World humanities - Towards an ontology of policy

Abstract

The border-crossing nature of science is well recognised, and has long been a focus of policy-makers with an interest in governing this space. The international aspect of the humanities is less clearly understood, and the extent to which it has been a focus of policy is similarly not well conceptualised. UNESCO’s efforts in this area provide a useful corpus of texts through which international humanities policy can be explored. Drawing on Theodor Adorno’s negative dialectics, this paper considers what UNESCO’s attempts at developing international humanities policy have to say about the ontological status of the humanities, and of policy itself. In setting out an ontology of policy, it generates a concept of ‘world humanities’ as a means of reconstituting the humanities its own specific mode of inquiry and form of knowledge.

Introduction

Enough has been written about ‘international science’ and the ‘global governance of science’ to point us in the direction of a recognizable phenomenon. The activities of scientists and policymakers now reach beyond and across national boundaries as a matter of course. Postdoctoral researchers work abroad to improve their future prospects, and funding agencies often give preference to cross-border teams of researchers. This is, however, ‘science’ understood in the Anglophone sense - STEM (science, technology, engineering, and maths), the Naturwissenschaften. The humanities are a notable absence in the scholarship of international science. This is emblematic of a divide between science and other fields, and although it has become naturalized (Porter, 2005) this can be understood historically, going back as far as Giambattista Vico’s (2002) La Scienza Nuova in the seventeenth century. Our purpose is not to explore the origins of such a split, however, but rather some of its consequences. This paper seeks to understand the relationship between science policy in an international dimension and the humanities, to the extent that there can be said to be “international”, “world”, or “global humanities”.

One can speculate as to why the international consolidation of the natural sciences far outstrips that in the humanities. One reason could be that irrespective of whether scientific activities are categorized according to ‘discipline’ or ‘intellectual field’ (Whitley, 2000: 6–7), those in the humanities have often been situated in national (historical, cultural, linguistic) contexts. Linking the socio-political to the epistemological, one can identify a groundedness in the humanities in that they exist as fundamentally situated knowledges (Haraway, 1988). But this need not be understood simply as a product of the ideology of nationalism; indeed it can be seen long before then. For instance, Turner gives the example of Geoffrey of Monmouth’s philological (if fantastical) explorations in the twelfth century linking the history of the kings of Britain to Aeneas and Rome, so as to glorify the former (2014: 53). Later explicit identification of languages with nations such as in Herder codified this national character of the humanities. This was so ‘successful’ that when an alternative, perhaps ‘borderless’ inflection of the humanities arose it was stoutly criticized. As such the term ‘encylopaedic’, used by thinkers such as Goethe, Humboldt, and Herder himself, was “a dismissive shorthand for the naïve and ultimately futile pursuit of a comprehensive knowledge […] which had failed to do anything more than accumulate information” (Wellmon, 2015: 78). “Language makes possible the objectivity of objects and their thematization” (Levinas, 1969: 210) and this is pre-eminently true of the languages of science. STEM fields, built from quantification and mathematization, require the elision of unnecessary context – which is the lifeblood of the humanities – as a precondition for their ‘objectivity’. This allows for communication across and indeed irrespective of cultures, languages, and contexts. This constitutive absence of context is what gives us international science, and it identifies something noteworthy in how the humanities do not exist in a strongly international mode.

That said, there have been efforts to constitute the humanities as international, especially in certain kinds of policy. To understand these efforts, this paper explores the work of the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organisation (UNESCO). UNESCO’s work in international science beyond STEM has had increased attention recently, for instance Per Wisselgren’s work focusing on the role of UNESCO and its ‘social scientific internationalism’. One aspect of this focuses on how social sciences became separate from ‘philosophy and humanistic studies’ to constitute two of UNESCO’s eight different programme sections (the others then being education, natural sciences, museums, libraries, arts and letters, and mass communication, Wisselgren, 2017: 154–156). In a chapter examining the career of Alva Myrdal, Director of the Office of Social Sciences in UNESCO from 1950 to 1955, Wisselgren quotes from a manuscript she prepared, entitled “The cost of national isolation in the social sciences”. Here Myrdal establishes her view that “UNESCO has a unique, but also an urgent, function, which can only be performed by an international organization: to try to overcome the national isolation in the social sciences” (Wisselgren, 2021: 287). That something similar might have been said about the ‘national isolation’ of the humanities would not be a leap – but specific and sustained attention has yet to be dedicated to UNESCO’s work as it relates to the humanities.

It is necessary to say something, however, about why this paper adopts humanities-derived language and philosophical perspectives (namely the work of Wilhelm Dilthey, Theodor Adorno and Emmanuel Levinas) to understand what we term the ‘policy ontology’ of standardization and control. In this paper we argue that there is a conflation of ‘policy’ on the one hand with ‘the world’ on the other, a kind of closure in the minds of policy-makers and politicians. In order to hinder this conflation, attention to language and the underlying concepts informing this realm is necessary. Through a philosophical, and more specifically ontological, approach we contest this closure, in order to open up space for the humanities, and ultimately a more open sense of what policy can be. Thus, the insistence of analysing and discussing how policy constructs and enacts the meaning of ‘world’ through international policy concerning the humanities, reveals an often unacknowledged and unrecognized ontological dimension of policy-making.

