Joseph Moses Final

Humanities is not only about human nature and the way we function, but it takes a deeper look into why we are the way we are and why we do the things we do. Humanity is just another word for mankind or the human race. In class we learned about some of the most important and at the same time the most basic constructs of our human nature. Everything we learned about had some connection to the way we act or the way we think, and during every unit we looked deeper into the history behind how it was all started. Sometimes this meant looking all the way back to the very first art forms and trying to decode its meaning, other times it meant looking at writing from the philosophers of ancient Greece. Throughout the class we looked at how the ancient creative uprising formed the human society we live in today.

To understand human culture and the way we came to be you must first take a look at how the human brain works. In the first unit we took a look at how people’s most basic functions stem from the brain. Shlain’s Right/Left brain reading packet helped me understand the difference in the way people think. In the most basic sense there really are two types of people, either right brain dominant or left brain dominant. The right brain is the more spiritual thinking side of the brain where the left side uses logic and reason, because of this, the right brain is much more artistic than the left. It was interesting to see, as the class went on, how humans changed from being more left brain dominant to shifting to right brain dominant, at least with the progression of art. Looking back on some of the philosophers and artists we studied it’s interesting to analyze whether they were right or left brain people. We went on in the unit to talk about the difference between written and oral stories. Genesis is an example of one of the most popular written stories. Genesis is the traditional christian creation story in which it explains how God created nature and everything in the world and then created man. A Brief History by John Bowker talked about the ritualistic ways of early humans and shows how it connects to the right actions controlled by the right brain. He wrote about how things like music and art are embedded in all human behavior, and how we created myths and rituals that answered questions the ancient humans had about where we originated. The first creation stories were part of an oral tradition, passed down through the generations. As people would tell the stories they would engage in the earliest versions of rituals. The Aborigine tribe of Australia would come together and listen to these stories and as they would listen they would engage in dances, bonfires, and drum music. The goal for them while listening to the stories of their creation was to go into a trans where they would be in another state of consciousness. This was, in a way, the first form of enlightenment and was a crucial part of ancient humans behaviors.

The second unit we studied tied really well to the first, transitioning from the way people told the stories, to the stories themselves. Nature plays a huge roll in each creation myth we studied. We took a look at how each creation myth spoke of nature and the differences in how nature was being perceived. In the Abenaki creation myth Glooscap and His People nature is seen as being sacred and the Abenaki people believed they were there to serve nature and to live in nature. This concept is different in the story of Genesis where it is believed that nature was created more for people and that people should take from nature not only what they needed but also just what they desired. One of my favorite parts of the second unit was the viewing of Grizzly Man, a documentary about Timothy Treadwell commentated by Werner Herzog. Grizzly Man was the story of Treadwell, a man who took after the Aborigine and Abenaki view of nature, he loved nature and believe that humans should do everything they can to try and protect it. He devoted years of his adult life to protecting grizzly bears on a wildlife reservation in Alaska. Werner Herzog, ironically, had a completely different view of nature, talking about how dangerous it is and how modern humans have no place outside of civilization. I agree with Herzog’s beliefs, nature can be a peaceful and calming place but humans are lost when they completely step outside of society. Sure, camping is nice but I think even that is still somewhat in a safe environment like a campground. We are always sheltered and somewhat connected to our society, I think it could be dangerous for people to step out of societies’ comfort zones. I liked the nature poem Toward Climax because it describes humans in nature and how ancient humans saw nature much like Treadwell did; it was a sacred space and they worshiped it. Humans have always had a connection to nature, nature is something that always has been and always will be. We are as much a part of it as we want to be, we can serve to protect it or destroy it.

The love, beauty, and art unit was my favorite unit. It was really interesting viewing the documentary How Art Made the World: More Human than Human narrated by Nigel Spivey. In the documentary Spivey went all the way back to the first recorded art forms. I thought it was cool to learn about how art had changed from small exaggerated sculptures to scaled egyptian wall paintings then to the perfected Greek sculptures and finally back to hyperrealistic exaggerated sculptures. Each culture had a reason behind the human figures they created. The oldest sculpture discovered is called “Venus of Willendorf” which appeared to be a sculpture of a woman with exaggerated breasts and hips, the reason the artist chose to exaggerate these features of the human body was because they were connected to fertility which is seen as being a beautiful thing of nature. It was really interesting learning about how each civilization thought about specific traits of the human form were beautiful and how their art reflected that. Love and beauty could also be seen in poetry and philosophical works that we read. Plato’s Symposium  showed love and beauty through things that were good. Fertility and procreation remained a sign of beauty, it was thought that through creating something beautiful it brings you closer to immortality. On page 73, line 207 of The Love Of Beauty packet Plato wrote “love is of immortality” and love, according to the same packet could only be seen through things that are good. It’s weird because when looking at the love poetry we saw lots of tragedy and sorrow. Like in the story The Romance of Tristan and Iseult where Tristan dies before he can see his lover and following his death Iseult died of a broken heart. Love was seen in a very different light as it was often tragic and unfair. Throughout all of history one thing can be seen, the construct of love and beauty is a basic human function. Even though the way it’s looked at changes, it never goes away.

