Permanent Crisis: The Humanities in a Disenchanted Age, by Paul Reitter and Chad Wellmon

Abstract

Permanent Crisis addresses a common misconception: that the humanities were devalued or displaced by the rise of modern science. Rather, as Paul Reitter and Chad Wellmon argue, “the modern humanities were not a casualty of the modern university and specialization—they were a product of them” (52). The social and historical developments of the nineteenth century that led to the foundation of the new, specialized German university in Berlin in 1809 also saw the rise of the modern humanities, whose self-appointed function was much grander than that of their predecessors, the seven liberal arts. Rapid technological and scientific progress was accompanied by a similarly rapid fragmentation of knowledge and a decline in the unifying role of the church and religion. The humanities, therefore, as Reitter and Wellmon argue, suddenly assumed a new role: on the one hand, to serve as a corrective to disciplinary specialization and fragmentation and tie all knowledge together and, on the other, to provide moral guidance, meaning, and a unified picture of the world to those who studied them. This epistemic and ethical ideal was to become “the moral and rhetorical project” that offered the hope of unifying the modern university and created a kind of “secular sanctity” (52) that would produce the progressive moral subject. “What the Bible does for the masses, Homer does for the educated,” proclaimed August Wilhelm von Hofmann, rector of the University of Berlin. The humanities then were to provide “moral consolation and unity [for] educated professionals” (151).Reitter and Wellmon trace both the enthusiasm and the deep reservations about this new project. Parallels with the contemporary American university are frequent and convincing. The proposed new goal for the universities produced the identity of the academic, the ideal scholar set apart in complete and ascetic devotion to the pursuit of knowledge. At the same time, the new disciplinary specialization gave rise to fierce competition to attract researchers of national reputation, at the expense of the growing numbers of nonsalaried faculty who taught lower-level courses and tried to produce research in a desperate bid to achieve recognition in the form of a permanent post.Neither the desired unity of knowledge nor the proposed moral vision was ever achieved. The pressures of disciplinary specialization were coupled with a climate of political distrust that encouraged only research of a highly technical nature. At the same time, German intellectuals, preoccupied with the idea of cultural decline, berated the German university for failing to halt cultural disintegration and moral rot. Humanities professors had, as the educational reformer Friedrich Diesterweg stated pointedly, abandoned their duty to participate in the moral upbringing and shaping of students’ characters (71). Yet intellectual freedom—understood as morally and religiously unencumbered inquiry—sat uneasily next to demands to inculcate moral commitments. The purpose of a humanities education disagreed with the purposes of research in the humanities. Attempts to resolve this tension resulted in various assertions: from Max Weber’s insistence that honesty and academic freedom will help students discover their own vantage points in light of personal ideals (74) to Nietzsche’s lament that specialized philological training had “succumbed to professionalization and its parsimony of spirit” (104), failing to help develop a “free, autonomous personality” (103). The academy had acquiesced in the “destruction of antiquity” by suffering from this “most modern of diseases, skepticism,” which had been somehow transformed into a scholarly virtue (110).The humanities, in the words of Reitter and Wellmon, “did not precede the maelstrom of modernity, but emerged from it” (116). Born of crisis, they made crisis a condition of their institutional existence (187). As American universities adopted the German model of the research university, they also inherited the spirit of interminable crisis creation, even as they were tasked with the function of being the chief guardian of democratic values. Therefore, as the authors argue, a major driving force in what we now take to be the humanities is scholars’ attempts to present their own disciplines as the solution to democratic and moral crises.In their final remarks, Reitter and Wellmon offer a vision for the future of the humanities. Even though the discourse of crisis has sustained humanities scholars for a long time, it has also misled us. Once the vocabulary of crisis is embraced, the humanities are on the defensive, and a major enemy is to be fought, whether it be religion, science, technology, vocational training, or something else, thus widening gaps between disciplines and severing historical connections. The authors draw inspiration from Max Weber to encourage us not to overpromise but rather