A New History of the Humanities: The Search for Principles and Patterns from Antiquity to the Present (Part III)
Logic
The Greeks were one of the first people to develop valid reasoning, known as logic or dialectics, with Zeno of Elea (c. 490-c. 430 BC), Plato (c. 428/27 or 424/23-c. 348/47 BC), and Aristotle (384-322 BC) playing critical roles in its development. Aristotle’s Organon presented a system of logic that was adopted by Europe until the nineteenth century. Syllogism was at the core of Aristotelian logic: an argument in which a proposition (conclusion) was deduced from two other propositions (the premises).
After Aristotle, a different type of logic developed by the Megaric and Stoic schools: propositional logic. The truth or untruth of combinations of propositions was deduced from the truth or untruth of the propositions themselves, with the operations on propositions taking place on the basis of connectives: negation, conjunction, disjunction, implication. Despite its precision, propositional logic was no match for Aristotle’s logic because of the latter’s practicality.
In India there was also a flourishing tradition in the study of logic that was older than the Greek’s. The oldest speculation about logic was to be found in the Rigveda (c.1500 BC) in which various logical distinctions were made, such as “A,” and “not A.” Medhatihi Gautama (c. seventh century BC) created the first school of logic. Punarvasu Atreya (c. 550 BC) and Panini’s grammatical work, Ashtadyayi later created their own schools. But the most important Indian school of logic is Aksapada Gautama’s Nyaya Sutras (c. 200 AD). Four sources of knowledge were identified: observation, inference, comparison, and evidence. Unlike Aristotle’s logic, this form of reasoning was not deductive and therefore more applicable in practice, such as making medical diagnosis on the basis of symptoms.
Themes of logic were found in China’s Book of Changes (Yijing) but the most important school was the Mohist in the fifth-century BC. Disputing Confucian ideas, Mo Tzu (c.468-391 BC) placed logic at the center of his studies. The Mohists concentrated on analogical reasoning rather than formal logic and used four techniques: illustrating, parallelizing, adducing, and inferring. But like Aristotle, the Mohists developed the law of non-contradiction and the law of the excluded middle in what they called the basic principles to which all reasoning had to be subjected.
In medieval Europe there were no new developments in logic from Aristotle. Between 500 to 1200 there was the old logic that was based on the Boethius’ translations of two books from Aristotle’s Organon; between 1200 to the Renaissance logic was based on Aristotle’s Analytica priora which became available in Europe in the twelfth century. Despite the looming presence of Aristotle, the period did see some significant and original contributions to the discipline of logic: Peter Abelard (1079-1142)’s modus ponens and modus tollens; William of Ockham’s (c.1287-1347) De Morgan laws and supposition theory; and Jean Buridan’s (c.1295-1358) Tractatus de consequentis and Summulae de dialectica.
In the Islamic world, al-Farabi (c.382-c.950) and Averroes (1126-98) continued the Aristotelian tradition of logic while Avicenna (980-1037) created his own independent logic based on inductive reasoning. Islamic logic eventually split into two camps along these lines of thinking. Two schools also developed in India: Gangesa’s (c. twelfth century AD) Tattvacintamani, which continued the inductive logic of Nyaya, and the Buddhist Dignaga’s (c.480-c.540 AD) Hetucakra, which was similar to Aristotelian syllogistics. Buddhist logic was introduced to China which eventually displaced the Mohist school.
By the time of the early modern period in Europe, logic became intertwined with linguistics with scholars looking back to antiquity for new insights rather than rely upon Modist linguistics or scholastic logic. There was a renewed interest in grammar, with Francisco Sánchez de las Brozas (1523-1600) who applied logic to syntax in his Minerva (1587). He gave a new syntactic theory based on substitution, deletion, addition, and permutation, all of which were subject to rules. This theory influenced the Port Royal linguists, who became aware that first principles were the basis of both word and sentences forms in language. The attempts to model vernacular language after Latin was stopped in the recognition that every language was autonomous which, in turn, started the discipline of comparative philology.
Finally, many thinkers were critical of scholastic logic. René Descartes (1596-1650) and Francis Bacon created a new science to replace it. Descartes advocated a new type of mathematics and logic while Bacon supported experimental investigation and the construction of a new, universal language for the civilized world to replace Latin. Finally, before logic became absorbed into linguistic studies, Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz (1646-1716) created symbolic logic where the manipulation of symbols yielded new truths.