The next unit we looked at was about ethics and human frailty. This was the first unit that we really looked at the issues of humanity and the opposite side of being human. In class we watched the movie Crimes and Misdemeanors which dealt with the morals of a rich dentist who had been having an affair with his secretary for years and when she threatened to expose him he paid to have her killed. I think Judah was clearly in the wrong but it was interesting how he justified what he did and how he dealt with it. Religion played a big part in the ethics of that movie, in class we looked at some of the religious aspects of morality. We compared the Christian The Ten Commandments to the Buddhist Ten Non-Virtues. It seemed like the ethics of Buddhism were similar but stronger than the Ten Commandments because they dealt less with God and more with being a better individual. They focused more on what you should do to be a better person and as long as you followed the moral laws laid out by the Ten Non-Virtues you would live a happy life. Sometimes life gives us tricky situations where it isn’t easy to tell right from wrong. An example of this would be Frank O’Connor’s Guests of the Nation, this story is about prisoners of war who are executed. War always brings up a huge moral dilemma, when is murder ok? In the story the men who are being executed did nothing wrong but fight for their country, and the men executing them were doing the same. I do not think it was right that those soldiers were executed but on page 256 Donovan asks Belcher “you understand that we’re only doing our duty?”  It seems like the thought of right and wrong has been a part of human nature since the beginning of time. War is an exception to that, it’s an abandonment of all morals where we revert back to our violent primal ways. However even though Judah had someone killed and Donovan was forced to execute prisoners who had become his friends, they had that feeling deep down in their gut that what they had done was wrong, and they tried to justify their reason for doing it. Things like murder and theft have always been wrong and people agreed to live by rules they set for themselves to make a better civilization.

The last unit was about the human journey and humans more spiritual side. Gilgamesh was a book we read, the human journey in that story was really interesting because Gilgamesh was the strongest and toughest person in the world but when his friend Enkidu died it broke his spirit and he grieved and went on a long journey to try and escape death. In the end Gilgamesh found peace with himself and returned back to his kingdom to enjoy the rest of his life. Sometimes things aren’t always what they seem and you just need to look with a different perspective. This reminds me of The Allegory of the Cave, a story in which three prisoners are in a cave with their backs facing the entrance, all they have ever known is the shadows that are cast from the outside world. One day one of the prisoners was freed and exited the cave to learn that the shadows were not actually what make noise and walk around on their own. The man had a completely changed sense of reality but when he went back to the cave to inform the other two prisoner, they laughed at him. I think this serves as a metaphor for ignorance and looking at things from a different perspective. Siddhartha was all about changing his perspective and looking at things how other people didn’t, like with the Samanas Siddhartha left because he questioned whether it would bring him enlightenment, most people did not question they just followed. Siddhartha attained enlightenment himself, I think he had to live all aspects of life, being a poor man and a rich man, suffering the pain of losing his lover and loving a son who didn’t want to follow the same path as Siddhartha. All of these things led Siddhartha to enlightenment. He could always see things in a way not many else could. The Ferryman told him that he had taken many people across the river for all kinds of reasons, but to everyone it was always a burden or an obstacle they needed to get over, but Siddhartha saw the river for what it was and he learned from the river. I think we are all on some spiritual journey, maybe not to enlightenment but to happiness. I believe as long as we are at peace with our own mortality like Gilgamesh, and we keep an open mind and learn from other people and ignore ignorance like the man who was freed from the cave, and finally if we never lose our sense of self every step of the way and we are able to question other people and ourselves like Siddhartha, than we are on a path to happiness.

Humanities was all about feelings, feelings drive the human brain. They create emotion and emotion is really what we studied in a way. Art would never be the same without emotion, art brings out emotion in all of us. Love and beauty are all human emotions, we feel things that we can’t explain so we give them words. But I don’t think words do a very good job at explaining emotion because it will always be the feelings we have inside. All semester we learned how different people from different times, all over the world dealt with these emotions. We saw how people wrote about them and how people sculpted what they felt and we learned why we do things.I think the reason we look at these things and study them is because it is, in a way, our real creation myth, we look at the first cave paintings because those are early humans that is where we came from. Taking a deeper look into history is like learning the creation myth of the entire human race.