Editor’s Note: The article we publish below originally appeared in the Spanish edition of Letras Libres in January 2025. We wish to thank Daniel Gascón, editor of Letras Libres in Spain, for allowing us to share this text with LALT’s readers.
Facing vain attempts to raise the humanities to the level of great science, it seems more appropriate to replace apology with self-criticism: to investigate the causes of the paralysis in humanistic disciplines and, if possible, identify solutions.
The response to the crisis experienced by the humanities is usually an apologetic discourse from its actors. Defending the irreplaceable character of the humanities undeniably has meaning, but the limitations on all apologetic discourse are also undeniable. Apology moves in parallel with the decadence of its object. What is decaying is defended. And, even worse, with this defense it is only possible to attract those who are part of its sphere. Only those who are already convinced applaud apologetic discourse. Critics will point out the economic, social, and cultural limitations of this discourse and, above all, of its object. And, in fact, not only do humanistic disciplines attract less of an audience and less money, less investment, and produce less, but they are unable to follow the innovative impetus of great science. And, beyond this, they are unable to explain the causes of their own unstoppable disparagement.
So it seems more appropriate to replace apologetic discourse with a self-critical discourse. It is a question of investigating the causes of the paralysis in humanistic disciplines and, if possible, identifying the measures that could be taken. It is not a new question. For more than two centuries, the West has taken on the challenge of raising the level of humanities to the level of great science. The challenge of modernity—the coming of age of humanity—is to govern the world. To govern it, it needs to be understood. The humanities should stop being arts—an ornamental and courtly phenomenon—and be based on an efficient method comparable to that of the natural sciences. However, this challenge does not seem to be being won. The successive failures of attempts over more than two centuries have made it so, today, skepticism has taken hold of the actors who try to guide modern thought, and the vast majority of those who work in the humanistic disciplines settle for a mediocre, banal discourse.
The Two Paths
The nineteenth century launched the first serious attempts to provide the humanities with a scientific foundation. These attempts opened up two opposing paths: the disciplinary path and the transversal path. The disciplinary path opened up different routes, new disciplines to interpret culture. In principle, one discipline, history, would exercise leadership for the humanities. History was based on the historical-critical method developed by biblical studies. This method sought documented verification of facts and authorship—sources—questioning mythical memory. And it served as a model for national histories. And, after the national–political–histories, the literary and artistic stories emerged. The historical-critical method tried to understand the past, establishing a precise chronology and documenting true facts and their authorship, discarding explanations based on myths and legends. However, documentation was not sufficient to solve the issue of interpretation, and voices critical of the inadequacy of this method soon appeared. In addition, historical disciplines tended to solve the problems of their inadequacy by searching for their own methodologies and affirming their autonomy, a disastrous direction. In the long run, this path has led to the disciplines being discredited. And, with this, to a discrediting of the method that has been called positivist, which sought to transfer the empiricism of the experimental sciences to the humanistic sphere.
This discrediting drove a reform of the disciplinary path: anti-positivism. Anti-positivism is based on the idea that the method for experimental disciplines does not serve for humanistic ones, the disciplines of the spirit. What serves nature does not serve culture. What seemed like a step forward was actually a step backwards. Positivism was based on the idea of realism. Schelling had explained this. Reality is composed of material objects and ideas. Anti-positivists assume that ideas and events that inspire do not behave like things—material entities—because culture is not nature. The first consequence of this rethinking is history’s loss of leadership. Disciplines such as linguistics (Saussure) and sociology (Max Weber) would propose a new method based on the notion of system. The system sets out to achieve the effectiveness of physics. Sociologists spoke of the envy they felt for physics, where the empire of mathematical logic rules, and would try to emulate this empire by eliminating irrelevant differences from cultural phenomena. And, to do this, they eliminated the past and focused on the present. Saussure had suggested something similar for linguistics: overcoming dialectal and historical differences to find the fundamental laws of language, which would form a system. Although the promoters of the anti-positivist method—Wilhelm Dilthey and Ferdinand de Saussure—were not willing to renounce history, their epigones were more consistent and reformed their disciplines based on the notion of system, excluding, in fact, the historical perspective. Added to this scarcity is the fact that the widespread growth of the humanities—of their professional groups—has facilitated the convergence of two apparently contrary phenomena: the formation of states of opinion that resist innovation and the fragmentation of disciplines into hubs of power that compete for dominance: that is, corporatism. Both phenomena are a consequence of the disciplines’ losing sight of their true direction: the scientific challenge.
