human nature10 quotes

“The Hero Cycle, wherever found, is a story of ‘fitness’ in the Darwinian sense: a blueprint for genetic ‘success’. Beowulf leaves... Ivan leaves... Jack leaves... the young Aboriginal on Walkabout leaves... even the antique Don Quixote leaves, And these Wanderjahre, and combats with the Beast, are the story-teller’s version of the incest taboo; whereby a man must first prove ‘fitness’ and then must ‘marry far.

In practice, it scarcely matters whether myths are the coded messages of instinct, whose structures will reside in the central nervous system, or tales of instruction handed down from the Year Dot. One point cannot be emphasised too strongly. Seldom, if ever, in myth, is it desirable, morally, for a man to kill a man in cold blood.”

“What characterizes man is not any unity which is finally, perfectly, achieved, but the activity and effort undertaken in view of unity, the action by which he progresses toward communion without ever completely realizing it.”

“How often in our frustrations with trying to solve the mysteries of mind do we comfort our questions with anatomy, real or fancied, and think of a thought as a particular neuron or a mood as a particular neurotransmitter! It is a temptation born of exasperation with the untestableness and vagueness of all the above solutions. Away with these verbal subtleties!”

“O, What a world of unseen visions and heard silences, this insubstantial country of the mind! What ineffable essences, these touchless rememberings and unshowable reveries! And the privacy of it all! A secret theater of speechless monologue and prevenient counsel, an invisible mansion of all moods, musings, and mysteries, an infinite resort of disappointments and discoveries. A whole kingdom where each of us reigns reclusively alone, questioning what we will, commanding what we can. A hidden hermitage where we may study out the troubled book of what we have done and yet may do. An introcosm that is more myself than anything I can find in a mirror. This consciousness that is myself of selves, that is everything, and yet nothing at all—what is it?”

“At the core of every moral code there is a picture of human nature, a map of the universe, and a version of history. To human nature (of the sort conceived), in a universe (of the kind imagined), after a history (so understood), the rules of the code apply.”

“A human life is composed of performances, and each performance is a disclosure of a man’s beliefs about himself and the world and an exploit in self-enactment. He is what he becomes; he has a history but no ‘nature’. This history is not an evolutionary process or a teleological engagement; there is no ‘ultimate man’ hidden in the womb of time or prefigured in the characters who now walk the world.”

“Our moral values, our emotions, our loves are no less real for being part of nature, for being shared with the animal world, or for being determined by the evolution that our species has undergone over millions of years. Rather, they are more valuable as a result of this: they are real. They are the complex reality of which we are made. Our reality is tears and laughter, gratitude and altruism, loyalty and betrayal, the past that haunts us and serenity. Our reality is made up of our societies, of the emotion inspired by music, of the rich intertwined networks of the common knowledge that we have constructed together. All of this is part of the self-same ‘nature’ that we are describing. We are an integral part of nature; we are nature, in one of its innumerable and infinitely variable expressions. This is what we have learned from our ever-increasing knowledge of the things of this world.”

“Man is no simpleton, ‘naturally good’ and stupid, and not a semi-ape with technical tendencies, as Haeckel describes him and Gabriel Max portrays him. Over these caricatures there still falls the plebeian shadow of Rousseau.

No, the tactics of his living are those of a splendid beast of prey, brave, crafty, and cruel. He lives by attacking and killing and destroying. He wills, and has willed ever since he existed, to be master.”

“The animal of prey is the highest form of mobile life. It implies a maximum of freedom from others and for oneself, of self-responsibility, of independence, and an extreme of necessity where that self can hold its own only by fighting and winning and destroying. It imparts a high dignity to Man, as a type, that he is a beast of prey.”

“There are no ‘men-in-themselves’ such as the philosophers prattle about, but only men of a time, of a locality, of a race, of a personality type, who contend in battle with the given world and through or fail, while the universe moves slowly on with a godlike unconcern. This battle is life, and life in the true Nietzschean sense of a cruel, pitiless, relentless battle deriving from the Will to Power.”