Rhetoric
In antiquity rhetoric was an independent discipline and the crowning achievement on the foundations of grammar and logic. The sophists, Plato, and Aristotle all contributed to the development of rhetoric, with Aristotle’s Rhetorica being the first systematic attempt to treat the discipline from the perspective of speaker, argumentation, and audience. If one followed his general procedure, then one’s rhetorical presentation would be one of proof (enthymeme). This procedural system of rules and principles included 1) finding a precedent or example; 2) a statement plausible to a target group, and 3) the final rhetorical argumentation in the form of an abbreviated syllogism. The spread of Greek culture under Roman rule led to the rhetoric being taught as a liberal art and organized by Cicero’s (106-43 BC) De inventione as inventio (discovering argument), disposition (ranking arguments), elocutio (style), memoria (memorizing the speech), and action (the delivery).
In India the Chlaraka-Samhita (550 BC) explained the methods of debating and were adopted by the Nyaya philosophers. The categorization of rhetoric was 1) definition of the subject of debate; 2) a proposition; 3) a counter-proposition; 4) the speech or source of knowledge; 5) the application (e.g., logical induction); 6) the conclusion; 7) the response; 8) the example; 9) the truth established by experts or proof by deduction; 10) doubt or uncertainty that was accepted by both parties. The Chinese also were interested in the practicalities of debate and under the Mohist school adopted an analogical logic to undergird its rhetoric. A debate therefore was defined as a disagreement about assertions that are in contradiction with two featured principles. The first debating principle was that one of the two contradictory assertions must be untrue; the second was that it was not possible for both assertions to be untrue: one of the two must be true.
Rhetoric and poetics were so interwoven in medieval Europe that they are analyzed together. Augustine grounded rhetoric in the biblical coherence principle: classical rhetoric was reinterpreted in terms of Christian teachings, as already happened in historiography and would later happen in art theory. Poetics likewise was recast in Christian terms, with Augustine’s De doctrina christiana (397/426) contending that every text could be interpreted both literally and allegorically. The allegorical method made it possible for the Old and New Testament to be in concert with each other and influenced Aquinas’ (1225-74) four-level biblical exegesis: 1) literal, 2) allegorical, 3) moralistic; and 4) anagogic. Dante (1265-1321) also used Aquinas four-level biblical exegesis but for secular stories.
Islamic civilization continued to follow Aristotelian rhetoric and poetics, with rhetoric being tied closely with logic and poetics in oratorical evocation (takhyil). Poetry was considered one of the key sources of knowledge, since the Koran was written in verse. Avicenna’s takhyil was a complex interaction between memory, imagination, and emotion where the image was wedded with logic. Poetics was a way to discover universal canons that applied to all or most people. Literary criticism also thrived in the Islamic world. Tha’lab’s (c. ninth century) Qawa’id al-shi’r analyzed poetry on a linguistic basis: the examination of words rather than poetic features, like meter. al-Jahiz (781-868), Ibn Rashiq (999-1063), and Ibn al-Nadim (c. tenth century) contributed to Arabic poetics and literature, although no formal rules or methodological principles were established.
Logic and rhetoric also were indistinguishable in India. The Mimamsa and Natya Shastra schools presented prescriptive rules for the ritual interpretation of the Vedas on the basis of rasas. However, there were no new patterns discovered during this period. The most significant development was Kumarila Bhatta’s (c. 700 AD) influential commentary on the Vedas, Mimamsa-slokavarttika, which enabled the Vedic tradition to endure.
The first systematic analysis of Chinese rhetoric was Chen Kui’s (1128-1203) Wen Ze that was used in preparation for taking government examination, where candidates had to demonstrate originality and skill in argumentation. Kui derived his rules and principles of good writing from existing texts and then tested them on new works and amended his rules if necessary. By combining empirical rhetoric and instruction with the ambitions of young men into a single work, Kui created one of the most original and important works of rhetoric in the Middle Ages.
