform the studia humanitatis and all those arts that had settled into the lower “philosophical” faculty or sub-fsculty within faculty of literae humaniores of the university into an explicitly moral and *philosophical* project, or research programme, tying them to the human and reason as universals, as ends in themselves.

"The HUMAN being," writes Kant, “is destined by his reason to be in a society with other human beings and to cultivate himself, to civilize himself, and to moralize himself by means of the arts and sci-ences.”

Kant and the pantheon of German philosophers, theorizers, and bureaucrats who followed him identified the university, and the “philosophical faculty” — sub-faculty within the faculty of literae humaniores of in particular, as the primary institution of this human development project or political research programme.

 Whereas the higher faculties of law, medicine, and theology rely, as Kant writes, on the "command of an external legislator" — the state and its statutory authority — the lower, philosophical faculty — sub-faculty of philosophy within the faculty of literae humaniores — relies on and has access to reason itself.

 Its professors, tutors, and pupils are only interested in securing the "interests of knowledge" — in other words, in pursuing knowledge for its own sake.

By drawing an analogy between human intellection and the divine mind, Kant and the neo-humanists, idealists, and Romantics who followed Kant ascribe the capacity for spontaneous, creative reason to humans, conceiving of it in terms traditionally limited to the mind of God.

In so doing, they elevated the activities and creations of the human mind above the merely technical, useful, or necessary.

 These intellectual activities and the objects to which they gave form became ends in themselves.

Yet around the same time, as German scholars began labelling themselves as university-based philosophers —that identity itself being a new scholarly persona —, humanist doubts and assumptions reached an apotheosis.

Scholars turned practices and techniques honed in one specific field of criticism into advanced methods and applied them to ancient classical philosophical texts. 

From the beginning, they assumed that technical mastery provided by the mods is compatible with ethical cultivation provided by the greats.

By mastering and criticizing the variant reading's and technical rules offered by the scholia," Wolf writes: we are summoned into old times, times more ancient than those of many ancient writers, and, as it were, into the company of those learned critics." 

The careful study of ancient philosophy, scholia, and commentaries according to pre-established methodological conventions enabled a better understanding of the ancient world, which, in turn, facilitated an encounter with the moral exemplars of antiquity. 

But such study could also undercut the authority of the ancient texts, as did Wolf's conclusion that the Odyssey was not the work of one author, Homer, but the product of textual accretion over time—a conclusion similar to the one biblical scholars had reached about the authorship of the Old Testament. 

Philosophers were bound not by books or even the love of books but by technical methods. 

The objects of the application of these methods were fungible or even incidental.

While classicists turned philosophers were worrying about the authority of ancient texts, a new generation of scholars began to raise similar concerns about more modern ones. 

An important factor in this development was the destabilizing effects of the proliferation of print.

Schlegel, a German Romantic and one of the first scholars to approach literature-not just drama or poetry but a much broader range of printed writing, including novels— as an art, lamented the pitiful state of reading and writing, invoking what he termed "literature proper." 

Given the ready availability of printed texts, readers no longer read with "devotion but rather with a thoughtless distraction."

 To remedy this situation, Schlegel proposed that literature be distinguished asa particular kind of writing that had been filtered and sorted from among the surfeit of all that had been printed. In his view, literature wasn't simply a "raw aggregate of books" but the material expression of a universal Geist (spirit) -the expression of a common life, even a common humanity. And it was this common human spirit that gave literature its unity and made it a "store of works that are complete as a type of system."

 If Kant had located the historical development of human being and reason itself in "the arts and sciences," Schlegel was more specific. 

The "spirit," human being and reason, worked itself out in philosophy.

It is not incidental, then, that one of the first documented uses of the word humanism occurred at this time. 

In 1808 the philosopher and educational reformer Niethammer coined Humanismus in a polemic against school reformers seeking more practical pedagogical training.

"Humanism," he wrote, referred not simply to the "study of the so-called humaniora in the learned schools" but also to the pedagogy of antiquity whose essential feature was the elevation of a student's "humanity over his animality."69 

In a conflation that would eventually characterize the  humanities, Niethammer further defined humanism as both a curricular program (the study of ancient texts via humanist scholarly traditions) and a moral project with an underlying philosophical anthropology. 

He envisioned the transformation of the studia humanitatis into a pedagogical project oriented toward the "idea of the human in itself as well as its vocation." 

No longer subordinate to the professionalizing interests of the higher faculties (law, medicine, and theology) or to the confessional ends of the studium divinitatis, the newly conceived humanities would constitute their own institutional and pedagogical "system" that would safeguard reason over instrumental rationality, the human mind over the animal body. 

