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.

Maddie Powers- Final Exam Blog Post

Our first blog post was about what we thought it meant to be human. I find it only fitting that for our last blog post we get to write about being human throughout the different topics we have covered within class. Every aspect of life affects the human experience. If nothing changed the human experience we would never change, learn or grow. As we wrap up the semester, I realize that unit we covered was truly about the human experience. We started in the basics of the brain, language, and storytelling. Then we moved directly through humans and covered the nature of them along with their sacred space. We covered the love that humans experience, beauty within everything and art around the world. Wrapping up the semester, we covered human ethics, the law, the frailty of humans and humans inner journey. Overall these topics all come back to one thing, the human experience.

For as long as humans have been around, people have shared stories. The stories have been funny, sad and mysterious. People have written down their stories, told them orally, shared them through pictures and many more ways. Sometimes the stories are real and other lead your mind through a time of imagination. In Leonard Shlain’s reading The Alphabet Versus the Goddess, he discusses the right brain and left brain. The left brain is responsible for giving the facts of the story and deals with being orderly and planned. Typically the left brain prefers non fiction stories. The right brain houses the imagination and enjoys creative storytelling. Another piece of storytelling is symbol’s and signs. Stories can be told through pictures for instance you could tell a story in emojis. John Bowker in God:  A Brief History, talks about symbols that appear in religious stories. For instance a tree is often seen in religious stories all over the world. He says “a symbol is a conventional sign with an agreed meaning”. Another form of storytelling is through pictures. Some say a picture is worth a thousand words. A picture can stand as a symbol that people all over the world can understand. In A Short History of Myth, Karen Armstrong discussed oral storytelling. Within the Paleolithic Period there was not a written record of their myths. Myths were proved to be crucial to the way that humans understood themselves and educated the people about their survival. The Paleolithic men and women told all their stories orally and the stories were passed along the same way.

Some say the humans were created by nature, and some might ask if that's where the term human nature comes from. I believe that it is human nature to have a sacred space. It could be a place where you feel safe or with someone/something where you feel as if when you are together you could conquer the fears of the world. Let’s start from the beginning with the creation of humans. In the story of Genesis God created man and women from nature. Nature was a big part of the creation of humans. Physical pieces of our world, it can be viewed as human nature. In the play “The Tempest”, it constantly explored the concept of human nature and what it meant to be human. Prospero and his daughter Miranda are stranded on an island with the beastly Caliban when a second shipwreck brings ashore the man of Miranda’s dreams. Shakespeare viewed nature through a more natural versus socially imposed lens to expose people's true human nature. Timothy Treadwell also dove into human nature, along with physical nature and touched upon sacred spaces. He spoke highly of the grizzly bears. His sacred space was with the grizzly bears. Treadwell felt that he belonged with the bears and that humans were destroying the precious bears. All three pieces of literature touched upon a piece and part of humans, nature and sacred space.

In the unit of love, beauty and art, I think that all three entwine into each other. I believe that you can’t have one without the others in this unit. In Nigel Spivey’s How Art Made the World, he described the term “picturesque” which literally means “like a picture”, or something seen as a painter would see it”. It was artwork that provoked satisfaction. Spivey described how amazing art can be and the feelings it can produce. In the next text art and beauty take on a different role. In The Picture of Dorian Gray , the portrait that was painted of Dorian showed his sin and corruption. He continued to have physical beauty, but the portrait was no longer beautiful. It was honest, but the beauty was taken and replaced with sin. In the film The Shape of Things, the art changed also. The canvas became a human and the artist changed the canvas into her version of an ideal form of art regardless of the feelings of the canvas. To her, he was a canvas and to him, she was his true love. He fell in love with someone who took advantage of him and used him. In all three pieces of literature art was a focus, but there was also the sense of beauty being embraced or taken away along with the truth or falsity of love.

Within life there is the law, ethics, and human frailty. In the bible, there is the Ten Commandments. The Ten Commandments are not laws, but rules that you should live by. They guide you more on the ethical path of life. It also covers our human frailty by saying that “though shalt not covet thy neighbour’s house, thou shalt not covet they neighbor's wife, nor his manservant, nor his maidservant, nor his ox, nor his ass, nor anything that is thy neighbors”. Human frailty is all about resisting our temptations. In The Sermon on the Mount, Jesus taught some of the most important lessons. He encouraged those around to live a morally sound life. Not all live a morally sound life though. In Crimes and Misdemeanors, Judah has an affair. It is not until two years into the affair that he realizes that he broke his own ethical code. Then he breaks the law, by having the women killed. Due to his own human frailty, he broke his own ethical code which then caused him to break the law to cover his mistake.

