In a conversation with his secretary Eckermann, the great German poet Johann Wolfgang von Goethe mentioned a Chinese novel he had just been reading.Reference Goethe1 Eckermann’s reaction was: ‘Chinese novel! […] that must look strange enough.’ Goethe responded: ‘Not so much as you might think […] the Chinamen think, act, and feel almost exactly like us; and we soon find that we are perfectly like them, excepting that all they do is more clear, more pure, and decorous than with us’ (Ref. Reference Goethe1, p. 173). The poet stressed that the Chinese could already look back on a long tradition of novel writing, already at a time when – I quote – ‘our forefathers were still living in the woods’ (Ref. Reference Goethe1, p. 174). Goethe considered poetry to be ‘the universal possession of mankind’ (Ref. Reference Goethe1, p. 174) and was convinced that ‘national literature is now rather an unmeaning term; the epoch of world literature is at hand, and every one must strive to hasten its approach’ (Ref. Reference Goethe1, p.175). Thus, long before the term ‘globalization’ entered the debate, Goethe predicted the internationalization of literature. This paper wants to contribute to the current debate on the role of the humanities in a globalized world by adding an analysis of the current state and future perspectives of the humanities from a European point of view. It will try to widen the scope by also looking at the quite sharp variations of the ways in which the humanities are perceived and valued, in the level of sources of funding, the richness of the archives, the nature of the institutions, and the agendas of the respective researchers. Although it begins with a brief recognition of national and continental differences, and in spite of the difficulties to draw general conclusions, it also sketches some shared matters of concern, and the possibility of a common approach to them.
Expectations, Threads, and Opportunities: The Humanities in a State of Crisis
In one of his Elizabeth Costello-Lessons (named after a character in his fiction) the South African writer and Nobel Laureate J.M. Coetzee talks about ‘The Humanities in Africa’, and he particularly addresses some of the challenges the Christian as well as the Hellenistic traditions in the humanities are confronted with in an African environment. To be more specific, Elizabeth Costello’s sister Blanche (when she is being awarded an honorary doctorate at a South-African University) confronts the audience with her analysis of the developments over the past 500 years. She blames the universities for having lost the humane part of what was once called ‘studia humanitatis’ and having reduced the scope of humane studies to ‘textual scholarship’.Reference Coetzee2 Blanche concludes her short speech by stating: ‘The studia humanitatis have taken a long time to die, but now, at the end of the second millennium of our era, they are truly on their deathbed. All the more bitter should be that death, I would say, since it has been brought about by the monster enthroned by those very studies as the first and animating principle of the universe: The monster of reason, mechanical reason’ (Ref. Reference Coetzee2, p. 123).
Blanche’s speech leaves the audience somewhat puzzled and causes numerous angry reactions such as ‘Who does she think she is?’ or ‘A missionary from the sticks in Zululand – what does she know about the humanities?’ (Ref. Reference Coetzee2, p. 124). Even at the subsequent formal luncheon hardly anyone likes to speak to Blanche. It is only her sister Elizabeth Costello who manages to talk to Professor Peter Godwin who remains convinced that the humanities ‘remain the core of any university’ (Ref. Reference Coetzee2, p. 125). Godwin’s complacency causes Elizabeth Costello to defend her sister’s position by stating: ‘Wasn’t she saying something more interesting, more challenging – that there has been something misconceived in the study of the humanities from the start? Something wrong with placing hopes and expectations on the humanities that they could never fulfil?’ (Ref. Reference Coetzee2, p. 125).
The formative, humane and civilizing function of the humanities even nowadays is seen as one of the most important reasons for providing opportunities to study them in depth at our universities. At the same time, more and more doubts are being raised about the approach taken by the humanities themselves as well as threats articulated to which the humanities are being exposed in an environment that has rapidly changed over the past two decades. In the United States, for example, there seem to be rising concerns about the more or less universal trend to do away with the humanities and the arts, and to shift resources from these domains to apparently more profitable subjects in science and engineering. Martha C. Nussbaum in her book, Not for Profit. Why Democracy Needs the Humanities, clearly stresses this point: ‘Thirsty for national profit, nations, and their systems of education, are heedlessly discarding skills that are needed to keep democracies alive. If this trend continues, nations all over the world will soon be producing generations of useful machines rather than complete citizens who can think for themselves, criticize traditions, and understand the significance of another person’s sufferings and achievements. The future of the world’s democracies hangs in the balance.’Reference Nussbaum3 Martha Nussbaum presents several examples of institutions and conferences around the world where, in recent years, the humanities, the arts, and critical thinking were abandoned in favour of focusing on ‘profit-making strategies’ (Ref. Reference Nussbaum3, p. 3). She criticizes the predominant, all too narrow focus on economic growth, and argues in favour of developing a concept of global citizenship that involves a broadly based training in the humanities way beyond the usual facts and figures about foreign parts of the world.
