ARTIST’S NOTE | 19
The Question of the Human
2024 노트에서 발췌
At some point, we grew accustomed to thinking of human beings as something like neural networks—systems to be adjusted, optimized, and managed. Even neuroscience is often used less to deepen our understanding than to reduce us to biochemical mechanisms. Our fixation on routines and self-optimization follows naturally from this view.
Understanding the human being as a biological entity matters. But when we begin to see ourselves primarily as systems of input and output—expected to perform, respond, and justify our existence through results—we quietly diminish something essential. This way of thinking does not clarify what a human life is; it distorts it.
As this perspective takes hold, our understanding of ourselves narrows. Human beings become legible only in ways that are easy to measure. In the process, the kinds of questions that once gave shape and direction to life are pushed aside. This shift shows itself first in language. Words that once demanded reflection now circulate as disposable comforts. We are surrounded by statements, yet deprived of questions that stay with us. Perhaps this is why a vague sense of emptiness has become so common.
At this point, I find it impossible not to return to a basic question: what does it mean to be human? What kind of dignity belongs to a person, beyond function or performance? What does it mean to think critically about one’s own life and to make choices that are not merely effective, but intact?
In a world organized around speed, outcomes, and evaluation, meaningful dialogue fades and isolation deepens. What remains often hardens into cynicism.
So the question returns: what kind of stance can we reasonably ask of ourselves? Not perfection, but a refusal to treat ourselves carelessly. And alongside that, a willingness to regard others not as metrics or abstractions, but as persons. Only by returning, again and again, to this question can any renewed understanding of the human begin.