Episode 1: The Origin and Worth of the Humanities Transcript
Episode 1: The Origin and Worth of the Humanities Transcript
Howdy and welcome to the Plutarch Project’s inaugural podcast. I’m your host Josh Nieubuurt and I’m here to talk to you about something that can change your life forever. It’s something–well a combination of things, really– worth more than all the gold in fort Knox, worth more than the bankroll you’d get for finding a deposit of oil underneath your house, and most definitely more valuable than all those boxes beenie babies you have stored away in your closet as retirement insurance.
It’s something that can expand your understanding of human reality, a field to plant the seeds of empathy and cultural understanding, and a tool to give you a sense of where we, as a species, have been and perhaps–a glimpse at where we are going. The best part– it’s inherited wealth from all the people who have come before. It’s the Humanities.
The humanities are a set of academic disciplines including: literature, history, mythology, religion, art, language, and musicology. They are the creative, speculative, and critical approaches of what it’s like– and what it means– to be human. Most of what we will be talkin about in this podcast is relegated to the written word: literature, philosophy, literary and critical theory, and mythology. Perhaps we will touch on others but let’s just play by ear and see how it goes.
So some of you out there are probably thinking, “What in tarnation could I get from a bunch of hippie, highty tighty, liberal arts nonsense.” Well, the humanities aren’t just for academics sitting in a room of leather-bound books in smoking jackets and the hipsters sitting in some dark corner of a local cafe angrily typing away on their vintage typewriter– their man bun swinging side to side in their haste to disprove the merits of contemporary monopoly capitalism-while of course sipping on their $10 coffee.
No, no, no-The humanities has been a field explored by people from all walks of life. From world moving billionaire CEO’s, kings and queens, plumbers thumbing through the pages of Plato, prisoners waiting for their next bid at freedom, and students for thousands of years from all across the globe. The humanities really have something to offer to everyone.
“So what are some of the benefits of exploring the humanities?” I’m glad you asked. Study in the humanities offers a chance at multidisciplinary study. This allows folks to make connections, think critically about life and the situations it presents all of us, and give us fascinating insights into the lives of those who came before us.
It’s also a field that gives you the ability to look at things from various vantage points. The idea of the world as some easily understood, black and white thing will disappear and be reborn with all the colors of the rainbow. It will make you take a step back and realize the depth and awesome power of humanity and of yourself. Venturing through the various halls of ideas you’ll grow to appreciate the role others have played in making the world you now live in. And maybe, just maybe, it will give you the tools to help make the world a better place for those who will come after.
There’s definitely folks out there that will say, “well, that’s all sunshine and rainbows but what can I really take away from studying the humanities. What’s in it for me?” The roots of the humanities as a bonafide field of study can trace their roots sto the folks of ancient Greeks who found themselves facing social problems. These are still problems we face today in courtrooms, legislative matters, business boardrooms and in our understandings of news and media. It’s the ability to see through the mechanisms of an argument to understand and come to a conclusion about the pith of a matter. Thinking along this line let’s take our first step on this journey together. .
The humanities, as a field of study, can trace its start to ancient Greece. Of course the subjects studied by the humanities have much older roots– Don’t worry, we will get to these on later episodes. Now, before giving you some information about the origin of the humanities let’s keep in mind today’s podcast is like untying our shoes before dipping our toes into the ocean. We’re just barely scratching the surface. I’ll be sure to add plenty of resources for your inquisitive folks out there in the description and on the website.
In ancient Greece the humanities were a broad set of subjects to help educate the Greek citizens of the time. Now keep in mind here– it was for the citizens and not folks who were–at the time– deemed below citizenry at that time. This educational practice would later go on to be adopted by the Romans culminating in the trivium: grammar, rhetoric, and logic.
The study of grammar–much like the kiddos studying singing songs, listening at story time and learning the alphabet at their tiny little desks in elementary schools today– was to help people understand how language works at the most basic of levels. It helped people to associate ideas with their sensory experiences in the world.
Next up was logic or dialectic. It’s here that students would learn how language could be manipulated to display truth and disassembled to show the faults in an idea or argument. Students would learn to discern between truthful and fallacious arguments. People learned to disassemble arguments to try and arrive at the truth of a matter. Quite often this was accomplished through the dialectical method. Were going to discuss this more with a silly real world example and I’m sure a lot of you folks out there listening know what I’m talking about, but if not lets take a closer look at this.
