In their remarkable study of the humanities, Paul Reitter and Chad Wellmon portray a field in permanent crisis.Footnote ¹ They argue that this crisis has afflicted the humanities since their inception in the late nineteenth-century German university and in subsequent adaptation and development in the United States. On Reitter and Wellmon’s account, this crisis is a result of an ambivalent legacy—tied to the creative arts on the one hand, aspiring to match the rigor of the sciences on the other. This crisis of legitimacy, stemming from uncertain foundations and less apparent aims, has also been a resource for mobilizing the humanities and endowing them with a sense of purpose. In the disenchanted age in which the book’s subtitle situates the humanities, some advocates see them as nothing less than an antidote to the vicissitudes of modernity, the reign of technology and capitalism under which we live.

One line of defending the humanities is vocational promise.Footnote ² Unlike their reputation for not yielding practical skills, humanities subjects in this view develop useful skills and foster supple and adaptable minds. The humanities would thus be instrumental in producing the graduates needed in a business and technology environment that touts mental and intellectual flexibility and creativity as key to professional success. Yet this strategy is often pertinent only for a segment of the humanities disciplines, in particular the ones that intersect with the social science disciplines. It’s a pitch that misses something fundamental about the humanities by assimilating them too quickly to the social sciences on the one hand, and by submitting them too unequivocally to the expectations of “job readiness” on the other. The critical thinking often claimed to be the distinctive skill taught in the humanities is by no means the prerogative or privilege of any one discipline, as John Guillory has pointed out.Footnote ³

Another line of defense is more idealist and civic-minded, arguing that the humanities foster engaged and informed citizens, subjects capable of participating in debate, forming their own judgments, resistant to demagoguery, and amenable to being persuaded by reason and expertise. But as Reitter and Wellmon point out, the nexus between an education in the humanities and active and responsible citizenship is by no means a given.Footnote ⁴ If it were, it would be the strongest reason for making the humanities integral to higher education. In the United States, this view accounts for the longstanding prominence of the liberal arts in college education, but lately it has become subject to centrifugal forces and its survival is in question—as evident in the astonishing cutbacks to language and literature programs implemented, of all places, at the University of Chicago.Footnote ⁵

Both defenses, the pragmatic and the idealist, skip the fact that if one seeks to gauge the value of the humanities in terms of outcomes and benefits they afford, one should not expect these effects to be too obvious and immediate. Study of the humanities disciplines may yield results such as job readiness and civic-mindedness, but they are by no means guaranteed. Descending from the artes liberales, the humanities were precisely not geared toward vocational qualification nor necessarily toward achieving political maturity but rather without any immediate practical ends. The training in rhetoric, history, and literature of which the modern academic humanities are the heirs was integral to the aspiring civil servants ethos, inducting him into the ranks of the high-minded administrators of the ancient res publica. But it is precisely the unmistakable elitist outlook of this inheritance that has made this educational ideal suspect, at least in the eyes of some, as a rationale for advocating the humanities today. Recalling this genealogy provides a welcome illustration of the ambivalence in the humanities between their universal scope—the studia humanoria or humanitatis were about the human (over against studies concerned with things divine) and therefore of significance for everyone—and their historically exclusive character, necessarily limited to a select group with enough spare time and leisure to afford the commitment required. Advocates of the modern liberal arts would surely take issue, though, with the idea that this history diminishes the humanities’ genuinely democratic aspirations. But while this idealist appeal—the insistence that the humanities, in theory, are inclusive and foster democracy—is not without merit, it takes the debate to a very abstract level and claims social and political effects that are exceedingly difficult to measure.Footnote ⁶

A different approach, suggested by British intellectual historian Stefan Collini, consists in changing the terms of the conversation.Footnote ⁷ Rather than ponder the possible “yield” of the humanities, their social, political and economic benefits, Collini argues that giving an account of the actual activities and practices of research in the humanities disciplines avoids the defensive stance that is too often conditioned by the assumption of an unsympathetic interlocutor. Rather than resorting to abstract and lofty ideals, it allows for a more realistic picture of what the humanities afford their practitioners. Put in the most basic terms, the humanities are engaged in refining and enhancing our understanding of the arts, artifacts, and texts that make up our cultural traditions. It is a type of activity that involves the perceptiveness and judgment of its practitioners. Its elementary gesture consists in drawing attention to aspects of a given object or phenomenon hitherto overlooked or unavailable within the received conceptual framework. This obviously presupposes familiarity with the existing scholarship, but the perceptiveness and judgment that are indispensable for this activity are above all a matter of training and practice. Students are essentially invited to hone and enhance their perceptiveness and to sharpen their judgment through emulation and practice and to become adept at “the disciplined free play of the mind,” to use an apt phrase of Collini’s.Footnote ⁸

All of this is predicated on the premise that understanding and its continual improvement—the “advancement of learning,” as Francis Bacon called it—is a desirable and worthwhile goal in and of itself and that it affords its practitioners its very own kind of gratification. In a sense, the proof is in the experience itself and its unquantifiable rewardingness. This will not sway the skeptic, and it is not meant to do so. The point is not to accept the challenge to defend the humanities in light of criteria which, at best, they fulfil only incidentally.