Throughout life we travel through an inner journey discovering things about ourselves that we never knew and searching for the true meaning of human reality. In the Basic Teaching of Buddhist Ethics, the main goal of buddhist practice is to reach freedom from suffering by coming to see the world as it actually is and abandoning the distorted projections that our thoughts and emotions create. The two most important systems of moral discipline are the Five precepts, which apply to lay people, and the Vows of Individual Liberation, which applies to monks and nuns. Following the system of moral discipline helps in achieving the main goal of buddhism. For some on their inner journey they are not discovering things about themselves, they are experiencing an array of emotions that controls their life. In Hamlet, death takes a toll on Hamlet. He is grieving the loss of his father, while dealing with his mother’s new marriage to his uncle. Hamlet starts off depressed and suicidal, then he becomes very angry about his mother’s new marriage. Throughout his splurge of anger he kills quite a few people. This part of his inner journey that is portrayed within the play as an emotional roller coaster for Hamlet. Siddhartha's inner journey was emotional, but it was more focused on the meaning of human reality. He left to study and learn with the ultimate goal of achieving nirvana. Siddhartha was never satisfied and walked away from some of the most respected teachers and unexpectedly found one that would teach him more than anyone else. He reached enlightenment and he found his own answer as to what the true meaning of human reality was. Sometimes the answer you're seeking takes you on journey that will change your whole life.

The human experience doesn’t come all at once. It is something you live everyday. Not every aspect of the human experience is sunshine and roses, but what is not so pretty makes us as humans stronger. It's the trials and tribulations that give us a chance to change our ways and come out bigger and better on the other sides. “Life’s a climb, but the views great”(Miley Cyrus).

Jocelyn Pellerin- final post

At the beginning of this class, I did not know exactly what I was going to learn. Going into this class with an open mind definitely made learning easier. I have learned not only the content taught, but a lot about myself as well. I feel this class has some very valuable life lessons and asks the kind of tough questions needed to analyze who you really are. I have enjoyed the many books, films, pieces of art, and other readings that we have studied and I believe that this class is essential in learning about the human experience.

Our introductory unit was about cognition and the different ways people think. One of the first pieces of text that we read was the Leonard Shlain reading of an excerpt from The Alphabet Versus the Goddess. This reading was about the different hemispheres of the brain and their functions and impact on the human experience. It also talks about verbal and nonverbal communication and what the hemispheres of the brain have to do with it. Continuing our education on the brain, we watched the TED talk by Jill Bolte Taylor about her experience with a stroke. A blood vessel had exploded in the left hemisphere of her brain and when she woke up with a pounding headache, she could hear her brain telling her muscles what to do. Soon, the “chatter” in her head stopped and when her brain went silent, she felt a sense of nirvana. Additionally, we learned through Karen Armstrong's What Is a Myth? about the origins of myth and why it is so important in today’s society. She says that mythology was created to help us understand our place in the world and to help cope with death. Understanding the brain is the basis of understanding the human experience. It is where everything starts and leads us to comprehend things that we might not be able to comprehend the day before. Understanding the world is the foundation of understanding the human experience.

The next unit was Nature, Human Beings, and Sacred Space. In this unit, we looked at what it meant to be human and how the world around us influenced our existence. One of the first pieces of film we watched was National Geographic’s Australia’s Aborigines. This film highlighted the lives of indigenous people of Australia and how they live in a much simpler world. The Australian Aborigines have a special connection to Earth and are very in tune with nature. Another piece of text we read was the introduction to the book of Genesis. This includes two stories, one of how the earth was made and one of how humans were made. A third text we read was a piece entitled “Of Cannibals” by Michel de Montaigne. This text was comparing cannibals to people who kill and torture others in warfare. Montaigne explains how society views cannibals so badly because they eat the flesh of dead people, but what people do in war, torturing before killing, is not frowned upon but should be. This unit is important to the human experience because it shows us different creation stories and different cultures. It opened our eyes to different beliefs and started to make us question what our own beliefs were.

Love, Beauty, and Art was our next unit that explored what exactly made something beautiful. The Picture of Dorian Gray by Oscar Wilde is a perfect example of this. The book explored the importance of beauty and ultimately determining that a need to be beautiful will lead to an unhealthy life of obsession and contributed to Dorian Gray’s death. To some people, the definition of beauty is different. We see this by the different ideas of aesthetic philosophies by many great philosophers, like Wilde. These philosophies from Plato, Aristotle, Kant, Ficino and others continued our exploration of what beauty and art really means to us. The movie The Shape of Things also demonstrated explorance of what is considered art and beautiful and what isn’t. Evelyn took advantage of an overweight, socially awkward man and succeeded in changing him into the person she wanted him to be. She took this transformation and used it as an art exhibit. Exploring love, beauty, and art is essential when looking at the experience of being human. We are experiencing love throughout our life; whether it be loving a spouse or loving a child. We continue to make judgements based on beauty and something we see as pleasurable, such as art.

