Humanities: Taking them Seriously

We moderns are living in a condition of cultural schizophrenia. We think of ourselves through humanistic categories such as meaning, subjectivity, selfhood, normativeness, value, social reality, and the like. Indeed, we are humanistic beings, for the humanistic conceptual system is grounded in our being and involved in our constitution as persons as well as in the structure and texture of the lives we live. Yet we insist on placing ourselves under the modern scientific conceptual system and locating ourselves in the world as defined by it. As a result, our culture produces a serious human identity crisis that expresses itself in various forms of alienation and in other personal and social pathologies.