The History of Learning Humanism: What Most Humanists Miss in Cognition.

This essay has taken four books (in this order):

Bakewell, Sarah (2023). Humanly Possible: Seven Hundred Years of Humanist Thinking, Enquiry and Hope, London: Chatto & Windus.

Hayot, Eric (2021). Humanist Reason: A History, An Argument, A Plan, Columbia University Press.

Radhakrishnan, R. (2008). History, the Human, and the World Between, Duke University Press.

Reitter, Paul and Chad Wellmon (2021). Permanent Crisis: The Humanities in a Disenchanted Age, The University of Chicago Press.

The essay is known as a literature review essay which combines different books into an argument. This literature review is for humanists, to show them what they are missing in their cognition, as many persons today have difficulty in the skill of advanced reading. A literature review helps those who lack the capacity to understand what is in the book’s arguments. The order of the book reviewed is the order of the singular argument:

1. There is a much bigger history of humanism that many humanists have missed;
2. Humanist reasoning is not what many humanists think;
3. Humanism needs to be read and understood in the “betweeness”;
4. The misunderstanding of the progressive-type humanism goes back to its origins in the German Intellectual History of the 1830s.

This is my writing but I have reproduced the phrasing of the book authors verbatim in parts with editing. This is a legitimate practice today when the source is fully acknowledged, and the sources are acknowledge. It is more legitimate and purposeful to do the editing in this way since the words of authors are faithfully and accurately recounted.

1. Bakewell, Sarah (2023). Humanly Possible: Seven Hundred Years of Humanist Thinking, Enquiry and Hope, London: Chatto & Windus.

In the eighth chapter, Unfolding Humanity, Bakewell explains the phenomenon of “the New Humanism” as “an ideology that briefly flourished in some American universities in the early twentieth century”.  Bakewell sees Irving Babbitt (1865-1933), a polemical American academic and literary critic, as the ‘inventor’. Against the educational philosophy of Harvard President Charles Eliot (1834-1926), Babbitt argued that the humanist’s role was only to teach the elite. Eliot argued for book education of the masses. The “New Humanists” believed Babbitt rather than Eliot, and now, in the early 21st century, we have mass stupidity in the population. It is not that the direction of history was misunderstood in what “New Humanism” would do. Sinclair Lewis (1881-1951) named his satirical novel, Babbitt, deliberately. In 1930 when Lewis delivered his acceptance speech for the Nobel Prize, he scolded the New Humanists. According to Bakewell, the variant of humanism almost permanently scarred the evolving movement; “Yet they contributed to leaving a bad odour hovering around humanism…the very word humanism suggests a narrow elitism.”

2. Hayot, Eric (2021). Humanist Reason: A History, An Argument, A Plan, Columbia University Press.

Writing needs a bit of charisma, and Hayot has said it loudly. Writing and thinking needs to be done seriously enough. There is a principle: “that the simple, looser, plainer things that we learn to say in the world often rely”, however, such approach to work depends upon an enormous amount of humanist labour of the scholarly type. The saying of the simpler things, or the simpler saying of these things, would not be ethically or epistemologically legitimate without such scholarship.

The sharp distinction made between more scholarly books on the history of the humanities and a more public-facing books on the social status and institutional positioning of the humanities is that the public discussion dismisses the scholarship too easily and not for its own good. The public discussion in the politics of our contemporary institutional life (except as a kind of background) are the weak thinking and cannot stand epistemologically against the works of real scholarship.

To address the state of humanist reason today would have to do a few things.

1. A person would have to think carefully about the historical and philosophical origins of the epistemology of the modern humanities, and…
2. A person would need to measure those origins and their claims against the evidence of humanist practice.
3. A person would have to come up with a provisional definition for the ideas of reason and of truth that corresponded to those practices, and all the while…
4. A person must retain their connections to existing, evidence-based critiques of the social use of such terms.
5. A person would need a vision of the humanities that was simultaneously recognizable and transformed, familiar in its core capacities and beliefs but unfamiliar in terms of its social position and its long-term possibilities for expansion.
6. Ideally, a person must keep humour about the absurdities of life.