Refusing to engage in an argument in terms imposed from without may go some way in restoring self-confidence, but it does not resolve the predicament, the perennial crisis plaguing the humanities. On Reitter and Wellmon’s account, this crisis has been permanent but has reached a new peak. The current institutional outlook—declining enrollments, department closures or mergers, the disestablishment of programs, diminishing career prospects for young scholars, the reactionary wholesale denunciation of the humanities as “cultural marxism”—is alarming indeed.Footnote ⁹ Its reasons are manifold; but for the most part they are outside the purview of the debate. One factor, for instance, is undoubtedly the receding significance in the public eye of the very artifacts, texts, and traditions at the heart of the humanities, notwithstanding the greater inclusiveness they have adopted over the past decades, encompassing popular culture and media.Footnote ¹⁰ Even the addition of cultural studies to the arsenal of research paradigms in the humanities has not reversed the overall trend. But precisely because the humanities will not remedy a situation not of their making and far beyond their purview, a less despondent stance is necessary and, I believe, possible.

What the humanities do is deceptively humble and straightforward, even though it takes time and effort. This is at odds with a widespread perception of work in the humanities by outsiders, namely its aloofness and disregard for the general public—a disregard and neglect frequently invoked, by the way, as another culprit for the fundamental predicament afflicting the humanities disciplines over the last few decades: their rapidly diminishing returns. Without entering into the details of this debate, between Rita Felski, John Guillory, and others, the apparent disconnect from interested publics appears to me to be the most viable opening for a new lease on life, a kind of reinvigoration, in a lower key to be sure and most likely in venues outside of academia.Footnote ¹¹ The fact that it is very hard to countenance this prospect shows the difficulties of imagining the humanities not in the guise of scholarship.

Scholarship in the humanities is as specialized and rarefied as research in the sciences. For the most part, such scholarship addresses itself to other scholars; it is in dialogue with predecessors, it presupposes and is expected to reflect familiarity with developments in its field. It is generally characteristic of research and scholarship, whether in the sciences or the humanities, that their insights and findings are most often not readily available to the curious outsider. In the case of the humanities, this tends to cause discontent, whereas the results of scientific research are rarely expected to be grasped by the broader public. As regrettable as this discrepancy may be, the expectation should be regarded as a potential for the humanities to tap into. For it turns out that there is after all a far greater deal of interest in developing and enhancing one’s appreciation of the arts and letters, to use the old-fashioned term, among those not professionally devoted to them.Footnote ¹² They constitute multiple and diverse publics that are interested in different areas within the extensive realm covered by the humanities. The humanities, in spite of their name, are not concerned with humanity as such but with a wide range of cultural artifacts and documents that are in one way or another exemplary of human meaning-making, and so it is no wonder that they will attract different constituencies, dispersed and comparatively small.

What form this would take, how such initiatives are organized, how successful they are, and what constitutes success, these are open questions that require creative responses. Among the most prominent examples of new public humanities publications are The Hinternet Foundation seeking to chart “A Third Way for the Humanities”; The Point magazine, “founded on the suspicion that modern life is worth examing” which it does by engaging with issues of contemporary life from a variety of perspectives, informed by humanistic thinking; and, finally, The Public Humanities journal itself, whose most recent issue is dedicated to the very practical question of how to do public humanities and whose very first issue, dubbed “The Manifesto-Issue,” showcased numerous instances of what such work can look like.Footnote ¹³ In the United States there are numerous initiatives offering interested members of the public, frequently but not exclusively non-specialists, venues to read and discuss works of literature and philosophy, workshops and seminars often run by academics disenchanted with the university.Footnote ¹⁴

For all its promise, the prospect of accommodating the existing public demand raises all sorts of specters. In closing, I want to address two reservations that this moderately optimistic outlook is likely to encounter. The scenario confronts “the scholar” with the very figure from which he sought to distinguish himself, the amateur expert or connaisseur. Not bound to the ethos of scholarly rigor that had presumably done away with affect and affectation, the (amateur-)connaisseur would release the genie of subjectivism from its bottle. But precisely inasmuch as the public humanities would want to be ecumenical, setting up rules for admission and conduct for what will likely be quite heterogeneous publics would defeat the purpose. As for the specter of “undisciplined” subjectivism, it is a welcome reminder that subjectivity is at the heart of the studia humanitatis, the subjectivity, whether in an individual or a collective sense, speaking from the subject matter under discussion but also that of the discussants whose enthusiasm (or reserve) is an important resource for the collective effort to engage with the given materials.Footnote ¹⁵

The second reservation concerns the fate of scholarship itself, the kind of scholarship addressed to other scholars, assuming an advanced level of familiarity with the matters at issue, and untroubled by questions of immediate relevance. As I said before, it is virtually impossible to imagine this type of focused work outside the framework and the infrastructure furnished by the research university. Given the overall trends, the number of people doing scholarship in the Humanities is likely to become dramatically smaller than it is today and retreat to a few elite institutions, research centers and scholarly academies. However, it is important to remember that scholarship actually predates the university and has also had a life in other sites all along. The survival of the scholarly, academic humanities will be closely tied, it seems to me, to the success of the public humanities whose prospects actually look quite promising.

More than twenty years ago Stanley Fish recommended that those advocating the humanities aim lower.Footnote ¹⁶ Rather than brandishing the flag of moral and political improvement, humanists should insist on the intrinsic value of their pursuit. In the book into which he expanded his article, Fish also advised against adopting the language of economics and profitability in order to persuade state legislators, administrators, parents, and other skeptics.Footnote ¹⁷ My plea is advanced in a similar spirit but under increasingly challenging institutional circumstances. “Aiming lower” is to return the humanities to their primary calling of analysis, interpretation, and discussion, engaging those who are keen and interested. It is a calling that is open to all yet obliges no one. Recognizing this would save us, in turn, from the strange need to convert anyone to its cause.