HUMANITAS: Rethinking It All
An Editorial Statement
[From HUMANITAS, Volume VI, No. 1, Fall 1992/Winter
1993 (c) National Humanities Institute]
HUMANITAS exists to help invigorate the humanities, including the social
sciences properly understood. In its new format the journal can provide
more space for scholarship that challenges uncritical assumptions and can
set the humanities on a more promising course. Among the obstacles to an
intellectual renewal today is an unwillingness genuinely to consider unaccustomed
ideas. A spirit of partisanship has produced narrowing habits of mind and
corresponding patterns of academic group-formation. Two seemingly contradictory
tendencies—fragmentation and a push for conformity—are widely present in
the humanities as in society at large. They are actually different manifestations
of a partisan disposition. A proliferation of views and schools, which
in other circumstances might have presented opportunities for cross-fertilization
and productive syntheses, is today all too often symptomatic of unchecked
bias and intellectual isolation. The prejudices of particular groups harden
into positions that are not really open to question. Representatives of
a particular doctrine move almost exclusively within its confines and reject
out of hand questions raised about its assumptions. Ideas and methods are
parroted rather than philosophically elaborated and sharpened in struggle
with contending views. The group cultivates an attitude of superiority
over other groups, which helps silence internal doubts and justify dismissal
of criticisms. The doctrine provides a philosophical validation of sorts
for the partisan objectives of the faithful. Learning the language of the
doctrine initiates candidates for membership and then separates friend
from enemy. "Schools" of this kind answer to a desire among intellectually
insecure academics to belong, to count among the enlightened few. The intellectual
and psychological attitudes of the group are such that where it acquires
power it pushes for monopoly and conformity.
Breaking Out
Even a truly philosophical movement must have its own structure and sense
of purpose and must define itself in opposition to other currents whose
weaknesses it is attempting to overcome. But a part of real philosophical
discipline is not to ignore the nagging awareness of obscurities in one's
own thinking and to be willing to reach beyond customary sources for possible
remedies. Genuine intellectual freedom is today threatened, in the universities
and society at large, by premature certainty organized into group partisanship.
One of the preconditions for invigorating the humanities is to break out
of the ambiance of intramural ideological debates and rejoin the larger
historical and international discussion. The reign of positivism, empiricism,
and related forms of rationalism caused a neglect in the humanities of
questions that are felt by most people to be central to human life. Justified
as the growing opposition to this reign has been, many of the reactions
have had insufficient philosophical and historical grounding. They have
been too ideological or faddish and have sometimes been too obviously influenced
by
personal neuroses or grievances. Rebelliousness has been directed not just
at artificial intellectual and social structures but at order and continuity
of every kind. Attempts to defend older classical and Judaeo-Christian
traditions against not only positivism and empiricism but other modern
movements have suffered from weaknesses of their own. Traditionalist writers
have typically been disinclined to engage in systematic philosophical discussion
and to confront the weightier intellectual challenges to ancient traditions
coming from such philosophical movements as German historicism. Traditionalists
often have resorted to repeating inherited formulations. Some have been
reluctant to concede that in the humanities modernity has produced any
insights that could appreciably strengthen the older Western heritage.
Much as HUMANITAS welcomes new ideas and perspectives, it recognizes the
profound, if often unacknowledged, dependence of fresh insight on the past.
But it is in the rearticulation and development of insight in changed circumstances
that old ideas must achieve and prove their continued vitality. Radicalism
and conservatism are in one sense indistinguishable and mutually dependent.
They are aspects of one and the same necessary process of preservation
and renewal. "Conservative" ideas that are not just well-worn slogans but
directly relevant to the present must have an element of originality and
embody a break with the past. "Radical" ideas that are not just quickly
fading sparks but capable of lasting illumination necessarily develop potentialities
of the past and speak to enduring concerns. One of the great needs of the
present is a better understanding of the dialectical and synthetical relationship
of past and present. HUMANITAS will oppose the facile classification of
ideas in political terms and will encourage articles that go beyond an
obsolescent left-right distinction.
