New Overlaps and Reciprocities Between the Faculties

The ongoing establishment of new specialized disciplines and subject areas from the mid-nineteenth century to the mid-twentieth century leads to a relatively clear and widely accepted division between faculties and types of knowledge. Since the Second World War, however, these divisions have been decisively questioned. While the university institution and its forms of knowledge expand drastically, the conception of knowledge is altered. To an increasing extent, knowledge is produced and perceived as a form of know-how of considerable relevance for the surrounding society. Whereas the withdrawal to the purely and emphatically human space, where human understanding could be intensively developed in isolation from the rest of the (social and lucrative) world, was still positively connotated and highly appreciated in Humboldt’s time, the expression ‘ivory tower’ gains a predominantly pejorative connotation during the twentieth century. Knowledge is increasingly understood and evaluated in terms of performativity as know-how that enables people to do or produce something new. Coincidentally, new forms of transversal, situated and interdisciplinary scholarly knowledge are established. Among these emerging disciplines of science are area studies. With cultural studies, interdisciplinary forms of science equally emerge within the human sciences. Traversing the divisions between the faculties of science, these new forms of scientific knowledge affirm their situatedness and assert themselves as contributions to specific larger contexts. Since the beginning of the Second World War, thus, disciplines emerge that build up a decisively different relationship not only between the scientific faculties but also between science and its objects, human earthlings and their surroundings.