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Abstract:
This paper sketches an epistemology of the humanities as a type of knowledge distinct from, yet encompassing scientific knowledge. Drawing on philosophical hermeneutics in the tradition of the Geisteswissenschaften, as well as on the Latin rhetorical tradition and Greek paideia, the essay presents humanities knowledge as “involved knowing”: rather than abstracting from the subjective conditions of knowing, including emotional and conative determinants as introducing personal and historically contingent biases, humanities knowledge focuses on precisely these subjective factors as intrinsic to any knowledge in its full human significance. In particular, poetry, which is historically the matrix of knowledge in all fields including science, explores and expresses these specifically human registers of significance.
Introduction to the Humanities as Involved Knowing
Method and Truth in the Humanities
What kind of knowledge, if any, do the humanities represent? Beginning from epistemological questions concerning the nature and conditions of knowledge in the humanities might seem hopelessly remote from the study of great works of literature in the humanities disciplines and from their remarkably rich contents. But actually theoretical awareness and self-reflectiveness are integral to most any authentic knowledge and insight in the humanities. To begin, therefore, with some broad theoretical considerations on this type of study is already a way of directly embarking upon it. The question of the kind of knowledge the humanities entail can be approached in theoretical terms through probing the history and the method of the humanities as intellectual disciplines. Given the inextricably historical character of humanities knowledge, the two, history and method, are closely intertwined and indeed inseparable. Logically the question of method demands to be taken up first. Yet even to speak of method in the humanities risks impropriety and betrays an, in some ways, inappropriate bias. For knowledge in the humanities is not per se methodical. To the extent we feel the need to establish at the outset the right method of research, our conception of the humanistic disciplines is under the sway of the scientific disciplines with which they share the liberal arts curriculum in academic institutions of higher learning. While in science a sound method supposedly guarantees true results and is theoretically necessary to arrive at certainty of the truth, the experience of truth in the humanities, for example, in and through a work of art, may be more likely to come about as an epiphany and in the most unmethodical, incalculable ways.[1]
Not cognitive knowledge alone but aesthetic sensibility and moral feeling, emotional empathy and imaginative vision, along with many other types of intelligence and awareness are intrinsic to all that is known in the humanities. This means that knowledge in the humanities is contextual and relational, and therefore also historical, and even personal. A unique personal history is necessarily the context for all knowledge that is one’s own and that can truly be called human knowledge.
There are a few verses by the eighteenth-century English poet William Blake that for me personally, since undergraduate days, have stood out as a sort of motto over the gate of entry into the field of the humanities:
For a tear is an intellectual thing
And a sigh is the sword of an angel king
And the bitter groan of the martyr’s woe
Is an arrow from the Almighty’s bow.
It is enough to hang on to just the first verse for its suggestiveness concerning what may be considered the objectives of the kind of study undertaken in the humanities, namely, the attempt to learn to think with and through feelings and in light of images, and to cultivate what has in tradition oftentimes been called “the intelligence of the heart.” In putting it that way I am quoting the seventeenth-century French philosopher, Blaise Pascal, who wrote that the heart has its reasons which reason does not understand (“Le coeur a ses raisons, que la raison ne connaît point,” Pensées 277). Our objective, in other words, less like the Bible’s and more like Plato’s, is to attain to that kind of thinking, or approach that level of understanding, where knowledge and love are one, or where the will’s desire for the good coincides with the intellect’s passion for truth. And if we also heed the aesthetic aspects of this intelligence, we can state further that both these desires, desire for the good and desire for the true, coalesce in the love of the beautiful.
I state these objectives in what, admittedly, are somewhat lofty, elusive terms partly because of a doubt as to whether objectives can or should be stated very rigorously at the outset of any study of the humanities. The requirement of setting objectives belongs rather to the methodology of science as a technology for achieving practical aims and—what is even more worrisome--expresses the demands of an information-crazy culture that actually preserves little or nothing of the genuine scientific spirit of search and inquiry by experimentation, but only the mechanical, calculating aspects of applied science as exploited in technologies of mass production that are so unlike real scientific endeavor-- itself a richly human activity.
The very procedure of defining highly specific objectives and laying out methodical steps to achieving them entails assumptions that are not altogether appropriate to learning in the humanities, for the total clarity and transparency of objectives demanded by at least a certain idealization of scientific method and procedure abstract from the temporality of human understanding and inquiry, from ways in which all human experience and knowing are embedded in time and, more concretely, in the histories of persons. In its specifically human meaning and dimension, the goal of experience remains perpetually a mystery beholden to a time beyond time and beyond scientific comprehension. It is a time when all things shall be revealed and “all flesh shall see it together” (Isaiah 40: 5), as intimated by the biblical voice so pervasively infused all through the tradition of Western humanities.
For the sake of conformity to the unrelenting demand to define objectives, we might say, for instance, that the objective of study of the humanities is to develop critical thinking. We cannot but hope, indeed, that precisely that will happen. Nevertheless, our ultimate goal is not to acquire another power or hone another skill to enable us better to dominate the information that makes up so much of our culture, but rather to open up worlds of experience, that is, to open ourselves up—in Blake’s words, once again—to “infinite worlds of delight ever expanding in the bosom of God, which is the Human Imagination” (Jerusalem). Study of the humanities does not aim to give us just another capability for manipulating the world after our own designs, so as to make it conform yet more conveniently to our wishes or “objectives”: it aims to give us another world, in fact, infinite worlds. Rather than striving to achieve preconceived objectives, we advance towards human intelligence through an intensely energetic letting be, and in doing so we ourselves are changed. Our objective is to respond fully to the possibilities of being human as these have been mediated to us, among other ways, by so-called “great books” of our tradition. What we in the end most profoundly desire belongs to the search itself, rather than being just the goal or result of it. We need not to know exactly what we want out of it in order to genuinely—and most profitably—study the humanities. For the goal of human endeavor and its potential fulfillment belongs to the mystery in question: it is to be discovered and revised all along the way, rather than being determined and presupposed from the outset.
