Permanent Crisis

The Humanities in a Disenchanted Age

Paul Reitter,Chad Wellmon

• Publisher: University of Chicago Press
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9780226738376
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education General

Leads scholars and anyone who cares about the humanities into more effectively analyzing the fate of the humanities and digging into the very idea of the humanities as a way to find meaning and coherence in the world. The humanities, considered by many as irrelevant for modern careers and hopelessly devoid of funding, seem to be in a perpetual state of crisis, at the mercy of modernizing and technological forces that are driving universities towards academic pursuits that pull in grant money and direct students to lucrative careers. But as Paul Reitter and Chad Wellmon show, this crisis isn't new—in fact, it's as old as the humanities themselves.Today's humanities scholars experience and react to basic pressures in ways that are strikingly similar to their nineteenth-century German counterparts. The humanities came into their own as scholars framed their work as a unique resource for resolving crises of meaning and value that threatened other cultural or social goods. The self-understanding of the modern humanities didn't merely take shape in response to a perceived crisis; it also made crisis a core part of its project. Through this critical, historical perspective, Permanent Crisis can take scholars and anyone who cares about the humanities beyond the usual scolding, exhorting, and hand-wringing into clearer, more effective thinking about the fate of the humanities. Building on ideas from Max Weber and Friedrich Nietzsche to Helen Small and Danielle Allen, Reitter and Wellmon dig into the very idea of the humanities as a way to find meaning and coherence in the world.

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Chapter One

The Modern University and the Dream of Intellectual Unity

In the fall of 1903, the Harvard psychologist Hugo Münsterberg issued a programmatic statement about the unity of knowledge. The occasion was the upcoming St. Louis Congress of the Arts and Sciences, which would bring together European and American academics in an event marking the centenary of the Louisiana Purchase. Asked to be one of the conference planners, Münsterberg threw himself into the role. He was German—William James had lured him to Harvard—and he helped ensure the participation of such luminaries as fellow German social scientists Ferdinand Tönnies and Max Weber. Münsterberg hoped to make the event in St. Louis a point of convergence not just for eminence but also for what he portrayed as an intellectual movement arising from the “growing feeling of over-specialization in the sciences today.”1 Writing in the Atlantic Monthly, Münsterberg enjoined all those scholars participating in the conference to “strive toward a unity of thought . . . instead of heaping up once more . . . scattered specialistic researches.” “Such disconnection,” he conjectured, wouldn’t go over well “with the American nation,” with its “instinctive desire for organization and unity in work.” Münsterberg thought the Midwest would be the perfect place to begin a concerted pursuit of intellectual unity in America.

But several American scholars spoke out against his plan, objecting not so much to the goal of unity as to how he construed it, which they saw as constraining rather than liberating. They had a point: Münsterberg had developed a narrative in which the flawed unity designs of nineteenth-century materialists—flawed, in his view, because they reduced life to passive, inert mechanism—had given way to the dualism of the natural sciences and the modern humanities. A new “idealism” was now, in turn, overcoming this dualism, and would, he thought, preserve differences between values and physical facts while allowing for unity by means of unspecified common philosophical principles. The result would be an ordering of the academic world in which “every theoretical and practical science would find its exact place.”

John Dewey complained that Münsterberg’s proposal ran counter to “the live-and-let-live character” of contemporary “science,” enshrining as the ultimate authority “a particular methodology emanating from a particular school of metaphysics.” William James criticized Münsterberg’s “resolute will to have a system of absolute principles and categories.” Such a system might, paradoxically, lead to silos of knowledge rather than consilience, James warned.2

Another reason for the wariness may have been that in late nineteenth-century America, the ideal of the unity of knowledge had been vigorously invoked in attempts to preserve the broadly Protestant basis of the traditional American college. Institutions such as Princeton, Yale, and William and Mary designed their curricula and structured student life around the notion that scientific and theological knowledge were mutually enhancing and that moral philosophy could synthesize them in a grand unity.3 Münsterberg’s attempt to link institutional design and aspirations to unity, however, came out of a different tradition of unity thinking, one that rose to prominence in Germany in the age of idealist philosophy and played a central part in discussions of higher education in general and the humanities in particular, contributing vitally, and in ways that may seem surprising, to a persistent sense of crisis in the humanities. Indeed, in order to understand how that sense of crisis developed in nineteenth-century Germany, we must examine how unity thinking became so important there—important enough for Münsterberg to have staked his career on bringing it to the United States.

On the Uses of an Idea

To be sure, the dream of the unity of knowledge isn’t an exclusively German phenomenon. It stretches back at least as far as the pre-Socratic Greek philosopher Thales of Miletus and the emergence of the first monotheistic religions, and it has found purchase in a variety of places and times. Peter Galison and Lorraine Daston have made the case that the ideal of unity found a special resonance in nineteenth-century Germany. This, according to Galison, was where the ideal began its career as a “regulative part of scientific theorizing.” Although German idealist philosophers created the necessary foundation in the first half of the nineteenth century, it was only with “the so-called ‘Professors’ Revolution’ of 1848,” Galison maintains, that the unity-of-knowledge principle became a frequently invoked tenet across the sciences.4

For German natural scientists of the nineteenth century such as Hermann Helmholtz, Emil Du Bois-Reymond, and Rudolf Virchow, all of whom wanted to see the German territories unified under a modern constitution, there was a political resonance to the epistemology of science and an epistemological resonance to the politics of nation building. When the push for unity in 1848 failed, they found compensatory purpose and satisfaction in continuing to advance the cause of scientific unity.

