The Shifting Tides: A Return of the Humanities in Public Imagination

Dr Neville Buch

https://www.academia.edu/145459099/Shifting_Tides_The_Return_of_The_Humanities_in_Public_Imagination

The Shifting Tides: A Return of the Humanities in Public Imagination

Abstract

The contemporary return of the humanities to the public imagination is a critical response to the technicisation of cognition and the resultant “immense regression,” a state characterized by “absolute non-knowledge” and the erosion of human agency. This phenomenon signals a major shift in the intellectual landscape, where philosophical inquiry is moving away from purely abstract or scientific models toward a humanistic discipline aimed at “making sense of being human”. The humanities are newly valorised not merely for cultural enrichment, but for providing the reflexive self-understanding and historical awareness necessary to navigate a world increasingly subjected to purposive-rational action and investment calculation. This intellectual return is fundamentally driven by a recognition of the prosthetic core of humanity (technics as the unthought originary de-fault) and the ensuing crisis of human authorship and temporality. The ascendancy of the humanities is a necessary step toward formulating a new politics of memory and achieving comprehension—a robust, inclusive understanding grounded in social and historical truthfulness.

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Dynamic of Cognition Analysis: The Humanities’ Reflective Ascent

The surging importance of the humanities represents a shift in the cognitive cycle, asserting the necessity of comprehensive, historically grounded inquiry against the reductionist prejudice of the modern era (DoC: Lost Thought/Lost Awareness).

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1. The Technics Crisis and the Intellectual Necessity for the Humanities

The primary impetus for the humanities’ renewed public role is the structural crisis induced by the pervasive and unexamined role of technology in human life, leading to the decay of critical faculties and public discourse.

1. The Unthought and the De-fault of Origin

Philosophy, throughout most of its history, has repressed technics as an object of thought; technics is the unthought. This repression creates a vulnerability because technology—the pursuit of life by means other than life—is constitutive of human beings as essentially prosthetic. This technical nature is rooted in the originary de-fault (lack or deficiency) that defines the human species.

The consequence of repressing this fundamental relationship is the paradox of contemporary technics, where human power simultaneously manifests as the power for the self-destruction of humanity. This crisis is evident in:

1. The Technicisation of Knowledge: The analysis of mathematical thought shows that technicisation through calculation produces loss of memory and a forgetting of its truth (the memory of originary intuitions), culminating in the “crisis of the European sciences”.
2. The Divorce of Rhythms: Industrial civilization depends on permanent innovation which causes a divorce between the rhythms of cultural evolution and the rhythms of technical evolution. This accelerated technological evolution shakes the “understanding that Dasein has of its being”.
3. The Loss of Human Authorship: At the global level, destiny is submitted to the techno-economic imperatives regulating investment calculation. This dominance leads to a systemic closing that replaces communicative action with purposive-rational action, enforcing behavioural control steered by external stimuli. This fundamentally threatens the human authorship (reason, freedom, and responsibility) that humanism champions.
4. The Humanities as the Counter-Technic

The return of the humanities is predicated on overcoming this technical crisis. This requires philosophy to forge a new relationship to technics by rethinking the bond originally formed by humanity, technics, and language.

1. Liberating Communication: Jürgen Habermas argues that true progress depends on rationalization at the level of the institutional framework by removing restrictions on communication. The technicisation of language is seen by both Habermas and Stiegler as a denaturation or perversion of an instance proper to humanity. The humanities, by prioritizing rational-critical communication, provide the necessary medium to resist this degradation.
2. The Necessity of Lived Experience: The philosophical tradition of Lebensphilosophie (Philosophy of Life), which champions dynamic becoming and lived human experience (Erlebnis) over abstract rationalism, provides the essential foundation for this critique. This tradition asserts that reality and value are found within life itself, necessitating interpretative understanding (Verstehen) of intentions and meanings, rather than mere causal explanation (erklären) of quantifiable events.
3. Aesthetics and Morality: The humanities engage with aesthetic appreciation, viewing art and literature as contributing to moral character and an understanding of the good life. Aesthetic value is philosophically important because it relates to emotional relations to nature (gratitude/peace versus terror/stimulation) and embodies a value crucial to preserving what is worthwhile in human life.
4. The Reflective Ascent: Philosophy as History and Self-Understanding

The re-emergence of the humanities signifies a methodological shift toward embracing complexity, history, and philosophical pluralism, thereby achieving reflective self-understanding.

1. The Centrality of History and Contingency

History is a central case of a humanistic study, and philosophy has very special relations to it. Bernard Williams argues that philosophy must learn that conceptual description (or, more specifically, analysis) is not self-sufficient, and that projects derived a priori from universal conditions often leave unexplained features that provoke inquiry.

1. Truth and Historical Understanding: The reflective understanding of our ideas and motivations, a philosophical aim, is going to involve historical understanding. This is essential because ethical concepts, such as authenticity or integrity, are manifestly contingent cultural development dependent on the course of Western history. Philosophy needs reflective social knowledge, including history, that can command unprejudiced assent if its hopes for self-understanding are to be realized.
2. Challenging Vindicatory Histories: The historical story of how modern concepts (like equality) came to replace earlier outlooks is not vindicatory; rather, the history of those liberal arguments is the very history of the outlook we accept. Consequently, relying on stories that try to vindicate modern conceptions (e.g., unfolding of reason, growth of enlightenment) is problematic. The failure to believe in a vindicatory history means that philosophical argument cannot pretend to an absolute conception of the world.
3. Spiral Historiography and Inclusion: The method advocated for overcoming historical fragmentation and advancing humanism is Spiral Historiography. This involves examining the cyclical patterns of ideas and continually re-evaluating the insights of past thinkers, critically re-evaluated in our present context, to inform contemporary humanism. This method requires reading ancient texts with modern inclusivity.
4. The Challenge to Theoretical Dogmatism

The return of the humanities rejects the rationalistic demand that reflection should be taken to require theory. The sheer density of human experience and the complex historical deposit of our ethical ideas resist systematization into a comprehensive ethical theory.

