A Brief History of Human Nature

The comic lists several philosophical attempts to define what makes humans distinct. It moves from Plato’s “featherless biped” and Aristotle’s “rational animal” to Descartes, Schopenhauer, Nietzsche, Sartre, Wittgenstein, and Derrida, each framed as a different answer to the same question.

It also adds a joke at the start and end, first presenting the line about humans being created to stare at computer screens for 8 hours a day, then ending with the claim that postmodernists deny a fixed human nature because it is shaped by social context.

Reading notes

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• A comic gathers philosophical attempts to define what is human.
• Plato is remembered with the formula “featherless biped”, ridiculed by Diogenes with a plucked chicken.
• Aristotle appears with the idea that man is a “rational animal”.
• Descartes is presented as someone who attributed soul and consciousness only to humans, even denying pain in other animals.
• Schopenhauer sees the human experience as suffering because desires and needs are never fully satisfied.
• Nietzsche highlights the capacity to extend the will over time through promises made to oneself and kept.
• Sartre treats freedom as an essential trait of the human being.
• Wittgenstein points to language as the most singular and defining characteristic.
• Derrida and other postmodernists deny a fixed human nature and link it to social context.