The next unit, Law, Ethics, and Human Frailty, may be the most important unit in the human experience. In this unit, we explored the ten commandments, buddhist ethics, and watched Crimes and Misdemeanors.  The Ten Commandments are the set of rules given by God that one must follow. It includes things from “do not murder” to “do not desire things.” The buddhist ethics that we read explained how to live a virtuous life according to the Buddha. It includes the Ten Non-Virtues which are very much like the Ten Commandments, with the addition of actions of speech. The movie Crimes and Misdemeanors explored the ethics of many different characters. The two main characters both acted unethically (at least in my opinion). They both had/wanted to have affairs and felt guilty about it in the end. I believe that Law, Ethics, and Human Frailty is the most important unit in understanding the human experience because our ethics shape how we live. Exploring our own ethics gave us a deeper understanding into who we are and what we believe in.

Our final unit, The Inner Journey and the Meaning of Human Reality is fitting to be the last. This brought everything together and looked at the bigger picture of what it means to be human. We explored suffering, death, and the possibility of an afterlife. We read Hamlet by William Shakespeare which follows an unstable and suicidal man Hamlet whose father was killed by his uncle, who then married his mother. He has a certain attachment to his mother that makes him incapable of loving Ophelia. We also read Siddhartha, the story of the Buddha explaining his journey to enlightenment. He realizes he must be his own teacher and therefore chooses not to follow under the teachings of the Buddha before him. Another piece of text we read was Plato’s “The Allegory of the Cave.” In this, Socrates is explaining that if people lived in a cave, shackled, their whole life, all they would know is whatever is in front of them. If there was a fire behind them and people made shadow puppets, they would believe those are the real thing. If they were to go outside one day, they would be unable to comprehend and they would not be able to go back to the way life was in the cave. The inner journey of a person ultimately is the human experience. It is the path a human takes that shapes them into the person they are meant to be, and this is true for the human experience.

The order in which the units were taught coincides with the steps of the human experience. In the beginning, we learn about our brains and how to use them. Then we learn what it means to be human, how to comprehend love, how to form our own ethics, and finally, we see the path which we have taken to get us to who we are today. This humanities class taught me so much about who I am and who I want to become, and I am thankful I signed up for it. The topics covered in this class brought up tough questions that needed to be asked in order to find what our beliefs are. I think everyone should be required to take this class before college, because at least for me, this class has taught me so much about myself that I never even knew existed.

Olivia Guerriero Final

Human behavior is in constant contradiction. Between an animal instinct for food, reproduction, and safety, and a rational need for security, fulfillment, and understanding, we are in continual conflict over the safest course of action. This struggle has shaped human history, inspiring the separation from nature and the creation of laws and religion. Numerous philosophers have discussed this aspect of the human experience, while many others have picked the approach to existence that they feel is the safest or the most human. What is eventually discovered, however, is that the human mind is in a perpetual battle between desire and reason, shaping our relationships with language, nature, love, ethics, and purpose.

The uniquely human development of two vastly different hemispheres of the brain represents this relationship between human and animal existence, influencing human action across history. As David Shlain discusses in The Alphabet Versus the Goddess, the human brain is bisected into two hemispheres. The right hemisphere deals with emotion, instinctual thought and habit, imagery, and existence, making it perfect for understanding color, feeling, and relationships. The left hemisphere deals with cognition, complex abstract understanding, and action, making it perfect for language, analysis, and detail. The right brain is distinctively more animal, the left more “human;” our evolution has been a raging back-and-forth between the two ways of understanding the world. While we need both hemispheres to make us human, we constantly fight our way between the two in order to find some kind of safe balance that will propel us forward. In Karen Armstrong’s A Short History of Myth, she discusses the early inclination towards myth and story that humans experienced. In order to understand a world in which humans are small and weak but have the capacity to fear death, sadness, and the future, we create stories to explain the things that confuse and scare us. Armstrong presents evidence to show that the first myths may have been stories of an afterlife, influencing burial rituals among Neanderthals. This practice makes personal death and the death of loved ones less scary and uncertain, and it appeals the the right brain. Oral storytelling and tradition work within the right brain, making connections between person and person, as well as between person and space. Eventually, however, these things became obsolete in most places as written language developed. This is discussed by David Abram in The Spell of the Sensuous; written language provided a different kind of comfort for people, a comfort that came from the newfound ability to define and therefore control the world. This appeals to the left brain, which analyzes symbols like letters and numbers and gives them a commonly-agreed upon meaning. The human world shifted from a right-brained world of stories to a left-brained world of letters, allowing for greater philosophical and mathematical thought but losing some of the mystical understanding of the world that is associated with right-brained thinking. This shows the fight between right and left brain, animal and human instinct, that defines human growth across history. Both sides are seeking comfort and stability, but they are seeking these things in very different ways.

