Nietzsche found no way out from the condition he diagnosed, and it may well be that there is none. The decline of the humanities may be no more than an episode in the decline of the West. The idea that a solution can be found in the academy is silly. A cultural malady that goes all the way back to Socrates is not going to be remedied by anything that is done in floundering 21st-century universities.
If the rot set in with Socrates, then it has had 2500 years to work. The youngest person reading this blog probably went through college at most sixty years ago, a bit more than 2.5% of that span--assuming a more or less linear degradation, shouldn't we all be in the same boat?
ReplyDelete