A New History of the Humanities: The Search for Principles and Patterns from Antiquity to the Present (Part I)
A New History of the Humanities traces the origins and evolution of the disciplines of linguistics, historiography, philology, music, art theory, logic, rhetoric, and poetics from antiquity to today. The common thread among these disciplines and through each historical period is the identification of patterns in texts, art, music, language, and literature: the rules that constitute validity, beauty, and order in these fields. Bod ultimately argues that the opposition between the sciences and humanities is a false one, with both branches of knowledge engaged in identifying patterns in their respective fields. By reconceiving the humanities as pattern-seeking inquires of knowledge, A New History of the Humanities may have discovered a way for these disciplines to become relevant again to students, the academy, and the public. Whether one agrees with Bod’s account of the humanities, it is a bold and refreshing take on the humanities today.
The book consists of six chapters: an introduction, a conclusion, and four chapters for each time periods: antiquity, the Middle Ages, the early modern era, and the modern period. In each period, the humanities are organized by the disciplines of linguistics, historiography, philology, musicology, art theory, logic, rhetoric, and poetics. The book approaches the humanities from a comparative perspective by looking at European, Chinese, Indian, and Islamic civilizations. While acknowledging certain obstacles in this study–the distinctions among the humanities, social sciences, and natural sciences are difficult to make; the problems in comparing different civilizations; the selection of source material, and the bias of presentism – the A New History of the Humanities nevertheless makes a significant contribution to our understanding of the humanities and the role it plays in our lives.
Linguistics
The first attempt to systemically describe language as a whole was made in India by Panini (c. sixth to fifth-centuries BC) in classical Sanskrit. He developed a procedural system of rules (grammar) that was complex, precise, and resembled a scientific study of language. Founded on formal and complete rules, Panin’s procedural grammar was not designed to teach someone to learn Sanskirt as a foreign language. By contrast, the Greeks and Romans created grammar textbooks to teach Greek or Latin for normative instruction: Dionysius Thrax (170-90 BC), Varro (116-27 BC), Apollonius Dyscolu (second century AD), Donatus (fourth century AD), and Priscia (c. 500 AD). In the Islamic world, the Persian linguist Sibawayh’s (c. 760-93) Kitab employed an example-based description of language to enable non-Arab Muslims to understand the Koran. By using this method of example, Sibawayh introduced the concepts of analogical substitution (the substitution of words in similar, analogical contexts) and lexical dependence (the form of a word depends on the form of another word).
In medieval Europe, the recovery of Aristotle led linguistics like Roger Bacon (1214-92), Boetius of Dacia (c. thirteenth century), and Thomas of Erfurt (c. fourteenth century) to study language as a theoretical rather than a practical branch of knowledge, with the goal to discover the universal aspects of language and its relationship to reality. This speculative grammar movement employed grammatical categories (modi) that were ones of being (modi essendi), understanding (modi intelligendi), and signifying (modi significandi). Grammar consequently was understood to be universal and language was to be parsed (i.e., sentences broken down into parts). Although “Modism” was later eclipsed by the debate between nominalists (who rejected universalism) and realists (who defended universal concepts), its influence continued to be felt in the contemporary works of Noam Chomsky and David Wilkins. By the end of the Middle Ages, grammar was a combination of example-based and rule-based descriptions, with a tradition of the Modism seeking a universal grammar.
The advent of humanism in Europe led scholars to embrace philology and historiography and abandon Modist linguistics (and scholastic logic). The studies of vernacular language were to show how their grammar corresponded with Latin instead of advancing the theoretical insights of the medieval era (e.g., Thomas Linacre [1460-1520], Joseph Justus Scaliger [1540-1609], Leon Battista Alberti [1404-72]). In spite of this period of stagnation, Franciscus Sanctius’s (1523-1600) Minerva presented a new syntactic theory on the basis of four operators–substitution, deletion, addition, and permutation–that spread throughout Europe and particularly influenced the Port Royal linguistic school with its belief that both word and sentence construction could be covered by a system of rules. Other contributions during this period included Johannes de Laet (1581-1649) who showed that language can be compared on the basis of a quantitative and qualitative principles and that all languages were not derived from Hebrew; and Francis Bacon (1561-1626) who proposed a construction of a completely new language for the whole civilized world.
