Standing on the shoulders of giants
The phrase used to mean the opposite of what it means today.
I have a complicated relationship with semantic drift — the gradual change of meaning of words and phrases. As an student of evolution, I see it as inevitable, natural and even beautiful. As a student of history, I can’t help but focus on the meanings that are being lost, sometimes forever. For example, I shudder every time I hear the phrase “divide and conquer” used in the sense of “conquer X by dividing the conquerors into cooperative groups” — that is, to divide labor, to split responsibilities. The original meaning, of course, is “conquer X by dividing the conquered into rival factions” — a much more nuanced, and cunning, political maneuver well known to great emperors of the past. This original meaning is now used so rarely that I know it’s time to move on and accept that language evolves. But doing so means erasing something ancient.
So it is with the phrase “to stand on the shoulders of giants”. In modern English, it means to build upon someone else’s achievements, to continue in someone’s footsteps. The phrase sits as a self-appointed motto for all of science underneath the search bar of Google Scholar, Google’s scientific literature search engine:
It is not uncommon to hear that someone is standing on someone else’s shoulders, and that person is standing on someone else’s shoulders yet, and so on. Sometimes the “giants” are not actually giants at all, and the whole thing need not have anything to do with discovery. Here’s a quote from Roger Kimball’s “Athwart History” describing Nazi organization that enabled the Holocaust:
“In order to liquidate six million people you have to have a pretty extensive killing machine. There are the people who actually turn the valves to let out the toxic gas. But those, relatively few, stand on the shoulders of the guards who ruin in the victims, who in turn stand on the shoulders of the army and the police.” [italics mine]
What modern English speakers are imagining, in other words, is this:
What the phrase used to mean, however, is more like this:
(image credit: Jim Nelson)
The point was not only that you are standing on someone else’s shoulders, but that you are standing upon a giant, while you yourself are a dwarf. The message was not that of continued progress, but almost the exact opposite: that it is a fool’s errand to try to build upon the ancient greatness. Yes, you might see a tiny bit further than the giant, but that is all you can hope for no matter how hard you try — everything truly important has already been discovered.
It is difficult to wrap our modern mind around this pessimism, but that is only because the past 500 years solidified in our mind the idea that there’s always more to discover. That’s not what Western people believed in the Middle Ages. The vibe back then was that of degradation. The Latin world had an inferiority complex towards the Ancient Greeks and Romans — they saw abundant evidence of art, science and technology that existed in the past but was lost later, and their focus was on interpreting and deciphering what ancients — “the giants” — had to say about the world. The idea that instead of reading Aristotle, you could be learning from your own experience (early on, the words experience and experiment meant the same thing), was, to educated minds, arrogant and preposterous. So this is what the saying expresses: remember that you are a dwarf standing on the shoulders of giants, stop wasting time trying to figure out something new, and instead brush up on your Plato.
Of course that frame of mind did not survive the Scientific Revolution. First came the rounding of Africa. (According to classical philosophers, it was supposed to extend into the south forever.) Then came the discovery of the Americas. (There weren’t supposed to be “antipodes” — dry land on opposite sides of the globe.) Then Tycho Brahe walked out of his house and saw a supernova. (The sky was not supposed to ever change.) Then Galileo looked in his telescope and saw that Earth rotates around the sun, the Moon is rough, Saturn has rings, and Jupiter has satellites. (It was all supposed to be perfect spheres rotating in perfect circles around Earth.) Then Leeuwenhoek looked in his microscope and discovered the microworld (there wasn’t supposed to be anything there at all.) The idea that there’s nothing else to discover was replaced with the idea that there will always be something new. I can’t say that I’m 100% sure which of the two ideas is more deluded.
It is especially funny that the most famous use of the phrase “to stand on the shoulders of giants” comes from the letter of Isaac Newton to Robert Hooke, and hides multiple layers of sarcasm (it is well known that the two titans of the Royal Academy could not stand each other’s guts):
What Des-Cartes [sic] did was a good step. You have added much several ways, & especially in taking the colours of thin plates into philosophical consideration. If I have seen further it is by standing on the shoulders of Giants.
This is as acrid a diss as you could write in 1675. It’s equal parts condescension, fake humility, and barely-concealed body shaming (Hooke was famously short.) How great of you, says Newton, to add these small details to the monumental scientific achievements of Descartes. If I, too, contributed anything of value (which, of course, Newton did — he toppled our whole understanding of light and matter), it is surely as negligible as a dwarf standing on the shoulders of giants.
You have to admit it’s a pretty good joke.