to open opportunities of exploration for all students, who are to find their own “meaningful forms of life” in this world (263).Reitter and Wellmon’s account resonates strongly with scholars familiar with the institutional history of rhetoric. In search of a disciplinary identity, and under pressure to develop its own discipline-specific methodology, rhetoric has wandered among various humanities departments in different garb—speech and communication, writing and composition, public relations, classics—while upholding the model of the eloquent, virtuous, civically engaged citizen that it has inherited from the older trivium model. In what follows, two rhetoric scholars and one philosopher ask the question, Quo vadis, Rhetorica?Paul Reitter and Chad Wellmon’s Permanent Crisis brings a much-needed historical perspective to scholarly conversations about the state of the university and convincingly argues that crisis talk has been a persistent feature of the modern humanities. To make their case, Reitter and Wellmon focus primarily on explicating the writings of nineteenth-century German intellectuals such as Schleiermacher, Nietzsche, von Humboldt, Dilthey, and Weber, except for the last chapter, which focuses on the development of the humanities in the United States. The approach to intellectual history is genealogical: Reitter and Wellmon trace how a rhetoric of crisis first appeared on the scene when the modern humanities began, then show how it subsequently organized discourse in and around the modern research university. They present a history of the modern humanities’ myriad crises to help readers see recurring patterns in the arguments scholars used to make sense of the humanities’ purpose, values, and meaning.Permanent Crisis is rich in historical insight from other periods of perceived decline in the humanities, and it chronicles crises that contemporary scholars will recognize as similar to those in the research university today. For example, Reitter and Wellmon note how “deteriorating institutional conditions” after the “golden age” of the humanities at the end of the fifteenth century led professors in the arts to be “subjected to the indignities of sitting at the bottom of a hierarchy,” how “arts faculty offerings appeared last in course catalogs,” and how “the professors themselves marched last in academic parades, . . . their academic robes . . . generally less grand” (12). Frequently, the reader cannot help but hear similar laments made by arts and humanities faculty today.Unlike other histories of the university—for example, Roger Geiger’s The History of American Higher Education (2015)—Reitter and Wellmon’s Permanent Crisis is foremost an intellectual history in the German tradition. And, while it does not intend to be a work about the history of rhetoric, its scholarship will be valuable to those interested in the rhetoric of higher education and the humanities. Historians of rhetoric will find that this book naturally complements studies of modern Western rhetoric and the history of rhetoric’s relationship to the development of modern science and scientific research. Some may be reminded of Thomas Conley’s argument in Rhetoric in the European Tradition that early twentieth-century rhetoricians like Kenneth Burke, Richard McKeon, I. A. Richards, and Richard Weaver—who sometimes had opposing theories of rhetoric—were united in “the sense of crisis they shared” (Conley 1990, 281). Like the teaching of humanities in general, the teaching and practice of rhetoric has, at times, held out hope for a unity of knowledge, one that could unite disparate disciplines and help students grapple with the uncertainty of modernity. Indeed, others may be reminded of Wayne Booth’s (1987) Ryerson Lecture, in which he proposes rhetoric as the great unifier of the university.1Permanent Crisis helps situate such theories of rhetoric in the context of broader debates about the humanities.Permanent Crisis also provides an unexpected yet helpful historical perspective on contemporary debates about classical reception and the teaching of ancient Greek and Roman texts in history of rhetoric courses. For example, I can imagine assigning chapter 3—“Philology and Modernity”—in a graduate seminar on histories of rhetoric since the debates reflected in Nietzsche’s writings and explicated by Reitter and Wellmon also capture debates in our field about historiography, such as: for what purpose have classical texts been studied and embraced or not, and why? Historians of rhetoric who read this book should be able to place such debates within larger histories of how the modern university was envisioned, on the one hand, and how the humanities have been valued and defined, on the other.A book rich in careful scholarship and historical detail, Permanent Crisis often opens up more questions than it answers. For example, though the authors caution readers from the start that their book “is not a call to action” (3), I remain curious about what