The humanities are in a deep crisis. Worldwide, funding for humanities departments shrinks, and the young generation in many countries, such as in East Asia, loses interest. After all, governments call for strengthening the STEM disciplines, seen as crucial in achieving the nation’s competitive advantage. At the same time, we observe a flurry of humanities research that aims to overthrow the old paradigm and champions various forms of XX-humanisms, such as post humanism. Mostly, these refer to ideas like getting rid of the old homo (who is also debunked as a white male) and substituting this by some kind of assemblage, be it-making kin with other species or symbiotic relations with robots and other devices. Generally, all these are moves proclaimed against the anthropocentrism of the old humanities. In my view, this throws the baby out of the bathwater. I am certainly a protagonist of moves against anthropocentrism, and even edit a journal on “more-than-human culture”, “Cultural Science”; but being also trained as a sinologist, I have been always defending the “old humanities”, back into the 1990s when I published a defense of sinology against social science criticism.
The journal Cultural Science features as “multi-disciplinary”, and not as XX-humanist. What is the difference? If we recognize that other species or robots have culture, this means that we strive for a synthesis across the disciplines in understanding “their” culture”. This requires intellectual openness of all disciplines, such as biology introducing methods of cultural analysis. An example is Richard Prum’s approach to aesthetics and creativity in birds, where he employs the humanities concept of the “artworld” across species. At the same time, this is based on thorough ethological analysis. I wouldn’t deem this argument “posthuman” since it remains essential to treat the notion of “artworld” as tied to the original paradigm, namely human arts. I think in developing such arguments, it is necessary that the various disciplines retain their autonomy because otherwise, the strength of triangulation is lost: Identifying and analysing a phenomenon from different methodological angles and with different types of evidence, and if they converge, therefore, conclude that the insights gained are valid ones.
What does it mean that the humanities are autonomous, as they stand, and that, therefore, blurring the lines by proclaiming various XX-humanities is at least not necessary and, at worst, confusing?
The first is that the term “humanities” may have misled much anglophone discourse. In German, until most recently, the term has been Geisteswissenschaften, now tending towards Kulturwissenschaften. As I detailed in a previous paper, the translations are problematic but also revealing and instructive. The Geisteswissenschaften never dealt with “humans” in the sense of human individuals and their psychology. The term Geist is rooted in Hegel’s notion of spirit, which is expressivist and externalist: In modern parlance, the Geist has always been seen as an assemblage! Geist is “objective”, and Dilthey’s Geisteswissenschaften deals with phenomena beyond the human, meaning, collectives of humans and their material creations. This is Popper’s world 3, indeed not the world of human individuals and groups (world 2).
The second point is that German idealism put one concept at the centre of driving the evolution of Geist, namely freedom. Freedom is a dialectical phenomenon, both creating spirit and being made by spirit. Freedom is also the key theme Graeber and Wengrow’s masterpiece “The Dawn of Everything”. They make the compelling point that a defining feature of being human is being free to choose the way of life. At the same time, they postulate a process they call schismogenesis, which means that cultural diversity is driven by human collectives perceiving and making themselves different from others, often like mirror images, or, a dialectics of thesis and antithesis. Again, that means that there is interaction between the individual and the collective processes.
I think that both views imply that the humanities never have been about humans only. However, they were burdened by the ideology that only a distinct group of humans are capable of culture that comes along with schismogenesis. Denigrating some other humans as non-humans was always part of human culture, alas. In this sense, we need to get rid of ballast of the old humanities. But that is different from eschewing the humanities as a distinct field. Here, the term is really misleading. Hegel would certainly have shuddered when hearing that animals have culture. But in fact, his tale of recognition applies in the same logic. We need to expand the domain of recognition, but do not need of change the method, plus embarking on thorough cross-disciplinary collaboration.
Finally, in one sense the humanities deserve their English name. Given that humans are changing the fate of the planet in dramatic way, driven by their imagination and aspirations, we need a science of understanding the reflexive capacities of humans, the root of human freedom and schismogenesis, understanding and explaining the resulting processes empirically, and a conceptual toolbox of meta-reflection. This is the old humanities. In that sense, “posthumanism” is one of their products, but does not take their place.
The technosphere, our agency, our planet 