I’ve been braindead all day. I thought it would be a good idea to get up early and write. Unfortunately, whatever progress I made came at the cost of my cognitive faculties. However, I spent much of today reading some interesting material regarding human nature, that is, what it means to be human.
The answer, as far as I understand it, which my public education would condition me towards, would surmount to a declaration that humanity is a false conception, one rooted in some sort of terrible ‘human-centric’ perspective. There is nothing special about homo-sapiens save their intelligence, and a fat lot of good it’s done us: what with all our wars and atomic powers, we’re likely to destroy everything.
It always struck me as silly that we were to accept those contrary beliefs: that mankind has no moral superiority to nature, and at the same time, that mankind is responsible over nature. If mankind is not distinct from nature in some way, how can our actions in any way be contradictory to nature? If we are some aspect of nature, then our actions can never truly be unnatural.
And yet we all know, we all have some intrinsic understanding that we are not fully part of nature, that in some ways, we stand outside the natural. And that, that strange place outside of nature we find ourselves in, seems to be what makes us us.
Tale Told 