How humans search for the meaning of life

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CLIFTON FADIMAN: Those were six sculptured representations of the human face. Did you notice any differences among them? If you did, they must have been small differences because the striking thing about these faces is how similar they are to each other, although they were created over a span of time, some 4,600 years long.

Let's look at the sculptures again.

This is the head of an Egyptian pharaoh who lived 26 centuries before Christ.

And this is the head of a young Greek girl who lived some 350 years before Christ. The sculptor used her as his model for the goddess Aphrodite, the goddess of love.

The Roman emperor Augustus lived in the 1st century after the birth of Christ.

And this is the face of an unknown young woman who lived in the Italian province of Tuscany during the 13th century.

This man was probably a young Italian scholar in the city of Bologna during the Renaissance.

And, finally, this is the face of a German girl as seen by the 20th-century sculptor Lehmbruck.

When you get right down to it, the human face hasn't changed much in forty-six hundred years, has it? And that's because the mind in back of the face hasn't changed much. It's true that the world around those faces has changed a lot.

And the work men do has changed along with the world.

But the mind that created the pyramid is essentially the same mind that created the skyscraper, although the men lived thousands of years apart. You know, in a way, you and I may be said to be thousands of years old. Of course, that's not your actual age, though it's a little closer to mine. But, let's look at this clock, and I'll show you what I mean. Now this shows the entire time that has elapsed since men first appeared on the Earth some 500,000 years ago. And, incidentally, if I were to show you how old the Earth itself is, I'd have to make that hand go around 11,000 times. And it would take me about nine hours to do it. The Earth is five and one-half billion years old.

Now, since we're all members of the same human race, you and I can be said, in a way, to be 500,000 years old. But there's another sense in which we're older than we think. For a very long time man had a full-time job just keeping himself alive on the Earth. And then, maybe, oh, 25,000 years ago--something like that--we began to ask ourselves, what does it mean to be alive? We began to ask questions about ourselves: who we were; what we were supposed to be doing on Earth; where we were headed. And we began to figure out answers to these questions. First, scratching them on the walls of caves, or dancing or singing the answers, and, finally, writing them down.

Now, let's move ahead rapidly to approximately the year 4000 before Christ. There we are. It was around that time that our own civilization, Western civilization as we call it, first began to keep records of itself. At about that time, Western man, you and I, began to record his questions about life and his answers. And so, in another sense, you and I began about 4000 BC, for we're still living in that same Western civilization. We are what we are because certain ideas and feelings govern our minds. And some of these ideas and feelings, the main ones, go back a long way, in our case, to approximately the year 4000 BC. Man's ideas and feelings about life and about himself, recorded in certain definite ways, make up what we call the humanities. And it is the record of these ideas and feelings that makes up this course in the humanities.

Now, what are the ways in which civilized Western man has recorded his hopes and fears, his joys and sorrows, his vast guesses about his relations to the world, to other men, to his past, and, finally, to his God? Well, here are some of the ways--some of the humanities: literature or books, and in this course, we'll read some of the greatest; drama, plays, and we'll see some of them presented on the screen; music, and we'll listen to some; painting and sculpture, you remember we saw several pieces of sculpture at the beginning of this lesson, and we'll see a great deal more in later lessons of this course. Architecture, buildings like the skyscraper and the pyramids that we saw. The dance. All these are ways in which man has recorded his ideas and feelings. And there are others. And all together, they make up the humanities.

Now, to say that the humanities are a record of man's ideas and feelings is one way of describing them. Here's another way: the humanities deal with matters that never go out of style. You know that people once thought the Sun went around the Earth, and that idea is out of style now. It's not part of the humanities. Well, what doesn't go out of style? Basic questions, basic answers, basic ideas, basic feelings. The sculptured heads that we saw at the beginning of this lesson showed us that human beings of today are not really all that different from human beings of another time. All men have been interested, delighted, scared, and puzzled by life and by the world around them. And in this course we'll study the things that have interested, or delighted, or scared, or puzzled all of them. In this course we'll study the ways in which they've translated those things into forms that have lasted, books, musical sounds, sculpture, colors on canvas, structures in stone or marble.

