An Alleged Crisis of the Humanities

It has become commonplace to highlight that the humanities are undergoing a severe, acute and decisive crisis. The claim is that the crisis is the outcome of a longstanding process of decay and decline. Consequently, the humanities are facing a period of intense difficulty and danger threatening their very existence. This perception is voiced by various defenders of the traditional values of the humanities. If the human sciences seek to hold onto what is deemed essential to the human and particular to the humanities, they risk missing out on the knowledge gains, dynamism and societal relevance that an exchange with other sciences can provide. With the withdrawal to the humanities’ ‘essential’ identity, the humanities cut themselves off from participating in and contributing towards the vast majority of current university activities. This is all the more pertinent because the legacy of the humanities is not quite the carefully handed-down ‘silver heirlooms’ that the proponents of the ‘traditional’ humanities claim to polish. Since the foundation of the university and the humanities in an anthropocentric structure of knowledge that gathers around the human, the inception has been persistently contested. The initial centripetal foundation of the university has been followed by a continued opposing centrifugal movement experienced as an ongoing but productive crisis. As the disciplines at the faculty of arts have continually given rise to new branches of science and knowledge, the human sciences have had to continually reformulate and reassert themselves.