Towards a New Enlightenment – The Case for Future-Oriented Humanities E-Book

Gabriel Markus

• Herausgeber: transcript Verlag
• Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
• Serie: THE NEW INSTITUTE.Interventions
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2022

Seitenzahl: 115

Beschreibung

What role can the humanities play in shaping our common future? What are the values that guide us in the 21st century? How can we unleash the potential the humanities offer in a time of multiple crises? This volume tackles some of these fundamental questions, acknowledging and developing the changing role of academic discourse in a turbulent world. This timely book argues that the humanities engender conceptual tools that are capable of reconciling theory and practice. In a bold move, we call for the humanities to reach beyond the confines of universities and engage in the most urgent debates facing humanity today – in a multidisciplinary, transformative, and constructive way. This is a blueprint for how societal change can be inclusive and equitable for the good of humans and non-humans alike.

Leseprobe

The book series “THE NEW INSTITUTE.Interventions” aims at strengthening the voice of the humanities in public and political discourse. Its publications present the work of the fellows of THE NEW INSTITUTE, based in Hamburg, which brings together changemakers from academia, activism, the arts, media, government, and business to collectively generate new ideas and solutions for the most pressing problems facing humanity today. By linking up such diverse perspectives and mindsets in a highly collaborative effort, THE NEW INSTITUTE strives to create fresh, groundbreaking approaches for tackling some of the most complex challenges of our time. Through such a collectively produced body of knowledge that includes both astute analyses and fundamental reconfigurations in various key areas of society, our “Interventions” will hopefully provoke and fuel constructive debates across disciplinary and sectoral boundaries. All texts in the series are published Open Access under a CC license to facilitate the widest possible reach for these conceptual and practical impulses.

Towards a New Enlightenment – The Case for Future-Oriented Humanities

Markus Gabriel, Christoph Horn, Anna Katsman, Wilhelm Krull, Anna Luisa Lippold, Corine Pelluchon, Ingo Venzke

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First published in 2022 by transcript Verlag, Bielefeld © Markus Gabriel, Christoph Horn, Anna Katsman, Wilhelm Krull, Anna Luisa Lippold, Corine Pelluchon, Ingo Venzke

Cover layout: Maria Arndt, Bielefeld Copy-editing: Joan Lace, Saffron Walden Layout (adaptation) and typeset: Michael Rauscher, Bielefeld Printed by Friedrich Pustet GmbH & Co. KG, Regensburg Print-ISBN: 978-3-8376-6570-3 PDF-ISBN: 978-3-8394-6570-7 EPUB-ISBN: 978-3-7328-6570-3https://doi.org/10.14361/9783839465707 ISSN of series: 2751-9619 eISSN of series: 2751-9627

Contents

Preface

1The need to recouple the humanities and social sciences with society

Reorienting the humanities and social sciences

2The unique knowledge position of the humanities and social sciences

3The methods of the humanities and social sciences

Broad concept of humanities and social sciences

Need for value-laden approaches

Pluralism of methods and approaches

Decentring and multi-perspectivity

Universalism as universalization

Revitalizing hermeneutics

Moral realism

Moral constitutivism

Phenomenology

Narratives and values

Law and legal critique

4The humanities and social sciences will only succeed if they pursue an integrative approach

5Reconfiguring institutions – Towards a culture of creativity

6Towards a New Enlightenment

Key principles

Key challenges

Open questions guiding the way forward

7Suggestions for the way ahead

Coping with complexity

Welcoming otherness

Ecologizing systemically

Reconfiguring public health

Reconciling technology and culture

Summary

Notes

References

About the authors

Preface

In many respects our world is out of balance. The gaps are widening between technological advancements and social progress, between economic success and environmental degradation, and between research-based insights and political decision-making. They are complemented by a rapid loss of biodiversity, a growing trend towards privatization and commercialization of common goods, and last but not least by growing inequality, uncertainty, and complexity involved in meeting the challenges ahead of us.

