"What’s Left of Human Nature? A Post-Essentialist, Pluralist, and Interactive Account of a Contested Concept. By Maria Kronfeldner."
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Margaret Mead once wrote that “Human nature is potentially aggressive and destructive and potentially orderly and constructive.” (2000[1942], 134) She made this remark while reflecting on contemporary culture in the United States of America—a nation whose history, politics, and policies exemplified the many ways human beings could both flourish and suffer. Mead’s general attitude towards human nature was profoundly interactionist: biology intersects with culture in multitudinous ways to flesh out how human beings interact with the world and with each other. But as the quote makes clear, her attempt at characterizing the concept struggled with the wriggling, never-quite-comfortable, semantics of the phrase ‘human nature’. It is potentially this, probably that, somewhat biological, partly cultural.
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1469-9281