This paper addresses UNESCO’s work not simply in empirical terms, but also explores what this says about the crossings between the humanities and the world governance of science. As such this paper analyses international humanities policy in a humanities, philosophical mode, and addresses UNESCO’s involvement in this area through three vignettes. The first considers the discussion and debates in the conference to establish the new international organisation in the wake of World War 2. The second looks at the activities of UNESCO in the 1970s, and a series of rather focused documents. The third vignette moves to the 2010s and the World Humanities Forum meetings.

A negative dialectics of policy ontology

This article is consciously unorthodox in that it uses policy to explore philosophical issues, and uses philosophy to explore policy. In terms of policy, what is especially unusual is that it does not take a Foucauldian approach focusing on ‘discourse’. Nor does it outline either a ‘golden age’ argument, nor a ‘down with neoliberalism!’ polemic - instead it seeks to understand international humanities outside of standard approaches to historical or social scientific reasoning. The reason for doing so is in large part to have form and content rhyme – looking at humanities policy in a humanities mode. Philosophy is concerned with concepts, ideas, language, and how these relate to the full complexities of reality, with policy being for this paper another aspect of this reality. The existing body of research on the humanities and humanities policy is not short social scientific perspectives (e.g. Belfiore and Upchurch, 2013; Benneworth et al. 2016). In such work, there are shared assumptions and a view that the humanities are effectively the same as any other realm of knowledge (e.g. STEM, social sciences), but they’re bad at making arguments for how they can have the same impact or influence as their better funded counterparts. This paper is a philosophical interrogation of policy, which is parallel and complementary (not competing with, or denouncing, other views) to other approaches to be sure, but with its own focus. We start with a different assumption, namely that the humanities are in fact distinctly different from other approaches to knowledge (but not more true or real, as such), not just in terms of the content of their concerns, but how and why they address these.

This view is in sympathy with philosophers such as Wilhelm Dilthey, for whom the humanities are different to other realms of knowledge. Dilthey makes this distinction by framing the natural sciences as the realm of causality, and as such its role is explanation of these causal mechanisms. The humanities, in contrast, focus on lived experiences, expressions, and so its role is to develop understanding (Dilthey, 2002: 13; see also Makkreel, 2021). This moves focus away from questions of epistemology as what is being said, or how is it being said, and towards the question of being and becoming, or ontology, of the humanities. Ontology may appear an intimidating word, but there’s no reason why it should present any greater difficulty than terms like ‘ethics’ or ‘epistemology’. Ontology is a field within philosophy concerned with reality; how and why we define something as ‘real’, and thus given our attention. For discussion of policy as an ontology, the question then becomes ‘how are some forms of knowledge accorded belief as existing?’ If natural or social scientific concern with ‘mechanisms’ are the model of knowing we take as meaningful, other modes of being and becoming are as a direct consequence increasingly pushed to the margins. They cease to have ‘reality’, and our collective definition of the world, our ontology is narrowed and foreclosed. The things that make the humanities distinctive, the contribution they can make, are occluded. Turning explicitly to ontology then is a form of thinking that seeks to open up, and to recover other ways of thinking about, and the being and becoming of, the reality (or realities) in which we find ourselves.

To show how this ontological closure functions in the space of policy, we draw on Theodor Adorno’s “negative dialectics”, a part of his corpus which has apparently not previously been applied to policy. This work is to be understood as a “systematic exploration of a standardization of the world imposed fully as much by the economic system as by ‘Western science’” (Jameson, 2007: 15), parallel to the ontological narrowing we have traced. Adorno explores how “human thought, in achieving identity and unity, has imposed these upon objects, suppressing or ignoring their differences and diversity” (Zuidervaart, 2015). The task then is to recover difference and the ‘non-identical’, to recover what has been smoothed over and ignored. Negative dialectics are what Fredric Jameson describes as “a new kind of stereoscopic thinking” where concepts are engaged with philosophically on the one hand, while on the other we engage with “cruder and more sociological set of terms and categories” (2007: 28). Notwithstanding the value judgement implied in this quote, as a form of thought which can think the philosophical simultaneously with the sociological and political, Adorno’s negative dialectics is well-suited for application to the area with which this paper engages - namely policies relating to the humanities.

From Adorno’s early work with Max Horkheimer, domination is found to be central to and the defining logic of the project of ‘reason’. The critique of mastery or domination of nature endures as Adorno’s central concern, since

the mastery of men by other men and which finds its mental reflex in the principle of identity, by which I mean the intrinsic aspiration of all mind to turn every alterity that is introduced to it or that it encounters into something like itself and in this way to draw it into its own sphere of influence. (Adorno, 2008: 9)

What Adorno describes here is the urge of those who would have mastery to make uniform everything that is different, awkward, critical. Domination seeks what Charles Mills terms an “officially sanctioned reality” or ontology, one which “is divergent from actual reality” (1997: 18), a very specific ontology. Political and ‘real world’ forms of domination are grounded in conceptual forms (Singh, 2018). As a consequence, the need to resist domination is conceptual and theoretical, and as such philosophy is as significant in this effort as are politics and praxis. For Adorno philosophy is primary to interrogating this, and results in an “implacable critique of reason” (Jameson, 2007: 24) which calls for “an open philosophy” in contrast with “the phantasm of a totality” (Adorno, 2008: 80, 83). There is a tension here, of course, between using the tools of reason to think against reason’s limits or excesses, “a critique of enlightenment by the enlightened consciousness”, “to reach beyond the concept by means of the concept” (Adorno, 2008: 85, 88). There is a sense in which “reason and the universal - abstraction as such” is not to be rejected, but rather the task is to “reveal the social dimensions of abstract thought” (Jameson: 28, 36); this is what makes his project a ‘dialectics’ rather than simply a contradiction in terms.

