“The Artist is no other than he who unlearns what he has learned, in order to know himself.” — E.E. Cummings
E.E. Cummings writes about the agony of the artist in struggling to discover himself and express himself freely. If anything, this piece is about the joy of that discovery and finding a new way of looking at yourself and the world.
In high school, the sixteen-year-old me very definitively said, ‘Philosophy is pointless. I am never going to be interested in it because I’m never going to use it.’ And that’s how I thought till I became a research assistant for the co-curricular Being Human at HKS earlier this year. Here we were talking about what it meant to be human and to treat each other as humans in light of all the tensions, struggles, and violence in the world. Our entry point for this work was looking at it from the point of our own stories and our own experiences. To make sense of these experiences, we began using some of the theories and philosophies that have been written over the past many many years, from religious, cultural, and intellectual spheres. We began using these ideas and theories to understand how different people have explored what it means to be human.
In a class I had taken previously called Building and Sustaining a Successful Enterprise (which on paper seems as far removed as possible from Being Human), we had started to explore the idea of ‘theories’ as being lenses to look at the world. That was something that really caught my attention because instead of seeing the theories as definitive answers in and of themselves, it was simply treated as a way to make sense of and to test our assumptions and hypotheses of the world. The idea that ‘rules were meant to be broken’, seemed to apply to theories in this case. And I think that’s what I deeply appreciate about the class ‘Being Human’. Where philosophical and ideological ideas and theories are taken as lenses or as stories that have shaped our way of looking at the world as well as a means of looking at the world through a new perspective, instead of being treated as some sacred definitive knowledge. This sense of openness felt refreshing!
This has been possible because of how Professors Marshall Ganz and Chris Robichaud have made this content accessible. In the past, the few times that I tried engaging with philosophy, it felt oriented to a certain type of study that I did not associate myself with as a designer and an educator. In our third session together that focused on ‘The Cultural Human’, Chris guided us through ideas on being human by Aristotle, Plato, Hobbes, and more — not in a theoretical way, but in a narrative way — that focused more on seeing these ideas as just that — ideas to engage with and to play around with, and helping us make connections between what these philosophers had hypothesized and what we were seeing in our world. I remember the moment that I made a connection between Hobbes’ theory of humans needing structure and leadership to be able to thrive and Loki’s speech, ‘You were made to be ruled’, from the first Avengers movie. That felt like a penny-drop moment when philosophy jumped out from dusty old books to become something I could now visualize.
This was the first time when I began looking at philosophy as a lens that is meant for me to understand other human beings better and understand where they’re coming from better. And we weren’t looking at the idea of being human from a philosophical lens solely. Instead, this course has encouraged us to make connections across science, philosophy, and theology, while rooting it all in our experiences. One of the most important readings from science that shifted my thought process about this was from Being You by Anil Seth which made me question how I had been thinking about reality because it questioned the objectiveness of one true reality since we all perceive the world in different ways. Ideas like this from science helped me look at religious stories that I had grown up with in a different light.
And it is in sharing what I have learned growing up as a Hindu in north India, in listening to how others have grown up in different parts of the world, and in exploring these experiences through the ideas and language of philosophers, religions, and scientists that I have found a genuinely new way of looking at things. For instance in our fifth session based on ‘Rehumanization’, when playing a game in the class to understand rehumanization, we could draw on the ideas from philosophy, religion, and science to look at our interactions in this game differently and be able to shift our mindsets and our actions.
These experiences have opened up this whole new field of study for me to explore. To make connections across these different ideas that people have about being human and the struggles of being human, how we alienate each other or dehumanize each other and how the context that we grow in and the different stories that we grow up with impact the way we see the world and the way we engage with each other. These are the connections that I am now making and unsurprisingly I have found so much resonance in the work I do as a designer and an educator. Because the heart of all this work is relational and is about people engaging with people and systems. I have found through this work a more holistic way of thinking about people.
That is why I feel that this work and this learning is so fundamental to everything that we’re doing, especially in education where we’re trying to help children and even the adults in our buildings understand and develop a better way of engaging with each other and the world. And, it ties in so strongly with the idea of lifelong learning, because ‘being human’ is not something that you can learn in one session or one course or one degree, it is work that continuously evolves. In the very first session where we began to think about what it means to be human, this idea came about, first as a joke, that the term ‘human being’ seemed to denote that we were always learning to be human. And over the course of this semester, this has felt more and more true.
It has truly been such a rewarding experience to work on and take this course this semester. In some ways, working on this course has felt like experiential learning on the idea of being human. As we are thinking about rehumanizing in our final session for the semester, we are looking at how art, stories, relationships, play, and community help us see each other as full human beings. How experiencing wonder and awe helps us see ourselves, others, and the world in a new light. And how we think about collaboration, and standing up to dehumanizing establishments and structures. I have experienced wonder, awe, art, relationships, play, and community while working on this course.
Psychologist Mihály Csíkszentmihályi coined the term flow, which is defined as ‘being in the zone’ — the mental state in which a person performing some activity is fully immersed in a feeling of energized focus, full involvement, and enjoyment in the process of the activity. I love the idea of flow and to me, it represents the state where your energy in working on a project, and your energy in working with each other just aligns and it all feels like it is on the same wavelength and flowing in the same direction. And working on this course has definitely felt like being in a state of flow. This is not by accident. It is very intentionally by design. Marshall began our first session of this class with a question of respect. How it feels to be respected and to be disrespected. This course and the work are based on the foundation of respect — respect for the work and the people as full human beings. And so it has felt like a space where you are supported in your learning and growth along with working on something meaningful that is bigger than its parts.
This work has brought such a deep sense of joy to me and I look forward to learning more and making sense of what it means to be human.
References:
Joel J. Kupperman, Human Nature (Hackett Readings in Philosophy, 2012)
Anil Seth, Being You: A New Science of Consciousness (Faber and Faver, 2021)
Mihály Csíkszentmihályi, Flow (Harper Perennials, 1990)