The second path to the great scientific challenge has a transversal nature, contrary to the particularity of the disciplines. It is materialism. The nineteenth century saw major events for the future of this path. The decisive one was the publication in 1859 of On the Origin of Species by Charles Darwin. Others were the publication of Democracy in America by Alexis de Tocqueville, the works of Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, and even the thinking of Friedrich Nietzsche. Darwin’s book is the key to this direction because it lays the basis for concluding the contrary principle to anti-positivist thought: that humanity is nature. Materialism is the consequence of Kant’s and Schelling’s theses: Thought must work with things and ideas, that is, with human and natural concepts. Materialism shows the continuity of natural history in cultural history. We are nature. The reaction against this principle was furious.
As Edgar Morin has written, we accept that humanity comes from primates, but not one step further. The twentieth century denied the connection between natural history and cultural history. This denial has fueled the opposition between nature and society, a denial that has gone far beyond the neo-Kantian current—which it is frequently related to—and the anti-positivist method. It has even touched Marxism. The academic Marxism of the twentieth century rejected Engels’ thinking precisely because it links nature to dialectics (Anti-Dühring, Dialectics of Nature). In fact, Engels took the Darwinian influence further than his friend Marx. He understood the need to establish that bridge between natural history and cultural history, an essential piece for the fate of the humanities. This episode of the Marxist current should be taken as evidence of how the humanities have strayed in the twentieth century.
Of course, there are explanations for this deviation. The first lies in the limitations of modern materialist currents. Marxism boasted and boasts about materialism, but it has never overcome the level of mechanism. Mechanism was a pre-modern materialism. It conceives of the universe as a system of forces, but it cannot understand the phenomena of life, much less of imagination. That is how materialistic currents have come to stumble over cultural phenomena. And not to mention with aesthetics. Rough correlations with the social origin or ideology of authors and artists or with economic and political episodes have been the tendency of this mechanistic materialism.
Rhetorical Thinking
Philosophy was called upon to take on the role of a guide to face the challenge of the humanities. But it hasn’t worked out that way. Philosophy is the most resistant discipline to taking on this challenge, despite the fact that those who intuited it were German philosophers around 1800. Their task has had barely any continuity. The new disciplines—history, linguistics, sociology, psychology, etc.—gained a prominence that did not really pertain to them and to which they could not aspire. The result has been the appearance of a space occupied by methodological currents, better named pseudo-philosophies: Marxism, existentialism, structuralism, psychologism, cognitivism, etc. These methods fail to understand both the reason for the problem and the entirety of the humanities. They limit themselves to prioritizing a section of the disciplines and trying to understand them according to their limitations.
Two questions can be asked. The first is why this impasse happens. And perhaps the explanation is the weight of the past. Rhetoric was the foundation of thought within the humanities before the modern era. Rhetorical thinking is not only the thought of oratory or poetic thinking. It is the hegemonic mode of thought in the pre-modern historical stage. This is a very flexible way of thinking. It worked equally in antiquity to express relativism—in the face of traditional thought—as in the Middle Ages and early modernity to express dogmatism. And, in the modern era, it functions as a vehicle of expression for very short-term individualism. It adapts very well to the disciplines, which cannot grow without rhetoric (as pointed out by Hayden White). In the domain of the arts, it does not go beyond contemplating the specific categories of each art, the compositional categories. And, in the domain of thought, it makes do with school categories, pseudo-philosophies. It does not require a great display of research. It is within reach of anyone. And the widespread growth in the modern disciplines—due to the pervasiveness of advanced education and high culture—provides it with the most favorable space for its hegemony, which in the first two modern centuries has proved to be absolute. Perhaps the discipline that has best exploited the possibilities offered by rhetorical thinking is theology. It is very flexible and transversal precisely because it is indifferent to the great evolution in humanity. It is thinking for humanity’s underage period, the stage in which humanity submits and subordinates itself to the empire of the heavenly kingdom and does not know its own evolution.