Thus negative dialectics is based not only on openness, and rejecting closure, but also on understanding the roots of the impulse to systematize. We want to tidy things up, to systematize, to make the chaos of the world intelligible, but the notion of absolute certainty and “secure foundation” underlying this is only ever a “phantasm” (Jameson, 2007: 98, 100). Because of this, speculative thought “should be identified with the critical, the anti-ideological element; it is whatever is not satisfied with the façade” (Jameson, 2007: 101) – and using forms of thought from the humanities are one important way to not-be-satisfied with the officially sanctioned ontology. Policy can be understood as an important form of systematizing, an ontology that foreclose openness. It circumscribes some aspect of (social? scientific?) reality under the auspices of a rational authority, and as such is a clear form of political - and we argue here, conceptual and philosophical - domination. Exploring policies of the humanities and the kinds of knowledge created by academics and researchers with this is apposite, given the frequently critical, resisting mode of humanities scholarship. As such, the challenge in a philosophical engagement with humanities policy is to resist totality and domination, to use negative dialectics as a “logic of disintegration” (Adorno, p.6) to dissolve enclosing walls and offer a route into the open.

Global humanities, from affirmation to closure

The basis of what follows are three vignettes relating to discussions of science (and especially the humanities) in general discussions of an expanded understanding of what constitutes ‘policy’. Existing scholarly methodologies of engaging with policy can be split into two broad schools. On the one hand are what have been described as ‘traditional policy approaches’ (Diem et al., 2019), adopting technical empirical (Codd, 1988), authoritative instrumentalist (Shore and Wright, 2011) stances. In these, “language is widely perceived as transparent, which overlooks the function of texts in producing, reproducing and transforming social structures” (Saarinen, 2008: 722). These various labels come from another school of policy scholarship, namely critical policy approaches. The “in group” label might be simply “policy studies” - the question of being ‘critical’ doesn’t arise, as the goal is to improve existing policy, as it’s just one political problem among others. ‘Policy’ itself in this approach is not put into question, its basic ontology or picture of the world is accepted as a given to which we must adapt ourselves. Either way, these traditional approaches assume - against considerable evidence to the contrary - that policy is straightforward, linear, and ‘says what it means’. Such approaches also hold that the role of policy analysis or scholarship is to clarify intentions, assuming that communicating with policymakers exclusively in their terms is the route to influence or ‘impact’; decades of accumulated evidence of the dangers of carbon emissions going ignored serve as but one indictment of such assumptions. In contrast, critical policy approaches focus on values, who has the power to set agendas, and most significantly for our purposes, how policies are only ever partial representations of the reality they seek to describe or control. This is a less naïve view of how policy functions in reality, methodologically informed by careful empirical work. Our philosophical approach can be seen as aligned with critical policy approaches, expanding their concern beyond individual texts to consider broader conversations and discourses.

For this reason we take a vignette approach, with a broader view of the ideas and concepts that make up an ecology which feeds into ‘policy making’ rather than ‘policy mades’. As such, the genres of text include speeches, reports, books, and declarations, which speaks to a breadth of activity in policy as a process. It also allows for a Danish or German understanding of “Politik”, which encompasses both policy and politics as “every kind of activity that involves exerting authority” (Weber, 2020: 45). The texts selected are part of a wider study of humanities research and society, drawn from a sub-corpus of 141 international texts, part of a larger corpus of policy texts relating to research and the humanities internationally and in Europe (N = 456). We focus primarily on UNESCO, as this is a coherent way of outlining the international dimension of policy as it relates to the humanities, since it has been the primary forum for such international discussions since 1945, and as a representative organisation it was obliged to be a ‘clearing house’ for the range of views held by its members. The periods selected have been chosen to give a sense of the developments in ‘international humanities’ as part of international science, from immediately before WW2 to the recent past. This is not a historical paper, however, and the argument here is not intended as one of chronological progression. It is rather an ontological argument, about the nature of the humanities and policy more generally, and so these vignettes function as facets of the entity under examination rather than units in a developmental narrative. The ontological approach enables us to analyse and discuss across time-periods and to elicit the deeper strata of the ‘realness’ of policy, of the reality which policy seeks to dominate and enclose.

UNESCO after WW2 (1947)

Looking at the post-war period and the foundation of UNESCO, we can trace the outline of an international approach to science, specifically with reference to the humanities. Initially UNESCO was to be UNECO - without the ‘S’, and the conference in London of Ministers of Education from 45 allied countries was convened to discuss “proposals for an educational and cultural organisation of the United Nations” (UNESCO, 1945: 1). Indeed, it was not until during the 2-week conference that “science” was included as a central part of the new organisation’s remit (Wisselgren, 2017: 152). Paul Betts (2020: 316) notes that the atomic bomb, two of which the United States had by this point dropped on Japan, was “useful” for the argument to integrate science into the new organization’s brief - war and domination not far away even in this new period of ‘peace’, and lending urgency to the discussions. Indeed, the then British Prime Minister Clement Attlee gave a welcoming address to delegates placing the work of those attending the conference in the context of the recent shared experience of conflict.

