Humanities

Humanities is the broad field devoted to understanding how human beings create, express, interpret, preserve, contest, and transform meaning across time. It investigates the languages people use, the ideas through which they understand existence, the texts and records they leave behind, the histories they construct, the values they defend or reject, the beliefs through which they interpret the world, and the ways individuals and communities make sense of human experience. Philosophy, history, literary studies, linguistics, religious studies, classics, philology, intellectual history, cultural history, and related disciplines approach different portions of this responsibility, yet they share a fundamental concern with the intelligibility of human thought and action: not simply what people did or produced, but what those actions, words, institutions, beliefs, and representations meant within particular contexts and what they can mean when interpreted later.

Humanities is consequently neither a collection of old books nor the study of culture in a vague sense. It does not exist merely to preserve inherited traditions, celebrate canonical works, or describe the past. Its central task is more demanding: to investigate how meaning becomes possible, how evidence from human activity can be interpreted responsibly, how ideas change across historical contexts, how language shapes thought and communication, how values are argued about, and how people understand themselves in relation to others, institutions, traditions, mortality, knowledge, freedom, identity, power, beauty, obligation, and the world they inhabit. The field becomes especially important whenever a question cannot be answered adequately by measuring frequency, identifying physical mechanisms, or calculating efficient outcomes alone. Human behavior can be measured, but the meaning of a promise, a political speech, a religious ritual, a legal concept, a philosophical argument, a historical testimony, or a literary narrative cannot be exhausted by measurement. Humanities studies that additional dimension: human phenomena as meaningful phenomena.

Human Meaning as the Central Problem

Human beings do not merely respond to environments; they interpret them. A physical event can become a memory, a symbol, a warning, a source of identity, a legal precedent, a sacred event, or the beginning of a political narrative depending on how people understand and represent it. An object can have material properties while simultaneously functioning as an heirloom, monument, document, weapon, artwork, religious object, commodity, or evidence of a historical event. A sentence can convey information while also promising, accusing, persuading, commanding, remembering, apologizing, or redefining a relationship. Humanities begins from the recognition that human life is saturated with such layers of significance. Meanings are produced through language, convention, historical circumstances, institutions, narratives, beliefs, symbols, and acts of interpretation; they are neither arbitrary inventions detached from evidence nor purely physical properties waiting to be measured.

This is why interpretation is central. To interpret something is not simply to state a personal reaction to it. Responsible interpretation attempts to determine how a text, action, concept, artifact, or historical event becomes intelligible within a network of evidence. The meaning of a political document may depend on the vocabulary available at the time, the institutional setting in which it was produced, the audience it addressed, previous texts to which it responded, and later uses that changed its significance. The meaning of a philosophical concept may change as it moves between languages or intellectual traditions. The meaning of a historical event may be contested because surviving evidence is incomplete or because different participants experienced it differently. Humanities therefore teaches that meaning is often layered, historically situated, and open to revision, while still requiring arguments that can be evaluated as stronger or weaker according to evidence and reasoning.

The diagram should not be read as a classification of disciplines. Language, history, texts, ideas, values, memory, and interpretation are recurring lenses that can operate together within the same inquiry. A historian may analyze language and memory; a philosopher may study historical concepts; a literary scholar may investigate political ideas; a scholar of religion may combine textual interpretation, history, language, and philosophy. Humanities is unified less by a single object than by this sustained effort to understand human meaning through contextualized evidence and reasoned interpretation.

Time, History, and the Human Past

Humanities is deeply concerned with time because human meanings are historical. Words change meaning, institutions evolve, moral assumptions shift, technologies alter possibilities, political categories emerge and disappear, and ideas that later appear obvious may once have been controversial or unintelligible. Historical inquiry therefore does more than arrange events chronologically. It reconstructs relationships between actions, institutions, beliefs, material conditions, conflicts, choices, and consequences in order to understand how particular worlds came into being. A historical explanation asks not only what happened, but why certain actions made sense to people at a particular moment, which possibilities they perceived, what constraints shaped them, and how later outcomes differed from expectations.

