What is this Humanity?
The very differences between the humanities and the social sciences show us the areas of interest where those differences cease to be. We recognize that the humanities are more specially and emphatically concerned with the products of creative imagination, particularly as produced by individuals conscious of their effort, than are the social sciences.
The more spontaneous productions of everyday life, the tools and the institutions that grow up of themselves, as it were, interest the sociologist, the anthropologist, and often the political scientist and the economist, more than they are likely to interest the student of the arts or of philosophy. The interest in a work of art, with reference to its manner of composition and its standard of excellence, is not so characteristically present in the social scientist; and it is the philosopher rather than the social scientist who deals with systems of thought as developed by reflective individuals. Nevertheless, we find no clear line of demarcation here either, and in anthropology one may find a Ruth Bunzel studying the aesthetic norms of individual Pueblo potters and Paul Radin studying the philosophy of Winnebago Indians; and economics may produce a Harold Innis who writes like a philosopher. As to institutions, on the whole social scientists have described their forms and their workings and have accounted for their beginnings in terms of previous social conditions and in terms of the communication of ideas from one group to another. Perhaps they will become more interested than they have been in the way in which inventions and institutions arise in the minds of particular individuals and what conceptions of excellence have guided these productions. If they do so, their work will again become more like that of the humanistic scholars. The juvenile court is, among other things, a work of creative imagination and might be studied as such, as the student of architecture studies the building in which such a court may be housed.
The existence of psychology, in part a social science, and the great current scientific interest in studying human personality prevent one from asserting too strongly that it is the humanist who is concerned with man as an individual while social science regards him as a collectivity. Yet it is true that the humanities, academically recognized, are characteristically concerned with the productions of the few, while the social sciences are for the most part interested in the productions of the many. It is partly a difference between an interest in what is common to members of a society and an interest in what is made by a few of them and perhaps enjoyed by only a few of them. It is partly a difference between an interest in any and every product of man’s collective life, no matter how good or bad it seems to the investigator, and an interest in what is better. A responsibility for the development of appreciation, for the improvement of taste, is more apt to be felt by a student of art and literature, as a part of his work, than it is apt to be felt by an economist or a psychologist or an anthropologist. The social scientist studies markets, cannibalism, ward politics, taxi dance halls, nursery rhymes, and art forms and social life of the juke-box set, but is not likely to be followed in these directions by professors of art, literature, or philosophy. On the other hand, folklore exists as a study of popular productions occasionally under humanistic academic auspices, and psychologists’ studies of symbolic behavior are studies of the creations of individuals. There is more than a little in common between one of Freud’s cases, as he wrote them down for us to read, and Lowes’s study of Coleridge’s creative mind, The Road to Xanadu.
The relationship which the social sciences have with the other sciences is of course undiminished by what has here been written about a relationship in another direction. The former relationship exists in the scientific point of view and in the similarities of method, as to both observation and analysis. The relationship with the humanities, as should appear from these pages, exists chiefly in the sharing of the same subject matter: humanity. This suggests one easy sentence in which one might perhaps summarize the two comparisons: Social science is a discipline with the methods of the natural sciences and the subject matter of the humanities.
Like many other such easy sentences, this one is no better than an approximation. It requires qualification in both its parts. By no means all of the subject matter that the social scientists take up for study is humanity. As has already been recognized here, much that is around or outside of humanity they find to be their business too: population statistics; the market as a function of supply and demand; military power and its influence; congenital reflexes.
And the assertion that social science has the method of the natural sciences requires modification also. Social science method is like physical science method in that it describes; it does not evaluate. Like physics and chemistry it strives for objectivity, system, and comprehensiveness. It uses precise methods where it can, and where it can it experiments, and where it can it measures. But it differs in its method from the methods of all the physical and biological sciences for reasons that follow from the difference in its subject matter. In most of social science, human nature is itself a part of the method. One must use one’s own humanity as a means to understanding. The physicist need not sympathize with his atoms, nor the biologist with his fruit flies, but the student of people and institutions must employ his natural sympathies in order to discover what the people think or feel and what the institution means. This is what C. F. von Weizsacker has in mind when he says, in “The Experiment,” that a philologist trying to understand the meaning an author puts into a text, or a historian seeking the intention of an acting man, enters “as an T into the discourse with a ‘Thou.’ This kind of meeting with its object, physics does not know, because it does not encounter its object as a subject. This personal understanding is a mode of experience which is accessible to us in regard to our fellow man; but not in regard to the stone, the star and the atom.”
The management of this human sympathy, this meeting of the object as subject, is a part of the art or scientific craft of the social scientist. Years ago Cooley gave it the name “sympathetic introspection.” It is a part of the scientist’s art, and, one may add, it is also in cases a personal difficulty or problem, for the social science field worker experiences in that part of his professional life an internal conflict between the yielding to human sympathy, as required by his method, and the standing apart, as science requires so as to look objectively at that which he sympathizes. This is not a problem of the physicist.
What is this “humanity” that both the social scientist and the student of art, literature, or philosophy strive to understand? In what that is susceptible of systematic observation does humanity manifest itself, and what are the most inclusive words that can be used to denote its principal manifestations? No generally accepted answer to these questions can be put on behalf of the social sciences or of the humanities. For the latter an answer would perhaps be a naming of the forms of art and thought which recur in many or all times and places. If the answer to represent social science should be sought of a social anthropologist or sociologist, it might be offered in something like the following words.
Humanity presents itself to our scientific notice as it appears in all men; as it appears in particular individual men; and as it appears in the conventional ways of life of particular continuing groups of men. Three terms are commonly used, nowadays, to point in the direction of these three different but interrelated manifestations of humanity: Human Nature, Personality, and Culture.