Cultivating critical thinking and imagination as well as training suitable ‘citizens of the world’ do not seem to be objectives that are widely shared among current university leadership. In today’s market-driven, rankings- and ratings-obsessed world of higher education, even the status of university professors in the humanities appears to be threatened. Frank Donoghue in his book The Last Professors. The Corporate University and the Fate of the Humanities provides a wide array of facts, statistics, and other data underpinning his view that the growing corporate culture of higher education undermines some of the most fundamental values of the university, in particular by erasing one of its defining features: the tenured professor.Reference Donoghue4
If we turn for a moment to the German scene, we will have no difficulty in identifying similar criticisms and complaints. Just a few quotations may suffice to illustrate that humanities scholars feel heavily stressed and neglected by their university leadership as well as by politicians. They consider themselves totally underfunded, and they complain about being at a disadvantage when it comes to applying for large sums of money at the respective funding agencies. The quotations run as follows:
∙ ‘In many subject areas of the humanities one is already standing up against the wall. In some areas further cuts will immediately lead to their exitus [my translation, WK].’Reference Gehrke5
∙ ‘The humanities suffer from an ideological curse expressed in 1959 by Charles Percy Snow, physicist, novelist and high-ranking British civil servant when he coined the phrase of the two cultures, the scientific and the humanistic (literary) culture. He rather did it in passing, in a kind of Sunday sermon with an enormous impact, in particular on the humanities. This impact may indeed not tell us a lot about the truthfulness of Snow’s concept but rather about the nervousness and the lack of self-esteem which has its firm grip on the humanities [my translation, WK].’Reference Mittelstraß6
∙ ‘Jacob is yearning for a research scholarship (or at least a sabbatical) that allows him to get rid of his work in the library which he very much dislikes’, and ‘Wilhelm subsequently cultivates his disrespect for the students. Mediocrity is spreading everywhere [my translation, WK].’Reference Martus7
The last quotations – from a book by Steffen Martus published in 2013 – refer to the Brothers Grimm, as no doubt some of you will have recognized. This clearly shows that complaining about students, their competence and commitment, as well as trying to get rid of one’s institutional duties is at least about 200 years old. The only more or less up-to-date quotation is the first one, from the eminent classics scholar and former president of the German Institute of Archaeology, Hans-Joachim Gehrke, and it was published in the Journal of the German Research Association in 2008. The comments on C.P. Snow and his impact on the humanities are by the German philosopher Jürgen Mittelstraß, and they were written in the 1980s, almost at the same time when the philosopher Odo Marquard, in his famous speech at the annual meeting of the then still West-German Rectors Conference, claimed that the humanities should be much more aware of their ‘unavoidability’ (Unvermeidlichkeit) and in particular be prepared to compensate those effects of science and technology, which he calls ‘the downside of modernity’, or even ‘damages done by modernization’ (Modernitätsschäden). In a nutshell, Odo Marquard expressed his view in the following sentence: ‘The more modern the modern world becomes, the more unavoidable [or indispensable – WK] will be the humanities.’Reference Marquard8
What all of this shows is that in the humanities the mood of the respective researchers is oscillating between, on the one hand a lot of self-confidence, a certain degree of complacency, and at times even arrogance, whilst on the other hand feelings of neglect, disrespect, and even fears of unfriendly takeovers by other disciplines prevail. Under such circumstances the specific abilities and competences of the humanities get lost. It is about time to rethink and reconfigure the specific strengths, opportunities, and perspectives the humanities can bring to the table when we try to confront issues related to social, cultural, or technological change and the intricacies of globalization. The humanities will only succeed in this endeavour if they can build bridges across cultures and continents, last but not least, based on the conviction that it is necessary to be aware of the others, of the past, and of the dependencies of our present day lives if we want to responsibly shape the future.
