![]() ![]() ![]() It’s a cliché that much of the greatest literature and works of art explore these life changes and pivot points. #CAREER FOCUSED SERIES#Certainly, social scientists have a great deal to say about the series of stages - infancy, early childhood, middle childhood, late childhood and so forth - that constitute the life course, and the transitions - growing up and growing old - that mark our progression through life.īut it’s the humanities that reveal the profound transformations that have taken place in the definition and actual experience of the life course and the meanings that human beings have attached to the process of maturation, coming of age, achieving adulthood and aging. The human life course, too, needs to be studied through a humanities lens. #CAREER FOCUSED FREE#At least thus far, the greatest insights into questions of free will and determinism and the impact of environment and upbringing are found, not in the social or natural sciences, but through the kinds of documents that humanists examine and produce: novels, dramas, artworks, biographies and histories. It’s in works of literature, art, philosophy, theology and history that we can best learn about human nature: whether people are inherently good or evil, altruistic or selfish and self-seeking or sociable or individualistic. And the most powerful and profound insights into those issues are found not in the social and behavioral, brain, or natural sciences, but in the humanities.Īnger, envy, fear, gluttony, greed, grief, loss, love, lust, mortality, pain, pride, regret, sloth, wrath - all are aspects of the human condition that are also best studied through the humanities. These include an ability to communicate through words, sounds, symbols and gestures, movements, and facial expressions a capacity to ponder the past, present and future a capability for making decisions or taking actions and bearing their consequences.īut the true meaning of being human lies in our ability to reflect upon human nature or upon the relative role of reason, the emotions and the unconscious on human behavior. What does it mean to be human? Some generalizations, however gross or overly simplistic, make sense. But these perspectives haven’t been embraced on the broader scale that I am convinced is necessary. This list is certainly not meant to be comprehensive, and, indeed, some of these approaches are already offered by individual faculty members. Let me suggest six ways that we might do this. Humanities students should grapple with life’s meaning and purpose, ponder life’s deepest questions and wrestle with the most profound existential issues involving love, friendship, aging, gender, loss, justice and evil. The time has come, I am convinced, to reassert this older view of the purpose of the humanities, and to embrace the notion that the goals of a humanities education, especially at the lower division, should be to foster critical reflection, cultivate the moral and aesthetic sensibilities, nurture a rich inner life, teach the arts of living. Prior to the Renaissance, when the humanities came to be associated with the study of particular fields - notably art, history, law, literature, philosophy and theology - and particular methods - analytic, critical and speculative rather than empirical - the humanities was thought of as a process.įor Cicero, humanitas provided the kind of education that was necessary to produce a cultivated human being, one who possessed certain virtues, including empathy, compassion and a capacity for friendship, and an enlightened, mature, skeptical and critical mind-set. The critic and classicist Daniel Mendelsohn offers a simple yet compelling rationale for studying the humanities: you can study accounting, he writes, but when your father dies, your accounting degree won't help you process that experience. ![]()
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