Because of the differences between the reason and instinct within individuals and societies, the human relationship with nature has changed vastly over time. When right-brained oral stories and nature-based living were the norm for humans, involving hunting and gathering and familial connection within tribes and groups, humans were very close to nature. As seen both in National Geographic’s documentary Australian Aborigines and Spell of the Sensuous, the Aboriginal people, with no written language, agriculture, or complex societal structure, live from the land. They get their names and their personalities from the place where they were born, which is associated with a creation story and is therefore sacred to the individual. They feel a responsibility for the upkeep of the land, burning the brush to deter forest fires and taking only what they need for game. The relationship with the land is uniquely reciprocal, because they connect their lives, their stories and beliefs, and their origins with the land. In contrast, the Biblical relationship with nature that starts in Genesis and still influences the human perception of nature today, puts a deep divide between the human life and the natural world. The world is given to Adam by God, as are all of the animals on the earth. While Adam is made (in one story) from dust of the earth and will return to dust when he dies, this is not a positive association for man to have with the earth. The Bible enforces the idea that nature and animals both belong to man and are vindictive towards man, influencing a separation from and an attempted control of nature that led to the development of large cities based around agriculture. Civilization, which could not grow without the use of the written word, spread throughout the western world until there was a great divide between people who reject nature and people who embrace nature. This is shown in William Shakespeare’s The Tempest, where European society collides with indigenous lifestyle. Caliban, the indigenous character in the play, has an instinct to share the nature of his island with any visitor, showing the Europeans the best food and water and the ways in which to become safe on the island. The Europeans, however, reject nature and seek perpetually to return to the cities of Italy. This break between indigenous life and, for lack of a better word, civilized life connects back to the break between land-based stories appealing to the right brain and a structured control of the land appealing to the left brain. Again, both ways of life seek comfort and safety amidst an unexplainable world; the first is seeking this through story and connection to nature, and the second is seeking this through intellect and domination of nature.

This battle between reason and instinct connects to love and art, in which people struggle between an impulsive desire for companionship and procreation and a cognitive desire for beauty and goodness. In The Birth of Tragedy, Friedrich Nietzsche wrote that a human being is innately divided between their Apollonian self and their Dionysian self; the former Greek deity was a sun god ruled by reason, delicacy, and dreamlike ideology, while the latter was the god of wine and was known for sex, desire, and wildness. Once again, we see a distinction between nature and civilization, abstraction and reality, wild freedom and strict control. The Dionysian self in each person desires physical passion and immediate gratification, seeking a hedonistic fulfillment of love and lust. This serves the evolutionary purpose of furthering the genes, while providing bodily satisfaction in the moment. Dionysian love can be seen in ancient love poetry of Egypt, in which the narrators often base their love and desire on physical experience. Their pain is raw and untempered by a rational interpretation of human behavior. The poetry contains sexual imagery, as well as imagery and metaphors of food and drink, showing the physical need for another person. This approach to love is often seen to be wild and uncontrollable, however, and must be moderated with the Apollonian self, which seeks a control of the impulses and a prioritization of the mind over the body. This is the self that Plato sought for himself. In “The Love of Beauty,” from Symposium, Plato defines Love in terms of divinity and purpose, saying that love is a connection between man and god. He sees sex and physical relationships as an intellectual desire for procreation and immortality, and equates this kind of love with the love that a person can have for an art form or for philosophy. Man’s desire for beauty is due to the understanding that beauty equals goodness, and goodness equals happiness; therefore, the quest for beauty is a quest for happiness. In this, Plato rationalizes love by putting it in the mind instead of the body, controlling it and making it safer for himself and for others. Dionysus’ love is dangerous due to its separation from the intellect, and Plato’s Apollonian analysis makes love certain and avoidable. While we know that no one can approach love solely from an Apollonian or a Dionysian intent, the fight to keep love controlled or free is another example of the human desire to feel security in an insecure experience.

Morality is a uniquely human concept, and it too is affected by different desires for safety as influenced by different aspects of human nature. We are quite often torn between an animal instinct to keep ourselves safe and a logical imperative to follow a moral code. An interesting representation of this is seen in the Ten Commandments. The rules themselves are a mixture of universal ethical rules such as “Thou shalt not kill” and social law such as rules about property that keep a community orderly and controlled. The act of creating ethical law within religion is a very left-brained and logical; it allows for a simple rule that, when followed by all, keeps society in line and allows for maximum comfort for all. It makes a lot of sense, and it more or less works. However, within the Ten Commandments is something more right-brained and mystical: in order for the Commandments to function, the members of the community must all believe in God. This belief is anything but stable, as there is little concrete proof as to the existence of deities. Belief in God requires an intuitive trust and faith that goes against the logic presented by the Commandments themselves. A lot of religion is, therefore, a balance between blind faith and calculated logic. This is true of human action as well, which rocks back and forth between a reasonable imperative and an instinct. This is seen in two different ways in Dostoevsky’s Crime and Punishment and Woody Allen’s film Crimes and Misdemeanors. In Crime and Punishment, the main character fights between a logical justification for murder that he has created, and the wordless understanding that he has that he should not kill. In Crimes and Misdemeanors, however, one of the main characters fights between a logical thought that he should not kill and the instinctual feeling that he must kill to maintain his stability and happiness. In both instances, a man has a battle between his logic and his intuition; the battles are simply complete opposites from each other. This shows the ways in which morality appeals to both the reason and the feeling, and how both reason and feeling can ignore morality in favor of something stronger.