By the modern period, the study of language had become historical with scholars searching for diachronic patterns in sound changes between languages that could contribute to finding the Indo-European “protolanguage.” The search involved numerous thinkers like Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm (1785-1863 and 1786-1859 respectively) who developed the hypothesis that languages underwent sound changes in a historically regular way. Wilhelm von Humboldt (1767-1835) examined the relationship between sound and grammar, while August Schleicher (1821-68) believed that language could be depicted in a genealogical family tree. The next generation of linguistics, the Neogrammarians, rejected their predecessor’s historical-comparative approach and sought rules that made no exceptions to sound changes.
Ferdinand de Saussure’s (1857-1913) structuralism rejected the Neogrammarians’ notions of absolute laws in language and instead focused on its intrinsic structure: the relations of differences between linguistic signs of a specific language. Language was to be studied not as a historical object but as an autonomous system. Although this approach was successful with regards to phonology and morphology, structuralism proved to be inadequate to account for syntax, in which the number of sentences was proved to be unlimited, despite Noam Chomsky’s (born 1928) generative linguistic attempts.
Semantics also emerged as a field of study in linguistics with George Boole (1815-64) and Gottlob Frege (1848-1925) giving account of its principles, such as compositionality where the meaning of a sentence can be derived from its parts and the rules that combine these parts. The integration of generative linguistics and compositional semantics by Richard Montague (1930-71) showed how predicate logic, generative grammar, and lambda calculus can result in a new logical grammar. Yet in spite of this achievement, Montague grammar did not go beyond Panini’s grammar of classical Sanskirt and a number of new problems have emerged that threaten its foundation: grammar is increasingly seen as probabilistic and constructed rather than a set of established relations; the rise of computational grammar and the need for redundancy, which is contrary to generative linguistics’ desires to eliminate it; and the endless variety and sheer number of languages that resist structural-based accounts.
Historiography
Historiography emerged independently in different places in the world. In Europe Herodotus (c. 484-c. 425 BC) adopted the probable source principle for his history, while Thucydides (c. 460-c. 400 BC) used eyewitness accounts. Both saw history as a cyclical pattern of rise, peak, and decline, a pattern that would be later rejected by Polybius (c. 200-c. 118 BC) who argued that Rome was immune to this cycle because of its mixed constitution and therefore was a form of universal history. Roman historians, along with Manetho’s (c. third-century BC) account of Egyptian royal dynasties, employed the principles of chronological organization for history, a reliance upon written sources, and the introduction the biography (e.g., Plutarch’s Parallel Lives).
In China, historical sources were primary written, with even oral sources being transcribed into writing. The first great Chinese historian, Sima Qian (c.145-86 BC), also saw history as cyclical and defined five historical genres, each with its own form and style: 1) annals (imperial biographies); 2) tables (tabular overview of governments with the most important events); 3) treatises (descriptions of different state functions, like rites, music, astronomy); 4) hereditary lineages (descriptions of state and people in chronicle form); and 5) illustrative traditions (biographies of important people). The historians Ban Gu (32-92 AD) and Ban Zhao (45-116), possibly the first female historian, continued the task set out by Qian to record the history of China.
In both civilizations historians employed principle-based methods, whether probable sources, eyewitness accounts, personal experience, written sources, or a combination of written and oral sources. With the advent of Christianity in the West, history was interpreted according to the biblical coherence principle by Augustine (354-430) and others who understood history as starting with Genesis and concluding with Revelations. An example was Bede’s (c. 672/3-735) Liber de temporibus and De temporum ratione which integrated an astronomical understanding of computing within a theological context of history. Bede also introduced new forms of history in the accounts of cities, nations, and the encyclopedic.
