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Session No. 3661

The Human Community

Robert L. Shearer, Ph.D. Florida Institute of Technology

What is the role of humanities education in an engineering curriculum? More importantly why should humanities education be integrated in such a course of study, to have “full membership in the community of engineering educators”?

Engineering itself might be characterized as the art of fitting means with ends for practical results — results that make life much easier. Mathematical formulas, employed by the engineer, seem to draw from an abstract realm durable truths that manifest themselves in the reliability of products. The great debt owed to engineers, and thus engineering education, is that the world has become largely manageable — indeed civilized — in ways for which we are all thankful.

There is, however, a curious dichotomy that pertains to engineering and the civilization it has improved; indeed, an ironic split. For, while engineering has to be a discipline that is linear to the core, the civilization itself — Western civilization, for now — has become postmodern, and postmodernism is least of all linear.

Philosophically, postmodernism is a sense of groundlessness underlying the refutation of traditional systems of interpretation, especially those of the Western consciousness. It is a view that emphasizes the temporal sweep of appearance without a fixed system “behind the scenes” to account for the world; as such it is a very severe aesthetic that has produced works of austere beauty. On the negative side, it is manifest in the superficiality of contemporary cultural values, the breakdown of meaning, and thus the fractious nature of our society at the end of the twentieth century. It has arisen partly because the grounding metaphysics of the West has destroyed itself in helping to produce a technology that orients us more to the temporal than the eternal in making almost everything accessible, here and now; and partly because this technology is now nearly a global phenomenon, resulting in a more multi-cultured character to the media by which we know the world.

That is, postmodernism relegates the ancient anchoring of the temporal in the eternal to a merely historical interpretation that no longer obtains. Nietzsche was the first

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Shearer, R. L. (2000, June), The Human Community Paper presented at 2000 Annual Conference, St. Louis, Missouri. 10.18260/1-2--8431