they hope readers will do differently as a result of reading it. In particular, their conclusion raises two sets of interrelated questions, one about crisis rhetoric, the other about whether humanities scholars could make better public arguments for the value of the humanities today.The first set of questions concerns how the crisis of the humanities is defined and whether crisis rhetoric can ever be beneficial. Throughout most of the book, the crisis of the humanities appears to refer to a moral crisis or a crisis of values or meaning. However, when other contemporary scholars refer to the humanities crisis (especially in the United States), the sense is that they are talking about the humanities’ material crises, including contingent labor issues, declining enrollments, shrinking state and federal funding, low pay for faculty in comparison to STEM fields, and lack of quality space on campus. As the current Modern Language Association president Christopher Newfield recently argued: “The humanities crisis is a funding crisis” (Newfield 2022, 2). The book’s conclusion seems to caution against this kind of contemporary crisis rhetoric and argues that “reckoning seriously with this [crisis] discourse and its complexities is necessary to understanding the formation, evolution, and possible futures of the modern humanities” (253). But what would it look like for those of us in the humanities to “reckon seriously” with this crisis discourse today? Are there any situations in which crisis rhetoric might be beneficial for the future of the humanities?The second set of questions concerns the moral arguments for the humanities, which Reitter and Wellmon describe as dividing contemporary defenders of the humanities. Specifically, they claim: “There are in fact deep and persistent tensions, incompatibilities even, between Bildung and democracy, and progressive defenders of liberal education should face them honestly rather than dismiss them as the stock response of conservative reactionaries and elitists.” They suggest that, instead of “overpromising” what the humanities can offer, we might turn to Weber’s concept of “value freedom” to help students understand and reflect on the values they already hold and bring into the classroom (255). It seems wise to recognize the need to qualify what the humanities can offer students. I wonder, however, whether, in the face of drastic budget cuts and other structural inequities, defenders of liberal education and the humanities can put forth such a modest proposal for their value today. How can defenders of liberal education face up to these tensions and incompatibilities honestly while still making a compelling public case for their value?Permanent Crisis helps readers understand that there is not one continuous history of the humanities but instead a discontinuous history with two competing notions of the humanities: (1) a broad humanistic tradition encompassing classical education and general liberal education and (2) a modern humanities as a set of previously distinct, highly specialized academic disciplines. Part of why the teaching of rhetoric in the Western tradition appears to disappear with modernity is precisely in line with what Reitter and Wellmon describe. Rhetoric—the heart of the liberal arts and the humanistic tradition—was not compatible with the rise of the modern humanities.It will, then, perhaps be no surprise to rhetoricians that the conclusion to Permanent Crisis seems to be calling (indirectly) for what was lost in the development of the modern humanities: rhetoric as an art of public engagement and understanding. Rhetoric offers theories and ways of being responsive to people and publics that are unlike those offered by other disciplines in the humanities. The future of the humanities likely depends on the extent to which those of us in the humanities recognize the importance of rhetoric and uphold our rhetorical responsibility to be a bridge between the university and the public.Carolyn D. CommerVirginia TechPositing, in Permanent Crisis, a continuity of thought from the late nineteenth century to the present, Paul Reitter and Chad Wellmon contend that, “for nearly a century and a half, claims about the ‘crisis of the humanities’ have constituted a genre with remarkably consistent features: anxiety about modern agents of decay, the loss of authority and legitimacy, and invocations of ‘the human’ in the face of forces that dehumanize and alienate human beings from themselves, one another, and the world.” On this declaration, bold and evidenced, rests an arresting corollary: “Without a sense of crisis, the humanities would have neither purpose nor direction” (116). I have two responses to this argument. First, I do not think that the discipline of rhetoric is unfamiliar with the discourse of crisis or immune to its effects. Second, I think that our discipline has already arrived at a solution not unlike the one proposed by Reitter and Wellmon (and Max Weber). Toward the end