Similarly, Daston maintains that German intellectuals and scholars of the late nineteenth century embraced the unity ideal most forcefully. That context was “the place and period during which the contradiction between the ever finer division of labor in the sciences and the striving toward the unification of the sciences was felt with unprecedented intensity.”5 In explaining how this special situation took shape, Daston, too, underscores the importance of both German idealism and the question of German political unification.6 As scholarship became more fragmented in the late 1800s and as the quest for the unity of knowledge seemed, accordingly, to grow more quixotic, scholars with liberal commitments, such as the historian Theodor Mommsen, expressed a sense of disappointment most sharply. Disillusioned with political unification under Bismarck, they had found solace in the pursuit of intellectual unity, and now even that wasn’t turning out as they had hoped.

Certainly, in discussions of German versions of the unity-of-knowledge dream, idealist philosophy has loomed large. When they spoke of the ideal, Friedrich Schleiermacher, J. G. Fichte, Wilhelm von Humboldt, and Friedrich Schelling may not have meant the same thing, but all four thinkers—and others as well—relied heavily on the notion of an ultimate unity of knowledge. It figures prominently, for example, in their writings on university reform, which is what concerns us here. They invoked the unity of knowledge as a regulative ideal in making the case that the modern university should be a free community of scholars and students pulling together in the pursuit of liberal learning and pure scholarship with philosophy at the center of the undertaking.

Lecturing in 1808 Schelling claimed that “philosophy, which apprehends the whole of the human and touches upon all aspects of his nature, is even better suited [than mathematics] to free the mind from the limitations of a one-sided education and raise it into the realm of the universal and absolute.” Expanding on the connection between intellectual unity and human freedom—again, a key element in German idealism—he went on to say that “knowledge of the organic whole of all sciences must therefore precede a particular education focused on a single specialty. Whoever devotes himself to a particular science . . . must know how he should relate this particular science to himself so as to think not as a slave but as a free man, in the spirit of the whole.”7

Despite the salience such rhetoric enjoyed, the “unification enthusiasm” of Schelling and other reformers has received little sustained attention. The entry for “The Unity of Science” in the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy discusses some of the thinking that underlay the reformers’ passion, namely, Kant’s conception of knowledge as “a whole of cognition ordered according to principles.”8 The entry says little, however, about the unity ideal in later idealism. Nor do any of the works in its lengthy bibliography focus on the importance of the ideal there. Perhaps the mantra-like character of unity claims such as Schelling’s has discouraged fine-grained analysis of the type that Karl Lamprecht’s specific plans for achieving interdisciplinary unity have attracted.9 In short, scholars have tended to speak about the rise of the unity-of-knowledge ideal around 1800 in broad terms even when their subject is the discourse of university reform in which the ideal played such a vital part.

This is indeed the case in two of the most important works on the formation of the modern university produced in the last fifty years—R. Steven Turner’s “The Prussian Universities and the Research Imperative, 1806–1848,” and Thomas Albert Howard’s Protestant Theology and the Making of the Modern University. Turner addresses the unity-of-knowledge ideal at length, but the point of his observations isn’t to explore why the university reformers were so profoundly invested in it. Turner’s goal, rather, is to distinguish one notion of unity—the synthesizing notion of the idealists—from another—the analytic notion of the philologists and historians who helped initiate a kind of empirical turn in the 1830s.10 The analytic conception, Turner says, was articulated best by the philologist August Boeckh, who extolled the individual scholar capable of recognizing “in the depths of his limited object the idea of the whole in microcosm.”11 For his part, Howard repeatedly remarks on how Schelling and Schleiermacher appealed to the principle of the unity of knowledge in their discussions of university reform, but his observations in this regard are mostly summaries and paraphrases. Like Turner, Howard doesn’t fully consider the intellectual, political, and social purposes served by the unity-of-knowledge ideal.12

Yet the unity ideal invites political interpretations, and not just because of the connection Galison, Daston, and others have stressed. If a synchronous relationship between scientific unity and political unification could be posited, could there not also be a similar relationship between intellectual totality and totalitarianism? After the Second World War, a number of writers pointed to such a link. In Minima moralia (1951), his “reflections” from a life damaged by fascism, Theodor Adorno claimed that “the whole is false,” thereby inverting Hegel’s dictum “the true is the whole.”13 Writing with Max Horkheimer, Adorno had gone at least as far in Dialectic of Enlightenment (1947). There Horkheimer and Adorno identified a causal relation between the Nazi hatred of “foreign elements” and hostility to difference on the part of philosophical systems that operate according to the logic of conceptual understanding.14 Elaborating this thought in Minima moralia, Adorno condemns Friedrich Schiller for wanting to derive social reality from just “one principle” and speaks darkly of the mindset that characterizes such a desire: “In the innermost chambers of humanism, as its actual soul, an anger rages in its imprisonment; as a fascist, it turns the whole world into a prison.”15

