Fretting your transition into the humanities? This might help!
by Piyush Mathur
A chameleon in Yola, Nigeria (Photo Credit: Piyush Mathur)
Maybe you struggled with mathematics; maybe you were not good at laboratory work; maybe experimenting on fellow creatures anguished you; maybe the prospect of the space age had begun to worry you; maybe the worldwide death dances of advanced weaponry troubled you; maybe you began to dread losing out to the robots and Big Data; or maybe the narrow confines of your disciplinary track had begun to suffocate you…
Or, maybe you had begun to aspire to communicate on multifarious themes as impressively as the public figures you had come to admire; maybe you now wanted to explore philosophy, literary creativity, or criticism; maybe you craved to make a mark in journalism, perhaps in social work…Or, maybe there was something else along those lines that happened to you: and you decided to taste the fruit that had been forbidden to you (perhaps just by yourself).
At the end of your Bachelor’s in the natural sciences, mathematics, medicine, finance, engineering, or some other “professional” field, you decided to get a Master’s, ahem, in the Humanities! The heavens did not fall when you formalised your utterly unforeseeable decision. However, all but one of your erstwhile academic fellow-travellers expressed their puzzlement. Some of them expressed their outright disappointment; others warned you about the dreadful futility of your imminent Master’s; still others consoled you, highlighting the fact that you already have a decent Bachelor’s — and the new degree was not going to obliterate it: nay, it was ultimately going to make you even more marketable (except in arenas that they would not, could not pinpoint).
But in the heart of their hearts, your batchmates had lost trust in your mental health — and their suspicion of your commitment to truth, facts, rationality, utility, and all those nice traits that mark out the human as the human (as they saw it anyway) had just begun to take shape. No, you were not some unrecognisable subhuman just yet — but you were very likely on your way, as far as they were concerned. And as to that lone dissenter among your friends: He had not only turned philosophical, even poetic, in upholding your decision; but he had also let out a peculiar lament that he couldn’t, of course, make the same change in his own flight plan — and was condemned to autopilot more of the same through the rest of his life. He even left you with the unsettling impression that you were about to live out his dream!
Then, there was your parental family — and your significant other. The family worried about your economic future, tried to alert you to its bleakness — but ultimately told itself, with a few sighs too many, that you were well over an adult now, and they could barely choose a future for you anymore. And as for your significant other, the person had more than an inkling of the evolving you — and there was little to be done about it except to wait and watch (in the short run anyway). So, there you were, in the middle of nowhere, standing virtually all by yourself — with your back to a promising past, your front to an uncertain future: Your classes in the Humanities were to start the following Monday.
First week into your classes, and you are left wondering how in the world you are going to navigate this mist! You have already noticed that your new classmates have plenty of thematic background; they love to exchange ideas on all manner of things — referring to random books, authors, journalistic sources, historical figures, events and whatnot along the way. They also appear to agree on many things and yet also disagree on many others somehow; and of course they seem used to reading fat, wordy books; to writing weekly and even daily assignments; and to arguing on issues without necessarily trying to come to an agreement.
All of that has left you puzzled as much as impressed with your class. What worries you, though, is that you appear to be a fool in the midst of savvy intellectuals. After some heartburn, you realise that the underlying question you are faced with is this: As an academic alien, how do I transition into the Humanities? What follows below is a somewhat tedious guide to help you make that transition.
A chameleon in Yola, Nigeria (Photo Credit: Piyush Mathur)
Your eightfold path to a successful transition into the Humanities
1. Reinvent yourself as a listener — and how.
All learners are expected to be attentive listeners; however, listening itself is not the same across the learning contexts. That listening must differ from one learning context to another becomes easier to appreciate if we consider how the student of music must use her ears versus that of financial accounting, for instance; or how the student of ornithology must do the same versus that of graphic design. The disciplines being compared above are far apart from each other, which allows us to notice clearly the auditory differences between them; however, across the disciplines (and academic faculties) listening differs (if ever so slightly) not only in quality and character but also in the amount and type of attention it demands of the listener.
