Where the word comes from

A find in a monastery

In January 1417 a Florentine scholar named Poggio Bracciolini, in Germany as a papal secretary for the great Church council at Constance, went looking in monastery libraries for lost Roman books. In a remote German monastery he found one that had not been widely read for centuries: a poem by the Roman writer Lucretius, On the Nature of Things, which explained the universe as atoms moving in a void. Poggio never named the monastery, and scholars still guess at Fulda. He did not keep his find to himself. The manuscript went to his friend Niccolò Niccoli in Florence, whose copy became the model for dozens more. Within decades the poem was circulating across Italy, and in 1473 it was printed.

The year before, at the abbey of St. Gall in Switzerland, Poggio had turned up a complete Institutes of Oratory by Quintilian. In a letter he described the place where it lay as a dark prison at the foot of a tower, and he sat down and copied it out himself. That is a good place to begin, because Poggio belonged to a group who gave a name to what they were doing. They called their program the studia humanitatis, “the studies of humanity.” Almost every later use of the word humanities traces back to them, and through them to a Roman who used the phrase nearly fifteen centuries before. This lesson follows the word backward, to Rome and to China, and then forward again to the nineteenth century, when philosophers tried to say what it is that the humanities study.

The studies of humanity

The Renaissance humanists were not, in the first place, philosophers. They were teachers of Latin, secretaries, tutors, and chancellors, the people who wrote the letters and speeches of Italian city-states. What they shared was a conviction that the writers of ancient Rome and Greece had understood how to speak, how to govern, and how to live, and that this wisdom had been buried under centuries of bad Latin and worse copies. The cure was to find the original texts, clean them, and imitate them.

The scholar who has done most to clarify what they taught is Paul Oskar Kristeller. He showed that the studia humanitatis was a recognizable cycle of five subjects, built on the Greek and Latin classics: grammar, rhetoric, poetry, history, and moral philosophy. By the middle of the fifteenth century those five were the standard list. The Italian word umanista, “humanist,” appears in the late fifteenth century, as university slang for a teacher or student of these subjects, parallel to legista, a teacher of law. The word humanism, as an “-ism,” is far younger: a German educator, Friedrich Niethammer, coined it in 1808 for a classical school education, and later in the century historians began to apply it back to the Renaissance.

What did they do with those subjects? One answer is that they asked whether a text was what it claimed to be. The “Donation of Constantine” was a Latin document by which the first Christian emperor was supposed to have handed the pope rule over Rome, Italy, and the western provinces. Popes had cited it for centuries. In 1433 the German churchman Nicholas of Cusa had already called it a fake on historical grounds. In 1440 the Roman scholar Lorenzo Valla, then in the service of King Alfonso of Aragon, who was at odds with the pope, destroyed it by the study of words. Who ever heard, he asked, of satraps, a Persian title, in the councils of Romans? How could the document speak of Constantinople as a patriarchate, he asked, when the city had not yet been built? And its Latin was crude and barbarous, nothing like the Latin of the fourth century. We now think the Donation was forged around the years 750 to 800. Valla’s treatise circulated in manuscript and was first printed in 1517, when the Protestant Reformers seized on it. It was a lesson that the study of words can overturn a claim about power.

In this reading, the humanists teach a lesson about the whole subject: the humanities begin as the practice of reading carefully what people have said and written, in order to live better. The questions that followed, about what a good life is, what beauty is, what justice is, were the ones the humanists wanted to ask.

A word with two meanings

Where did the humanists find the phrase? In Rome. In 62 BC the orator Cicero defended a Greek poet named Archias, who was being challenged over his right to Roman citizenship. Cicero argued that poetry and learning made better citizens. All the arts that belong to humanity, he said, have a common bond, and he asked the court to let him speak a little more freely about “the studies of humanity and letters”: studia humanitatis. Of those studies he said that they feed the young, delight the old, adorn good fortune, and offer refuge when things go wrong. Cicero did not invent the word humanitas, which is older, but he made it central to his writing.

About a century before Cicero’s speech, a comic playwright had given the spirit of the first sense of the word its most famous line, though without using the word. Terence, said to have been born in Carthage and to have begun as an enslaved man, wrote in 163 BC a play in which a nosy neighbor defends his questions by saying: “I am a human being, and I think nothing human is alien to me.” The line was quoted by Cicero and by Seneca, and Augustine, centuries later, is said to have recalled the theater breaking into applause when it was spoken.

Not every Roman liked what came with such ideas. In 155 BC three Athenian philosophers came to Rome as ambassadors, and their lectures drew crowds of young Romans. The elder Cato, the stern defender of old Roman ways, was alarmed and urged the Senate to settle their business quickly so that they would go back to their schools. Within a generation Roman nobles around Scipio Aemilianus, among them the historian Polybius, were at home in Greek learning, and Cicero later looked back on that circle as the home of humanitas. (The “circle” is largely Cicero’s own idealized portrait.)