Universal histories also were produced in Islamic civilization but based on the reconstruction of Muhammed’s life. The principles of probable source and eyewitness accounts were used to classify sources as sahih (very reliable), hasan (good but less reliable), da’if (dubious), or mawdu’ (invented). This isnad methodology to record oral accounts was employed by the Islamic historians al-Tabari (838-923), al-Masudi (896-956), and al-Biruni (973-1048). Building off their achievements was Ibn Khaldun (1332-1406) who introduced a “new science” to historiography: every source had to be critically compared in regards to its social context and the laws that control society (i.e., the sociologically analyzed source principle).
In China Liu Zhiji (661-721) introduced historical criticism, raising questions about the style used, the problems with documentation, and the use of criticism in investigation. Unlike Khaldun, Zhiji believed that historiography should employ as many sources and factors as possible: the all possible source principle. Other Chinese historians adopted the basic virtue principle where the usefulness of history was the moral lessons derived from it.
Regardless of the principle adopted by different civilizations, the pattern of historiography during the medieval period was that the time structure of a civilization’s historiography corresponded with the time structure of its canonical text. Christian and Islamic civilization followed a linear pattern with a unique beginning and ultimate goal as represented in the Bible and Koran respectively, while Chinese historiography was characterized by an absence of a beginning or end in accordance with canonical Confucian and Taoist texts. This pattern was broken by Ibn Khaldun, who saw successive civilizations continue to build upon one another (i.e., a theory of knowledge of accumulation). However, his ideas had little effect on Islamic historiography.
By contrast, Petrarch’s new historical pattern was influential in the West: the medieval period was a time of the “Dark Ages” and thereby salvation history was pushed aside. History was neither linear nor cyclical: the new age was not the start or a beginning but a renewal of an earlier time (i.e., Classical Rome). Bruni (c. 1369-1444), Biondo (1392-1463), and Piccolomini (140-5064) all adopted Petrarch’s historiographical paradigm in their accounts of antiquity. But it was Machiavelli (1469-1527) and Guicciardini (1483-1540) who saw that history could be served as a manual to help political leaders. But whereas Machiavelli was prone to generalizations from historiography (e.g., it is permissible to use all means to survive as a leader whose fate ultimately was determined by necessity and virtue), Guicciardini was more skeptical that historical examples could serve as the basis for general political lessons or historical laws.
Skepticism of a linear history grew in Europe, particularly with the discovery of the Americas, and of the value of historiography itself, with Bodin (1529-96) even questioning the humanist’s claim that a better tomorrow can be created by historiography. Bodin’s incorporation of philological methods in historiography; Scaliger’s principle of favoring the oldest source closet to the event described; and Vico’s (1668-1744) claim that histories of all societies follow the same pattern influenced the Enlightenment thinkers (e.g., Voltaire [1694-1778], Turgot [1727-81], Condorcet [1743-94]) who understood history as a spiral pattern of progress. This new pattern of history by Enlightenment thinkers in turn was criticized by Rousseau (1712-78), Hume (1711-76), Gibbon (1737-94), and Herder (1744-1803), all who rejected that history was progressive.
In non-western civilizations, new approaches also were developed. In China Li Zhi (1527-1602) advocated a form of historical relativism where judgments of the past had to be amended. Zhang (1738-1801) criticized philological and linguistic analyses of historical sources as too static and argued that change was the most important characteristic of history. In Africa, India, and the Ottoman Empire historiography examined variations of the past but with the same methods.
Of all the innovations in historiography in the modern period–Ranke’s (1795-1886) historicism (treating all historical periods of having equal status), Comte’s (1798-1857) historical positivism, Macaulay’s (1876-1962) Whig interpretation of English history–Marx’s (1818-83) positivist salvation history was the most influential. Viewing history as dialectical materialism, Marx’s historiography inspired political revolutions and public intellectuals. Dilthey (1833-1911) and Windelband (1848-1915) rejected positivist historiography: historiography was one of understanding (verstehen) of unique entities (idiographic) rather than explaining (erklären) and discovering general patterns (nomothetic). This divide in historiography between those who sought patterns (e.g., the Annales school) and those who did not (e.g., the Critical School, narratrivism, postmodernism) continued throughout the twentieth century and still remains with us today. In the 1980s a middle path has been sought by cultural historians (e.g., Geertz [1926-2006]) who argued that all fields of human life are expression of culture.