Historical knowledge depends on surviving evidence, and surviving evidence is always incomplete. Letters preserve some voices but not others; administrative records may document institutions more readily than ordinary experience; monuments may reveal what authorities wished to commemorate rather than what everyone believed; newspapers reflect editorial priorities; oral testimony preserves lived memory but is affected by time and perspective. Historians therefore do not simply collect facts that already exist in finished form. They evaluate sources, compare testimonies, reconstruct context, detect contradictions, distinguish contemporary evidence from later interpretation, and make arguments proportional to what the evidence can sustain. Absence of evidence can matter, but it must be interpreted cautiously because archives themselves are products of historical power, preservation, accident, destruction, and institutional practice.

This makes history fundamentally different from memory even though the two interact continuously. Memory is lived, transmitted, selective, emotionally charged, and often central to identity; history is an evidentiary discipline that subjects claims about the past to critical reconstruction. Collective memories can motivate historical questions, while historical investigation can challenge, complicate, or confirm inherited memories. Societies frequently negotiate their relationships with the past through this tension: monuments, commemorations, museums, school curricula, family narratives, archives, and public controversies all reveal that the past is not merely gone but continually interpreted in the present.

Language, Text, and the Transmission of Meaning

Language is one of the principal media through which human beings make experience shareable. It allows people to name distinctions, formulate claims, preserve memories, establish laws, transmit beliefs, construct narratives, debate values, and imagine possibilities that are not immediately present. Humanities therefore studies language not merely as a mechanical communication system but as a historically and socially situated medium of meaning. A word acquires significance through relationships with other words, conventions of use, communities of speakers, genres, institutions, and historical circumstances. Because these relationships change, language carries traces of cultural contact, political transformation, technological development, intellectual history, and social difference.

Texts provide especially durable evidence of this human activity, although “text” should be understood broadly. A poem, philosophical treatise, legal code, diary, inscription, sacred scripture, political manifesto, newspaper, private letter, speech transcript, or digital conversation can all become objects of humanistic interpretation. Reading such materials responsibly requires more than paraphrasing their explicit statements. Genre influences meaning: a satire should not be interpreted as if it were a bureaucratic report, and a philosophical thought experiment is not the same kind of claim as an eyewitness testimony. Audience matters because writers anticipate particular readers. Rhetoric matters because authors attempt to persuade, move, instruct, justify, or provoke. Intertextuality matters because texts respond to prior language and traditions. Material transmission matters because manuscripts, editions, translations, censorship, editorial intervention, and technologies of reproduction can alter what readers encounter.

Philology and related forms of textual scholarship make these issues especially visible. When a text survives through multiple manuscripts or translations, scholars may need to reconstruct relationships among versions, identify copying errors, examine vocabulary, compare historical usages, and determine how transmission altered meaning. Translation creates another interpretive problem because languages rarely divide experience into perfectly equivalent conceptual units. A translation may preserve literal wording while losing tone, or reproduce rhetorical force while departing from syntax. Humanities therefore treats language as both a vehicle of understanding and a source of interpretive difficulty.

Philosophy and the Examination of Ideas

Philosophy represents one of the most explicit forms of humanistic inquiry because it asks whether our concepts, assumptions, arguments, and values withstand careful examination. Philosophical questions concern knowledge, reality, reasoning, morality, political authority, consciousness, language, freedom, responsibility, beauty, identity, and many other foundational problems. Rather than accepting inherited categories automatically, philosophy makes them objects of analysis. What counts as knowledge? What makes an action right or wrong? What does it mean for one event to cause another? What justifies political authority? What is a person? What makes an argument valid? Questions of this kind are difficult partly because disagreement often concerns not merely facts but the concepts used to organize those facts.

Philosophical inquiry therefore gives special attention to distinctions, definitions, arguments, implications, counterexamples, and consistency. An argument can fail because its premises are false, because its reasoning is invalid, because a central term shifts meaning, or because an apparent conclusion does not actually follow from what was assumed. Philosophical analysis makes such structures visible, but philosophy is not reducible to formal logic. Many philosophical problems also require interpretation of experience, conceptual history, moral judgment, thought experiments, comparison of competing theories, and reflection on what different positions imply for human life.

Ideas also have histories. Concepts such as liberty, nature, reason, civilization, sovereignty, race, rights, progress, personhood, or democracy have not carried exactly the same meanings in every period. Intellectual history and the history of ideas investigate how concepts emerge, acquire authority, migrate between contexts, and become reorganized through debate. This historical dimension prevents philosophical vocabulary from being treated as timeless simply because familiar words have survived.

