The central problem of the human sciences remains unresolved. Despite the new claims championed within molecular biology, evolutionary psychology, artificial intelligence and the cognitive neurosciences, one of the central organising categories of each of those disciplines – the human – has resisted definition. This resistance has a long history. When Kant asked the last of the four key philosophical questions posed in his Logic of 1800 – ‘Was ist der Mensch?’ – he likely knew that nineteenth-century theory would fail to provide a definitive answer. The category that came to define both the humanities and the human sciences in the German-speaking territories – that of Geist, the inherently un-measurable, unstable and speculative prefix to the Geisteswissenschaften – served only to produce provisional answers that would in turn only give rise to further questions.
Towards the close of the nineteenth century, Wilhelm Dilthey concluded that this resistance to definition was inevitable because the human being is an ineluctably historical being whose attempts at self-understanding are always contingent upon a particular historical perspective and therefore always subject to variation (Dilthey 1991 [1883]). Within the German tradition of philosophical anthropology advanced by Max Scheler (1928) and Helmuth Plessner (1928), among others, and recently taken up in the writings of Hans Blumenberg (2006) and Peter Sloterdijk (2004), the human being is held up as a ‘cultural being’ that is able to survive only because of its non-biological adaptations and technologies. Human nature, these writers insist, is human culture, and the human sciences would thus require a methodology quite different from those of the natural sciences.
This recognition that human nature is, in the last analysis, historical has been foundational to the post-structural turn in the human sciences. The acknowledgment of the radical problem that the question of the human posed underwrote the work of Michel Foucault and Jacques Derrida. Foucault famously argued in The Order of Things that ‘Man, in the analytic of finitude, is a strange empirico-transcendental doublet, since he is a being such that knowledge will be attained in him of what renders all knowledge possible’ (Foucault, 1970: 318). Derrida, in his essay ‘Structure, Sign and Play in the Discourse of the Human Sciences’, described the knotted field of those sciences, one constituted by two ‘absolutely irreconcilable’ modes of interpreting: one that ‘seeks to decipher, dreams of deciphering a truth or an origin which escapes play and the order of the sign’, and the other that ‘affirms play and tries to pass beyond man and humanism, the name of man being the name of that being who, throughout the history of metaphysics or of ontotheology – in other words, throughout his entire history – has dreamed of full presence, the reassuring foundation, the origin and the end of play’ (Derrida, 2001 [1967]: 370–71). Those two opposing desires – one a flight to an imagined ‘before’, and the other a leapfrog over, and hence beyond, the shoulders of ‘man’ – are with the human sciences, still.
The writings of Foucault and Derrida acted as a lightening rod for multiple others to interrogate the old organising categories that had served as the basis for human scientific research in the first half of the twentieth century. Language, reason, history, evidence, testimony, sexual difference, biology and culture: all were subject to profound deformations that fundamentally reshaped the terrain of the human sciences. It was in response to this radical ferment that our predecessors, Arthur Still and Irving Velody, founded History of the Human Sciences in 1988. Through their work, alongside that of James Good, who took over as editor in 1999, and Roger Smith, who has served as an associate editor since the journal began, History of the Human Sciences emerged as one of the central forums in the English-speaking world for reflection upon the constitution and demarcation of this contested field, as well as the wider institutional and political implications of these epistemological deformations. From its inception, the journal recognised that the French and German terms – sciences humaines and die Geisteswissenschaften – had no simple equivalent in the English language, and that the term ‘human sciences’ was already being deployed within the biological sciences to describe attempts to bring together genetics, ethology, communications studies and the neurosciences into an overarching synthesis. In their opening editorial, the editors acknowledged collegial uneasiness around the term, but insisted that the phrase, unlike ‘social sciences’, ‘suggests a critical and historical approach that transcends these specialisms and links their interests with those of philosophy, literary criticism, history, aesthetics, law, and politics’ (Still and Velody, 1988: 1).