3. Radhakrishnan, R. (2008). History, the Human, and the World Between, Duke University Press.

The way today’s cognition histories and sociology works are through strategic intersections and juxtapositions, rather than by way of an exhaustive and one-at-a-time analysis of a particular thinker or school of thought. For Radhakrishnan, the thinkers are Friedrich Nietzsche, Adrienne Rich, and Frantz Fanon. We find his insight theme across the sub-fields of phenomenology, poststructuralism, and postcoloniality. What we scholars are doing in the interdisciplinary comprehension of the subfields is the strategic juxtaposing of systems of thoughts and philosophies, or of individual thinkers, writers, and theorists. We are trying to bring out the complex, contradictory, and unpredictable relationships between the places in which people live and the spaces in which they think. At the centre, and working outwards is to pose epistemology as an existential question, realize the political as an ethical resolution, dramatize an epistemological challenge of the political and vice versa, and find the moment of balance between the allegorical leap and historical anchorage.

There is presumption that everyone knows what history is? However, some ways of thinking about history does not affirm life and the history of the present, and these attitudes haunt and paralyse life. As Nietzsche ruefully acknowledges, the human being, unlike the blissfully oblivious animal, is condemned to ruminate, and then we must ask how does the human either decide to remember or forget the past?

The burden we have developed in modernity is of objective knowledge and subjective authenticity. We cannot merely abandon the burden of such a project, since it has become phenomenological and then recognised as existential. It inescapably produces general forms of anxiety about time, temporal, and historicity; and specialist obsessions. The ‘average’ thinker does better by not ignoring the profession or a specialist. The populists find this difficult to do, and choose to ignore since the specialist has chosen to complicate or complexify these questions in the following way:

• an agenda in the context of the theory versus history debates;
• revisionism problematizes any notion we might have that history is objective or just; and
• how does the history account for the worlding of the world within its discursive parameters.

Some have argue that since the famous linguistic turn, theory has become profoundly ahistorical, even posthistorical. The era we live in, we find that theory, problems, contradictions, and challenges are always already sublimated into various fluid and unstable states of “post-ality“: post- this and post- that.

As far as theory goes, Frantz Fanon and Antonio Gramsci have been thoroughly poststructuralized in alignment with Derridean dissemination or Lacanian theories of the unconscious. That is all very well, but what is lost is the historical sense in what is the human condition (the historical is the value in Hannah Arendt). The very term postcoloniality has come to signify a way of dealing with history by really not dealing with it.

The high theorists come back against historiographical critics with the readymade response that:

(1) by raising self-reflexivity to the level of a primary politics and;

(2) by paying scrupulous and critical attention to the epistemological subject (on the assumption that radical practices in the realm of epistemology automatically trickle down as answers and solutions to the level of politics), they have already taken care of history, and;

(3) that postcoloniality is not intended as a substitute for Commonwealth or third world or Anglophone or Francophone studies for the simple reason that the temporality of the post- does indeed collocate geopolitics along different lines and axes.

That’s fine as far as it goes, it ignores the fact that antitheory folks no longer can read the critical thinking history, since they dismiss the effort as history being highjacked by theory into false forms of identification and recognition. Those who criticise theory have, ironically, the points of critical thinking theory:

• There is misrecognition through the seduction of theory and theory’s access to infinite discursive proliferation: new terms, jargon, terminologies, and formulations that stake their truth claims as post-representational;
• There is misunderstanding between theory and history and it brings into focus two related issues: perspectivism and the relationship between the places in which people live and the places in which they think;
• Clearly, histories are created, interpreted, repossessed, and produced in response to present perils and threats. History is always contested within a dialectic tension: subjective and objective, perspectival/polemical and omniscient.