The student of conventional humanities is expected to be exceedingly attentive, as a listener, linguistically — as in being able to grasp and appreciate the exact words used and in what sort of syntax; she is also expected to be acoustically, culturally, sociologically, and ideologically alert to what the teacher and the fellow students are saying. Let us briefly identify below these different types of listening:
Linguistic attention involves exercising a deep as well as a broad understanding of the language of instruction as much as of the texts under consideration.
Acoustic attention has two tiers to it: one, heeding the tone of everybody’s speech (and being prepared to respond to others not in kind, but kindly); and, two, being able to hear writing (including, but especially, one’s own). (Both these aspects of acoustic attention prepare one to be a worthy respondent to others — be it in speech or in writing.)
Cultural listening involves remaining alert to the prevailing assumptions of behavioural normality underlying a speaker’s verbal statements (even if that speaker is oneself) and being able to assess their impact on the purpose and meaning of what is being exchanged.
Sociological listening involves keeping one’s ears and eyes open to whether, how, and to what extent, the meaning and content of somebody’s utterances are his efforts at relating — positively or negatively — to his immediate audience; and whether and how those utterances make him appear to be similar to or different from any human collectives (historical or otherwise).
Ideological listening involves being able to guess at or ascertain the underlying socio-political-cultural and economic ideals of the speaker’s verbal statements — and, by extension, of the speaker’s conscious or tacit sympathies for outstanding clusters of such ideals.
While the Humanities train the student to be a good listener on all of the above fronts, the student would do well to prepare himself as that sort of a listener to facilitate his transition into the stream and to excel within it. To do so would require the student to keep himself informed on the widest range of issues — contemporary and historical — while also observing the characters behind the communicators; the context of communication; and the interrelationships among all the speakers as well as their listeners.
2. Prior knowledges are your assets — but don’t use them as a weapon, and don’t overuse them!
The Humanities camp is as porous as it can get. Despite their general lack of ease with numbers and overly framed graphical illustrations, Humanists welcome those that use those approaches to enrich the Humanities camp. Indeed, the self-image of the Humanities stream is that of epistemological inclusion; intellectual broadening; methodological accommodation; compassionate, self-enlightening listening; and across-the-board curiosity. The Humanist is always hoping to be surprised: by some new approach, discovery, interpretation, or even a new personality (which only other streams could apparently supply it).
Unlike nature researchers or mathematicians — who tend to be extremely sceptical of the disciplinary outsider — the Humanists’ first reaction to such an outsider would often be that of curiosity, longing, and warmth. This does make the Humanities a bit too porous for the comfort of the empirical rationalist; however, it also turns it into a welcoming platform for those that would have found other streams too suffocating for their innovative mindset, radical socio-political critique, or unconventional combinations of ideas or methods.
Given the above orientation of the Humanities, an incomer to the stream should feel confident that what she already knows through her prior training in any other stream is only going to help her rehabilitate herself in her new academic ecosystem. However, any prior knowledges ought to be employed to enrich the Humanities camp, not to patronise it — leave aside to belittle it — if the incomer wishes to do well as a Humanist. Moreover, prior knowledges (including methods) should not be made to eclipse the core proceedings of a Humanities class or the content of one’s assignments in it as a student.
3. Deductive logic won’t cut it.
If your prior fields of study trained you to ensure a complete consistency between your premises and your conclusion(s), and to settle for nothing less than a clear and certain conclusion (or set of conclusions) — a methodology that would have also required you to have a clearly delineated, closed-off realm and theme of investigation — then you have so far been a creature of deductive logic or reasoning. While that sort of reasoning works well for ascertaining physical realities and articulating mathematical abstractions, it falls short when applied to living realities in which (human) subjectivities, ideals, and preferences are not merely involved but are in focus.
The Humanities, of course, address the latter dimension of reality. Deductive reasoning is useful to the Humanities, but it cannot be the predominant form of reasoning for it. In the Humanities, the forms of reasoning that dominate are inductive, abductive, and intuitive. That is because there are always too many factors and kinds of evidence involved in research in these fields — and the costs of ignoring any observations made in the research are also difficult to illustrate with ultimate certainty. Moreover, research themes in the Humanities remain somewhat tentatively delineated; an entire body of research may also remain more or less open to alternative iterations; and subjectivities are frequently plied as assets within the research.
