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What human nature? If the last few centuries have thought us anything is that "human nature" doesn't really mean anything. It's way more arbitrary than people t
by re-actor 7y ago
What human nature? If the last few centuries have thought us anything is that "human nature" doesn't really mean anything. It's way more arbitrary than people trying to find truths in lobster hierarchies would let you believe.
- scotty79 7y agoCommunists thought the exactly same thing and see how it turned out. Greed and lazyness are so innate that you could probably trace them back to lobsters.
- jf22 7y agoBeing able to overcome greed and laziness is human nature. Lobsters are a slave to their instincts, humans are not.
- scotty79 7y agoLobsters thing was a joke. And communism was based exactlyu on the idea that people will be able to overcome greed and laziness for common good. They are but just occasionally and briefly.
- graeme 7y agoIf this were true we couldn't read Machiavelli, Baltasar Gracian, Francis Bacon, Dale Carnegie. Even Shakespeare. Superficial customs have changed. Not how underlying perceptions of interests are governed.
- re-actor 7y agoOur "underlying perceptions" for most things concerned with society are nigh completely incompatible with that of Shakespare and most certainly Machiavelli. Sure we can still understand thinkers of old in a limited capacity, but that's not due to us thinking like them or even experiencing the world like them as our experience is coloured by the concepts we use. We can understand them because of the continuity of society, the constant translation of the old into the new. Capitalism can only exist now because of how much those underlying assumptions have changed.
- graeme 7y agoYou misunderstood. I was saying people can and do use the first four as practical guides. As for Shakespeare, his plays still speak to fundamental, understandable human drama.
- re-actor 7y agoI don't understand how I misunderstood? That's exactly what I was replying to.
- graeme 7y agoOh. Well your original post was saying that human nature had changed radically over the past few centuries. I mentioned the authors as evidence that the stuff they taught about human nature still applies. When you said when we only understand them in a limited way I took that to mean you disagreed with me that the books have practical value still, and thus were not a good marker of an unchanging human nature. But that's mere contradiction of a claim, you didn’t argue anything directly to show that old authors are in fact hard to understand etc. I don’t think it’s merely cultural continuation. We can likewise read Sun Tzu and recognize ourselves and our psyches in his stories. There is no cultural continuity with European authors there. Perhaps I missed something?
- re-actor 7y ago> Oh. Well your original post was saying that human nature had changed radically over the past few centuries. I dispute the very concept of "human nature", it implies a platonic "human", a base which we can only uncover the details of. While in reality there doesn't appear to be such a thing. > I mentioned the authors as evidence that the stuff they taught about human nature still applies. It kind of does, changes in the "public consciousness" are more often subversive than radical, a lot of concepts Shakespeare popularised or came up with are still in common use, however it's not because he's unlayering the onion of "the human" concept, but because these concepts are useful and haven't been subverted or forgotten. > When you said when we only understand them in a limited way I took that to mean you disagreed with me that the books have practical value still, and thus were not a good marker of an unchanging human nature. But that's mere contradiction of a claim, you didn’t argue anything directly to show that old authors are in fact hard to understand etc. They of course still have practical value, when I say "in a limited capacity" I mean it in a more "glass-half full" way, a lot of context for these works has been lost forever and how a person reading a text understands a word relies more on his entire lifetime of experience than it does on the authors intent, good authors can generally bridge the gap easily, dead authors can't. So information is lost. > We can likewise read Sun Tzu and recognize ourselves and our psyches in his stories. There is no cultural continuity with European authors there. Unless you've brushed up on your ancient Chinese that's not really true, the cultural continuity here is the translator.
- thatcat 7y agoThose works were chosen for you to read because they are relevant to our underlying cultural preceptions. Other possibilities for perception exist.