The Experiential Whole
This journal would foster a more acute sense of the living, concrete whole
of human existence. That reality has been obscured or distorted by a proliferation
of abstract, one-sided, fragmentary or pedantic academic approaches that
have either robbed the humanities of humane relevance or charged them up
with the artificial relevance of ideology. For HUMANITAS, the purpose of
the humanities is to expand and deepen our understanding of human existence—its
glories and failures, happiness and suffering, and mere humdrum ordinariness.
The humanities should assist in the effort to enhance life by clarifying
the conditions for the realization of its higher potentialities. The humanities
should illuminate the dynamic of will, imagination and reason at whose
center lie the moral choices by which individuals shape their destiny.
In ethics HUMANITAS welcomes new attention to the role of will and imagination.
A central question is whether what is ultimately normative in the moral
life might be a special quality of will. Many different doctrines, some
of them of ancient lineage, neglect the role of will in discriminating
between morally opposed potentialities and in exercising needed self-control.
The humanities would also benefit from greater sensitivity to the role
of the imagination, not just in dreams and works of art but in shaping
man's aspirations and sense of reality. In epistemology it is necessary
to question the long tradition according to which grasping reality is a
matter strictly for the intellect. Of crucial importance to the ability
to know is the orientation of personal character. Equally important is
the direction of the imagination that the will inspires. In general, the
interactions of will, imagination and reason need to be better understood
if the problems of the modern world are to be adequately defined and addressed.
Truth in the humanities is not a mere accumulation of bits and pieces,
arranged according to convenient classifications. The particulars of the
humanistic sphere are not related in a mechanical, external fashion. They
belong to an organic, dialectical whole that is constituted by the subtle
interplay of moral, aesthetical and cognitive forces. Human experience
presents us with universality and particularity in simultaneous tension
and union. The rich diversity of the concrete world is inseparable from
the whole that gives continuity and unity to experience. And yet many in
the humanities affirm historical particularity in ways that neglect or
deny universality. Others affirm universality in ways that neglect or deny
particularity. These approaches misconstrue both the universal and the
particular and miss the central dynamic of human existence. At their best,
the humanities study universality as a living force within the concrete
texture of experience. The careful and systematic articulation of that
reality should not be confused with the gathering of data conducted by
positivists and empiricists, whose "historical facts" are reified and fragmentary
evidence extracted from a larger, living whole.
Universality with Particularity
Recognizing the simultaneous union and tension between universality and
particularity seems to be a basic precondition for revitalizing the humanities.
HUMANITAS is greatly interested in treatments of universality that do not
lose themselves in abstractions (and hence become unreal) and in treatments
of historical particularity that do not lose themselves in idiosyncrasy.
To stress the historical nature of human existence without acknowledging
the continuous whole to which it belongs amounts to a denial of lasting
meaning or purpose, a denial that is inconsistent with undertaking any
inquiries in the first place. But the contrary assumption, that universality
alone is important and that it lacks any integral connection with historical
particularity, is equally destructive of the humanities. The latter approach
engenders disembodied, abstract conceptions of universality that ignore
our individual humanity and changing concrete circumstances. It never captures
the distinctively human sphere of personality, freedom and creativity.
Examination of the relationship between universality and particularity
will inevitably confront the issue of transcendence. The need for definitions
and clarifications is here acute. Like the term "universal values," "transcendence"
is today often used very loosely. Scholars claiming to center their thinking
in the transcendent tend, even if their subject is history, politics or
literature, to leave the concrete implications and entailments of "the
beyond" quite vague. Transcendent reality is treated as if it lacked integral
association with the immanent world and only called humanity away from
historical existence. The need for concrete definition is supplied by the
writer's own religious, ethical or political prejudices, which are are
somehow endowed with the sanction of presumed transcendent truth. HUMANITAS
encourages approaches to the transcendent that do explore its immanent
manifestations and do inspire critical reflection upon actual human life.
The notion of radical transcendence exemplifies a reluctance today in the
humanities and society at large to face and deal with concrete historical
realities. That reluctance connects a broad range of currents that otherwise
may look quite different. In its more extreme forms it amounts to escapism.
