Brilliant article by Anna Wierzbicka, professor of linguistics at the Australian National University
EVEN under the disguise of social sciences, the scope of the humanities is rarely understood by the public.
MOST English speakers assume they know what science is: the word science is part and parcel of ordinary colloquial English. The same is not true, however, of the phrase the humanities, which belongs to a more specialised academic register.
It is not surprising that many people have no clear idea of what the humanities really are.
The phrase the social sciences is not an everyday one either, but most people would take it to mean some kind of extension from science, modified by the adjective social. It is likely, therefore, that most English speakers would not be puzzled by the phrase, and that the association with science would lend it some kind of prestigious glow that is lacking in the term the humanities.
It is particularly important, therefore, that the meaning of the humanities, and the idea behind this phrase, should be explained both to various funding bodies and to the general public.
Otherwise it might not be clear to many people why the humanities should have a claim on institutional space or the public purse in countries such as Australia, Canada, Britain and the US.
It could even be asked: What can the humanities contribute to human knowledge and human understanding that neither science nor the social sciences can?
The English word science, which excludes not only the humanities but usually also logic and mathematics, does not have exact equivalents in other European languages, let alone languages further afield, and is saturated, so to speak, with British empiricism.
For example, in German the word Wissenschaft (from wissen, meaning to know) embraces all systematic presentation of knowledge and does not privilege empirical, sense-derived knowledge over any other kind. The two branches of Wissenschaft, Naturwissenschaften and Geisteswissenschaften (from Natur, or nature, and Geist, mind or spirit) are seen as being on a par.
In French, too, there are les sciences exactes (exact sciences) and les sciences d’homme (human sciences), and the French adjective scientifique is closer in meaning to the English words “scholarly” and “academic” than to the English word “scientific”. But in English, knowledge based on experience (derived from the senses) acquired so much cachet and such a privileged status in the edifice of human knowledge that it shaped the modern concept of science itself.
Consequently, in the conceptualisation of knowledge embedded in modern English, there is no category of science or sciences that would include both natural sciences and the humanities. Rather, the concept of science is very prominent in modern English, while the concept of the humanities is not, and the two are not seen (in ordinary thinking, reflected in ordinary language) as being on a par. The modern English concept of science focuses on empirical and objectively verifiable knowledge about things. The expression social sciences purports to extend the empirical method and the ability to be verified to the study of people rather than things, especially people studied as groups rather than individuals. The prestige of social sciences derives from their perceived (and purported) analogy with science.
The concept of the humanities evokes a field of inquiry that is fundamentally different from science and which has its own goals and its own methods. The subject matter of the humanities is people, and people studied not in the way in which things can be studied.
The fundamental distinction between studying things and studying people was introduced into European thought by the Italian 18th-century philosopher Giambattista Vico.
Although modern English has since developed its own ways of categorising knowledge, with its own concepts of science, social sciences and the humanities, Vico’s basic idea lives on in the modern English concept of the humanities.
Essentially, the idea is that people can know things of many kinds about people in a way they can’t know things about anything else, that it is extremely important for people to know these things about people, and further, that people can know things of these kinds about people imaginatively, from inside, and that they can have a better understanding of them than they can ever have of the natural world.
To study people in the way one can study things would mean, according to Vico, “to ignore the distinction between human beings and non-human nature, between material objects and natural or emotional life”.
Taking this contrast between the knowledge of the external world and the knowledge of people as human beings as his point of departure ,Vico set out his vision of the scienza nuova. This phrase, when rendered as the new science, can be misleading to Anglophone readers. In contemporary English the word science means something quite different from what scienza meant for Vico, and indeed, from what science meant in 17th and 18th-century English.
Vico’s scienza nuova was not some extension of science (conceived of in the sense in which this term is used in modern English, that is, roughly, as the empirical study of the external world), but a different kind of knowledge including a perspective “from within” the subject-matter.
Vico held that such thinking about human beings can lead to true knowledge no less than what the natural sciences do — in a sense even more so.
He criticised Descartes for restricting “true knowledge” to “those characteristics of men which they share with the non-human world”.
As the philosopher Isaiah Berlin puts it: “Descartes [for Vico] is the great deceiver, whose emphasis on knowledge of the external world as the paradigm of all knowledge has set philosophy on a false path.”
