Everyone knows perfectly well which sciences count as exact and which as humanities. But hardly anyone has ever stopped to think why people pick one science or another as a favourite, study it as a hobby, or go even further and get an education in one discipline or another.
And, as a rule, these people come from completely opposite camps. I hardly know anyone who would love both equally, or hate both equally. Though about “hated” I probably went too far, because every other person is like that. But let’s stick to those who love at least some field. And so we don’t have to look far for examples, let’s stop at me.
So, which sciences do I like more? Philosophy, literature, history, sociology, psychology — or mathematics, physics, biology, chemistry. I like the second group more. And the whole point is that the sciences in the second group are exact, natural ones. Speaking of that, there is even a difference between the exact and the natural sciences, but we won’t go into the details and, for simplicity, we’ll put them in one group. So why do I like the exact sciences in particular? The answer is right there in the name: they are exact. That means nobody can fool you here, and you can check for yourself whatever interests you. There are formulas that you take, use, and get an answer to the question you care about. On the other side stand the humanities, where the answer, or rather the truth, depends on a whole pile of different factors. One of those factors is the person telling it.
At school, my classmates and I had to be in the 9th grade twice, and no, not because we were mentally weak, but because the education system was built in such a strange way. Afterwards, though, those who stayed at school went straight into the 11th grade. I went to college. At school, in one of the lessons for the 10th grade, which I was in fact in, but not officially, we were going through some work. It was Russian literature. We were taking apart one of the characters of a classic, though which one I no longer remember, since more than 10 years have passed. The teacher, who was an authority for the ninth-graders, steered the whole discussion toward the main character being as bad a person as possible. The teacher gave arguments, gestured, and not a single classmate, who at the time, of course, had no critical thinking, could say anything back to the teacher. And there was no need, because it was in our interest to agree along, since the hero really was a negative one.
Then, as I’ve already mentioned, I went to study at college, and in the first year, when the real ninth-graders mixed with the ninth-graders who were in fact tenth-graders, we started taking apart the very same classic in Russian literature class. Some hadn’t read it at all, others were already reading it for the second time. The most interesting moment came when we started analyzing this work. This was a completely different teacher, and she pushed her own line. The main character is definitely positive. The teacher gave quite solid, good arguments. And, as you can already guess, hardly anyone argued with her either: everyone agreed along, and in the end we settled on the hero really being positive.
A one-of-a-kind situation in life, which once and for all turned upside down my understanding of how, in the humanities, answers can be blurred, and the truth takes the version of whoever is most convincing in their arguments. The key word is in “their own”, not in the actual facts. Since then I have almost stopped taking people at their word, and I understood that, to form some true and reliable answer about anything or anyone, one opinion is nowhere near enough. In other words, for me one opinion (that very “first” one) means nothing and says nothing. It is an opinion that has to be checked. Of course, this is far from true of everyone, because with family, with people close to you, and even with colleagues you’ve already more or less figured out, you roughly know what to expect.
In the exact sciences the answer (which I would rather call the truth) is always a single version (unless, of course, probability theory gets involved, and even then, on large scales, even those answers follow patterns). About the humanities, unfortunately, I cannot say the same. Teachers of philosophy and literature, even bloggers who have authority over one group or another, will plant “their” version, which is far from always the right one. And, saddest of all, almost everyone takes that for the truth.
