What Are We, Anyway?
On Being Human
By Karl Wolff
38 pages
Chicago Center for Information and Photography
Various formats, including electronic and a paper edition, available at cclapcenter.com/onbeinghuman
An essay review by Christopher Bernard
The question “what does it mean to be human?” has become daunting. Both more urgent and more problematic in recent decades, it promises to become even more so in years to come. This short book of brief and stimulating essays on “novels and movies that examine the question of humanity,” written by Karl Wolff, a staff writer and associate editor for the Chicago Center for Literature and Photography, brings a number of these concerns to sharp focus. His book does what criticism does at its best: not only raising important questions and suggesting new avenues of exploration but introducing readers to ideas and works new to them, or encouraging readers to revisit and understand them in new ways.
It is odd that up until a few decades ago, the title “On Being Human” could have been used for some anodyne book in an undergraduate “humanities” course on “the miracle of Greece,” the marvels of the Renaissance, and the triumph of the Enlightenment, with a few passing references to such modern sages as Tolstoy, Albert Schweitzer, and Gandhi. Only in the last century, especially the last generation, has the category “human” become problematic, troubling, even empty, as the lessons of the “inhumanity” of human beings learned from the monstrosities of slavery to the carnage of Verdun to the death camps and killing fields of Europe and Asia to the Sixth Extinction have sunk in, and the virtues of our humanity have seemed increasingly overwhelmed by our evils.
