The HBS hosts ask not what is human nature, but what is at stake in this constant recourse to human nature.

The history of philosophy can in part be understood as one long rumination on the question of human nature. Throughout its history philosophers have put forward multiple definitions of what it means to be human and what sets humans apart from other animals: political animal, rational animal, tool making animal, etc., but these definitions have come under scrutiny for both the way they maintain both hierarchies separating humanity from non-human animals  as well as hierarchies within human societies, as rationality, tools, and politics become instruments of exclusion. Is it possible to dispense with the idea of human nature, or is it an unavoidable question, framing how we understand ourselves in relation to not just animals but also our increasingly intelligent machines? In other words, human nature, can’t live with it, can live without it. 

On this episode we discuss the following:

• Emma Goldman
• This is the quote that Jason butchered from her essay Anarchism: What it Really Stands for? : “But what about human nature? Can it be changed? And if not, will it endure under Anarchism? Poor human nature, what horrible crimes have been committed in thy name! Every fool, from king to policeman, from the flatheaded parson to the visionless dabbler in science, presumes to speak authoritatively of human nature. The greater the mental charlatan, the more definite his insistence on the wickedness and weaknesses of human nature. Yet, how can anyone speak of it today, with every soul in a prison, with every heart fettered, wounded, and maimed? John Burroughs has stated that experimental study of animals in captivity is absolutely useless. Their character, their habits, their appetites undergo a complete transformation when torn from their soil in field and forest. With human nature caged in a narrow space, whipped daily into submission, how can we speak of its potentialities?”
• David Graeber and his idea of “everyday communism”
• Co-host Jason Read wrote more about this idea of everyday communism and the idea of competition on his blog here
• the idea of the posthuman
• Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak and her notion of “strategic essentialism.”
• our episode on Artificial Personhood with Regina Rigi.
• Elon Musk.
• Donna Haraway and her Cyborg Manifesto.
• Spinoza, Gilles Deleuze, and what Deleuze means by an assemblage.
• Star Trek.
• Michel Foucault and his idea of the empirico-transcendental doublet.
• Michael Jackson song “Human Nature” and incorrectly referred to it as a Michael Jackson/Paul McCartney duet. 

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