To Interpret, to Explain, or to Provoke – How can the Humanities Realize their Potential?
Anyone who wants to talk about the humanities as a whole must be aware of the fact that he or she has to deal with an incredibly wide cosmos consisting of numerous stars, several milky-ways, and a lot of different planets whose complexities can never be fully grasped and adequately described. With respect to my topic and its main reference point, the situation within our research universities, I should like to focus on three main functions, or domains of the humanities which – in order to keep things simple – I should like to link to the following terms: to interpret, to explain, and to provoke.
‘To interpret’ or to understand (the German term is ‘verstehen’) became the central category of the humanities in the course of the 19th century, at least in the sense of the German term ‘Geisteswissenschaften’. According to Wilhelm Dilthey (as outlined in his book on Der Aufbau der geschichtlichen Welt in den Geisteswissenschaften) to understand, or to interpret things is closely linked to self-reflection, to moving from the outside world towards the inner world, and thus clearly to distinguish the approach taken by the humanities from the empirical and lab-based ones of science and engineering. Closely connected to Dilthey’s concept is the so-called ‘memoria function’ of the humanities, the right to interpretation, and the art of cultivating a hospitable imagination that enables us to fully engage with multiple others in the world, and to push us to continually problematize the boundaries of our openness towards the other, historically or geographically biased as it may be. Interpretation allows us to read things ‘against the grain’. It almost always contains a speculative element, in particular with respect to what we cannot or do not know, what is hidden to us, and what needs to be added in order to provide opportunities for intellectual debates.
‘To explain’ or to verify the subject matter to be studied has been at the forefront of some of the humanities and most of the social sciences almost throughout the entire 20th century. But for the humanities there were only a few disciplines that relied heavily on field work, surveys, lab-based research, etc. It is a relatively new feature that, at least in the Central European debate, the term ‘Geisteswissenschaften’ has been replaced by ‘Kulturwissenschaften’ (Cultural Studies) in order to indicate that their research approach is very different from the hermeneutic approaches traditionally taken in the philological disciplines. More recently, the digitization of the humanities has triggered an enormous array of new approaches ranging from close collaboration between computer scientists and the humanities all the way through to joint projects with people whose background is in the cognitive and neurosciences. These opportunities of making use of large quantities of data have already triggered the establishment of a new Max Planck Institute for Empirical Aesthetics located at Frankfurt am Main (and headed by Winfried Menninghaus).
‘To provoke’ or to irritate, perhaps even to disturb or disrupt traditional views may at first sound quite strange with respect to the role of the humanities. But it is essential that we become aware of this important remit, in particular when we try to responsibly shape our common future. It is essential that intellectuals with a firm basis in at least some domains of the humanities engage in critical reflection or pro-active thinking (the German term is ‘vorbeugendes Nachdenken’) in order to question our common wisdom, and sometimes even to be a thorn in the flesh of all too common place reflections uttered in the media. One quite prominent example in the German context is the most recent publication by Thomas Nagel entitled Mind and Cosmos: Why the Materialist Neo-Darwinian Conception of Nature is Almost Certainly False,Reference Nagel9 which has already been named the most ‘hated academic book of the year’. In this case protagonists of evolutionary biology are particularly challenged by a philosopher. These critical, thought-provoking contributions by humanistic scholars are quite often not welcomed by scientists and engineers: ‘Things are as yet not getting easier when humanistic scholars come to the table’ is a phrase often used.
In view of the opportunities as well as the limits and limitations of humanistic studies, it is essential that we confront ourselves with the interpretive, explanatory, and provocative functions in each case. Most of the questions we are confronted with in our globalized world cannot be solved without making use of inter-, or transdisciplinary approaches. These, of course, are difficult to plan, to resource, and they often cause a lot of headaches for university leaders as well as heads of funding institutions. Nevertheless, it is a necessity for all of us to try to provide the preconditions for these ambitious endeavours to successfully cope with the complex realities of an increasingly multipolar and interconnected world at the beginning of the 21st century.
