In the latest lecture of his course Anamorphic Encyclopedia, Andrey Velikanov explores our human nature.
Can we ever give the human a precise definition? Plato argued that a man is a creature that has two legs and no feathers. Then, Diogenes plucked a cockerel and said to his students, ‘Here’s a man according to Plato.’ So Plato had to update his definition. ‘With broad, flat nails,’ he added. And still today, humans are struggling to define themselves. Let us take a lamp, like Diogenes, and join the quest for human nature.
“…nothing entitles us to assume that man has a nature or essence in the same sense as other things. In other words, if we have a nature or essence, then surely only a god could know and define it, and the first prerequisite would be that he be able to speak about a ‘who’ as though it were a ‘what.’ The perplexity is that the modes of human cognition applicable to things with ‘natural’ qualities, including ourselves to the limited extent that we are specimens of the most highly developed species of organic life, fail us when we raise the question: And who are we? This is why attempts to define human nature almost invariably end with some construction of a deity, that is, with the god of the philosophers, who, since Plato, has revealed himself upon closer inspection to be a kind of Platonic idea of man.” (Hannah Arendt. Vita Activa or The Human Condition).