So, navigating the Humanities elegantly would require a newcomer to excel at inductive, abductive, and intuitive forms of reasoning. Much more important, however, would be for such a newcomer to acquaint herself with the types of methodologies that the Humanities researchers have articulated for themselves.
4. Learn to live with ambiguity, uncertainty, inconclusiveness — without confusing them with lies; but do not fetishise truth, either!
It is by no means the goal of the Humanist to disseminate falsehoods, to wallow in counterfactuals, or to sing the praises of the divine; however, the stream of Humanities is also not particularly fond of firm claims to or illustrations of any definitive truth. To the Humanist, truth could as much be a source of tyranny as of liberation. Often perceived as the outcome of authority, interpretation, and socio-historical-political-cultural circumstances, truth in the Humanities is a contested concept.
Without being let go, truth is frequently shown in the Humanities to be non-singular, perspectival, contingent, and subjective (to different degrees). Of course it helps that the Humanist focuses on human subjects and their systems (which are fickle), not phenomena of nature (which, to different extents, are objectively ascertainable). In this context, knowledges systems aimed at studying and certifying the state of nature are also approached as human systems — which, of course, they are — and they are thus scrutinised within the Humanities for their own infirmities, inconsistencies, and injustices.
The Humanist is almost obligated to show alternative truths, to show the limits to a given truth, and — in the process — to highlight ambiguities, uncertainties, and inconclusiveness in texts as much as situations and systems. Whenever nature comes twined into socio-cultural situations — or has unavoidable (intellectual) implications for the latter — then the Humanist instinct is to look for possible infirmities in truth claims concerning it, too.
Under those circumstances, the Humanist takes huge risks — and not always knowingly, leave aside whether with all available facts — and he may thus invite the wrath and ridicule of the nature researcher. However, this kind of effort is still worth it, to the Humanist anyway, and very likely for a society, too — since this might be the society’s way to come to terms with a new natural finding or fact, and to make systemic adjustments in response to the same. At any rate, nature researcher is far from infallible — and instances are innumerable in which the Humanities have shown the limits to the former’s methods and outcomes of inquiry.
A disciplinary alien to the Humanities must ready herself for an interminable exploration of ambiguities, uncertainties, inconclusiveness, marginal truths, and alternative interpretations before deciding to jump into this stream.
5. Prepare to celebrate diversity.
If nature researchers aim at unifying and integrating their (sub)disciplinary stands and methodological approaches based upon objective and/or physical evidence (and with as little regard as possible to the researchers’ personal backgrounds and personalities), then the Humanities researchers aim at enriching, diversifying knowledge — frequently by encouraging fellow researchers to bring their perspectives to it (as informed, inspired by their personal backgrounds). Of course loose sets of consensus do evolve in the Humanities; however, driving fellow researchers into any rigid, uniform interpretation or rendition of anything — and trying to single out some irrefutable evidence to accomplish the same — is not ordinarily the aim of researchers within the Humanities.
On the contrary, Humanists frequently take pride in undercutting evolving successes at intellectual agreement at all sorts of levels: from textual interpretation to historical understanding to evaluative criteria to what should or should not be included in the syllabi to what kinds of courses there need to be in the curriculum, and so on. The Humanist impulse is predominantly that of diversification and depth, not of consensus and unanimity. Under these circumstances, diversifying those that pursue the research and teaching — and/or those whose works are researched and taught — itself remains an important goal for the Humanities (even though it also remains locally contentious always).
Transitioning into the Humanities from engineering or other rigid disciplines would thus be a lot easier if one trains oneself to explore the world of ideas, texts, and people in terms of diversification — but without forgetting rigour. Such an effort, though, would be truly meaningful and enjoyable if the person commits herself to celebrating diversity (and not just accepting it).
6. Learn to be a critic — even for the sake of being one!
When we speak of Humanists, we are generally speaking of the critical types. Critique is very much the mode and frequently the object of this academic stream; and although it is now trendy to distinguish it from criticism, in reality they are fundamentally overlapping terms. To the Humanist, heeding any work itself is a compliment to its creator, and already an appreciation of the work; it is secondary whether the attention thus accorded the work or the creator is meant to discourage or encourage the same type of creation. The Humanist hope of course is that the critical enterprise will refine and thus promote creativity and its quality; the Humanities thus put a premium on the freedom of — and respect for — evaluative articulations.