Indeed our question must be not so much what do we think we want out of this type of study and out of the texts that we study in it as, What do they want of us? This involves treating our texts as partners in dialogue rather than just as specimens for analysis. Only in this way do we let them make their claim upon us. Only so can we respond to the possibilities of human being as they have been construed and conveyed to us by certain “great books” that are recognizable as monumental works of our tradition. We interrogate them in order to be ourselves interrogated. The question is: What do these works call us to be and see and do? What do they invite and challenge and enable us to become?
Human existence has, and indeed is, a multiplicity of possibilities which call for realization. We are constantly contemplating these possibilities of our own life as we work through the possibilities for human existence represented in our readings in the humanities. My proximate goal as pedagogue is to mediate (or as Socrates would say, play the midwife) in allowing these texts to speak to us, to waken us to the sense of the possibilities for existence that are in us and which we are. One can be qualified for doing this only by virtue of one’s own experience of these texts and a long-standing, exacting discipline and devotion to the study of the humanities. My own knowledge of the concerns of the humanities is not different in kind from that of the beginning student’s, but it has been patiently and painstakingly trained in ways that may prove to be of service in leading others down the path of discovery of the human and imaginative worlds embodied in these texts.
Involved Knowing versus Scientific Objectivity
What, then, are the humanities? In terms of academic disciplines, one straightforward, inevitable answer, given the traditional structure of university instruction, is that they are the third division in the scheme of the liberal arts curriculum: Science / Social sciences / Humanities. This approach, however, can cause distortions in our understanding of the humanities by allowing them to fall under the shadow of the scientific paradigm cast over the liberal arts curriculum as a whole. Humanities in this scheme tend to be treated by assimilation as one more field for the application of the scientific method of knowing. Christened thus as “human sciences”—literally les sciences humaines, as they are called in French, or the “sciences of the spirit,” the Geisteswissenschaften, as German says—the objective of the humanities would be to extend knowledge by the methods of science adapted to a different kind of subject matter, no longer nature or numbers but “humanity,” that is, human beings and their history. The tendency to treat the humanities as a peculiar, less exact, less potent, less certain, less reliable, and less lucid kind of scientific pursuit is very strong in the university.[2] For we think we know what scientific knowledge is and can define it.
Yet, understood according to the scientific paradigm, the humanities are denatured. For humanity is not an object. We are human. A common way of expressing the presumed privilege and superiority of scientific knowledge is to state that science is “objective knowledge.” But human beings cannot be known as objects. To gain knowledge of human beings one must actually participate in human experience and know it from within, personally as a subject, rather than only analyze it detachedly and objectively from without. Indeed all human knowledge is necessarily self-knowledge, at the same time as it is knowledge of whatever else. The ancient motto, “gn©ui seaytøn” (“know thyself”), the inscription over the oracle at Delphi in Greece (Xenophon, Memorabilia IV, 2, 24-30), expresses in the form of an injunction a condition that is fundamental and imperative to all genuinely human knowing. In all knowledge in the humanities we experience ourselves, that is, our possible selves, the possibilities for our existence. In fact, the possibilities for existence and self-understanding available in our culture today have, to a considerable extent, been forged by the works studied in our humanities curriculum or by others like them. We stand therefore to extend our understanding of why we think and feel about things the way we do by discovering in their emergence in these texts the attitudes and insights that define our horizons, and which we can then either refuse or freely assume.
Scientists themselves today generally recognize the naivety of belief in objective knowledge, but we seem not to be in possession of any clear and convincing alternative to it. For lack of understanding of the nature of knowledge proper to the humanities, we do not know what genuine knowledge is if it is not “objective” in the scientific sense; we can only imagine that the alternative must be subjective and arbitrary ideas that are really not worthy to be honored with the name of knowledge at all. We have become progressively less aware of the sort of pursuit of knowledge as a cultural endeavor to conform to universal human ideals that existed before the advent of scientific research. Accordingly, we can aim through this type of study to come back into touch with ancient and medieval approaches to human learning that had not yet forgotten this broader meaning of knowledge in relation to the subject that knows—what in those days was called the “soul”—as an integral part of being in and belonging to a cosmos from which the individual had not yet been abstracted and exiled.
All that is being said here about human knowing actually applies, only a little less directly and obviously, to scientific knowing as well, for science, too, is nothing if not a human activity. Rather than understanding the humanities as “human sciences,” we can just as well—and need to—understand the sciences as human endeavors. While science likes to abstract from this inescapable human element—the fact that there is always someone who knows whenever knowledge takes place—the humanities dwell upon and accentuate precisely this human factor. They bring forward into the light of truth the human conditions surrounding all knowledge, including scientific knowledge. And in this light it is clear that the objectivity of science comes at the expense of an awareness of the humanly contingent conditions and contexts of every instance of knowing. To express cognizance in its wholeness, that is, as an embracing awareness of the circumambient conditions of knowing, beyond the narrow focus on objects of science or scientia, the ancients used the term sapientia or “wisdom.” Knowledge not just of facts but also of oneself and one’s limitations, and of the meaning of the world in relation to oneself, is the goal of the humanities expressed in this term “wisdom.” Part of wisdom is knowing that in human knowledge and experience we experience always also ourselves, including our possible selves in all their inexhaustible, multifarious variety.
