what can we expect from the humanities? from humboldt to ... · reformer wilhelm von humboldt ....

Jürgen Barkhoff

From Humboldt to Horizon 2020

What can we expect from the Humanities?

Ju?rgen Barkhoff Cover 07/11/2012 15:17 Page 2

Jürgen Barkhoff

From Humboldt to Horizon 2020.


Inaugural address of the

Director of the Trinity Long Room Hub

Arts and Humanities Research Institute

17 October 2012

Ju?rgen Barkhoff Inside 07/11/2012 15:47 Page 1

Welcome and thank you for coming here tonight to the Trinity Long Room Hub Arts

and Humanities Research Institute. I would like to begin with some art, Max Ernst’s

Humboldt Current from 1950.

The original can be admired in the Fondation Beyeler in Riehen near Basel in

Switzerland, and I have chosen it for the start of my talk because it brings Humboldt

and Horizon together. The Humboldt current that is represented here in an abstract,

yet densely atmospheric manner, is the cold current running from Antarctica up the

Pacific alongside the western seaboard of South America in parallel to the Andes. It

is named after the German explorer, geographer and naturalist extraordinaire,

Alexander von Humboldt, who between 1799 and 1802 undertook his famous Latin

American expedition.

And the Horizon? It is dark, in fact black; quite fitting for a symbolist picture that

alludes to the Romantic tradition, celebrating the night and the unity of nature

rather than enlightenment ideals, the cold light of scientific enquiry or focus on

empirical detail. Thus the horizon of modern science comes into sight and with it

Jürgen BarkhoffFrom Humboldt to Horizon 2020. What can we expect from the Humanities?

2

Humboldt Current, Max Ernst


the - decidedly less romantic – prospect of Horizon 2020, the EU Commission’s main

European research funding instrument that will be the successor programme to

Framework Programme 7. It will be launched in 2014 and run for five years and is

expected to have a volume of 80 billion euro. Thinking about Horizon 2020 one

might be inclined to read the picture symbolically as well, as many see dark clouds

gathering on the Horizon for the Humanities: there is a lot of concern that the way

research money will be allocated in the funding instruments of Horizon 2020, the

Humanities will once again be marginalized and not adequately represented in the

thematic calls which identify areas for collaborative research on urgent societal

challenges.

Let me pause for a moment, I fear this is not a good start.

Not yet two minutes into my talk and I find myself

explaining its somewhat cryptic title, evoking the

Science-Humanities divide and spreading gloom and

doom about the Humanities. So let us try a second start:

This cute fellow, Spheniscus humboldti, the Humboldt

penguin, is also named after Alexander von Humboldt.

You might have seen the likes of him in the zoo, as he is,

sadly, an endangered species. That is what we do with

endangered species, isn't it, we build nice habitats for

them, where a few of them can flourish and where we

can admire them. There is widespread concern that Arts

and Humanities scholars might be a bit like Humboldt Penguins; that we, too, are an

endangered species, and one could be forgiven for viewing institutes such as this as

privileged habitats, where a few of us are protected from the arctic winds of

spending cuts and the ubiquitous calls for applicable research and immediate and

measurable outputs.

Jürgen BarkhoffFrom Humboldt to Horizon 2020.


3

Spheniscus humboldti, the Humboldt penguin


Let me assure you, I do not see the Trinity Long Room Hub in this way and I do not

want to talk about my species as endangered Humboldt Penguins.

We could, however, take inspiration from their resilience, their dignity and their

upright posture as the chip on the shoulder of Humanities advocates, which creeps

in all too easily into debates about the role and future of the Humanities, is, in my

view, decidedly unhelpful. As is the often apocalyptic tone of the debate, the most

prominent example of which is probably Martha M. Nussbaum's important book Not

for profit. Why democracy needs the Humanities of 2008. While I agree

fundamentally with her passionate and persuasive argument that the Humanities

are central for democracy, societal innovation and responsible citizenship, I do not

think that alarmist rhetoric about ‘a crisis of massive proportions and grave global

significance’ (from the first sentence of the book) is the most constructive way of

framing the necessary debate about the many challenges to the Humanities. One

reason for this is that talk about the crisis of the Humanities is part of their discourse

since the opening up of the Science-Humanities

divide in Humboldt’s time; Totgesagte leben

länger, as we say in German; those pronounced

dead live on longer.

Starting my talk with reference to Alexander von

Humboldt, the famous scientist after whom dozens

of species and places are named, is of course a

reference to this debate as I will not talk about him

at all from now on, but rather about his older

brother, the philosopher, linguist and educational

reformer Wilhelm von Humboldt .


4

Wilhelm von Humboldt

1 Martha M. Nussbaum, Not for Profit. Why Democracy needs the Humanities, Princeton, Oxford 2008, p. 1.


Is anything named after him? Yes it is, of course, Humboldt University in Berlin. It

wasn't called Humboldt University when it was founded in 1810 but Friedrich-Wilhelm

Universität after the then Prussian monarch. Today its name is connected to Wilhelm

von Humboldt, the instigator, tireless advocate and brain behind the concept of this

reform university. In a number of memoranda he formulated and propagated the

famous Humboldtian educational ideals, calling for the establishment of a new type

of university to encourage independent enquiry and a holistic approach to education

- Bildung (which is poorly translated with ‘education’ and entirely missed with

‘skills acquisition’, but has more connotations of character development and

self cultivation).

