ABSTRACT
To observe that the humanities are currently in a state of crisis has become so commonplace to sound almost clichéd. Yet however 'much-observed and much discussed', this state of crisis continues to elude all efforts at resolution. Indeed, it has merely persisted and grown ever deeper. To understand how the humanities could have reached such a crisis, however, we must probe beyond these obvious symptoms of exhaustion. For as the theologian Colin Gunton observes, 'our treatment of the arts betrays the symptoms of a deep-seated moral predicament as the result of which we know how to behave neither toward each other nor toward the world'. It is to this 'moral predicament', therefore, that we must now turn. As Ritchie notes, 'many defenses of the humanities lack the depth of their ideological opponents because the ideologues, to their credit, explicitly make clear the presuppositions that guide their work'.