Achieving ground-breaking insights is not just a matter of coincidence. It requires a research-friendly, high trust environment which also provides adequate room for transdisciplinary as well as transnational communication and cooperation. New ideas or insights often come about through seeing things differently, as if one were to see them in another light or with the eyes of someone else. Furthermore, it is important to find the right balance between a sufficient degree of diversity of disciplines and the most intense degree of communicative interaction among the scholars involved. If the institution is too small and homogeneous in orientation, then the potential for extradisciplinary stimulation will be missing. If the institution is too large and heterogeneous, then there are hardly any opportunities for personal contacts and content fertility. Narrow disciplinary focus often leads to monotony; all-encompassing breadth transforms such a degree of diversity into unproductive heterogeneity. In both extremes intellectual creativity is ultimately stymied, and along with it the generation of transformative knowledge.
Thinking and working in terms of complex and possibly time-consuming endeavours is not favoured by the current framework conditions for resource-allocation, at least not in Germany and other Central European countries. We all too often pursue a ‘we don’t trust you, we know better, and we want results now’ kind of approach, which extinguishes small flames of creativity, and certainly prevents them from turning into strong fires of transformative research. No doubt, the implementation of evaluation processes and assessment exercises at regular intervals has brought about not only a wealth of information about the respective unit of analysis but also initiated a lot of learning processes as well as numerous improvements. For many a rector or president of a university the results of such state-, or country-wide comparisons have been serving as eye-openers concerning the qualitative positioning of the department or centre assessed. But if we look at the current situation of an almost ubiquitous array of monitorings, reviews, assessments, and evaluations, we cannot help but recognize that these various instruments in one way or another have fallen victim to their own success.
The Challenges Provided by Digitization and Globalization
In our rapidly changing, increasingly globalized world, we are confronted with huge problems ranging from local wars and regional conflicts, mass migration, and terrorist attacks all the way through to earthquakes, pandemics, climate change, and financial instabilities. Many of these issues can only be dealt with adequately through increasing our knowledge base. Universities as strongholds of research and training need to re-contextualize themselves and pay attention to the expectations of other stakeholders, their fears and anxieties as well as their hopes for results and solutions. At the same time, the public at large, and politicians in particular, must acknowledge the fact that the search for fundamentally new insights operates under highly fragile, risky, and uncertain conditions. In many instances, the researchers cannot immediately deliver the straightforward answers, forecasts, or solutions we all would like to see so urgently. It takes a reliable, high trust mode of long-term funding for teaching and research in order to fully reap the fruits of scholarly explorations. Despite the many errors and failures that do occur in our universities, the answer cannot be to introduce ever more and ever tighter reporting and control mechanisms. To my mind we rather need a leap of faith based on high trust principles that allow us to thoroughly rethink common wisdom and to conduct research in unknown territories and off the beaten track areas. This particularly applies to the humanities and their contribution to dealing with the changes, challenges, and complexities of our multipolar world.
Indeed, the humanities can help to prevent us from taking an all too narrow perspective on issues such as digitization and globalization. They can also prevent us from considering these phenomena only in economic terms. Social and ethnic conflicts should not be overlooked. While on the one hand there is clearly a trend towards a worldwide acculturation and inter-linkages, we can, on the other hand, also observe a growing tendency to erect walls against other cultures, against anything that appears ‘alien’ or ‘foreign’, an attitude that often turns into hatred and open hostility. If attitudes are to be developed that enable fruitful contacts with what is at first sight perceived as alien or foreign, and thus facilitate a better understanding of what seems to be strange or unfamiliar, intercultural encounters and the comprehensions they engender must be better understood. In an increasingly globalized and interconnected world the humanities have an important role to play. By opening up historical as well as cross-cultural perspectives they considerably enhance the reflexive capabilities of universities, research institutes, and the public at large.