All this is to say that the humanities consist in relational or personal knowing rather than in objective, methodological knowledge. In other words, we ourselves are involved in what we know, and this character of personal involvement is crucial to the nature of this knowledge. This applies, I would suggest, to all knowledge, in the humanities and in the sciences alike, with the difference that in the humanities we do not try to eliminate, or even to limit, this personal involvement and underpinning of our knowledge. Accordingly, we need to understand science too as fundamentally a human undertaking dependent on imagination and the poetry of its discoveries to be meaningful.
In fact, science, or its ancestor “natural philosophy” in a direct line of descent, began as poetry: the earliest Greek philosophers, the “physicists” of Milesia and Ionia in Asia Minor, thinkers such as Thales, Anaximanes, and Heraclitus, and directly following them Pythagoras and Parmenides, active in the Greek colonies of southern Italy, wrote their observations of nature and the world wholly or partly in verse (or at least highly artistic metrical prose) and as poems of the universe and its intrinsic Logos. This is emblematic of the intrinsically poetical character of science at its origin. Conversely, the first poems are at the same time essays in natural philosophy and theology, typically in mythic form. Mythologies in Greece and the world over are the earliest attempts to formulate a comprehensive understanding of the world in which humans live: they constitute the earliest encyclopedias of knowledge.
The fact that knowledge is assembled into encyclopedic form, particularly in epic poetry, suggests that the character of humanities knowledge is to be holistic. It is by comprehending contexts in their widest ramifications and furthest implications that the type of knowledge characteristic of the humanities is realized. The image of a lesson or instruction circling around into a complete circle of knowing is written etymologically into the word “encyclopaedia” (as is also the notion of educating children, paedeia in Greek). As the encyclopedic model suggests, humanities knowledge strives to be knowledge in the round that encompasses things whole: and indeed the epic poems constituting the backbone of traditional humanities classics are all works that in various ways are encyclopedic in scope.
The basis of all education in the ancient Greek world from the 6th century B. C. on was Homer. The first prerequisite to being a cultivated individual was knowing Homer by heart. Homer was generally esteemed to be the source and sum of all knowledge and wisdom. Numenius and Porphyry relay the widespread idea that Homer was a philosopher, a revealer in the Platonic manner of even the highest theological truths. According to Quintilian, he was “familiar with all the arts” (Istitutio oratoria XII, 11, 21), and Melancthon states that the description of Achilles’s shield in Book XVIII laid the foundations for astronomy and philosophy.[3] The Iliad was read as an instruction manual for kings and princes, with invaluable lessons on such matters as war and statecraft. The Odyssey, on the other hand, was studied and revered as an authoritative encyclopedia of information about domestic life and all the arts appertaining thereto. Thus, between them, the Homeric poems were considered to contain the sum of all the most necessary knowledge. Seen in this way, the poems laid claim to being a compendium of all the arts and sciences.
Likewise Virgil, in the Middle Ages, particularly in the Neoplatonic tradition of Macrobius and Servius, who continued the philosophical allegorization of epic that had grown up around Homer already in antiquity, was viewed as a universal polymath and a magician, the master of all knowledge, natural and supernatural.[4] His example as model of the epic poet was to be emulated in subsequent literary history, most convincingly by Dante, who endeavored to synthesize in the encyclopedic form of his poem, the Divine Comedy, practically all that was known of human history and culture. This work even includes frequent excursuses on current scientific topics such as moon spots, embryology, and meteorology. Dante’s own model, of course, to an even greater extent than Virgil, was the Bible. It, too, was deemed to be the paragon of encyclopedias. For the Christian Middle Ages this book was the Book, the very essence of the Book, containing all possible books at least virtually in itself in its character as a total, unified system of knowledge. As a direct revelation of the mind of God, the Bible was held to express the original template for the Creation.
An incomparably important predecessor of Dante in his totalizing synthesis of traditions by the power and originality of literary form is Saint Augustine. Augustine’s Confessions, like Dante’s Commedia, presents a summa of fundamental philosophical and theological knowledge in the form of an autobiographical narrative. Augustine also wrote a more systematic encyclopedic work, the City of God. But more interesting to us than the system of doctrines he was able to lay out from the vantage point he finally reached is the autobiographical path he followed in order to formulate his personal vision. Still, the way the two sorts of knowledge, the personal and the systematic, fit together and indeed fuse in tradition, as they do in Dante’s journey through the three realms of the afterlife, is itself highly instructive as to the nature of knowledge in the humanities, as well as in any possible science. The personal and poetic search and journey are clearly indispensable to doctrinal knowledge in Dante and in Augustine alike.
The originary universality of poetry, its being the original form of expression of all knowledge, is grounded in the fact that all knowledge is humanly situated and that every human situation can be sounded by poetry. In every instance, knowledge belongs to someone with a particular disposition in a particular situation, and as such it can best be expressed by poetry. While in the modern epoch science has tended to dictate paradigms to all disciplines, historically the liberal arts and all knowledge emerge rather from religious and artistic modes of experience that find expression almost always first in poetic genres. Poetry, as the affectively charged representation of a world, embodies at the earliest stages of culture the sort of universality that tends to be accorded only to science today in the age of the technological domination of our society and communications.[5]
This means, for example, that the fundamental importance and basic human interest of astronomy within the liberal arts curriculum might be captured more effectively by a poem than by any astrophysical formula. The words of a poetic text like Psalm 8 communicate the human wonder before the mystery of the universe that lies at the source of astronomical inquiry:
When I consider the heavens,
the work of thy fingers,
the moon and the stars, which thou hast ordained,
What is man that thou art mindful of him,
or the son of man, that thou visitest him?