To give you an idea of how this looked let’s put into in an example: imagine your with a few people getting together shooting the breeze with each other at the 6th century BCE watercooler. Your friend Jebediah takes a sip of the water and notices it has a unique taste.
“Ah, it tastes a bit funny, eh?” Jebediah is apparently an ancient Greek-canadian. Jimmy, your other friend standing nearby chimes in, “Ah, yeah those darned centaurs must be bathing up the river.”
You take a sip and realize that it does indeed taste funny. After some lively discussion about how irrational it is to think centaurs are bathing- you look further upstream and see someone washing out their dirty togas in the river. Before Jebediah runs off to purge his stomach you shout, “Aha! It’s the sweet sweet taste of Gunther’s toga! You lucky dog you!”
In short it was people coming together to understand the truth of something through reasoned arguments. This lead to final part of the trivium rhetoric.
If grammar were the pieces of a machine, and logic its power source, rhetoric is the final working product. Looking back at the last example grammar was the words and the way they were put together to form the meaning that there was something wrong with this water. The logic was trying to deduce, through the use of their senses and previously acquired knowledge, why that water could have a weird taste. And the rhetoric was conveying the final truth that Jebediah was drinking water tainted with the body juices of someone else.
This is a rather silly example but I hope it helps simplify arguments we will talk about in the future. So why was this important to know in ancient Greece and Rome?
ancient cultures began using their traditional beliefs and language to explain what their cultural preferences and correct ways of acting in society were. This began through oral tradition and eventually to the written word. We’ll be talking about both of these in the next few episodes if you’re interested in finding out more about them.
In societies older than the ancient Greeks — Egyptian, Mesopotamian, Sumerian, Babylonian, Indian, and those of the indigenous American peoples– often told stories to state how their culture and society viewed the world. You know, how they thought things were, or how and why things were and should be done in a certain way. The message wasn’t always apparent– quite often people would have to read between the lines to get a clear understanding of what their culture stood for. You can still see this in today’s media. Quite often contemporary cultures-foreign and domestic– are in large part understood by media portrayals of them. A lot of the ideas we have now of the middle east, Asia, the United States, and basically anywhere are– for those less inquisitive than you folks– the only information they have about them. For the ancients it was an easy way to learn who and what they were as a people. They offered their audience information at both a surface level and an allegorical level.
In the ancient Greek language, the word for a story was “mythos,” which, not so coincidentally, is where the English word “myth”comes from. It’s important to note that a mythos wasn’t necessarily to be viewed as a wholehearted representation of the truth. Rather, it was a story that carried a lesson or explanation.
As the Greek language and the culture it framed evolved, the people in the city of Athens used an early form of democracy. Or in other words, they used early political and legal systems in which the opinions of the majority of people about an issue were enacted and followed. Our modern word, “democracy” comes from the Greek “demokratia” stemming from the words demos” meaning “common people,” and “kratos” meaning “rule or strength.” Their legal system spawned the social phenomena we see to this day, jury trials.
Now here’s the juicy part. This meant that it was incredibly important for individuals, who wanted to get a majority on their side of an issue, to figure out how to manipulate the tool of language to persuade people. Well now we have a problem. There’s a need in the marketplace for a specialized skill. Remember this is in the 6th and 5th century B.C.E. They couldn’t just hop on the internet and find some freelancer on Fiver. Someone needed to step up and fill this need. Enter the sophists.
Freelance teachers emerged from the population who, using their own skill in language, would teach people wanting to enter politics or the legal system how to effectively persuade people. These folks were called “sophists,” which originates from the Greek word sophos meaning “wise.” People wanting to become leaders would seek out these freelance teachers to make them better speakers. One of the most famous being Socrates. Socrates didn’t write anything down, most of what we know about him was passed down from other thinkers including his pupil Plato. Now, some folks will debate if Socrates was really a pure sophist. To be honest he was a bit of a wildman. He was known to have horrible hygiene and to be a bit of a pest. He also never accepted money; though he did take payment in lodging and food.
