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.

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.