In its great expansive capacity, rhetoric has exploited the two sides of modern humanities. For the historical side, it offered the ideal means to fill in the space left by documentation and chronology; that is, it allowed it to establish the meaning of research. Normally, this meaning had a nationalistic and individualistic orientation, anti-female besides. In the case of the theoretical, anti-positivist side, it gave it a neutral appearance and justified abstraction and its irrelevance.
The second question is what steps philosophy should take to redirect the drift away from this challenge. Perhaps the person who has contributed most in this direction has been Edgar Morin with his “lost paradigm.” This paradigm must deal with several tasks. I will list the main ones.
History must develop its conceptual dimension. Concepts cannot be mere abstractions but rather the conclusions derived from the process of the great evolution of life and, in particular, of sapiens culture. Sapiens culture has experienced stages: the unproductive stage—mere consumers—and the productive stage (from the emergence of agriculture to the modern era). And, within the productive stage, a first phase in which only oral culture is known and a second phase in which written culture competes with orality and establishes a relationship of superiority over it.
Theory and analysis must overcome the rhetorical phase—ahistorical—and submit to the empire of conceptual history. The autonomy of the disciplines has to make way for knowledge and a transversal, unifying method.
The system of disciplines is an obstacle for conceptual history. Conceptual history must unfold as a philosophy of history and of imagination (culture). The fragmentation and dispersion of knowledge is a symptom of failure in the face of the modern challenge.
It is thus a question of reformulating materialism. Denouncing mechanism involves understanding, based on materialism, the world of ideas and of aesthetic symbolism, the world of imagination, goals that are unattainable for vulgar materialism.
Some steps have been taken in recent decades in this direction. Perhaps the most striking thing is the appearance of a series of great bibliographical successes worldwide: those by Bryson, Attali, Harari, Rifkin, etc., which are characterized by raising the problem on a scale of the great evolution of sapiens culture, yet with limitations. Another aspect is the growing interest shown in research on the other humanities, especially the Neanderthals. This phenomenon is the other side of the global perspective on Sapiens culture. A third dimension consists of the emergence of Big History, which, despite its limitations, also focuses on the continuity between natural history and cultural history. These three steps seem to announce the onset of what, in the terminology of Big History, is called Goldilocks Conditions: that is, the right conditions for a change, a turn in the dynamics of natural and cultural phenomena.
Other steps—and perhaps more productive ones—have had less impact, for the moment. I will refer to two that are from Spain: the works of Jesús Mosterín (1941-2017) and Nicolás Ramiro Rico (1910-1977). Mosterín is the author of an encyclopedic effort. He had understood the need to make a philosophy of culture and to connect natural history with cultural history. Standing out in his great work are the monographs he dedicated to the Chinese, Hindu, Jewish, Greek, and Latin cultures. Mosterín was a giant in the philosophy of history. Ramiro Rico is an opposite example: almost an illiterate. His work is collected in a small posthumous monograph compiled by his friends Francisco Murillo and Luis Díez del Corral, El animal ladino, in 1980. Today he is a forgotten author. The University of Zaragoza press has rescued his monograph from oblivion. Ramiro Rico is the finest Spanish thinker of the twentieth century. Starting from the philosophy of labor law—and from Marx’s work—he denounces the limitations of mechanistic materialism and outlines what the materialism of the symbolic can be. You can synthesize his proposal with the formula “from nutritious bread to symbolic bread.”
Neither Mosterín nor, much less, Ramiro Rico lived in a world receptive to the transcendence of their thinking. Perhaps the twenty-first century will offer other opportunities to bring back the transversal path of the humanities and resolutely face their challenge. The current decay in the humanistic disciplines gives rise to hope that this will be the case.
