Standing on the shoulders of giants
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The metaphor of dwarves standing on the shoulders of giants (Latin: Pigmaei gigantum humeris impositi plusquam ipsi gigantes vident) is first recorded in the twelfth century and attributed to Bernard of Chartres. It was famously used by the seventeenth-century scientist Isaac Newton (see below).
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[edit] Original attribution
The attribution to Bernard is due to John of Salisbury. In 1159, John wrote in his Metalogicon:
"Bernard of Chartres used to say that we are like dwarfs on the shoulders of giants, so that we can see more than they, and things at a greater distance, not by virtue of any sharpness on sight on our part, or any physical distinction, but because we are carried high and raised up by their giant size."
This saying is also inscribed on the side of the standard design of UK two pound coins.
The thirteenth-century stained glass of Chartres Cathedral's south transept may also be influenced by the metaphor. The tall windows under the Rose Window show four major Old Testament prophets Isaiah, Jeremiah, Ezekiel and Daniel as gigantic figures and the four New Testament evangelists Matthew, Mark, Luke and John as sitting on their shoulders. The evangelists, though smaller, "see more" than the larger Old Testament prophets in that they see the Messiah about whom the prophets spoke.
[edit] References during the sixteenth to nineteenth centuries
Didacus Stella took up the quote in the sixteenth century; by the seventeenth century it had become commonplace. Robert Burton, in The Anatomy of Melancholy (1621-51), quotes Didacus Stella thus:
"I say with Didacus Stella, a dwarf standing on the shoulders of a giant may see farther than a giant himself."
Later editors of Burton misattributed the quote to Lucan; in their hands Burton's attribution Didacus Stella, in luc 10, tom. ii "Didacus on the Gospel of Luke, chapter 10; volume 2" became a reference to Lucan's Pharsalia 2.10. No reference or allusion to the quote is found there.
Later in the seventeenth century, George Herbert, in his Jacula Prudentum (1651), wrote "A dwarf on a giant's shoulders sees farther of the two" and Isaac Newton famously remarked in a letter to his rival Robert Hooke dated February 5, 1676 that:
"What Des-Cartes did was a good step. You have added much several ways, and especially in taking the colours of thin plates into philosophical consideration. If I have seen a little further it is by standing on the shoulders of Giants."
This has been interpreted as a sarcastic remark directed against Hooke. This is somewhat speculative: Hooke and Newton had exchanged many letters in tones of mutual regard, and Hooke was not of particularly short stature, although he was of slight build and had been afflicted from his youth with a severe stoop.
Samuel Taylor Coleridge, in The Friend (1828), wrote:
"The dwarf sees farther than the giant, when he has the giant's shoulder to mount on."
Against this notion, Friedrich Nietzsche argues that a dwarf (the academic scholar) brings even the most sublime heights down to his level of understanding. In the section of Thus Spoke Zarathustra (1882) entitled "On the Vision and the Riddle", Zarathustra climbs to great heights with a dwarf on his shoulders to show him his greatest thought. Once there however, the dwarf fails to understand the profundity of the vision and Zarathustra reproaches him for "making things too easy on [him]self." If there is to be anything resembling "progress" in the history of philosophy, Nietzsche elsewhere writes, it can only come from those rare giants among men, shouting out to one another across the annals of time.
[edit] Contemporary references
- Melvyn Bragg uses this as a title, and framing metaphor, for his 1998 non-fiction work, On Giants' Shoulders.
- After seeing the inscription on a £2 coin, Noel Gallagher of British band Oasis decided to name their fourth studio album after it, but in his mildly inebriated state, wrote down the inscription as Standing on the Shoulder of Giants. The phrase also appears in the song King of Birds by the U.S. rock band R.E.M. as the lyric "...standing on the shoulders of giants / leaves me cold."
- The phrase is used by the major figure in Umberto Eco's novel The Name of the Rose, William of Baskerville.
- Google Scholar has adopted "Stand on the shoulders of giants" as its motto.
- MIT professor Hal Abelson is credited with the quip "If I have not seen as far as others, it is because giants were standing on my shoulders." Abelson himself attributes it to his Princeton University roommate, Jeff Goll [1].
- On the Shoulders of Giants is a collection of works by the major scientists Nicolaus Copernicus, Galileo Galilei, Johannes Kepler, Isaac Newton and Albert Einstein, all compiled by Stephen Hawking. In his introduction, Hawking addresses Newton's famous version of the quotation above.
- In Google's different search options, if a surfer clicks on Google Scholar (in order to search "scholarly papers"), under the search bar is written "Stand on the shoulders of giants".
[edit] Further reading
- Robert K. Merton, On The Shoulders of Giants: A Shandean Postscript, Free Press (1965).