The past two decades have seen unprecedented transformations of political, economic, and technological systems. Across the world, the accelerating conversion of information and communication technologies is shifting the balance towards an almost ubiquitous and universal availability of anything, anywhere, any time. The rapid enhancement of electronic communication is not only affecting more and more aspects of our daily life, but it also changes the very nature of teaching and research. Whilst students can now access lectures and seminars given in other universities and use electronic textbooks, Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs), and so on, researchers can also make efficient use of digitization by entering into large-scale, ‘big data’ empirical research work that, hitherto, nobody even dared to dream of. These processes not only affect research work in areas such as the human genome project or high energy physics, which have always demanded large data storage capacities, but more and more we can also observe a tendency towards the digitization of knowledge production in the humanities. This opens up new perspectives and research opportunities, which so far have not been fully explored. With new statistical methods and visualization techniques at hand, the collaborative work processes of humanities scholars are no longer primarily focusing on the creation of new knowledge but rather also on knowledge design. Moreover, the demand for large-scale, expensive infrastructures is no longer confined to science and engineering. Several of them have already transcended national borders. The following examples of European research infrastructures may suffice to illustrate this point:
∙ CLARIN – a research infrastructure to make language resources and technology available and useful to scholars of all disciplines;
∙ DARIAH – a digital infrastructure to study source materials in cultural heritage institutions;
∙ CENDARI – the collaborative European digital archive infrastructure;
∙ EHRI – the European Holocaust research infrastructure.
At a conference organized by the Volkswagen Foundation, Jeffrey T. Schnapp (Harvard) and several of his colleagues demonstrated the shift of emphasis from focusing on unique objects and biographical studies towards larger entities and patterns occurring in millions of objects. Some of this work is established on platforms such as CURARIUM or Harvard’s Arboretum where by means of QR codes the viewer enters into a quite new world of knowledge: the purpose is no longer to pass on established knowledge about each object but rather to enable individuals to produce additional knowledge by themselves.10 According to Jeffrey T. Schnapp, the digital approach ultimately is ‘about extending our cognitive faculties and social existences; new ways to analyze and experience the past in the present; new ways to work, think, share, and enjoy; new ways to make things, even tradition-bound things like scholarly books.’Reference Schnapp11
Perhaps, not surprisingly for some of you, this concept of self-activation of scholars, visitors, and students chimes well with the classical concept of a modern university as expressed in Wilhelm von Humboldt’s, the Brothers Grimm’s, and von Savigny’s writings. They all focus on the formation of scholars and future leaders for various walks of society as something that is closely connected to activating their sense of creative and critical thinking. Basically, Wilhelm von Humboldt’s concept rested on four pillars:Reference Schwinges12
∙ the integration of teaching and research;
∙ the complementary principles of Lehrfreiheit (freedom to teach) and Lernfreiheit (freedom to study);
∙ the demand for solitude (Einsamkeit) and freedom in the autonomous pursuit of truth;
∙ the introduction of the seminar system as the backbone of a community of scholars and students (Gemeinschaft der Lehrenden und Lernenden).
It seems to me that our digitized and globalized world offers new opportunities for realizing Humboldt’s vision under quite different circumstances. What we are still lacking, however, is a programmatic renewal of the respective curricula in our colleges and universities. It will take some vitally needed ‘out-of-the-box’ thinking about the objectives of future studies in colleges and universities, and quite a wide array of diverse visions for the content of such curricula.
As the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching has pointed out, this is not just a matter of redesigning bachelor and master courses. It affects the PhD research and training objectives just as well. With the notion of ‘Steward of the Discipline’ the Carnegie initiative on the doctorate tried to provide us with a vision that could help us strike a balance between the necessary critical analysis of the existing bulk of knowledge and the creative thinking required for the production of new knowledge.
The doctorate should signal a high level of accomplishment in three facets of the discipline: Generation, conservation, and transformation. A Ph.D. holder should be capable of 1.) generating new knowledge and defending knowledge claims against challenges and criticisms, 2.) conserving the most important ideas and findings that are a legacy of past and current work, and 3.) transforming knowledge that has been generated and conserved by explaining and connecting it to ideas from other fields. All of this implies the ability to teach well to a variety of audiences, including those outside former classrooms.Reference Golde13
Where and How Can the Humanities Unfold their Integrative Capacity?
To a large extent our universities are still organized on a discipline by discipline basis. Degrees awarded, reputation gained, and career prospects offered almost everywhere rest on the respective disciplinary framework. If inter-, or transdisciplinary work is pursued at all, then it is mostly done in a mode of additionality, which ensures that the results can be published on a case by case basis in highly reputable and highly cited disciplinary journals. Efforts needed to integrate the methods used and to come up with more than just a summary of the respective project are often not undertaken because these publications all too often do not even count in today’s world of ratings and rankings (e.g. A-rated journals vs. ‘the rest’) when it comes to applying for posts, scholarships, or grants.
