Epilogue: General Education for Humanity 2.0 — A Focus on the Brain

Abstract

Humanity 2.0 provides an opportunity to put the brain at the heart of general education. The ultimate value of encouraging general study of changing knowledge and attitudes to the brain lies in the organ’s long standing as a concrete site for entertaining human self-transcendence. Though of clear theological provenance, this function has taken on renewed significance in recent years, as marked by, on the one hand, an increased understanding of the continuities between human and animal brains; and on the other, the unprecedented prosthetic extension of human brains. Thus, there is an opportunity to provide a radical alternative to the traditional liberal arts understanding of the integrated human body as the natural seat of ‘humanity’. In that spirit, the curriculum proposed here bears the centrifugally oriented title: ‘The Brain in the West: From Divine Instrument to Transhuman Icon’. Much of the course is justified in terms of the emerging interdisciplinary field of ‘neurohistory’, which takes the specificity of the brain — both its hard-wiring and its plasticity — as an opportunity for reintegrating the natural and human sciences by promising a richer sense of what it means to ‘re-enact’ the thoughts of the past.