As philology became value-free and pedagogy became pragmatic, the larger value of both enterprises was called into question. Why study the ancient world if not to became more virtuous? But a training in virtue now seemed to be one quality that neither scholars nor teachers could offer. Since Montaigne — one of the first to offer these criticisms in a cogent form — the claim that the liberal arts would produce 'new men', men of an enhanced virtuous disposition, has often been repeated; and new generations of believers in the ideals of early humanism have tried to show that some new form of literary education could achieve this goal. For all their brilliance, and for all their formative influence upon practitioners of the liberal arts, neither Wilhelm von Humboldt nor Lionel Trilling, neither F.R. Leavis nor G. Gentile has had an impact on anything but a small segment of élite education in the West, or satisfied more than a handful of critics with the intellectual centrality of their enterprise. Like them, we watch as our most gifted students master the techniques and methods of textual analysis, the command of ancient and modern languages (which they can transpose effectively to new and developing disciplines), but in the main discard that over-arching framework of 'civilised values' by which teachers of the humanities continue to set store. Whether we like it or not, we still live with the dilemma of late humanism: we too can only live in hope, and practise the humanities.
Anthony Grafton & Lisa Jardine. From Humanism to the Humanities. Duckworth (1986).
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