...And in the End...A New Beginning...

This past semester in Humanities has been a whirlwind through the ages and the world. Our first day in class, we were told to write down what our own ideas were on various aspects under the broad umbrella of humanities. Some of the terms I did not know exactly what they were, but as we went along in the class, we learnt more what these terms meant, as well as better learnt the meaning of the terms we thought we knew so well. One thing that I have found, through these last few months, is that while at the beginning of the class I had certain beliefs and ethics, these beliefs and ethics that I wrote about on the first day of class have not been changed, but rather more clearly defined.

In our first unit, we came to understand the beginning s of humanity itself, how we as humans have learnt to cope with our existence from early on, through the birth of language, to creation myths, to the woman of Willendorf. In the excerpts we read from The Alphabet and the Goddess by Leonard Shlain, we came to understand how written language developed from our need to translate our spiritual perceptions of dreams, intuitions and visions. In The Spell of the Sensuous by David Abram, we discovered that this new skill we humans developed created a schism in our perceptions of the universe, causing us to see a duality of body and mind. Through these, in the book of Genesis, and the other readings, we came to the realisation that our most basic perceptions, how humans view the world, though the higher orders may differ from culture to culture, from time to time, they all stem from some ancient, prehistoric common ancestor, just as all of us biologically do the same.

In the next unit, we furthered out comprehension on the ancient gestalt understanding of the universe through the contemporary eyes of the Australian Aborigines in the National Geographic’s documentary, Australia’s Aborigines, and through our readings about the ancient cave paintings, as well as BBC’s documentary, How Art Made the World’s episode, “The Birth of Imagination”. This then segued into the history of the sacred place, with the first sacred places being dark caves where ancient seers and shamans would paint their psychic visions of the “dream world” as the Aborigines called it. We read The Tempest by William Shakespeare, in which is described a primitive island inhabited a primitive man, one with his connectedness with the “dream world” still intact. We see the consequences of him encountering modern, “split” people. As the schism developed between us and the “dream world,” our sacred spaces changed too, from being places of union with the universe, to solemn places of beauty and prayer; from the ancient caves, to the great cathedrals of the Middle Ages.

This led us into the third unit, in which we explored the concepts of beauty, and what it is to love, and be loved. We examined Plato’s and Kant’s philosophic analyses of beauty, comparing their views to those of Nietzsche, and Ficino. We read the love poetry of Sappho, of the Song of Songs from the Bible, Shakespearian sonnets, and the love poems of Keats and Browning. In these, we revealed to ourselves how the expression of love has changed over time, from the erotic ancient Egyptian love poetry, to the courtly love expressed in the Mediaeval poetry of Beroul and Cappelanus, to the romantic love of Keats, as compared to our modern pop culture expressions we see on TV every day. We watched the French film, All the Mornings of the World, and read The Picture of Dorian Gray by Oscar Wilde, in which we observed the decent of a man’s morals as his superficial beauty remained preserved.

Thus we entered the next unit, in which we examined ethics, law, power and human frailty. We read the “Ten Commandments”, “The Sermon on the Mount”, and the “Holiness Code” from the Bible, in which we compared the ethics and laws presented in those writings with the Eightfold Path taught in the Buddhist tradition, in an attempt to distil the teachings into a basic, universal ethical code by which all cultures live, across space and time. We then explored what happened when these moral and ethical laws were deconstructed in the reading of Crime and Punishment by Fyodor Dostoevsky, in the Woody Allen film Crimes and Misdemeanors, and in the Greek play Lysistrata by Aristophanes. We then reconstructed our ethics in learning of the birth of Christianity, from Frontline’s documentary From Jesus to Christ, and through excerpts from the four gospels, Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John, and from our readings from a spattering of ethical philosophers from throughout history, such as Spinoza, St. Augustine, Sartre, and Hume.

This then led us to our final unit of the year, in which we made a full circle, exploring the inner journey and what it means to be human. We watched the movie Waking Life, in which a man goes through a journey of self discovery through his dreams, coming to a better understandment of the universe, and of his own existence. We read The Epic of Gilgamesh, in which Gilgamesh goes through a journey of his own, coming out a stronger and better man. Through this, we analysed the heroes throughout history, as can be explained as heroes in this definition, such as Moses and Jesus. We read about Plato’s allegory of the cave, in which the world is described as a cave, in which we are all entrapped in, yet which we can escape from, if and when we realise we are entrapped, thus changing our perception of the universe itself. This then led to us watching the film I [Heart] Huckabees, which we have as of now yet to finish, but has in it one such person who has escaped from Plato’s cave, as well as people in it who are trying to grapple with their existence, and must go through some similar rebirth.

Throughout our tour through the vast and varied world of Humanities, we got a broad and yet intimate look at humanity, that is to say ourselves. Through our learning of the outer and inner journeys of mankind, we ourselves have had our own awakenings and epiphanies along the way, inner journeys of our own, hopefully reappearing on the other side changed for the better. And yet, through our discoveries, through my own discoveries, I have found that all I needed to know, I already knew, because in learning about us all, I learned about myself. In the end, we discovered that what we learned at the start of the class is the same as what we learned at the end. And what we learned was a better understanding of what it is to be human. Just as the ancient right-brained societies understood, and just as Spinoza explained, everything is connected, everything is part of the same blanket.