1. Reflection Destroys Knowledge: An important, un-Socratic conclusion is that in ethics, reflection can destroy knowledge. This occurs when reflection disturbs traditional thick ethical concepts (which combine fact and value) that provided knowledge at an unreflective level. Once these local concepts are questioned, the abstract and general concepts that replace them may not satisfy the conditions of propositional knowledge.
2. Embracing Pluralism and Conflict: Philosophical understanding must respect that there are many different ethical outlooks that these dispositions can be used to support, some of which exclude one another. The aim of philosophical systematization is to reduce or eliminate conflict among ideas and sentiments, but doing so would alter our moral perception of the world.
3. Truthfulness over Objective Truth: Instead of pursuing the phantasm of ultimate ethical truth, philosophy should focus on the value of plain truth—the truth of historical and social truthfulness. This pursuit is grounded in what can command unprejudiced assent within a contingent, human perspective.

III. The Future Mandate: Human Authorship and Compassion

The shifting tides call for a decisive response from the humanities to secure the future of human authorship and to realize its ethical aims through procedural kindness.

1. Reclaiming Authorship and Confidence

The humanistic discipline is defined by a deep need to remind ourselves what a human life is, has been, and can be. The capacity to act as the authors of our own lives (human authorship) is intricately linked to reason, freedom, and responsibility.

1. Confidence over Dogmatism: The central imperative is finding how enough people can come to possess a practical confidence that… will come from strength and not from the weakness of self-deception and dogmatism. This goal resists the illusory dissociation of the theorist in oneself from the self whose dispositions are being theorized.
2. Overcoming Alienation: The historical problem of historicist weariness and alienation must be overcome through philosophical understanding that does not abstract from local perspectives or idiosyncrasies.
3. Panser: The Procedural Necessity of Kindness

The necessary cognitive procedure for anchoring philosophical rigor in lived reality is the reinvention of thought as caring.

1. Thinking as Caring: Dr. Buch’s framework, drawing on Stiegler, mandates that thinking (penser) be reinvented as caring (panser). This involves tending to wounds and cultivating compassion as the indispensable human complement to technological function.
2. Inclusive Humanism: This procedural kindness grounds Inclusive Humanism, affirming that a person of faith is quite capable of being skeptical, rational, secular, and humanist, thereby dissolving the unnecessary wars of exclusion that deplete intellectual energy.
3. The Goal of Comprehension: This leads to the final goal: comprehension, defined as always seeking the whole of the matter and filtering out fallacies. This intellectual ascent is critical because the humanistic project risks seeming peculiar if it fails to acknowledge its connections with other ways of understanding ourselves, especially in an education system focused purely on the technical and the commercial.

The current shifting tide is the realization that to survive the Gestell (modern technics), humanity must prioritize the subtle, sophisticated tools of the humanities over the crude logic of mere efficiency, restoring the intellectual integrity required to shape time and destiny. It is the movement from simply being caught in the machine’s logic to consciously writing the human story.

REFERENCE AND BIBLIOGRAPHY

Bertocci, P. A. (1954). The Nature of Cognition: Minimum Requirements for a Personalistic Epistemology. The Review of Metaphysics, 8(1), 49–60.

Collingwood, R. G. (1939). An Autobiography. Oxford University Press.

Dilthey, W. (1883). Einleitung in die Geisteswissenschaften: Versuch einer Grundlegung für das Studium der Gesellschaft und der Geschichte. Duncker & Humblot.

Habermas, J. (1979). Communication and the Evolution of Society (T. McCarthy, Trans.). Beacon Press. (Original work published 1976).

Hume, D. (1988). Enquiries Concerning Human Understanding and Concerning the Principles of Morals (P. H. Nidditch, Rev. ed.). Clarendon Press. (Original work published 1751).

Husserl, E. (1970). The Crisis of the European Sciences and Transcendental Phenomenology (D. Carr, Trans.). Northwestern University Press. (Original work published 1954).

McGinn, C. (1983). The Subjective View. Clarendon Press.

Moore, G. E. (1959). Principia Ethica. Cambridge University Press. (Original work published 1903).

Noddings, N. (1984). Caring: A Feminine Approach to Ethics and Moral Education. University of California Press.

Stiegler, B. (1998). Technics and Time, 1: The Fault of Epimetheus (G. Collins & R. Beardsworth, Trans.). Stanford University Press.

Williams, B. (1978). Descartes: The Project of Pure Enquiry. Penguin.

Williams, B. (1985). Ethics and the Limits of Philosophy. Fontana Press.

Williams, B. (1995). Making Sense of Humanity and Other Philosophical Papers 1982–1993. Cambridge University Press.

Williams, B. (2006). Philosophy as a Humanistic Discipline. Princeton University Press. (Original lecture 2000).

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Neville Buch

Professional Historian at Professional Historians Association (Queensland) Inc.

Neville Buch (Pronounced Book) Ph.D. is a certified member of the Professional Historians Association (Queensland). Since 2010 he has operated a sole trade business in history consultancy. He was a Q ANZAC 100 Fellow 2014-2015 at the State Library of Queensland. Dr Buch was the PHA (Qld) e-Bulletin, the monthly state association’s electronic publication, and was a member of its Management Committee. He is the Managing Director of the Brisbane Southside History Network.

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