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How the Humanities changed the worldpermalink buy nowPosted on Monday, February 17th, 2014 at 3:30 am SHARE:
By Rens Bod
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Have insights from the humanities ever led to breakthroughs, or is any interpretation of a text, painting,musical piece, or historical event as good as any other? I have long been fascinated with this question.To be sure, insights from the humanities have had an impact on society. Yet even this observation maycome as a surprise, since humanities disciplines like philology, art history, musicology, literary studies,and theatre studies are usually seen as a luxury pastime which is of little use to society and even less tothe economy. Arguments in favour of the humanities usually emphasize their importance for criticalthinking, historical consciousness and for creating competent democratic citizens. While these argumentsmay all be true, a quick glance at the history of the humanities shows a rather different picture. In allperiods, humanists have made discoveries that literally changed our world, for better and worse. As ifhumanities scholars have no clue of their own history, these discoveries have even been attributed to thesciences.
In the fifteenth century, when the humanities were called studia humanitatis, the Italian philologistLorenzo Valla showed by meticulous lexical and stylistic analysis that the document known as theDonation of Constantine was a mediaeval fake. In this document it was stated that the Romanemperor Constantine the Great had donated the Western Roman Empire to Pope Sylvester I out ofgratitude for Constantines miraculous recovery from leprosy. But when Valla showed that thedocument could impossibly have been written in the time of Constantine, the papal claim to worldlypower appeared suddenly to be based on fiction, a result which was vehemently taken up by the churchreformer Martin Luther. Thanks to Vallas philological innovation, one individual could now wipe thefloor with a document that had been deemed unimpeachable for centuries.
In the early seventeenth century the historian Joseph Scaliger tried to reconcile the divergentchronological systems of different peoples. When he arrived at Egyptian history, Scaliger was able todate the beginning of the first Egyptian dynasty to 5285 BCE. To his dismay this date was nearly 1,300years before the generally accepted date of Creation, which according to biblical chronology had to bearound 4000 BCE. Although Scaliger tried to save the Bible by placing the early pharaohs into ahypothetical period which he called proleptic time, his result led to fierce biblical criticism that usheredin the early Enlightenment with Spinoza among its most famous exponents.
The Donation of Constantine (Unknown Painter)
A more recent humanistic breakthrough is the discovery that virtually all languages in Europe andAsia are related via precise sound shift rules that govern phonological changes over time. The linguistAugust Schleicher argued that this result pointed at a large language family that had evolved from an
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original proto-language called proto-Indo-European. This triggered the hypothesis of the existence of apure Aryan race, a view which was eagerly adopted and abused by the National Socialists. Thus theimpact of the humanities, like that of the sciences, is not necessarily positive. The claim that thehumanities are important for democracy and for developing critical citizens, as put forward by MarthaNussbaum, thus deserves a more nuanced discussion.
Humanistic insights and discoveries have also led to scientific and even technological breakthroughs.When Leon Battista Alberti gave the first description of linear perspective in 15th century Florentinepainting, it not only (literally) changed our view of the world but it also led to revolutionary architecturaldesign techniques. And when the 19th-century scholar Karl Lachmann used the model of a tree of textswith a common root for his textual reconstructions, he also gave biologists a powerful method fordescribing zoological phylogenies.
Perhaps the insight from the humanities with the most impressive impact on science and technologyoccurred in the study of language. When in the late 1950s linguists like Noam Chomsky developed anotation for defining grammars, it was immediately taken up by computer scientists such as John Backuswho applied this notation to designing programming languages. Chomskys syntactic definition of alanguage served as the pattern for the structure of the whole compiler for ALGOL the first higherprogramming language. Thus the development of modern programming languages was initiated throughlinguistic work. This unexpected application of the study of language is rarely if ever mentioned in thehistoriography of linguistics while it is widely acknowledged in (the history of) computer science.
The disregard of these kinds of utilizations of humanistic insights is symptomatic for the humanities.While applications of humanistic methods in other fields may not be the core business of the humanities,the underlying insights that led to these applications are. In their critical investigations of texts,languages, art and music, humanists have revealed patterns and theories that led to new and unforeseenutilizations. A profound awareness of the general history of the humanities can guard us against themisconception that the humanities only deal with attributing value, developing a critical and aestheticalmind, or creating historical consciousness.
Sadly modern humanists often believe that they are moving towards science when they use an empiricalapproach in studying texts, art, music, or the past. They are mistaken. Scholars using empirical methodsare returning to their roots in the 15th-century studia humanitatis when the empirical approach wasinvented and not since disappeared.
Rens Bod is a professor of humanities at the University of Amsterdam. His latest book is ANew History of the Humanities: The Search for Principles and Patterns from Antiquity tothe Present.
Subscribe to the OUPblog via email or RSS.Subscribe to only humanities articles on the OUPblog via email or RSS.Image credit: The Donation of Constantine. By Unknown. Public domain via Wikimedia Commons.
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