This is the logo of Humboldt University and it shows, we might be surprised to

realize, the two brothers, Alexander and Wilhelm. Humboldt University is named,

and that is not well known, after both brothers and not

the man who invented it and lobbied for it. This is not

another put down for the Humanities, but rather an

expression that the so called saddle epoch around 1800,

the formative period of the modern world we live in, did

not yet categorically separate P.J. Snow’s two cultures in

two all too often antagonistic camps, but tried to hold

them together in a spirit of brotherhood, which the

educator and the explorer, the philosopher and the

scientist together represent.

Why does Humboldt matter? He has formulated the most influential principles which

have shaped the structures and identities of modern western universities all over

Europe; principles, which were not meant and are not specific to the Arts and

Humanities, but which gave them a pivotal role in the university and enabled them

to flourish. There is widespread concern that recent developments in the European

university landscape like the emergence of the mass university, the Europe wide



5

Logo of Humboldt University,Berlin


implementation of the Bologna structures, growing managerialism, a move away

from core funding to project funding, and, most recently and most acutely, a

reductive view that the priority of universities research has to be on 'jobs and

growths', on immediate economic benefit, are destroying the university culture

connected with Humboldt’s name; and that the Humanities are particularly hard hit.

Geoffrey Boulton, Vice Principal of Edinburgh University, and Colin Lucas, former

Vice Chancellor of Oxford, for example open their inspirational 2008 position paper

‘What are Universities for’, which strongly argues against a narrow and reductive

interpretation of innovation and relevance of research with this quote:

‘A university is a place […] whither students come from every quarter for

every kind of knowledge; it is the place to which a thousand schools make

contributions; in which the intellect may safely range and speculate. It is a

place where enquiry is pushed forward; discoveries verified and perfected,

and error exposed, by the collision of mind with mind, and knowledge

with knowledge.’2

This quote is actually not by Wilhelm von Humboldt, but a kindred spirit from this

island, John Henry Newman, the founder of the National University of Ireland, later

UCD, and author of 'The idea of a university' of 1852. Newman is the second big

name connected to the foundational myths of the modern university, and we should

give this educational reformer from these islands his due in this context. The quote

certainly is in a Humboldtian spirit (though it is an open question whether their views

are more antithetical or more complementary), and Boulton and Lucas immediately

after mentioning Newman turn to Wilhelm von Humboldt and invoke his ideals,

formulated 40 years earlier.


6

2 Quoted from: Geoffrey Boulton, Colin Lucas, What are universities for? League of European ResearchUniversities (LERU) Position paper, September 2008, p. 3. Accessible at:http://www.leru.org/index.php/public/publications/publications-2002-2009/.


A second reason why Humboldt is of interest today is that he is an inspirational figure

for university reformers and anyone who thinks about the roles of universities in a

time of crisis. In 1809 and 1810 he was head of the Prussian education system for only

16 months as a kind of junior minister, and in this short period he prepared and pushed

through a root and branch reform of the whole Prussian educational system, from

primary level to secondary level to the universities, based on the aspirations of the

Enlightenment and a utopia of free and universal education; a reform which would

have profound and lasting effects for centuries well beyond his native Prussia and

Germany. He was also highly creative in a time of scant resources and a contracting

economy: his suggestion to locate teaching and research in the same institution and

to deeply intermesh the two was partly making a virtue out of a necessity, as the

impoverished Prussian state could simply not afford to establish academies for science

separate from teaching institutions like the French. University presidents and deans

will also be interested to hear that he resigned mainly because of a controversy over

funding. Humboldt felt passionately that for the protection of the autonomy of

universities they needed to become more independent from government money. He

was arguing that the new university needed big endowments, which effectively meant

land in the Mark Brandenburg, and that got him into conflict with the vested interests

of the local landed gentry, the Prussian Junkers.

Equally important for us today is, thirdly, the historical context of Humboldt’s reform:

the comprehensive Bildung he was advocating as the prime task of universities was

decidedly aimed at society and not just at the individual, and a society in urgent need

of reform. His question was: what contribution can education make to the renewal

of a country and to lifting the spirit of a people that had just lost their sovereignty

to the most powerful European nation and to the most dangerous leader in Europe

– Napoleon; a nation that was experiencing an occupation and was no longer in

command of its destiny. He was, in short, looking to education for the country to

reinvent itself, restore its sense of direction and purpose.



7


Finally, there is a fourth and rather selfish reason to look to Humboldt: it gives me

an opportunity tonight to talk about the culture and the epoch that a lot of my

research is about, and I hope that you will indulge me. After all, in order to be

credible our engagement for the Humanities as a whole needs to be grounded in our

disciplinary expertise (a theme to which I will return).

