Human Nature
1999–2000
Topic Director: Wendy
Steiner, Richard L. Fisher Professor
of English and Director, Penn Humanties Forum
For humanists, human
nature is a phrase that triggers the most contradictory
hopes and fears. On the one hand, it promises a common
ground among us, belying the indeterminacy that even
the most paradoxical postmodernist finds trying. If
human nature exists, then so does the communication-both
among people and across the range of disciplines. We
have only to learn the parameters of what it is to be
human to explain why language, the arts, social behavior,
and finally everything “human” are as they
are. At last the prospect nears of discovering all knowledge
to be one.
On the other hand,
however, human nature seems to close down individual
freedom and, indeed, the humanities as such. After all
these decades of discovering the political agendas hidden
in essentialism, the invitation is going out once more
— from biologists, psychologists, philosophers,
experts in artificial intelligence — to accept
a set of limits created by an inescapable collusion
of genes and evolutionary adaptation and to join in
a unified account of reality. If deconstruction is silent
on the topic of beauty, biology is not. If relativism
finds no clarity in the ideas of "evil" or
"the monstrous," evolutionary psychology waxes
eloquent on the subject. If Critical Legal Studies treats
the law and social mores as arbitrary power-driven oppressions,
certain moral philosophers welcome them as expressions
of the deepest human needs.
How quickly the notion
of human nature raises the specter of the Two Cultures
and so many other binarisms that have become more wearying
than productive in our research: nature/nurture, nature/culture,
transcendentalist/empiricist, unmediated/mediated, formal/contextual,
determinist/free. Yet we cannot deny, from a historical
perspective at least, the importance of ideas of human
nature in all areas of culture. There is no society
without language, song, storytelling, building. Architectural
projects — public, commercial, private, memorial
— have sprung from historically specific understandings
of human nature, definitions that are apparent in the
choices of material, scale, shape, and historical reference.
The transition from figurative to abstract art came
during a radical redefinition of human nature and led
to a redefinition of the purposes of art and the very
meaning of the primitivist, pastoral, decadent, tragic,
heroic. With the rise of positivism came the rise of
literary realism and naturalism: the use of narrative
to observe and experiment with the "laws of nature."
Moreover, the most
uncompromising postulations of a single, physiologically
determined human nature have been known to coexist with
the most relativist of politics. It is hard to reconcile
Chomsky's nativist arguments in linguistics, for example,
with his leftist activism. Edward O. Wilson, who claims
that every discipline will eventually find a home in
biology, professes a thoroughgoing left-liberalism.
Though it seems all too clear that human nature is a
concept always motivated by ideology, it is not so clear
that that ideology must logically be conservative or
reactionary.
The heroic achievements
of the biological and social sciences in recent years
have led to research into traditional humanistic areas.
This cross-disciplinary leap can be exciting, but its
lack of grounding in humanistic thinking is sometimes
troubling. For example, when psychologists study the
effects of violence by showing experimental subjects
photographs of violence, they are failing to distinguish
pictures from their referents. Similarly, social-scientific
studies frequently treat human beauty as if it were
the same as sexual attractiveness — a trait with
major reproductive advantages — whereas the whole
history of post-Enlightenment aesthetics has rigorously
distinguished beauty from allure. Regardless of one's
feelings about Kantian aesthetics, no humanist would
deal with the topic of beauty without taking Kant into
account.
Under the circumstances,
it seems a pity that humanists have been so silent on
the topic of human nature. We at Penn have begun to
consider it. Accordingly, the Penn Humanities Forum
has set as its topic for 1999-2000 "Human Nature,"
a properly millennialist undertaking.
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Programs & Fellows
1999–2000
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