Lecture/Discussion presented at the meeting of the Humanists of Utah on May 12, 1994, by Patrica L. Hanna, Ph.D., Professor of Philosophy and Dean of the College of Humanities at the University of Utah, and a former math student. The following notes were used by Dr. Hanna in her presentation.

When Bob Green asked me to address you for a few minutes in February, he suggested the topic: "How can studying the humanities make us humanists?" Then I ended up having surgery and was home recuperating on the day I was supposed to be here. I'm going to stick to my original title for tonight. I'll keep my remarks brief so there will be time for discussion.

Before answering this question directly, I would like to spend a few minutes talking about definitions; after all, I am a philosopher of language and I would be derelict if I didn't spend some time talking about definitions.

"Human." Clearly, I don't intend by this term to invoke images of some biologically fixed classification. No matter how long or hard a dolphin studied humanities, it would not result in a transformation from one genus and species to another. But, one might ask, am I not misusing "human" if this isn't what I mean? No. If you look at the debate surrounding free choice vis-a-vis abortion it is apparent that when someone says that abortion is wrong because the fetus is human, they do not mean that the fetus has such-and-such a genetic structure. When someone else says that this is not the point, but insists that the fetus has the potential to become human, they don't mean that it lacks the appropriate genetic structure but might develop it in time. No, in both cases the term human is being used as a moral or value term; and it is in this sense that I use it when asking whether studying humanities can make us human.

In this sense, to be human is more than belonging to a certain genus and species, it is also to possess the ability to make choices and to act on them; further it is to belong to a very large and spatially discontinuous community of fellow agents, what we might call the global community of persons; and finally (and perhaps most importantly), it is to see oneself and others as members of this community and to accept mutual obligations and rights in virtue of this membership.

On this understanding, southern slave holders were not fully human because they failed to see themselves and their slaves as members of a mutual community; likewise, some Afrikaners are not fully human for similar reasons; anyone who worked in the Nazi death camps lacks full title to being human; and, in Bosnia, Serbia and Croatia there is more than enough room to accuse various participants in the conflict of failing to be human.

We can now restate the question, and restricting the class of students to entities belonging to the appropriate genus and species:

Can studying the humanities

1. help develop the ability to make choices and to act on them;
2. help bring us into the global community of persons; and
3. help us to see ourselves and others as members of this community and to accept mutual obligations and rights in virtue of this membership?

This is a longer question, but I think it makes the landscape of the inquiry much more perspicuous. But there is one further piece of definitional housekeeping.

"Humanities." What is/are the humanities? At the University of Utah, The College of Humanities contains the following departments and programs: Asian Studies, Communication, English, History, Humanities Center, Languages and Literature, Linguistics, Middle East Center, Philosophy, University Writing Program.

At other universities, the administrative divisions are different. For example, history is often considered as a social science, communication as a free-standing school. But this really doesn't help us. At universities, groupings aren't ultimately anything more than arbitrary administrative decisions made by someone on the basis of who knows what criteria. I think that the best definition is the one that we use at the Humanities Center, taken from The Humanities in American Life, Report of the Commission on the Humanities, issued in 1980.

"Through the humanities we reflect on the fundamental question: what does it mean to be human? The humanities offer clues but never a complete answer. They reveal how people have tried to make moral, spiritual, and intellectual sense of a world in which irrationality, despair, loneliness, and death are as conspicuous as birth, friendship, hope and reason. We learn how individuals or societies define the moral life and try to attain it, attempt to reconcile freedom and the responsibilities of citizenship, and express themselves artistically."

Here the burden shifts from listing the subjects which are appropriate for a course in humanities to the methodology used in approaching an open-ended list of subjects.

Many have remarked on the value of an education in the humanities in helping us to find our center, our core values. And surely it does this. After all, what better way to discover what you believe a good life to consist of than by reading Plato and Aristotle on the good life, or by learning about the impact that such people as Mahatma Gandhi, Martin Luther King, Jesus Christ, Charlemagne, Hitler, Lao Tzu, and Confucius have had on history and reflecting on how this impact might have differed had they been other than they were, or by learning about different cultures, their languages, literature, history, art, and forms of governance?

This is certainly a first step toward addressing 1, 2, and 3 above; but let me try to be more precise. The humanities requires us to do several things in approaching any topic. First, we must come to a clear understanding of the issues raised; in turn, this requires us to gain a sense of the history of those issues, how and when did they arise? Have they developed and evolved over time? How? What influences do changes in culture have on the issues.

The first requires the development of our analytic and critical skills, as well as the ability to read carefully and with an open mind. The second requires us to have a sense of intellectual history and of the diverse cultures and people of the planet. The humanities gives us all of this. Philosophy, discourse analysis, rhetoric, critical thinking, literary analysis, and the study of the structure of language all call upon and expand our analytic skills. History, cultural studies, the study of languages and culture enable us to address the second set of questions.

And this tells us how the humanities enables us to develop the ability to make rational choices and to act upon them; but it also shows us how we are drawn into the global community of people making and acting on such choices.

Once I begin to appreciate how the problem of other minds or the problem of evil first emerged, and once I see how this very same problem still engages us today, I cannot help but recognize that I am a sister of the long dead Egyptian or Greek or Chinese thinker who contemplated the same mysteries that engage me today. I also cannot help but look at the mother in New Guinea, sitting at home in her hut, playing with her daughter and see myself playing with my daughter; both of us are concerned that our daughters develop into well-functioning adults, both of us worry about fixing meals and cleaning and a myriad of other little things that go together to form part of the "good life". Once this new form of seeing has emerged, the recognition that I am part of a global community is irresistible.

And with this recognition comes another realization: if we are fellow "citizens" (so to speak), we are not disconnected, we are not islands unto ourselves. This community provides us with support and with obligations; to be human is to help and be helped, and to recognize this mutually dependent/supportive relationship.

An interesting and informative discussion then followed between Dr. Hanna and a number of members and visitors in attendance.

Editor's Note: In her lecture of May 12, 1994, Professor Patricia Hanna quoted the noted philosopher, Ludwig Wittgenstein, but she was unable to get it to me in time for the June Journal. The quote is pertinent to her presentation and I include it now:

If the good or bad exercise of the will does alter the world, it can alter only the limits of the world, not the facts--not what can be expressed by means of language. In short the effect must be that it becomes an altogether different world. It must, so to speak, wax and wane as a whole. The world of the happy man is a different one from that of the unhappy man.
So too at death the world does not alter, but comes to an end.
Death is not an event in life: we do not live to experience death. If we take eternity to mean not infinite temporal duration but timelessness, then eternal life belongs to those who live in the present. Our life has no end in just the way in which our visual field has no limits.

--Ludwig Wittgenstein,
Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus
translated by Pears and McGuinness