Chapter 17

What are the Humanities?

David Pan

Disciplines in the Humanities

The humanities constitute a field of study that approaches the world from the point of view of human meaning. In studying the humanities, we look at the ways in which humans have created meaning through their thoughts, their actions, and their creations.

Philosophy considers the ways in which people have tried to create meaning through pure thought. This thought, such as with the philosopher Epictetus, can be directed at determining what it is to lead a happy and fulfilling life. Alternatively, philosophers such as Moses Maimonides have reflected on how we should understand our relationship to God. Philosophy considers the way that human thought works in practice as well as the logical principles that underlie our thinking, our actions, and the world around us. Because it focuses on such underlying principles that govern all other scientific thinking as well, philosophy has been called the “queen of the sciences.” For example, in our course we will use a philosophical approach to look at natural science in our study of Galileo and Werner Heisenberg. Though their work can be studied as physics, they engaged in a debate about the structure of the universe, which is also a long-running philosophical problem. Not only does their work have consequences for philosophical thinking about this issue, we can also use a philosophical approach to consider their work in terms of what it says about the human relationship to nature and to God.

Historians seek to understand human actions and events in terms of their significance for the participants and for others. Instead of trying to document every event that has ever transpired, historians focus on events and processes in terms of their human significance. This often means that they try to trace the causes and consequences of human actions within the context of past events, often seeking to recover the stories of past lives. Historians ask the following kinds of questions: “How did change occur?” “What caused these changes?” “Why and how is the present different from the past?” Historians approach primary texts to determine the answers to such questions as these that provide us with our understanding of the past. In looking at their primary sources, historians establish an interpretive relationship between the past and the present moment. This does not mean that the past is considered only in terms of immediate present interests, however. A compelling and believable history is usually balanced, meaning the historian paid careful attention to many perspectives, including ones the historian may have disagreed with. In looking at the European colonization of Africa or the civil rights movement, for example, the historian tries to make sense of these events, both in their significance for the people involved but also for her or his own time. In investigating the past, the historian is simultaneously coming to an understanding of what is meaningful in the present.

Literary critics, art historians, and musicologists study the meaning of different things that humans have made. These creations typically include objects such as paintings, novels, buildings, musical and dramatic performances, but could also encompass shoes and sidewalks, as long as they are involved in producing human meaning. It is important to remember, though, that a humanities approach will not consider these creations from the perspective of how to produce them nor in terms of their purely physical characteristics. For instance, a construction engineer might study the Coventry Cathedral to determine how its sandstone weathers and deteriorates over time in order to then be able to build a more durable building in the future. Though the object of study is a work of art, the engineer’s methodology is a technological and not a humanistic one. A humanities approach considers this building in terms of the significance of its history and present form for people who encounter it. As with the historian, the mode of inquiry involves an interpretation that establishes a relationship between the object of study and the person studying it.

Interpretation

Interpretation is the primary method because the meaning that humanities scholars search for is not an objective quantity. Rather, standards of meaning change when one moves in time and in space from one cultural context to another. Negotiating this movement is the primary task in humanities inquiry and can be described as an interpretation process. In looking at a philosophical text, an event, or a work of art, we want in the first place to make sense of it. But we can only make sense of it to the extent that we can set up a relationship between ourselves and the object of study. In reading Epictetus’s work, for example, we can make sense of his thoughts by comparing them to something that we already are familiar with, such as the ideas and goals of modern psychology. In this way, we can gain an understanding of Epictetus’s ideas by relating his thought to a set of meanings that we already have.

In one sense, this relationship sets a severe limitation on our interpretation. We can only understand something to the extent that we are already familiar with it. But this limitation also means that, to the extent that we can understand the objects of study in the humanities, they are speaking to us personally – to the way we understand ourselves and the world. When we come to an understanding and are able to establish this relationship to our object of study, we are coming to a new understanding of ourselves. If we can recognize in Epictetus some aspects of modern psychology, we gain a new perspective on this psychology that will tell us something about the way it relates to conceptions of divinity and of human happiness. We have thereby expanded the scope and the applicability of our knowledge.

The process of interpretation is therefore something that each person must carry out on her or his own, as it depends on establishing this personal relationship to the object of study as something that has meaning for oneself. We all participate in an equal manner in the humanities to the extent that we come to our own personal understanding of our objects of study. This is as true for you as for the most advanced researchers in the humanities. We are all just trying to make sense of ourselves through the world around us. But as our theme, “the human and its others,” indicates, this self-understanding only arises through our encounter with what is different. Just as someone gains a better sense of one’s own family by visiting another family and seeing the similarities and differences, we can properly understand our own thoughts, actions, and creations only through interpreting those of others. We investigate the past to construct our present, and we explore other cultures to define our own. The final goal is nothing more nor less than ourselves.