In this talk, I want to demonstrate that the Humboldtian ideals are neither dead nor

irrelevant, but that there is a reformulation of these ideals for our time which offers

the Humanities challenges, but also plenty of opportunities. I will use this discussion

to show what we as a research community and as a society can and must expect from

the Humanities (and for a large part of this audience it means: what do we

expect from ourselves!). I also want to use this opportunity to situate within

this landscape institutes such as this which have the twin objectives of promoting

cross-and interdisciplinary work and engaging Humanities research with wider public

debate. This is my structure:

I. Introduction

II. Humboldt’s ideals today

III. Interdisciplinarity in Horizon 2020

IV. A taster: Europe in a changing world

V. What can Irish society expect from the Humanities?

II. Humboldt’s Ideals Today

Humboldt’s idealistic propositions are known today mostly in the form of a number

of catchy slogans, which he distilled with great political acumen from more

comprehensive theories mainly from the German theologian Friedrich

Schleiermacher (which is one of the reasons why we should perhaps better speak of

the Humboldt ideas as a foundational myth). They are:

➢ Unity and differentiation of knowledge

➢ Unity of teaching and research

➢ Solitude and freedom of the researcher


8


Solitude and Freedom of the Researcher

This is the most misunderstood and controversial of the Humboldtian ideas, and I

shall therefore start my discussion with it. 'The lone scholar' working in solitude has

become a bit of a Feindbild, a bogeyman in recent debates that promote the

desirability and necessity of collaborative work, though the bulk of research

excellence in the Humanities is done by individuals. I think we should avoid and

ostracize the term ‘lone scholar’, as it suggests isolation

and withdrawal from the world, and use 'single

researcher' instead. ‘Lone scholar’ has asocial, antisocial,

even pathological connotations. Melancholia comes to

mind, the archetypal affliction of the learned, the

brooding thinker, the doubter.

We might think of images of the most famous isolated

and self-doubting scholar of world literature, a university

professor who enters into a pact with very dark forces

indeed to overcome his isolation. The opening

monologue of Goethe's Faust takes place in a typical

traditional ideas space, a university professor’s study as

the locus classicus of melancholia, ’a lofty-arched, narrow,

Gothic chamber’.

Enlightenment discourse shunned the melancholic as an

enemy of society, who had a dark view of the world, and

refused to contribute to the De humani corporis fabrica,

Vesalius progress of society and humanity. I found this

illustration of the skeleton as thinker, with the iconic

gesture of the melancholic in one of the earlier

promotional materials for the Trinity Long Room Hub.



9

Melancholia 1, Dürer

Faust’s Monologue,Rembrandt


That is neither our view of scholarship nor was it

Humboldt’s. For him, as already indicated above, solitude

did not mean at all that the scholar should not interact

with his community of discourse or indeed with society.

Just the opposite. Humboldt's academy was very sociable,

fostering intellectual curiosity beyond your chosen

subject, making the studium generale - in our days, Broad

Curriculum - a core element of university education,

encouraging the theologian to take a course in

geography and the physicist to go to lectures in drama

studies. It also certainly does not mean not engaging in the kind of cross-disciplinary

dialogue Horizon 2020 is encouraging and organising. To illustrate what it means

allow me a short personal reminiscence to a formative experience I had as an

undergraduate during my year as a visiting student here in Ireland. It took place in

a long established and venerable educational institution in the heart of Dublin.

In those days we would go for a pint after the library closed, and sometimes a

recently appointed young lecturer in Philosophy would come with us. One evening

we challenged him on his research in a typical undergraduate mix of naivety and

provocative boldness with the question: ‘Do you

think anything you write about is useful to

anyone?’ He responded ‘Sometimes I fear it

might’. This is not an answer with which you

would impress governments, funding agencies

or even governing bodies of universities, and it

was, of course, half given in jest. It is an answer

open to misinterpretation, but it is also one that

commands respect, when you think about it. It

was, in other words, a true philosopher’s answer.


10

De humani corporis fabrica,Vesalius

O’Neill’s on Suffolk St.


Intellectual curiosity, driven by the passion of enquiry, regardless where it leads to,

regardless of the consequences, is a formidable intellectual power of the first rate,

one that we can and must expect from our Humanities scholars (as indeed from all

scholars). This kind of solitude, the one that keeps you awake at night, chained to

your desk or the laboratory table, is the driving force that makes people world

leaders in their fields and gets them coveted European Research Council grants. And

indeed the philosopher who gave this answer was not one who spent his days in the

pub, but has today one of the most prestigious chairs in philosophy in Oxford and is

a true world leader in his area of philosophy. Innovation, the buzz word of recent

times, is by its nature unpredictable and often serendipitous, and deeply depends on

individuals that are driven by their curiosity! What solitude means however, in this

context, is that in order to fully focus on your research questions, you have to be

protected from outside pressures and you have to have the right to withdraw, to a

degree and temporarily, from those aspects of the world that are not related to your

work; that is a fundamental requirement of all research and should not be mixed up

with a disinterest for society or the well being of one’s people.