Western interpretations of historiography influenced other civilizations. For example, Marxism was adopted the official history in China and by some historians in India. However, African historiography resisted European influence because African historiography had been largely based on oral transmission and personal experience. But whether Herodotus’ probable source principle, the isnad method, or Marxist dialectical materialism, all historiographical principles are focused on source criticism, the constant factor in both time and place in historiography. As Bod puts it, “Whatever history is, without source criticism there can be no history writing” (271).
Philology
Knowledge of grammar, rhetoric, history, and poetics came together in philology (textual criticism) which was established as a discipline around 300 BC when the Library of Alexandria was built. The collection of hundreds of thousands of manuscripts revealed discrepancies among the copies of same text, raising the question how the original source was to be deduced. Zenodotus of Ephesus (c. 333-c.260 BC), who also was the first librarian of the Alexandria Library, tackled this problem by compiling a dictionary of Homeric words to formulate a perfect text from the corrupted manuscripts. His successors, Aristophanes of Byzantium (c. 257-180 BC) and Aristarchus of Samothrace (c. 216-c.144 BC), tried to keep philology as free as possible from subjective elements. They employed the concept of analogy to see if an unknown word was formed and conjugated or declined in the same way as a known word and thereby reconstructed the original form. The word forms had to correspond in regard to gender, case, ending, number of syllables, stress, and complex or simplex when comparing two word forms. This approach differed from Panini’s grammatical system of rules because the Alexandrians had no precise rules for establishing corresponding word forms.
An alternative and competing approach was the Stoic Zeno of Citium (334-262 BC) who searched for exceptions rather than regularities (the anomaly principle). Instead of looking for analogies between word forms, this approach sought differences and exceptions between them. Both methods had strengths and weaknesses. The anomaly approach addressed interpretations and the assumed intentions of the text but ignored the order between words, while the analogy method looked at the regularities between words but underestimated the semantic and pragmatic purport of a text, ignoring the intentions of the author. Both of these approaches were adopted by Roman philologists, particularly by the Roman historians like Varro (116-27 BC) who drove chronological historiography forward with his reconstruction of annals texts. Later Roman philology became encyclopedic and formed the basis of the trivium (grammar, logic, rhetoric) and quadrivium (geometry, arithmetic, astronomy, and music) of the artes liberals.
In Christendom there were reconstruction of texts but not based on any demonstrable methodological principles, such as St. Jerome’s (347-420) Vulgate where the Old Testament was based on the original Hebrew text and not just the Greek version, which provoked criticism from Augustine. The success of the Vulgate led to errors creeping into it as it was copied throughout Europe, which prompted Charlemagne (742-814) to reconstruct the original Vulgate text by collecting and comparing manuscripts from all regions. Roger Bacon devised the principle that the old Latin manuscripts of the church fathers were the first authority. If these manuscripts did not correspond with each other, then it was necessary to refer to the original texts.
In the Islamic world, the most important activity was compiling the text of the Koran. The official codification of the collected texts began under the third caliph, Uthman ibn Affan (644-55), on the basis of diacritic and vowel symbols. There was other textual criticism in Islamic civilization but unfortunately their philological methods remain unclear. Likewise, philology flourished in China with Mencius’ (372-289 BC) text reconstruction of Confucius (551-479 BC) and Zeng Gong (1019-83) reconstruction of Strategies of the Warring States, although we do not know on which principles the reconstruction of these texts was based. The problems of textual reconstruction were less in India where the Vedas had been handed down in an oral tradition and thereby limited the problem of inconsistency in text reconstruction.