Literature and the Interpretation of Human Experience

Literature gives language unusual freedom to represent interior experience, imagined worlds, conflict, memory, desire, social relationships, ambiguity, and possibilities that may never have occurred historically. Literary study therefore concerns more than identifying plots or evaluating whether works are entertaining. It investigates how language produces effects through narrative structure, imagery, voice, perspective, rhythm, genre, symbolism, characterization, silence, repetition, ambiguity, and relationships with prior texts and cultural conventions. A narrative can allow readers to inhabit perspectives unavailable in ordinary experience, while poetry can compress meaning into forms whose significance depends on sound, structure, and association as much as explicit statement.

Literature is also historically situated. A novel participates in the linguistic, political, economic, technological, and literary conditions under which it was produced and circulated. Publication technologies affect readership; censorship shapes expression; conventions of genre influence expectation; ideas about gender, class, empire, religion, or nation can structure characters and conflicts. Yet literary works are not simply illustrations of historical context. Their formal construction can complicate, resist, reimagine, or expose contradictions within that context. Humanistic interpretation therefore moves between the internal organization of the work and the larger worlds with which it interacts.

The existence of multiple plausible interpretations does not mean literary analysis lacks standards. Claims can be tested against textual evidence, coherence, historical knowledge, linguistic detail, genre, and explanatory power. An interpretation that accounts for more of the work with fewer contradictions is generally stronger than one that depends on ignoring inconvenient passages. Humanities thus provides a model for rigorous reasoning where evidence does not always produce one mathematically unique conclusion.

Religion, Worldviews, and Questions of Ultimate Meaning

Religious traditions have shaped human societies through beliefs, rituals, institutions, moral systems, texts, architecture, law, art, calendars, education, political authority, community formation, and conceptions of life and death. Religious studies approaches these phenomena as objects of historical, textual, comparative, philosophical, and cultural inquiry. It can investigate how communities interpret sacred texts, how rituals organize social belonging, how religious authority is established, how traditions change through contact or reform, or how concepts of transcendence, salvation, suffering, obligation, purity, or sacredness structure human experience.

Studying religion humanistically requires distinguishing understanding from endorsement. A scholar can investigate why a belief is meaningful within a community without asserting that the belief is metaphysically true, just as a historian can analyze a political ideology without adopting it. At the same time, reducing religion entirely to economics, psychology, or political control can erase meanings that participants themselves regard as central. Responsible inquiry therefore combines critical distance with contextual understanding.

Worldviews extend beyond formally organized religions. Secular philosophies, political ideologies, ethical traditions, cosmologies, and intellectual movements can also provide frameworks through which people interpret existence and obligation. Humanities examines how such frameworks become authoritative, how they conflict, how they are transmitted, and how they shape institutions and personal identities.

Evidence, Interpretation, and Argument

Humanities works with evidence, but its evidence is often heterogeneous. A historian can use census records, diaries, court proceedings, photographs, architecture, maps, speeches, artifacts, and oral testimony within the same investigation. A literary scholar may combine textual analysis with archival documents and publication history. A philosopher may analyze arguments while drawing on conceptual history. A linguist may examine corpora, inscriptions, sound patterns, and historical manuscripts. Because evidence takes many forms, the methods used to evaluate it must fit its provenance and purpose.

Interpretation begins by asking what kind of evidence is present, how it was produced, what circumstances shaped it, and what claim it can legitimately support. A propaganda poster is valuable historical evidence even when its explicit claims are false because it reveals what its creators wanted audiences to believe. A diary provides unusually direct evidence of one person's perspective but cannot automatically represent an entire society. A law reveals formal institutional rules but does not prove universal compliance. A philosophical text reveals arguments but may require reconstruction of vocabulary no longer used in the same way. Humanistic rigor therefore depends on source criticism: identifying origin, authorship, audience, genre, context, transmission, purpose, bias, and limitations.

The resulting argument is interpretive rather than merely descriptive. It explains why evidence supports one understanding better than alternatives. Scholars must distinguish what is explicitly documented from what is inferred, acknowledge uncertainty where evidence is incomplete, and revise interpretations when stronger evidence becomes available. This is one reason disagreement is normal within Humanities. Scholars can agree on the existence of documents yet disagree about their significance because larger interpretations connect evidence differently. Productive disagreement becomes possible when those connections are made explicit.