Research Communities

Though the measure for a humanities approach is the single human mind, what separates students from teachers is the extent to which their interpretations make sense to others. In developing your skills as a writer and researcher, you will be learning the current methods, ideas, and concerns of different communities of researchers. While the first audience for your writing is yourself, your goal is to develop your ability to speak to others by writing, first, for your peers and your instructor, and then expanding your knowledge and skills to be able to adequately address the concerns of different audiences. As you go through the course, you will be learning more about the way that each of the disciplines of history, philosophy, literary criticism, and art history makes up a separate research community with its own expectations and interests. Your writing will improve as you learn more about the specific characteristics of each research community and what it takes to become a recognized participant. The best writers are not writers in general but writers who have developed expertise and authority within a particular genre of writing and a specific community of readers.

This issue of the research community brings us back to the question of warrants. In the “Warrants” chapter of this handbook, I described a warrant that Professor Miles used to link his evidence back to his claims. As you might recall, this warrant interpreted God’s “Where are you?” to Adam and Eve as proof that God had an emotional need for company. This idea helps demonstrate that He has a complex personality. This single-sentence warrant for the quote leads us to the more general warrant that underlies Professor Miles’s overall method: that the text of the Bible provides an indication of God’s personality, whose development is a complex one that can be traced as a biographical narrative. This warrant defines, first, a set of questions that can be put to the text, second, what counts as evidence for settling these questions, and, third, a framework for interpreting this evidence. Unlike the claims, the warrants are generally not proved by reasons or evidence, but rather form the basic assumptions that underlie the text’s methodology.

From this account it becomes clear that varying warrants define the methods that differentiate researchers working in different disciplines. In his preface, Professor Miles explains how he uses a literary critical method that contrasts with two other methods. The difference between these methods is defined by the warrants that each uses. These warrants establish the rules of evidence as well as the relevant questions to be asked. Here is his description of his approach as opposed to the methods of theologians and historians: “I write here about the life of the Lord God as – and only as – the protagonist of a classic of world literature; namely, the Hebrew Bible or Old Testament. I do not write about (though I certainly do not write against) the Lord God as the object of religious belief. I do not attempt, as theology does, to make an original statement about God as an extraliterary reality. I do not write as a historian and therefore do not focus, as historians do, on the successive Israelite and Jewish communities that believed in God” (10). He shares the same body of evidence as theologians and historians, namely the Hebrew Bible. But he uses this evidence to demonstrate a different set of claims than researchers in those other disciplines. Rather than using the Bible as evidence to make claims about God as something that exists outside the text or about the people who believed in this God, he uses the text to make claims about God as a literary figure, in the same way one could write about Hamlet as a literary figure.

These three possibilities for interpreting the Hebrew Bible present us with the three basic disciplinary methods for working with texts in the humanities: philosophy, history, and art criticism (which I take here to include literary, film, and music criticism). To stay with our example, we can use the Bible as the evidence for our thinking about God, as evidence that tells us something about the human practices and events that accompanied the Bible’s writing or that have followed from its reception, or as evidence about its meaning as a literary creation. All three approaches still focus on human meaning, but each chooses thoughts, actions, or creations as the basis for understanding this meaning.

Moreover, differences in warrants also separate researchers within each of these three broad disciplinary categories. Professor Miles is idiosyncratic as a literary critic for his choice of the Bible as an appropriate text for literary analysis rather than more traditionally understood works of literature. Moreover, his literary approach uses the evidence from the text in order to formulate claims about character development rather than plot or stylistic development. This places him within a school of criticism that uses texts to make claims about characters rather than confining claims to the structures and transformations of literary language itself. All these decisions about the use of evidence are imbedded in the specific warrants of his book.

As you prepare to write your research paper, your choice of a question to be answered will have consequences for you regarding your warrants and the kind of disciplinary approach you will be using. While we do not expect you to refine your warrants to the point that you place yourself within a particular methodological school within a discipline, you should be able to define for yourself the particular discipline within which you are working. One basic characteristic of humanities research is that you will use some kind of “text” as your evidence. This text could be in the form of philosophical texts; historical documents or artifacts; or human creations (e.g. literary, artistic, musical works). A second characteristic is that your work will somehow engage in the interpretation of human meaning and thus should make sense to yourself at the very least. Third, in order to be able to speak to a broader audience, you will need to consider your essay as an attempt to enter into a conversation that is already taking place and that already has established a set of methods in its warrants. In the choices you make about which evidence to use and how to interpret the evidence, you will be placing your text within one of the disciplines of philosophy, history, or art criticism. Once you are clear on the discipline you are working in, this should help you to think about the expectations of your audience concerning evidence and warrants. You need to meet those expectations in order to be considered a legitimate participant in the field in which you are working. Your sophistication as a writer will increase as you learn about these expectations and fulfill them by mastering the methods of the research community you are addressing.

Work Cited

Miles, Jack. God: A Biography. New York: Vintage, 1996.