Admittedly, it is possible to obtain from astronomical science much more precise information about the stars and their properties than what is given in these verses. But does that added technical knowledge, for instance, statistics concerning the stars’ orbits and material densities, enhance the human being’s actual experience of cognitive encounter with the phenomena of the heavens? Does it heighten the sense of belonging to an infinitely fascinating cosmos and the rapt wonderment through which the heavens are perceived as divinely made or as participating in the mystery of Creation? It certainly can. The technical precisions of modern knowledge are themselves awe-inspiring. But still those who love science will not ignore its human dimension and rootedness. Otherwise we risk suffering an immense human loss for the sake of a merely technical gain of “scientific” knowledge. Knowledge, humanly considered, is valuable in proportion to the intensity and richness of the relationships it enables.
In stressing the “human” significance and originally poetical character of all knowledge, whether personal or systematic, I wish to valorize scientific inquiry and research in a new and vigorous way rather than to diminish or disparage it. Science is without doubt the most thought-provoking gnoseological adventure of the human race in recent centuries and, in many respects, of all time. It is the apotheosis of the speculative adventure begun in Greece in the sixth century B.C. with the first recorded meditations of the presocratic philosophers on the general nature of things. The incalculable complexity and order of Creation, as it has been progressively discovered by the always newer instruments of science, from the microscope to the atomic particle accelerator to the laser beam, fill those who consider it with awe and coerce minds like Newton’s and Einstein’s, not to mention those of humbler capacity, to see the evidence that God does not just play dice with the universe. Yet in order to be this provocative revelation of the infinitely rich and intricate mystery of existence, science needs to preserve a sense of the human significance of what it discovers in probing, with its methods and instruments, ever further the facts and matter of nature.
Considering how epic poetry and presocratic philosophy form matrices for proto-scientific patterns of thinking makes it clear that the history of science emerges from the history of the humanities. Thus my purpose is not at all to denigrate science but rather to bring out its original unity with human culture broadly considered and its integration into the whole spectrum of human knowledge. The predominant modern tendency to view all the various disciplines of the liberal arts—at least to the extent that they have to do with knowledge rather than with performance, for example, of a musical instrument, or with creation, for example, of a painting or sculpture—as a species or sub-species of scientific knowledge, more or less rigorous and pure, is perhaps irresistible. It is but one symptom of the cultural hegemony science has achieved in our technologically sophisticated, technocratically managed civilization. However, I am proposing that we can equally well view the humanities and their pursuit of a wisdom that reflects understanding oneself in relation to the general order or disorder of things as the spirit pervading the whole gamut of the liberal arts: by empathetic participation, rather than by detached domination over a field of objects, the humanities render manifest and most directly realize the rational and real value of all forms of liberal learning, including the scientific.
Typically, the sciences objectify. They bring into sharp focus a field of objects, but they block out the human situation that is comprehended by the peripheral vision characteristic of the humanities with their sensitivity to the unfocused, background factors that count so much in determining the overall significance of any experience. In human knowing, there is always a subject who is not quite focused as object, but who is expressed in indirect ways—as intimated by nuances of language or as suggested by the tone of discourse—and this is poetry. In humanities studies, we always need to ask what is the human meaning and value of a given form or instance of knowledge: that is what makes it matter to human beings.
An example from poetry can serve handily to illustrate the ineradicably relational and personal aspects of knowledge that move into the foreground in humanities texts. It recounts the drama and pathos of the encounter between Hector and Andromache, in which Andromache pleads with her husband not to go out to battle where he is going to be killed by Achilles and leave her a widow and her son an orphan. Like any human experience, this encounter is not per se a fully determinate object of knowledge, a discrete entity, one and the same for all concerned. Andromache’s predicament is apprehended through her personal history and is expressed in terms of personal symbols: they are at first her own and then belong to any reader who becomes involved in interpreting her story. As its appropriations in later literature, for example, by Baudelaire in “Le Cygne,” suggest, this drama is bound to mean something different to every individual. Homer’s Andromache pleads with Hector as follows:
‘Dearest,
your own great strength will be your death, and you have no pity
on your little son, nor on me, ill-starred, who soon must be your widow;
for presently the Achaians, gathering together,
will set upon you and kill you; and for me it would be far better
to sink into the earth when I have lost you, for there is no other
consolation for me after you have gone to your destiny—
only grief; since I have no father, no honoured mother.
It was brilliant Achilleus who slew my father, Eëtion,
when he stormed the strong-founded citadel of the Kilikians,
Thebe of the towering gates. He killed Eëtion
but did not strip his armour, for his heart respected the dead man,
but burned the body in all its elaborate war-gear
and piled a grave mound over it, and the nymphs of the mountains,
daughters of Zeus of the aegis, planted elm trees about it.
And they who were my seven brothers in the great house all went
upon a single day down in to the house of the death god,
for swift-footed brilliant Achilleus slaughtered all of them
as they were tending their white sheep and their lumbering oxen;
and when he had led my mother, who was queen under wooded Plakos,
here, along with all his other possessions, Achilleus
released her again, accepting ransom beyond count, but Artemis
of the showering arrows struck her down in the halls of her father.
Hektor, thus you are father to me, and my honoured mother,
you are my brother, and you it is who are my young husband.
Please take pity upon me then, stay here on the rampart,
that you may not leave your child an orphan, your wife a widow,
but draw your people up by the fig tree, there where the city
is openest to attack, and where the wall may be mounted.’
(Iliad VI. 404-34, Lattimore trans.)
Everyone experiences this scene in a personal way as projected onto their own existence. Each person has his or her own horizon of possibilities, past and future, and each of us understands Andromache’s predicament by reference to what for us personally would constitute loss of that which is most vital to us, the central, unifying concern in our lives. [6] Understanding the experience of others entails mapping its crucial features onto the coordinates of our own personal experience. In this sense, human experience calls to be understood from the inside rather than only as an object of analysis.