There may be no aspect of human life where the divide between instinct and logic is more visible than in the quest for meaning and knowledge. On the instinctual side, meaning is rather irrelevant; safety, comfort, and companionship is really all that is needed, and the present moment is all that is considered. On the logical side, we think about the past and the future, both within our own lives and throughout human history. We feel that we must have a purpose and answers to all of our questions in order to live full and happy lives. In William Shakespeare’s Hamlet, the title character spends the play in anguish because he can find no purpose to his life. He contemplates suicide on numerous occasions, but the lack of knowledge that he has about what awaits us after death keeps him from killing himself. This is an instance where a lack of knowledge tortures an individual. In Herman Hesse’s Siddhartha, the main character spends the entire novel searching for knowledge and enlightenment. His search proves fruitless for most of his life, especially because the search for knowledge and the experience of never receiving answers only makes him more unhappy, like Hamlet. However, Siddhartha eventually finds bliss and enlightenment when he gives up the search for a purpose and stops striving for future goodness. When he loses his need for a logic answer to life’s questions, he is able to live from feeling and to live in the moment. Alternatively, in Plato’s “Allegory of the Cave,” the man who sees the light and goes into it, or who attains knowledge, can no longer relate to those who do not have his knowledge. His understanding of the world, greater than that of everyone around him, causes him suffering because he cannot use his knowledge or find anyone to relate to him. This is an instance where the possession of knowledge causes suffering. As humans, we have a constant need to search for knowledge and to focus on the next moment, the next event, in the hope that that is where happiness will lie. This need, driven by a rational, planning mind, often causes pain. We feel the draw of moment-to-moment life, driven by instinct and feeling, but we reject it in favor of plans and questions because these feel safer to us.

The connection that I see between all of the works that we covered is the underlying theme of conflict, between biological instinct and rational imperative. Everything that we do is in search for safety and stability. There have been many philosophies advocating only for the use of reason or only for the use of natural feeling in order to attain happiness. I believe that we need to blend the two aspects of our humanity; we are, of course, animals with animal instincts. But our cognitive approach to things is what defines us and sets us apart from even the most intelligent of animals. It does not make us better, for our constant questions and issues cause a lot of unhappiness, but it is a defining feature among us and it must be fostered alongside a more affective way of understanding and being.

Ashleigh Krenzien Final Exam

Throughout Humanities, I feel like I grew as a person and a student. I learned a lot of new things and read a lot of books that I never knew id love so much. I became a better writing, and I opened up out of my shell and become more comfortable expressing my thoughts and opinions. When we first started this class I would have never imagined all of these units, texts, and visuals all coming together. During my time in Humanities I made a lot of new friends and met a teacher I grew to love, when I walk into humanities everyday, we feel like a family.

In Shlain’s The Alphabet Versus the Goddess he talks about right and left brain behavior and thinking. The right side of the brain is the side that develops first and it is the feeling side. It integrates feelings, recognizes images, and appreciates music. While the left side is the doing, speech, abstraction, and numeracy side, it is the logical side. The right side attributes the act of being, such as love, humor, or aesthetic appreciation and facial recognition We can connect the right and left sides of the brain to the human experience by the parts of speech, numeracy, feelings, appreciation, and doing, are all things that make up a human. We as humans use these things in everyday life, we use numbers, and logic, feelings, and doing in all tasks, even the simple ones. In Bowkers ‘s A Brief History he talks about symbols and their different meanings and uses. He defines symbols as a visual expression of the feelings and thoughts that humans have had about their world and about their situation. Symbols are a universal language that all people around the world use. Symbols are important to being human because symbols represent not only God and attributes of God, but they are believed also to carry something of the reality of God in themselves. He also talks about the representation of rituals in everyday life. A ritual is a learned and repeated behavior that people in a particular group or religion practice, either individually or together. These connect to being human because not only do we use symbols like the peace sign, numbers, signs, and other things in everyday life, we also have our rituals or routines, everyday we wake up and have a plan of what we are going to do everyday. Lastly, in Armstrong's “The Paleolithic Period” it states that men and women regularly reach for the sky, and devise techniques of trance that enable them to put their ascension stories into practice and to achieve a higher state of consciousness. We use this idea in being human because we, as humans, always try to do our best and achieve everything we want in life. We always strive to be the best and have the best.

In Herzog’s Grizzly Man it is a story of Treadwell’s actual footage of his time living among the grizzly bears in Alaska. He believes he has bridge the gap between human and beast. When Treadwell dies, due to a bear attack, it shows us the understanding of nature and its realities. This is used to demonstrate being human because, us as humans, have a natural instinct that we should be scared and careful of wild animals because they can hurt us. Throughout the documentary there are signs of him being mentally ill, this is essentially what caused him to have this theory of bringing humans and animals together. Treadwell not being well, altered his living experience and ultimately caused his death. In Genesis it describes the christian ways in which humans were created. In Genesis (1) It says that human and woman are created at the same time, after all nature and beasts are created. In Genesis (2) man creates all nature and beasts and then creates woman. This shows the state of being human because, the human experience has been around since the beginning of time, the state of being human was a concerned always. In Australia’s Aborigines, it describes how humans use things such as, water, trees, and other natural items to describe other things. For example, water might be God’s tears, and trees, might be his arms and legs. This connects to being human because, we tend to use other things as a way to describe things. For example, we use the word “sick” to mean cool, or “wicked” to mean awesome.

