As a humanistic scholar within an interdisciplinary school, I’m often put in a position to distinguish how the humanities differ from the social and natural sciences. There is a long tradition of distinguishing between these “two cultures,” with the most frequent point of focus, for humanists, being that they concern themselves with human meaning and interpretation, not with causal explanation.
Here’s my most recent attempt to articulate this difference into a simple distillation. Comments welcome. (This post is timely, with the humanities being somewhat under attack at my own institution; see note [1] below for more on that. If the difference articulated here isn’t enough to make the case for the importance of the humanities, what is?)
- The natural sciences seek pattern and meaning in the empirical phenomena of the world in general. They are guided by the goal of attaining ever more truthful correspondence between the meanings and patterns they identify (theories, models, explanations, et al.) and the meanings and patterns found in the world.
- The social sciences seek pattern and meaning in the empirical phenomena of the social world specifically. Like the natural sciences, they are guided by the goal of ever more truthful correspondence between their theoretical observations and the social world(s) they observe. (Question: does this make certain kinds of forestry a social science? Perhaps.)
- The arts and humanities (see note [2] below) express, interpret, and evaluate the patterns and meanings humans find in their efforts to live. They are guided by ideals that are themselves avowedly contestable: ideals such as beauty, goodness, value, meaning, justice, and others, which they take to be more humanly “meaningful” than simple correspondence.
This means that the social and natural sciences share the normative assumption of “truth” as “correspondence to reality,” while the humanities (and arts) do not. The latter begin from the premise that correspondence, or at least representational correspondence, is one kind of truth, but not the only one and likely not the best, “deepest,” “highest,” or most satisfying one. Notions of truth, for humanists, are therefore at play and uncertain; they must be negotiated alongside the effort to make sense of the world (especially the world of meanings and values).
At their best, humanists strive to be self-reflexive on the question of normativity itself. This makes humanities fields less amenable to “paradigmatic stability,” and more subject to a constant “regress” (which can also be seen as progress) into multiple perspectives.
This doesn’t mean that humanists don’t arrive at consensuses within their fields. Few literary critics would dispute the value of Shakespeare, the Bible, or the Mahabharata for understanding the “human condition.” Few historians would dispute that something like “the Renaissance” actually happened or that “Chinese civilization” exists (or existed). But they tend, in principle, to recognize that such consensuses are relative and not guaranteed, and that the way to establish them is through the work of humanistic expression itself, not by virtue of a direct correspondence between those things (Shakespeare, the Mahabharata, China) and the world. In other words, any of these things can be disputed, but if you cannot write a persuasive and compelling book (or other document) about it, then you might as well give up on the idea.
The humanities are therefore essential to making sense of the world — a world that doesn’t reduce itself to a single “sense,” but to many — and to communicating about the sense(s) that is (are) made. Unlike the sciences, which strive for truths that stabilize the world by corresponding to it, the humanities keep the world alive in the richness of its instabilities, uncertainties, and negotiations fated to remain ever open. They seek to retain the vibrating intensity at the heart of our human experience of the world.
These are, of course, ideals. In theory, the humanities should therefore be more open to multiple perspectives, but in practice they are subject to consensus building through “groupthink,” since that is how humans work (as social scientists can easily demonstrate). Since this isn’t a problem specific to the humanities — it’s true for all human activities — it needn’t be fatal to them.
All of this gets scrambled when humanists begin to call themselves “posthumanists.” I address that in a forthcoming article, which I’ll share when it’s appropriate. But, for starters, let’s just say that if the humanities are concerned with the patterns and meanings humans find in being human, we can only ever be human within the larger contexts that enable our humanity to flourish. To the extent that some concepts of “the human” have tended to forget those broader contexts, posthumanists both remind us of them and point at ways we may be transcending those concepts of the human as we go.
Note 1: More on the proposed gutting of humanities programs at the University of Vermont can be heard on this podcast from VT Digger. A quote from religion professor and Humanities Center associate director Ilyse Morgenstein Fuerst captures much of the argument in defense of the Religion Department, which is threatened with closure:
It is shocking to me as a scholar of race and religion that, in a moment where we saw the largest protests in American history this summer around Black Lives Matter, where we’re seeing these unprecedented spikes in hate crimes against religious minorities, and where we’re seeing the erosion of our public discourse around Christian supremacy — to say that you want to cut humanities departments, where that is where you learn about about those issues broadly, I think you’re just destroying the university. I don’t think there’ll be a university left. ↩
Note 2: I acknowledge an ambiguity in combining “the arts” with “the humanities” as I have done here. The arts and humanities are fields, while artists and humanists are practitioners working within those fields. The arts are generally more focused on expression and creation; the humanities, on interpretation and evaluation. Artists who are not humanists practice and/or teach the craft or techniques of art without dealing with the theory of what that art means. To the extent that practitioners of both deal with all of these, they all qualify as “humanists” or “humanistic scholars.” ↩
