The fear of death that I have felt since childhood has led to my inability to understand suicide, which in turn has led me to question why we live. The humanities explore the nature of human beings through these questions, and ultimately seek to answer the question of what makes us feel alive.
Ever since I was a child, I had a strong fear of death, but it didn’t affect my life to the point that I became a Buddha, it was just a vague fear of death that everyone has. It started with the question, “How much will it hurt when I die?” and ended with a feeling of sadness at the thought of the futility of life between birth and death. Thinking about death from a young age could have easily led me to nihilism, but thanks to my innate optimism, after deep contemplation, I would rationalize it away by saying, “The good is good now.
Because I was so afraid of death, I couldn’t understand people who chose to die by suicide, which naturally led me to the question of why humans live. I wondered if listening to the stories of people who made such extreme choices might provide answers to the question of why humans cannot live. In the end, I realized that the question of why humans live was something I had always wondered about growing up, but the more I thought about it, the more difficult it was.
The humanities are the study of human thought and culture. What is important in the humanities is ‘problem-solving’. Humanities is a discipline that does not take human ideas, culture, or the nature of human beings for granted, but constantly asks questions and seeks answers. In that sense, it can be seen as the beginning of humanities when I asked myself questions about death and ‘why do humans live’ as a child. Of course, different people have different values and different depths of thought, so the answers they come up with will be different, and not everyone will find the answers they want, but some people will find answers that impress many people, such as brilliant philosophers like Immanuel Kant and Ludwig Wittgenstein. And then there are those who question whether it’s even necessary to try to find answers to such a “livelihood-less” subject.
In the same vein as the last sentence of the previous paragraph, the phrase ‘humanities crisis’ is constantly being talked about. In Korea’s manufacturing-oriented society, the ‘humanities crisis’ is perhaps a natural social phenomenon. Even before universities began to restructure, humanities-related majors were atrophied, and this phenomenon is still ongoing. But on the other hand, the importance of the humanities is being emphasized. They say that Korea’s rapid growth in a short period of time overlooked something. Because of that, they say, Korea is facing growth limits in the global economy. CEOs of various companies and national figures have cited a lack of creativity and imagination as one of the reasons for this, and have argued that the humanities should be the solution.
Thanks to the social awareness of these high-profile figures, the humanities craze in Korea began to take off a few years ago. In the bestseller section of bookstores, there are always humanities books that are promoted as being well-written. Of course, I haven’t read all of them, so I don’t know if they are well written. Among them, Michael Sandel’s *Justice: What’s the Right Thing to Do?* was very popular in Korea. I was so curious to read it, and I was shocked by what I found. At first, I started reading it as a light read to pass the time, but the topics and issues covered in the book were so cutting edge that I had to reevaluate my thoughts after every chapter. The questions it asked me and the thoughts it organized around them made me feel alive.
To this humanistic question, which I have been thinking about for a long time since my childhood, the answer I finally came up with was: “Humans live because they think they are worth living.” The value of living here is human dignity. I don’t mean worth living in the same sense as human dignity, but rather in the sense of personal self-esteem, the feeling of being alive that I mentioned earlier. For some, it’s grades, for others it’s work and promotions, for others it’s the responsibility of raising children. Maybe some people feel alive by walking outside on a nice day and looking at nature. But in my short experience, feeling alive by measuring yourself against others, such as money or social status, is a recipe for unhappiness. Part of it is the inferiority complex you feel toward people who are better off than you, but more fundamentally, it’s because the money, possessions, and relationships you have in life are empty things that don’t belong to you. Especially for those who have gotten a lot of things easily, there is a great sense of emptiness. You can understand cases like drug addiction and suicide among second- and third-generation chaebols in this context. Because life is so empty, people need to spend a lot of time focusing and immersing themselves in something in order to feel happy and alive. When an individual invests effort and accomplishes something, they may initially feel fulfilled and alive. But over time, what truly makes a person feel alive is the experience and effort of creating something out of nothing, and that is something that can be completely owned by the person.
The humanities craze may have started with a few words from someone high up, but that doesn’t mean the momentum has stopped. The humanities force individuals to constantly ask questions, to reflect on human nature, and to work tirelessly to find answers. In the process, they force individuals to think and come up with their own answers, creating an experience of creating something out of nothing. And from that experience, the individual is liberated from the emptiness of everyday life. Jesus once said, “You shall know the truth, and the truth shall set you free. Perhaps Jesus meant freedom from emptiness, freedom that makes an individual feel alive? The humanities satisfy our desire to know, perhaps arrogantly, that we are one step closer to the truth. The humanities make us feel alive, which is the true guarantee of freedom.
In Korea’s stagnant social structure, we are forced to accumulate qualifications and learn skills to the point of death in order to survive. However, I wonder if the humanities are not a means for people to make a living, but rather serve the purpose of liberating people from emptiness and making them feel alive. I wonder if the humanities craze is a reflection of our society, which is full of thirst for knowledge that we have neglected in order to make a living.
