Contents:

• Overview
• Reflection Activities

Topic: What constitutes meaningful human activity?
Related Reading: Ch. 3 in The Most Human Human - The Migratory Soul

The chapter The Migratory Soul explores several contexts for what might be considered the center of our humanity. This question spans several contexts:

• Socially and culturally, do we value our heart or mind, body or intellect? ("Hey, I'm up here.")
• In language, what idioms do we use? Do we say, "That shows a lot of heart," or "That shows a lot of liver"?
• Spiritually and religiously, is our soul, psyche, or essence a tangible thing that is attached to our bodies, or is it separate? What is its purpose? Does it reside in a specific place?
• What makes a life most worth living? Aristotle proposed the concept of eudaimonia and arete. Other ethics systems emphasize personal and social outcomes (consequentialism) or rules and discipline (deontology).

Whatever the source of our personhood- soul, intellect, ability to reason logically, etc.- the chapter also examines fundamental questions of selfhood. Is the notion of a person as a single monolithic intellect the best model?

• Split brain patients can show the ability to reason and percieve with the left and right halves of their brain independently.
• Humans don't seem to follow perfectly rational behavior economically. When the emotional part of a brain is compromised, such persons can have difficulty making trivial decisions.
• Rationality bias- we seem to favor the notion of rationality as the seat of our being, but many of the problems we have to tackle in life are not questions of strict rationality.
• Hemispheric bias- we spend our entire schooling years mainly training our left hemisphere of our brains, perhaps to the detriment of our whole being: "As children grow up, we start to educate them progressively from the waist up. And then we focus on their heads. And slightly to one side."

Written Reflection Exercise

• Reflect on the nature of what it means to be human, to have a fulfilling life, and/or to engage in meaningful human activity. When you think about the chapter, what kind of person do you want to be? What concepts resonate most strongly with your life?
• Your submission should be 500-1000 words in length, roughly two to four pages double-spaced.
• You need to quote at least once from the book for full credit.
• You may use your notes from our Ignatian reflection activity in class, and this might be a way to structure your reflection. (Context, Experience, Reflection, Action, Evaluation)
• Submit your work via the Assignments page on Canvas. (I strongly suggest you use a separate text editor to prepare your submission.)

• What more sets us apart from the animal kingdom and/or computers? Our minds or our bodies?
• What do you want to do with your life and why do you think that will be fulfilling?
• Does society over-emphasize the role of rationality in being human?
• Take an especially meaningful quote from the book and expound on why you found it significant.

Good reflections make a statement and support it with evidence. You can use our class text as a source of evidence, but you may also (and are encouraged) to use other sources as well as your own life experiences.