In many ways the terminological challenges faced by our predecessors have been superseded. This has occurred for two related reasons. On the one hand, the journal’s success over the last 28 years has established the human sciences as a field, and made clear its intrinsically historical basis. In the last quarter century, the long-standing neglect, on the part of historians and philosophers of science, of the human sciences in comparison with the natural sciences has given way to an investigation of their often intertwined (as well as times opposed) epistemic projects, practices and commitments. On the other hand, the porous boundary between the natural scientific approach pursued in many of the life sciences and the historical approach promoted by this journal has largely dissolved. In recent years, there has been growing acknowledgement, for instance, of the ways that new biological approaches and technologies have helped to reshape our understanding of life and the human (e.g. Landecker, 2010); of the role of material culture in shaping historical practice; and of the close relationship between the sociological and biological projects in the first half of the twentieth century (e.g. Renwick, 2012). In addition, grand – and contestable – claims are now being made for potential inclusion of psychological, evolutionary, and cognitive neuroscientific perspectives within historical analyses (for example, within the field of neuro-history). Whatever one may think of such demands, and certainly they are complicated by the necessarily historical character of those disciplines, it is clear that our working concepts of subjectivity, history, life, emotion, and culture cannot be insulated from developments in psychopharmacology, the neurosciences, bioinformatics, and all those fields gathered under the neologism ‘omics’ (including genomics, proteomics, metabolomics and transcriptomics). Thus while we remain committed to the claim made by the journal’s founding editors, that ‘All reflections in the human sciences seems embedded in history, forming a categorical framework difficult if not impossible to escape from’ (Editorial, 1992: 1), we also recognise that the character of history and the shape of the historical imagination are uncertain. What it might mean to be ‘embedded in history’, then, is subject to on-going reformulation.
We see the contingency and uncertainty that underlies the term ‘human sciences’ not as a source of anxiety but as the grounds for celebration. It provides new points of departure for critical reflection and opens up new opportunities for interdisciplinary collaboration. Certainly, this is reflected by our own disciplinary orientations: an historical geographer of twentieth- and twenty-first century psychiatry, psychology and cognitive neuroscience, who draws upon social and critical theory (Callard); a historian of psychology and psychiatry and their connections to broader cultural history (Hayward); and a Germanist and literary scholar with interests in the history of anthropology, critical theory and psychoanalysis (Nicholls). As incoming editors, we are joined by book reviews editor Chris Millard (a historian of twentieth-century psychiatry), and we have created the new role of web and social media editor (which is filled by Des Fitzgerald, a sociologist with a particular interest in the past and present intersections of the social and life sciences). This year, we launch a new website for the journal (www.histhum.com). Given our interest in how genres, media and technologies are entangled with the kinds of knowledge that the human sciences are able to produce, we are keen to see how the website might help found new connections – between scholars, ideas, methods, practices – in this heterogeneous, interdisciplinary terrain.
We invite all readers both to engage with our website, and offer contributions and ideas about where we might take it. We have also invited a number of academics on to the journal’s advisory editorial board, with the aim of bringing into the journal’s fold a greater proportion of early- and mid-career scholars (many of whose publications are already shifting premises, epistemological starting points and objects of inquiry in the history of the human sciences). We are deeply indebted to the meticulous work of both James Good (as editor) and Sarah Thompson (as editorial assistant) in relation to the journal’s curatorial and substantive contributions. The shape of the history of the human sciences over the last 15 or so years bears the imprint of their visible and invisible labours. We are delighted that James remains a member of the advisory editorial board, and Sarah continues in her editorial role.
