Two Aeon authors on Human Nature

There is a hadith of the Prophet (pbuh) - do not vilify the Aeon- in obedience to which I will confine my criticism to two Philosophy professors who have published an essay on human nature on the Aeon website.

They commence thus-

A strange thing is happening in modern philosophy: many philosophers don’t seem to believe that there is such a thing as human nature.

Since humans. in a state of nature, don't specialise in telling stupid, obvious, utterly useless, lies in exchange for a credential or a salary deriving from the corrupt marketing of the same, it follows that academic philosophers won't pretend to believe in a phusis, or natural order of things, which denies their compossibility. Instead, they will hold- with Aristotle, who like most pedants held every possible position- that nomos, convention, 'artificial reason', rules, or pretends to, all truly human affairs.

What makes this strange is that, not only does the new attitude run counter to much of the history of philosophy,

Nonsense! The history of philosophy features nothing but incompossible substances. That's why everybody has always considered the subject shit.

but – despite loud claims to the contrary – it also goes against the findings of modern science.

Rubbish! If there is a 'human nature' then some minimal set of creodes or developmental paths must exist such that indiscernably identical human beings can be synthesised or simulated. Modern Science would then be univocal in affirming our future as Westworld. This would impact on Financial Markets. Our own fitness landscape would change in a manner that fulfils Science's prediction.

This has serious consequences, ranging from the way in which we see ourselves and our place in the cosmos to what sort of philosophy of life we might adopt.

I see myself as a fat, stupid, loser who might possibly justify my place in the cosmos by some kairotic act of projectile incontinence as might cause Donald Trump, on his State Visit to London, to slip upon my turd, as he alights from the Queen's carriage, so as to bash his brains out upon the Mall's macadam paving.

What serious consequence am I faced with if Human Nature actually exists? I already know I'm shit. So do all philosophers though they may be obliged to pretend otherwise.

But that pretence is not natural at all. It is conventional merely.

Our aim here is to discuss the issue of human nature in light of contemporary biology, and then explore how the concept might impact everyday living.

Your aim here is to shill your own worthless oeuvre.

The existence of something like a human nature that separates us from the rest of the animal world has often been implied, and sometimes explicitly stated, throughout the history of philosophy.

No. What has been asserted is something like a soul which we are endowed with to a higher degree or  to a different telos.

Aristotle thought that the ‘proper function’ of human beings was to think rationally, from which he derived the idea that the highest life available to us is one of contemplation (ie, philosophising) – hardly unexpected from a philosopher.

Aristotle only thought this with respect to a specific pedagogic function of his own- viz. gassing on about good & bad. Since ethics is wholly conventional, not natural, the only question that remains is whether it can be nomothetic, and feature isonomia, or whether it is wholly idiographic, or 'expert'.
Since we do in fact have what look like nomothetic laws- i.e. rigid rules which appear universal- to which however we allow equitable exceptions to prevent injustice by reason of the Law's generality- Aristotle fudges the matter in the manner we all do because the only honourable alternative would be to fudge our pants so as to drive home the only alethic point which can be made in this connection- viz. pedagogues are just big babies- attend to their noetic effusions as you would to an infant's nappies. Do hug them though. Everybody needs love. Say 'Sir, your lectures changed my life!' They like that. Don't tell them you are now homeless. Pretend, as I do, that I'm a fucking Tech billionaire or summat.

The Epicureans argued that it is a quintessential aspect of human nature that we are happier when we experience pleasure, and especially when we do not experience pain.

Really? They argued that did they? Whom with? Was there ever anybody at all who said 'we are unhappier when we experience pleasure and sad when we do not experience pain.'?

What is the fucking point of writing a sentence as stupid as this? Epicurean Economics was a decided advance on what went before.  It rejected the notion that the Oikonomon would work himself to death trying to squeeze the most out of his estate rather than 'satisfice' in operational, purely 'economic' matters while hedging on chrematistic markets.
Like the Stoics, the Epicureans took up a term from literary criticism- enargeia- and interpreted it in a different way from Aristotle. It became a sort of self-certified truth. Utility or Revealed Preference corresponds to this conception of enargeia. Cicero, commending the elegans lascivia of Philodemus, displays enargeia in parrhesia- his vivid language serves a purpose of State of the highest Utility- in his great oration against Piso, Ceasar's father-in-law. A few Centuries later, the gorgeously false Gospel of Nicodemus. too, displays enargeia in teaching Pilate who mocks alethia, that but mummery is his akrebia. It is not the case that a homo economicus exists but, rather, that human beings exhibit an epigenetic creode or canalisation whereby Focal Solutions to coordination problems are saddle-point recoils from such solipsism as is represented by Piso's gross appetites or Pilate's self-serving sophistry.

Thomas Hobbes believed that we need a strong centralised government to keep us in line because our nature would otherwise lead us to live a life that he memorably characterised as ‘solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short’.

