The Philosophy of the Curriculum-The Need for General ...

Humanism and the HumanitiesFrederick A. Olafsonwere being opened up that could hardly have been understood if theyhad simply been forced into the parochial framework suggested byWestern history. But the point I want to make about historicism is thatit did not completely abandon the idea of ordering, in terms of criteriaof significance and value, the extraordinary wealth of materials withwhich the historian and the humanist have to deal. While it wasaccepted that the subjective preferences of the individual human person-whetherhumanist or not-lacked the cognitive authority to establishsuch an ordering and that God no longer seemed available toperform that function, a displacement of such authority to the historicalprocess itself seemed both feasible and attractive.The nuclear thesis of historicism is that, in spite of all its appearanceof chaos and conflict, the order to historical time is also the orderof realization of a goal toward which history moves. A convincingentelechy for world history as a whole might be difficult to agree on forthose who lacked the inspired audacity of a Hegel; but within moremanageable and familiar unities like the history of Western civilization,there was a real plausibility to the notion that history is a cumulativeprocess in which, at the deepest level of interpretation, thingshappen because they are required by the inner logic of the process itself.Within that process conflicts among limited perspectives andstandards of judgment would be progressively overcome and resolutioneffected at a higher level. And, what was most reassuring, itseemed that the whole business of "values" was being transacted in thethird person and thus constituted a perfectly satisfactory object of inquiryfor the humanities or Ceisteswissenschaften, as they came to becalled. The "compromise" thus effected between the evaluative andthe cognitive claims made on the humanities permitted the humanistto take a strongly relativistic view of the forms of life he studied, includinghis own, while still maintaining a teleological conception ofthe historical process in which the fulfillment of some momentous, ifvague, goal was ~romised.The version of historicism I have presented is an explicitly philosophical,indeed Hegelian, one. I am not suggesting that it wasprincipally or exclusively in this form that historicism became a reigningmethodology in the humanities. But as Professor E. H. Gombrichhas recently pointed out, the broader kind of Geistesgeschichte thatderives from Hegel has dominated humanistic scholarship for morethan a century, most conspicuol~sly in Germany, but also e~sewhere.~It attaches primary interest to the placement of a writer or thinker orartist within a stage or period of an evolving process in which eachstage is a necessary condition for the one that follows upon it as well asthe implicate of the one that precedes it.For many critics-among them Professor Combrich-the forms ofcontinuity introduced into historical sequences by these Hegelianassumptions are spurious and finally detrimental to historical understandingitself. Other writers have drawn attention to the peculiarlyanonymous character of the self that takes its directives and its criticalperspective from some hypothesized schedule of historical developmentand is always second-guessing the historical process in order todetermine what part has been assigned to it in the latter. In the backgroundof all these contemporary critiques of historicism is Nietzsche'sgreat attack on what he called historical Bildung and on the imbalancebetween past and present that characterizes it-an imbalance that resultsfrom a belief that all meaning and direction come to us from thepast we study rather than being brought to the past, as Nietzschethought it should be, by a sense of identity and purpose in the present,which seeks out the past it needs.These are powerful criticisms, and to the extent that historicismhas made possible this peculiar kind of ventriloquistic role-playing onthe part of scholars whose work thus lacks any definable relationshipto what they are or stand for as persons, it has clearly run counter tothe central inspiration of humanism. If the motivational interests of theinquirer remain wholly unrelated to his concerns as a person and as amember of a community, and if both he and the figures in the past towhom he turns his attention are defined entirely in terms of the positionthey occupy within some historical entelechy to which they contributebut which they cannot control or perhaps even understand, it isreally not clear what the point or possible human benefit of an encounterbetween them might be.For all these justified strictures on two major aspects of the historicalparadigm for humanistic inquiry, it seems to me that it haseffected a permanent enrichment of such studies and that it has conferredbenefits on those who pursue them that dwarf the liabilities Ihave been recognizing. While it is true that many of the continuitieshistoricism introduces into the historical process have been speciousand derive more from a priori postulations than from empirical evidence,many of them were very well founded indeed. The notion of atradition, which has become so central to humanistic studies, is onethat is capable of empirical validation; and while there are many logicaland empirical problems connected with the use of generalizingconcepts like those of period. style, culture, and so forth, it would beabsurd to suppose that these stand or tail with the metaphysical principlesof synthesis with which they may have been associated.Beyond these questions of method, the point is that historical inquiryin the humanities has made available to us a wealth and diversity