As far as I can see, we can nevertheless distinguish between five different levels or attempts of integration that are being used when it comes to tackling at least some of the challenges we are confronted with:
(1) As already mentioned, the mere accumulation of methods and techniques is the most common form of combining different perspectives when looking at one and the same object. It is mainly multidisciplinary approaches that follow this path, and it usually allows all the researchers involved to address their preferred disciplinary communities. Often it is even required with respect to the future careers of the junior researchers involved that they adhere to this self-sufficient disciplinary mode of a somewhat moderately integrated operation.
(2) The integration of competences from other disciplines is one of the most important ways of pursuing research questions of a global nature. For large parts of the humanities (e.g. studies on modern China or India) it is even a prerequisite if one wants to come up with sound insights concerning the respective region or topic, in particular when it comes to cross-cultural and comparative studies.
(3) To develop different methods and disciplinary competences in one and the same person is perhaps the most ambitious (and sometimes cumbersome) way of gaining the necessary degree of intimate knowledge about the object under study. If pursued with great competence and stamina, this approach can lead to outstanding results and globally acknowledged findings, represented in ‘opera magna’ kind of books that are translated into many other languages.
(4) The inter-, or transdisciplinary aggregation of competences in a medium-scale research group is a complex endeavour, but if thematically as well as methodologically and organizationally integrated it turns out to be the best way to go ahead in most cases. The centre approach taken by the Danish National Research Foundation is perhaps the most successful one to date.
(5) Problem-driven aggregations of competences are the most common approaches taken in large-scale projects and programmes. They are often confronted with enormous tensions: (1) between the heterogeneity of the phenomena to be studied and the aspiration towards methodological coherence throughout the project; (2) the tension between the often microscopic obsession with detail on the one hand, and that of striving for a holistic explanation on the other hand, sometimes even at the global level; (3) and last but not least the tendency of each one involved to be self-sufficient in one’s discipline, and at the same time a huge disposition to epistemic immodesty concerning knowledge claims with respect to the overarching goals. Cluster approaches taken by the humanities are telling examples for these huge discrepancies between the objectives proposed and the everyday reality of the work done.
Conclusion
The integrative capacity of the humanities can best be realized if the whole effort is conducted on a medium scale and to a large extent driven by the complex problem itself. Only if the very problem to be tackled urges the researchers to combine their relevant kinds of expertise are they ultimately able to fully develop their integrative capacity and to come up with surprising insights resulting in radically new perspectives and outstanding publications.
It is about time for the humanities to (re)discover their genuine strengths, to focus on fully illuminating the objects to be studied, and to unfold their integrative capacity by entering into well-defined partnerships in teaching, training, and research. It is essential for the humanities not to be ashamed of pursuing basic and curiosity-driven ‘blue sky’ research, and thus avoid falling into the trap of demonstrating their ‘usefulness’ simply by becoming a ‘service industry’ for problem-solving in science and engineering. Instead, there is a clear need for them to autonomously develop their own, genuine research questions, which can prominently contribute to achieving social, cultural, or economic solutions. In particular, in our digitized and globalized world with its multiple opportunities for networking and interacting with one another, it is essential that the humanities bring to the fore how much it helps us to grow our personalities through these encounters. Ultimately, it is the other (be it an object or a human being) who enables me to understand myself and my environment much better than before.
Acknowledgement
This manuscript represents an abridged version of Lectures presented at Tsinghua University in Beijing on 15 May 2014, and at Washington University St. Louis on 12 February 2014.
Wilhelm Krull is Secretary General of the Volkswagen Foundation, one of the largest private research funding institutions in Europe. He was the Chairman of the Board of the German Association of Foundations from 2008 to 2014 and still is a member of the Boards of Regents of several Max Planck Institutes. Since the mid-1980s he has been involved in research policy-making in many countries throughout the world. His experience in research evaluation ranges from systemic assessments of major research organizations in Germany, Denmark, France, Ireland and South Africa all the way up to the monitoring and evaluation of EU Framework Programmes. As of 2012, Dr Krull is also serving as a member of the Research, Innovation and Enterprise Council of the Prime Minister of Singapore.
