Introduction: What does it mean to be human?

What does it mean to be human?

This is a big question and one that can only be answered by exploring various facets of human existence. For as long as human beings have roamed the earth, walked out of The Cave, made fire, and wandered beyond the horizon, we have wondered what it means to be human. We have questioned our existence and purpose on this planet as well as what happens once our time walking this ground has come to an end. It’s natural to ask these questions. It’s natural to ponder the role of consciousness in our lives.

In this textbook we’ll explore the themes What do we value? What do we belong to? What do we love and create? and What is the future of humanity? in an attempt to answer this big question. Throughout our lives, we make choices. We make choices about what things are important to us. We make choices about people who are important to us. We wonder how we should spend our time and balance that sense of wanting a higher purpose in life with the day-to-day pressures and realities we have to negotiate to make our lives comfortable while we are in this world. We wonder what happens when we die. We don’t know if there is an afterlife or, if when our body ceases to function our consciousness also ceases to function and we are left with only the legacy we made while here on earth.

In answering these questions, we’ll think deeply about culture. Culture refers to the shared beliefs, values, customs, behaviors, and artifacts that characterize a group or society. It encompasses the way people live, including their language, religion, cuisine, social habits, music, arts, and other forms of expression. Culture is learned, transmitted from one generation to another, and evolves over time as people adapt to changes in their environment. A study of culture requires us to analyze media, literature, and other cultural artifacts to understand how they reflect and influence society. For the sake of simplicity in this course, we’ll refer to these cultural artifacts as art.

Here are questions we might ask as we study art throughout this course:

• What kind of artwork is it? To what artistic category does it belong? What is its type?
• Why was the artwork made? What was its function, purpose, or use? Who was responsible for producing it? Who paid for it or commissioned it?
• What does the work express or convey? What does it reveal about its creator? What does it reveal about its historical and social context?
• What social, cultural, and moral values does the work express, reflect, or embody?

Balancing the social, cultural, and historical realities that works of art reflect reveal uniquely personal visions of experience. Works of art are experiments in living. Through them readers and viewers can experience other imaginative perspectives and share other visions of human life. Art appeals to the human capacity for feeling and thought through the imagination. In contrast to science, which seeks to explain what exists, art seeks to create something new. But in that quest to create something new, art bears a distinct relationship to what exists.

Making Connections

A study of the humanities involves more than an examination of art history. It involves a consideration of how forms of human artifacts in many times and places echo and reinforce, alter and modify each other. An important aspect of studying the humanities involves seeing connections among the arts of a given culture and discovering relationships between the arts of different cultures.

Three forms of connection are of particular importance:

1. Interdisciplinary connections among artworks of an individual culture
2. Cross-currents among artworks of different cultures
3. Transcendent links between the past and the present

To contemplate these questions is to interrogate the meaning of humanity. To seek answers to these questions is to come closer to recognizing what is common in humanity. The arts: visual art, literature, poetry, music, and theater as well as philosophy and history are all artifacts of culture that reflect our shared humanity. In this course, we will investigate what it means to be human by examining a variety of cultural artifacts and discovering what they have to tell us about the human experience. Finally, we’ll ponder the future of human existence – what will humanity look like as we continue to evolve, adapt, and accept technology as a growing part of the future human landscape?

Let’s get started!

Introductory Vocabulary

Disciplines: the different branches of humanities such as art and architecture, music, literature, philosophy, and history

Conventions: accepted practices, such as the use of a frontal eye in a profile face, found in the art of the ancient Egyptians, or the use of sonnet form by Shakespeare

Form: one of the two components of art, form refers to the arrangement, pattern, or structure of a work, how a work presents itself to our physical senses

Content: the other component of art is what the work is about, its nature or substance to comprehend how the form expresses the content is one of the keys to understanding art

Artist: the producer of artworks in any discipline new line composition the arrangement of its constituent parts new line

Technique: the processor method that produced the art new line medium: the physical material that makes up the work such as oil paint on canvas

Style: style means several different things such as the manner in which something is done or the fashion of the time

Function: in general, the function of art can be divided into religious and secular religious or liturgical art, music, or drama is used as part of a ritual of a given religion. Art that is not religious art is secular. Secular art is used for entertainment purposes, but among other functions has been its use in the service of political or propaganda ends, such as films that were used in Nazi Germany.

Genre: each discipline has subsets called genres. In music, for example, we have classical and rock & roll; in literature we might contrast a novel to a short story; in visual art, digital media to oil on canvas.

A note about this content:

This text is a combination of sources that are available in the public domain and which are available freely online.  All authors are acknowledged as well as the sources of their texts and where they are made available for the public. The editors of this text claim no copyright over these texts and provide them here under the guidelines of educational fair use.  The purpose of this pressbook is educational, non-commercial, and the materials herein are only for the use of students enrolled in this course for purposes associated with this course and may not be retained or further disseminated.

Editors:

This text has been arranged for Humanities 101 at Howard Community College by Dr. Ryna May and Professor Marie Westhaver. We are deeply indebted to Professor Claire Adams of Salt Lake Community College for the use of excerpts from her text, The Human Experience: From Human Being to Human Doing.