Human Nature and the Human Condition

Throughout history human beings have attempted to produce theories of knowledge and learning. Some of the most basic questions such theories have attempted to answer are: What is knowledge? Where does knowledge come from? And how do we know what is true is true? Plato theorized that only things that do not change, that are immutable, can be known. Limitations of the human senses and perception have always played into theories on knowing. So, too, has human capacity for ration and more often than not conceptions of ôGod.ö Augustine and Descartes used the premise of Cogito ergo sum, ôI think; therefore, I am.ö Modern philosophers like Bertrand Russell theorized that all knowledge that exists is empirical, a posteriori, and derived from experience. Others argue in favor of the existence of a priori knowledge.

In order to live our lives, we must often ask ourselves a number of different questions like: What is knowledge? What is the source of Knowledge? How do we know knowledge when we find it? What are the limitations of knowledge? And how do we apply this knowledge to our lives in a meaningful manner? It is these kinds of questions and their answers that former Columbia University professor Joseph Wood Krutch (1959) focused on in his collection of essays entitled Human Nature and the Human Condition. Though first published in 1959, KrutchÆs exploration of human nature and the human condition is highly relevan

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l democracy serves to do is distract from the real truths by holding us as true anything that is popular in the majority, even a scant majority as the past two presidential elections in the U.S. demonstrate. This tends to conceal absolute morals as much as any other distorting philosophy. As Krutch (1959) argues, ôIf the normal is only the average; if the good life is whatever the majority thinks (or has been persuaded to think) that it is; if what men should do is whatever they do do; then it must follow that the desirable is whatever is most widely desired and that ædemocracyÆ means that what the majority admires is excellenceö (118). In other words, any number of values or morals espoused by politicians is subject to being scrutinized not as something that is of real or absolute moral value but as something conjectured to gain the most popularity and, therefore, the most votes. In our commercial and exploitative surroundings, even in 1959, Krutch maintains that we have lost the ability to sustain focus or attention long enough to become well educated. Our rapid dissemination of mountains of information in the contemporary technology age only compounds a problem that Krutch maintains was present more than four decades ago.
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Approximate Word count = 3604
Approximate Pages = 14 (250 words per page)

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