I read this in an article on the present state of the humanities by Heather MacDonald.  It is a quote from an unknown humanities work:

“Total presence breaks on the univocal predication of the exterior absolute the absolute existent (of that of which it is not possible to univocally predicate an outside, while the equivocal predication of the outside of the absolute exterior is possible of that of which the reality so predicated is not the reality. . . . of the self).”

What does it mean?  I have no idea.  Why was it written?  Because many present-day professors and scholars of so-called humanities disciplines can neither write nor think.  Is there a crisis?  Yes, and it is worse because many incoming college students and college administrators consider learning—real learning from the past, as opposed to the gobbledygook above—to be useless.  After all, it “can’t get you a job,” they say.  The humanities faculty on the other hand believe the “old” way was not just useless, but evil, full of racism, oppression, sexism, imperialism, etc.  It must be ignored at worst, eradicated at best.

Humanities is a rather broad category, including disciplines such as history, philosophy, religion and theology (there is a difference), literature, and even aspects of social sciences like politics, economics, and sociology (all economics isn’t differential calculus).  The sciences too partake of the humanities to the extent they delve into the philosophical elements of the disciplines such as physics, chemistry and biology.  If, as I believe, humanities and related fields, are important, what defense can one give to support that assertion.

Several have been advanced: pragmatic, philosophical, and teleological for example.  The pragmatic argument says that if one takes humanities courses, he or she can think better, respond more creatively to new problems and function better as a citizen and a human being.  I agree.  I am convinced that humanities courses, when properly taught, can enable individuals to do better in their jobs, to advance faster and farther, to avoid becoming mere technocrats, to write better (a talent we desperately need more of), and, to top it off, to make more money in the long run.  Now I am not arguing that a humanities major itself will reap monetary rewards, but that the appropriate combination of humanities courses will produce the desired results, no matter the major.  A well-educated engineer, I submit, will be a better person, a more valuable employee and a better citizen, and will tend to move further in his field.

The philosophical argument too is a valuable one.  The mind is raised to higher things, above the merely present or mundane, or downright gutter level.  It now (hopefully) considers true beauty, real virtue, the crucial existence of a real God and its implications, what it means to be made in the image of God in dignity, creativity, reasoning ability, and, perhaps most important, to know and grasp the limitations of humans, in order to avoid the utopian mentality that drives so many who would impose their fantasies on others.  We are but human, “all too human” and it matters for us and our civilization.

The teleological argument is that the humanities have an inherent good of their own, or rather that they are good in themselves as an end.  This too has merit.  Knowledge as a thing to delight in is a very good attainment.  Of course, it absolutely must be tamed by a recognition of our own limitations, especially well-understood by Christians.  We cannot know everything, so we cannot pretend we do, for ourselves or others, we will fail, ethically, so we are humbled and driven to the God who is not silent.  These are the kinds of thoughts that elevate us, as well as humiliate us.  But they are thoughts worth having.

The current rush to throw all of it out is an exercise in arrogance and self-centeredness.  As one writer put it, the new architects of the humanities are obsessed with what they see behind every tree and in all those “dead white males”—they see everything through their perception that they are victims, everyone is a racist, the evil West oppressed the rest and would have continued if they hadn’t come to the rescue, and that in every “great” work of literature, art, music, or prose, there lurks the demons of racism, sexism, oppression, bigotry, and so on.

As a Christian, I abhor this movement, for more than one reason.  It does reduce us to mere bundles of matter, with no noble thoughts except those that the new architects would have us think.  We do  not learn from the past, both good and bad, because we don’t care about it, so they wish.  But ultimately, they seek not just to reduce us to less than human, but to remove the supernatural from the world.  I refuse to allow them to emasculate God or to eject Him from this world.  All thinking Christians ought to oppose this move to radically change or eliminate the humanities.  In fact, we should seek to improve them, to use them for the glory of God.  In some respects, yes, we are “plundering the Egyptians” in that some elements of the humanities are not all that Christian.  But they do serve an important purpose and we can make them even better while not rejecting them.  The new mandarins cannot do that, for they have no ground for it.  They have no ground at all.