Kant & The Human Subject
Brian Morris compares the ways Kant’s question “What is the human being?” has been answered by philosophers and anthropologists.
“Scholars with diverse intellectual traditions”, explore the “human subject”.
Enough said?
The human subject as an intellectual contraption that bears almost no resemblance whatsoever to flesh and blood human beings going about the business of attaining and then sustaining the least dysfunctional world.
You know, to actually live in.
Instead, the complexity [as in this very article] will revolve almost entirely around words defining and then defending other words.
Okay, but how are differentiations of this sort not just basically common sense? There is the self as a biological entity embedded in the human species. But even here the genetic programing of particular individuals is all over the biological map. Some focus on gender, others on race, still others on temperament and character. Where here do genes end and memes begin? And the psychological “I” intertwined in the social “I” embedded in countless historical, cultural and circumstantial contexts…how can this not make the task of pinning down, among other things, the motivations and intention of any one of us in any particular context nothing short of profoundly problematic?
Exactly. Given this enormously complex intertwining of variables from countless “disciplines”, does not pragmatism seem the best approach to, say, moral and political interactions, to government policies?
Then yet more “schools of thought”:
So, given all of this, how on earth are we to explain the sheer number of moral and political objectivists among us? Both down through the ages and cross-culturally. Well, excluding determinism as the only explanation for everything, I can only presume that there must be something in how the human brain is hard-wired that we are “driven” towards a psychological need to pull everything together into one or another rendition of this: ilovephilosophy.com/viewtop … 5&t=185296