Reflecting the decline in college courses on Western Civilization, Marshall Sahlins aims to accelerate the trend by reducing "Western Civ" to about two hours. He cites Nietzsche to the effect that deep issues are like cold baths; one should get into and out of them as quickly as possible. The deep issue here is the ancient Western specter of a presocial and antisocial human nature: a supposedly innate self-interest that is represented in our native folklore as the basis or nemesis of cultural order. Yet these Western notions of nature and culture ignore the one truly universal character of human sociality: namely, symbolically constructed kinship relations. Kinsmen are members of one another: they live each other's lives and die each other's deaths. But where the existence of the other is thus incorporated in the being of the self, neither interest, nor agency or even experience is an individual fact, let alone an egoistic disposition. "Sorry, beg your pardon," Sahlins concludes, Western society has been built on a perverse and mistaken idea of human nature.
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"In this latest in a series of contentious . . . pamphlets, really, distinguished anthropologist Marshall Sahlins (who is also executive publisher of this series) opposes the Western idea of human nature (at least its Hobbesian branch) as avaricious, pugnacious and destructive, unless severely governed. He cites earlier and non-Western societies in which this view is by no means prevalent. Think, he says, of the many societies in which beasts are considered substantially human rather than humans being substantially beasts."—Martin Levin, Globe & Mail
About the Author
Marshall Sahlins is the Charles F. Grey Distinguished Professor Emeritus of Anthropology at the University of Chicago. The author of numerous books, Sahlins is a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and a member of the National Academy of Sciences.
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9 of 9 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
insightful and thought provoking,
By
This review is from: The Western Illusion of Human Nature: With Reflections on the Long History of Hierarchy, Equality and the Sublimation of Anarchy in the West, and ... on Other Conceptions of the Human Condition (Paperback)
Unlike the other reviewer here, my rating doesn't relate to the degree to which I agree or disagree with this or that in this book, but rather the quality of the book itself. It's very thought provoking, short, insightful, and useful to a reader pondering human nature or other culture concepts. It's also very densely written, and wanders in tone from seriousness to coyness. I suppose the former is to be expected in a short work tackling such a complex topic - the author would no doubt wish to cover all his bases as deeply as possible, hence, dense, sometimes convoluted writing. The latter is an academic tic one may or may not want to forgive. For these reasons I'm rating it less than the five it would otherwise deserve.As to the content, I don't think the other reviewer quite grasped it, although it's hard to really know what she's talking about since he provides no evidence of her own to qualify or back up her simple assertions that what Sahlins is discussing is actually universal. I'm really not sure what she means when she says "it's a well documented aspect of human nature" and "it is not about human nature [but] about human behavior under certain specific conditions." This makes no sense. Sahlins is arguing that the concept of "human nature" as utilized in Western Civilization excludes culturally and socially mediated behaviors, and thus pits an imagined "culture-less human animal and behavior" against the culturally-informed behavior that is dependent on society and circumstances. This is a very strange, very distorting point of view to have. Evidence suggests that, to the extent that there is a base "human nature," it includes social activity and culture, without which no human is fully human. Our pre-human ancestors had culture, which influenced evolution of current humans. In other words, our biology has evolved along with our aptitude for culture, and to speak of "human behavior" is to speak of culturally-informed behavior. So, to claim that Sahlins is writing about some sort of ideology that is couched in "human behavior under certain specific conditions" is in actuality to make his exact point for him; and to say that it is somehow both contingent on specific conditions, and also universal, is oxymoronic. The ideology of "human nature" as separate and below our aptitude for culture is in fact a culturally specific belief on its own. Cheers, Adam
1 of 9 people found the following review helpful:
3.0 out of 5 stars
debatable,
By dune cruiser (riyadh, saudi arabia) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: The Western Illusion of Human Nature: With Reflections on the Long History of Hierarchy, Equality and the Sublimation of Anarchy in the West, and ... on Other Conceptions of the Human Condition (Paperback)
this is an exciting and thought provoking piece by mr sahlins that contains his personal reflections on historical interpretations of a certain kind of human behaviouri, personally, disagree with him on two counts. first, what he labels as the 'western illusion of human nature', that, basically, humans are savage by nature, is not a western illusion. it is an interpretation of observation that, although distributes in space and time unevenly, certainly does not peak in 'the west'. second, it is not 'of human nature'. it is about a particular kind of human behaviour that can occur under certain conditions an intriguing, informative and occasionally challenging read. the three stars reflect not as much the value of the book than, say, the extent of my agreement with it
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