ABSTRACT
My title is ‘The future of human nature’;1 but by this I don’t mean to be asking whether our species will be around much longer. Rather: is there anything more than merely biological to the idea of ‘human nature’? Does it still make good philosophical sense to think so today? If Michel Foucault and his kindred spirits are to be believed, the very idea of ‘man’ is an idea whose time has come and gone. We’re still here; but the idea that ‘we’ have some sort of determinate nature, about which there is anything interesting to be studied and discovered and said, is purported by Foucault to be a nineteenth-century invention that we ought to drop. Nietzsche famously told us that God is dead; and according to Foucault, he ought to have said the same of ‘man’. There is nothing out there that has a divine nature; and there likewise is nothing around here that has a human one. Or rather: there are human natures aplenty on this planet; but all of them are historically contingent affairs – and this supposedly makes nonsense of the idea that there is anything like a blueprint of humanity that we all either do or ought to exemplify.
