Introduction
Outline
Expanded Project Statement
"Rethinking the Humanities" in the University of
Michigan Context
It is becoming increasingly clear that the traditional Western model of the role of the humanities in university education, inherited from the 19th century, needs rethinking. The most obvious changes that need to be addressed are (1) within universities, the rise of the social sciences, and especially the recent development of cultural studies; (2) in the relation of universities to society, increasing multiculturalism within Western societies and the globalization of academic discourse.
The University of Michigan, with its strong tradition ofinterdisciplinarity, a new administration concerned with academic values, and its new International Institute, seems to be an ideal site for initiating debate on this topic.
(1) We propose to stimulate debate within the University by organizing a two-day colloquium on October 8-9, 1999 titled:
Body/Bildung: Discipline, Desire, and the Humanities. About ten papers will be available before the conference on email; they will address the Humboldtian justification of the humanities as forming character by a combination of the contemplation of beauty and the discipline of studying past civilizations, the forms in which this model of Bildung was exported to the non-Western world, its silences and suppressions.
(2) Simultaneously, we will set up a debate on the history and current role of the humanities with other colleges, universities, and research institutes (worldwide) on the Internet. This will provide a way of linking related projects that are already in progress or being planned (e.g., at the Getty Institute, Columbia University, Heidelberg University, the Collegium Budapest), and we hope it will stimulate colleagues in other institutions to organize their own projects (workshops, faculty seminars, co-taught courses, etc.).
(3) If the first two stages of the project are successful in stimulating interest and debate, the UM might then seek NEH funding for a larger conference to bring together the most active participants in the Internet project.
Two agendas that developed in the late 18th and early 19th century have been especially influential in shaping modern conceptions of the humanities. The first derived from the intersection of the Enlightenment attack on the clergy with the 'modern' claim that antiquity could no longer provide models for social development. In this agenda, classical antiquity was repositioned, as a source of spiritual values. A classical education would develop finer feelings through its concentration on beautiful works of art and sublime texts, would replace (or reinforce) Protestant moral education by the discipline of scholarship, and by its holistic approach to texts and cultures would build solid foundations for a humanistic integration of character, values, and experience. Our colloquium title Body/Bildung pinpoints the tension between the image of the beautiful (male) body, representing the fullness and indivisibility of human experience, and the subtext of ascetic discipline, on which this new humanism was based.
So far, the story is well known, although its contradictions and tensions are not often explicitly confronted. But the new humanism also generated a second agenda, which has deeply marked the dialogue between the West and its cultural others. Its redefinition of the aims and methods of classical philology provided the model for a new crop of 'orientalist' philologies, which had their own contradictions: between the Romantic-relativist idea that every historic culture had its own classics and spiritual values and the elitist claim that only those trained in Western philological disciplines could interpret them, and between models of personality-integration centered on national heritage and religion and models centered on rationality and modernity. Any project for resituating the humanities in the multicultural, global world of the 21st century has to confront this agenda and the conflicting desires that all parts of the postcolonial world have inherited from it.
Where we are now, at the end of the second millennium, universities do not seem very clear either about what they supply in addition to vocational education or about how they do it. There is a vague sense that the humanities provide this supplement, and that beauty, discipline, and the wholeness of human experience are still part of the picture. There is an increasing commitment, in principle, to multiculturalism and interdisciplinarity. But there is not much debate at the interfaces between inherited models and reactions to social change, between our commitment to critical thinking and our research and teaching agendas, between the University's departmental/disciplinary structures and its broader intellectual mandate, between conceptions of the humanities based on traditional associations between culture, leisure, private life, and national heritage and the needs of the less work-oriented society of the future.
We see this project as related to other initiatives currently under way at UM, in particular the International Institute's 'Crossing Borders' Ford Foundation project, which has as one of its stated aims "to facilitate significant cross-regional, comparative, and international initiatives as normal practice", and this semester's discussions at the Retreat of October 26-27 and in LSA faculty Focus Groups on the values and vision of the University, support for interdisciplinary efforts, and related topics. It also responds to anxieties voiced by some faculty in Arts departments that the study of premodern societies and texts is becoming increasingly marginalized both at the undergraduate level and in interdisciplinary activities involving faculty and graduates. It may also be possible to link the project productively with the Arts of Citizenship program.
There is a certain risk, when a discussion of values is initiated, that it will not get beyond platitudes. To avoid this, we have deliberately planned our initial colloquium to raise provocative questions about values and the humanities (What is going on when the human body is used to symbolize beauty and wholeness as the focus of a sublimated desire? Why is discipline attractive? Do we still accept a Protestant model of the self?), and linked it to a follow-up project on the Internet, to stimulate faculty here and elsewhere to organize their own debates, workshops, seminars, reading groups, and other forms of interaction. Rather than formulating statements on academic values as a foundational charter, we want to set dialogues in motion in which they will crystallize in argument, and be contextualized in their historical conditions of genesis, criticized for their blind spots, and analysed for the contradictory desires encapsulated in them.