As a complimentary – and not antagonistic - process, agenda setting by stakeholders

from outside academia is also very necessary (and I will come to that later), but we

need to remind ourselves that foresight exercises that define the research questions

we have to tackle can get it badly wrong. For example, Roosevelt’s 1937 Commission

to advise on the most likely innovations of the next 30 years missed, among other

things, nuclear energy, lasers, computers, xerox, jet engines, radar, antibiotics and

the genetic code. For that reason it is very encouraging that the ERC grants which

support brilliant individuals across all fields without being prescriptive as to their

research topic and with excellence as the only criterion have been given a prominent

place and a doubling of its budget in the Horizon 2020 proposals.

And freedom? ‘The pursuit of truth wherever it may lead to’ alluded to above is of

course also the definition of academic freedom, which for Humboldt, a liberal



11


academic in the Prussian absolutist state, was a prime concern – as it is for us today.

And his insistence on freedom as a core academic value and a prerequisite for

excellent research does extend, for him and for us, to the institution, and includes

institutional autonomy and the principle of self-governance.

Unity of Teaching and Research

Research-led teaching: this is the best known of the Humboldtian principles and the

one that you find reference to in the strategic plans of every self-respecting university.

It is the ideal of the teacher-scholar who ensures in his/her teaching that the students

participate in the intellectual excitement of discovery, who treats them as equals in

terms of their curiosity and intelligence and organizes a mutual process of learning.

Though this is an ideal that we all subscribe to and that we strive to realize, the

realities of the modern mass university and ever increasing staff-student ratios makes

this ideal increasingly difficult to attain, certainly at undergraduate level. But in this

respect I see an opportunity in the much maligned Bologna reforms and a role for

institutes such as this, as the shift towards level 9 and 10, towards more taught

graduate programmes and research postgraduates allows a more intensive

interaction with the next generation of researchers. In fact the increasing number of

research groups fostered within externally funded projects offer great opportunities

to bring together doctoral students, postdoctoral fellows and senior researchers,

working on common problems. Graduate programmes and doctoral schools such as

our Digital Arts and Humanities Structured PhD Programme also offer great potential

in this respect. In this building we give the centrality of the education of the next

generation expression in the study spaces on the fourth floor: the most inspiring views

of the campus are reserved for our PhD students from the Hub Schools.

But if I think of the unity of teaching and research in terms of what we as a society can

and should expect from the Humanities, I think first and foremost of the kind of Arts

and Humanities graduates and their competencies that are the ‘product’ of an

integrated approach to education. Our graduates are a reflection of our aspirations


12


and our potential as researchers. In arguing against a narrow definition of specific skill

sets as the desired outcome of university education, Geoffrey Crossick, the Chair of

our Institute Board, rightly observed: ‘Universities are educating students for jobs that

have not yet been invented’.3 For that reason alone we need to emphasize generic

skills such as critical reasoning, independence of mind, creativity and problem-solving

as central to our educational mission. But even more important is the contribution

these competencies make to the notion of responsible citizenship. Martha M.

Nussbaum has written most eloquently on that, and so has John Laver, the first Chair

of our Institute Board, in describing ‘two distinctive attributes’ of Arts and Humanities

graduates: ‘reflectiveness, leading to a thoughtful tolerance that is one of the

hallmarks of a civilized culture, and a sense of being rooted in a cultural and historical

context’.4 Let me add to this the intercultural competence that comes with the ability

to read other cultures and negotiate their ‘otherness’ and in this the importance of

language skills, if a very short plug for my own subject and School is allowed!

We are all aware of the high employability and attractiveness of Arts and Humanities

graduates across all fields of employment. Let me just mention as one prominent

example the CEO of Hewlett Packard between 1999 and 2005, Carly Fiorina, the only

woman to date to have led a Fortune 20 company, who has a BA in philosophy and

medieval history from Stanford (as well as an MBA). When asked in an interview at

the world economic forum in Davos who the most influential business guru in her life

was, she responded ‘Hegel’ – incidentally one of the first professors of the university

Humboldt founded.

On this front as well we should not and must not be defensive when it comes to the

expectations that the Arts and Humanities sector has to contribute to jobs and



13

3 Geoffrey Crossick, The future is more than just tomorrow: Higher education, the economy and the longerterm. Report for the Universities UK’s From Recession to Recovery Project 2010. Accessed at:http://www.universitiesuk.ac.uk/Publications/Pages/FromRecessionToRecovery2010.aspx .