When we look at the current state of affairs, the mounting crises, the Russian–Ukrainian war, and the atrocities that go with it, we surely have many reasons to give in to feelings of pessimism and despair. The downward spiral of adverse developments appears to dominate our perception. And yet, as scholars as well as concerned citizens we can no longer ignore the fact that it is the responsibility of our generation to come up with new ideas and viable concepts that can pave the way for an urgently needed transformation of our lifestyles, modes of production, and societies at large.

By courageously, critically, and creatively reflecting on various imbalances and their root causes as well as by trying to open up pathways to viable solutions for at least some of the huge problems we are confronted with, scholars and practitioners from various walks of life can help to change course in the direction of a more just, ecologically sound, and economically sustainable future. This holds particularly true when they jointly embark upon a journey focused on thoroughly rethinking and reconfiguring current practices.

It is against this background that the first cohort of fellows at THE NEW INSTITUTE involved in the start-up phase of our programme ‘Foundations of Value and Values’ set out to develop a conceptual and strategic framework for an intellectually ambitious attempt at positioning the humanities in the wider context of bringing about systemic change. Despite the professional diversity of the group, fellows succeeded in focusing on their commonalities alongside their differences. This discussion paper is itself proof of the integrative capacity of the humanities. Building on their epistemic foundations and specific expertise, as well as their boldness and persistence, the humanities will nevertheless have to enlarge the scope and scale of their activities beyond understanding past and present phenomena towards more future-oriented approaches.

All of this requires a change of perspectives not only within the humanities themselves but also in the respective ecosystems of knowledge production at large. Even nowadays, in many debates focusing on research and innovation agendas, the humanities are often seen as less useful when it comes to shaping the future. While science and engineering are widely accepted as the key drivers of economic and technological progress, the humanities seem to lack a clear orientation towards the major challenges ahead of us. This perception of a set of decoupled knowledge domains urgently needs to be changed, last but not least in view of the multiple, interwoven crises we are confronted with.

To ultimately realize their potential as strongholds of reflexivity, multi-perspectivity, and normativity, the humanities will have to proactively take on the task of adopting a conceptual and strategic framework that puts them centre stage when it comes to tackling such crucial questions for our common future as: What is a sustainable value system for the 21st century? How can we create a common way forward towards a New Enlightenment? When and why are people prepared to change their behaviour and to reconfigure their lifestyles in favour of a sustainable future for humankind and our planet? Last but not least, the provision of adequate answers to these questions will require serious commitment to interdisciplinary, trans-sectoral, and intergenerational collaboration.

In several respects this was the spirit in which our fellows – namely Markus Gabriel, Christoph Horn, Anna Katsman, Corine Pelluchon, and Ingo Venzke – cooperatively and creatively worked on this paper. My deeply felt thanks go to all of them and to Anna Luisa Lippold as well as Barbara Sheldon from the facilitating team for their impressive and continued commitment to our common endeavour.

In addition, many distinguished colleagues provided helpful comments on an earlier draft or discussed selected parts with us. These include Ruth Chang, Lorraine Daston, Nikita Dhawan, Rainer Forst, Hans-Ulrich Gumbrecht, Geoff Mulgan as well as Martin Adjei, Harald Atmanspacher, Isabel Feichtner, Tobias Müller, Vladimir Safatle, and Christiane Woopen. Their criticisms and supportive arguments considerably improved our manuscript, in particular with a view to explaining our request for more future-oriented humanities as well as possible options for working our way towards a New Enlightenment. Moreover, we thank the participants of the TNI@Stanford meeting organized by Markus Gabriel on 3–4 March 2022, who provided further comments and significant input: Andrea Capra, Amir Eshel, Roland Greene, Hans-Ulrich Gumbrecht, Robert Pogue Harrison, Courtney Blair Hodrick, Paul Kottman, Teathloach Wal Nguot, and Laura Wittman.

We are also grateful to Karin Werner and her colleagues at transcript publishing house, first and foremost for their enthusiasm about our aspirations and our project, but also for their invaluable support in the production and distribution process of this booklet.

Last but not least, I would like to thank our generous founder and funder Erck Rickmers for his friendship, empathy, care, and courage in all matters of concern to our joint endeavours at THE NEW INSTITUTE and beyond.