I think I can hear your question. What's the good of studying what a lot of dead people have thought and felt? What will the humanities do for me? Well, I'll give you some answers, but, the answers aren't really satisfactory because the real answer lies in what will happen inside yourself as you study and enjoy the humanities, I hope, for the rest of your life. Eventually, as you study them, you'll be a different person. You'll feel a little less lost, a little more at home in this puzzling and rather scary world than the man who knows nothing of the humanities. But you won't realize that until some years have passed. And that's why my answer to your question, "what will the humanities do for me?", won't satisfy you. But I'll answer it anyway or try to.

There are a large number of fundamental questions that concern all of us as thinking human beings. The humanities pose these questions and come up, sometimes, with answers. Let me give you a few of these questions: what does it mean to be a man or a woman? What are we? A system of whirling electric particles? A collection of chemicals? A complex machine equipped with levers and lenses? A rational mind? An immortal being made in the image of God? Or all of these? Another question: why are we on this Earth? To have a good time? To reproduce other beings like ourselves? To make the world better? To prepare ourselves for a better world after death? Another question: is one way of living as good as any other or is there one best way to live? And still another: am I master of my own life? Or am I driven by fate? Now, some of these questions may never have occurred to you. But as you grow older, I guarantee, they will occur to you. And the man who has never thought about them, and dozens of other questions related to them, that man will always feel lost in the world. When he comes to die, he may wonder why he has lived. The humanities will help to save you from that bewildered, that lost feeling. And that's one thing they can do for you.

Let's take a two-minute course now in one branch of the humanities, literature. We'll look at a few statements by some famous writers. They raise the kind of questions that the humanities, in part, deal with. And let's see whether anything happens inside our minds as we read these statements and briefly reflect on them.

"The life which is unexamined is not worth living."

Twenty-five hundred years ago, a Greek philosopher named Socrates thought that. Is it true?

"The populace may hiss me, but when I go home and think of my money I applaud myself."

A Roman poet named Horace said that. By the way, 2,000 years later, a successful television entertainer was given some very bad reviews by the critics. He said the reviews almost broke his heart. He cried all the way to the bank. Are Horace and the television entertainer right? In other words, how important is money?

"There are truths which are not for all men, nor for all times."

Voltaire, a French thinker, thought that one up. Does the truth change? What things are always true, if any?

"To think for himself! Oh, my God, teach him to think like other people!"

That was said by the wife of the English poet Shelley around 1825, when she was advised to send her son to a school where he'd be taught to think for himself. Was she right?

Well, there are four statements that raise a lot of questions, questions that, when you come to think of it, have a good deal to do with our own lives and the way we'd like to run them. The humanities, among other things, raise these questions. But, remember, they don't necessarily answer them, or they may answer them in a lot of different ways that don't agree with each other. The humanities, remember, are not the truth, they're a record of the search for the truth.

Let me show you what I mean. Throughout man's history, one subject he's always been interested in is love. Well, you might think that after so many centuries of investigating the subject, he would have come up with a simple, clear definition of it. He hasn't. Here are four statements about love.

"Love is a product of habit."

The Roman poet Lucretius said that about 57 BC. Cynical, isn't it?

Now, compare what the Greek philosopher Plato said 300 years before Lucretius:

"At the touch of love everyone becomes a poet."

A 17th-century Frenchman named Rochefoucauld thought this:

"There are people who would never have been in love if they had never heard of love."

Well, think of the influence of the movies. Maybe Rochefoucauld had something.

"It makes the reptile equal to the God."

That was said by the poet Shelley, whose wife we've already met. Apparently, Shelley had a better opinion of love than Rochefoucauld did.

Now, these four sentences obviously don't tell us what love is. As a matter of fact, several of them contradict each other. But they may at least have provoked us into some ideas of our own on that fascinating topic. Well, in the same way, the humanities don't always supply us with the answers, but they do supply ideas that may help us to formulate our own answers. They challenge us to draw our own conclusions.

Another thing the humanities do for us is help us in some strange way to make sense out of the confusion that life often seems to be. Isn't it true that for most of us life is frequently confusing? We're not quite sure where we fit in. We--we don't really know where we're headed, or, at least, we lose sight of it. But, fortunately, there are also moments in our lives when we have the feeling that everything suddenly makes sense. We may get this feeling from a beautiful summer day or from hearing a piece of music or from being with a good friend or from praying to God. In those moments we have a feeling that we do fit in.

