The World Made by Human Studies
In 19791 spent the summer at a National Endowment for the Humanities sum? mer seminar at Princeton with Richard Rorty, an experience which had nu? merous consequences, including a very Rortyan paper subsequently published in Human Studies called "Social theory without wholes" (1984). Over this summer I also worked on a manuscript that grew out a long article published in Human Studies on Weber and the fact-value distinction entitled "The lim? its of reason and some limitations of Weber's morality" (Turner and Factor, 1979). The research I was doing in the Princeton library was primarily con? cerned with filling in the context in which Weber had made his famous state? ments about fact and value, and also with examining the sequelae of those writings in subsequent philosophy. This topic represents an important and dis? tinctive strand in the tradition of continental philosophy, something that has now increasingly come to be recognized (for example in Safranski's recent book on Heidegger, 1998). During that summer I came to recognize, although in a very dim way, the significance of journals as communities, and what I recognized has a great deal of bearing on my own appreciation for Human Studies. In tracking down and copying journal versions of articles in such journals as Logos, the journal of the philosophy of culture in which Rickert, Weber, and Simmel played the defining role, I entered a world of ghosts. I was well aware of the relations among these three, their relation to Jaspers, the antagonism to Scheler, and Scheler's relation to Heidegger. Something else stayed with me, however. The texts that I was looking for at Princeton not infrequently were no longer shelved in Firestone, the main library, but had been transferred across the river to a utilitarian but brightly lit storage library which one was able to browse, just as one could browse the stacks of Firestone itself. There I found, adjacent to the volumes I was looking for, a large number of exceptionally beautifully bound and produced journals, in German, on subjects that had, to use the Bismarkian expression of the German politics of the time, had their day in the sun, a day that in some cases ended abruptly in 1933. Today, only a specialist in the history of the human sciences could so much as write a long paragraph explaining what the intellectual movements that produced these impressive journals actually were about. But these shelved and