In the unit Love, Beauty, and Art we talked a lot about the aesthetic philosophers such as Plato, Aristotle, Wilde, and Kant. We discussed this philosophers and their purpose on humans. Philosophers such as Plato believed the real world, was just a copy of the real world that exists in a different realm. Aristotle believed in evoking strong emotion, while Plato did not. Augustine believed that only intellectual things were beautiful. Ficino says that evil deeds are ugly, and good deeds are beautiful. All of these things connect to being human because, us as humans tend to think that being smart, and having strong views and emotions makes you powerful and beautiful. Also, we as humans know that bad things are wrong and good things are okay. In many of the greek myths we read such as Pygmalion, Myrrha and Cinyras, and Aphrodite and Anchises are all myths that depict love, beauty and human nature. In these myths they all talk about a kind of love that is forbidden or not acceptable in some way. Even in today’s society we still have times when we feel like people won't accept us for who we love or won't approve. Lastly, in The Picture of Dorian Gray, Wilde tells the story of Dorian, a young man who essentially falls in love with himself and becomes over confident. He begins losing sight of the more important things in life such other than materialistics and looks. This connects to being human now because, we all have those people we know who are just so overly confident that they are mean to others and don't know what is really important.

In the packets we read about the Ten Commandments of Judaism and Christianity it talked about the 10 most important things in the lives of these religions. It was interesting to see how the two were so similar, they both have no murdering, no stealing,no sexual misconduct, no malice, and no lying on their lists of the 10 rules to follow by. I think it is very interesting they relate so closely together. In both packets about each religion it talks, in more detail, about the exact origin of these beliefs and why they are so important. These relate to being a human because, in both cases we, even now, believe and follow a lot, if not most of these. In the movie Crimes and Misdemeanors it talks about moral relativism and objectivism. Moral relativism is the view that what is morally right or wrong depends on what someone thinks. Subjectivism is what is morally right or wrong for you depends on what you think is morally right or wrong. Conventionalism is what is morally right or wrong depends on what the society we are dealing with thinks is right or wrong. These themes show up in the movies but also in being a human now a days because there are some people who always follow the rules, know what is right and what is wrong, and never get in trouble, then there are the people who do the exact opposite. Also, many people tend to think different things are right and wrong than their family or friends.

In our final unit we read three books, The Epic of Gilgamesh, Hamlet, and Siddartha. In The Epic of Gilgamesh, Enkidu became Gilgamesh’s best friend, and when Enkidu dies Gilgamesh becomes heartbroken, Gilgamesh spends many days and weeks traveling trying to figure out a life without him. Trading, stealing, and mourning as ways to cope with the loss of his best friend. This relates to the human experience because when people lose someone so close to them become numb, closed off from all contact and tend to think of all the good times reminiscing on all the good. When we loss people that are close to us it helps us better understand how much life is taken granted for and how precious it is. In Hamlet, him being the main character, we learn about his mental illness and his struggle with love, self identity, and death. Hamlet has trouble forming, and keeping relationships due to his lack of trust for the world and people. He also struggles with his own identity, he struggles throughout the whole play to learn and figure out who he is and what he wants. Also, he struggles with death, when Ophelia dies, Hamlet becomes so depressed, also after seeing his own mother and uncle kill themselves, he ultimately kills himself. This connects to being human now, especially to us as teenagers because, we often struggle with finding ourselves, and knowing who we are and what we want. Also, we struggle with trust and love at times. Finally, in our reading of Siddartha, we learn of Siddharth and his journey to become enlightened in Judaism. Throughout the novel, we read of his struggles of connecting with the outside world. Then becoming self motivated, and he then begins to realize that his past is the past, and it should not dictate his life now. He learns that he does not need friends to be ultimately happy. In the book he does have down days and begins to forget his humble, important values. But in the end his finishes his journey and becomes enlightened. This connects to being a human even now, because we all struggle with finding our path in life. We graduate high school and most of us don’t even know what we want to study in college. Life is a rough time filled with happiness and sadness, but just like Siddartha, we ultimately learn and grow from that.

Taking this humanities class has really taught me a lot about myself, my views, and my values. I feel like I have a better understanding of what I want in life, what I believe in, and what is ultimately most important. All of these units have taught me something that I will take away from this class and shape me into the person I am now. This class not only taught me what “being human” means, but it taught me what being myself meant.

