Human Natures: Aristoi in Modernity Week 11

How the Greeks comprehended nature and humans as phenomena of nature is yet to be grasped, incisively and as a whole, by parochial moderns. Salient evidence is seen throughout Plato and Aristotle — and other philosophies, tragedies, comedies, epics, and poetry, political-historical documents — of the following typologies. But they betoken a worldview alien to moderns, not for how we actually think and behave but for how we have been ideologically conditioned to conceive ourselves. —Notoriously the Greeks did not consider humans a rationally substantive topic for philosophy: humans vary from case to case so drastically nothing morally significant or universally true can be said of them in toto. “The human” is not a criteriologically controllable topic like triangles or quantities. Not rigorous science (episteme) but philosophy as art is thus needed to understand human nature, and philosophy must be informed by naturally or intrinsically valid concepts, not merely conventional definitions. Key existential issues thus figure obliquely in Greek philosophy but not at all in our own.