Now, the humanities can give us the same feeling by showing us that underneath the apparent chaos of existence there is certain unchanging patterns. And the humanities show us how we fit into those unchanging patterns, how each of us is part of something larger. The humanities bring into relief what is permanent in man's crowded, rushed, and, seemingly, incoherent life.

To see what this means, let's look at a group of photographs from a collection called "The Family of Man," put together by the photographer Edward Steichen.

This is a group of Americans.

This, a group of Italians.

These people are Russians.

And these are Japanese.

These four groups of people live in different parts of the world. They speak different languages. They make their livings in different ways. And, yet, there's something about all four groups that relates them to each other, in spite of differences of dress, environment, and skin color. All four groups are families. All four show us a married couple and their children. These photographs help us to understand the universality of marriage and the family. All over the earth, men share these basic human institutions. And, so, the photographer has shown us an unchanging pattern that exists in all human life, though its forms differ in different parts of the world. He's shown us how all of us, wherever we may live, whatever language we may speak, fit into this pattern. Now, you may not have thought of photography as a part of the humanities, but the good photographer, like the good sculptor or the good writer, helps us to recognize how we are related to the rest of mankind.

What else can the humanities do for us? Well, if we go through life with all our emotions bottled up inside us, we won't be very happy, will we? We must release our emotions, and we do through love, through action, even through talk. But we can also release them in another away. Listen.

[Music]

That was the beginning of the "Third Movement of the Clarinet Quintet" by Brahms, a 19th-century German composer. Now, to some of you it may have seemed just a lot of sounds put together in a way you can't follow. But, to others, it will express, and that means release, some feeling you've had. Now try this.

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Now, whatever the 19th-century composer Brahms may have expressed for some of you, it's very different from what that piece of jazz expressed for you and released in you. Now, both are good pieces of music, both are parts of the humanities. And perhaps you feel just a trifle better or happier or richer inside you for having heard them.

Well, what have we learned so far? We've learned that the humanities ask and try to answer certain basic questions. We've learned that the humanities challenge us to think up our own answers. We've learned that the humanities reveal to us certain underlying patterns beneath life's apparent confusion. And, finally, we've learned that the humanities help to express our emotions for us and so release them.

Now, in all these respects, the humanities are rather unlike the sciences. The sciences are concerned with giving us exact information. They enable us to understand and control nature. But there's no rivalry between the humanities and the sciences. They merely represent different approaches to life. But both are the result of man's refusal to live without thought or aspiration. Both mark us off from the animals.

Now, often the sciences and the humanities help and reinforce each other. And I'll end this lesson by giving you an example of this mutual aid. Here is a picture of the longest single span in the world, the Golden Gate Bridge, soaring over the strait between San Francisco Bay and the Pacific Ocean.

At one time, this magnificent bridge was nothing more than crude iron ore. Then, mining engineers, using tools developed by scientific minds, took the ore out of the ground. And, through a process discovered by other scientists, the ore was transformed into steel and the steel into girders. Then, engineers drew up construction plans, calculating the exact stresses and strains the bridge would have to support. Thus, science helped in the mining of the ore, the smelting of the iron, and in the construction planning. But the completed bridge is more than an achievement of science. It is a work of art. It is more than simply a steel structure that makes it possible for us to drive our cars from one side of the bay to the other. Beyond its mere utility, it is beautiful. As we look at it, it does something to our imaginations and our feelings. We may, perhaps, see in it the symbol of man's success in spanning wide spaces. We may see it as a symbol of man's progress. At any rate, few of us will fail to be exhilarated by it. And all of us will feel proud that we, human beings, have succeeded in building this bridge.

And so, the Golden Gate Bridge, though founded on physics and mathematics, is still part of the great tradition of the humanities. It reveals to us something about the human race, about ourselves, just as literature, sculpture, photography, and music do.

Now, embarking on this course, you yourself will become a part of this long tradition of the humanities. You're going to take part in the great study of man and so arrive at a better understanding of yourself. And you'll discover as you study the humanities that in this drama of human thought and feeling you are, yourself, the hero. The humanities are about you.

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