Justin Smith-Ruiu at Wondercabinet:
Higher education is no longer expanding; it is contracting, or transforming to the point of total discontinuity with what it had once been. It is only natural that this transformation should bring with it a rediscovery of the historical fact that there is nothing intrinsically “elite” about reading Homer or Shakespeare. Yorkshire coal miners used to do it, together, with great joy and satisfaction. It was a lie and a betrayal on the part of the hermeneuticists of suspicion to have told their students—and their deans—that humanistic inquiry is, in its essence, anything but democratic. The humanities are democratic precisely because they do not come down to us through blood ties, but must be cultivated anew over the course of an individual life. As Seneca said: “If there is any good in philosophy, it is this—that it never looks into pedigrees. All men, if traced back to their original source, spring from the gods.” (Of course, since the early 20th century the dominant strain of Anglophone philosophy has sought to distance itself from the humanities and to find its niche somewhere closer to the positive sciences—yet another case of hoverflies sneaking into the beehive. But this has been a futile effort—one which, again, we’ll have to address on another occasion.)
more here.
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