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I suppose in essence, the humanities is an enquiry into what it is to be human, while avoiding any kind of meta-position that might suggest we can understand ourselves from any purely objective standpoint - hence its emphasis on things like interpretation and human creativity and why people like Freud are studied far more in humanities departments than they are science ones. It's probably why Marx has endured so well in the humanities, where it's treated more a method of interpretation than as a way of emprically understanding human behaviour - much to the annoyance of those who consider Marxism a science, I'm sure.
In that sense, I imagine the moment the humanities tries to adopt such a meta-position will be the very moment it stops being the humanities.
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