Final

Zoe Proulx

Humanities Honors

June 6, 2015

The Entirety of the Human Experience

Humans have been analyzing life since the very beginning- through written stories, spoken word, paintings, sculptures, music and much more. In our humanities honors class, we took a look at many examples of the human experience, and viewed different cultures that strongly represented the human experience. We were able to analyze and discuss many paintings, books, articles, movies and cultures. These discussions allowed us to see things from many different perspectives and learn more about what it means to be human. In this class we focused on five main units: the Introductory Unit, Humans, Nature, and Sacred Space, Love, Beauty, and Art, Law and Ethics, and The Inner Journey and the Meaning of Human Reality. Each of these units we studied in depth, and were given many things to analyze that would help us to further understand the meaning of the unit. All of these units together make up the entirety of the human experience.

The class began with the Introductory Unit, which involved learning about the right and left brain functions, written and oral language, metaphors, and symbolism. This beginning unit was crucial to understanding how and why humans communicate the meaning of life and the human experience. We studied the culture and art of the Australian Aborigines, which helped to understand how they communicated and interpreted the world. The Australian Aborigines used oral language to pass on their creationary stories and myths. In the film Australian Aborigines, a mother was shown telling a story to her children using a piece of string to allow the children to interact and further understand the story. By watching and listening to their mother, the children were using their creative mind as well as their logical mind to understand and comprehend the tale. This tied directly into our studies of the right and left brain functions. In The Alphabet versus the Goddess: The Conflict Between Word and Image by Leonard Shlain, it explains how the right side of the brain is nonverbal, and uses gestures, facial expressions, body stance, and aesthetics to understand and comprehend an oral story (Shlain, 18). By verbally communicating a story to her children, the mother is able to express the emotion and intensity of the story and how it affected people. Shlain also discusses metaphors and explains how they are the right brain’s unique contribution to the left brain’s language capability. This relationship between the right brain and its comprehension of metaphors and emotion connects directly to an article written by John Bowker called God: A Brief History. This article discusses symbols and signs and how they contribute to the process of communication. Metaphors, much like verbal symbols, have multiple levels of meaning that are perceived simultaneously (Shlain, 20). Metaphors express emotion, dreams, and complex feeling-states. They are much like symbols, which, rather than verbal, are visible expressions of the feelings and thoughts that humans have about their world (Bowker, 39). Symbols can also represent something holy or divine, such as the Jewish star of david or the cross. All of these things- right brain, left brain, symbols, storytelling- represent how we communicate within our cultures. These factors influence the human experience drastically. Without communication, our world would not advance or have interconnections. Communication allows people to explore the inner and outer mind, and question the real as well as abstract parts of our experience.

The next unit we reviewed was Humans, Nature, and Sacred Space. This unit was perfect to place after the Introductory unit. Reviewing how humans interact within nature allows us to take our new comprehension skills and put them into action. We looked at different forms of art as well as past examples of human interaction with nature. During this unit we watched a film on a very interesting person, Timothy Treadwell aka Grizzly Man. The particular film we watched was by Werner Herzog, who viewed Timothy’s relationship with nature as careless and naive. This film demonstrates a great contrast in views, where Timothy sees an extreme emotional connection towards nature, Herzog sees violence and separation, saying that nature is not only politically corrupt, but corrupt within itself (Noys, 38). This film represented a very modern spectrum of views on humans and nature. Studying ancient art allowed us to get a better view on how the relationship between humans and nature changed. In particular, the sacral-idyllic chinese landscape paintings. Many of these paintings displayed the intense beauty of nature, showing large mountainsides and wide, tangling rivers. The people, if any, are displayed as small and insignificant compared to the land around them. This shows how important nature was in the late 17th century, and how humans were viewed with unmistakably less significance than nature. Studying this relationship with nature led into the next part of the unit, Sacred Space. This section was mainly focused on the sacred spaces within our world, such as churches, synagogues, burial places, and places with extreme religious significance. We continued to watch films on indigenous cultures, learning more about the sacred spaces within their culture. A few examples are the caves in which the Australian Aborigines buried their dead, and the physical locations that were directly related to their gods, such as rocks and mountains. These things are large scaled sacred spaces, but there are also smaller sacred spaces such as bedrooms, prayer spots, and meeting sites. Humans, nature, and sacred spaces are part of the human experience because they demonstrate how we interact with the world around us. Humans live everyday within nature, and are continuously interacting with those around them as well as the gods they believe in. Nature is embedded in the human experience, it is the physical space in which humans experience every event of their lives, in and around others.