4 John Laver, ‘The humanities: afterthought or cynosure?’, in Ronald Crawford (ed.), A Future for ScottishHigher Education. Committee of Scottish Higher Education Principals 1997, pp 151-161, p. 157.


growth. I would like to mention some figures from two recent reports that pretty

much speak for themselves in this respect. The 2006 EU report on Economy of

Culture in Europe noted that the Creative and Cultural Industries in 2003 across the

then EU 15 generated 654 billion euro for the economy, considerably more than

the IT sector and the automobile industry, traditionally seen as a key motor for

growth.5 The average qualification and earning potential in this sector is higher

than in others and the sector also grows significantly faster than others. In Ireland,

the 2010 HEA report Playing to our Strengths. The role of the Arts, Humanities and

Social Sciences and Implications for Public Policy estimates that the wider Arts

Sector, the Creative Industries and the Entertainment (Media and Film) industry

together contributed in 2006/7 over 11 billion euro to the Irish economy.6 With a

view to the Creative Technologies and the IT sector we need to note that

technological advances are in many cases driven by developments in the generation

of creative content, for which Humanities graduates are largely responsible. The

growing importance of the Digital Humanities also needs to be noted here, with

Trinity Long Room Hub projects being leaders in Ireland in this field such as the big

FP7 funded digital infrastructure project CENDARI led by Dr Jennifer Edmond or

the European Digital Humanities network DARIAH, for which Prof Susan

Schreibman is the Irish representative.

Unity and Diversity of Knowledge

This third Humboldtian principle might sound like the most idealistic and most

remote. It indeed is a Romantic idea, a reaction to increasing specialisation, the

fragmentation of knowledge and the modern division of labour during the saddle

epoch. In today’s highly differentiated research landscape this Humboldtian ideal of

overcoming artificial boundaries between the fields of knowledge reemerges in the


14

5 See The Economy of Culture in Europe. KEA Study prepared for the European Commission 2006, p. 6.Accessed at: http://www.keanet.eu/ecoculture/studynew.pdf.6 Playing to Our Strengths. The Role of the Arts, Humanities and Social Sciences and Implications for PublicPolicy. HEA report 2010, p. 44. Accessed at: http://www.hea.ie/files/files/file/HEA%20FAHSS%20Report.pdf


call for cross- and interdisciplinary work that draws together different competencies

and specializations in order to tackle problems and questions that cannot be

addressed by single disciplines. Vartan Gregorian, the President of the Carnegie

Foundation and former President of Brown University and the New York Public

Library wrote in 2004:

‘We must reform higher education to reconstruct the unity and value of

knowledge. […] The complexity of the world requires us to have a better

understanding of the relationships and connections between all fields

that intersect and overlap – economics and sociology, law and

psychology, business and history, physics and medicine, anthropology and

political science.’7

In this sense I see the Trinity Long Room Hub and similar institutions which

encourage and foster interdisciplinary work as places where we can reenergize this

Humboldtian ideal, reformulate and realise it for our time. The Hub is constituted by

the (currently) seven Hub Schools and the Library representing a wealth of

disciplinary perspectives which they bring to collaborative undertakings. It is the

excellence of our researchers from across these seven Schools in their individual

disciplines together with their interdisciplinary appetite and experience, which forms

the basis of any serious interdisciplinary practice, which must be rooted in disciplinary

scholarship. Steven Jay Gold argues that there are two basic types of researchers,

hedgehogs, who pursue just one research field and methodology with great effect

throughout their careers, and foxes, who roam around curiously and try out a variety

of approaches and topics.8 Myra Strober, however, points out that we all must be

hedgehogs first before we can become foxes, both in terms of our career profiles and

in terms of the credibility of what we have to contribute to the interdisciplinary



15

7 Vartan Gregorian, ‘Colleges must reconstruct the unity of knowledge’, in Chronicle of Higher EducationNr 4 June 2004, B 12.8 Cf. Stephen Jay Gold, The hedgehog, the fox and the magister’s pox, New York 2003.


dialogue.9 Given this I am tempted to suggest adopting our neighbouring foxes in

the Provost’s garden as patron animals of the Hub, only that they don’t easily meet

one of the important criteria of the Hub’s success – visibility!

We must also be conscious that cross-disciplinary or even interdisciplinary work is a

very difficult business and that these buzz words are being branded around rather

too easily and too frequently. And we must not pretend that cross- or

interdisciplinarity is the new panacea – it is neither new - the first conversation I ever

had with a university professor when I started my studies in Tübingen in the late

1970s was about the virtues of interdisciplinarity - nor is anyone suggesting that all

or the majority of our work should be of an interdisciplinary nature. Finally we must

be cognisant of and sensitive to the impediments to deep collaboration across

disciplines. There is interesting research on this. Myra Strober, for example,

convincingly argues that the biggest difficulties that had to be overcome were of

an intercultural nature – if we see diverse disciplines as possessing not only distinct

methodologies, but also different cultures of communication. She argues that

participants in successful and productive cross-disciplinary research groups had to

show great sensitivity and tolerance not only towards specialist terminology and

different jargons, but to rules ‘with regard to a wide variety of subjects including

level of civility, degree of democratic decision-making, style of presentations, style

of discussions of texts, and style of leadership’.10 My own limited experience in an

interdisciplinary research group as a post-doc at the Kulturwissenschaftliche Institut

in Essen is very much in line with such observations.

