The Value of the Humanities
Upon man's emergence from his possibly self-imposed nonage, there were three key questions. Firstly: “What can we know?”, secondly: “What may we hope for?” and thirdly “What ought we to do?” Today's answers are certainly different from those at that time, but this does not make them easier.
Since the Age of Enlightenment, the range of human knowledge has increased exponentially, and there are a great many indications that it will continue to do so. This applies in particular to the knowledge about the nature which surrounds us, but also to the knowledge of ourselves, inasmuch as we are a part of this. The differentiation among the natural sciences, and consequently among technologies, necessary for their utilization, has given us the potential to acquire knowledge and to shape our environment, a potential of which Kant would never have dreamed. It has however brought with it problems which would have been inconceivable at that time; not only in the real world, but in the world of knowledge as well.
The more knowledge grows, the more inevitable it will become that new knowledge will be more specialized. Thus the differentiation among the sciences and their constantly increasing specialization is a necessary prerequisite for their success. This does however have its price: Fewer and fewer people have increasingly detailed information about less and less, which creates considerable problems in evaluating the new knowledge. Each academic discipline attempts to solve these problems by peer reviews or by obtaining a certain status in peer groups. In order to avoid raising anyone’s suspicion that in these cases insiders are practising mutual self-aggrandizement, an academic discipline organized in this way firstly has to look for more general theories which put each of the new insights in its own field into a larger theoretical context, and secondly it has to explain and make plausible its findings and the necessity of their further funding in a way which transcends disciplinary boundaries.
As I see it, this is one of the main reasons why universities with all the traditional core subjects are the best locations for publicly funded research, since it is at the universities where such funding is exposed to justification pressure from the neighbouring sciences. Thus those establishments which do research only, such as the Max Planck Institutes, should be connected to a university so that they will not be able to avoid criticism from their colleagues. It is precisely each of the other sciences that will be able to help the non-scientific general public to evaluate the findings of the one branch of science under review.
In the past centuries, the natural sciences have provided only a few basic answers to the first of our initial questions, but they have produced amazing, and an amazingly large number of, new answers to it. In order to provide more of these, they are requesting an increasingly large proportion of the funds granted for academic research.
There have been comparatively few new answers to the second and third questions since the time of Kant. Perhaps the means of science are not suited to finding universal answers to these, because they can only be answered individually. Any scholarly research in this area will if anything deal with the past, present and conceivably future ways of living and prospering together with such individual hopes and deeds. There has also been an amazing growth and differentiation of knowledge on this. However, we cannot expect those sciences which study these areas to produce clear-cut or even measurable results. This makes it difficult for them to enforce their claims to funding in the competition among the sciences. (And it also makes it necessary for them to present their results on more than just a couple of pages.)
But are these human sciences or, as the English aptly say, “humanities” of less value because of this? In my opinion: no. In a world in which due to the natural sciences more and more people live, travel and communicate more quickly and are able to kill each other at a terrible and increasingly high rate, a rational discourse on the myths, explanations, arguments and rules of law these sciences are studying and presenting is more important than ever.
Georg Siebeck
[Written for the Mohr Kurier 2010/1 in January 2010; translated by Jill Sopper in February 2010]