Among the aspects of today’s university, in the context of which the expression crisis is more than a mere cliché, I would like to emphasize one in particular that, though I certainly did not discover it, has hardly received sufficient attention in the public discussion. It is related to, but in no way coincides with, that general phenomenon known as the divergence between self-cultivation and specialized training. It is not easy to speak of it, and the vagueness and thesis-like style of this improvised attempt must be excused. It bears on the question of whether in the contemporary university culture still succeeds in those pursuits where its concept is thematically and traditionally maintained, that is, in the so-called human sciences1—whether in general the student of the human sciences can still gain in any measure that kind of intellectual and spiritual experience that the concept of culture meant and that inheres in the significance of the very objects he studies. There is much supporting the view that precisely the concept of science, which arose after the decline of grand philosophy and since then has enjoyed a kind of monopoly, undermines the culture to which it lays claim by virtue of its monopoly. Scientific discipline is an intellectual form of what Goethe as well as Hegel called for under the name of ‘externalization’:2 the devotion of spirit to something opposed and alien to it and through which alone spirit attains freedom. Anyone who has shirked this discipline through dilettantish, impulsive thinking and practiced gossip will easily fall below the level of what had aroused his legitimate aversion: the method heteronomously imposed upon him. But this discipline and its corresponding conception of science—which in the meantime has become the contrary of what Fichte, Schelling, and Hegel understood by the term—has acquired a fatal preponderance to the detriment of its contrary aspect, a preponderance that cannot be revoked by fiat. Spontaneity, imagination, freedom toward the subject matter, despite all explanations to the contrary, are so restricted by the omnipresent question “but is it science?” that even in its native regions spirit is threatened with being dispirited.3 The function of the concept of science has become inverted. The often invoked methodological neatness, universal confirmation, the consensus of competent scholars, the verifiability of all assertions, even the logical rigor of the lines of reasoning, is not spirit: the criterion of watertight validity always also works against spirit. Where the conflict against the unregimented understanding is already decided, dialectic and culture, the internal process between subject and object as it was conceived in the age of Humboldt, cannot arise. Organized human science is a stock-taking and a reflective form of spirit rather than its proper life; it wants to come to know spirit as something dissimilar from itself and elevates that dissimilarity into a maxim. But if human science tries to usurp spirit’s place, then spirit vanishes, even in science itself. This happens as soon as science is considered the only instrument of culture and the organization of society sanctions no other. The more profoundly science senses that it does not provide what it promises, the more it tends to manifest an intolerance toward the spirit that is unlike it, and the more science insists on its own privilege. The disappointment of many students of the human sciences in the first semesters is due not only to their naiveté but also to the fact that the human sciences have renounced that element of naiveté, of the immediate relation to the object without which spirit cannot live; the human sciences’ lack of self-reflection is no less naive. Even when their worldview opposes positivism, they have secretly fallen under the spell of the positivistic way of thinking, that of reified consciousness. Discipline, in accord with an overall tendency of society, becomes the taboo placed on anything that does not stubbornly reproduce what already exists: but precisely that would be the definition of spirit. In a foreign university a student of art history was told: “You are not here to think, but to do research.” In Germany, indeed, out of respect for a tradition of which little more remains than that respect, such sentiments are not expressed so bluntly, but here, too, they have not left working habits unaffected.
The reification of consciousness, the deployment of its ingrained conceptual apparatuses often preempts its objects and obstructs culture, which would be one with the resistance to reification. The network in which organized human science has enmeshed its objects tends to become a fetish; anything that is different becomes superfluous, and science has no place for it. The philosophically dubious cult of primordiality practiced by the Heideggerian school would hardly have so fascinated students in the human sciences if it did not address a genuine need. Every day they see that scientific thinking, instead of elucidating the phenomena, readily makes do with the shape into which each phenomenon has already been deformed. Yet because the very societal process that reifies thinking goes unrecognized, they in turn make primordiality itself into a field, into an allegedly radical and therefore specialized question. What reified scientific consciousness desires in place of its subject matter is, however, something societal: to be protected by the institutionalized branch of science that such consciousness invokes as its sole authority as soon as anyone dares to remind it of what it has forgotten. This is the implicit conformism of human science. Whereas it pretends to cultivate intellectual-spiritual people, it is rather precisely these people whom it breaks. They install within themselves a more or less voluntary self-censor. This leads them first of all not to say anything that lies outside the established rules of conduct in their science; gradually they lose the ability even to perceive such things. Even when confronted with spiritual creations, precisely those who are academically involved with them find it genuinely difficult to think of something different than what corresponds to a tacit and hence all the more powerful scientific ideal.
The repressive power of this ideal is in no way restricted simply to pedagogical or technical disciplines. The dictate exercised here by practical utility has also engulfed those disciplines that cannot claim any such utility. For the dispiriting is immanent in the concept of science that has inexorably expanded ever since science and philosophy broke away from one another, due to each and to the detriment of each. Even where academic culture is engaged with spiritual matters it unconsciously falls into step4 with a science that takes for its standard what already exists, the factually real and its processing—that facticity with which the vital force of spirit should not content itself. Just how profoundly deprivation of spirit and scientification are intertwined at their roots is manifest in the way that ready-made philosophemes are then imported as an antidote. They are leached into interpretations made in the human sciences in order to lend them the luster they otherwise lack, without such philosophemes being the result of coming to know the spiritual creations themselves. With ridiculous solemnity the same thing is read invariably, again and again, out of them.5
Between spirit and science a vacuum has developed. Not only specialized education but culture itself no longer cultivates. Culture is polarized between the elements of the methodological and the informational. In the face of this the cultivated spirit would be a form of involuntary reaction as much as its own master. Nothing in cultural and educational institutions, not even the universities, offers any support to spirit. While unreflective scientification increasingly ostracizes spirit as a kind of extraneous nonsense, it also entangles itself ever more deeply in the contradiction between the content of its activity and the task it sets itself. If the universities are to change their orientation, then there is no less reason to intervene in the human sciences than in the disciplines they falsely imagine to be backward in spirit.