By the time of Socrates’ death sophists had a pretty bad wrap. They were kind of considered hustlers who would help people win arguments that they probably shouldn’t have won. It would be easy to compare them of the sleazy lawyers we see in modern times. It wasn’t always this way though.
Like many other sophists and other pre-socratic thinkers of the time Socrates operated by dismantling the language and the ideas they framed in order to see how they worked. From that process he would try to understand what could be learned from the words or ideas to gain a better understanding of the world.
In short, he was like an onion peeler. He’d start out with a whole onion lets say this onion represents the idea of justice. He’d peel off layer by layer, mainly by chatting and debating friends, acquaintances, strangers, and other thinkers of his time, until he got as close to the center as he could. When he couldn’t pursue it any further he’d state his claim of what he thought justice really was. Then he’d pickup another onion and repeat the process. Through all of this peeling, which is now known as the socratic method, a definitive understanding of an argument would be made.
A bit of an aside here-It should be noted the creation of the Socratic method is generally attributed to another pre-socratic philosopher named Protagoras. Protagoras was the OG of sophists. He was the first guy to see the need in the market for these skills and become a professional.
These ancient Greek thinkers engaged in analysis and philosophy on just about any topic you can imagine — how an ideal society should be set up, how the various phenomenon in the natural world work, why the universe even exists in the first place, even what it meant to be human. Sometimes their answers would be hilarious by today’s standards. But nonetheless they kept peeling the onions trying to understand the world around them.
Soon many young adults and middle-aged folks would come to people like Socrates and Protagoras seeking sharper mental tools; some even went on to become major figures in philosophy and politics. One of the most notable, perhaps THE most notable being Plato. Now if you don’t know who Plato was you should stop staring at shadows on the wall of your dark cave and get out to see the light sometimes. If you do know who Plato was you probably just got the reference in the last sentence. If you don’t, don’t fret we can get to him and his work in the future if you all would like to.
As in any democracy people banded together with like minded individuals to create what we would now call political parties. There was a lot of partisanship and quite a bit of battling for a superior position. These analytical skills were-as they still are today- a valuable skill to have in this ancient world. Many of the people who ended up studying with Socrates were considered to be part of the aristocrat-dominated political party. Now, as far as we know, Socrates was not a fan of democracy. He thought it could lead to people-who he deemed less enlightened or learned-to make poor decisions that could cause catastrophic problems within society. I’m sure this sentiment is still out there today.
Later in Socrates life another political party came into power. As mentioned earlier the sophist as a profession fell out of popularity and they prosecuted Socrates for “corrupting the youth of Athens,” and he was eventually condemned to death. There’s a lot more to this story so if you’re interested I’ll post some links on the website to some pretty good resources on the life of Socrates. It’s really an amazing story from start to finish.
Awhile after Socrates’ death Plato founded the Akademia/Academy, where he taught about Socrates’ methods. Plato built upon the ideas of his teacher and made his own-arguably more important- contributions to philosophy and the study of humanities. If you’re interested in the life and times of both of these thinkers don’t you fret in your little booties we’ll be sure to come back to them in the future .
Experts across the Humanities have called this period of the ancient Greece, “the analytical revolution.” Socrates and other pre-socratic thinkers changed the game with their abilities to create analyze, and manipulate language to persuade people, tell moving stories, and convey information.
Before that time, ancient peoples tended to operate by storytelling, remember mythos from earlier in the podcast? It was an enormous shift in the way people thought and talked about the world. For the first time in human history people had a teachable structure that allowed ideas to be taken apart, discussed, and an opportunity to find new and even better ideas.
This tradition is carried on today in Humanities programs, law schools, and grammar schools all over the world. So next time you or someone you know criticizes the study of the humanities think about how different the world would be without even this one example from history. How would governance work? Can you imagine a modern political debate without the foundations laid down by the ancient Greeks? How would people solve disputes among each other? How different would courtrooms look? How different would your own life be without the ability to think about and consider the nuances of language? Let me know what you think about all this. You can reach out to us on Facebook.com/Tplutarchproject, plutarchproject.com, or shoot us an email at theplutarchproject@gmail.com.
Thanks for listening. Onward.