of this response, I will explain that, while I am philosophically attracted to the authors’ “principled commitment to intellectual and value pluralism” (263), I worry that this theoretical alternative might result in our institutional suicide. For now, before marinating in my reservations, allow me to explain why rhetoric, as it is theorized by American academics, is not unfamiliar with the discourse of crisis.A full disciplinary history is beyond the scope of this brief response. Instead of such a comprehensive account, I will turn to another book, one written long before Reitter and Wellmon began their investigation. Pat Gehrke’s The Ethics and Politics of Speech finds that, during the early twentieth-century experimentation with the German model of the research university, rhetoric scholars “often grounded their work on a tradition of liberal humanism and liberal democracy” (2009, 3). Gehrke juxtaposes two early twentieth-century paradigms, both guiding scholars in the emerging discipline of speech communication: psychology and mental hygiene, both of which drew on specialized scientific vocabularies, one striving for exacting methods, the other for healthy citizenship (Gehrke 2009, 21–28). Between these paradigms lies the same tension that bedeviled Friedrich Nietzsche, a tension between Wissenschaft (scholarly knowledge) and Bildung (moral education). Returning to Reitter and Wellmon’s account of the German academy, we can see a parallel. Speech communication scholars took up mental hygiene as a moral counterbalance to scientific psychology. When confronted by late nineteenth-century scholarly pursuits and philological methods—projects like Theodor Mommsen’s sedulous collection of all known ancient inscriptions—Friedrich Nietzsche asked, as Reitter and Wellmon point out, whether the humanities can maintain “disciplinary forms of knowledge and simultaneously function as cultural practices that require faith and reverence from those who profess them” (99). In Reitter and Wellmon’s account, the question led Nietzsche, the cynic, to despair. In Gehrke’s history, a similar question led rhetoricians to a series of resolutions, beginning with psychological methods (which bring us back to Wissenschaft) wedded to mental hygiene (Bildung) and then cascading through the century to the “last decades” and the question of “agency” (Gehrke 2009, 133). Gehrke’s concluding chapter focuses on the scholarly methods devised by postmodern theorists/sociologists (another Wissenschaft) and the “presumption of an innate free will” (a “recalcitrant” Bildung) (2009, 134).On the basis of The Ethics and Politics of Speech, I conclude that the discipline of rhetoric, all the way up to Gehrke’s reconciliation of the “tension . . . of ethics and efficacy” (2009, 159), has repeated the German humanist’s odyssey. Like Nietzsche, we have been sailing between scholarly knowledge and moral edification, listing one way then the other, never finding a true course. We learn and promote new analytic methods. Then we despair that our scholarly craft distances us from our civic calling. Nietzsche pondered the purpose of scholarly knowledge when such erudition separates its possessor from faith and reverence. Gehrke similarly opens his study with “the Hitler problem”: “What does it mean for communication and rhetoric if those skilled in its arts can put them to the purposes of extraordinary evil?” (2009, 1). In response to this problem, Gehrke alleges, the discipline has balanced liberal humanism against social science. If psychology and the social sciences enable modern evils such as mediated propaganda and demagogic fascism, then humanism and the liberal arts can compensate for these evils with ethical edification. Reitter and Wellmon call this application of a humanistic poultice to modernity’s ulcers the “compensatory role of the modern humanities” (17), a defense that they trace back to Niethammer (1808).Just as Gehrke offers his intellectual history as a prelude to his own preferred position, Reitter and Wellmon present the German nineteenth century as a lengthy prolegomenon to Max Weber’s defense of disciplinary methods grounded in a modest scholarly ethic. To quote Reitter and Wellmon again: “Weber offered his own account of scholarship as a meaningful, deeply moral, and passionate way of life even as he undercut what many saw as the university’s moral purpose” (200). I suggest that something like the Weberian solution has been championed recently by Jeffrey Walker, under the banner of Isocratean pedagogy and Antonine practice. Again, I must simplify for brevity’s sake. Walker wrests from Isocrates a slim art of inquiry: “the identification of key question(s) at issue and what the discourse specifically must accomplish, and the methodic searching, selection, and combination of the relevant ideai and topics of invention, so that the student of able wit can more readily discover what otherwise would be hit upon haphazardly” (Walker 2011, 154). From Marcus