To this extent, the process of knowledge in the humanities is closer to the activity of reading than to perception. Science tends to understand all knowledge on the model of the perception of an object. The object to be known is what it is wholly apart from the knower and the question of who he or she is. Knowers simply open their “eyes” and perceive what is, objectively, in front of them. In reading, on the other hand, the text in front of the reader’s face does not become known except as it is assimilated into the reader’s own interior world: it is reformulated in the reader’s memory and imagination, and this subjects the text to all manner of influences from the reader’s own individual existence and personal concerns.
Indeed all knowledge, including scientific knowledge, when approached from the distinctive point of view of the humanities, is in crucial ways more like reading than like perception. For all knowledge is humanly conditioned and situated. Traditionally science has wished to forget or at least to limit the effects of this situatedness by an intense, narrow focus on the object alone. Nevertheless, a subject is the condition of possibility of having an object in the first place. “Subject” and “object” are nothing if not correlative terms. The subject is constantly reading himself or herself into the object, and this encounter and interaction with the object in turn is necessary to constitute the subject.
Today, more than ever, we need a broader perspective than that of the hard sciences taken in and for themselves, a perspective that encompasses aspects of reality that cannot be objectified and subjected to scientific scrutiny. Hence the crucial importance of cultivating the humanities. Why is technology today achieving dominion over the earth and destroying the physical together with the human environment in so many appalling ways? The name “Chernobyl,” connoting a trans-continental nuclear disaster, is perhaps most apt to suggest some of the more sensational aspects of this pervasive catastrophe. There are accidents of all kinds that prove disastrous for the earth—the name “Prestige” conjures up the specter of oceanic oil slicks—and these are relatively isolated incidents compared with the constant exacerbation of the greenhouse effect threatening to make our planet uninhabitable, or with the deliberate, rampant ravaging of the natural environment everywhere by urbanization, to the complete disappearance of coastlines crammed with construction and the all too conspicious spectacle of river banks heaped with the wreckage and waste of heavy industry. However, this tragedy occurs even earlier and most insidiously within the human spirit that endures subjection to a view of the world as consisting in objects available for material manipulation, with loss of the human dimension—and a fortiori the divine one—which characterizes the world as it is revealed in so-called great books of the tradition of the humanities. The effects of this crisis of the spirit have become manifest over and over again in the arts and culture especially of the twentieth century, in existentialism, for example, in Dada and surrealism, in the ecology movement, in religious revivals east and west, including “new age” religions and cults. All in various ways represent a revolt against the invincible automatization that implacably advances in the ever more technological civilization of our present historical era—this end and aftermath of the second millennium and transition into the third.
Because the outlook of science and technology can view only objects, it eclipses that dimension of the infinite and indefinable that is present in whatever is human—for example, in the infinite value of a single human life. All that can be specified as an object never adds up to the human individual, nor can it begin to exhaust the mystery of personal identity, not to speak of the divine person of which the human is held traditionally to be a reflection or “image.” Science cannot pick it up on the radar screen or stethoscope or X-ray machine or electroencephalograph. For it is no object, but rather belongs irreducibly to the being of a subject. The light of science can make perceptible only objects, but objects can only be objects in relation to subjects, which science nevertheless tends inevitably to reduce to the status of just objects among other objects. Poetry, conversely, tends to animate objects, to treat all things as subjects. The sea takes on personality as Neptune, trees are inhabited by nymphs named dyads, the air by sprites, heaven and earth become Uranos and Gaia, “the hills leap like rams,” and “the earth rejoices in the Lord at the sound of his coming.”
As these quotations and allusions illustrate, humanities texts are almost without exception (especially the further back one goes in tradition) also religious texts. This is the case at least in the sense that they take some sort of stand concerning the whence and wherefore of human existence, but usually more specifically also through express imaginations of divinity. For humanity does not exclude divinity but is defined in relation to it. Humanity from earliest times in virtually all known cultures has conceived of itself vis-à-vis divinity. In one way or another, virtually all the “great books” of humanities tradition happen to propose what may be understood as profoundly religious views of life. Although religion may mean very different things, this ineluctable involvement with religion in some form is even more evident close to the origins of the humanities tradition. Homer is the source book of Greek religion at a stage where religion is undifferentiated from myth. Virgil elaborates a theological justification of the Roman Empire, a theodicy—even as he a challenges and questions it. Dante takes all classical tradition and programmatically Christianizes it by reinterpreting classical figures and myths as anticipations and foreshadowings of revealed Christian truth. The calling or summons to fullness of human vision and experience is conceived in all these texts as issuing from some kind of at least quasi-divine source such as the poet’s muse. The Bible and Augustine’s Confessions, finally, are religious classics par excellence. This apparent inseparability of humanity and divinity calls for elucidation, and it is a vital topic for reflection within studies in the humanities.
To sum up what has been said here on the threshold of study in the humanities: we are involved in what we know; science necessarily forgets and abstracts from this condition of knowledge in the interest of universality, objectivity, and disinterestedness. But note the contradiction. Science, too, stems from human interest, and it never transcends this starting point as its indispensable condition. Science is no less humanly involved than any other type of knowledge, but for methodological reasons it endeavors to separate these human elements from its object of study, whereas humanities studies move this human element, and the conditionedness of all knowledge by it, into the foreground. The point here is not to diminish the importance or challenge the integrity of science, but rather to see science in its essential unity with all human concerns and endeavors. For this purpose, we can do no better than to turn to the history of education. Having characterized the specificity of human knowledge in descriptive terms, most succinctly as “involved” knowing, and having brought out its resistance to being measured by the standards of scientific method, we must now open a deeper perspective into the historical development of this sort of knowledge and of the scientific knowledge that contrasts with it. For science and its methods can even threaten human knowledge, if the distinctive character of knowledge in the humanities is not understood and respected.