Perspective, Difference, and the Problem of Context

Humanities frequently encounters perspectives that are difficult to reconcile. Historical actors may hold values radically different from contemporary ones. Texts can reflect hierarchies or assumptions now rejected. Different communities can preserve conflicting memories of the same event. Concepts translated between languages can lose important distinctions. These situations require a balance between contextual understanding and critical evaluation. To understand why a practice made sense historically is not necessarily to justify it morally; conversely, condemning historical actions without reconstructing the concepts and institutions surrounding them can produce shallow explanations.

Contextual interpretation helps avoid anachronism, the mistake of projecting present concepts or assumptions backward into periods where they did not function in the same way. It also helps prevent cultures from being treated as internally uniform. Societies contain disagreement, hierarchy, regional variation, generational change, minority traditions, and competing institutions. A surviving official document may represent government policy without revealing everyday practice; a canonical author may be influential without representing everyone who lived at the same time. Humanities therefore asks repeatedly whose perspective survives, whose language became authoritative, whose experiences were excluded from records, and what kinds of evidence can recover less visible histories.

Comparative work adds another challenge. Comparison can illuminate differences and shared structures, but it can also distort when one tradition becomes the unexamined standard against which all others are measured. Responsible comparison identifies the dimension actually being compared, attends to local terminology and context, and remains alert to apparently equivalent categories that may function differently. Humanistic inquiry seeks neither to erase difference nor to portray human worlds as so incomparable that understanding becomes impossible.

Memory, Identity, and Historical Consciousness

Individuals and communities construct identities partly through relationships with remembered pasts. Families transmit stories, nations commemorate events, religious communities preserve narratives, institutions maintain archives, and communities use monuments, rituals, anniversaries, and places to connect present life with prior generations. Such practices create historical consciousness: an understanding that the present has emerged from a past and that interpretations of that past affect current possibilities.

Memory, however, is selective. Communities remember victories and traumas differently; some events become central while others disappear from public narratives. Political transitions can change which monuments are preserved, removed, or reinterpreted. Testimonies may challenge official histories. Archival discoveries can alter familiar narratives. The politics of memory therefore concerns more than factual accuracy. It concerns authority over representation: who is commemorated, whose suffering is acknowledged, which histories become part of education, and which identities gain legitimacy through public remembrance.

Humanities examines these processes because memory influences belonging. Language, ancestry, religion, migration, historical experience, literature, philosophical traditions, places, and shared narratives can become resources through which individuals and communities understand themselves. Yet identity is not simply inherited intact. People reinterpret traditions, combine affiliations, reject inherited categories, create new ones, and encounter identities imposed by institutions or outsiders. Humanistic study therefore treats identity as historically produced and interpreted rather than as a timeless essence.

Values, Ethics, and Human Judgment

Human societies continually make judgments about what is desirable, permissible, admirable, unjust, sacred, offensive, beautiful, true, or worthy of preservation. Such judgments cannot be explained entirely by describing what people happen to prefer. Ethics asks what people ought to do and what reasons can justify those obligations; political philosophy examines authority, rights, justice, freedom, and collective responsibility; aesthetics examines forms of value associated with art and experience; philosophy of law considers the relationships among rules, legitimacy, interpretation, and justice. Humanities provides spaces in which these normative questions can be examined explicitly rather than hidden inside apparently neutral decisions.

Moral reasoning is difficult because values can conflict. Freedom may conflict with security, equality with certain forms of autonomy, loyalty with impartial justice, preservation with change, truth-telling with protection from harm, and individual interests with collective responsibilities. Ethical analysis does not eliminate these tensions by producing one universal formula for every case. It clarifies relevant principles, identifies hidden assumptions, examines consequences, distinguishes similar concepts, and asks whether reasons offered for a judgment can be defended consistently.

Historical and comparative perspectives deepen this inquiry by showing that moral vocabularies themselves change. Practices once defended as natural can later be condemned; concepts of rights can expand; social roles can be reconceived; new technologies can create ethical questions that older traditions never addressed. Understanding this history does not imply that all values are merely relative. It shows instead that moral reasoning occurs within inherited conceptual worlds that humans can criticize and transform.

