The Fate of the Humanities, the Fate of the University

Abstract

The aim of this article is to analyze the current crisis of higher education and to propose a new model to counter the threat this crisis poses to the arts and humanities. The crisis of the university is presented through a comparison with two earlier crises: the first occurring in the seventeenth century and the second in the early nineteenth century. I argue that as an institution and a culture the mission of the university is to uphold the value of autonomy, a term I borrow from Cornelius Castoriadis, and to actively cultivate the autonomy of its students and teachers.

Notes

Notes

1. Cornelius Castoriadis, “The ‘Rationality’ of Capitalism,” in Figures of the Thinkable, trans. Helen Arnold (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2007), 58; subsequent references to this collection of essays are cited in the text.

2. Castoriadis uses the term “institution” in a larger sense, to refer to “language, religion, and power, and about what the individual is in a given society,” including the significance given to “man,” “woman,” or “child” in a particular time and place (95).

3. The instituting power and fundamental role of the imagination is crucial to Castoriadis's thought. In his major work, The Imaginary Institution of Society (L’institution imaginaire de la societé [Paris: Éditions du Seuil, 1975]), he argues that “history is impossible and inconceivable outside the productive and creative imagination, that which we have named the radical imaginary” (my translation, 220). Castoriadis had plans for a “properly philosophical” investigation of the imagination in a future work, to be entitled L’Elément imaginaire, which however never appeared except for two chapters in other collections (7). However, the undisputable relation to “classical German philosophy,” especially to Fichte's earlier work (“of the first Wissenschaftslehre”), is acknowledged in a footnote (220). In the second part of The Imaginary Institution of Society, Castoriadis expounds his own original philosophy of the radical social imaginary, in which the prominent contributing discourses are psychoanalytic theory as well as philosophy and socio-political analysis.

4. Jacques Derrida, “The Principle of Reason: The University in the Eyes of Its Pupils,” trans. Catherine Porter and Edward P. Morris, Diacritics 13.3 (1983): 13.

5. See Immanuel Kant, The Conflict of the Faculties, trans. Mary J. Gregor (New York: Abaris, 1979).

6. Michael, J. Hofstetter, The Romantic Idea of a University: England and Germany, 1770–1850 (Houndmills, UK: Palgrave, 2001).

7. “Wilhelm von Humboldt (1767–1835),” in Prospects: The Quarterly Review of Comparative Education 23.3–4 (1993): 616. The citations in the article are from Wilhelm von Humboldt, 1903–36 Gesammelte Schriften: Ausgabe der Preussischen Academie Der Wissenschaften. Bd. I-XVII (Berlin); originally published as “On Public State Education,” in Berlinische Monatsschrift (December 1792).

8. Elisabeth Leedham-Green, A Concise History of the University of Cambridge (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996).

9. Hofstetter, The Romantic Idea of a University, 3.

10. Jonathan I. Israel, Radical Enlightenment: Philosophy and the Making of Enlightenment, 1650–1750 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002), 119; subsequent references are cited in the text.

11. Gordon Graham, Universities: The Recovery of an Idea, 2nd ed. (Exeter, UK: Imprint Academic, 2008), 37; subsequent references are cited in the text.

12. John Henry Newman, The Idea of a University Defined and Illustrated (1899), ed. Frank M. Turner (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1996).

13. Friedrich Schiller, On the Aesthetic Education of Man, In a Series of Letters (1794), ed. Elizabeth M. Wilkinson and L. A. Willoughby (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1967); subsequent references are cited in the text.

14. Cornelius Castoriadis, “Pouvoir, politique, autonomie,” in Le monde morcelé, Les carrefours du labyrinth 3 (Paris: Éditions du Seuil, 1990), 170; subsequent references are cited in the text. Here, as elsewhere, one can readily detect how Castoriadis's reflections on education relate to Schiller's in Letters on the Aesthetic Education of Mankind, and to those of other German thinkers. Although initially emerging as a figure in postwar France from an intensive engagement with revolutionary thought, Marxist and post-Marxist, Castoriadis was also reputed to be a keen and constant reader of both the ancient Greek philosophers and German Idealism. The pivotal significance of the “radical imagination” in The Imaginary Institution of Society was continually reinstated and explored in later writings, along with the revolutionary potential of psychoanalytic thought. Castoriades argued that we had to go beyond the strict bounds of the social sciences and of philosophical materialism in order to rethink the revolutionary potential of human societies.

15. See Castoridadis, Le monde morcelé.

16. See Jan Patočka, Plato and Europe, trans. Petr Lom (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2002).

17. I am referring mainly to Derrida, “The Principle of Reason: The University in the Eyes of Its Pupils,” 20, and to L’Université sans condition (Paris: Éditions Galilée, 2001).

18. As with “The Principle of Reason,” an inaugural lecture given at Cornell, this too was a talk Derrida was invited to give at a university in the United States. It was first delivered at Stanford University as a “Presidential Lecture,” with the full title, “L’avenir de la profession ou L’Université sans condition (grace aux ‘Humanités’ ce qui pourrait avoir lieu demain)” [The Future of the Profession, or the University without Condition (by virtue of the ‘Humanities’ what could take place tomorrow)]

19. Derrida, L'Université sans condition: “L'université sans condition ne se situe pas nécessairement, ni exclusivement, dans l’enceinte de ce qu’on appelle aujourd’hui l’université. Elle n’est pas nécessairement, exclusivement, exemplairement représentée dans la figure du professeur. Elle a lieu, elle cherche son lieu partout ou cette inconditionnalité peut s’annoncer. Partout où elle (se) donne, peut-être, à penser. Parfois au-delà même, sans doute, d’une logique et d’un lexique de la ‘condition‘” (78).

20. Derrida, L'Université sans condition, 79.