I am teaching at an experimental university, where students, to a large extent, choose what they want to work on. In recent years, history has become less prominent in their choices, especially the kind of history that poses as detached from contemporary reality. So, there is little chance that I could sell a course on, say, “The History of Philology from Poliziano to Wolf” or even “Theories of Language and Literature from Saussure to Derrida”. The students are idealists of a practical kind. They are not, like previously generations at the university, obsessing about Marxism or French theory. They are concerned about the problems of the world that they live in
The students are not averse to historical approaches, if one starts with the problems. The history of the humanities is here a key resource, if considered in the right way. This history cannot be defensive, reminiscing about a glorious past when people cared about literature, history, and philosophy or pontificating about the moral superiority of a pure scholarship that is “not for profit”. It must be critical and constructive, discussing how the humanities share a responsibility for many of the problems that concern the students and maybe also offer some of the solutions. The humanities therefore also cannot be too narrowly defined. If we remove everything applied, the history of the humanities loses its relevance.
A history that addresses the problems of the contemporary world may have a central place the curriculum. Together with colleagues, I have now for some time been working on redefining the theory course, which is obligatory for all third-semester students in the humanities, almost five hundred students every fall. We here try to explain and discuss humanities research as it is done in practice and how this practice influences the world around us. The history of the humanities offers examples for discussion and reflection. It serves a “historical epistemology” of the humanities, theory by the way of history.
The community of historians of the humanities could support such efforts in future. The challenge is to write histories that are both more presentist and concerned with applied research and contemporary problems and, at the same time, more critical and focused on epistemological questions.