The discovery of the complete text of Cierco’s De oratore and the introduction of Aristotle’s Rhetoric, after the fall of Constantinople in 1453, led to a revitalization of rhetoric that incorporated classical learning. Vico’s Institutione oratoriae (1711) and Johann Gottsched’s (1700-66) Ausführliche Redekunst studied rhetoric positively. Bernard Lamy’s (1640-1715) Art de parler provided an overview of rhetoric by analyzing the combination of individual sounds and the ranking of words. However, this was the high point of rhetoric, as later it swiftly declined with Descartes, Hobbes, Bacon, and other disparaging rhetoric. Eventually rhetoric merged with the discipline of poetics.
Poetics
Poetic and rhetoric closely resembled each other but Plato made a distinction between the two, calling the former mimesis (imitation). Rhetorical tools might be employed but the experience was essentially mimetic. While Plato believed poetics was unhealthy, Aristotle considered the human need for imitation natural and possibly beneficial if poetics followed certain rules that resulted in catharsis. The two concepts of mimesis and catharsis continued in Horace’s (65-8 BC) Ars Poetica and Dionysius of Halicarnassus’ (c.60 BC-c.7 AD) De compositione verborum, with the later believing that poetics should be modeled after the natural world. Finally, Longinus’ (c. first century or c. 213-273 AD) Peri Hupsous introduced the idea of the sublime, a style of writing that rose above the ordinary. There were five sources of sublimity: great thoughts, strong emotions, figures of speech, noble diction, and dignified usage.
There was a search for rules in poetics in India, too, with Natya Shastra providing the basis for all literary and dramatic productions in Sanskrit. There were eight rasas (rhetorical sentiments): erotic, comical, pathetic, furious, heroic, terrible, odious, and marvelous. Each rasa expressed an emotional condition. In China Liu Xie’s (465-521 AD) Wexin diaolong was the oldest surviving systematic work about Chinese literature that explained its thirty-two genres, the process of writing, and the role of the critic and writer in society.
The 1549 translation of Aristotle’s Poetics led to new studies in poetics. However, Julius Caesar Scaliger (1484-1558), Antonio Minturno (1500-74), and Lodovico Castelvetro (1505-71) transformed Aristotle’s description of poetics into normative instruction, such as the unity of time, place, and action. These ideas would spread throughout Europe until Samuel Johnson (1709-84) launched a successful attack on classicistic poetics. According to Johnson, plays should not be judged on how well they corresponded to real life but on their dramatic content, thereby making certain objectives, like the unity of time, place, and action, irrelevant. A play was like a narrative in which different time and places can be given shape: the audience recognized the artificiality of the play and did not mistaken it for reality itself.
The most important literary criticism during the Ming dynasty (1368-1644) was Hu Yinglin (1551-1602) who asserted the essence of poetry was two principles: 1) formal style and musical tone; and 2) imagination and personal spirit. Rules could be applied to the first principle but none for the second. Yet without spiritual resonance or imagination, there was be no poetry.
In the modern period, poetics became transformed into literary, theater, media, cultural, and digital media studies. Literary studies was primarily bibliographic but eventually became positivist in the belief that a work can be explained causally (e.g., Darwinian, naturalist). Later formalists believed that writing from the same period or region normally displays common features. Scholars of literary history therefore transitioned from a nineteenth-century preoccupation with philosophy and positivism to a twentieth-century focus on formal elements.
Literary theory also was influenced by formalists like Vladmir Propp (1897-1970). He attempted to create an exact model of analysis for narratives in folk tales. The influence of Claude Lévi-Strauss’ (1908-2009) structuralism and formalism gave rise to narratology, a term coined by Tzvetan Todorov (born 1939). Narratology sought to have a complete narrative analysis that revealed not solely the constituent parts and their functions and relations, but the themes, motives, and plots, too. Narratology has been formalized to such an extent that for some media it can be executed algorithmically (usually in television procedural shows). However, narratology’s focus on the text gave way to the attention of the reader in the movement of poststructuralism, with the meaning of any text dependent upon the identity of the reader. Postmodernism also had tremendous influence on philosophy, particularly in deconstructivism.