Attention is diverted from problems that are acute and widespread. The
escape takes numerous specific shapes of which the following are just examples:
in the intellectual life, a fondness for abstractions, for theoretical
intricacies with little bearing on concrete human life; in the arts, flights
of intoxicating and otherwise distracting fancy; in personal conduct, an
evasion of up-close personal responsibility; in religion, a merely sentimental
"compassion"; in politics, a substitution of bureaucratic administration
for individual accountability.
Contributions to HUMANITAS
This journal encourages research and writing of a certain kind. It hopes
to inspire articles that might not have been written without it. It also
wants to gather between its covers articles on varied topics but with similar
philosophical-theoretical aim that otherwise would be widely scattered
in specialized academic publications and perhaps escape the attention of
those who are most keenly interested. Particular articles in the journal
should gain intelligibility and impact from appearing within a certain
philosophical frame of reference and in proximity to articles that elucidate
related problems. Writings from different disciplines are expected to contribute
to an evolving common core of insight as authors address different aspects
of central questions and employ kindred perspectives and approaches. The
exploration of genuine universality, as distinguished from abstract rationalistic
constructs and mathematical or geometrical propositions, always involves
historical particulars. But articles in HUMANITAS should place less emphasis
on detailing the historical material that lies behind every serious scholarly
claim than on setting forth conclusions reached and their implications
for further research and thinking. While this journal relishes historical
illustrations and proof, it is not impressed by the positivistic, bureaucratic-minded
academic conventions that praise the elaborate substantiation of findings
but have difficulty determining whether particular findings were worth
the effort in the first place. Insight in the humanities does not result
simply from a diligent compilation of sources and records. Not even an
abundance of evidence will stop a scholar who lacks a sense of reality
and proportion from misconstruing what has been collected. Ideas and perspectives
that are insufficiently grounded in historical particulars do indeed become
diffuse, but not even the most extensive scholarly apparatus can make up
for bland and trivial findings, to say nothing of rescuing misconceived
ideas and wrong-headed interpretations. Footnotes are to be expected in
most scholarly articles, but the editors of HUMANITAS find it worth noting
that today numerous and elaborate footnotes and references to esoteric
sources are more often signs of academic pretentiousness, insecurity, careerism,
bureaucratic fastidiousness, and/or lack of intellectual discipline than
of focused erudition. HUMANITAS welcomes articles, reviews and comments
that explore subjects in which problems of ethics, aesthetics, and logic
intersect and illuminate each other and that are relevant to more than
one discipline. Although contributions to HUMANITAS are expected to come
from a wide range of disciplines, such as history, politics, economics,
philosophy, English, art and theology, arguments of any importance are
inherently interdisciplinary. Conversely, arguments in the humanities that
do not throw any light outside of their own disciplinary context are inherently
trivial. HUMANITAS, then, is less interested in historiographical detail
and fine points of interpretation than in writing that sets forth ideas
and perspectives that may broaden and deepen humanistic scholarship and
thinking. In selecting articles for publication HUMANITAS would rather
err on the side of intellectual daring than on the side of "safe" respectability.
Authors interested in abstract intellectual games, in the pedantic reexamination
of sources or texts, or in the exploration of minutiae do well to pursue
other avenues of publication.
A Reminder
The philosophical and scholarly approach has no monopoly on reality. Thinkers
and scholars are greatly indebted for their sense of reality and proportion
to the pre-conceptual insights of persons of acute imagination. True, artistic
imagination and philosophical-scholarly reflection are wholly different
modes of approaching human existence. The former is intuitive, the latter
conceptual and cognitive. The one is free to create its own personages,
events, and images; the other must work within the bounds of history. Indeed,
the creations of art sometimes fly in the face of reality. But, in their
highest forms, both art and thought attempt, in their different ways, to
articulate the drama of life. A destructive tendency often seen in the
humanities is a conceited, puritanical belief in the ultimacy and autonomy
of the intellect. To remind its readers that creative imagination can alert
us to reality and that philosophical and scholarly insights are not achieved
independently of such non-intellectual grasp of human existence, HUMANITAS
may on occasion open its pages to more literary writing—to a poem, a short
story, or the like that freshly expresses life and helps orient and sharpen
the scholar's conceptual elaboration of reality.
HUMANITAS
P.O. Box 1387
Bowie, MD 20718-1387
Phone/Fax (301) 464-4277
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