The humanities can only exist as long as its most important element is missing somewhere else. To let the questioning of the limits of knowledge be a question for only one faculty is to keep a comfortable distance to the subject. Is it perhaps time to abolish the conception of the humanities?
”Is it not something seriously wrong with this picture?”
A lot of people are talking about the humanities in crises. The system with payment per student graduated makes the universities lower their demands – it is easier to make money on graduating a student on low demands than teaching the student something difficult. If the demands are lowered a bit within the humanities money could be spent on medical and engineering education instead. Educations with status.
A lot have been said and written about this crisis. Philosophy professor, Svante Nordin, is longing back to a time when men were men and books were books and everybody was reading Plato (DN 29/3 2008). A magnificent golden age behind us in time. Swedish Trade and Industry and the economy professor, Mats Alvesson, think that it would be much better if the students learned real stuff. Stuff you can make money on. What kind of science is for instance fashion and what is a predetermined profit over a ten-year time period? Etcetera.
The humanities and its existence and how to shape it are always discussed, like constant rumble in the background, sometimes increasing in strength. But when discussing what the humanities should be, and discussing the humanities exclusively, isn’t there a risk to miss something important.
The fair-trade marking in the store could be an excellent indication – what possibilities are there to speak negatively about that? It only marks a product produced under good conditions, with fair contracts. The only thing is that a fair-trade marking is only valid as long as other products are produced unfairly.
In a similar way the same goes with the humanities. The universities have this fantastic faculty where people can study the foundations of knowledge, reflect over their existence and the influence of language on our perception of reality. But the fact that these institutions only are humanistic, with the implied idea that the study of abstract and ethic dimensions of the existence is happening at these institutions and nowhere else, makes it a problem. Studies became at some point something that developed the disregarded individual and only happened within one faculty.
Within other branches it can still be found but as a secondary aspect. Within the humanities’ research areas are explored, which other academic fields not can supplement, or have as a primary focus. This doesn’t mean that the humanities are superior to other branches of knowledge. Instead it means to partly discuss the real limits of knowledge in a way that it becomes useful when it is implemented in the learning process, and to partly discuss how the aesthetic dimension of knowledge seemingly has been reserved for the humanities. But if these understandings are used, we should maybe consider how the limits are established between the academic branches related to undergraduate education.
Law students at Swedish universities learn how to apply the law, which is reasonable as they study become lawyers. However, that is the only thing they learn before they start on general jurisprudence. One single course to cover up the abstract perspective of the student’s law studies. Furthermore, this happens at the end of the entire course. At the same time students at the Faculty of Philosophy learn about moral philosophy in Kungshuset and the conditions on how to start a society without even being close to a court. Isn’t this picture totally out of range?
This doesn’t mean the demands on students should be to study only to fill a place in the economy. If so, this would be a notable and planned economic starting point. On the contrary, what I search for is a bigger presence of abstraction and aesthetics within all fields of knowledge. However, it is also easy for the universities to avoid including more abstract reasoning, or the aesthetic reflection, among those who need them, when it is easier to refer them to the faculty of humanities. Why doesn’t the meta-studies of the branches go together with the branch itself? Or as Johan Kalzua, student representative at the MBA’s union and their quality evaluation system, said in an article in the MBA magazine: ”If not the critical thinking are with us, what is left? It is the economy handicraft and then there is no difference between what we and the handicraft colleges are doing”.
Attempts to perform branch-crossing education have been done and are being done. Unless through the introduction of a norm-critical perspective (even if badly performed) within all the branches of the university. Jonatan Macznik, law student and columnist at lundagard.se, describes it as ”when the gender perspective is to be included, it is often done in an inflicted and uncomfortable way. It is like it is sufficient to mention gender to have the gender demand cleared”. And it is not strange at all. On one day the law is here, the humanities there. Then part of the humanities is added to law and a total confusion is a fact, things are done the wrong way and nobody understands the point in somebody coming from outside the academic world making a fuss. It is in a way the correct reaction. Why should this kind of conclusions come from the outside, from a different part of the university? The risk is that the humanities, or more specific thoughts around the role of knowledge in an existential environment are seen as a limited dimension that has nothing to do with the university.
The absolute best way to take advantage of the knowledge within the humanistic sciences might be to integrate them with other branches. It is possible that we should endeavor to abolish the humanities, the courses on gender and general jurisprudence. Not how the subjects are interpreted, not the studies of the subjects, but the conceptions. The delimitation. Like the fair-trade marking in the stores, they can only exist as long as something important is missing somewhere else.
Text Philip Stålhandske
Illustration Catrin Jacobson
Translation Lars Jansson