This history of literary theory is known as hermeneutics, started by Fredrich Schlegel (1772-1829) and later developed by Friedrich Schleiermacher (1768-1843) and Wilhelm Dilthey (1833-1911). The concern was how to understand a text in its parts and as a whole, how the parts and whole were related to each other (i.e., hermeneutic circle), and how the reader and author interpret text in their own respective cultural contexts. Whereas nineteenth-century hermeneutics explored the author’s intention, twentieth-century hermeneutics examined how prejudices, preconceptions, and pre-judgements affected one’s understanding of a work. Martin Heidegger (1889-1976) argued the most important thing is to be aware of one’s own (the interpreter’s) position, while Hans-Georg Gadamer (1900-2002) called for readers to understand a text as it applied to the reader’s own situation (i.e., fusion of horizons). Other literary movements that emerged from formalism and structuralism were the new criticism (the close reading of texts), the new historicism (the historical context of a text), psychonarratology (the application of psychology to narrative), rhetorical analysis and argumentation theory, and the study of orality.
Theater studies was primary a subfield of literary theory until Max Herrmann (1865-1942) who wanted to reconstruct lost theater performances. Although such an aim was utopian, it spurred a renewed interest in the historical material of Greek, Roman, medieval, and Renaissance theater, including the recent rebuilding of Shakespeare’s Globe Theater in London. With respect to theater analysis, art and literary theories have primarily analyses. Likewise, film study has followed art and literary theories, like structuralism in Christian Metz’s (1931-93) Film Language: A semiotics of Cinema. Other key influences have been narratology, critical theory, poststructuralism, feminism, postcolonial studies, and historiography.
The general study of film, TV, journalism, and digital media is denoted under the umbrella term, media studies. Walter Benjamin (1892-1940) was influential in media studies by pointing out that the value of authenticity was not relevant in film, photography, and the gramophone, since they were mass produced. The result is a pattern of democratization in the arts. This analysis was continued by Marshall McLuhan (1911-80) but with a different focus. For McLuhan, media was an extension of the human senses and therefore the medium itself deserves one’s attention (i.e., “the medium is the message”).
Finally, cultural and digital media studies have emerged as new fields of inquiry in the humanities. Cultural studies included media studies, economics, communication studies, sociology, linguistics, literary studies, cultural anthropology, philosophy, art history, poststructuralism, and other disciplines. It attempted to combine all of these disciplines to study cultural practices and their relationship to power. Digital media studies, which was the study of the internet, the web, virtual reality, video games, mobile telephony, digital film, interaction television, was how new media adopted and transformed older media into itself. A critical concept in digital media studies was Gilles Deleuze’s (1925-95) and Félix Guattari’s (1930-92) “rhizome” where a discipline created a multiplicity of junctions without a clear beginning or end. The rhizomatic structure can be covered by the concept of the graph instead of a linear or hierarchal structure.
Conclusion
In antiquity there are several patterns in the humanities that are brought to the forefront: 1) the pursuit for a system of rules; 2) parallel discoveries of patterns in the disciplines of history (cyclical pattern), music (the harmonic principles of tonic, octave, and fifth), logic (the excluded middle and non-contradiction principle), and art theory (numerical proportions for visual harmony), while dissimilar patterns existed in rhetoric, grammar, and narrative; 3) a change from descriptive to prescriptive accounts; 4) the seldom use of deductive method (especially when compared to classical science); 5) hypotheses that could be falsifiable and replicable, such as in historiography, musicology, grammar, and poetics; and 6) different rules for the “good,” the “beautiful,” and the “sublime,” although there was not as a system of valid rules for them.
There also are several unanswered questions. Why did Greek linguistics lagged behind the other Greek humanities and why was no system of rules developed for linguistic syntax whereas one was created for musical syntax? Why is there no Indian historiography? Why Roman learning and science delivered nothing original and remained eclectic? And why did Chinese linguistics and philology remained “backward” when compared with India and Greece?
In the medieval period, the most important innovations came from the Islamic world with advancements made in historiography, logic, and linguistics; and in China with art history, rhetoric, and poetics. The geographical fragmentation of this period was matched with the fragmented nature of principles used and patterns found. Nevertheless, there were still some patterns across regions and disciplines that continued with antiquity: 1) the pursuit of rules (e.g., the biblical coherence principle); 2) parallel discoveries (e.g., example-based grammar, foreshortening in art, congruence between historical and theological time structures); 3) the move from descriptive to prescriptive accounts except for musicology (e.g., Arabic and Latin grammar; Chinese and Christian art theory, rhetoric, and poetics); 4) the seldom use of the deductive (i.e., systems of rules were seldom explained on the basis of first principles except in Aristotelian logic); and 5) empirical rules for the “good” but not for the “beautiful” (e.g., musicology, Chinese art theory and poetics).
