Humanities as Insurrection Against Everyday Life Volume 3 - Issue 5

Jorge Alberto López-Guzman*

• Anthropologist, Political Scientist, Specialist and Master in Government and Public Policies, PhD candidate in Anthropology. University of Cauca, Colombia

Received: March 17, 2021   Published: March 29, 2021

Corresponding author: Jorge Alberto López-Guzman, Anthropologist, Political Scientist, Specialist and Master in Government and Public Policies, University of Cauca, Colombia

DOI: 10.32474/JAAS.2021.03.000173

Abstract PDF

If I could compare the effervescence with life that studying the humanities has caused me, I could do it with the greatest teaching I owe to my parents: the love of books.On some occasion, I was asked in the first class of a subject called Plato what is philosophy? –– What a suggestive and complex question–. I remember my answer: “philosophy is burning with questions.” Today I could say that getting involved in the humanities is burning in them, but how rewarding it is!
My years of academic training since I entered preschool at the age of 3, I went through elementary school, high school, two undergraduate degrees, two postgraduates –– currently pursuing a doctorate––; They made me realize, that I have studied too much, but not enough, that eternal happiness does not lie in knowledge, but in its different methods of acquisition, that the claim to life is not knowing more and more, but possibility of turning reason into an instrument of social and political change.
If I had known that in these years immersed among political theorists, cultural chroniclers, and commentators on doctrines, my daily life would take such a sensible and impassive course; In many of my gatherings surrounded by liquor, my first recommendation to anyone who has already found a comfortable meaning in their life, is that I took refuge in books for at least one hour a day to observe what others only see, question what has been normalized and challenges all the obvious.
The claim of the humanities goes beyond establishing a grammatical relationship with concepts taken from a dictionary or historiographies written in an encyclopedia, they are the possibility of combining our experiences with the gloom in which the ignorant live.Without exaggerating or using superlatives, each reflection that has arisen in my life is not only the argument of an inopportune experience or a badly read text, rather, it is the corroboration that we are alive, that we feel and are moved, that through From the ideas of a group of misanthropes (as), unhinged (as) and above all, insurgents (as), we build paradigms of existence, of re-existence, where every day, we find the world more unintelligible.
Our daily life is a constant flow of abstractions and symbolisms that, consciously or unconsciously, allow us to approach the environment in which we are born and the different scenarios to which life will take us in its passage. Studying political power, cultural practices, and philosophical ideas have transformed my mind into an agora of melancholy and hope, highlighting a literary apotheosis of shock and wisdom.

I cannot conceive of living without reading, I do not believe in a life without books, without the constant reflection of academic dystopias, without reflections on political manipulation as an art to govern, without apologies for otherness as a visibility of what is different and without the arrogance of logic to understand language.
My life from the humanities is the life of everyone, it is the life of the reader of this text, my neighbor, my ex-partners, my friends, my mother, my father (where physics and metaphysics have taken it), from my sister –– miles away–. It is a life filled with midnight nostalgia and depressing sleepless nights, where I find pleasure in outdated books, in lethargic classes, in loveless sex, in irrational drunkenness, in finite friendships, in the loyalty of my family and above all, in the insurrection in the face of life.