What is a human being exactly?

This is a question that is answered, in one way or another, in the thinking and writing that occurs within any particular cultural epoch. In this web presentation I want to set out what I think these answers have been in the sequence of periods in the West inaugurated by the rise of Modern science.

As I begin the project I myself am much clearer about some conceptions and some issues than I am about others. Maybe people will be prepared to help.

In speaking of ‘cultural epochs’ and ‘successive periods’ I am already committed to the idea that ways of thinking sort themselves into strata – as taught, in the stratum I belong to myself, by Thomas Kuhn, by Michael Polanyi and most influential as far as I personally am concerned, by Michel Foucault. The history of ideas is to be understood as a succession of paradigms or, for Foucault, épistèmes. There is much that is difficult with this fecund idea, not least the dramatic implication that different periods make little or no sense to each other, not an encouraging thought at the outset of such a project as this. My plan is to try it out nonetheless.

The cuts I think the meat falls into are these: following the Renaissance, the Early Modern, from Descartes to Hume; following the early Modern, the Romantic, from Herder to Hegel; thereafter the 19th Century, from Liebig to Bernard; and the twentieth from Cannon to Turing and beyond.

The borderposts in this periodisation honour a mix of disciplines, highlighted because the responsibility for thinking about the human being is one of the things that shifts. In the early modern period, theology and its secular form, philosophy, think of themselves as authoritative: then, under Romanticism, the poets and writers. After that it is the voice of science that is heard: chemistry, which tells us that the human being is a self-constructing self-maintaining chemical plant, and in the twentieth century the conception that we are flows of information, latterly conceived of as a ‘program’ in principle indifferent to the particular piece of hardware upon which it runs, and indifferent even to the type.

I start off at any rate in hopes that this division of the past will help make sense of our changing ways of thinking about the human being. But at the outset perhaps I should admit one large hesitation.

The thing I myself am clearest about is that the conception of the human being embraced by the 18th Century was not the conception that characterised the thought of the century succeeding. If to the 18th Century the human being was a glider, the 19th Century bolted into it an engine. But between the two frameworks as I have identified them, Early modern and 19th Century, I have suggested there lies another - Romanticism. Is Romanticism a framework in its own right I wonder, with its own distinctive picture of the individual or is it better seen as a transition, between 18th and 19th Centuries, between Hume and Liebig? - A transition that Charles Babbage achieved in a moment, one might argue, when the idea struck him that an Analytical Engine with its central mill would be an improvement upon the Difference Engine with its trains of cogs organised in two-dimensional simplicity.

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Revised 07:05:05

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Conceptions of the Human Being in the West