The University and the Human Sciences
Herman De Dijn
Vice-rector for the Humanities and Social Sciences, K.U. Leuven
European Journal for Education Law and Policy, 3: nr.2 (1999), p. 121-125.
Key words: University, human sciences, Geisteswissenschaften, objectivity (of human sciences)
Abstract
The current malaise affecting the university in general and the human sciences in particular has a deeper origin than is usually recognized. It has to do with the gap between science and culture, between the scientific way of dealing with things and the ordinary-lifeway of dealing with them. The more the university is seen as the bastion of science, the less those sciences which traditionally deal with human affairs as seen from the ordinary, common sense point of view, are taken seriously. It is particularly the Geisteswissenschaften which are de facto depreciated. The usual reaction is an attempt to ever more professionalism and methodological rigidity also in these sciences. This leads to disastrous consequences both for the Geisteswissenschaften and for the university as a whole.
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The human sciences are usually divided into, on the one hand, the sciences concerning language, history and culture (in German: the Geisteswissenschaften; in Dutch geesteswetenschappen) and, on the other hand, the behavioural and social sciences (like psychology, economics, sociology, etc.). Although what I will say is relevant for all human sciences, I think that it is particularly relevant for the sciences concerning language, culture and history, i.e., the Geisteswissenschaften. (I will use the terms natural sciences, positive sciences or exact sciences indiscriminately.)
My hypothesis is that the current malaise affecting the university in general and the human sciences in particular has a deeper origin than is usually recognized. It has to do with the gap between science and culture, between the scientific way of dealing with things and the ordinary-lifeway of dealing with them. The more the university is seen as the bastion of science, the less those sciences which traditionally deal with human affairs as seen from the ordinary, common sense point of view, are taken seriously. It is particularly the Geisteswissenschaften which are de facto depreciated and which are in need of constant defence.
The importance of the Geisteswissenschaften was traditionally related to the interest in a general, humanistic education. A university-educated person had to be an intellectual, someone with a broad knowledge not only of a particular science but also of literature, art and history, and someone interested in aesthetic, ethical and socio-political affairs. No one seems to know anymore precisely what such a humanistic education means even if one still pays lipservice to it (one thinks here of the recent discussions about the canon in literature, i.e., which great books a well-educated person ought to have read). As a result of this situation, the defence of the Geisteswissenschaften today usually takes another turn: the stress on the humanistic aspect is replaced by an attempt to display ever more professionalism and scientificity. But the more the human sciences are trying to profile themselves as serious, full-blown sciences, the less they seem to be of importance, certainly in comparison with the natural sciences. Apart from a handful of scholars dispersed over the globe, nobody seems to be particularly interested in the study, for example, of “Some Early Middle English Diphthongs - au, ai, oi” or in the evolution of the conceptions of grammar in 17th and 18th century France.
My thesis is that what is needed, is not more professionalism and scientificity in the Geisteswissenschaften, but a continuing confrontation with the wider culture, the general public, the amateurs within and outside the university. The reason is not that this contact is necessary to create goodwill or raise more funds, nor even that it is part of the mission of the university to be relevant to society at large. The reason is simply that this is a matter of life or death for the Geisteswissenschaften themselves. If this confrontation with the wider culture is not preserved, the Geisteswissenschaften will lose contact with the Geist, the spirit which is their origin and their continuing inspiration.
To many people, especially in the positive sciences, the human sciences seem to be hopelessly unscientific. They seem incapable of growing beyond a pre-paradigmatic stage: it is not clearly defined what problems are to be dealt with, what a model-solution looks like, how the work has to be divided up. A lot of research is done in isolation, often more geared to texts of the past than to actual discussion. This is perceived as producing a lack of the “critical mass” necessary for scientific research. Even in domains such as linguistics, where there is a semblance of scientific character, the debates about method seem not to subside.
As a reaction, many scholars also in the Geisteswissenschaften try to demonstrate that their research is really professional. They try desperately to develop a theoretical framework, a stringent methodology. They try to reach a certain level of objectivity, separating their work from value-judgments, from all edification. The study of literature, for example, becomes the study of texts, not of high literature. For this purpose, a theory is developed capable of dealing with all sorts of texts, from literature to pulp-fiction or even newspaper-items. Intractable questions, especially those having to do with meaning or value, are declared inappropriate, not belonging to the field of study. As in the positive sciences, the drive towards more professionalization leads to greater specialization and fragmentation. There are other so-called “advantages” related to this growing professionalization: it seems to become much clearer what training in the field requires, how to evaluate products of training and research, what the criteria are for determining recruitment or tenure, etc.
