Classics: The heartbeat of our Humanity

Undoubtedly, we are living in an era increasingly shaped by artificial intelligence. Machines now perform tasks once believed to belong exclusively to human hands and minds. In recent years, it has become almost fashionable to question the place of the Humanities – Classics, Philosophy, Literature, History, Art – in this new world. What relevance can Homer or Aristotle possibly have in the age of neural networks and algorithmic precision? What can Shakespeare or Brontë teach us that a machine cannot imitate or reproduce? And truly, what value remains in sitting down to read a Platonic dialogue, line by line, thought by thought? The answer, quietly profound and urgently needed, is that the humanities are not a luxury of a bygone world, but a necessity for the one that lies ahead.

The era of “technological maturity”, a world in which most forms of labor – even intellectual ones – may become obsolete, is looming ahead. Yet within this future, certain capacities remain resilient, even essential: judgement, discernment, meaning-making, and the ability to engage in autotelic activity, the pursuit of ends chosen for their own sake. These are not easily delegated to machines because they belong to us; ours to hold, ours to honor.

Nowhere is this more evident than in what the ancients knew as philomathy (φιλομάθεια), the love of learning, not as means to an end, but as a joy in itself. This is the meaning of education. To learn not for status or survival, but because the pursuit of knowledge expands the soul. Aristotle begins his Metaphysics with the words, πάντες ἄνθρωποι τοῦ εἰδέναι ὀρέγονται φύσει (All humans by nature desire to know.) In an age where knowledge is abundant and instantly accessible, it is this desire that must be cultivated, not the data itself. And how is that desire sustained? Not through mechanical instruction or passive consumption of course, but through play, embodiment, and aesthetic engagement. Especially for children, learning is most powerful when it is playful. Neuroscience confirms what Plato intuited long ago: learning anchored in play, music, rhythm, and beauty forms stronger neural pathways, engages more areas of the brain, and builds long-term cognitive resilience. In classrooms where the arts are integrated, where the rhythm of poetry is chanted, where stories are acted, painted, and embodied, children instead of just retaining information, come alive, thus becoming connoisseurs of meaning, rather than just gatherers of facts.

This kind of education builds what one might call a cognitive immune system, a subtle but vital capacity to resist manipulation, misinformation, and memetic contagion. It cultivates judgement, patience, and depth of perception. When students engage with Thucydides, not only do they learn about war, they learn how power operates, how human motivations collide, how rhetoric seduces, and how truth resists. In this way, they acquire the very tools needed to navigate a digital world of conflicting narratives. Yet beyond resilience, the humanities offer something far more profound: pleasure. Not the fleeting pleasure of consumption (διασκέδασις), but the deep, enduring joy that arises when thought, emotion, and action are brought into harmony in the pursuit of the good (ψυχαγωγία). It is the very essence of what Socrates called «καλὸς κἀγαθός»: the beautiful and the noble, united in a life well lived. As Aristotle wrote: “The virtuous person, precisely insofar as they are virtuous, takes joy in actions of virtue and feels pain in acts of vice, just as the musician delights in beautiful melodies and is pained by the discordant.” («ὁ γὰρ σπουδαῖος, ᾗ σπουδαῖος, ταῖς κατ᾽ ἀρετὴν πράξεσι χαίρει, ταῖς δ᾽ ἀπὸ κακίας δυσχεραίνει, καθάπερ ὁ μουσικὸς τοῖς καλοῖς μέλεσιν ἥδεται, ἐπὶ δὲ τοῖς φαύλοις λυπεῖται.»)

This is the very key to creating a future in which we find joy in the appreciation of beauty, in the understanding of deep truths, and in the texture of meaningful experience. Indeed, what is more pleasurable than recognizing beauty where others perceive only confusion? A Classical education teaches just that. It teaches one to slow down, to notice, to savor, to see the symbolic power of a line of verse, the moral dilemma in a tragic figure, the divine in a simple gesture of respect for the dead. These are not tasks to be optimized but mysteries to be approached with reverence. And reverence matters. One of the most profound truths we often overlook in the age of simulation and automation is that some acts must be performed by us and only by us. Honouring ancestors, upholding traditions, continuing a ritual or a relationship, cannot be delegated, replicated, or meaningfully simulated. Their significance lies precisely in the fact that they are carried out by particular people, in continuity with a past. In reading Homer, in speaking Ancient Greek, in lighting a candle for someone long gone, we preserve a tradition but most of all, we enact a fidelity. A fidelity to memory, to place, to identity. And perhaps it is this quiet, unwavering commitment that most deeply defines what it means to be human. Even in a world of abundance, there will be a hunger for meaning. And while technology may offer us infinite pleasures, it cannot tell us what to value. The humanities do. By offering a kind of hedonic alignment of elevation, they guide us to find joy in the right things, in the just things, in the beautiful things. They help us design lives that are far from pleasurable; they are worth living.

Some may still argue that in a fully solved world, we will lose our sense of urgency, our historic purpose. But I insist, perhaps now – right now – is the golden age of purpose. If we truly care about justice, truth, and beauty, this is the time to act. To teach. To learn. To preserve. To initiate the young into the great conversation that began millennia ago and still sings through the language of the ancients.

The world is changing. But the question remains: What is worth doing, even if AI could do it better? To love, to learn, to play, to remember, to create beauty, these will always be ours: ours to hold, ours to honour. And in a future shaped by code and computation, we will still return to what pulses beneath it all: the search for meaning, the longing for wisdom, the love of learning – the heartbeat of our humanity.