Human nature is make-believe
I -
I will try and understand human nature in relation with nature as a whole. I do not believe it possible to separate human nature, from nature. Nature is one great undivided thing, that cannot be understood in terms of meaning or concepts (for it has none). To "know" nature is to be part of it, and that is where true human nature lies, back in our past. It is not good, or evil or anything - all of these moral ideas come much later. Human nature is part of nature, and nature is meaningless...
II -
Every act of language is false. Or at least, it is inaccurate. As we have no absolute definition of anything, when we use language we are using a tool that cannot provide absolute answers. It is always subject to interpretation, always received with our own personal bias, always filtered through our own particular world view. There is no escaping language, it is drilled into us before we have a chance to resist it. This means that we can only experience reality through the lens of a language-using entity.
The 'problem' then is this: Our language does not describe the world as it is. It never truly reaches the essence of what it is we are trying to describe. This means that all of our concepts are incapable of connecting us with the thing we are trying to describe. What we are left with is probability and guesswork, when it comes to understanding one another, or even ourselves!
It gets worse! For this complex world of language exists entirely in our heads and we can take it anywhere we wish, mixing all sorts of fantasies into our realm of probabilities. Our ability to grasp 'reality' or 'nature' with language is in great peril indeed. To summarize: Not only do we not have any total understanding about the things that we are talking about, but the concept of those things only occurs inside our heads - we impose our concepts outwards onto reality.
These are the creative creatures that will rediscover the meaning of human nature? It is not seeming too likely.
III -
We have no hard facts about reality and this makes it subject to human imagination. 'What about 2+2=4? This is absolute knowledge, always testable, always proveable'. I do not think this is so. The entire sum finds its origin inside the mind. There is no two, there is no other two, there is no plus, there is no equals and there is no four, out in the real world. If you see two mobile telephones and you add them to the other two mobile telephones, you get four mobile telephones. However, it is your mind that divided the mobile telephones into two sets of two in the first place. In reality there were four mobile telephones there all along - in fact, no there weren't! There were material things there which we then classified in such and such a way. As such, the sum occurs inside our heads, it is make believe, and can only be proven to work in a realm of make believe - nature does not divide things up into such parts.
IV -
Human nature is now oozing in language, and language is make-believe; the creation of a world projected outwards from the mind and normalized into a 'real world'. We only need to look at the history of civilization, and within our own imaginations, to see a near-infinite array of ideas, deities, mythologies and creativity.
I do not think that this will lead us to relativism (the idea that every viewpoint is equally valuable and/or possible). Just because the fabric of our world - morality being the big one - is imagined and is imprecise, it does not mean that we cannot come to some agreement about what is and is not important. We can still have experts and novices, creatives and technicals, and so on, there just is no absolute certainty involved in any of it.
V -
In terms of natural experiences, these may still be reachable. We still have similar physical bodies to our ancestors, with all of our impulses and instincts intact, for the most part. The feeling of hunger has a certain rawness and earthiness to it. To paraphrase a good friend of mine: 'Sexual excitement is a connection to the cosmos, man.' A return to nature which transcends our make believe creation! These feelings make us pre-historic, taking us back in time for a brief instant. Language has not completely removed us completely from our nature, it has just reduced it to lesser role.
If this is the case, then 'human being' is just a guess, and so is ones own nature. There being a 'nature' for anything is itself a human concept. The only conclusion from this - What is natural is that we do not have a word for. By discussing human nature we have failed to reach it, except in informing ourselves of what we cannot know. Even if we could 'feel it', how would we know we have felt it and not just imagined it?
Pure imagination is the new human nature, defying the reality before us. 'Live in the real world' they say - no, we defy the real world by utilizing language, and so do you sir! Our vessel of communication is not just our natural body, it is this accidental mutation that has learnt to see itself and complicate everything with brilliant abstract flair.
If acting within human nature were our nature, how could we become removed from it? Is being removed from our nature part of human nature?
No. We are the greatest joke this cosmos ever played.
By Selim 'Selim' Talat
The Philosophy Takeaway 'Human Nature' Issue 36
