The humanities are presented as the living infrastructure through which societies make sense of themselves, their past, and their possible futures. Rather than viewing them as a set of academic disciplines or cultural ornaments, they are understood as the invisible medium—like water to a fish—that enables ethical reasoning, historical consciousness, and democratic imagination. The crisis of the humanities is thus a crisis of meaning itself, a sign that societies no longer perceive the frameworks that shape their experience. A distinction is drawn between two models of culture: the normative, which aspires to emancipation and human formation, and the descriptive, which views culture as embedded and plural. The humanities mediate between these poles, providing the tools to critically examine both inherited traditions and emerging forms of life. Reducing the humanities to heritage is a dangerous gesture. Declaring them as heritage treats them as finished, museumified objects, rather than as active forces of reflection and transformation. Paradoxically, the humanities are what allow something to be recognized as heritage—they generate significance, they do not merely preserve it. To instrumentalize or archive them is to cut off their political and epistemic function. In a time of cultural saturation and ideological confusion, the humanities offer not nostalgia but orientation. They are not the memory of the past but the practice of awareness: the capacity to think with others, across time, in conditions of uncertainty.
