The world is weary of the past

It does not seem to be the case, generally, that our age suffers from an overly pious relation to its past. On the contrary, people are probably more likely to be surprised at how old a certain phenomenon is (that the Elizabethans knew what a woman’s clitoris is, for instance) than at the thought that our predecessors did not yet know something that for us is common knowledge. This attitude does not make a good foundation for learning from past mistakes. But, more to my present point, if literary scholarship, and the humanities more generally, are to have a purpose, this purpose cannot be separated from an attitude to history. Not only because we primarily study dead people, nor because we serve as the guardians of a canon and hence a tradition (even if the aim of some scholarship is to revise the canon or deconstruct canonicity altogether). Not even because we are well suited to show how each present constructs its past using by and large the same means with which an artist conjures a fictional world, but because the past would not exist without humanistic inquiry.

That is very strongly put. Firstly it elides an important distinction between the past as such and history. Perhaps it would be fairer to say that the universe has a past, but only humans have a history; history in the sense of a narrative that puts events into context and offers causal connections and developments between them. Thus, history would not exist without humanistic inquiry. But this still elides a second important qualification. Events that took place, people that lived, trees that grew, have all existed, whether we know about their existence or not. But in order to be present today as something that has existed – as part of history – the event, person, or tree also has to be remembered in some way. Thus, history would not exist without a mode of inquiry whose questioning keeps the no-longer-extant in existance, if only as problem. The purpose of the humanities, then, is neither to recreate the past, nor to conserve it as heritage, but to keep it alive by continually putting it into question. For the same reason, a research question in the humanities has little to do with a research question in the ‘hard sciences.’