What Could Be More Human?

October 07, 2018

What could be more human than making art? Than mastering a highly complex physical skill (fulfilling our evolutionary destiny as the ultimate tool-using primates), and then using it to express and share our souls?

What could be more human than teaching? Than using one of our most sophisticated technologies—language—to build knowledge across the generations, in defiance of mortality?

What could be more human than sports? Than taking mere competition, mere physical toil, and investing it with narrative and meaning?

What could be more human than music? Than finding in something as elemental as vibration a bridge to the abstractions of emotion and mathematics?

Art is a mapping from tools to the metaphysical; teaching is a mapping from language to knowledge; sports are a mapping from action to meaning; music is a mapping from the physical to the transcendental. Perhaps the purpose of humans is level-bridging.