To prepare for the Humanities stream, the learner must prepare to be a critic that seeks the company of fellow critics, including of her own work. Understanding and bringing into a sharp focus the limitations of whatever one might be observing or experiencing are supposed to be enjoyable activities in the Humanities — and it would be helpful for a trainee in it to cultivate a sense of irony and wit to achieve excellence.
7. Expect hypocrisy — but don’t be indifferent to the notion of values.
Because Humanists engage with ideals and moral/ethical values — as much as with the limitations of any articulable ideal or moral/ethical value — they have to reconcile with the constant presence of hypocrisy in everybody’s lives (including their own). A physicist, qua physicist, does not deal with whether peace is a virtue or whether violence is a vice — when, to what extent, and/or of what kind, etc.; however, (most) philosophers, socio-cultural-political critics, historians, creative writers, and creative-writing commentators grapple with those sorts of questions, associated ideals and other moral/ethical values on a daily basis.
It is thus easier for a new student in a Humanities classroom to feel confused or betrayed by the actual interactive conduct of her teachers and classmates. Contrariwise, a new student of Humanities may find the courses to be childishly idealistic — going way too detailed about human rights violations, psychological abuse, power imbalances, workplace exploitation, sexuality, identity, character, emotions, and so on — and thus impractical (if not useless). In light of the above observations, somebody new to the Humanities is advised not to get stupefied by the observed gaps between what the classmates and the teachers may be proclaiming regarding life’s values and their individual practices; rather, he is advised to learn to live with those observed gaps as testimonies to human imperfections while remaining committed to bridging such gaps in his own life.
To different extents, hypocrisy shall always characterise every human — and the Humanities explore that to the nth degree while also mirroring it; but what this stream shall not tolerate is a human that would not want to even register the notion of values. Indeed, the Humanities want their trainees to not only be observant of values but also to grapple with them in sharp and extensive details.
8. Beware of the mystically spiritual!
Many years ago, while I was on a visit to the Pune-based campus of Indian Institute of Science Education and Research, a random undergraduate student I met on a bus wondered with me about my visit, what I did, etc. When I told him that I was employed with another institute’s Department of Humanities and Social Sciences, he mumbled: “In the Humanities, you guys focus on spiritual stuff, right?” His question was such a peculiar characterisation of the Humanities that it left me tongue-tied — and all I could do was to murmur back, “No, social issues are more like what we discuss.”
One is of course spiritually or emotionally uplifted through the Humanities — but they are primarily about understanding, appreciating, reporting, and demystifying the non-mathematical intangibles relevant to human existence. These intangibles could be values, emotions, ideas, ideals, notions, beliefs, concepts, identities, or systems. The Humanities approach the above through the following means: critical exploration, analysis, and interpretation of relevant records; concise communication about them; informed (re-)conceptualization; reason; by heeding the margins and engaging with the marginalised; by removing silences; by connecting hitherto unconnected dots; by suggesting alternatives; by questioning power and authority; and by refining — frequently renegotiating — all manner of evaluative parameters regarding the good, the bad, and the ugly.
Whenever a researcher or student of Humanities compromises with the standard of any of the above means — and surely there would be no researcher or student who could claim to be perfect on even one of them anyway — the Humanities cluster opens itself up for confusion with all sorts of other phenomena (including mystical spirituality, theology, religion, or fiction, to name just a few). Of course, the Humanities track must engage with each of the above as objects of study — which is how one has classes in literature, for instance — but it is not to be confused with any of them and nor should it venture to replace any of them.
To conclude, transitioning into the Humanities would be a lot easier if the incomer understands that the Humanities demand and develop critical reasoning in the trainee based on a realistic grasp of the material world — and that they have little directly to do with any mystically spiritual endeavours.
Piyush Mathur is the author of Technological Forms and Ecological Communication: A Theoretical Heuristic (Lexington Books, 2017).