By the time of the early modern era, philology held a central place in learning. Petrarch (1304-74) was the founder of humanism despite the opaqueness of his philological method. By calling for the reconstruction of literary, artistic, and historiographical classical Rome, Petrarch sought to bring Roman antiquity back to life by reconstructing its texts. Philology was essential to this task and seen as the “queen of all learning.” Lorenzo Valla (1406-57) followed in Petrarch’s footsteps and wrote a handbook of Latin language and grammar as well as showed that the document, Donatio Constantini, was a forgery. He arrived at this conclusion by employing the three “principles of consistency”: chronological, logical, and linguistic. Valla’s refutation was accepted immediately by Pope Pius II (reign 1458-64).
Angelo Poliziano (1454-95) introduced genealogical ranking for sources and the elimination of derived sources. This method spread throughout Europe, influencing the likes of Erasmus (1446-1536) who adopted the original language principle in reconstructing the New Testament from Greek rather than Latin. Julius Caesar Scaliger (1484-1558) and Joseph Justus Scaliger (1540-1609) also employed Poliziano’s genealogical principles in the reconstruction of texts as did Isaac Casaubon (1559-1614) who exposed the Corpus Hermeticum as a later text (200-300) rather than an earlier one during the time of Moses. The methods developed by these philologists resulted in a new practice that could be used to study all humanities.
In China Chen Di (1541-1617) was the first to demonstrate that Old Chinese had its own phonology with pronunciation rules different from contemporary Chinese. Gu Yanwu (1613-82) used Di’s work as a foundation to study Chinese classics with primary sources valued in this philological, linguistic, and historical enterprise. A philologist should use the inductive method: a judgment should be given based on the highest possible probability of comparing as many sources as could be found. The creation of a philological school in China, the Empirical School of Textual Criticism, was in response to merchants and intellectuals searching for early manuscripts and rare editions for their own collections and the introduction of western scholarship by the arrival of the Jesuits.
In the modern period, philology received the greatest attention in the decoding of hieroglyphs but soon afterwards became absorbed in the disciplines of linguistics and literature. Jean-Francois Champollion (1790-1832), and to a lesser extent, Thomas Young (1773-1829), decoded the Rosetta Stone, allowing many Egyptian inscriptions and papyruses to be read. Likewise, the decoding of Linear B by Michael Ventris (1922-56) and the current attempt at the Maya script also demonstrates philology’s use, with the number of symbols in a script system being a crucial factor. If this number is lower than thirty, the symbols are probably sounds; if the number is over thirty, they are likely syllables; and if they are many thousands, they may be concepts.
Karl Lachmann (1793-1851) contributed to philology by creating stemmatology where a family tree (a stemma) of surviving texts was built that can be used to reconstruct the original text. He divided the method into three separate phases: 1) recensio (collect all versions of text, inventories the differences, and determine the genealogical relationship as a family tree); 2) examinatio (decide whether the stemma was authentic); and 3) emendatio (if it was not authentic, it had to be emended to reconstruct the lost archetype from the oldest surviving accurate version). The underlying principle of this method was if an error was created in a version of a text it was probable that descendants of the text had the same error. The stemma therefore was a historical depiction of the relationship between texts and the reconstruction of texts on the grounds of logical inference based on the differences and agreements in the genealogical relationship.
Lachmann’s philology resulted in the reconstruction of Lucretius and medieval literature like Hildebrandslied and Nibelungenlied. His philology not only became the standard for text reconstruction in Europe but a cornerstone of Rankean history which utilized philological source criticism for objective historiography. In spite of its success, Lachmann’s philology has been criticized for assuming that every version was derived from exactly one direct ancestor and that a copyist only made new mistakes instead of correcting the errors of predecessors. Nevertheless, Lachmann’s philology provided a precise method with which texts from all periods and regions could be reconstructed. As Bod puts it, “Stemmatic philology is to the humanities what classical mechanics is to the sciences” (279). But stemmatic philology is no longer taught to students of linguistics or literature and has been downgraded from its place as the “queen of all learning.”