Editor’s note: In the opinion page’s “Faculty Fridays” series, a different faculty or staff member writes column each week about issues facing ISU faculty and staff, ISU students or the world at large.

Over forty years as a historian in training and in practice, a few consulting activities (including a fair amount of service on national grants panels) and recently, as chair of Iowa State’s Council for Scholarship in the Humanities, plus an invitation to write this column, has given me an incentive to say a few things about the purpose and character of the humanities.

The essential purpose of the humanities is to investigate the nature of human experience or what is sometimes called “the human condition.” Our mission is to tell the truth about various aspects of this subject.

Our mission is to provide a resource that can save society’s understanding of our humanity from the errors and manipulations of those with personal or partisan agendas. Our fundamental disciplines are literature, history, philosophy and other disciplines that use methods common to these. In usual discourse, although not in the ISU curriculum, the fine arts, performing arts, and creative writing are not classified as humanities, although I think we have a good deal in common with them.

Human experience manifests itself in many forms, whether individual, social, cultural, or intellectual. Its variety and complexity make it an ever-fascinating and challenging subject of study. The trickiest aspect of humanistic study is that people, us scholars, are studying other people. We have to work on developing “objectivity,” “detachment,” “empathy,” or some such attitude to be sure we gain a serious insight of real value to others.

We can see right away that the humanities are not the same as the natural sciences. The humanities have a different subject matter and a different mission.

The humanities also differ from the “social sciences” in their reliance on “anecdotal” evidence, evidence about things that have happened only once, and which have to be understood in relation to other anecdotal evidence.

Thus, we can’t decide how important the Kansas-Nebraska Act was in causing the Civil War by taking it out of the stream of events in the 1850s and seeing whether or not the war would have happened.

It is pointless to speculate what English literature would have been without Shakespeare, Russian literature without Tolstoy, or western literature in general without the Judeo-Christian scriptures. These things are there and our job is to understand them, as best we can, on their own terms.

There are essentially three methods of achieving this understanding – textual, historical, and philosophical. Actually, all humanists use some combination of these methods but often one purpose dominates.

We can understand Abraham Lincoln’s Second Inaugural Address, for example, by noting how its text expresses objectivity, moral passion, and a limited human capacity, how its literary form compared to contemporary models, how its delivery toward the end of the Civil War expressed a culmination of his efforts to reconcile ideals and principles with political realities, and how its message measured up to theological and ethical standards philosophically understood.

Thus, one document, a piece of anecdotal evidence, offers a fascinating array of possibilities for our understanding.

As with all branches of knowledge, the humanities are always developing. Ideas that pop into the heads of solitary scholars in windowless studies deep inside a library or archive can change the way in which we look at our evidence. Words like “status revolution,” “deconstruction,” “post-modernism,” and “mentalit‚” had this kind of origin. Also, great social movements can stimulate our thinking.

The civil rights movement initiated the growth of “minority studies” disciplines and sent scholars back to their sources to investigate the literary, historical, and ideological nature of race and gender relations.

As a member, and recently as chair of the university’s Council on Scholarship in the Humanities, I have had the privilege of reading about the important work that humanities faculty are doing at Iowa State.

The variety of proposals shows the great breadth of talent on the ISU faculty and the quality of intellect (the systematic rigor, interpretive insight, and ability to address “big” ideas) is right up there with the fellowship applications I’ve read for many years for the National Endowment for the Humanities.

Good books and articles about literature, history, and philosophy ought to teach you something about human experience.

My former colleague Don Rawson, who taught Russian history, used to ask on his final exam, “what this course has taught you about the human condition.” A pretty good question.

George McJimsey is professor and chairman of history