Antonius the elder, a character featured in Cicero’s De oratore, Walker learns a similar lesson, the importance of know-how in the service of know-that. Often imagined as a crass technical rejoinder to Lucius Crassus’s robust humanistic education, Marcus Antonius’s approach to rhetoric becomes, in Walker’s analysis, a practice, meaningless in the abstract but efflorescent in its application: the capacity to see the world from many perspectives and to speak persuasively to many audiences. Or, in Walker’s terms, “a set of resources, embodied as a trained capacity, for the copious invention of things to say” (2011, 56). The Antonine rhetorician argues, as my epigraph suggests, from many perspectives to understand fully and to persuade others respectfully.Walker’s view of rhetoric as a “trained capacity” and Weber’s view of science as a vocation are both value plural. When Weber insisted that “the prophet and the demagogue do not belong on the academic platform” (1946, 146), he promoted what many have interpreted as value neutrality. Reitter and Wellmon persuasively argue that his approach to disciplinary knowledge did import modest scholarly virtues, a “principled commitment to intellectual and value pluralism” (263). Walker’s rhetor is hardly value neutral. In fact, if one follows Antonius’s lead, then he or she will have to become value plural, trying honestly to respect the dignity of every perspective while arguing in the voice of another and preparing a considerate response. But there is a telling difference between Weber’s research professor and Walker’s Isocratean pedagogue. Weber’s position depends on an institutional separation of technical proficiency and humanistic edification, while Walker’s Isocratean rhetor reunites these endeavors. Isocrates’s slim art of argumentation, Reitter and Wellmon point out, was taught from the sixteenth century through the eighteenth, with instructors pursuing the “more practical, more technical goals” of linguistic proficiency (9). Only in the nineteenth century, as secondary institutions took on the chore of teaching literacy, did college professors start claiming that humanistic edification could ethically compensate for modern degradation. While high school humanists taught argumentative skill, collegiate humanists could promise moral elevation. Walker’s Isocratean rhetor challenges this institutional division of labor, reuniting the technical and the ethical. The technically accomplished rhetor is an explorer, never comfortable in a monolingual metropole, venturing out into the provinces and speaking with those who, together in their situated and peculiar languages, constitute humanity. In a lifetime of in(ter)ventional exploration, the rhetor learns the human(itie)s. Thus, the Isocratean rhetorical capacity leverages technical skill into humanistic knowledge, becoming responsibly persuasive (unlike Weber’s demagogue) without promising salvation (unlike Weber’s prophet).Walker’s value-plural practice of rhetoric avoids, I suggest, the signature pitfalls that Reitter and Wellmon attribute to humanistic crisis discourse. Mining humanity’s wealth with rhetorical picks does not require “negative justifications,” those blighted “attempts to define or defend the modern humanities” by “pitting them against various threats” (254). Additionally, the Isocratean rhetor need not obscure the difficulty of applying premodern ideas to modern institutions (255) because, though the Isocratean art may be narrow, the Isocratean disposition is capacious, allowing a range of rhetorical and analytic techniques, including ancient progymnasmata and modern social-identity theory. Finally, the Isocratean rhetor will not overpromise a redemptive solution to any looming crisis (257). If we believe Reitter and Wellmon, humanists, from Adolph Diesterweg to Wendy Brown, have championed holistic moral edification over technical scholarly acumen (56). The most recent instantiation of this preference, I suggest, is the turn toward decolonialism and critical race theory, both admirable tributaries now flooding rhetoric’s river. Rather than swimming against modernity’s stream, Walker’s Isocrates navigates humanity’s rivulets, guided by a technical-rhetorical savvy. Therefore, while I appreciate Reitter and Wellmon’s analysis, and while I incline toward their modesty, I prefer Walker’s rhetorical to Weber’s scientific escape from humanistic crisis discourse.I have posited, so far, that the slim art of rhetoric can help us speak to the world’s inhabitants while respecting their dignity. Like Cicero’s Antonius, I conclude by imagining a possible refutation. Reitter and Wellmon explain that general education requirements—like the first-year writing class and the basic course in speech communication—“institutionalized these promises” to rescue humanity from modernity in the midcentury United States (228). English and communication departments depend on these general education courses and increasingly staff them with