Studying further into the human experience, we began to look at the basic values of our society. Love, beauty and art are at the core of these values. Within our society, everything we see around us is built to represent these three values. To start off this unit, we reviewed the art of multiple different cultures such as prehistoric, Egyptian, and greek. The different pieces we studied portrayed how that culture viewed and experienced beauty, because the art represented the things that culture wanted to create and look at. Prehistoric art showed large hips, breasts, and butts, as well as prominent genitalia. For the people of this generation, the sexual organs were the main focus of their attraction, stemming from the instinctual desire to reproduce. Egyptian art showed proportioned bodies and realistic proportions. This shows how Egyptian cultures viewed the realistic bodies of people as beauty. Greek art showed fitness and physical perfection, incredible beauty, and realistic, lifelike proportions. These arts represented how humans experienced beauty and determined what was beautiful to them and society. Next in this unit, we read the book A Picture of Dorian Gray by Oscar Wilde. This book represents the role of love and beauty within our society. In the book, the main character is utterly obsessed with his youth and beauty, and all those around him are equally mesmerized by his looks. The character is not particularly smart, but he is adored and liked by those around him. The entire book displays the importance of beauty to those around us, and how it affects our everyday lives. The lengths this character goes to preserve his beauty - selling his soul, committing murder, ruining his relationship with those around him - shows how much emphasis is put on beauty within our society. After reading this book, we viewed a film called The Shape of Things. We were given questions that provoked us to think about the relationship between the characters in the movie to the characters from PDG. Many of the characters were alike, some being so wrapped up in the idea of being beautiful that they go to great lengths in order to obtain and keep that beauty. In this film, the character Adam changes nearly everything about his appearance and personalty (to the point where he gets plastic surgery) in order to be appealing to others. Beauty, art and love are large parts of the human experience. Everyday as we travel and look around us, we see ads, magazines, people, shops, and tv shows that display immense beauty. The art in our society represents what we view as aesthetically appealing, and humans are constantly experiencing this throughout their lives.

The next unit, Law and Ethics, represents the moral dilemmas humans experience every day. Ethics and law play a very large role in the human experience, determining how we judge our actions and how we judge those around us. We reviewed many different philosophers within this unit, including Plato, Aristotle, Augustine, Aquinas, Ficino, Kant, and Nietzsche. They all had many different views on ethics, particularly Nietzsche. Nietzsche believed that one should not think of others while making ethical and moral decisions, but do what is best for yourself. We also recently reviewed Buddhist ethics, in which the purpose is to end suffering, and in order to do this one must refrain from destructive ethical actions. In the Buddhist ethics, there are five precepts- refrain from killing, stealing, sexual misconduct, lying, and drunkenness. These five precepts are included in many other religious moral codes, such as the 10 commandments. These basic rules were the foundation of the human experience, and are meant to guide people through life. We also read a book in this unit called The Stranger, written by Albert Camus. This book was focused on morals and ethics, and forced the reader to ask themselves controversial questions while reading. The main character in the book has many interactions in which he is required to decide where he stands morally, and make decisions based upon what he feels. The main character, Meursault, must decide whether he cares enough about those around him to make decisions that will help or hinder them. These kinds of decisions have always been a part of the human experience. Ethics have built our law system since day one, and have been slowly evolving throughout the years.

The last unit we discussed was the Inner Journey and the Meaning of Human Reality. This unit was filled with the abstract questions that humans have been asking themselves for decades. The Inner Journey is part of every human experience, basically it is the "meaning of life". Every human does through their own personal journey of discovering who they are. In Gilgamesh, his journey is that he must find a way to live life fully and find a way to overcome his fear of death. Gilgamesh is told to dance, eat, and enjoy all of what life has to give him. Siddhartha also goes through an inner journey after he discovers the reality of life. When Siddhartha sees the four sights - age, death, illness, and hope - he decides that his journey must be to end all human suffering. Siddhartha struggles within himself to overcome his old ways of living and avoid the worldly pleasures that cause suffering. This is his inner journey, and he encourages others to find their own. Another example of an inner journey and meaning of human reality is the Allegory of the Cave. In this story, a man discovers the reality of life after leaving the cave and discovering what is behind the curtain that has been misleading all of his people. After adjusting to the harsh sun, he realizes the truth of reality and fights to understand and believe it. This story is explaining that one must face reality, even if it is difficult and disappointing. Understanding reality is important for everyone, and everyone must go through their own inner journey in order to come to terms with their true reality.

All of these units tied together to explain the human experience. Communicating and interacting with nature and those around us make up the human experience. Within our own minds we contemplate things such as morals, ethics, art, beauty, truth, and love. These things we contemplate our entire lives. The human experience is not something that can be summed up, but it is certainly something that can be studied. The human experience is also different for everyone, because not everyone has the same perception of reality. Siddhartha's inner journey is quite different from Hamlet's or Jobs, or mine. The entirety of our class was to study the human experience and attempt to understand our own perceptions of reality and begin our inner journey.