If alien scientists were to observe us from far away, they would probably be a bit confused by our love of gold. Even if they did learn that we valued the shiny stuff, they might not understand why we insist on melting it and reshaping it into rectangular bricks. Does it hold any special properties in bricks that it doesn’t have in balls? Of course, what our observers don’t understand is that we shape our gold to fit its containers — large cube-shaped boxes that can transport bricks more easily than balls.
At a university like this one, it’s not inappropriate to think of each one of us as a container of knowledge, filled with the facts and truisms that have been packed into our brains throughout our education. But while we are busy filling our brains to the brim, we often forget what our extraterrestrial observers forgot — we always shape gold to fit boxes; we always shape knowledge to fit ourselves.
“Observe and analyze” is the name of the game in academia, composing a shared set of assumptions from which many disciplines draw. First, observing a thing allows you to know that thing’s characteristics. I observe that all objects fall downward. I observe that when demand goes up and supply stays the same, price goes up. Second, through logical analysis, observations can be turned into an understanding of something. With these assumptions Newton discovered his laws of motion; we discovered the world was flat and our astronauts made it to the moon.
But when we turn this approach on ourselves and observe the actions of human beings we run into a bit of a problem. Believe it or not, there is an important difference between a human being and any other object, say a rock. We can look at a rock and know all sorts of things. Maybe it’s an igneous rock. Because we were all such good students in high school, we might remember that igneous rocks are formed from lava or something. So now we know several things about this rock. And we can go on and on, and know all sorts of things about it through observation. But when we look at a human being, what can we know? You might look at me and say I’m a white male, blonde, with glasses, whose facial hair needs to decide if it’s going to turn into a beard already or retreat back into my face. But these observations overlook an essential thing — “human beings” are the one thing we exist as. We all know what it’s like to be human, what it means to live a human’s life, to feel what a human feels, to exist as a human exists. Not so for a rock, gravity, economic phenomena or blocks of gold.
We possess a different kind of understanding of the human being, one that rests on the whole being part of “human being.” There are things that this form of understanding tells us that observation would miss entirely. You can’t look at me and tell that I can feel love. If you were our aliens from before, observation couldn’t tell you love was something humans felt at all. Things like love, hate, the despair that comes when your laptop won’t work right before you’re supposed to submit an article for The Cavalier Daily — these are things we don’t understand from observing; we understand these things from being.
It is “understanding through being” that composes the domain of the humanities. When you read Tennyson’s line, “’tis better to have loved and lost / than never to have loved at all,” you understand what it means because it is situated in the reality of being a human, of feeling love and loss. A rock, a bird or our poor observing aliens can’t share in that understanding. This is what the humanities express — the stuff that human beings don’t just know, but feel. And, in the process, it expresses those essential things that make us what we are. By demonstrating through poetry or art that we understand love and hate, we know that we have a capacity to love and hate.
Observation and analysis are essential in mining the gold that composes our knowledge of the world. The humanities are essential in telling us what shape we are, as containers for that knowledge. Because we always shape things to their containers, trying to understand knowledge without understanding human beings would be like aliens trying to figure out why we shape gold into bricks without understanding that we pack it into boxes. Observation without the humanities makes us alien to ourselves.
But, perhaps, this whole article could have been finished in two sentences:
Observation and analysis tell you what there is to know.
The humanities let you know what there is to you.
Jackson Wolford is a third-year College student majoring in anthropology.
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