As incoming editors, we have been thinking together about how best to articulate our own rules of thumb for the kinds of submissions to the journal that we hope to encourage. We are resolutely committed to continuing the support that the journal has always shown to arguments that might appear risky to the received ideas that underpin particular communities of thought and practice. More prosaically, we welcome manuscripts that address at least one of the modern human sciences, broadly conceived (including psychology, psychiatry, psychoanalysis, history, philosophy, medicine, sociology, geography, anthropology, archaeology, economics, political economy, human biology, physiology, science and technology studies, sexology, the neurosciences, critical theory, literary and cultural theory, linguistics). And of course we welcome engagements with all those domains of knowledge that have a more precarious relationship to, or have been discredited by, current epistemological norms (for example, parapsychology, the racial sciences). By using the qualifying adjective ‘modern’, we register the journal’s tendency to focus on the post-Cartesian period, though we emphasize that we welcome submissions on the pre-modern human sciences (such as Ancient Greek ‘psychology’, medieval medicine etc.) if the approach taken addresses the question of ‘the human’ of the human sciences and/or establishes a dialogue between those sciences and more recent human sciences in terms of particular ontological, epistemological or methodological problematics. Additionally, our hope is that submissions take an interdisciplinary approach – but that authors put pressure on what they believe ‘the interdisciplinary’ connotes by dint of their methods, modes of reading, and, indeed, their assumptions about ‘discipline’. We warmly welcome manuscripts that dwell on questions of method and methodology (rather than, say, simply use a method less common to the core concerns of the field with the assumption that this strangeness will be itself revelatory).
We are convinced of the continued utility of the themes that the first editors enumerated when they considered the particular problems they wanted the journal to address, namely: (i) the history of individual disciplines and their shifting boundaries within the human sciences; (ii) the dependence on theoretical and cognitive presuppositions in the human sciences; (iii) the infusion of literary and aesthetic forms in the human sciences; (iv) the character of substantive findings in the human sciences and their institutional implications; (v) the deployment of historical resources in the human sciences (Still and Velody, 1988: 2–3). But alongside this editorial continuity, we want also to record our own sense of how submissions in 2016 (and beyond) might look a little different from those received in 1988. We anticipate a growing number of submissions from authors reflecting on, and embedded within, the history of more recent fields in the human sciences (such as the medical and digital humanities, disability studies and queer studies, as well as the inter-disciplines prefixed with neuro-); from those interrogating the shape and the historiography of ‘the interdisciplinary’ itself; and from authors (or co-authors) who are simultaneously practitioners in the field(s) under historical investigation. For the boundaries between those external to and internal to many epistemological domains are under pressure, not least when many of those domains are themselves interdisciplinary. We are particularly keen to expand the journal’s attention to the space and constitution of the global and the local – and to the tangled histories of the colonial and the post-colonial – in the making and remaking of the human sciences. And we predict that the efflorescence of ‘animal studies’ – as well as wider attentions to questions of materiality, animality, vegetality, and, indeed, the inorganic – will continue to press on the edges of the central category, the human, with which we started this editorial.
The capacities and limits of non-human animals – as well as those of those cyborg entities that ghost, with ever greater density, our figure of the human – are undoubtedly being both rethought and remade. This in turn opens new questions about how to conceptualize the environments – physical, political, geological and social – in which those entities, both human and non-human, are embedded. That human experience – which has, in the time that has elapsed since the founding of this journal, been provincialized in a number of sciences – opens up, we suggest, exciting and difficult questions for all of us interested in the past and future of that sprawling field called the history of the human sciences. We welcome submissions, therefore, as much from those working on the ‘non-human sciences’ as on the human – so as to adumbrate more carefully the contours of this distinction. We want, nonetheless, to hold fast to the fact that insofar as the human animal is an animal that has history, narrative, the capacity for self-reflection, and the imaginative ability to project itself in the future, the human sciences remain in the last analysis interpretative and hermeneutical sciences.
Felicity Callard (Durham University), Rhodri Hayward (Queen Mary University of London) and Angus Nicholls (Queen Mary University of London) are the editors of History of the Human Sciences.
The final version of this article, as published in the Journal (Vol. 29, No. 3), is available here: http://hhs.sagepub.com/content/29/3/3.full.pdf+html
References
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