Vicissitudes of the Liberal Arts in the History of Education
When we lengthen our historical perspective and take a look at how humanities, arts, and science have positioned themselves relative to one another throughout the history of education in the Occident, what we find is an originary inseparability and even indifferentiation of “epistemé” (“science”) and “techné” (“art”). Originally, the Greek word for art, t™xnh, means all types of human activity qua rational, that is, in as much as they involve the application of some kind of knowledge. Medicine thus qualifies as a prime example of an “art,” as it indeed was for its ancient founders such as Hippocrates and Galen. The same goes for astronomy and even mathematics. In fact, Aristotle writes of “mathematical arts” and “poetic science.” For the two, science and art, are so much a part of the same thing that the Greek words for them can be used almost interchangeably. This near equivalence continues at least covertly and unconsciously today, for example, in our word “technology.” Although technology seems to us automatically associated with science, as in the formula “science and technology,” this word tellingly sinks its roots back into the Greek word for art (techné). On reflection, this need not surprise us, since science and its objectivity are necessarily rooted in human concern and involvement such as the arts express with particular translucency and power. Even a physical object reveals itself to us in relation to our existence, with its specific exigencies and interests, as for something, as defined by a network of relations that confer upon it its human meaning, and to this extent even physical science cannot escape a certain measure of “art.”[7] Whether they are considered scientific or artistic, human modes of knowing are also modes of relating; they express an existential relationship to the things with which they are concerned. Arts and sciences are indeed in this sense one and have accordingly been joined in the program of the liberal arts since antiquity.
The sort of knowledge that characterizes the humanities as at once techné and epistemé, both art and science, has been pursued throughout the history of education under the heading of the “liberal arts.” Liberal arts programs embrace both science and humanities; this is so because both are understood as essentially human forms of intellectual development and enrichment. In this context of general education, all knowledge is seen as fundamentally human, and the liberal arts as a whole can be understood as axised on the humanities: all are ultimately for the sake of the development of the human individual. This becomes especially perspicuous in an historical perspective.
The traditional scheme or canon of the liberal arts as it came to be fixed in late antiquity for the whole of the Middle Ages, embraces seven disciplines: Grammar, Rhetoric, Dialectics, Arithmetic, Geometry, Music, and Astronomy.[8] The first three of these disciplines were grouped together and known as the Trivium. All are in various ways language arts and cultivate verbal skills. The four remaining disciplines—making up the Quadrivium—are rather all quantitative in nature. Music, too, was treated as a science of numbers and proportions: it was every bit as quantitative, abstract, and exact as astronomy—concerned with measurements of heavenly bodies and their motions—and even as pure mathematics.
The Seven Liberal Arts
Grammar, Rhetoric, Dialectics Arithmetic, Geometry, Music, Astronomy
--------------Trivium-------------- -------------------- Quadrivium-----------------
verbal arts quantitative arts
Speculation on the rank and sequence of these various liberal arts was rampant from ancient times, all through the Middle Ages, and on into the Renaissance. Indeed it remains in different guises a burning issue still today. For at stake here is the selection and valuation of the types of study the young are trained in, and thus the basic outlook imparted and the very mentality imprinted by a civilization on those it nurtures. One idea that was frequently broached from early on is that the language arts form the necessary basis for all further learning. The word thus assumes a leading role as the originating source of knowledge. Grammar, the art of writing, accordingly, could be conceived as the foundation of all the arts and all knowledge. It could even be taken to reveal the origins and essences of things. Theological support for this idea was found in the biblical doctrine of Creation by the Word (Genesis 1), revealing the word at the very origin of the existence of all things. One great champion of grammar, for example, Isidore of Seville in the seventh century, in his encyclopaedic Etymologarium, analyzed the names of things etymologically in order to discover the intrinsic natures of the things named. In this perspective, the complex interconnections between love and death and bitterness could all be found written into the respective (Latin) words for these things—amor, mors, amer. All reality in this manner was conceived of as expressed immanently in language.
Alternatively, the integrating factor of all knowledge and education could be found in the art of persuasion, namely, rhetoric. Thus Quintilian—following Cicero’s ethical slanting of the art of oratory—exalted the perfect orator or rhetorician as the consummate master of all fields of knowledge. Again, the third member of the Trivium, dialectics, the art of discerning the truth by logical analysis, was considered by philosophers in the lineage of Plato as furnishing the only reliable criterion of true knowledge as against opinion. All of these views make the Trivium or one particular branch of it primary as the noblest part and the true basis for all learning.
However, it was also possible to emphasize rather the preliminary status of the first three disciplines in the series in order to claim greater prestige for the Quadrivium as comprising the higher disciplines furnishing substantive knowledge, for which the verbal disciplines were considered as merely propadeutic. More generally, this reflects the split between linguistic and mathematical approaches to learning that has created tensions in every age and still does today. In antiquity, philosophy had oftentimes asserted its hegemony over poetry as a purveyor of truth as against merely pleasing fictions and even malicious lying—in Plato, for example, who took mathematics as his model of true knowledge and associated poetry with illusory images. The battle between literature-based, poetic knowledge and more logically rigorous rational forms of knowledge is perennial. Plato’s banishment of the poets from his ideal republic, on the ground that their representations are too far removed from truth, sets a precedent that history often repeats. Again, in the high Middle Ages, a predominantly rhetorical culture based on literary study was challenged by the newer proto-scientific and systematic reasoning that became known as Scholasticism. Humanities learning flourishing, for example, in the school of Chartres during the 12th century, was eventually superseded by the dialectical theology emanating from the University of Paris in the 13th century.
