Thursday, June 17, 2010


THE HUMANITIES

To study the humanities is to learn about what distinguishes us as human beings as a species; about how we have behaved, what we have accomplished, what we have made of our unique potentialities; and about what more we might become and do.

To be a student of humanity, a humanist, is to be curious about human capacities, to seek out the full range of what we have experienced and made of our experiences, as well as what we have not yet manifested of our latencies, for we are not merely human beings but human becomings.

Other species are far less adaptive than we, since our unique intellect affords us hindsight and foresight, and produces technologies of enhanced comprehension and control.

We are born to quest and question, and what we ultimately seek is how to thrive, how to make the best of our tenuous and wondrous lives, pressing ever forward into the frontiers of our world and ourselves.



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