Your complimentary articles

You’ve read all of your complimentary articles for this month. To have complete access to the thousands of philosophy articles on this site, please

If you are a subscriber please sign in to your account.

To buy or renew a subscription please visit the Shop.

If you are a print subscriber you can contact us to create an online account.

Editorial

Being Human

by Grant Bartley

What is it like to be a human being? There’s one sense in which you already know the answer, of course: your life shows you what it’s like to be a human being. But how would you describe what that life is like? And what universal truths about human life does your experience reveal? What would we say about the human condition if we were to assiduously analyse it? I suggest we can’t answer these questions as well as we’d like to assume.

Science has spawned a whole line of sub-disciplines investigating the nature of human beings – sociology, anthropology, psychology, neurology etc – displaying a spectrum of success, and we may hope, all with bright futures. But even if science were to evolve a sound comprehensive theory of the laws governing human behaviour, this would tell only a quarter of the human story, at most. That is to say, science can describe and test the processes which make us who and what we are, but it does not tell us what is it like to live life.

…