This pattern of conflict between classical tradition and various forms of rational critique continued in the Renaissance. A great age for this debate is reached with the humanism of the Italian Renaissance. Scholars such as Coluccio Salutati (1331-1406), Leonardo Bruni (1370-1444), Giovanni Pontano (1426-1503) attempt to recuperate the sense of all knowledge as fundamentally poetic in nature.[9] The pendulum swings back again with the founding of modern science, emblematically in Francis Bacon’s Novum Organum (1620), establishing a logic of scientific inquiry on the basis of observation and experimentation guided by the principle of induction, and in René Descartes’s Discourse on Method (1637), which rejects the whole tradition of learning handed down in words from generation to generation in order to begin building the edifice of knowledge anew on the new foundation of the individual’s own clear and distinct perceptions. Indeed the whole history of education can be viewed as basically a history of tensions between literary or poetic and technical, scientific types of knowledge. While Plato banishes the poets from his Republic, for other ancient thinkers like the almost exactly contemporary Isocrates (436-ca. 338 B.C.) poets are the key educators, those who are able to lead the soul through images to truth. The tensions between more humanistic and more scientific orientations of studies today, felt acutely, for example, at the level of university budgetary allocations, are the prolongation of this ancient rivalry that became sometimes a deadly strife.
Just as hotly debated as the order among the various liberal arts was their place, as a group, within the overall order of knowledge. Were the liberal arts, taken together, to serve as preparation for some other type of study, such as philosophy or theology, or law, or could they be considered to be an end in themselves, even the ultimate attainment of knowledge or culture, and hence, at least in the medieval view, of human perfection? Hugh of St. Victor, followed by Thomas Aquinas, makes the artes a propadeutic for philosophy, while for Saint Bonaventure all arts and sciences depend directly on theology and ultimately on revelation for their unity, clarity, and completeness.[10]
Efforts to co-opt the liberal arts into some other program of education for which they would serve as a foundation began early. However, the intention was not necessarily to instrumentalize the liberal arts, so that their practical value could be cashed out for purposes extraneous to themselves, so much as to continue in their spirit of liberal learning for its own sake carried into further concrete spheres of life. For Galen (129-ca.200 A.D.), the arts were preparatory to the study of medicine, but medicine entailed a complete and even a contemplative knowledge of the general order of the cosmos, considered at both the mega- and micro-levels alike. For Vitruvius (ca. 80-ca. 25 B.C.), the arts readied the student for studying architecture conceived as the all-embracing framework of knowledge, since the works and activities of all the arts and sciences and of civilization as a whole must be situated somewhere within the spaces defined by architecture.
Similar sorts of subordination of the liberal arts occur for religious motives in the synthesis of Judeo-Christian with classical tradition since antiquity. For Philo, Clement, and Origen in the first and second centuries in Alexandria, as well as for Church fathers in the Roman tradition up to Carolingian times, particularly Alcuin (735-804), the liberal arts were the necessary prerequisite for advanced studies in philosophy and theology. They were understood as techniques valuable for their utility in application to some purpose beyond themselves. But this is not the understanding of their nature most proper to the liberal arts as such—unless we understand them as being integrated in this way into the highest, omni-comprehensive forms of knowledge represented by medicine, rhetoric, architecture, philosophy or theology, and as participating thus in the ultimate ends of humanity.
Inherent in the very words artes liberales is the idea that these studies are essentially not subservient but free and autonomous and valuable for their own sake, quite apart from professional, practical applications. In Seneca’s statement, famous in antiquity, the artes liberales are those arts whose purpose is not to make money (Letter 88). This notion involves a sort of contemplative ideal, whereby knowledge taken for itself is esteemed to be the highest value for humans. Aristotle established this value of knowledge for its own sake by defining metaphysics as first philosophy and explaining that its being studied for the sake of nothing else beyond itself alone was the highest distinction possible for any type of knowing. In this perspective the highest form of human life is the intellectual, quite independently of any practical, instrumental value it may have. This act of intellect coinciding with love—a purely intellectual act for Plato—is the highest human activity, and to achieve it is to participate perhaps in divinity. The liberal arts studied for their own sake can partake of the kind of knowing considered as in itself the highest realization of human being. To this extent, the “humanities” tend to transcend themselves towards the superhuman, surpassing all definitions of human ends and purposes. And the idea of their forming a continuum with philosophy and theology—which each in its way also claims to be first and final knowledge—actually validates the ideal of knowledge as an end in itself that the liberal arts incarnate.
Without this dimension of transcendence, the personal, human character of all real, concrete knowledge is eclipsed; it becomes instrumentalized and serves as a tool for some extrinsic and practical purpose. Indeed, the dominant tendency today seems to be to construe the liberal arts as serviceable tools, as preparatory training. Math and science, as well as English, can be necessary and useful training for further technical and professional specialization. College catalogues typically state that training in the study of the liberal arts is “fundamental” because it is “the basis of all professional study.”[11] This type of statement can easily be misunderstood and risks marginalizing the spirit of the humanities, which, properly understood, animates the whole gamut of the liberal arts. Unless it is made very clear that liberal arts prepare for professional study only indirectly, by forging whole individuals capable of applying their talents in whatever ways they choose, this view reflects the demise of belief that learning and intellectual vision is itself the highest activity of which a human being is capable. It eventually leads to the abandonment of study of the liberal arts, for other types of “training” will undoubtedly be proved by statistics to be more effective preparation for careers in our ever more technical working world. Nevertheless, though this is not the main point to focus on, such results and their implications also continue to be a subject of vigorous dispute. It is often ably argued that precisely the mental flexibility of non-specific, non-technical study of arts is necessary to train young minds to adapt to situations and technologies that change faster than instructional programs can be adapted.[12]
Science and humanities alike within the liberal arts curriculum have since antiquity had as their purpose not technical mastery and objective knowledge of facts but rather human development and the enhancement of human cultural life. The word in antiquity for education was paideia, the cultural forming of children.[13] In German, the word for education or culture is Bildung, and it concerns the disciplined building up of the person into full realization of all their human capacities. Science is part of this. It belongs to the concerted program of development of the whole individual. But only in this context do the sciences keep in contact with their own meaning and purpose. To this extent, the humanities have set the tone for the liberal arts since earliest times. It was never completely forgotten in antiquity that the humanities, or more broadly the liberal arts, in their intrinsic identity, were to be viewed as a kind of haute culture, the refined, finished culture of a free person. For Cicero, the art of living, ars vivendi, was the only one worth learning. By their own original conception, all the liberal arts are valuable to the extent that, together with whatever specific technical instruction, they also teach the art of living.
