Kant & The Human Subject
Brian Morris compares the ways Kant’s question “What is the human being?” has been answered by philosophers and anthropologists.
Really, how can someone explore in depth human historical and anthropological accounts and come to the conclusion that there is an “essential characteristic” – an “essential nature” – able to explain away all of the many, many diverse and ofttimes conflicting moral narratives and political agendas? Especially in regard to the so-called “rational ego”? Instead, once you go beyond biological imperatives that pertain to all of us, the rest becomes a cauldron of perennial confrontation.
As for human nature being essentially tribal, how do you explain the manner in which capitalism has of late basically ripped that demographic font to shreds. It’s not a question of if the individual prevails in the modern global economy, but how many millions of individuals are left behind barely able to sustain themselves as wage slaves from week to week to week.
Unless you want to call this assessment itself the essential characteristic of human interactions.
Memes for the most part. Social, political, economic. Sexual, artistic, psychological. There are really no aspects of human interactions in which the biological imperatives we all share in common are not confronted, then molded and manipulated, in a ceaseless accumulation of ever evolving human communities. All with their own more or less unique set of circumstances. The part where dasein, conflicting goods and political economy become more and more intertwined in “I”.
And the beauty of memes of course is that the moral and political objectivists among us can claim that they and they alone understand what they mean…and why everyone else is obligated to understand them the same way.
You can’t do that with genes…with the brute facticity built into human biology in the either/or world. There you either understand or misunderstand what is in fact demonstrable as “natural”.
Not that this will ever stop the objectivists. In regard to, among other things, race and ethnicity and gender and sexual orientation. Even the gap between what we think we understand about the evolution of life on Earth and all that there is yet to be known is closed by them in concocting their “one of us” vs. “one of them” mentality.