"Seven decades later
CIPSH, the International Council for the
Philosophy and Human Sciences, was established seventy years ago, in the
framework of the launching of the United Nations and of Unesco within them, as
part of a strategy that should help preventing a new global terror.
CIPSH started as one more structure that was fostered
by the core of partner nations, but with a past of its own and expecting its
further growing autonomy, trying to prevent the agenda of research and
knowledge from being governed by short term driven needs and results, which is
still a major dimension today.
In the first general assembly of CIPSH, the 18th
January 1949, Jacques Rueff, president its preparatory commission, define the
priorities for CIPSH at that time: campaign against non-reflexive
specialization (“We wish to get the technicians away from their techniques”),
encouragement of the setting up of international organizations in fields in
which no such organizations exist, coordination of bibliographical work
and re-establishment of a world “community of minds.
The contextual constraints of the humanities today
differ significantly from the 1950’s, but the crucial choices related to the
pressure of short-term anxieties share similar traits, since societal constraints, culturally generated through time,
are precisely the conditions of viability of humanities academic research.
Disciplinary isolation, insufficient coordination of research in some fields,
bibliographic dispersal, intellectual individualism,… these are contemporary
problems that were also present seven decades ago.
However. the context
pushes humans to, for the first time ever, face global unified challenges,
living not only within one environmental system with integrated ecosystems as
in the past, but also within a planetary socio-economic integration. The
question is if humans will be able to build a coherent convergence of
strategies to face a context that leaves no room for merely regional
adaptations, while requiring reinforced diversity, designing a new
modernisation which starts as one conceptual choice and proceeds as a
sociocultural facing of dilemmas, involving values and meanings. Humanities
have a major role in helping societies in this process.
The World Humanities Conference, organized by CIPSH
and UNESCO in 2017, led to five main results: institutional (new members and
fields of study), strategic (a first state of the art of the humanities),
networking (with UNESCO, with other international councils, but moreover across
CIPSH members), organic (through new structures, such as the new UNESCO and
CIPSH Humanities chairs) and operational (through new programmes, namely the
Global History of Humanity and the World Humanities Report). The new structure
of CIPSH, assuming its confederative dimension, clearly reinforces the Council
and its members, while debates need to be pursued, namely on how to move
forward, within a dispersed context that reversed the trends issuing from the
late 1940’s.
Today, the federations and unions are called upon to
help CIPSH, as the Council is asked to contribute for Unesco and various
international, regional and national institutions which experience severe
difficulties themselves. The path undertaken since 2014 is leading to positive
results, and CIPSH will certainly build from those, anchored in its member
organisations and in close partnership with the other domains of research and
with Unesco and society in general.
There is a need for a flexible framework of reference
capable of federating research and outlining a convergent path. CIPSH has a
major role to play in such process, which implies new administrative
procedures, a new vision building collaborations with other sciences, the
remobilization of its member organizations and a common joint program of action
rooted in a clear methodology. The World Humanities Conference and the
establishment of projects such as the Global History of Humanity or the World
Humanities Report contribute to this but need to be complemented with further
actions.
CIPSH, bringing together academies, world scholarly
federations and unions, universities and the whole scope of humanities, may
undertake this path, leading to resume the process of integrative knowledge
through diversity, making full but critical use of digital possibilities,
countering the current trend of disruptive ignorance of disciplinary
corporative approaches and focusing on meaning and integrative epistemologies.