He describes a “new world order” of “international collaboration” that the United Nations represented, and how education and culture were central to this, where “the whole intellectual realm with its ‘many goodly states and kingdoms,’ the sciences, the humanities, the fine arts, research for the advancement of knowledge and the whole vast territory in which ideas are disseminated” (UNESCO, 1945: 21). Why this was necessary comes in the form of a rhetorical question which would become a part of UNESCO’s constitution - “Do not wars, after all, begin in the minds of men?”: ¹

In your hands, and in the hands of the constituents whom you represent, the Ministries of Education, the universities, the learned societies, the teachers, the educational associations, rests here and now the opportunity of establishing a common front against the forces of ignorance, prejudice and misunderstanding. (UNESCO, 1945: 22)

Ellen Wilkinson, Attlee’s minister for education, in her own speech to the conference, directly addressed the inclusion of science in the title of the organization:

In these days, when we are all wondering, perhaps apprehensively, what the scientists will do to us next, it is important that they should be linked closely with the humanities and should feel that they have a responsibility to mankind for the result of their labours. I do not believe that any scientists will have survived the world catastrophe, who will still say that they are utterly uninterested in the social implications of their discoveries. (UNESCO, 1945: 24)

Humanities then would exert a civilizing and civilianizing effect on science. As to whether those in culture and the humanities had any responsibility beyond pleasing themselves, Wilkinson says “that might have been a tenable argument before the war” but those who experienced the recent conflict knew “how much the fight against fascism depended on the determination of writers and artists to keep their international contacts that they might reach across the rapidly rising frontier barriers”. Humanities as resistance to domination is clearly put forth, against the more general abstracting impulses of ‘reason’.

The evolutionary biologist Julian Huxley became the first Director General of UNESCO, which in 1946 published a book of his views on the new organization’s purpose. Here he sets out why UNESCO, if it was to represent its various members, could not espouse a defined philosophy, ideology, or theology. It would nevertheless have to embrace “some form of humanism” which was variously described as a “world humanism”, a “scientific humanism”, and an “evolutionary” - rather than a static or ideal - humanism (Huxley, 1946: 7). “Science” here was to be understood explicitly not in Anglophone terms where it denoted the mathematical and natural sciences only, “but as broadly as possible, to cover all the primarily intellectual activities of man, the whole range of knowledge and learning. This, then, includes the Natural Sciences, the Social Sciences, and the Humanities” (Huxley, 1946: 24–25). This broad or open science was to be seen both in its “pure pursuit” as well as its application. Philosophy and the humanities are given sustained attention - and treated separately from the social sciences. ² Huxley sets out the tasks of each, with a view of philosophy in the widest context of human knowledge, and a fact/value distinction; here its role is “aid in the clarification of values in society”, also with reference to the implicit values of the scientist “who says he does not believe in philosophy” (Huxley, 1946: 39) - perhaps gesturing towards an abstracted withdrawal of those scientists who were such a concern to Wilkinson. The task of philosophy for Huxley is to restate ethics as morality in the light of conflicts between systems and individuality, scientific advancements, international humanitarian crises, and the legacy of war - a resisting role. UNESCO then should “stimulate the quest, so urgent in this time of over-rapid transition, for a world philosophy” (Huxley, 1946: 41). Specific disciplinary, philosophical concerns are also outlined, and the notion of a “world philosophy”, Huxley hastens to add, can only proceed via conferences and discussion. UNESCO, then, is not apparently to replace the extant institutional apparatus. For the humanities, the task is to construct something of a history of development, both in the East and West (no mention of the South). The human as ‘individuality’ (in contrast with and resisting social structure) is proposed as a focus for UNESCO, as well as what appears to be a call for an early instance of interdisciplinarity, with cooperation between “the biologist, the historian, the artist, the anthropologist, and the sociologist” (Huxley, 1946: 43).

By 1947, a report of a survey by a committee of experts examining UNESCO’s activities observed that for all Huxley’s hopes, their programme was “weak in the field of philosophy and almost non-existent in that of the humanities” (UNESCO, 1947). A questionnaire was sent to member countries to examine the contribution of these fields to “the maintenance of peace”, and to consider them “in their international aspects and in the role they might play in the exchanges and understanding between nations”. Two possibilities were raised, namely: a renewal of philosophical and humanistic studies “in their normal present-day activities […] which might make them a more active factor of understanding and peace”; and how they might be of use to UNESCO “through research, studies or enquiries undertaken either on Unesco’s initiative or in agreement with it”. Given the world situation of the time “characterised by want, inequality and unrest” it was decided it would not be prudent for the organisation to

waste its strength, nor to jeopardise its credit with the nations that uphold it, and to that end start with a united action which takes into account the most urgent needs of men in the field of knowledge. Too many elementary needs remained unsatisfied in the vast majority for Unesco to give its first attention to the tops.

Here a sense of the institutional imperatives is weighed up against ideals. As such, no place for “intellectual cooperation in the old sense, the aid to Culture for Culture’s sake” is found in UNESCO’s priorities.

