Science and the social sciences give us important tools with which to think about the world. You won’t be able to think as coherently about issues and events if you don’t understand the concepts of present value and marginal cost, or if you can’t distinguish correlation from causation. But the humanities also offer important tools, useful for other kinds of critical analysis of the world.

Science draws conclusions in a context that is concrete and clearly defined; the humanities force you to draw connections in a context that is opaque, with concepts that are ill-defined and unrelated. Emerson and Fitzgerald force you to think outside the box, encouraging the kind of open-mindedness that pays dividends when it’s your own life you're reflecting on and not Gatsby’s.

The philosopher Thomas Nagel pointed out that, even with a perfectly complete objective description of what a bat is, it is still coherent to ask the question, “What is it like to be a bat?” That’s because that final bit of information detailing what it is like to be something—the phenomenon we commonly refer to as consciousness—is in principle unquantifiable and irreducible.

So it is of bats and men. No outsider will ever be able to tell you what it is like to live your life. That’s why the sciences will never replace the study of what it means to be human—the human experience is not reducible to the neurons and electrodes that make it possible. The phenomenology of experience is a peculiar perspective reserved for the pages of literature, musings of esoteric philosophers, and the actual lives we live.

Only you can answer what it is like to be a human. Now comes the messy work of living.

Geoffrey B. Kristof ‘17 is a Crimson editorial writer in Grays Hall.