But whatever the difficulties, it is clearly the case that a lot of the most exciting,

most innovative and most relevant research is happening at the edges of disciplines

and at zones of contacts between the Sciences. That is reason enough for expecting


16

9 Myra H. Strober, ‘Habits of the Mind: Challenges for Multidisiciplinary Engagement’, in SocialEpistemology, 20, Nr 3-4, 2006, pp 315-331, p. 324. See also her book Interdisciplinary Conversations.Challenging Habits of Thought, Stanford 2011.10 Strober 2006, p. 327.


from the Humanities sustained engagement in this regard. More importantly still

and absolutely compelling is however that a lot of the formidable challenges facing

the world today can only be tackled in interdisciplinary cooperation.

III. Interdisciplinarity in Horizon 2020

That is the point of departure for Priority 3 of Horizon 2020, the EU Framework funding

programme 2014 to 2020, which is organized around a number of societal challenges

that are to be addressed through cross-disciplinary research. It is divided into seven

themes.11 Nobody looking at these would disagree that these are formidable challenges

not only for Europe but globally, and seeing them assembled together here makes

already a pretty convincing case for the setting of research agendas from outside

academia. The two last challenges are explicitly identified as those to which the Social

Sciences and Humanities can make central contributions. In fact, Challenge 6 - Europe

in a changing world - which offers a lot of potential for the Arts and Humanities, was

only recently added after intensive pressure from the Social Sciences and Humanities

lobby. The overall budget volume of this Priority 3 is likely to be over 34 billion euro

with around 4 billion of this for the Humanities and Social Sciences. This in itself is an

interesting and indicative proportionality, but still a lot of money over five years for

the Humanities. Commissioner Geoghegan-Quinn has repeatedly issued reassurances

that Humanities and Social Sciences perspectives will be fully integrated into all research

pillars of Horizon 2020 and not just the last two. However, if one looks at the thematic

descriptions of Challenges 1-5 so far, one finds no reference at all to the role the Arts

and Humanities can and should play. This is deeply worrying, not because the

Humanities want a bigger chunk of the cake, but because the challenges identified

cannot be effectively investigated and addressed without their perspectives being an

integral element of the research set-up and research process.



17

11 The Horizon 2020 societal challenges are 1. Health, demographic change and wellbeing; 2. Food security,sustainable agriculture, forestry and marine research; 3. Secure, clean and efficient energy; 4. Smart, greenand integrated transport; 5. Climate action, resource efficiency and raw materials; 6. Europe in a Changingworld: Inclusive, innovative and reflective societies; 7. Secure and societies – protecting freedom and securityof Europe and its citizens.


All these challenges have to be addressed not only at the level of technology, but

crucially at that of attitudes and motivations. Tackling each of them, be it health,

food and agriculture, energy, transport or climate action depends decisively on

investigating underlying social, cultural and behavioural dimensions. In each of these

challenges it is, after all, human behaviour that has created the problems and human

behaviour in all its complexity is, alongside with technological innovations, also one

key to their solution. Health, demography and well-being, for example, cannot be

properly investigated without looking at issues such as definitions of ‘health’ and

‘mental health’, the link between wellbeing and belonging, the role of creativity

and the arts for our sense of well-being, attitudes towards ageing or mechanisms of

inclusion and exclusion around age or mental health. Equally topics like food

security, energy, transport or climate need research into, for example, habits of

consumption, attitudes towards waste, the cultural significance of food, attitudes

towards nature and landscape across different cultures, symbolisms and emotions

invested in nature and environmental debates, the competition between individual

rights versus collective responsibilities and, ultimately, the human resistance to or

ability for change.12

Negotiations about the formulation of the final shape of Horizon 2020 are still

ongoing, and via the Coimbra Group and ECHIC, the European Consortium of

Humanities Institutes and Centres, of which Poul Holm is currently the President, the

Trinity Long Room Hub is involved together with others such as the EUA, LERU,

ALLEA or the Academia Europeana, in a sustained and intensive lobbying effort to

ensure that due prominence is given to the Humanities aspects of these challenges

and to involve their representatives in all stages of the shaping of their agenda.


18

12 For a comprehensive discussion of this see Social Sciences and Humanities: Essential Fields for EuropeanResearch and in Horizon 2020. LERU advice paper Nr 11, June 2012, Accessed at:http://www.leru.org/files/publications/LERU_AP_11_SSH_Essential_fields.pdf.


IV. A Taster – Europe in a Changing World

Before I come to the close let me give you a little example of the potential of

Humanities research to contribute to a better understanding of the present

challenges under the ‘Europe in a changing world’ theme. They have to make a

crucially important contribution by grounding the acute crisis and our reaction to it

in deeper historical and cultural contexts. Let me do this with reference to a topic

that exercises most of Europe and most of Ireland on a regular basis these days.

This recent illustration of German Chancellor Merkel in the New Statesman is not

operating with crude Nazi references such as a moustache and a swastika.