The humanities in this view emerge as the life-blood of the liberal arts.
We have at least glimpsed a perspective in which liberal education in the humanities appears as the vital center of all learning rather than as peripheral and as preparatory to vocational training, even though this latter goal may also be achieved at the same time in the best way. We have seen emerge, on counts both of method and of history, the claim of the humanities to be an autonomous form of universal knowing, to offer their own kind of wisdom not to be supplanted by any technique or system, and to be necessary to the working of the whole system of knowledge as it evolves in our modern context. Humanities knowing even has a claim to being considered the pinnacle of all this knowledge—a claim that great books courses aim to test and defend. These reflections should suffice to suggest preliminarily the paramount importance of this traditional form of cultivation to the health and development of a humanity that exceeds the dimensions of all possible objects of scientific knowledge and opens upon the mystery and infinity of all that is—upon what since antiquity has been conceivable only in terms of “the divine.”
[1] This contrast between the experience of truth in the humanities and methodical knowing in science is the fulcrum for Hans-Georg Gadamer’s humanities-based “hermeneutic” philosophy in Wahrheit und Methode (Tübingen: J. C. B. Mohr, 1960), translated by Joel Weinsheimer and Donald Marshall as Truth and Method (New York: Crossroad, 1989), 2nd ed. rev.
[2] See, for example, the keynote address by Edward O. Wilson, “How to Unify Knowledge,” with its argument that “all of knowledge . . . can be united by a continuous skein of cause-and-effect explanation,” in Unity of Knowledge: The Convergence of Natural and Human Science, ed. Antonio R. Damasio (New York: New York Academy of Sciences, 2001).
[3] A guide throughout this discussion of the ancient and medieval tradition of liberal arts is Ernst Robert Curtius’s Europäische Literatur und Lateinsiches Mittelalter (Bern: Francke, 1948), p. 206. Trans. Willard R. Trask as European Literature and the Latin Middle Ages (New York: Bollingen, 1952). I have profited also especially from Roland Barthes, “L’ancienne rhetorique: Aide mémoire,” Communications 16 (1970): 172-223, and Henri Irénée Marrou, “Les Arts Libéraux dans l’Antiquité Classique,” Arts libéraux et philosophie au moyen âge (Montréal: Institut d’études médiévales, 1967).
[4] Macrobius, The Saturnalia, trans. Percival Vaughan Davies (New York: Columbia University Press, 1969), and Servius, In Vergilii Carmina Commentarii, eds. Georgius Thilo and Hermannus Hagen (Hildesheim: Georg Olms, 1961) in the fourth century are important sources for this view of Virgil. See Domenico Comparetti, Virgilio nel medioevo I (Livorno, 1895), rpt. ed. Giorgio Pasquale (Florence: La Nuova Italia, 1955).
[5] Whereas in antiquity Aristotle had underscored the special capability of poetry to disclose the universal (Poetics 1451b), Giambattisto Vico, with his Scienza nuova (1744), was key to a modern rediscovery of “poetic sapience” at the origins of human culture as the most universal, all-embracing form of knowledge.
[6] An exemplary discussion of how passages like these can reveal the whole human condition in its deplorable dependency and ultimate abject subjection to the arbitrium of “force” can be found in Simone Weil’s The Iliad or the Poem of Force. She first published it as L’Iliad ou le poème de la force under the acrostic pseudonym “Emile Novis” in Cahiers du Sud 27 (Décembre 1940), during the subjection of France to the Nazi regime.
[7] Martin Heidegger’s analysis of human being or Dasein, Being-in-the-world, as based on being ready-to-hand (Zuhandenheit) more profundly than simply being present-at-hand (Vorhandenheit) gives a penetrating philosophical elucidation of this ontological condition. See Sein und Zeit (1927), trans. J. Macquarie and E. Robinson, Being and Time (New York: Harper & Row, 1962).
[8] This roster was established thanks especially to Martianus Capella’s De nuptiis Philologiae et Mercurii (439 A.D.), which became a standard textbook in the Middle Ages.
[9] A strong contemporary advocate is found in Ernesto Grassi, Rhetoric as Philosophy: The Humanist Tradition (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1980).
[10] Hugh of St. Victor, Eruditio Didascalica, in Patrologia Latina, vol. 176, ed. J.-P. Minge (Turnholti: Brepols, 1862). Bonaventure, De reductione artium ad theologiam, ed. Sister Emma Thérèse Healy (Saint Bonaventure, N.Y.: The Franciscan Institute, 1955), 2nd ed.
[11] Vanderbilt University Catalogue (1991-92), p. 85
[12] See Martha C. Nussbaum, Cultivating Humanity: A Classical Defense of Reform in Liberal Education (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1997) for contemporary perspectives on the continuing value of classical education, as well as on the need for reform.
[13] See Werner Jaeger, Paedeia: die Formung des grieschichen Menschen (Berlin: W. de Gruyter, 1934), translated by Gilbert Highet as Paedeia: The Ideals of Greek Culture (New York: Oxford University Press, 1939).
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