Danica - Final Exam Blog Post

Humanities is defined as “the study of how people process and document the human experience… [involving] philosophy, literature, religion, art, music, history and language to understand and record our world” (stanford.edu). We learned about the connections between each aspect of the Humanities through various writing pieces, movies and documentaries, and art. These materials gave us a basic idea of what the Humanities are and why they are important to study and understand.

Our first unit was about cognition and knowing. Human cognition is an important part of the Humanities because they are all about why we experience life the way we do, and challenging our own thoughts and cognition. We as humans enjoy thinking about thinking, and analyzing why we think what we do. One of the most influential readings in this unit was Galapagos by Kurt Vonnegut. The main idea of this book is how human’s extreme capacity for cognition hinders our ability to enjoy life and be fully functional and productive. The story follows a small boatload of people in attempting to salvage the human species. The characters face many difficulties due to their intelligence and emotional abilities impeding their ability to simply reproduce and survive. Another important material that introduced the scientific element of human cognition was The Alphabet Versus the Goddess by Leonard Shlain. This excerpt explains the difference between the left and right hemispheres of the brain and how they facilitate our cognition of words, emotions, music, visual art, etc. The Alphabet Versus the Goddess explains how our right and left brain work in harmony to perform different tasks, but also how they can conflict and cause contraction in our thinking/knowing. This connects to Galapagos, in which the hemispheres of the characters’ brains often “disagreed” and held them back. Jill Bolte Taylor’s Ted Talk My Stroke of Insight is about how the stroke she has that disabled the left side of her brain, the side that controls emotion and creativity, and how it affected her cognition when she could only use the analytical, methodical side of her brain. Hearing about how Taylor’s daily performance was affected so strongly by only being able to use one side of her brain just proves how important the two independent sides and their partnership are. Vonnegut, Shlain and Taylor all explore how our brains and cognitive ability affect our daily lives and our experience as humans.  

The second unit was about nature, human beings and sacred space. “Nature” in this unit meant both human nature, as in natural tendencies, and also the earth’s nature. A sacred space is a place that has deep spiritual and emotional significance to the inhabitant of the space. Grizzly Man, a documentary about a man who goes to live with bears, perfectly embodies both “human nature”, and “humans in nature”. Tim Treadwell, the man who goes to live with bears in their natural habitat because he feels like he is “meant to be with them” is defying both human nature and the creatures of the natural world. The bear sanctuary was considered a sacred space for Treadwell because he felt that he felt very connected with. Though Treadwell may have been happy living with the bears, his mission to live as “one with the bears” was frowned upon because he was considered to be tampering with nature and the naturalness of earth without human impact. How Art Made the World by Nigel Spivey was a piece we used to learn about nature being “played with” by humans, similar to Grizzly Man. Spivey talks about landscape paintings, timeless renditions of nature, and how humans alter nature to appeal to their artistic styles/aesthetics. Both of these works show how it is seemingly human nature to tinker with nature’s tendencies. In contrast, the Australian Aborigines show us that not all cultures intend to overtake or possess nature. We read Aborigine stories and creation myths, revealing the importance of their surroundings to these people. The Aborigines are an indigenous tribe whose mission is to cohabitate with nature and respect the natural world, which they regard as their ancestors. These three works, among many others we explored, showed us different perspectives on the idea of human nature and the human relationship with the natural world. How humans interact with nature and other animal species’ is an important part of understanding the human experience.

For our third unit, we learned about love, beauty and art. Love is widely regarded as one of the most important “missions” of the human existence. We explored the interconnecting concepts of love and beauty, and beauty and art. One of the most meaningful readings was The Picture of Dorian Gray, about an artist and his philosophical ideas about beauty’s role in falling in love, and beauty’s role in his art. Oscar Wilde is the author of this book, and he shares his aesthetic philosophy through his characters. In addition, we read many speeches and sermons by other aesthetic philosophers like Plato and Aristotle, two very influential Ancient Greek men. Their works taught us why love is important to our existence and how/why we are so emotionally driven towards love. Plato and Aristotle write about our interest in physical beauty, and what makes something beautiful. The two also taught us a lot about motivations for art and what art essentially is. The ancient love poetry that we analyzed gave a more raw and wholesome perspective on the ideas of beauty and love. The poems that we read demonstrated the powerful influence love has on us, and how it has impacted humans through time. The works we read from various philosophers, poets and authors of different time periods showed us what love, beauty and art are, and why we pursue these things so passionately in our lives.

Our next unit focused on ethics, law and the frailty of the human existence. Ethics are our personal set of ideas on why we exist and what our human/life purpose is. Ethics has an important role in law, because our values affect how we choose to govern ourselves/each other. With ethics comes the idea of the frailty of human life; the fact that we are delicately sentimental and curious creatures. This unit proved that the human existence is just the epic rhetorical question. For this unit, we returned to concepts first encountered in Galapagos by Kurt Vonnegut.  Galapagos touches on the monstrous contradiction that is the human experience, and why we exist. The characters in the story find themselves desperately scrambling to maintain the human population on earth, and the story ponders what purpose our lives really have. Why were those characters trying to help the human species survive after all? In Galapagos, emotion gives great meaning to the lives of the characters. Similarly, The Ten Commandments, guidelines for Judaism, Christianity and Islam, also asserts that the purpose of our lives is emotional connections with others. The commandments focus on how we as humans shall interact with higher power(s), ourselves and others. The three religions that practice these commandments show us that many humans throughout time have believed that humans exist for their unique emotional capacity. We also read multiple philosophical readings on ethics, like Nietzsche, Kant, Wilde, Aristotle and Plato. These philosophers deeply explored how fragile we are as humans and our fear of not existing. Their dramatic stories show how our curiousness and confusion motivate us to try to understand our existence. The human emotion that these ethical philosophers write about, in addition to the religious codes we read, helped us to understand how humans throughout time have built their own ethical codes through religion, and how our quest to find meaning for our lives is an important part of the Humanities.

Our last unit involved the inner journey of humans and the meaning of our reality. Siddhartha was the main novel that we read during this unit. The story follows a young man on the path to enlightenment, and his journey within himself. Siddhartha shows us how he gives his life meaning by trying to improve and find himself. He also learns during his journey that desire is the root of suffering, and how strong human desire has caused him to struggle in his life. Night Journey, the story of Oedipus presented through dancing (Martha Graham) was a fascinating piece of art that showed many parallels to Siddhartha. Martha Graham’s dancers show through their bodies the intense emotions and struggles faced by Oedipus and his kingdom. Oedipus’ suffering in life due to guilt, prophecies, love, etc. make his story what it is and give significance to his personal existence. We also read Shakespeare’s Hamlet, following a similar ruler to Oedipus. Young Hamlet lives a life of displeasure and disappointment. These experiences shape who Hamlet is. Siddhartha, Oedipus and Hamlet all prove the importance of suffering, struggle and self improvement in the lives of humans.

The diverse collection of work we read, listened to and watched in Humanities opened our eyes to the meaning of being human. We were able to learn many different opinions and ideas about one confusing topic. Our wealth of knowledge gained from the many men and women who have philosophized the human experience has brought us a step closer to answering the rhetorical question we began this class asking ourselves: what does it mean to be human?