Speaking Tree - Discussing the 'Hows' and 'Whys' of life

Speaking Tree - Discussing the 'Hows' and 'Whys' of life:

The principal of a school recently told me that they were shutting down their humanities department. The school would do away with `soft’ subjects such as literature and history and concentrate on ‘hard’ subjects like physics and mathematics. The reason? There were very few takers for subjects like literature. In the school’s last term only a handful of students had opted for the humanities stream, while the great majority went for the sciences.   It didn’t make economic sense for the school to employ teachers of humanities.

The reason that few students were choosing to study humanities is also economic.

If you study science subjects like maths and physics you can get a well-paying job as an accountant or an engineer. What sort of job can you get after studying literature or history?  Probably a poorly-paying job as a teacher of these subjects. And there might be a question mark over that as well, if more schools start scrapping humanities, thereby making redundant teachers of such subjects. Being able to spout Tagore and Shakespeare, or expatiate on the reign of Chandragupta Maurya, might sound very fine and highbrow, but it isn’t going to do much good for your bank account.

On the other hand, the ability to work out a quadratic equation or design a computer programme could pave the way for a six-figure salary cheque from a techie company. But it’s precisely because we are becoming an increasingly science-oriented  society that we need the counterbalance of the humanities. The sciences and the humanities are not in contradiction to each other; they complement each other.   And the more they are enabled to do so, the more they can enrich our lives. Science is what might be called the ‘how’ of life.

It teaches us how to do things. How to devise an algorithm to regulate traffic, or build a bridge, or get people to live to be a hundred years old, or design a spaceship that can go to Mars. The humanities might be called the ‘why’ of life. They can help us better understand why we do, or ought to do, certain things. Or perhaps not do them. We might know how to get people to live to be a hundred years old. But do we know why we ought to do this? Does the story of Doctor Faustus who sold his soul to the devil in quest of immortality hold an object lesson for us? Or, for that matter, that of aged Lear, driven to madness and abandoned by all except his faithful clown, wandering on the blasted heath? Is eternal life, or even prolonged age, a boon or bane? ‘Whys’ help us to evaluate our ‘hows’.

Viktor Frankl, survivor of a Nazi death camp, formulated a psychological discipline which he called ‘logotherapy’ the principles of which were based on his personal experience of the dehumanising conditions he had endured. As an inmate of the camp he discovered that those who had some reason to live, those who had a ‘why’ for existence — to protect a loved one, to bear witness after liberation to the horrors they had suffered — managed to find a ‘how’ to survive. Frankl’s book, ‘Logotherapy: Man’s Search for Meaning’ has become a classic text in psychology.

The fundamental tenet in logotherapy is to discover the ‘why’ of life and the ‘how’ —how to overcome the most oppressive of circumstances — will find itself . The ‘why’ gives meaning to our lives.   The ‘how’ provides the mechanics of survival.   Both the ‘why’ and the ‘how’, the humanities and the sciences, are inextricably bound together in the ‘subtle knot’ that is humankind.