CORE!
My paper question for Core 202: What is your conception of the human nature? On the basis of this conception of human nature, what is the best achievable social order?
My first few sentences:
Many social theorists and philosophers write about their conceptions of human nature. These conceptions each share a common problem: they are closer to the author’s dream of human nature than to actual reality. Even authors who are conscious of their bias, like Nietzsche, tend to quickly abandon their attempts to discern and describe true human nature. I find myself running into this same problem as I try to build my theory of “life, the universe, and everything”. Human nature is hard to describe. People do stupid things for stupid reasons. Any attempt to describe human nature will be forced to ignore some of these irrationalities, plucking the most commonly repeated patterns of thought from the small fraction of observed life, building something which will at best describe only a small part of the motivations and consequences of human nature. So, I’ll be attempting to describe human nature as cynically as possible. I’ll try to focus on the stupidities and illusions we develop, as I find these things provide a much greater motivation than any “big concepts” ever could.
My first few sentences:
Many social theorists and philosophers write about their conceptions of human nature. These conceptions each share a common problem: they are closer to the author’s dream of human nature than to actual reality. Even authors who are conscious of their bias, like Nietzsche, tend to quickly abandon their attempts to discern and describe true human nature. I find myself running into this same problem as I try to build my theory of “life, the universe, and everything”. Human nature is hard to describe. People do stupid things for stupid reasons. Any attempt to describe human nature will be forced to ignore some of these irrationalities, plucking the most commonly repeated patterns of thought from the small fraction of observed life, building something which will at best describe only a small part of the motivations and consequences of human nature. So, I’ll be attempting to describe human nature as cynically as possible. I’ll try to focus on the stupidities and illusions we develop, as I find these things provide a much greater motivation than any “big concepts” ever could.
posted by Fifth at 2:27 PM
3 Comments:
Clever. Is this for Herschler?
I personally rather enjoyed 202. If theory and meta-language fail, at least we're better off understanding why it fails, historically and logically. Language can never truly capture the world in its kaleidoscopic life, (although narrative comes the closest) but I think it is absolutely necessary. Otherwise we'd be dead much sooner than later.
Yeah, Herschler. I'm afraid the rest of the paper doesn't really hold up so well.
Your website has a useful information for beginners like me.
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