Put the ‘human’ back in the humanities
sp!ked review of books
Put the ‘human’ back
in the humanities
Romantic individualism and political correctness have robbed university humanities departments of their ‘love of man’, that ‘amusing, tragic, contradictory creature who yearns to be the master of his fate and transform the world’.
Up on the Meaning of Life, is about the relative death of the humanities in American higher education. He investigates why humanities courses no longer aim to provide young people with insights into the meaning of life. Kronman argues that both he and his colleagues don’t think that the courses themselves have changed, nor do they think that the readings have become irrelevant in our globalised Information Age, as some might argue. He notes that professors at Yale will, in private, acknowledge that the humanities programme continues to provide young people with a perspective on the human condition, but publicly the humanities in America no longer plays its traditional role of pursuing life’s meaning. Hence, those teaching in liberal arts and humanities ‘claim not to possess any special wisdom about the meaning of life that might be communicated to their students in a disciplined way’, suggests Kronman.
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