Engaged Humanities

Abstract

For some reason, the anxiety of usefulness has been itching the humanities for a long time. When Jacob Grimm in 1846 convened the Germanisten (scholars of the German language, literature, and legal history) to a conference in Frankfurt's Paulskirche, one of the main items on the agenda was to find themes and topics with which these scholars, newly incorporated in dedicated university departments, could demonstrate their usefulness to the public. (In one of the great ironies of history, politics would cater to their craving soon enough: two years later, in the same Paulskirche, many Germanisten would meet again, this time as delegates in the 1848 Frankfurt Parliament, and many of them would claim a role as intellectual counselors to emerging German nationalism.)Anything to avoid looking like a bookworm, or a dilettante erudite. Perhaps the strongest argument for a socially useful humanities was made by Matthew Arnold around the same period. Drawing on the German concept of Bildung, he formulated a pedagogical usefulness in his classic Culture and Anarchy (1869). Writing in a dourly pragmatic, intolerantly moralistic Victorian climate, Arnold stressed society's need for a creative, mental agility to break through the blinkered vision of those he called "Philistines," "people who believe most that our greatness and welfare are proved by our being very rich, and who most give their lives and thoughts to becoming rich" (1869, p. 16). The power of the creative imagination to dispense "sweetness and light," he argued, would allow people to imagine a world beyond their narrow self-interest, to connect more easily with other people and other nations, and to replace the default attitude of mistrust and competition by an open-minded curiosity. That was the power of culture, "the best that is known and thought in the world"; and people were needed to "learn and propagate the best that is known and thought in the world" (Arnold, 1865, p. 283).Readers may sense how uncannily Arnold's mission reflects our modernday needs. The heyday of the humanities culminated (and ended) in the 1970s and 1980s when humanities scholars, fired by new theories, played a vanguard role in ethnic and sexual emancipation movements. That heyday has now passed. The humanities are everywhere embattled when it comes About the AuthorJoep Leerssen holds the Chair of Modern European Literature at the University of Amsterdam and is an Endowed Research Chair at Maastricht University. For his work on national stereotypes and self-images and on the comparative history of European nationalisms, he received the Spinoza Prize in 2008. He is the editor of the Encyclopedia of Romantic Nationalism in Europe (2018).