It creates an important set of questions for humanism:

• Is humanism all good or bad?
• Is humanism necessarily and unavoidably Eurocentric?
• Even if humanism has had a negative history, can it still be reclaimed in the name of all humanity?
• Is humanism possible as a general and nontechnical worldview, or does it have to be considered as an —ism and therefore subjected to a specialist-discursive treatment?
• How can the individual use humanism in innovative and creative ways so as to escape systemic paralysis and incapacitation?
• How can humanism be reinvoked to address multihistorical emergencies occurring both within and among the peoples of the world?

The historiographer is raising a similar disillusionment within his own discipline, history and academic historiography.

Western, non-Western, the master, the slave: all of these are specific locations of pain or pleasure, privilege or privation, hurt, grief, and loss, or of surplus from which histories are constantly revisited, reinterpreted in keeping with whatever the present needs for the historical may be. Even as history is deemed to be objective and empirical and factual, no one approaches history in a nonpolemical, nonpartisan mode. History is precisely what different historiographies contest. For Said, the history of humanism captures all the ambiguities despite which choices have to be made. Ranajit Guha, the subaltern Indian is agitated by the betrayal of the everyday by the historical, of existential temporality by official historiography, of poetic ways of dwelling in a world of rich possibilities by the disciplinary apparatus of a colonizing historical narrative. The concept of the real immediately sets in motion an exciting conversation between phenomenology as a way of life/living or method and phenomenology as a philosophical school of thought. I do so in the belief that the return to compatible comprehension, may be of some help to me as I seek, both as a general human and as a discursive intellectual, to understand the many betweens that constitute both my world and your worlds, my readers.

My argument is that the human subject and the concept of the between are mutually constitutive; that is, in thinking itself into a state of reflexive consciousness, the human subject discovers the spatio-temporality of betweenness as both ontological and epistemological. The “world” is indeed sandwiched between “history” and the “human”; and ” the very ontology of the world is rendered between, though the betweenness, properly speaking, characterizes the human and not the world condition.

4. Reitter, Paul and Chad Wellmon (2021). Permanent Crisis: The Humanities in a Disenchanted Age, The University of Chicago Press.

The focus of Paul Reitter and Chad Wellmon is the debates on humanism-humanities in the 1830s German Intellectual History, starting with this statement:

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 literature. (15)

In 1808 the philosopher and educational reformer Friedrich Niethammer coined ‘Humanism’ as a term against school reformers seeking more practical pedagogical training. His argument was that the pedagogy of antiquity whose essential feature was the elevation of a student’s “humanity over his animality.” His “study of the so-called humaniora in the learned schools” eventually characterize the modern humanities. It is moral project with an underlying philosophical anthropology. Niethammer 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.” It would be 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 modern 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.”

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 succour 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.”

In 1883, Wilhelm Dilthey offered a more systemic 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 Odo 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.

Niethammer, Dilthey, and Marquand make several important assumptions and claims that recurrence in many narratives that justify and defend the modern humanities:

1. they presume the continuity and identity over space and time of a human essence or being at a monolithic Western modernity threatens to render distant and inaccessible;
2. they not only describe the purpose of the modern humanities as the recovery of this human essence but also presume its historical necessity, as though the humanities were a particular form of Hegel’s “cunning of reason” or Kant’s “hidden plan of nature”;
3. they presume that as it erodes confessional religions and moral traditions, a uniquely Western modernity creates the very needs the humanities emerge to satisfy;
4. 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 cultural canons, 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; and
5. 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.

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.

By the end of the nineteenth century, intellectuals and scholars in the United States would claim that German ideas about knowledge, research, and universities had infected American higher education with a desire for specialized and technical expertise.

As teacher and educational reformer Friedrich Diesterweg and his contemporaries demonstrate, however, nostalgia-laden declensional critiques of a modern, disciplinary knowledge had been a key element of the German discourse around higher education since the 1830s. (17)

Featured Image: Two-Websites-of-the-Humanities

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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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