Before one can determine if Humanists or Social Scientists are better at illuminating truth, one must first decide on a definition of truth. Is truth an inarguable fact, as universal a law as gravity? Is it something that can clearly and irrefutably be established? Or is truth more complicated, more dynamic? Is truth dependent on the perception of the observer? Is my truth regarding an issue the same as your truth? For the purposes of this essay, I will argue that truth is subjective, not concrete, and as such varies with the observer in question. Even supposed scientific truths, like gravity or carbon dating, can be argued and redefined to suit the perceptions of an individual. Much like the question “Is this wood table real, because we can see it and touch it, or is it real because we collectively agree that it is a table and that it is here?” Truth is that table, and the validity of it is very much in the eye of the beholder. As such, I will argue that scholars of the Humanities are better able to address truth, because it is dynamic and changing, and the Humanities offer the greatest flexibility and adaptability in which to explore and accommodate the shades and variations of truth. The social Sciences, while highly valuable and relevant, offer us glimpses into different truths, but the structure and limits of most of the methodologies associated with the broad range of social sciences limits the range they can accommodate.
The Humanities has proven itself the most adaptive of disciplines over history. It is the original discipline if you will, the academy that all other fields of inquiry have developed from. In antiquity, all forms of learning were under the Humanities umbrella. The heart of the Humanities is to seek to explore and define the Human experience in any one period or another. It is a chronicle of our humanity, the glue that ties the experiences of life-scientific or otherwise, together with meaning. The Social sciences have profound value as a field of inquiry and data gathering, but without the context and meaning provided by humanities, the pursuits of the Social Sciences are bereft of meaning. The Social Sciences are also perpetually at odds with themselves, vacillating between the positivist methodologies of the natural sciences and the more abstracted methodologies of observation and inference. Because the Humanities do not have an obligation or duty to account for the process of its observations, it has the freedom to stretch boundaries and perception, and to address a far broader range of inquiry. In Humanities, the personal is political. In the social sciences, the personal is political if you can provide the data on how you came to that conclusion.
The accessibility of the Humanities lies in its subjectivity, thus making it most effective at speaking to the various truths of different individuals and populations. For example, let’s take a painting like Artemisia Gentileschi’s Judith Beheading Holofernes. Every viewer will have a different perception, and experience a different truth of the painting. Some will see simply gore and violence, some will appreciate it in the biblical context, and others still will see it as an early feminist example of reacting to gender oppression in a patriarchal society. The truth of this painting is completely individual to the viewer. This is beauty of Humanities-it validates everyone’s personal truth, and dismisses none. The Social Sciences, while seeking to ascertain individual truths, cannot do so while relying on any quasi-scientific model, because this would mean there was an absolute value for truth.
If the social sciences truly seek to illuminate truth, it must shed and discard preconceived notions prior to observation, and not seek to categorize it into a pre-established value. It must take it for what it is, rather than seeking to align it with anything else. It must understand relationships, but not force them. It must stop worrying about peer feedback from the natural sciences, and seek to establish itself as a unique truth seeking entity in its own right, free from the established models of other disciplines.
The reality is that no one can ever “know” truth, because truth is entirely subjective and unique to the individual. That, in a sense, is the beauty of truth. And in the end, no discipline creates or evaluates beauty better than the Humanities.
No comments:
Post a Comment