Connecting to the Big Picture

Caeley Sibley


            Connecting To The Big Picture

Defining exactly what it means to be human is an impossible task. We all have flesh, bones, a brain and a beating heart, but there is so much more to it. Each individual is unique in their own way but we all seem to share some similar qualities that make us human. Throughout history we have used many methods to try to define our species,including  mythology, psychology, historic fact, and even science. We have found these similar qualities even in our oldest ancestors.  Through humanities class we have gone into great detail to define and relate to these aspects. Each unit had a key piece of humanity, that all connected into one big picture by the end of the semester. In the first unit we looked at the way we think and the actual biology/anatomy of the human brain and why we may use our brains the way we do through symbolism and story. In the second unit, we looked at the role that nature endures in human life and how we value certain things in our life that is sacred to us. We tried to define what makes a human human. In the Love, Beauty, and Art unit, we dissected each of these concepts, and how they all connect to one another, also connecting to the previous units. Next, in the Law and Ethics unit we saw the human desire for rules and the concepts of morality and ethics. We tried to define right from wrong according to our own moral beliefs and found the philosopher we were most like in our own thinking. Lastly, in the final unit we looked at the journey through the meaning of reality, through the books and charts that helped us come to these conclusions. We learned about enlightenment and the truths within humanity. During the class we discovered how all of the units come together to connect to one big picture in defining humanity and the experience of human life that unites humans as a whole. It’s one big journey.

 In the first unit of humanities,  the basic foundations of human life were introduced and we learned how our brains make us more advanced than other species. We looked at the actual anatomy of our brains, to explain the way we think and do. We learned about the use of symbolism and picture throughout history and how the use of oral stories evolved us through civilization. We learned how the evolution of man can explain the evolution of the brain and how it works. For example, the Shlain packet taught us about the right and left brain characteristics that form our thinking and coordination. He showed us the  human brain’s division between knowledge and learning. We looked at the right side (emotion) of the brain versus left side (logic). We looked at the way humans learn and how some people are more dominant on one side or the other, while some fall in the middle of left/right thinking, like myself. Ever since our very first ancestors, we have been using stories and mythology to make sense of the world and explain how humans came to be. We looked at the separation between oral story and written story and how that affects brain and experience. We learned how experience differs from being told or reading about the topic due to the sensory and body language. One of the creation stories we studied was Genesis.  It showed the creation story of how the world, and humans were created, based on the Christian Bible. We also looked at the creation stories of other religions and compared and contrasted them, to connect it to previous and later units. One of the packets we read by John Bowker wrote about the uses of different aspects of the human experience including music, art, and ritual. We were then able to connect these aspects to the brain functions from the previous unit. I got to touch  a little more on this idea through my research paper on mythology. I learned just how much oral story has impacted culture, even today. Through this unit we learned that through the evolution of man, no matter the time period, or culture, we all seem to share similar aspects of human experience and how our brains work, although each of us are unique.

     In unit two, we began to go into depth about what it means to be human and the difference in nature, being the human characteristic, versus nature being the unindustrialized-outside world. Each have an important part in humanity. We learned about the sacristy of certain objects or places to different cultures, and then were able to define our own sacred spaces.  In the Australian Aborigines documentary, we learned about trance and how connected the aborigines are to nature, which made me realize how disconnected we are from nature. With that, we realized that some people are more connected to nature than others as well, such as Timothy Treadwell in the Grizzly man documentary. He was just a little too close with the bears. He tried to fight instinct and ended up suffering. However, Herzog, the director of Grizzly Man believed that nature was much harsher and less forgiving than what Treadwell was seeing and that there is a great separation between man and animal that is not to be crossed. We came to conclusions that different civilizations look at the placement of humans in nature in different ways, some victimizing it, and some worshipping it.  Some poems portrayed nature as being dense and cruel , some described it as a victim against man, and some described its sweet innocence. In the Chinese poem, Waters of Lung-To, the  insignificance of humans as opposed to nature reflected some of the Chinese ideas on nature’s importance. The Chinese landscape painting we studied in the Second Nature packet shows similar ideas by depicting the houses and industrialization of humans as a miniscule component compared to the overwhelming nature components of the painting. I believe that discovering your own relationship with nature is part of the human experience. No matter where we go in our lives, nature will be there. The last part of this unit included sacred space and we did projects on different sacred spaces around the world and blog posts on our own sacred space. It connected to the nature piece of the unit because it made me realize that there was an element of nature in all of the sacred spaces, no matter it place or time period, which shows how crucial nature is.


