Whether or not the following items were discussed during the first week of the quarter, these notes contain some basic information about the scope of the humanities. Be sure to read this page, the syllabus, and supporting materials carefully, because I'd like to be able to address specific questions on the syllabus and the lecture at the beginning of the second week of class.

Few people who take this class have the foggiest notion of what it entails. What is/are the "humanities" anyway? Why do we have to take a class like this in a school like this?

Simply put, taking this class will make you a better person (a better animator, designer, video producer, etc.) because it will help you find out how creativity happens. It will teach you something about the history of artistic traditions, and it will help you to learn how to do careful research and to "mine" the past for really good ideas.

It will probably also make you aware of how much we, as a culture (very broadly speaking), owe to our forebears. The mantra I will often repeat in this course is "the more you know, the more you can know" because human beings rely heavily on metaphor (comparison, analogy, translation, and many other manifestations of this basic process) both to learn and to create.

the arts

culture

But not

the sciences (medicine acquired "scientific" status in the nineteenth century, when it was no longer regarded as an "art")

We can roughly (very roughly) divide the humanities up into three categories:

It quickly becomes clear, however, that there is enormous room here for interchange: isn't film "visual"? Isn't poetry often "performed"? Aren't all of these things dependent on innovations in science and technology? Aren't scientists products of their cultures and therefore influenced by the arts? Aren't many of the humanities (such as architecture and music, or formal logic in philosophy) bound up with mathematics? Categorization and classification are often helpful, but they can also be limiting and artificial. Think about the ways in which any of the arts listed above could be considered in one or another of these categories.

Because I am by trade an archaeologyist turned philosopher of technology, I find it difficult to separate science and technology from the arts. As we will see, the overlap is often considerable and, in the technology-laden twenty-first century, inescapable.

The next section of these notes is devoted to a history of the humanities: where the term comes from, how we use it, and what we mean by it.

The History of the Humanities

The Greeks, beginning with Pythagoras, built the foundation for our notions about the humanities. Socrates and Plato formulated the kind of systematic thinking we now refer to as philosophy (from the Greek, "love of wisdom"); and although philosophical thinking certainly existed before the Greeks, the Western tradition emerged to an important extent from conversations between Socrates and his students, recounted in Plato's dialogues (two of which we will encounter in this class).

Parts of the Middle Ages are often referred to as the "Dark Ages" on the mistaken assumption that nothing of much intellectual importance occurred until the flowering of humanism in the Renaissance. But the high Middle Ages saw a 300-year period of peace and intellectual excitement which actually paved the way for the florescence of science and art that began in earnest in the fifteenth century after the birth of Christ. During the twelfth century, on the Iberian peninsula (Spain and Portugal), communities of Jewish, Muslim, and Christian scholars translated hundreds of ancient Greek, Roman, and Arabic texts that would provide the foundations of modern philosophy, science, and mathematics. [For an excellent, highly readable account of this intellectual revolution, see Richard E. Rubenstein's Aristotle's Children: How Christians, Muslims, and Jews Rediscovered Ancient Wisdom and Illuminated the Middle Ages. New York: Harcourt, 2003.]

As a result, the Renaissance revived interest in the Classical world, and scholarship shifted its focus to the reading of Greek and Roman literature and the enjoyment of Greek and Roman art and architecture. In the visual arts, people began to recognize that human beings are essentially historical beings (i.e. products of our cultural heritages), and to believe that the highest point of human experience occurred in Classical antiquity. This, of course, led to the valorization of things Greek and Latin, and the denigration of heritages other than these--and to the notion that in order to be cultivated or civilized (i.e. human), one must be well versed in the Classics. Some of this "cultivation" was accomplished through imperialism, elitism, racism, classism, and other forms of oppression, but the nurturing of human intellectual and creative abilities also allowed for questioning and the subsequent re-evaluation of long-held beliefs.

The eighteenth century saw yet another renewal of interest in Classical ideas and objects, and a new fondness for the exotic, as a direct result of the discovery of ancient sites such as Pompeii, and Napoleon's expedition to Egypt. Archaeology as a pursuit of dilettantes (people who didn't pursue a set profession and dabbled in almost everything) arose during this period, and by the nineteenth century, museums as institutions to house the spoils of collection found their way into every major city in Europe. The Neoclassical and Romantic periods in the visual arts and literature coincided with the Enlightenment or Early Modern period in philosophy, and generated a continuing discussion concerning Classical ideas about the arts.

In the twentieth century, beginning with the German philosopher Wilhelm Dilthey, the term "humanities" (Geisteswissenschaften) came to be opposed to "the sciences" (Naturwissenschaften) as everybody tried to become "scientific" (because science is "objective"--quantifiable--and thus a more reliable source of "Truth"). In 1959, C. P. Snow published a book called The Two Cultures and the Scientific Revolution (see these websites devoted to the controversy that arose around it), which set in cement the notion that the humanities and sciences were radically separate enterprises, using different research methodologies and even speaking different "languages."

But as science itself has come under considerable intellectual criticism (postmodern) for denying its sociocultural aspects, and as the sciences and humanities have begun to merge in such pursuits as computer animation and various other electronic media, we seem to have reached a point at which we recognize the improbability of an infallible Truth, and the strong possibility that the experience of being human leads us to truths (plural, little "t"). Although some cultural critics see this acceptance of multiple viewpoints as evidence of rampant relativism, we have also begun to recognize the fact that many cultural traditions continue to inform our own, and we have much to learn from studying them, not only in the humanities, but in the sciences as well. For an excellent overview of what the sciences owe to the non-Western world, see Dick Teresi's recent book, Lost Discoveries: The Ancient Roots of Modern Science--From the Babylonians to the Maya (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2002).

It would be impossible to cover the entire history and content of the humanities with any fluency in eleven weeks; but I will try in this class to acquaint you with some basic principles and methods that will allow you to conduct research in any of the areas that fall under the umbrella of humanistic studies: the visual, performing, and intellectual arts. But your course work will also involve learning how to learn, and discovering how scholars know what they know. To this end, we will also explore avenues of discovery: creativity as a process of translating ideas into images, objects, and/or words; the nature of art and craft, relationships among art, craft, and technology; similarities and differences among different cultural traditions; and the debts the Western tradition owes to other cultures. I also hope to introduce you to the philosophical practice of considering the meanings of objects, ideas, images, and words within the contexts in which they are created.

Continuing themes: Metaphor, Translation, Memory, Performance, Play

Metaphor and translation refer to the same process: the carrying over of meaning from one place to another. I will maintain throughout this course that the translation process is a fundamental aspect of creativity. Equally important, perhaps, and not completely separate from translation, is performance. In addition to the performing arts (theater, music, and dance), we will consider the performative aspects of literature, poetry, philosophy, the visual and culinary arts, etc. At the heart of all this is the human proclivity for play. So, we will spend a good deal of time playing with ideas and examining the playful roots of the humanities. We will also reflect on memory: the role of the humanities in preserving human knowledge of the past. The picture that emerges from these efforts may not be complete, but the course should fulfill its mission to introduce you to a range of possibilities for further exploration.

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04.01.11