With these texts we are now more clearly in the realm of policy, in the attempt to assert some control over the relationship between science and society. From the speeches of Atlee and Wilkinson, the threat of domination in the form of war is a very recent memory, and the latter explicitly draws a connection between science and domination. Here the anglophone definition of science operates, and the scientists are in effect civilized by the humanities. This attempt to push the humanities into service implicitly acknowledges that this is by no means easy to achieve, however, and references to those writers and artists who explicitly resisted domination by various Axis powers perhaps unconsciously admits that from that quarter there would be resistance to any political authority. Indeed, domination and resistance hover as explicit concerns at this early stage of making policies, whereas science and the humanities remain vague abstractions beyond their political implications. By contrast, when Huxley sets out his more programmatic views of what UNESCO ought to do, there is a conscious openness. Unlike the politicians, he was from the world of science, and as such grounded in the complicated and open reality behind big, rather abstract words. As a policymaker, he too seeks to assert some control over what the humanities are or should do - within ‘his’ organization at any rate - but as a biologist rather than primarily a politician, his understanding of the humanities is specific and rooted in a knowledge of academic institutions and practices. Control could only go so far in the face of the resisting autonomy of the academy. Similarly the 1947 report gave due attention to the autonomy of the academic humanities and philosophy, and UNESCO’s role in maintaining a space of openness, but with an increasing sense of institutional logics entering the discussion. So in this post-war period, while a variety of elements are in tension, it does not appear that any one has overridden the others, and an open form of international cooperation remains the goal.

UNESCO 1970s documents on measurement (1971, 1972, 1974)

By the 1970s, the focus has shifted considerably, and the advent of the term “social sciences and humanities” is but one aspect of this. ³ A shift of the organization’s activities can be found in the title and contents of a report summarizing science policy, Science for Development. In this comprehensive document about science and knowledge in general, the humanities are totally marginalized. Indeed the sole reference to the humanities is as an indicator of backwardness. Here countries attaining the “first phase of industrialization” were considered unable to make a transition to a next phase as they “remain content with a rudimentary infrastructure of public services, and their universities are still oriented chiefly towards the humanities and medicine” (UNESCO, 1971a: 108). Another view of the issue came from Malcolm Sathiyanathan Adiseshiah, an Indian developmental economist and Deputy Director-General of UNESCO, who noted a general shift in university students’ interest in studying science from the late 1960s.

Science has produced the computer, the laser, nuclear fission and its use for bigger and better nuclear weapons and cleaner and neater atomic triggers and arms, the faster-than-sound jet, the missile, the rocket and exploration of space. Meanwhile, all around us in our poor planet there continues, and with growing impact, the sadness, the sickness, the wastage, the muddle, the poverty and inequality and injustice, crying aloud for remedy as they unfold and having little or no relevance to the marvels of science. The social sciences and humanities at least point up the dangers and are engaged in their diagnosis. Is it surprising then that the finest and most alert minds in our universities are turning away from natural science. (Adiseshiah, 1970: 244)

Adiseshiah’s views here were focused on what he called “the human role in development” - and here development was synonymous with natural science, engineering, and attendant disciplines.

Nevertheless, the humanities remained a statutory focus for the organization. The form its activities took was in line with a more general move towards data generation and descriptive statistics relating to scientific activity in member countries, “with a view to serving both the programme sectors in the Secretariat and the Member Countries” (UNESCO, 1972a: 181). One example was a study entitled The measurement of scientific activities in the social sciences and the humanities, which noted such statistics had from their inception been limited to the natural sciences and engineering. The paper’s author, Pierre Lefer, suggests that it was “always felt that in the long-run the social sciences and the humanities should be included within the statistical framework for the measurement of scientific and technological activities” - a feeling presumably held by UNESCO - that this has been hampered not just by methodological issues,

but also by the attitude of policy makers in many countries. The latter tend to give priority to R&D in the natural sciences, the results of which are considered to be most likely to improve the economic performance of firms, and to result in a rising standard of living and a strengthened position in world markets… (UNESCO, 1971b: 3).

It presents a chronology where generally governments focused on statistics relating to the natural sciences in the 1950s, social sciences in the 1960s, latterly turning to the humanities (UNESCO, 1971b: 59). Issues specific to the humanities and social sciences - treated as two separate “groups” – are presented as they relate to the natural sciences (UNESCO, 1971b: 60). The suggestion is to have more information; alongside a clearer definition of “the area” - i.e., what disciplines constitute the humanities in different national contexts, and a definition of just what humanities research is. A meeting of the Working Group on Statistics of Science and Technology the following year gave further consideration to this question, and confirmed both Lefer’s conclusions and the focus on methodological and technical issues of definition and categorization. By the time of setting out guidelines for a pilot survey of 29 countries’ scientific activities in the social sciences and humanities – now termed “SSH” – resulting from these discussions, the inclusion of humanities is described as “made in order to demonstrate the global approach UNESCO had adopted from the beginning for the measurement of all scientific activities” (UNESCO, 1974: 1). This survey is a response to an institutional imperative for total coverage. Science is described flatly as a “continuum”, and any distinctiveness that the humanities might have is registered only in the objection some might have whereby “[h]uman Sciences or the Humanities are to be excluded from the sphere of scientific knowledge.” No counter-argument is offered for the significance or importance of these fields, and the statistics remain out there, somewhere, for this survey to “collect”.