Nonetheless the Terminator Schwarzenegger alluded to here is, of course, also an

Austrian like Hitler, and we should not forget that the term leader is quite neutral

in English, while its German translation is not at all. Discussions about the Euro crisis

are currently dominated either by an undue narrow focus on the economic issues, or,

where history and different traditions are invoked, by the reactivation of old

simplistic national stereotypes and Feindbilder such as this. What is lacking is, on the

one hand, a historic appreciation of the enormous achievements of the European



19

‘Europe’s most dangerous leader’, New Statesmen, 20 June 2012


Union since the end of World War II (which is one of the reasons why the decision

by the Oslo academy to award the Nobel Peace Prize for 2012 to the EU is so

significant), and, on the other hand, a willingness and ability to get beyond the

national stereotypes and investigate into the different historical experiences and

mentalities across Europe that form the basis of current attitudes, convictions, policy

decisions and blind spots.

I recently heard a talk by a prominent European central banker in which he proposed

solutions to the Euro crisis like the fiscal and financial instruments needed to keep liquidity

going and restore the confidence of the market etc., strictly sticking to the economy, as

you would expect. In a smaller, semi-private circle beforehand, however, he took a very

different perspective: reflecting on the German refusal to agree to Eurobonds and burden

sharing he referred to the fact that Germany, in terms of its cultural imprint, was a

predominantly Protestant country and that Protestants, unlike Catholics, did not believe

in forgiveness and a fresh start, facilitated by confession, but rather in atonement through

a long period of suffering and hard work. Let me assure you he was not German, but he

spoke knowledgably, respectfully and in a genuine attempt to make plausible the current

German policy choices beyond the familiar economic arguments.


20

‘Not Ze Munny Ze Disziplin’, Peter Schrank, December 2011


Whether he knew it or not, with this analysis he was referring, among other things,

to one of the most influential theories of mentality, Max Weber’s 1904/5 The

Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism, in which Weber linked the Calvinist

dogma of redemption in heaven through hard work and success in this world to the

successes of northern, Protestant countries in the emerging capitalist market. That

Merkel is the daughter of a Protestant pastor of course helps to make this argument

plausible. Why did he not mention this cultural dimension of his analysis in his public

talk? I suppose he did not feel that he had the competence and authority to speak

out in this way. But we Humanities scholars have, and we should feel that we should

speak out. And we do.

Joep Leerssen, Professor of Modern European Literature in Amsterdam and a member

of our Institute Board, for example, led a big externally funded research project on the

cultural construction and literary representation of national characters. We all have

those stereotypes in our heads whether we want it or not and they are only too readily

activated. His team traced their discursive history with a view to demonstrating that

they were not based on empirical fact, but rather shaped by a discursive and rhetorical

environment which needs to be carefully reconstructed in its historic and cultural

contexts to be understood.13 Stereotypes are to a large part dominated by processes

of ‘othering’, interpretations from outside with a long imagological tradition of

ascribing national characteristics. To come back to Merkel, we expect her to be

associated with the militarist Prussian tradition like in the next cartoon.

But if we see her, the Northern German from the GDR, being pressed into an ill-fitting

(culturally speaking) Bavarian dirndl, bringing an unbecoming German brew of fiscal

union and treaty changes to the European table, we immediately associate the

Oktoberfest. But did you realize that this caricature is also quoting the oldest written



21

13 Cf. Manfred Beller, Joep Leerssen (eds.), Imagology. The cultural construction and literary representation ofnational characters. A critical survey, Amsterdam, New York 2007.


source on the Germans, the Roman historian Tacitus

who, in a classic example of ‘othering’, ascribed

to the barbaric Germanic tribes a propensity for

heavy drinking?

Exploring European identities in the dynamics

between self-image and ‘othering’ is just one

aspect of an immensely rich field of enquiry which

is necessary to better understand how European

nations and people and the different layers of

national and European identities relate to each

other; research that can contribute to a better appreciation of different traditions

across Europe and improved intercultural understanding. A lot of research into this

is going on here in Trinity. The seven Hub Schools, the Library and Institute Board

have just agreed on a first Hub priority research theme, which will also be one of the

College Research themes, on ‘Identities in transformation’. This brings together many

research strands from across the Hub Schools and

will allow us, in the years to come, to make a

concerted and considerable contribution to current

debates in Ireland and in Europe.

V. What can Irish Society expect from

the Humanities?

Arts and Humanities matter. But how de we know

that? We as humans are fundamentally meaning

seeking creatures and as such we need the reflection

of our questions and aspirations in critical reasoning

and open debate, and the refraction of our highest

hopes and deepest fears in art and culture. We need

this as much as we need food on the table and the


22

‘Frau Merkel serves up her strongbrew’, Gerald Scarfe, December 2011


air that we breathe. Imagine, for a moment, a world without music, visual art, drama,

film or poetry, a world in which we could not make links with the past of our people

and position ourselves in relation to tradition, or a world in which we could not

connect with other cultures and unfamiliar people via our common reservoir of artistic,

cultural or philosophical expressions of our shared humanity – it is a world that I cannot

imagine, regardless how hard I try, as it would quite simply not be a world inhabited

by humans. Or, to make a more direct connection with politics, allow me to quote my

colleague Darryl Jones from the School of English, who earlier this year, from this

lectern at a conference he organised on the idea of the university, so poignantly

reminded us: 'When the Fascists take over, when the dictators move in, whom do they

take first? The artists, the writers, the journalists, the intellectuals. That's how

dangerous they are'.

