Defining humanities and distinguishing modes of human inquiry

¶ … humanities modes human inquiry expression. Be address items paper: Define term humanities. Distinguish humanities modes human inquiry expression.

What are the 'humanities?' Why do they matter?

The word 'humanities' contains the word 'human' and thus interlinked with the definition of the humanities is the definition of what it means to be 'human' as conceived within academia. According to Stanford University, "the humanities can be described as the study of the myriad ways in which people, from every period of history and from every corner of the globe, process and document the human experience. Since humans have been able, we have used philosophy, literature, religion, art, music, history and language to understand and record our world" (The humanities experience, 2013, Stanford University). These disciplines are very diverse but there is a general 'lumping' of non-quantitative fields under the broad 'tent' of humanities disciplines, even though mathematics is occasionally classified as a humanities field and academics from fields such as history and architecture use quantitative data to substantiate their analyses.

The humanities have come under recent attack in academia: many outside the field have complained that humanities majors do not generate workers who can fulfill current demand for employment in the STEM fields. "The prestige of the humanities is at an all-time ebb, partly because there is a public sense that the most profitable way of making a livelihood in the global era is through technology or finance" (Seervai 2014). The popular media tends to stress that humanities graduates in the fields of, for example, English and History, are less likely to find lucrative employment than graduates from the fields of chemical engineering. However, defenders of the humanities stress that there is still great value -- personal if not always economic -- in learning how to write well and think critically from a humanities perspective. "Scientific knowledge pertains to external reality, to that which lies outside us and is available for objective observation. Humanistic knowledge pertains to inner reality, to our experience of the world, to what reality feels like. Humanistic knowledge is subjective. It is not verifiable, or quantifiable, or reproducible. It cannot be expressed in terms of equations or general laws" (Deresiewicz 2013).

Sometimes the differences between the humanities and other fields of inquiry can seem very fine, such as the distinction between political science (a social science) and history (a humanities discipline). However, political scientists are usually concerned with how specific research affects the 'here and now' of political development and often construct paradigms to analyze present-day actions, even if the knowledge they use is based in the past. In contrast, history attempts to analyze how people from the past saw themselves and experienced reality using subjective elements (such as personal accounts from the period) along with more objective data.

Art is another example of how a humanities discipline may at times use technical knowledge but always has that element of subjective, impressionistic experience that makes it uniquely part of the humanities in spirit. An artist may need to understand how the human eye interacts with color, shading, and light and understand technical aspects of using various media. Having a sense of the history of culture and art is often important in terms of creating art that stretches current creative boundaries, just as Pop Art like Andy Warhol's Campbell Soup portraits simultaneously mocked commercial culture and aspirations of 'high art.' What makes art a humanity is its subjective reaction to lived, human experience on a personal and individual level, even though art is inevitably impacted both by social movements and influences (such as funding for the arts and the value of art in the culture) and also elements of the natural world (such as new developments in technology as reflected in Warhol's use of silk-screening when he created his famous works). Likewise, musical developments such as The Beatles' Sergeant Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club band capitalized upon the technology of blending and mixing sound, reflected the anarchic, sexualized, and anti-authoritarian spirit of the 60s even while the concept album also drew upon much older forms of 'cheeky' British humor as well.

Architecture likewise is highly influenced by society and by technology in terms of the needs of human beings for structures to house themselves and businesses, financing, and technology in building construction (as well as technological needs of human inhabitants like for power and indoor plumbing). But architecture is not strictly a 'science' even though it uses science. Unlike science, it is not based on the experimental method which involves creating a hypothesis, using a controlled experiment to test the variable, and then drawing conclusions. Frank Lloyd Wright when he created his 'organic' style of architecture or the idea of form following function reflected a minimalist philosophy and interest in the natural world as a reaction to 20th century industrialization but did not use a scientific process to create this concept. "Organic architecture involves a respect for the properties of the materials -- you don't twist steel into a flower -- and a respect for the harmonious relationship between the form/design and the function of the building" (Elman n.d).