non-tenure-track instructors. At the same time, we have reinvested in the rhetoric of permanent crisis and fed the culture wars, as Reitter and Wellmon attest (252). We have additionally inspired college graduates to join the humanistic crusade. What if we give up this powerful propaganda, offering Weber’s humbly scientific or Isocrates’s modestly rhetorical vision instead? Would we have any other way to persuade undergraduates that the grueling process of earning a PhD is worth their while? We cannot, in good faith, promise adequate salaries or comfortable lives on the tenure track. We cannot even assure that a PhD from a nationally ranked graduate program will merit stable employment in higher education. So, instead, we tell graduate instructors and adjuncts that they can save the world from modernity’s colonial legacy through epistemic disobedience. If we give up this ethical argument, we might also abandon our best marketing campaign.Attention to ideological buttresses that maintain economic institutions leads me to my worry that, if we abandon crisis discourse and forgo humanistic salvation, we might commit institutional suicide because we belong to departments that depend on low-paid, non-tenure-track workers who staff general education classes, promising an ethical value-added in a morally bankrupt world. I find myself ruminating on one of Louis Althusser’s often-repeated descriptions of ideology: “the reproduction of the conditions of production” (1971, 1). If our talk about what Reitter and Wellmon describe as the “compensatory role of the modern humanities” (17) is itself an ideology, a means of hailing new humanists, an inspiring call in the absence of any other lure, then this discourse reproduces adjuncts and graduate employees whose exploitation is the condition of our scholarly production.Longaker Mark GarrettUniversity of Texas—AustinThe often-heard lament that the humanities are in crisis involves two somewhat independent but related claims. One centers on the drop in student enrollments in traditionally humanistic disciplines such as the classics, history, literature, languages, and philosophy. The other is concerned with the broader crises characteristic of modernity, which include the worry that vocational training in sciences and technologies is prioritized in both education and daily life while enduring questions about values, morals, and the meaning of life are sidelined, if not entirely forgotten.Reitter and Wellmon’s portrayal of the current situation is bleak but not uncommon and not untrue: few young people today are willing to undertake a professional study of the humanities. Yet I wonder whether this lack of interest constitutes a real crisis, a historically novel breaking point that will turn our world into a soulless, meaningless, mechanized place. Perhaps the current moment is simply the result of a normal fluctuation of attention? Perhaps, in time, students will return to the humanities, become once again interested in history, art, and literature, resume asking the timeless philosophical questions, and, in the process, soften the rough edges of our high-tech society and make it less alienating? Is this a far-fetched hope since, for as long as we know, older generations appear to have voiced predictable complaints about the state of the world—that culture is in decline, that young people no longer strive after excellence, that the ways things are done now is worse than the ways they were done before?Reitter and Wellmon’s Permanent Crisis addresses our worries directly. Their main thesis is a persuasive argument that, despite our desire to trace the humanities to the Renaissance and, ultimately, classical Greece and Rome, the humanities that we have today, with their discrete disciplines of different methodologies and separate departments, were born in the German universities of the nineteenth century and grew to maturity in the American universities of the twentieth century. They were born from what was perceived as the crisis of modernity, with the explicit purpose of resolving that crisis: they were to infuse the “cold sciences” with a beating heart and the warmth of meaning. A common argument was that people need the humanities if they are to escape the nihilism and pragmatism of the modern way of life. Thus, the humanities began to be presented as the remedy for our modern malaise, whether it be moral crisis, the fragmentation of knowledge, skepticism, loss of purpose, or whatever.The promise of the nineteenth century—that studying the humanities can revive and give a more central role to moral education and, in this way, make our alienated technical world more human—is not easy to fulfill. Reitter and Wellmon note that old-fashioned moral upbringing (Bildung)—the goal of the traditional humanities—is difficult to reconcile with the democratic values of multicultural societies. This is an important point because the humanities are frequently defended as the main vehicle for nurturing open-