In these texts, the previous openness towards knowledge is growing distant. Now science means STEM and its relationship with society is ‘development’, understood via the capitalist model. There is one trajectory for society – a closure in itself – and it is the task of science to accelerate that trajectory. Science is instrumental, but the humanities are not science. There is mention by Adiseshiah of aspects of domination, but it is surprising that these are not engaged with critically, that is, in a resisting mode. The closure of science to STEM means that what causes or underlies domination is not interrogated – “poverty and inequality and injustice” invite a “remedy” which natural science is to provide. So these are seen as engineering problems, a closure of the conceptual space that prevents them from being critiqued as questions. In terms of the other policy documents as they relate to the humanities, even the instrumental approach of Wilkinson and Huxley is not to be found. There is an exclusively technical focus on statistics and categorization, to have a flow of information which is the lifeblood of any such large organization. The task of those making policy appears in this context to be the domination of the policy space – the absence of focus on the humanities heretofore simply a ‘gap’ in UNESCO’s total coverage and domination of science policy. The closure effected here is wholly abstract, with the humanities now not grounded in any specificity at all. The domination aspect of policy is clearest, the resistive aspect of the humanities absent in favour of institutional autocatalysis.

UNESCO Busan Declaration and Recommendations (2011, 2012)

Turning to more recent examples, while in reports relating to higher education generally the term humanities is supplanted by “social and human sciences”, the 2010s saw a renewed focus on the humanities. This is most apparent with the World Humanities Forum (WHF), the first of which was held in the Korean city of Busan in 2011. Bringing together “humanities scholars, artists and visionaries to further reflection on key challenges and questions facing the world in the 21st century” (WHF, 2011), WHF delegates formulated a set of recommendations in what was called the Busan Declaration, “Towards a New Humanism for the 21st Century”. ⁴ Here again was a focus on the wider context of the humanities, namely “social transformations stemming from the convergence of economic, technological, environmental, social, cultural and political forces, as well as rising tensions between belief systems, ideologies, loyalties and identities”. The sense of “crisis” attending the humanities as well as “divisive globalism, environmental crisis and the uncertain horizons of rapid scientific and technological development” are the internal and external conditions that, this declaration argues, makes rethinking the humanities necessary. Responding to this, the DG of UNESCO Irina Bokova in a speech at the closing of the Forum explicitly refers to the global economic crisis and “climate change”, and the challenge to “better understand ourselves and the world we inhabit”:

We do so through science, of course. But science is often silent as to the meaning of what it explains and predicts. This is the role of the humanities. The humanities help produce meaning by mobilizing our imagination. They help us to understand ourselves and to reach out to others. This is the task of philosophy – it is also that of literature and the arts. (Bokova, 2011)

What was needed is not quite anything to do with the humanities, but instead a “renewed humanism to respond to the challenges of the 21st century and to guide new approaches to sustainable development”. Bokova refers to the UNESCO constitution – as the Busan Declaration did – with defences in the ‘minds of men’ against the wars that begin there; now the work is to develop ‘harmonious societies and sustainable development for all’. The following year Busan again hosted the WHF, this time resulting in a document called the “Busan Recommendations” (WHF, 2012). This reaffirmed what it calls “the importance of the humanities in understanding the nature of the sufferings and wounds of human beings and the conflicts and confrontations within and between societies in modern civilization and in reconciling and healing them”, and the value of the WHF as a place for dialogue. It consequently calls on both UNESCO and the Korean government to continue convening the forum, with more attention to be given to connections with the natural sciences, arts, and social science “in particular with respect to such profoundly transversal issues as peace, sustainable development and knowledge societies.”

Here there is something of a return to the instrumental view of science, and a view of how the humanities relates to society. Overriding this is a kind of conceptual blandness, however. The humanities are indistinct, and it is hard to grasp just what is being discussed – the elision of humanities to an undefined and entirely abstract “new humanism” is telling. It is as though the totalising coverage and domination of the science policy space achieved in previous decades now completely excludes specifics. None of these texts refer to aspects of material, institutional conditions experienced and inhabited by those in the humanities. This invites the question of what is at issue here is any longer science policy involving scientists, or whether it is science policy by science by and for policymakers. Humanities are everything and thus nothing in this flat policy ontology. In part this is the nature of the genre of texts referred to – declarations and speeches. These are texts in the mode of “capitalist realism” (Fisher, 2009) whereby it is admitted by the various UNESCO texts that there are ‘challenges’ but the humanities are there to ‘reflect’ on crises, rather than produce critiques leading to alternatives and away from the system which created environmental crisis and international division to begin with. The humanities are constructed as mirrors of the way things are, rather than lamps to open up the space, and show us the way to other possible worlds.

