Homo Ludens (1938) and the crisis in the humanities

Koen B. Tanghe,Peter Stanley Fosl

doi:10.1080/23311983.2016.1245087

Koen B. Tanghe, Peter Stanley Fosl

Open Access

https://doi.org/10.1080/23311983.2016.1245087

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Abstract

AbstractJohan Huizinga’s Homo Ludens (1938) is, in certain circles, still highly esteemed as a paradigm of humanist scholarship. Huizinga argues that cultures arise and unfold in and as play but that they tend to lose their playfulness as they mature. As a gifted writer and erudite philologist, cross-cultural historian, and culture critic, he made a, at first sight, brilliant case for this intriguing thesis. However, a more thorough reading shows that it is unsatisfactory as an explanatory treatise about the link between human play and human cultures. It is argued that this striking combination of intellectual brilliance and lack of convincing content is symptomatic of the lingering crisis in the humanities and that Huizinga’s masterwork thus excellently exemplifies the need of what will be called soft consilience between the humanities and science. It was anathema for Huizinga because of his strong belief in the vocational, epistemic, and methodological autonomy of the humanities, but any academic treati...

Highlights

The existential “crisis” in the humanities In recent years, we have been confronted with multiple reports about a supposedly alarming, numerical, or popular decline of the humanities.1 In reality, the great collapse of enrollment in the humanities happened almost entirely in the 1970s (e.g. Bérubé, 2013; Mateos, 2013), mainly because of a remarkable shift in education choices among women
The mutual animosity and influencing between the studia humanitatis and modern science is as old as modern science itself
I have here tried to show that such a study can, in any case, not ignore the insights, gained through the scientific study of the world and that the absolute separation between, on the one hand, the humanities and, on the other hand, the natural and social sciences that Huizinga defended, is untenable

Summary

Introduction

The existential “crisis” in the humanities In recent years, we have been confronted with multiple reports about a supposedly alarming, numerical, or popular decline of the humanities. In reality, the great collapse of enrollment in the humanities happened almost entirely in the 1970s (e.g. Bérubé, 2013; Mateos, 2013), mainly because of a remarkable shift in education choices among women (in the late 1960s, more than 20% of the degrees they earned were in the humanities, in the 1980s this number had dropped to less than 10%). The existential “crisis” in the humanities In recent years, we have been confronted with multiple reports about a supposedly alarming, numerical, or popular decline of the humanities.. The great collapse of enrollment in the humanities happened almost entirely in the 1970s (e.g. Bérubé, 2013; Mateos, 2013), mainly because of a remarkable shift in education choices among women (in the late 1960s, more than 20% of the degrees they earned were in the humanities, in the 1980s this number had dropped to less than 10%) In both the US and the EU, the number of students as a percentage of the entire college-age population, majoring in disciplines like history, English, or philosophy is greater than it was in the 1950s or the 1980s (Silbey, 2013). A crisis, it is largely located in the hearts

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