Alfred Romero
3/4/2023
Professor Frank
LIL 420
Journal #6
The humanities are a unique categorization of the education you can obtain from an undergraduate college experience. I myself am not a humanities major, rather just an English minor, so I personally don’t have the in-depth knowledge of the humanities as much as my fellow humanities majors do. But, from the experience I do have, I’ll first start by explaining the intrinsic value of the humanities.
Intrinsic values, by definition, are understood to be desirable in and of themselves. From my experience in the humanities courses I’ve taken, I’d describe these values to be directed towards widening the perspective of reality for the individual. Take the course Wisdom Literatures for example. This course is dedicated towards analyzing different texts that belong to individual life approaches (most would be religions, but some are just ways of life). The education obtained here could be put to use by the individual for the sake of their own life. An example from my own life would be Buddhism. Though I am a Christian, I’ve applied principles of Buddhism in my own life in order to keep my mindset of pushing forward through the struggles of my undergraduate career. But what society would want is based on instrumental value, or how these ideologies would benefit an end goal that would apply to a larger system.
This can be described as studying the humanities as “a view that sees equality as the goal” (Clune 5). By opening up the student perspective with the accommodation of works that the student isn’t used to observing, the transformation of vision and the difference in thought processing that would occur during times of analysis would ultimately serve larger goals. These larger pictures can be observed in the medical field, where this sort of thought process can address “how the dysfunctional US health-care system has been shaped by the ideology of econism” (Brody). But the humanities courses I’ve taken so far, I’d say anyway, could lead towards more adjusting the educational system or critiquing the government in some way. Wisdom Literatures can serve to critique tradition and how it can affect other factors of society in a bigger picture. Introduction To Literary Theory and Criticism can help the market analyze what techniques push good advertising. I’d say that the thought processes that could be derived by taking the classes I’ve taken in the humanities could be applied through certain specific skills that a job would require in order to make that job more effective. And these thoughts that could be generated are unique to how the individual student would perceive a work. There’s always something that could be perceived out of something else, it’s just a matter of who’s observing what.
