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Taking the Humanities Seriously
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12098 |
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Section : |
MODERN THOUGHT
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| Issue
Date : |
12 / 1987 |
5,566 Words |
| Author
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E.M. Adams
E.M. Adams is Kenan Professor of Philosophy emeritus at the
University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. |
We moderns are living in a condition of cultural schizophrenia. We think of ourselves through humanistic categories such as meaning, subjectivity, selfhood, normativeness, value, social reality, and the like. Indeed, we are humanistic beings, for the humanistic conceptual system is grounded in our being and involved in our constitution as persons as well as in the structure and texture of the lives we live. Yet we insist on placing ourselves under the modern scientific conceptual system and locating ourselves in the world as defined by it. As a result, our culture produces a serious human identity crisis that expresses itself in various forms of alienation and in other personal and social pathologies.
How did this crisis in Western civilization come about? Bourgeois life is governed by a dominant concern for our materialistic needs and the quest for the kind of power over nature and society that enables us to satisfy them. These priorities led to a restructuring of the culture and the society: They even gave rise to a reformation in the conceptual system and methodology of science, for we sought a way of understanding things that would give us manipulator power over them. When science became geared to the practical interests of the crafts, technology was born. And science and technology have been in an interdependent relationship ever since. Science in the service of technology and the materialistic interests of the society underwent a profound reformation. All vestiges of the humanistic conceptual system were eliminated from the descriptive/ explanatory conceptual system of the new science, especially the categories of value and meaning. So the world, as it became delineated and understood from within the modern scientific conceptual system, is devoid of ends, purposes, normative structures, values, meaning, rational processes, and intelligence. And as we have developed biology, psychology, and the social sciences, we have insisted on defining ourselves and our behavior by the scientific conceptual system. The result has been a culture and an intellectual vision of man-in-the-world ill suited for the humanistic needs grounded in selfhood and community. The dimensions of the culture that serve our humanistic needs, especially religion, morality, normative social and political thought, and the arts, have been left suspended and problematic, without epistemological or ontological foundations. The human results have been a far greater command over the material and even the social conditions of our existence, but at the price of spiritual chaos and a severe human identity crisis.
The human crisis in modern civilization is not a set of problems that lend themselves to our usual problem-solving methods of scientific
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