Writing less epigrammatically, the historian of science Anne Harrington has traced the lines of “holism in German culture from Wilhelm II to Hitler.” Her goal isn’t to show that German holism necessarily culminated in the Nazi variant of it, but neither does she portray that variant as unwarranted. Nazism is a part of German holism, which Harrington follows back to Goethe’s “vision of wholeness”—a “science of life” in which “the products of nature and art [were] treated one as the other, aesthetic and teleological judgment mutually illuminating each other.”16 The association is of course suggestive.

Although she emphasizes the diversity of holism in Germany, Harrington views German holism more generally as a hostile response to what were taken to be Newton’s atomizing, mechanistic theories. The writings of late nineteenth-century German university professors offer a treasure trove of general support for this perspective. “Almost everybody [in the academic community] by 1900 complained of the decline of the unity of science and scholarship,” Charles McClelland has observed.17 More specifically, many intellectuals and scholars associated threats to the unity-of-knowledge dream not only with increasing specialization, as Mommsen and other liberal scholars did, but also with what they regarded as the nightmarish aspects of modernity: the growing domination of technology in nearly all areas of life, democratization, social fragmentation, materialism, rootless individualism, and so on. They mixed an epistemological lament with conservative social theory. Intellectual culture—and society along with it—was succumbing to centrifugal forces, which remained ominously abstract but for their devastating effects.

For decades, educated elites repeatedly argued that what was needed was a recommitment to the whole for which the unity-of-knowledge ideal provided the best model. Devotion to intellectual unity became a symbol signifying an allegiance to “true learning” and much more: the deeply held spiritual values that distinguished German Kultur, despite its present condition, from the mere “civilization” of the West. In 1914 German academics and intellectuals celebrated the outbreak of war in just these terms. The philosopher Alois Riehl, for example, wrote, “The belief in the reality of the intellectual and spiritual world, in the life of the whole which transcends the existence of the individual, this belief, which awoke in all of us during the early days of August, must never more die out.”18

Political and social conservatives weren’t alone in worrying about the modern German university. Its capture by capital and an ever-expanding state bureaucracy and the splintering of their research structure—trends accelerated by the tumult of the Weimar Republic—threatened cultural coherence and social stability. And philosophers, philologists, and historians weren’t the only ones to appeal to the unity ideal. Well into the twentieth century, German natural and physical scientists (as we will see in later chapters) regularly invoked it as well, often when in roles of institutional leadership, as an orienting and definitive ideal for all German scholars and universities.

The links between the discourse of unities and wholes and reactionary dispositions, however, are clear enough to have led to forms of what Michael André Bernstein calls “backshadowing.” This, as its name suggests, is foreshadowing in reverse.19 When discussing how figures like Humboldt understood and used the unity-of-knowledge ideal, prominent intellectuals and scholars projected backward the use of neo-humanist tropes in the reactionary discourse that flourished around 1900, making the early neo-humanists sound like fretful late nineteenth-century mandarins. Some of Humboldt’s most influential writings on university reform weren’t discovered until the 1890s, and it was not until the early 1900s that the myth of Humboldt as the founder of modern higher education was constructed by men like Adolf von Harnack and Eduard Spranger, both of whom were quite selective in their exaltations. The centenary celebrations for the University of Berlin around 1910 provided an international platform for the creative reimagining of German neo-humanism.

Having been established in the early twentieth century, this reinvented neo-humanist tradition became the prism through which later scholars understood nineteenth-century concepts and institutions now primarily associated with Humboldt. Anthony La Vopa, for instance, has claimed that Humboldt conceived of his proposal to “unify all branches of knowledge” as the “unitary antidote” to the “modern” ill of “specialization.”20 In his account of Humboldt’s reform efforts in The Postmodern Condition (1979), Jean-Francois Lyotard focuses on what he takes to be Humboldt’s most important suggestion—that philosophy “must restore unity to learning” (emphasis added).21

The unity-of-knowledge ideal elevated the pedant to a priest and the student to a scholar by endowing learning with a systematic, almost holy end: the promise of coherence and a higher calling. Not only would those engaged in pure learning hover above mundane vocational study; they would be doing so in the service of a grand objective that required systematic thought yet had a sacred, Romantic resonance. In addition, the unity-of-knowledge ideal played an important role in the struggle to overturn the well-established hierarchy of the faculties in universities, which situated arts an...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• Introduction
• 1: The Modern University and the Dream of Intellectual Unity
• 2: The Lament of the Melancholy Mandarins
• 3: Philology and Modernity
• 4: The Mandarins of the Lab
• 5: The Consolation of the Modern Humanities
• 6: Max Weber, Scholarship, and Modern Asceticism
• 7: Crisis, Democracy, and the Humanities in America
• Conclusion
• Acknowledgments
• Notes
• Index