Humanities, Arts and Culture, and the Social Sciences

Humanities overlaps significantly with Arts and Culture and with the Social Sciences, but the categories are not interchangeable. Arts and Culture gives particular attention to artistic creation, aesthetic experience, cultural practices, heritage, performance, and cultural transmission. Humanities may study these same materials, but often through questions of interpretation, historical meaning, language, ideas, texts, values, and intellectual context. A painting can therefore belong centrally to Arts and Culture as an artistic work while also serving as evidence for a humanistic investigation into political symbolism, religious thought, historical memory, or theories of representation.

The Social Sciences investigate human behavior, institutions, groups, and societies through empirical and theoretical methods that often seek patterns, causal relationships, measurable regularities, or explanatory models. Humanities can study the same societies but may ask different questions: how political concepts were understood, how identities were narrated, how historical actors interpreted institutions, how moral vocabulary changed, or how surviving texts shaped collective memory. Neither approach is inherently superior. They illuminate different aspects of human life, and strong interdisciplinary research often combines them.

This boundary also explains why Humanities should not be defined merely as “subjects about people.” Medicine, economics, sociology, psychology, political science, anthropology, art history, philosophy, and literature can all concern human beings, yet they differ in their central questions and modes of justification. Humanities is distinguished especially by its sustained attention to meaning, interpretation, historical context, argument, textual and cultural evidence, conceptual structures, and normative questions.

Material Evidence and Worlds Beyond Written Text

Although texts are central to many humanistic disciplines, Humanities is not limited to written language. Buildings, landscapes, monuments, coins, inscriptions, clothing, tools, household objects, maps, photographs, graves, diagrams, sound recordings, and digital artifacts can all preserve evidence of human thought and activity. Material evidence is particularly important where written records are limited, where official documents represent only powerful institutions, or where physical environments reveal practices not described explicitly in texts.

Objects require interpretation just as texts do. Their material composition, manufacture, wear, location, ownership, alteration, and relationship with other objects can all provide evidence. A building reveals not only architectural technique but also assumptions about hierarchy, privacy, ritual, commerce, or public life. A map can describe geography while simultaneously expressing territorial claims or political priorities. An everyday household object can reveal trade networks, technical knowledge, consumption, gendered labor, or social status. Material culture therefore broadens the evidentiary base of humanistic inquiry and reminds us that people express ideas through built and material environments as well as language.

Digital environments now produce another enormous body of human traces. Websites, social platforms, digital archives, software interfaces, online communities, databases, and born-digital texts preserve forms of communication and cultural activity that future historians and humanists will need to interpret. Their preservation poses distinctive challenges because formats, platforms, links, interfaces, and access permissions change rapidly. Humanities therefore continues to evolve alongside the media through which human experience is recorded.

How Humanistic Knowledge Is Built

Humanistic research begins with questions rather than with a fixed method. A scholar may want to know how a political concept changed across centuries, why a literary genre emerged, how a community remembers a conflict, how translators altered a philosophical vocabulary, or how a religious practice transformed after migration. The evidence required depends on the question. Scholars may search archives, compare manuscripts, reconstruct chronology, analyze rhetoric, examine vocabulary, study material objects, compare translations, investigate reception, trace citations, or reconstruct intellectual networks.

Close reading is one characteristic method. It attends carefully to wording, structure, ambiguity, rhetoric, imagery, argument, and relationships within a text. Contextual analysis then places those details within wider historical or intellectual environments. Source criticism evaluates origin and reliability. Comparative methods examine similarities and differences without assuming equivalence. Genealogical approaches trace the development of concepts or practices. Hermeneutics examines the conditions under which interpretation itself occurs. Digital humanities can add computational methods for exploring large corpora, networks, textual patterns, geographic relationships, or archival collections, although computational patterns still require humanistic interpretation if they are to become claims about meaning.

Humanistic conclusions are often cumulative rather than final. New archives open, neglected sources become visible, translations improve, social perspectives change, and familiar evidence is reconsidered through new questions. This does not make humanistic knowledge arbitrary. It makes it historical and revisable. A strong interpretation explains evidence coherently, acknowledges limitations, distinguishes inference from documentation, engages plausible alternatives, and remains open to correction.

