I see the humanities (I mean literature here and not so much history etc) as a continuation of cautionary tales and parables and fables and legends and fairy ta

I see the humanities (I mean literature here and not so much history etc) as a continuation of cautionary tales and parables and fables and legends and fairy tales around the campfire. Its "output" is that you're better able to feel on a visceral level how others might feel or what the social outcome can be, or what the deep values of your society are etc. Literary analysis is twice removed from this. Ground level is how you act in a new situation. Once removed is the concrete stories you hear at the campfire. Twice removed is the dissecting analysis of the story and more meta levels. In physics the ground level is solving a new engineering problem in industry. You use the recipes and methods you learned in physics class to formulate your problem in the language of physics and solve it. Once removed is teaching the equations and methods themselves. Twice removed is discussing how the physics knowledge was produced historically and how research is done today. I do belive though that learning about the history of science is immensely enlightening. In school it seems like these things just fell from the sky fully formed like Athene from Zeus' forehead. Kuhn's book on the Copernican revolution is super interesting. I found it better than the more famous Structure of Scientific Revolutions. The latter is more abstract and tries to build a big theory, while the former mostly just narrates how it happened in the concrete case of Copernicus, Kepler et al.