More than two centuries after Cicero’s speech, the miscellany Attic Nights by Aulus Gellius recorded a puzzle about the word. The Greeks, Gellius says, had one word, philanthropia, for kindness and good will to all people. But careful Latin speakers did not use humanitas for that; they used it, he reports, for something like the Greek paideia: “education and training in the liberal arts,” which, he adds, make people most fully human. In real Roman usage the two meanings were mixed, and they have never quite separated since. Humanitas is both the warmth you show another human being and the cultivation that teaches you how.

This course gives the Latin word three senses: human nature, kindness toward others (which it compares to the Confucian virtue of 仁, rén, “humaneness”), and the training of the mind. That is a useful modern summary. The Roman sources themselves, as Gellius reports them, have two.

Arts for a free person

A third phrase belongs in the family: liberal arts. In his eighty-eighth letter the Roman philosopher Seneca explains why the “liberal studies” are so called: because they are studies worthy of a free person. But he does not praise them. He goes on to say that there is only one really liberal study, the one that gives a person liberty, and that is the study of wisdom; grammar, music, geometry, and the rest are at best a preparation. The number seven came later. By about the fifth century the North African writer Martianus Capella had given the seven arts their classic shape, in an allegory of the marriage of Mercury and Philology: grammar, rhetoric, and dialectic, and arithmetic, geometry, astronomy, and music. The names came a little later: Boethius used “quadrivium” for the four mathematical arts around the year 500, and “trivium” for the other three appears after about 800.

In English, a classic statement of the idea is John Henry Newman’s The Idea of a University (1852; collected 1873). Newman argued that “knowledge is capable of being its own end,” and that a liberal education makes “not the Christian, not the Catholic, but the gentleman.” In Chinese the term is usually rendered 博雅教育 (bóyǎ jiàoyù), “broad and refined education,” while 通识教育 (tōngshí jiàoyù) is used for “general education,” the kind promoted in Harvard’s 1945 report General Education in a Free Society.

The Chinese word

The Chinese phrase for the humanities, 人文 (rénwén), is older in written form than the Roman one. As far as we know, it first appears in the commentary on the hexagram Bi (贲, “adornment”) in the Book of Changes. The commentary is of the late Warring States period, around the third century BC, and is traditionally credited to Confucius, though scholars think it later.

观乎天文，以察时变；观乎人文，以化成天下。

We look at the ornamental figures of the sky, and thereby ascertain the changes of the seasons. We look at the ornamental observances of society, and understand how the processes of transformation are accomplished all under heaven.

Book of Changes, commentary on the hexagram Bi, trans. James Legge, 1882

The character 文 (wén) means a pattern, a marking, a piece of writing, and from there refinement and culture. “The patterns of the sky” (天文, today’s word for astronomy) are read to tell the seasons. “The patterns of people” (人文) are read to see how people live together and how they are changed. Notice what the phrase does not mean: it is not “humanism” in the modern sense, and it does not set humanity against heaven. It pairs the order of society with the order of the sky. The modern term 人文学科, “the humanities,” borrows the old phrase to translate a Western category.

Chinese tradition also had its own list of studies for the gentleman, the Six Arts: ritual, music, archery, charioteering, writing, and arithmetic (礼乐射御书数). The list is in the Rites of Zhou, where an official teaches them to the sons of the nobility. That book, however, is a late Warring States picture of an ideal state, not a record of what Zhou students actually learned, and “Six Arts” should not be confused with the “Six Classics” of poetry, documents, rites, music, changes, and spring and autumn annals. The two traditions, Roman and Chinese, never met, and their words do not mean the same thing. But they arrived at a similar thought: to understand human beings is to read what they have made, and the reading is meant to change how we live.

The expression of the mind

In the nineteenth century German philosophers tried to say what makes this kind of study a science and not just a taste. The most influential was Wilhelm Dilthey, whose Introduction to the Human Sciences (1883) used the term Geisteswissenschaften, “sciences of spirit.” His famous contrast, from 1894, was between two ways of knowing: we explain nature, but we understand mental life. The human sciences, for Dilthey, included what we now call the humanities and much of what we call the social sciences: history, economics, law, politics, religion, art, literature, and psychology. They study the expressions of human life, such as speech, action, law, and works of art, and try to understand them from within.

Ernst Cassirer, a generation later, widened the idea. In The Philosophy of Symbolic Forms, whose three volumes (1923, 1925, 1929) dealt with language, mythical thought, and knowledge, he argued that human beings do not meet the world raw. We meet it through symbolic forms: language, myth, art, religion, science. Each form has its own logic. His short book of 1944, An Essay on Man, gave the idea to a general audience, with its definition of the human being as animal symbolicum, the symbol-using animal, rather than only the “rational” one.

This is where the course makes its own claim. In this reading, what the humanities really study is the rules by which minds express themselves: the elements of a symbolic system, how they combine, and what comes out. Science then asks the same question of one kind of system, nature, and technology and business ask it of ever narrower ones. Whatever one thinks of the generalization, it explains why this course begins with cognition: before you can ask about the rules of expression, you have to ask how a mind takes in a world and decides what it means.