10-30-2009, 09:41 AM
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Join Date: Jun 2008
Posts: 835
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Quote:
Originally Posted by kerry
My friend who spurred this discussion is a good example of the difference. He's an alcoholic. The cure for his addiction is complete avoidance of alcohol. That's not possible with food and close to impossible with sex. Hence I think they should be classified differently.
Disorders is fine with me. I agree that humans are natural. I prefer 'second nature' for humanly created things.
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The term isn’t invalidated because of variable kinds of treatments.
Second nature is an interesting term. It’s been used a lot to describe the pliable tendency of humanity. Nietzsche used it in part as a model for the tendency of successive generations to have polar political views.
Freud illustrated almost the same thing but on a different scale. He roughly said that first nature is nature per se, unmediated by human knowing. But nature unknown is just that - an unknown-I-know-not-what, a Kantian noumenon. All people can know is phenomena. Accordingly phenomena is not the thing itself, but just the apprehension of it. From this starting point, all we can know is second nature, nature mediated by thought, and by extension; and all thought occurs inside culture.
Freud went on to say that humans are so adaptable that there is no true nature to humans. (And by doing this he taught generations of therapists to build sand castles in people’s heads.  )
But I debate the validity of these masters. Both Freud and Nietzsche made a distinction between humans and nature. Clearly they both over-thought the plumbing. They were both victims of the Victorian era in this regard that showed man as the repressed but dominating crown of nature and by that desire man was separate from nature.
The growth of craft, art and science, has been more or less consistent since mankind formed groups. These are some of the purest expressions of human nature.
Well that and babies.
The evidence speaks for itself. What greater proof of nature is there than something that is both predictable and which prevails despite all of recorded history’s varying political and social influences and all attempts to objectify itself? Human nature is as predictable as birds chirping in the morning.
At least, that’s my story and I'm stickin’ to it….
Btw, this guy is a trip:
http://www.human-nature.com/human/chap3.html
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