A A question from Dietrich Bonhoeffer in a letter to his best friend, Eberhard Bethge; "Where do you see an intellectual 'life's work' these days?"
Bonhoeffer is writing from the confinement of prison, where he regularly experienced interrogation and intimidation. In addition to physical isolation and daily threat to his health and his life, he wrote often of the constriction of his mind by continuing enforced loneliness and separation from family, friends and his fiance.
Yet despite such emotional and intellectual deprivation, he is reflecting on the crucial importance of intellectual culture, scholarly activity, the ethics of learning and the work of human cultivation as the foundation of human culture and renewed civilisation. Somehow he is able to think beyond his own dangerously limited circumstances and his immediate personal future, to ask what would provide the moral and cultural framework to build a better future for him and for his nation.
One of my own interests is the place of the humanities in education, from earliest learning to higher education and beyond. Music and art, literature and history, languages, philosophy and theology, are dimensions of human learning which we call the humanities for a good reason. They arise out of human experience, they reflect upon and deepen understanding of that experience, and in so doing they provide the opportunity for each of us to better understand our own and others' humanity. With such understanding will also come humility, humour and humane responses to the world around us. Study of the humanities humanise us; an obvious but necessary reminder.
So it is no idle question Bonhoeffer asks. Here is his fuller exposition of what troubles him:
"Where do you see an intellectual 'life's work' these days? Where is anyone gathering, working through and developing what it takes to accomplish such? Where is there the blissful lack of fixed goals and yet the planning in broad strokes, which belong to such a life? I think even for technicians and scientists, who are the only ones who still have freedom for their work, no such thing exists anymore. If the end of the eighteenth century means the end of 'universal scholarship,' and in the nineteenth century intensive study takes the place of extensive learning, and finally toward the turn of the century the 'specialist' has developed, today really everyone has become nothing more than a technician -- even in the arts (in a good form in music, but in painting and poetry a mediocre one at best). Our intellectual existence remains but a torso." (306-7)
Context, of course, modifies such drastic judgement. Germany was fighting a losing war and becoming increasingly desperate to produce and develop armaments. For that you needed scientists, engineers and technicians rather than musicians, writers and artists. But Bonhoeffer was well aware that the necessity for war machinery was at least partly due to a more mechanised view of human society, a new machinery of political dominance and new goals for economic efficiency. Indeed, as Bonhoeffer had long recognised, the reduction of human educational formation to such priorities as technical mastery, mechanised mass production, and social engineering towards such goals, was itself inescapably dehumanising.
We should also remember that Bonhoeffer was viewing German culture through the broken lenses of catastrophic national, moral, and social collapse. The Germany of Bach and Beethoven, of Goethe and Schiller, of universities whose international reputation was the envy of Europe for rigorous scholarship and advanced academic disciplines had become a war factory. And he sensed an abyss had opened up over decades, out of which destructive ideologies erupted and fused with intellectual power and technical know how to become the driving force of National Socialism.
Late in his own imprisonment, only a year before his execution, Bonhoeffer was asking the question that would require answering to enable post-war national, cultural, and economic recovery. But it was also the question that would require asking and answering for even more critical reasons; how to recover his nation's soul when so much of its previous history was discredited; how to restore a sense of identity more deeply rooted in humane learning whose goal was a more creative and compassionate humanity; how to redress the balance of human education and learning so that technical mastery would not outstrip moral capacity, and technological development would be harnessed to more peaceful ends in the the new world order of nations; how to do all this?
The intellectual life's work of the thinkers and poets, the artists and scientists, the philosophers and engineers, the musicians and technicians, cannot continue to be on separate tracks towards very different goals. Bonhoeffer sensed much of this as the war came near to its end, and his nation faced certain defeat. Like much else in his prison writings, his words are prescient, and remained undeveloped. But like the most significant prophetic voices, he had asked the life giving question, which we 75 years later have to live with, and go on seeking answers to it, for our own day.
This is being written in the midst of a pandemic, the most serious threat our world has faced for generations. We will need scientists and technicians, engineers and inventors, new technologies and industrial scale medical resources. But we will also need a revival of humanism, defined as respect for humanity, care for nature which is our living context, moral visions of human life committed to the common good, the nurturing of a culture of the mind, the imagination, the conscience and of strengthened human values. So we will need artists and poets, musicians and novelists, historians and lovers of language. Because our context, no less than Bonhoeffer's, is now a place of urgent questioning of what a human life is, what a human being is for, and what can safeguard and nurture the values that enable not only survival, but human flourishing that does not threaten the health and life of the world which is our home.
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