現代文化와 大學敎育그리고 人文學

Abstract

The current malaise affecting the university in general and the human sciences in particular has a deeper origin than is usually recognized. It has to do with the gap between science and culture, between the scientific way of dealing with things and the ordinary-lifeway of dealing with them. The more university is seen as the bastion of science, the less those sciences which traditionally dealt with human affairs as seen from the ordinary, common sense point of view, are taken seriously. It is particularly the Geisteswissenschaften which are de facto depreciated. The usual reaction is an attempt to ever more professionalism and methodological rigidity also in these sciences. This leads to disastrous consequences both for the Geisteswissenschaften and for the university education as a whole. The fact that the human sciences do not partake in the strict rationality and objectivity of the positive sciences, does not automatically make them irrational or subjective. Otherwise, the same ought to be said about practically everything in human life. Outside the rationality and objectivity of science, there is certainly room for reasonableness and wisdom. To think otherwise is to surrender what is most important in human life, the questions concerning meaning and value, to subjectivism and cynicism. This reasonableness and wisdom is of course not easy to obtain. But this can be no reason to abandon the most serious things in life, precisely the meanings and values which made it into a human life, to pure whim or force.