his inaugural lecture at Wittenberg in 1518.^74 In our day, an unceasingflow
of publications document a more substantial and, arguably, more urgent
need to protect the liberal arts that traditionally sustained the university’s
ethos for integrative learning geared towards character formation.^75 The
modern crisis of higher education and the humanities stems from a cultural
phenomenon unknown to Melanchthon, namely the epistemology endemic
to fundamentalist scientism arising from the scientific revolution and the
mechanistic, physicalist views of human cognition that ensued. Any attempt
to recover the importance of the humanities depends on an articulate
rejection of this scientistic epistemology.
The basic contours of this reduction of all human knowing to the scientific
method of verification, together with the emotive force this view draws from
the subtraction narrative of secularization, were already outlined in the intro-
ductory chapter to this volume. What interests us here is the fact–value
distinction that arose from this scientific objectivism and currently lies at
the heart of our modern day educational crisis. On this distinction, still deeply
ingrained in modern minds, hinges the contemporary privileging of suppos-
edly fact-oriented, practical,realknowledge in science and business over
merely subjective, evaluative, moral reasoning in the humanities. Even well-
meaning efforts to reassert the importance of the humanities for responding to
the contemporary craving for spiritual awareness, meaning, and purpose often
unwittingly uphold this dichotomy. Science helps us understand the world,
while the humanities help us to give it meaning.^76
This fact–value dichotomy, based on the chimera of neutral observation,
has been criticized by philosophers and scientists alike long before the arrival
of postmodernism. Edmund Husserl (1859–1938), for example, in his work on
the crisis of the European sciences, debunks the naïve scientific belief that an
observer merely looks at facts. Instead, he argues, the researcher perceives
facts asmeaningful based on a mental construction of details based on
beliefs and experience.^77 Similarly, the scientist-philosopher Michael Polanyi
(1891–1976) has demonstrated that understanding any mechanism requires
(^74) Martin Greschat,Philipp Melanchthon: Theologe, Pädagoge und Humanist(Gütersloh:
Gütersloher Verlagshaus, 2010), 28–9. See also Irena Backus’s portrait of Melanchthon in
chapter 2 of this volume.
(^75) See, for example, Bill Readings,The University in Ruins(Cambridge, MA: Harvard
University Press, 1996); John Sommerville,The Decline of the Secular University(New York:
Oxford University Press, 2006); Anthony T. Kronman,Education’s End: Why Our Colleges and
Universities Have Given up on the Meaning of Life(New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2007);
Frank Donoghue,The Last Professors: The Corporate University and the Fate of the Humanities
(New York: Fordham University Press, 2008).
(^76) Kronman,Education’s End, 197.
(^77) See Edmund Husserl,Die Krisis der Europäischen Wissenschaften und die Transzendentale
Phänomenologie, ed. Elisabeth Ströker (Hamburg: Meiner, 1996), 111.
154 Jens Zimmermann