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How the Humanities changed the world
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Posted on Monday, February 17th, 2014 at 3:30 am SHARE:
By Rens Bod
3/4/2014 How the Humanities changed the world | OUPblog
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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 may
come 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 to
the economy. Arguments in favour of the humanities usually emphasize their importance for critical
thinking, historical consciousness and for creating competent democratic citizens. While these arguments
may all be true, a quick glance at the history of the humanities shows a rather different picture. In all
periods, humanists have made discoveries that literally changed our world, for better and worse. As if
humanities scholars have no clue of their own history, these discoveries have even been attributed to the
sciences.
In the fifteenth century, when the humanities were called studia humanitatis, the Italian philologist
Lorenzo Valla showed by meticulous lexical and stylistic analysis that the document known as the
Donation of Constantine was a mediaeval fake. In this document it was stated that the Roman
emperor Constantine the Great had donated the Western Roman Empire to Pope Sylvester I out of
gratitude for Constantines miraculous recovery from leprosy. But when Valla showed that the
document could impossibly have been written in the time of Constantine, the papal claim to worldly
power appeared suddenly to be based on fiction, a result which was vehemently taken up by the church
reformer Martin Luther. Thanks to Vallas philological innovation, one individual could now wipe the
floor with a document that had been deemed unimpeachable for centuries.
In the early seventeenth century the historian Joseph Scaliger tried to reconcile the divergent
chronological systems of different peoples. When he arrived at Egyptian history, Scaliger was able to
date the beginning of the first Egyptian dynasty to 5285 BCE. To his dismay this date was nearly 1,300
years before the generally accepted date of Creation, which according to biblical chronology had to be
around 4000 BCE. Although Scaliger tried to save the Bible by placing the early pharaohs into a
hypothetical period which he called proleptic time, his result led to fierce biblical criticism that ushered
in 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 and
Asia are related via precise sound shift rules that govern phonological changes over time. The linguist
August Schleicher argued that this result pointed at a large language family that had evolved from an
3/4/2014 How the Humanities changed the world | OUPblog
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original proto-language called proto-Indo-European. This triggered the hypothesis of the existence of a
pure Aryan race, a view which was eagerly adopted and abused by the National Socialists. Thus the
impact of the humanities, like that of the sciences, is not necessarily positive. The claim that the
humanities are important for democracy and for developing critical citizens, as put forward by Martha
Nussbaum, 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 Florentine
painting, it not only (literally) changed our view of the world but it also led to revolutionary architectural
design techniques. And when the 19th-century scholar Karl Lachmann used the model of a tree of texts
with a common root for his textual reconstructions, he also gave biologists a powerful method for
describing zoological phylogenies.
Perhaps the insight from the humanities with the most impressive impact on science and technology
occurred in the study of language. When in the late 1950s linguists like Noam Chomsky developed a
notation for defining grammars, it was immediately taken up by computer scientists such as John Backus
who applied this notation to designing programming languages. Chomskys syntactic definition of a
language served as the pattern for the structure of the whole compiler for ALGOL the first higher
programming language. Thus the development of modern programming languages was initiated through
linguistic work. This unexpected application of the study of language is rarely if ever mentioned in the
historiography 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 unforeseen
utilizations. A profound awareness of the general history of the humanities can guard us against the
misconception that the humanities only deal with attributing value, developing a critical and aesthetical
mind, or creating historical consciousness.
Sadly modern humanists often believe that they are moving towards science when they use an empirical
approach in studying texts, art, music, or the past. They are mistaken. Scholars using empirical methods
are returning to their roots in the 15th-century studia humanitatis when the empirical approach was
invented and not since disappeared.
Rens Bod is a professor of humanities at the University of Amsterdam. His latest book is A
New History of the Humanities: The Search for Principles and Patterns from Antiquity to
the Present.
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Image credit: The Donation of Constantine. By Unknown. Public domain via Wikimedia Commons.
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