Although knowledge of the humanities was fragmented, general trends can be founded during this period. Trends included 1) the move from rules to examples, as in linguistics; 2) formalization and unification in historiography; and 3) a religious revolution in the interpretation and creation of the humanities. Historiography became salvation history, linguistics was a search for the universal language before Babel, poetics became the study of biblical-allegorical interpretation, rhetoric was transformed into preaching, art theory was anagogic, and musicology formalized the polyphonic. Both the subject and method of the humanities had become transformed by religion and adopted allegorical patterns.
This anti-empiricist approach was overturned in the early modern period where works from antiquity became incorporated into the humanities. Both the humanities and the sciences contributed to a new understanding of human being’s relationship to the cosmos. The values of precision, consistency, documentation and the methods of logic, mathematics, and procedural formalization were adopted by practitioners of the humanities. There also was a movement from prescriptive to descriptive accounts in the humanities and parallel discoveries continued to transpire across regions.
During this period there was progress–defined by Bod as problem-solving capacity–in the humanities except in rhetoric. In determining a language’s word forms and sentence structure, linguistics made progress in developing rules, although none were as complete as Panini’s. In dating historical events, historiography made progress for local or internal dating (e.g., Chinese dynasties, Roman ab urbe condita) but the problem of global dating would not be solved until after the harmonization of these different calendar systems. Philology made progress in adopting Polizian’s genealogical method that brought greater reliability in determining textual sources. Alberti’s treatment of empirical perspectives led to a hybrid theory of mathematical and experiential approaches to portray three-dimensional objects on two-dimensional surfaces. Musicology made some progress in developing precise musical notation but the problem of consonance of intervals remained unresolved. Only in Europe and Islamic civilization was there little progress in logic and practically none in rhetoric.
In the modern period, the humanities followed some common patterns: 1) they became historical; 2) the trend from prescriptive to descriptive continued; 3) hierarchical stratification (i.e., works were split into constituent parts); 4) the importance of grammar as both rule and example based; and 5) cross-fertilization with the sciences and social sciences.
Contrary to the depictions of Dilthey, Windleband, and others, Bod argues that the humanities continued in its search for patterns and there was no disruptive break in its tradition. In historiography, Ranke’s source criticism did not represent a break but an extension of the humanistic historiography of Guicciardini’s and Scaliger’s. Philology, linguistics, musicology, art history also had a high degree of continuity. However, logic underwent a transformative change with Frege’s predicate logic, although this result was built on early modern attempts of Leibniz and others. Literary and theater studies also wrestled with similar questions founded in antiquity in spite of the new narrative grammars developed by Propp, Todorov, and others. In this sense, there was a sense of progress in the humanities in the development of each discipline’s problem-solving capacity.
The book concludes with a review of some of the methodologies unique to the humanities and how they interacted and influenced social, cultural, political, and scientific movements. For instance, the invention of source criticism was significant to the birth of the Reformation, and later to the Enlightenment, because the techniques of text reconstruction led to controversy and criticism of the authority of the Bible and the Catholic Church. Other examples Bod cites are the interaction between theory and empiricism in the humanities help form the basis of the Scientific Revolution; the invention of grammar favored imperialism and laid the basis for computer science; the Indo-European language family revealed the relationship between peoples; and the recovery and analyses of ancient texts fueled nationalisms. This interplay between the humanities and the sciences show that the dichotomy between the two is a false one, although the humanities do allow exceptions in their findings, whereas the sciences do not.
The humanities therefore should be seen as the search for patterns and rules and how different regions of the world influence one another. Bod himself points out that more research needs to be done in Asia (e.g., Japan, Korea, Vietnam) and pre-Columbian America to provide a fuller account of the humanities worldwide. And as the humanities continue to adopt new approaches–cognitive, digital, computational, supra-disciplinary–in its search for patterns, scholars need to be aware of these latest methods, approaches, and findings.
A New History of the Humanities is an essential work on the subject. It not only covers the history of the humanities but shows how it can be reconceived in a way that is relevant. It is a bold and fresh attempt to show why the humanities matter today. Although one may reservations or even objections to Bod’s method or findings, A New History of the Humanities is what is needed now: a publicly accessible yet scholarly work that illuminates what the humanities have been, still are, and may be for the peoples of this world.