Open ontology of world humanities policy – from problems to questions

Policy through these examples can be understood as constructing a problem rather than a question. The notion of a problem implies a defined understanding of an issue derived from a pre-formed view of the world as well as assuming a potential solution, rather than the more open notion of approaching an issue as a question which might lead to reconsidering our fundamental assumptions, and to develop our understanding. The ‘problem’ is a staple of critical approaches to policy, by asking of a text ‘what is the problem represented to be’ (e.g. Bacchi, 2012). Considering just how policy problems are made is one aspect of engaging with policy, and useful for empirically understanding policies as texts, processes, and social practices. Policy problems are epistemological and political. This leaves the fundamental ontological aspect of policy untouched, however, in terms of what the world might be beyond that framing. Indeed, whether the scholarly approach taken is ‘uncritical’ or ‘critical’, we are prevented by this closed ontology from seeing policy as a question. By contrast, the philosophical question we pose is ‘is there a problem here’? Asking this is what points towards being, towards the wider reality that policy seeks to simplify, towards ontology. In describing a ‘policy ontology’ we can draw on a parallel point made by Mark Fisher in Capitalist Realism (2009), where he uses the concept of a “business ontology” to describe “the idea that everything is folded inside a business reality system, that the only goals and purposes which count are those that are translatable into business terms” (Fisher quoted in Fuller, 2009). Fisher’s use of this term clarifies how aspects of reality are converted into business problems, requiring business solutions - and excluding the very possibility of fundamental questions. Similarly, the policy ontology of the problem sets out a policy reality system whereby whatever policy captures is reality. Policy pre-forms the world in a narrower mode than the full diversity of possible ways of being and knowing that exist outside the policy ontology.

A further aspect of considering policy in terms of ontology is its mode of being. Frequently, by the time policy is encountered, it is finished, it has become a product, its ontology is that of statistics, problems, solutions. In this way, most often we encounter the static being of policymades rather than policymaking. There is a closure, as those who might have a say in it are not included or given the right to do so, and policy as a process and becoming is excluded. Policy as static thus becomes another prerogative of those who control the political process, and cements the notion that this representation is all there is. Policies of what the humanities are for society thus throw light on certain, selected aspects of reality in order to effect a ‘distribution of the sensible’ (Ranciere, 2010: 54) and an ‘officially sanctioned reality’ (Mills, 1997: 18). The parallels between illumination and Adorno’s enlightenment here are suggestive - a shining, shiny political ontology of policy. Politicians and policymakers seek to emphasize only some of the possible connections in the ecology, to trim the full profusion of the forest into an obedient topiary of domination and consensus. The vignettes above call the static ontology of policy into question however. The first two vignettes are examples of the science/humanities and society relationship prior to definition and closure, with a variety, an openness, and a specificity in terms of what the society and humanities might be. As Weber observes, “[u]nless we are working toward something specific, our actions aren’t anchored in any purpose or meaning” (2020: 98). In the discussions immediately prior to and after the war, there is still a question about what the policy might be, there is still purposeful dialogue about what could be done with the humanities. That is, there is meaningful discussion as a direct consequence of the concern for specifics, and differences. Dialogue is not neutral, however, and in some ways is akin to walking on eggshells (Grant, 2010), with risk and a potentially dark side since there is a potential violence in language (Levinas, 1969: 70). Framing language in ‘uncritical’ terms suggests merely coming to consensus and agreement, in the neutral vision of policy and perhaps the perspective of one such as Habermas. Openness means openness to disagreement, however, the possibility of the question, and the necessity of resistance as Adorno proposes. “No one has ever died from contradictions” as Deleuze and Guattari write (2004b: 151), but a closed policy ontology in contrast seeks consensus at all costs, to the extent that (as in the third vignette) it completely conceals the very possibility of disagreement.

There is also the question of how this ontology relates to the humanities. What the focus primarily on humanities as discussed in policy has presented is the specificity of the humanities as a crucial strength. This concern for ‘specificity’ aligns with some of Eric Hayot’s (2021) nine ‘articles of humanist reason’ from his recent and powerful argument, albeit with a different focus given our interest in policy. Against the power of standardization and abstraction for the purposes of domination – political, economic, social – we suggest that the humanities as a way of relating to society are most compelling when asking questions rather than providing solutions to predefined problems. One distinctive aspect of the humanities is that questions can be explored again and again, since many of the concepts dealt with are “essentially contested” (Gallie, 1956). The humanities are situated, and humanities scholars position themselves in the middle of things, in a specific realm. Specificity is where much of the power of the humanities resides; we see this ebb away, however, when the humanities are discussed without specificity, in flat platitudes about near homonyms such as ‘humanism’, or the catch-all of social-sciences-and-humanities.

Fraught as it may be to stake normative claims, such a position emerges from the discussions of science and the humanities in these texts. This is notable since much of what has been discussed in these policies has been about the humanities, but not always by humanities scholars. In his study of the humanities, Cassirer refers to “dark qualities” that must be banished from research (2000: 89) in order to allow "mechanical causality” to triumph over all other forms of knowledge. Science as dealing with problems, and policy as dealing with problems are instances of mechanical causality, and the logic of the problem is thus inimical to the logic of the question as found in the humanities. While addressing specific problems may be an aspect of the ‘posthumanities’ or humanities as a branch of ‘social-sciences-and-humanities’ - these might also be considered as an artefact of policy, the attempt to banish the dark quality of the question, and assert the dominance of the policy ontology of problems. The humanities are unfinished, and we reread e.g. texts again and again to continually ‘reopen’ them. Inhabiting unsettlement is the ideal, and the humanities are a type of nomadology in themselves (Deleuze and Guattari 2004a).

With inspiration from Levinas (1969: 42), we argue that any ‘global’ humanities policy makes a closed ontology, absorbing the humanities out of their local and contextual rooting in the world and, thus assimilates the humanities and the world they describe into an enclosed policy of sameness. Global policy, thus, becomes an ‘ontological imperialism’ reducing the diversity and rooted knowledge of the humanities into a closed orb without any windows, a policy ‘egology’ (Levinas, 1969: 44) of policy humanities – that is, the humanities as they exist only in policy. Global humanities policy does not give the social and cultural contexts and phenomena about which they speak a ‘face’ in the Levinasian sense. The closed ontology remains a ‘silhouette, but has lost its face’ (Levinas, 1969: 45) - a somewhat recognizable outline is there, but there is little that is specifically identifying.