These are extremes, but as such they crystallize our thinking. But before I declare

the Hub an anti-Fascist bulwark (which I think you will not find expressed in the fine

symbolism of its architecture), let's take it down a notch or two and return to the

Ireland of today.

What can Irish society expect from the Arts and Humanities, especially in the present

crisis which is after all, first and foremost, a crisis of attitudes, of expectations and

of values? We can expect and must indeed demand that the Arts and Humanities

involve themselves and make themselves heard, and I see it as a prime task of an

institute such as this that it fosters and enables involvement in public debate,

develops a culture of engagement with the big questions that are facing us today

and in doing so demonstrates the difference our research makes. This is not easy

and implies, among other things, a readiness to embrace new formats of delivery and

engagement, and to cultivate a language that is not only understood by our peers,

to refrain from the jargon and the delight in hermetic language which you

sometimes find in academic discourse.



23


We must be ambitious in this, but must also be realistic and not overburden the

Arts, Culture or the Humanities by expecting them to fill the ethical void in public

life and singlehandedly rescue us from the despondency that the roller coaster of

boom and bust has left us with. This would just be the flipside of declaring the

irrelevancy of the Humanities that one hears occasionally, equally wrong and

equally dangerous. Such illusionary expectations would amount to a reinstallation

of the artists, the philosophers and the cultural commentators as high priests of

culture, burdened with the impossible task to replace, in a secularised world, the

certainties of religion. The most idealistic versions of the Bildung idea around 1800

aspired to that, and their highly ambivalent legacy teaches us to be cautious in

this respect.

But we can reflect, for example, what civic responsibility and active citizenship entails

and requires today for the ‘renewal of the Republic’, to borrow a phrase from the

President. What we can expect and demand from the Humanities is leadership in

the debate against the pragmatism, materialism, disillusionment and widespread

cynicism that we encounter. Over the next few months, the Trinity Long Room Hub

will, for example, spearheaded by the Department of Classics, make a contribution

to this debate by organising a series of consultations with men and women from

various strata of society on such questions.

And we will contribute to the upcoming decade of commemorations, which will re-

examine the formative period of war, revolution and nation-building, the memory

contests around its remembrance in Ireland and Europe and their impact on the way

Irish and European societies interpret and represent themselves.

The upcoming Irish Presidency of the EU and the fortieth anniversary of Irish

accession to the EU in 2013 will also give us important opportunities, which we will


24


grasp, to discuss how Irish society positions and redefines itself in relation to the

European project and the European reality. Together with our Social Sciences sister

institute in the Faculty, the Institute for International Integration Studies or IIIS,

we are planning a Trinity Forum on Europe. This will be two interlinked parallel

lecture series with a mix of TCD contributors and prominent guest speakers in

which we will investigate questions of European identity and Ireland’s position

towards it from the complementary perspectives of the Humanities and Social

Sciences, thus instigating a dialogue across this particular divide. We will also

organise a Trinity Week Symposium with the working title ‘Conflicting Directions,

Competing Identities: Ireland and Europe’. I am looking forward to discussing and

developing many more ideas with you in the coming weeks and months on

how best to energise these necessary debates by bringing academic and public

discourse together.

I am coming to a close. I warmly thank you for coming tonight to the Trinity Long

Room Hub. This extraordinary building is a huge asset, as it provides a prominent and

symbolic space to bring scholars across the disciplines together and to connect

academic debate with the wider public. Against all those concerns about the

marginalisation of our subjects, putting it here in the middle of the historic campus

is a bold statement made by the University and its leadership two years ago about

the centrality of the Arts and Humanities to its mission and its contribution to society.

The striking modernity of this building enters into an exciting dialogue with its

classical surroundings and expresses the interaction between the past and the

present that the Humanities enable and enact. From each of its many windows it

opens new and unexpected vistas onto the campus and in this symbolizes the multi-

perspectivity and freshness of insight which interdisciplinary dialogue offers. It is our

responsibility as an Arts and Humanities community to make sure that what is going

in inside is just as visible and striking!



25


I think it has become clear that the question posed in the subtitle of this address

was not meant defensively, as in so many debates about the Arts and Humanities.

It was meant as a challenge. It is a challenge - to all of us. It is a challenge that

requires a lot of imagination, commitment, team spirit, sustained effort and

courage. But it is needed! And it is worth it. Expect a lot. Expect more. Watch this

space! Create this space!

Thank you!


26


Jürgen Barkhoff

From Humboldt to Horizon 2020


The Trinity Long Room HubArts and Humanities Research InstituteTrinity College DublinDublin 2Tel: +353-1-8963174www.tcd.ie/longroomhub

Ju?rgen Barkhoff Cover 07/11/2012 15:17 Page 1

what can we expect from the humanities? from humboldt to ... · reformer wilhelm von humboldt ....

Documents