Jeremy De Chavez
Department of English, University of Macau. ORCID: 0000-0003-0320-372X. Email: jeremydechavez@um.edu.mo
Volume 12, Number 5, 2020 I Full Text PDF
DOI: 10.21659/rupkatha.v12n5.rioc1s3n1
Abstract
The history of the present is replete with the language of crisis, which has infiltrated various domains including the political, economic, social, environmental, and moral. Those various proclamations of collapse and disaster intersect somewhat in yet another crisis that we have become all too familiar with: the Humanities crisis. We are regularly reminded, and with intensifying pleas of urgency, that the Humanities are in peril. While various commentators have linked the troubling erosion of the Humanities to the present and impending failures of critical thought, democracy, and civic duty, the Humanities are still widely regarded as unable to measure up to the emerging dominant metrics of value. What then is to be done? How might we come to the defense of the Humanities without merely mouthing banal pieties or capitulating to the paralyzing force of cynical reason? Avoiding both prescriptive polemics and resignation to the corporate university’s remorseless logic of markets, I offer some reflections on what might constitute a valid defense of the Humanities. I suggest a plural form of defense that does not exacerbate what C.P. Snow has called “a gulf of mutual comprehension” between “two cultures” (1963, p. 4).
Keywords: humanities crisis, Nussbaum, liberal arts, two cultures