However comprehensible or popular these developments may be, I think they are not the right answer to the present malaise concerning the human sciences. Professionalization, fragmentation and specialization may be inevitable, even desirable, in the positive sciences (although even there, they cannot perhaps be pushed too far). In the human sciences they will mean, they do mean, disaster, at least as a general attitude. (I admit that attempts at paradigm-formation are not automatically wrong since these attempts may exceptionally lead to the creation of a new science. Perhaps cognitive science will prove to be a case in point: it started off as a speciality in philosophy and may develop into a genuine science. The same may happen to certain developments in psychology. But this is not to say that cognitive science can replace philosophy, or that “folk” psychology must disappear altogether.)
The reason why the drive towards scientificity and professionalization as a general tendency would be disastrous, particularly in the Geisteswissenschaften, has to do with the intrinsic link between these sciences and the questions and problems which occupy human beings in the real world. This real world is not the world of science and technology, but what phenomenologists have called the life-world. The life-world is the world of everyday living which looks radically different from the science-fiction-like world of pure science. However much science will explain to us the inner workings of natural things, even of human things, this will not lead to the disappearance of the meanings and values which we experience in ordinary life, which we endlessly talk about in our daily conversations, in the stories we tell each other about ourselves, about others, about past and future. As long as we see ourselves and others as persons, as long as we have all sorts of emotions and evaluations related to this, certain questions, desires and interests, will not go away; they will require intense reflection of a kind not to be found in a strictly scientific, objectivist approach.
The problems which occupy people in the life-world, are problems of understanding oneself and others, one’s past, the meaning of one’s life, what to do (instead of simply what there is, scientifically speaking), how to feel the right feelings (e.g., how to react to love, how to mourn properly). These problems cannot even be understood if one doesnot really participate in the life-world in the first place. Of course it is true that scientific-technological developments more and more influence the life-world and create special, additional problems. But even these additional problems cannot be understood at all if one has no prior grasp of the original life-world problems. The ethical problems related to IVF, the production of superfluous embryos, e.g., are of course related to growing medical technology. But the problem is totally incomprehensible in separation from our non-scientific notion of a human person and of our non-scientific attitudes with respect to human procreation.
The human sciences, particularly the Geisteswissenschaften, cannot and should not sever the umbilical cord which links them with the insights, understandings and sensibilities present in the life-world. One could call this their traditionality: they become meaningless when cut off from the traditions of meanings and values constituting the life-world of human beings. But now we find ourselves on the other horn of the dilemma. As I explained before, cut off from the problems, questions and interests of real life, of ordinary people, the human sciences perhaps gain scientific status (though always of lower standing or doubtful character), but they become the irrelevant pastime of university-mandarins. Linked to the broader culture, however, they do not seem to be worthy of finding a home within the university: they lack the seriousness and objectivity of a real science; inevitably they seem to fall prey to ideological differences and subjectivity. Is this really so?
Before I try to answer this question, let us reconsider our problem, which really is the problem of the survival of the human sciences, particularly the Geisteswissenschaften within contemporary culture and university. It is typical of Western European culture to have developed very different ways of reflection about the life-world: not only the kind of reflection which is called poetry and literature, not only the essential forms of conversation, palaver, gossip, story-telling and singing, but also a form of reflection which has been given the name “science” like in human science or Geisteswissenschaften. Like all sciences , these sciences also derive their origin from the Greek invention of philosophy which means - as everybody knows - the search for wisdom. To make a long story very short, the divorce between science and philosophy (which happened at the beginning of the Modern Age, in the 17th century) brought about a separation between scientific knowledge and the other forms of reflection on the life-world, a separation between the scientific way of talking about things and the kinds of talk which were rooted in the categories of the life-world (categories like person-nonperson, death-life, man-woman, order-chaos, beauty-ugliness, good-bad, pleasant-unpleasant, etc., etc.). This meant that a gap had arisen between science and wisdom. Philosophy, instead of being, as of old, the queen of all sciences, is now relegated to the domain of the human sciences, becoming a minor subdivision within the domain of the Geisteswissenschaften. In the Geisteswissenschaften the term Wissenschaft or science has somehow retained this link with wisdom, with a non-scientific form of knowledge or truth which gives insight into what it all “really means”, which gives enlightenment in the sense of orientation for right living. This means that the Geisteswissenschaften, however much they may have become “scientific”, are still circling around the problems, categories and distinctions which are of central importance in the life-world. To try and become “really” scientific, would mean to do away with this link (as happened with the positive sciences). It would mean giving up the special kind of reflection on the life-world and its problems, interests, etc., which is the unique outcome of historical developments which gave rise first to philosophy, then to science and finally to the human sciences, in particular the sciences of the Geist (including philosophy).