As a contrast to global humanities policy we call for a different policy ontology that we term ‘world humanities policy’. World humanities policy gives the humanities a ‘face’ in the meaning of maintaining the social, cultural, historical, and linguistic diversity and specificity that humanities research and education make manifest. The ‘face’ of the humanities then becomes present in the very ‘refusal to be contained’, and ‘total resistance to the grasp’ (Levinas, 1969: 194, 197) of any closed ontology. World humanities policy would not strive for a bland and faceless consensus but is ‘produced in the opposition of conversation, in sociality’ (Levinas, 1969: 197). However, such a dissensus of world humanities policy is ‘maintained without violence, in peace with this absolute alterity’ – though it is a peace at which one must work continually. World humanities policy would constitute a ‘living presence’ (Levinas, 1969: 66) through dialogue and discourse. Our understanding of ontology borrows from Roy Bhaskar’s work on “transcendental realism”, where he argues that “it is because the world is open that science, whether or not (and for how long) it actually occurs, is possible” (2008: 56, 116). Ontologically, this influences an understanding of policy in the way that policy is not be a reply to an underlying, perhaps even universal, potential justice inherent in the (political) world. On the contrary, because the world is open, policy might exist as a way to catalyse this openness in a politically responsible way. Ontologically seen, policy hereby strives not to seal off reams of the world in neatly wrapped cohesive semantics but, with much greater risk, to unleash overlooked and unrecognized powers and value systems into the known world through the forging and negotiation of processes of policy making.

World humanities policy makes clear that the humanities cannot be contained in a closed ontology but has to be inhabited from the world and the various local contexts from where they emerge and become rooted. It also abstains from the “sloppy humanism” of intercultural dialogue (Jullien 2014), and instead attends to the very real scholarly challenge that doing such work represents. As Reitter and Wellmon (2021: 5) point out, the humanities are both ‘practice and discourse’, and, we argue, can link up with policy in an open way if that local anchoring in humanities language and modes of thought is maintained. World humanities policy would thus form a ‘new ontological contract’ (Barnett et al., 2022: 146) between policy making and humanities research and education in which diverse and critical voices are not muffled or silenced through the imperialistic language of sameness. Rather than seeking out institutional problems to which a narrowed conception of ‘policy humanities’ might provide solutions, world humanities policy would focus on what questions should be asked - by society of the humanities, and by the humanities to society. It might also ask whether we need policy at all, or whether policy is the appropriate modality for our conderns.

Conclusion

This paper uses the humanities to explore the humanities, applying philosophical analysis as an approach to policy, in order to enact what it analyses. This side-steps an existing bias for certain chosen vocabularies. The humanities have long been addressed from social scientific perspectives, and that path is already well-trodden. Our effort was to forge a new path through the thicket, to see something new, to hear something new – and to conceptually enlarge a world which has become narrowed in and through ‘global’ policy discourses. We sought to disturb the routine discourse, to maintain an openness towards the specific world that the humanities constitute. This is not an historical paper, nor a social scientific traditional approach to policy, and so our goal was consciously not to effect a levelling down (an often standard direction to take) but to open up a space for those who are interested in these issues to engage with, and understand the reason for the language we use.

A second point this paper explored is how policy is, by definition, a narrowing of concerns. This narrowing makes sense if policy is understood as seeking to effect change in a certain sphere, when there is a focus to address a known problem. Policy is compelling when there is a coherent vision, and a clear sense of the specific issue to which some modes of the humanities might be directed. This is seen in the initial discussions around the foundation of UNESCO. Adorno sensitizes us to the nature of this narrowing, however, and what is smoothed over and ignored in the process of focusing attention to a given area without a clear vision. From the 1970s to the 2010s focus became narrowed to the exclusion of what empowers us through the humanities to generate a distinctive and different viewpoint. Adorno allows us to recognize this as constructing a policy abstraction. In this paper, we argued that what has become global humanities policy conflates policy and reality, creates an intentional reduction of the possible meanings of ‘world’, and discursively enacts a narrowed and ‘closed ontology’ – whereby what is said in policy is taken to be the full extent of reality. This process of near-total abstraction becomes especially relevant and urgent in the context of a narrowing of possibilities, of what is taken to be and what might be possible. In a world where there are real problems, the humanities must come into their full powers as a mode different from other processes of inquiry and forms of knowledge.

Our final suggestion is that in contrast with the view that it is policymakers’ minds who need to be changed, on the contrary, humanities and policy scholars must be reminded that it is the humanities and the university that are different from current, and dominating, policy. This difference must be defended - but that is not a rhetorical matter of merely different or better arguments. In fact, only by understanding how the humanities are in fact different, and constitute another ontology, can such a defence be articulated. This is not an argument for withdrawing into the ivory tower, nor is it a less practically and contextually engaged approach. On the contrary our argument is that the world is much more diverse, complex, sprawling, and wild than is captured and embraced in policy language. In contrast to a humanities approach often accused for being distant or falsely removed from the world, our argument is that a humanities approach can herald in an ontological turn in policy analysis, whereby we can engage with a much wider and more open world.