The humanities would "defend the human's spiritual nature in its autonomy, its independence from the material world, and thus assert something that is very true.""

Just as importantly, Niethammer, as one reviewer enthused in 1808, juxtaposed the new humanities with those "branches of knowledge such as mathe-matics, physics, chemistry, which are more immediately related to material production" and better suited for "material use and practical utility."

In a "culture" consumed by the "drive for money and profit" and devoted to "big agriculture and forestry, manufacturing, commerce, and indus-trialization," knowledge as an end in itself was worth nothing, Niethammer wrote?3 "Technical and mechanical know-how" triumphed over "pure," non-instrumental knowledge. 

These instrumental sciences and the technologies and historical processes they unleashed did not simply transform knowl-edge; they corrupted educational institutions, religion, traditions, and everyelement of human "moral development" (Bildung).?*

 In the context of such cultural and spiritual loss, the new humanities, he asserted, were needed to "exercise and form" human reason and thus ensure the "general education of individual humans" as well as the "development" of all of humanity?

Niethammer underscored this compensatory role by redrawing the divisions of knowledge. Instead of comparing the humanities to theology as the stu-dia humanitatis or literae humaniores (the study of things more human than divine), as had historically been done, he pitted the humanities against the natural and physical sciences. In this sense, the new humanities were fundamentally modern because they served not some antiquarian curiosity but the explicit needs of both present and future; they provided practical moral succor for a new age. 

Yet Niethammer still sought to legitimate the humanities as newly understood by asserting their continuity not only with the "so-called humanioren as taught in the schools of the learned" but in a "more distinguished sense with the entire pedagogy of antiquity." 

Against the onslaught of industrial and technical revolutions, the new, modern humanities would, he claimed, emerge as keepers of "humanity.""

Seventy-five years later, in 1883, Dilthey offered a more systematic account of Niethammer's claim when he argued that the modern humanities satisfied a "need" by compensating for the alienating effects of an industrial and technical modern society.® 

More recently, the German philosopher  Marquand has argued that the humanities compensate for the "losses" of modernization, which have been largely effected by the natural sciences and associated technological advances.79

Niethammer, Dilthey, and Marquand make several important assumptions and claims that recur in the following chapters as we recount the narratives that justify and defend the modern humanities.

 First, they presume the continuity and identity over space and time of a human essence or being that a monolithic Western modernity threatens to render distant and inac-cessible.

Second, they not only describe the purpose of the modern humanities as the recovery of this human essence but also presume its historical neces-sity, as though the humanities were a particular form of Hegel's "cunning of reason" or Kant's "hidden plan of nature."

Third, they presume that as it erodes confessional religions and moral traditions, a uniquely Western modernity creates the very needs the humanities emerge to satisfy.

Fourth, they presume that the modern humanities did or, under the right conditions, could satisfy those distinctly transcendent needs previously met by religious and moral traditions. 

As reconceptualized by Niethammer and others, the humanities transformed canons of sacred texts into culturalcanons, adopted and adapted reading practices, established new forms of socialization, and institutionalized these practices and objects within the temple of Western liberal culture -the modern university. In essence, the development of the modern humanities both depended on and played a crucial part in the rise of the modern research university. 

This relationship is central to our account.

Finally, as described by Niethammer, Dilthey, and Marquand, the modern humanities are an epiphenomenon of a modernity in which they have fixed functions. Chief among these functions is "the historical transferal of faith" and moral power away from established forms of religion, especially Western forms of Christianity, to the canons, ideals, practices, and institutions that emerge to legitimate the modern humanities' compensatory claims.

Just over thirty years after Niethammer made his case for the compensatory role of the modern humanities, however, the very premise of his functional, ideologically committed conception of the modern humanities seemed in doubt. Their sacred power appeared already to have eroded. The teacher and educational reformer Diesterweg called the behavior of "the humanities professors" of the 183os "a scandal," characterized by

"scuffles, malicious attacks, spiteful remarks, effeminate passion for gossip, deceitful backbiting, constant factiousness and us-against-them mentality, and just plain hubris." 

In particular, Diesterweg bemoaned the proclivity of philosophers to engage in acrimonious debates over competing "ways of reading and interpreting" a text or to get into defensive arguments over Kantian or Hegelian systems instead of studying and celebrating what is simply human. The force of Diesterweg's portrayal of the German humanities professoriate derives from a contrast with what he presumed to have once been. 

Who could legitimately teach the humani-ties, since scholars had ceased to embody them? 

The modern university had deformed those moral exemplars of humane virtue into self-seeking specialists trafficking in the "lifeless details" of pedantry. Humanities professors no longer believed in the power of the sacred objects they had been called to tend and teach. They had lost faith in the historical task of the humanities to maintain the human.