Arts, Humanities, Sciences, Uses

Abstract

We should not define the “uses” of the arts and humanities against the sciences. Nor, in our finite world, should we resist asking what their uses are. The long perspective of science helps us see that art, which might seem the most useless of all major forms of human activity, can reshape minds and societies by its very freedom from immediate use. Fiction in particular has led to an expansion in sympathy and a decline in social harm, and like all the arts prompts the imagination to envisage richer purposes in a richer world. Given that we need to imitate in order to innovate, the arts and the humanities, as seedbanks of the human past, make a world of difference. In our ultrasocial species, our arts, our sciences, our societies are humanities, all the way down. If we currently section off science, medicine, engineering, architecture, economics, and fine arts, even these specialisms are also all humanities, the product of human action, thought, inquiry, accumulation, contestation and preservation. In the core humanities, where we examine what we humans think and do, have thought and done, and might think and do, we need to focus more on creative problem-solving in the past and how that can help engender creativity in the present and future. At their best the arts and the humanities, like the best science, critique themselves, both building on and challenging what has gone before. A poem by Szymborska and a novel by Nabokov show how creativity and critique, by exploring the possibility beyond the actual, help extend what is actually possible.