What are the humanities? Better living through interpretation.

Institutionally speaking:The humanities is an umbrella term that refers to a set of academic disciplines usually including (more or less) Classics, History, Philosophy, Religion, Law, Literature, Linguistics, the Visual Arts (such as Painting, Photography, and Film) and the Performing Arts (such as Music, Theatre, and Dance).

Conceptually speaking:The humanities study the things humans have made, from art and literature to language and culture. (The sciences study naturally occurring phenomena, the things that humans didn’t invent: rocks, stars, molecules, animals, gravity, chemical reactions, the circulation of blood, and so forth.)

Being Human: The humanities help us understand the experience of being human by asking the big questions that individuals and societies face day after day, year after year, generation after generation, and century after century: What is true? Why do we do what we do? How should we lead our lives?

Beyond Common Sense: The humanities try to get to the bottom of things when the best way to understand something is unclear, asking and answering questions that aren’t easily accounted for with common sense.

Past and Present: They usually treat answers as provisional and open to revision. Thus, we come to reckon with the relationship between the past and the present.

Value and Judgement: The humanities identify historical objects, events, and traditions that deserve to be known and thought about today, raising questions about how we exercise judgment and how we determine value.

Mental Training: Forcing us to articulate what we think is true and good, and why, the humanities train our mental capabilities: our ability to interpret and our ability to explain. Thus, we develop the skills needed to think about and talk about why we do what we do.

Reflection and Justification: A premium is placed on both reflection (bringing about the possibility of changing one’s own mind) and justification (bringing about the possibility of changing someone else’s mind).

Instrumentality: The humanities provide neither rules for living (as church does), nor training for a certain job (as vocational schools do). Instead, they provide the skills that equip people with the ability to do other things better.

Beyond Academia: That's why it's equally mistaken to believe (1) that the humanities are a self-contained end in themselves that can remain cozily insulated in academia, and (2) that people don’t need the humanities if they’re going to pursue a vocation outside academia.

The Liberal Arts: Ancient Greek and Roman universities were organized around what was called the liberal arts, the seven fields of knowledge a student needed for a life of learning: logic, grammar, rhetoric, arithmetic, music, geometry, and astronomy.

Triviumand Quadrivium: In medieval European universities, the liberal arts were categorized into the triviumand the quadrivium. The trivium included logic, grammar, and rhetoric. The quadrivium included arithmetic, music, geometry, and astronomy. Students would proceed sequentially through these fields, starting with the trivium and then proceeding to the quadrivium, because the fields dealt with in the trivium were (and still are) seen as a necessary foundation for success in the fields that constitute the quadrivium. That is, the skills developed in the trivium – the skills of thinking, reading, writing, and speaking – allow a student to deal with other kinds of specialized knowledge, namely those of the quadrivium.

The Rise of STEM: Modern American universities face a unique educational challenge in the context of the tradition of the liberal arts. American society has elevated careers (and therefore skills) stemming from the quadrivium above those stemming from the trivium. Consequently, American education has decreased attention on skills stemming from the trivium. This push was led, we must say, by President Obama and his “race to the top” educational policy, which really meant “race to the top of STEM fields”: Science, Technology, Engineering, and Math. This moniker, “STEM,” attempts to replace the trivium with the STEM fields as the foundation or “stem” from which knowledge is built or grows. It is explicitly not knowledge, however, and even less so something like happiness,but “economic prosperity” that, according to the STEM Education Coalition, is our goal.

The Economics of STEM: This position was epitomized, for example, when in 2013 the Obama administration proposed using graduates’ starting salaries as one matrix in a college and university rating system. This position reappeared when in 2015 Wisconsin Governor Scott Brown tried eliminating the sentence, “Basic to every purpose of the system is the search for truth,” from the University of Wisconsin’s Mission Statement and replacing it with language stating that the university’s mission was “to meet the state’s workforce needs.” In other words, the trivium traditionally seen as a foundation for the quadrivium – not as grade school stuff, nor as frivolity or added bonus if there’s enough time after dealing with the important science stuff, but as a necessary prerequisite for success – has been devalued at precisely the time when it is most needed.

From Trivium to the Humanities: In modern academic parlance, the field of “rhetoric” and the disciplines collected under the banner of “the humanities” have acquired the significance of the trivium. The humanities is the name we use to study the human individual (i.e., our subjective experience in the world) in contrast to the sciences that study matter (i.e., the objective reality of the world).

Textuality and the Humanities: The humanities are based in the notion of textuality– that is, in the idea that the world is full of texts, or things we humans have created (whether material objects like a poem or immaterial events like a war), and that we can interpret those “texts” in the same ways that we interpret “texts” more traditionally understood (as in works of literature).

A World Full of Poetry: If textuality is the condition of having been made by humans, it’s no throwaway platitude to say that the world is full of poetry, from the Greek word poiesis, “making.” The world is full of things that we’ve made for this reason or that. The textuality of the world around us means that we must acknowledge the interpretability of well nigh everything, at least everything that we humans have made. You might love, hate, or fear the idea of poetry, but all you need to study “poetry” – understood as the making of things – is an intense curiosity about the way humans make things to get what we want.

The Humanities and the Sciences: The notion that we can study what we have made is the basis of humanism as an intellectual tradition and the humanities as an academic discipline: both study what, how, and why humans create things, leaving the many aspects of existence that humans did not create to other modes of inquiry, such as the natural sciences. Not everything was or is created by humans, and not everything is available to the humanities for interpretation: humans did not create the rocks and the stars, so the humanities have nothing to say about such things, though the humanities certainly do have something to say about the interpretations and discourses we humans create in response to those naturally occurring objects.

The Paradox of the Humanities: The paradox of the humanities is that it studies the most important, but not the most basic, feature of existence. Human experience is the most important feature of existence for the simple reason that existence is meaningless and irrelevant unless we humans are alive and kickin’ to experience it. But human experience is not the most basic feature of existence. The most basic feature of existence is matter (protons, neurons, electrons, and so forth) – in other words, the things that are studied by the natural sciences and disciplines such as physics. Because matter is more basic, it seems to have acquired the status of being more important, but it is experience in the world, not the reality of the world, that matters most for human being.

Being Human: The problem with too scientific an approach to existence is that no one will ever meet and shake hands with a proton or electron; yet we deal with human beings all the time. Human being is the event that necessarily mediates – that is, stands in the middle of – existence and any experience of existence that may occur.

Interpretation and the Humanities: If we define a textas “something created,” an authoras “someone who creates,” and interpretationas “explanation of an author’s creation of a text,” then the humanities are the only form of academic inquiry that interprets things. The humanities study the things humans have made, from art and literature to language and culture. When we study such things in the humanities, we are serving as messengers conveying the meaning of the authors who created those things. We are interpreting, and you can’t interpret something that wasn’t created by human hands. Other academic fields perform invaluable kinds of analysis and inquiry. Interpretation is not the only game in town, but interpretation belongs to the humanities. Interpretation is what we do. For the humanities, it is our responsibility as well as our justification.