Thanks for the feedback! I was also interviewing a few months ago and really loved the interactive learning platform Codecademy offers. However, I really wanted to know who my teachers were so I could pick and choose the ones I liked. That got me thinking about this project.
"But one man is possessed by an avarice that is insatiable, another by a toilsome devotion to tasks that are useless; one man is besotted with wine, another is paralyzed by sloth; one man is exhausted by an ambition that always hangs upon the decision of others, another, driven on by the greed of the trader, is led over all lands and all seas by the hope of gain; some are tormented by a passion for war and are always either bent upon inflicting danger upon others or concerned about their own; some there are who are worn out by voluntary servitude in a thankless attendance upon the great; many are kept busy either in the pursuit of other men's fortune or in complaining of their own; many, following no fixed aim, shifting and inconstant and dissatisfied, are plunged by their fickleness into plans that are ever new; some have no fixed principle by which to direct their course, but Fate takes them unawares while they loll and yawn—so surely does it happen that I cannot doubt the truth of that utterance which the greatest of poets delivered with all the seeming of an oracle: 'The part of life we really live is small.'"
Absolutely incredible that his words can speak to someone 2000 years later and make them feel something in the core of their essence. Thanks for sharing this really helped me with some things this morning.
I know right?! The language is simple and entertaining.
There's also a hilarious passage about a wealthy guy who gets carried everywhere, and becomes so numbed by luxury that he can't tell whether he's sitting down or not.
If you like Seneca's work, check out Boethius's "Consolation of Philosophy" -- astonishing how every part of it is still relatable, despite having been written around 600-700AD. I never got a liberal arts education but I've been told that Boethius's writing was the link that helped the Western world re-discover the stoics like Seneca. His resolution of the conflict between an all-knowing God and individual free will is more convincing to me than anything else I've read (to be fair, very little) on the matter.
Human nature hasn't changed probably in thousands of years. Our tools and possibilities did but if you'd swap a few people around in time (of course, ignoring the shock of the change) they'd fill their shoes the same way.
I don't agree entirely. Our physical bodies may not have changed much (also not entirely true but a different discussion).
But the fabric of thought and knowledge has changed immensely.
When a human is born today, to caring parents, they will have entirely different experiences, stories, teachings than their 1000 year old counterpart, and these shape their brain and mind immensely.
What is "human nature" if not what we become as we grow?
Even our instinct to survive has changed, and is very varied (from survivalist trump types to hippies and beyond probably).
There's no reason to debate "who would survive if the world was so-and-so" it's interesting, but not important in discussion what human nature means.
So, let's swap people from today and the earliest homo sapiens:
Newborns with type 1 diabetes
- Only the one from the past survives
5 year old healthy kids:
- They'd probably do fine, assuming the one from today can adapt their immune system (and vice-versa).
10 year old healthy kids:
- Probably already issues here, I'd not bet on the modern kid.
30 year old person:
- Not betting on the modern one, might be they can integrate themselves into the group, but it might become apparat that they're not carrying their weight, and ousted.
- The one from old, if they manage to learn our language, that'd be success, they'd probably end up in prison or an institution.
I often wonder if it is true that human nature is unchanging. The proposal comes up often in political debates, but there is not really the place to have an informed discussion about human nature.
It seems to me that human nature has changed quite a lot in the last few hundred years. Examples would be the change in how we view other humans, slavery is regarded as barbaric now, we have the declaration of human rights and equality for women and people of different sexuality etc.
If we accept the definition "fundamental dispositions and traits of humans" then I wouldn't consider those examples to qualify, as they are not sufficiently fundamental in my view. They are closer to social norms. If we experienced a wholesale global economic collapse, I could easily see our great-grandchildren retuning to those and other barbaric norms.
Just to join in: since it's "human nature", I think it's reasonable to consider only things which are relatively universal / innate, not learned things like social norms.
2,000 years is very little time on a genetic timescale, I wouldn't expect to see many changes. Some, sure, but not much.
But that's education and society that can steer the human nature, rather than human nature itself. And the proof is in the fact that slavery, human rights violations (even with support from the law and society), gender and sexual discrimination are still very much alive even in countries that ostensibly have a more forward thinking.
If you take a number of modern humans and put them in a Bronze Age setting you will get Bronze Age humans. Our genetics stayed pretty much the same and education just reigns in and steer our human nature.
The spectrum reached by "human nature" is probably very similar to what it was 2000 years ago. The actual occurrence of each possible value of it seems to change widely just in a few centuries; some times in decades.
Those are technological changes. Once technology made slavery obsolete, it was banned. Once technology meant women could be as productive as men, and could control reproduction at will, they were given equality.
Have you read many ancient Roman manuscripts? Human nature may not have changed but I found the vast majority of texts completely unrelatable - both due to content and prose. Seneca and a few other philosophers/authors are the exception.
I haven't really. But keep in mind that a manuscript is just the world as seen through the author's eyes and mind, not the world. So I'm not saying that the writing style hasn't changed in 2 millennia, rather that the people themselves are the same once you drill beneath the thin layer of change from education and society.
I find texts written by my conationals a century or 2 ago already hard to relate to, also modern ones written by people from cultures very different from mine.
> So I'm not saying that the writing style hasn't changed in 2 millennia, rather that the people themselves are the same once you drill beneath the thin layer of change from education and society.
We've been debating the nature versus nurture question since philosophy was a concrete concept with no visible light at the end of the tunnel. Many people, myself included, would strongly disagree with the latter half of that statement.
> myself included, would strongly disagree with the latter half of that statement
In your earlier comment you seemed to be in perfect agreement:
> Human nature may not have changed
This echoes my sentiment that nurture may change from one generation to the next but nature stays the same. Our traits that stubbornly stay the same probably come from our nature, while the ones that change easier over generations or centuries come from nurture. This isn't about which one is more important in defining you. Fresh out of the womb humans have probably been the same for many, many millennia. Like x86 CPUs running newer and newer software.
“Let each of us examine his thoughts; he will find them wholly concerned with the past or the future. We almost never think of the present, and if we do think of it, it is only to see what light it throws on our plans for the future. The present is never our end. The past and the present are our means, the future alone our end. Thus we never actually live, but hope to live, and since we are always planning how to be happy, it is inevitable that we should never be so.”
This meshes well with my current view - within the constraints of our "normal" perception, the only thing that exists at any one given time is the present. The past exists as memory, and the future doesn't exist yet. This may end up not being true to objective reality, but that doesn't even matter. It certainly helps me appreciate existence itself. It also makes me want to help other people have a pleasant in-the-moment experience.
Also "On Tranquility of Mind," and if you're willing to put the time "Letters from a Stoic."
One thing I do find a little overdone in the Stoics is the constant focus on death. There's a great recent book about Montaigne called "How to Live" and I think it does a great job of describing how Montaigne took the best parts of Stoicism but also created his own humanistic take on living.
There are many sentiments in that book that are highly relatable and one marvels at how long ago they were written. Of course, there's also a fair share of things to recoil from.