The Geisteswissenschaften have their origin in a non-scientific relation with reality. Aesthetics and literary studies are an extension of the love of art and of literature. The study of history is bound up with the manner in which we are intrigued by the past. The scientific study of old and foreign cultures has its soil in a non-scientific acquaintance with the forms of life of other peoples who attract us because they are similar to and different from us at the same time. The Geisteswissenschaften can never entirely free themselves from this origin without losing their specific relevance. This relevance lies in their capacity to reflectively deepen, clarify, entertain or expand our dealings with what is meaningful, significant, strange, wild, mad, etc.
There is a real difference here with the natural sciences. These necessarily turn away from the whole of the views and attitudes of the life-world. In the life-world, our awareness and thinking keeps itself at the surface of lived meanings. In the positive sciences, thinking penetrates under the surface so to say (under the bedrock, as L. Wittgenstein would express it). This is quite justified because the relevance of these sciences does not lie in a reflection on the lived meanings of nature and of things and persons, but rather in the delivery of reliable information and explanation aimed at prediction and, if possible, effective control.
The relevance of the Geisteswissenschaften consists in a reflection which must be subservient to an elucidation of the meanings and values of the life-world and which is comparable to a kind of celebration and edification of these meanings and values. This implies that the “scientific aspects” of the Geisteswissenschaften (which I do not deny or reject) function in a special way, subordinate to the central aim of reflection. I will briefly demonstrate this, not only with respect to the theoretical element but also with respect to other elements, such as the role of facts, the opposition objectivity-subjectivity, the opposition fact-value, the relation theory-practice, or thought and feeling.
In the positive sciences, the theoretical model serves to arrive at universally valid insights into the structures and workings of things. These insights are really ends-in-themselves. They determine how the referents of the ordinary language terms really have to be understood. In the human sciences, the theoretical element has a subservient function: it has to contribute to a reflective insight into concrete meaning structures (novels, poems, historical changes, human relations, etc.). This means that a subtle balance has to be established between the development of the “theoretical model” and the pre-theoretical awareness of the human phenomena observed. Clifford Geertz called this the balance between “experience-distant” and “experience-near” concepts. The point is not to replace as much as possible “experience-near” concepts by scientific insights; the point of the “experience-distant” concepts is precisely to come to a deeper interpretation of the always particular combination of experience-near concepts. If the theoretical element becomes predominant, it hinders, rather than improves our reflection (when this happens in philosophy for example, this is called excessive speculation).
What is said here about the theoretical element applies mutatis mutandis to the role and importance of facts in the human sciences. Interest in the facts cannot function here as it functions in the natural sciences, as an independent test for our theoretical insights or in order to have a more effective intervention in reality. The importance of facts (as, e.g., in history, or in literature - think of non-fiction novels) can only be grasped from within the peculiar interest in question (e.g., our strange interest in the past, which cannot be understood from the point of view of better adaptation, but which rather resembles the delight we have in childhood memories).
Another difference precisely concerns the relationship between science and practical-technical intervention. It is undoubtedly the case that certain theoretical developments in the human sciences were or are prompted by a similar ideal of scientifically-based technical intervention (cf. psychology; the study of translation; social anthropology). It would however be quite wrong to see this as the aim of all, or even most, human sciences, let alone of the Geisteswissenschaften. For what then are the problems which the study of literature or history addresses? We do not intend here to obtain a better grip on things. On the contrary, we are engaged in a reflection that gives us a deeper understanding of that which fascinates us, of that which occasions wonder. One is engaged in obtaining what Wittgenstein called eine übersichtliche Darstellung: an overview of things such that the meaning of the phenomenon (the past, e.g.) shines for us as anew or as pregnant with deeper meaning. The aim is not better information or control, but insight, illumination of what always already lies before us.