Wilhelm Krull

Founding Director of THE NEW INSTITUTE

Hamburg, July 2022

1The need to recouple the humanities and social sciences with society

Humanity is facing a complex meshwork of nested crises: the ecological crisis, various economic crises (from financial crises to growing inequalities), the geopolitical crisis, the energy crisis, the soon to be massive migration crisis fuelled by geopolitical catastrophes, the crisis of healthcare, and the still ongoing coronavirus crisis. These crises are systemic, global, and experienced by different human and non-human actors in a variety of ways. They confront us with environmental, economic, health, social, and political risks, which raise profound questions about the currently dominant models that define what is perceived as successful and normatively desirable development.

A crisis does not just mean that something is wrong or that there is a general problem or even a very big problem. A crisis, from the Greek krisis, means a decision; a crisis is a turning point that requires an intervention in order to avoid catastrophe. A crisis is, thus, a normatively laden turning point. Its outcome depends on human decision-making in conditions of social and natural complexity. For this reason, we can only meaningfully deal with a crisis by endorsing a set of normative principles from different domains in order to prevent catastrophe by taking the right decisions.

However, the current crises are all interwoven and they are associated with different kinds of normativity: military and ethical, ecological and economic, legal and aesthetic, cultural and universal, local and global, individual and collective norms are at play both in describing and in solving the problems that first lead to crisis and, if unresolved, transform into catastrophe.

One important driver of the dynamics of the nested crises noted above is the decoupling of natural-scientific, technological, and economic development from broader questions of human value, the good life, and wellbeing.1 A few examples may suffice to illustrate this point:

•The immense power of modern information and communication technology (most recently: artificial intelligence) in large-scale social systems is restructuring human interaction in hitherto unknown ways. Purely technological perspectives cannot answer the question of the purposes to which technology should be put, and who is entitled to make such decisions.2 The risk is that human value, collective decision-making, and wellbeing will be left behind. For this reason, governments rightly call for the regulation of socially disruptive information and communications technology in legal and ethical terms, which is why the recent discipline of the ‘ethics of AI’ has gained much attention. Its function is to re-couple socially disruptive technology with research into legal and ethical values and value representations in order to provide guidelines for how to reshape the relevant technology in light of human needs, rights, and duties.

•The digital transformation called for by many governments as part of the solution to the ecological crisis in turn creates novel issues of sustainability as a result of the material resources needed to produce and maintain the material dimensions of apparently purely symbolic data. The humanities are ideally suited to critically investigate this ideological layer and the illusions generated in a context of rapid social transformation. Recoupling in this context means integrating humanistic and social-scientific qualitative studies into the discourse of digital transformation with the aim of distinguishing between desirable and undesirable cases of automation of labour and replacement of human interaction and practices by digital systems.

•Food production and consumption are driven by unsustainable desires, expectations, and mindsets. Inappropriate mindsets hamper the ability to tackle the complex relationship between humans, non-human animals, and our shared habitat so that a systemic change on the level of mindsets and their material conditions is necessary. The humanities deal with our view of ourselves as human beings. Insofar as human beings do what they do in light of broad conceptions of how they fit into nature, how they share features with non-human animals while still being profoundly different from them, humanistic research into such conceptions and mindsets is a precondition for meaningful, systemic change of our value representations.

•Standard economic models that still focus predominantly on quantitative growth are too narrow to measure human wellbeing. This leads to a conception of the socio-economic sphere in ways largely blind to the models designed to explain and overcome shortcomings in the actual target system of economic models, i. e. our economies. The very discipline in the business of producing economic solutions creates new problems when it does not take value-laden human experience into account in its efforts to measure economic success. Unrealistic conceptions of us as human beings, of our preferences, utilities, mindsets, desires, and modes of thinking and cooperating affect concrete policy proposals which then interfere with society as the broadest domain of socio-economic interaction. Socio-economic interactions qua target-systems of economics contain values and value representations in the form of the arts, religion, vast cultural differences, local and global histories, as well as threats, hopes, and interests on individual and collective levels that have to be integrated into economic theory. The humanities, therefore, can and ought to contribute to a paradigm change in economic thinking which takes into account the concepts of the quality of life, the first-person perspective of human agents and their integration into larger natural and social processes.