What Makes Us Human: A cosmos and a chaos

“What Makes Us Human?” is a biweekly column where Emi Sakamoto ’28 investigates the interdisciplinary criteria whereby we may better respond to this metaphysically contested question. Amidst our rapidly evolving technological landscape, it is incumbent upon us to do so.

To meet an artist is to peer into the soul: an impossibly opaque, yet perennially discernible constellation in the immaterial galaxy of who we are. As soon as I met Alexander Nemerov, Stanford professor of art and art history, I was certain I was in the presence of one. 

Nemerov is celebrated across the Stanford student body as a sage, a poet, a prophet. His classroom is revered as a sanctuary, welcoming students from every creed and craft. Some have considered the four walls which corner his confession-like lectures as akin to a cathedral — his teachings, a religious experience. 

As an agnostic, I was admittedly curious; as a student of philosophy, I was cautiously questioning. Today, as I write, I am somehow believing. This is my attempt to capture what can only be reconstructed: the kindling hope of retaining some truth-value of my impression, a single stroke on his canvas. 

Within a mere 25 minutes, time stretched outwards in an infinite regress as I witnessed an unhurried, prudential artist at a work. It was a kind of labor that pressed onwards through a hearty, leisurely passion. Nemerov spoke with the lyrical sensibilities of a poet and the timeless omniscience of a prophet: the syntactic structure of each sentence was richly textured and transcended that of a typical response. As we progressed through the interview, I was confronted with the tediously satisfying friction of parsing through each premise and postulate. As he gazed outwards at the mitered corner window overlooking Hoover Tower, I leaned inwards, entranced by the language of his luminous poetry.

“Without knowing it, what drew me in [to art history] was the sacred stillness of paintings — that they might offer me a chance to reflect, to ponder who I might be,” he said. And so our conversation began.  

With swift humility, Nemerov quickly brushed over his own history before proffering a posture toward art itself: “the beauty of an inarticulate inwardness that one tries nonetheless — in a spirit of generosity and kinship with others — to bring words to that very inarticulacy, that deep feeling.” He proceeded to compel the consequence of this definition by inviting me to the ocean. “For human beings, it constitutes both the cresting of the wave on the beach as well as the beautiful expenditure of our energy and remains of our strength that are left on the sand,” he said. I found myself ankle deep in the ocean, sifting through the sand, searching for seashells. 

I probed him about the value of art within the inescapable context in which we are situated: the sunken heart of Silicon Valley which may as well be synonymous with AI. We hardly exist in a vacuum, yet this silo feels particularly singular in its techno-optimism. Admittedly, I had anticipated Nemerov to express an indicting account. Perhaps I imagined something about the corrosive consequences of AI as a moral infraction, a senseless slaughter which strangles human art altogether. While his critiques began with a similar theoretical machinery, his sentiment hardly followed this crude logic. 

“More than beauty, [art] is a religious estimate of human existence that of course Silicon Valley is powerless to explain or frankly is openly indifferent to exploring,” Nemerov continued. “[AI] turns oneself as a human being into a projectile of accomplishment and efficiency… We have lost the criteria of what it even means to be moved by something, to be shaped inward by something.” I couldn’t help but hear echoes of Pressly’s Oblivion and Eshel’s Resonance within these sentiments.

Rather than imposing a strictly critical remark on the harms of AI, he opined an open curiosity towards it — splashing its surface with the colors of a malleable landscape. Most importantly, he explained art as that which may continually be shaped by each successive generation: anything but forever fitting.

“My students here at Stanford are young enough, many of them are naive enough, to be wise: to believe their lives are changed by art,” he said. “And that is a great pleasure to me.” These are the very students with the responsibility to paint a new pallet of possibility by searching from within instead of scaling from a sense of without. In a campus adorned by palm trees, we are fortunate to exist in abundance, yet we somehow find ourselves persisting in the language of scarcity.  

When I asked him about the artist, Nemerov responded with a stunningly simple remark: “What artists offer is genuine emotion and the density of experience. Your experiences when you are five and seven, nine and 14, are bound up in who you are now. To define language for that singular existence on earth and to give it grace is a life’s work.” The artist, then, is uniquely tasked with reconciling this harsh partitioning of our past lives by painting its portraiture in a universally resonant kind of remembering.  

But what of disillusionment? What of the artists who have conceded to this flattening? The creeping cynicism seeping into the rhetoric of disillusionment began to spill out of me — I couldn’t help it. It’s the kind that spoils the billboards splattered across the busy metropolitan highways of San Francisco; we are ensnared in it. 

Nemerov responded, “An artist, in order to be good, has to be disillusioned, to find that there is something lacking in the world.” Thereafter, it is incumbent upon the artist to “discover what is personal as a means of bringing others, making others aware of their own comparable gift.”

There was nothing earthly about the conversation we shared to begin with, but he concluded by lifting it up into space. “An artist is an astronaut that goes into outer space and comes back to reveal to the rest of us that which is supernatural or extraordinary in each one of us land-bound people,” he said.

And like Artemis II, he brought it back to earth by responding to the question I came for: “What makes us human?” 

Nemerov responded, “The universe is inside us and that is why we cannot know ourselves. This notion of containing a cosmos and a chaos is actively ignored as something non-utilitarian and hence a waste of time. But that is what it is to be human. The purpose of education, the purpose of writing, the purpose of being, is to contemplate that mystery and what it requires of us… [Those who] search for and try to portray that which is specific to them might find an echo in the heart of another.”

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