Reading Against Simplicity

One of the most important contributions of Humanities is resistance to explanations that become simple by erasing meaning or context. A revolution cannot be understood only as a change in institutional control if participants were acting through competing ideas of legitimacy and justice. A religious movement cannot be reduced completely to economic interests if belief shaped participants' understanding of their own actions. A literary work cannot be treated solely as historical evidence if its form transforms how experience is represented. A legal concept cannot be interpreted adequately by dictionary definition if centuries of argument changed its institutional meaning.

This does not mean that economic, political, psychological, or technological explanations are unimportant. Humanities often incorporates them. The problem arises when one explanatory vocabulary is assumed to exhaust the phenomenon. Human beings act through overlapping motivations and symbolic worlds. Material conditions shape possibilities, but people interpret those conditions. Institutions constrain action, but their authority also depends on ideas and legitimacy. Technologies change communication, but communities determine how technologies become meaningful. Humanities protects this complexity without abandoning disciplined explanation.

The same principle applies to apparent binaries. Tradition and change often coexist. Individual agency operates within inherited structures. Text and context influence each other. Past and present interact through memory. Language enables communication while also creating ambiguity. Identity can provide continuity while remaining historically changeable. Humanities is particularly valuable where understanding depends on holding such tensions together rather than forcing them prematurely into one side of a distinction.

The Long Conversation of Human Thought

Humanities can be imagined as a conversation extending across generations in which people continually answer, reinterpret, reject, revive, translate, or transform ideas inherited from others. Philosophers argue with earlier philosophers; legal traditions reinterpret precedents; historians revise narratives when new evidence appears; writers adapt older genres; religious communities debate inherited texts; political movements redefine established concepts; translators carry ideas into new linguistic environments where they acquire additional meanings.

This long conversation is neither a straight line of progress nor a static inheritance. Knowledge can be lost and rediscovered. Traditions can coexist without converging. Concepts can become more precise in one context and more contested in another. Intellectual movements can react against their predecessors and later become traditions themselves. Canon formation determines which voices remain influential, while subsequent scholarship can recover writings and experiences excluded from earlier accounts.

Understanding this temporal conversation helps explain why Humanities frequently requires substantial background. A single sentence in a philosophical work may presuppose centuries of debate; a political slogan may compress a long history of concepts; a literary allusion may activate meanings unavailable without knowledge of earlier texts. Humanistic education therefore develops the capacity to move between immediate expression and the layers of history that make that expression intelligible.

Why Humanities Matters

Humanities matters because human beings live not only in physical environments but in worlds of meaning. Laws function because people interpret authority and obligation. Political institutions depend partly on concepts such as legitimacy, citizenship, sovereignty, and rights. Communities persist through memory and narrative. Religious traditions organize questions of existence and obligation. Literature explores experiences that cannot be reduced to factual propositions. Language makes shared reasoning possible while shaping the categories through which reasoning occurs. Historical knowledge reveals that many institutions and assumptions that appear natural are products of change and therefore open to further transformation.

Humanities also develops a particular intellectual discipline: the ability to remain with complexity long enough to understand it. It teaches readers to distinguish a source from an interpretation, an argument from an assertion, historical context from present projection, explanation from justification, evidence from speculation, and cultural difference from intellectual incomprehensibility. It trains attention to language because small changes in wording can alter law, philosophy, politics, literature, or historical testimony. It teaches that disagreement need not signal the absence of knowledge; disagreements can be evaluated by comparing evidence, conceptual clarity, contextual adequacy, coherence, and argumentative strength.

Most importantly, Humanities addresses questions that recur regardless of technological or institutional change: how people understand themselves, how they remember, how they justify actions, how languages carry thought, how beliefs acquire authority, how values are contested, how inherited worlds constrain and enable the present, and how meanings change when human beings encounter one another across time and difference. These questions cannot be settled once and permanently because each generation inherits both human experiences and the responsibility to interpret them anew.

Humanities is therefore the broad field through which human expression becomes interpretable, the past becomes historically intelligible, ideas become examinable, language becomes an object of inquiry, values become arguable, and human experience becomes available for sustained understanding rather than merely description. Its characteristic movement is not a mechanical sequence but a deepening one:

trace → context → interpretation → argument → comparison → reconsideration → understanding.

That movement explains the distinctive contribution of Humanities: it turns the surviving languages, ideas, memories, texts, artifacts, and arguments of human life into opportunities for rigorous reflection on what people have meant, what they have believed, what they have done, and what those inheritances allow us to understand about being human.