In unit three (my favorite unit) we saw the connections in life between love, beauty and art. These three things are a crucial piece of the human experience as well. We are naturally drawn to them as part of the human experience. Each person has a different opinion on what they believe to be beautiful or ugly .Or what's considered art or not. Or what they define as love. This unit really made me realize that even though one would think our class, full of similar people in age, and culture would have the same opinions on art, but in reality, we had extremely different views. While we interviewed an artist, we found out how someone who specializes in beauty and art looks at art as oppose to our own selves. In The Picture of Dorian Grey, Wilde was able to show his ideas of the connections between love, art, and beauty in a moral sense. Each character portrayed love, art and beauty in a different form. When Basil creates the painting of Dorian, they all see beauty in the painting. Basil has love for art and beauty and Dorian has love for the youth and innocence of it. However Dorian suffers at the idea that his beauty will fade with age unlike the painting. This is where his moral dilemmas are shown. Art is unique because it never fades or dies. It only mimics the ideal perfect form, which is what Aristotle believed was the only way art can be experienced. In this unit we also learned each of the major philosophers ideas on art and beauty, and we were able to find similarities and differences among them. I found myself sharing a lot of the same philosophical ideas as Kant. In the Aesthetics packet his opinion on the subjectiveness of beauty describes how I also feel about beauty in art and people. Something doesn't necessarily need to be visually appealing to be beautiful if you can connect and relate to it.  In our First Thoughts packets as well as our blog posts,  we explored how the ideas of love, art and beauty relate to our own lives and our own personal opinions on what they mean to us. In unit three, we also explored the idea of truth and its connections to beauty. We wrapped up this unit with the movie, The Shape of Things. It combined just how much truth and beauty interact and contradict each other in our society. Adam is considered “not beautiful” but throughout the movie, Evelyn gently persuades him to show the true him. The movie also connected how love can hide the truth and infect your thinking. However, it also showed how love will  shape the truth because through his love for Evelyn, Adam adapts to her ideas and changes the true him. His gullibility to the truth allows his love to cloud his judgement as he morphs himself into what he believes Evelyn wants him to be. His love for her hides the truth, making him become more beautiful as her art project on human persuasion.These are all aspects of human nature and similarly to Adam, a lot of times suffering and tragedy go hand in hand.

In unit four, we dove into law, ethics and human frailty. We looked at what we consider to be our own ethics and I decided that that was a really hard concept to grasp because our ethics change so much depending on our environment or situations. Our knowledge and our understanding of right and wrong make up our laws and ethics. Many ideas we have on ethics and morality and taboo are similar culture to culture. We looked into why this is and how certain things such as murder, stealing, or adultery are always a sin. Is it a cultural influence, or is it religion? Religion dictates many people's views on  ethics and what they consider to be acceptable. The Hebrew Bible’s Ten Commandments showed us their set of rules to live by that is very similar to the Christians Ten Commandments, that we looked at. Repeating concepts such as stealing, murder, adultery, and desire  are seen in both sets of commandments. We wrote a blog post about what our own commandments are and later in the semester connected thee to what we believe happens after death. In Crimes and Misdemeanors, the main character murders a man and at first, he is suffering through the fact that he is a killer. He was initially horrified by his actions, but in the end he gets away with it and is no longer phased by it even though he knows the right thing to do would be to turn himself in. This concluded our Laws, Ethics and Human Frailty unit because it showed how we have laws to monitor and enforce these taboo behaviors and as a part of the human experience, we not only need these rules, but we somewhat crave them.  I think that guilt is also a part of the human experience. It is in human nature to feel ashamed for going against our societal standards/ religion.  We need rules to avoid chaos and as humans we tend to feel lost without this dictation.

 In the last unit of humanities class, we learned about the inner journey of life and the meaning of human reality. Through nearly all of the works we analyzed this semester, there is one aspect of human nature that stood out to me- suffering. It seems that suffering is part of everyone's journey in experiencing life. In Siddhartha, through his search for enlightenment Siddhartha experiences many aspects of human nature. He experiences suffering before he finally experiences fulfilment. He had to suffer before he could be enlightened. In Hamlet, Hamlet also experiences suffering and loss at the loss of his father. The other characters suffered due to Hamlet's suffering as well. Before hamlet got justice, he suffered. In The Epic of Gilgamesh, Gilgamesh loses his best friend Eniku, which causes him great suffering as well. Even in the children's book version of Gilgamesh, the suffering was present but in a more friendly way because parents try to hide from their children the harsh reality of life- we all suffer at some point.. It seems that part of what makes us human, what makes us relate to one another is, is suffering. That is the inner journey of life.  Maybe it's part of our journey to suffer before we can finally reach our own enlightenment, like Siddhartha, Hamlet, the prisoners in Shakespeare Behind Bars, and everyone else did. No matter what journey we endure, suffering seems to be the only component that is always present  before we are enlightened like Siddhartha. We have to experience life's worst components before we reach nirvana and this is the human reality. Suffering is just part of human experience. The last unit connected all previous units and made me realize how harsh, yet beautiful life can be.

Through humanities class we have learned about ourselves as a species and as an individual. We have dissected the key components of what makes us all so alike. We all have such different journeys, yet we somehow experience the same things and that’s what makes us human. Humanities taught me the many different components of human experience that we all endure, and have been since the dawn of time. In the first unit we learned the history and biology of the human and by the last unit, we were able to determine the components of humanity that we all endure. It seems that to be human we must experience. This class has taught me a lot about myself and the importance of making connections, as well as analyzation of texts. I didn't realize just how much everything connected into one big picture until I wrote this blog and now I finally understand.  I am glad I ended high school with this class, because it opened my mind so much about life and experience.