For Vico the intimate knowledge of human beings, which is the proper aim of, as we might say today, the humanities, is inextricably linked with the question of language.
The understanding and interpretation of human conduct and behaviour cannot be strictly separated from moral judgment. Natural sciences are widely taken to be value-free (and social sciences tend to imitate science in this regard). The humanities, on the other hand, do not aspire to be value-free. Thus, when a historian writes of Stalinism and Nazism that “moral judgments are intrinsic to all historical understanding”, he is placing history in the context of the humanities rather than the social sciences.
This link with values and moral judgment needs to be taken into account in the full definition of the humanities.
The concept of the humanities focuses on studying human experience: what can happen to people and what people can do; possible ways of thinking, ways of feeling and ways of speaking; possible motives and possible values. The words can and possible highlight the imaginative character of the research in the humanities. They also highlight the double focus of the humanities: on humanity as a whole and on individual (though culturally embedded) human beings in all their immense diversity.
The scope of the humanities is necessarily very broad. It embraces things that happen to people, things that people do and things that people say, as well as people’s thoughts, emotions, motivation and values. This broad scope explains why fields as different as history, biography, literature, philology, linguistics, classics, philosophy and religious studies can all be seen as part of the humanities.
Some of these fields can also see themselves as part of the social sciences, or at least as having one foot in the social sciences and one in the humanities. Such overlaps are possible because the concept of the humanities refers not only to a particular subject matter but also to method and approach.
For these reasons the approach envisaged by the humanities is different — fundamentally different — from that of science and, consequently, from that of the social sciences, which seek to emulate the approach of science.
Furthermore, the definition of the humanities outlined here is not exclusively focused on knowledge. The humanities seek also to provide opportunities to contemplate how someone can (and should) live, and why they do what they do. This is not something open to empirical verification either.
The appeal to the imagination inherent in the word “can” links work in the humanities in some ways to the work involved in creative arts. This is due not only to the avowedly non-empirical character of the humanities and to its conceptual link with creative imagination, but also to the implication of there being some room for individual mastery and excellence that cannot be fully captured by measurable quality indicators (to use an expression from bureaucratic parlance).
Art, of course, produces works of art, that is, some lasting products. The humanities, too, hope to produce some tangible products — perhaps more enduring and less likely to be outdated than the results of scientific research tend to be. Often these products take the form of books (rather than journal articles), but they can also take the form of critical editions, dictionaries, philological exegesis, and so on. Science appears to aspire to be constantly on the move and the scientists appear to always want to know more.
By contrast, the concept of the humanities includes an aspiration that “afterwards, people can know many things of many kinds about people because of this”.
The non-scientific and experiential aspect of the humanities is also reflected in the goal of understanding other people. A social scientist seeks knowledge about people, but not about other people.
Generally speaking, science studies classes of things rather than individual objects, and social sciences focus on populations and societies. The humanities, on the other hand, have a double focus. They are interested in people in general and they assume it is good if people can know various things about people. But they are also interested in the individual — not necessarily in specific individuals but in the whole range of human experience, human pursuits, emotions, values, ways of thinking and ways of living.
There is pressure on English speakers to regard natural sciences as the paradigm of all knowledge — at least all knowledge that modern societies should value and pursue. As we have seen, the Italian Vico held the Frenchman Descartes responsible for the undue absolutisation of that particular paradigm. In fact, however, neither Italian nor French (nor any other European language) has absorbed this absolutisation in the way English has.
The semantic changes that the English word science underwent in the past two centuries or so make empirically based knowledge of the external world seem central to all human knowledge, and self-evidently so. Modern English suggests to speakers of English, in a subtle and insidious way, that there is no knowledge like scientific knowledge, and that if one wants to focus on people rather than things, one should at least model one’s endeavours on those of the scientists and try to practise social science, cognitive science, or some other science.
Equally, there is pressure on funding bodies in English-speaking countries to see excellence in research and scholarship through the prism of the priorities and expectations of science, in the modern English sense of the word.
It is important, therefore, for those working in the humanities to explain their priorities and expectations to their colleagues in science and to society at large. It is also important for linguists to draw attention to the historically shaped semantic peculiarities of the modern English words science, sciences, scientific and scientists — peculiarities that may sometimes prevent speakers of modern English from making up their own minds about the kinds of knowledge necessary for human beings and their societies to flourish.
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