Hobbes held no such belief. He could scarcely have done so in an age where no 'strong centralised government' existed anywhere. Also, the guy was a fuckwit. Why quote him? Guy Fawkes inspired the film 'V'. Hobbes inspired... what?

Jean-Jacques Rousseau embedded the idea of a human nature in his conception of the ‘noble savage’. 

Some jack-off has a conception of something. Okay, maybe he does. But how the fuck does he embed the idea of anything at all in that conception? Suppose I'm jerking off to my perfervid conception of the velvety tightness of Donald Trump's asshole. How am I supposed to embed the idea of Donald Trump into my conception such that whenever any random dude has an idea regarding the Donald he also finds my dick up Trump's arse?

The authors know very well what acceptation 'embedding' has within their own imbecilic, semi-literate, community. It is that of Polanyi or Granovetter.  So, fuck are they saying? Rousseau wasn't just Plato's God but he could also travel back in time and create the very Social Institutions which would shape his own tachyonic trajectory?

Confucius and Mencius thought that human nature is essentially good, while Hsün Tzu considered it essentially evil.

WTF?!  The word 'essentially' means, in English, in all possible worlds. Xunzi, like Catholics, Jews, Muslims, Hindus etc, held that costly signals, of a wholly conventional, not natural, sort are required to establish separating equilibria- e.g that between good and evil.

Since Xunzi considered a certain defeasible, or equitably alterable, set of rituals of a wholly feasible- verging on cheap talk- conventional sort, to provide the necessary partition; the illiterate round eyed authors are pointing at a wholly false binary.
Why not simply say that Chinese vaginas go sideways? Not all of them- Confucian cunts are okay, but them Legalist Han Feizi cunts- and Xi is one!- they go sideways big time. So, Donald, you better watch out when Xi sits on your face.

The keyword here is, of course, ‘essentially’.

Which you guys essentially misused because you wrote nonsense in all possible worlds- including ones in which some Chinese cunts go sideways- you stupid as shit, every wideningly round eyed, sphincterless assholes.

One of the obvious exceptions to this trend was John Locke, who described the human mind as a ‘tabula rasa’ (blank slate), but his take has been rejected by modern science.

Yeah. That's what happened. Locke was just rappin' with Modern Science and he goes like 'dude, tabula rasa is gonna be the next big thing in Tablets' and then Modern Science goes into a huddle before returning to say- 'Sorry brah. We gotta reject your take on this. Also we're well stocked on Rohypnol and can tabula rasa the shite out of any co-ed at our parties. Still, nil desperandum. You're thinking Greek. Try Delta Tau.'

As one group of cognitive scientists describes it in 'From Mating to Mentality' (2003), our mind is more like a colouring book, or a ‘graffiti-filled wall of a New York subway station’ than a blank slate.

Yup. Minds are like some of the least important things they produce. The cogitations of Cognitive Scientists, clearly, are their own Brain-turds.

In contrast, many contemporary philosophers, both of the so-called analytic and continental traditions, seem largely to have rejected the very idea of human nature. A prominent example is our colleague Jesse Prinz at the City University of New York, who argues forcefully for what is referred to as a ‘nurturist’ (as opposed to a ‘naturist’) position in his book Beyond Human Nature: How Culture and Experience Shape the Human Mind (2012). More recently, Ronnie de Sousa argued that modern science shows that human nature does not exist and, drawing on Jean-Paul Sartre’s notion of radical freedom, concluded that this favours an existentialist philosophical outlook. We beg to differ.

Why differ with a stupid self-publicist peddling a worthless book? Why not quit competing with him and get a proper job?

What exactly does science tell us about the idea of a human nature?

Science can tell us something about the nature of ideas. It can't tell us about the idea of anything at all. If it could, there would be an 'idea of science' which would contain within itself every alethic finding of all possible scientific research programs. Science has good reasons to doubt that any such ideas exist. Thus we know that the answer to the question posed above is - 'Zero. Nothing to see here. Move along please.'

If we take evolutionary biology seriously, then we certainly should reject any essentialist conception of it, such as Aristotle’s.

We could also reject essentialism by taking Aristotle seriously rather than use him as an Aunt Sally.

There is no immutable, clearly defined ‘essence’ that characterises human beings, and only them, within the whole animal world.

There must be some set of properties which human beings share in common across all possible beings provided some 'buck-stopping' tribunal of human beings is accepted. Thus, a genetically engineered brinjal which can defeat Vandana Siva in a public debate may be accepted as human by a tribunal constituted by Monsanto. However, if Vandanajee gets peckish and orders her cook to fry it up in ghee and then eats it, her votaries may decide a vegetable is always a vegetable,  whether genetically modified or not, and so Monsanto's tribunal would change its mind.

From Charles Darwin onward, the scientific consensus has been pretty clear: we are but one species among millions on Earth, members of a not particularly numerous branch of the tree of life, endowed with unusually large and structurally complex brains.

Everybody has always believed we are smarter than other animals- unless the eat us, in which case our beliefs don't matter.

Our particular lineage gave origin to the species Homo sapiens at least 300,000 years ago, resulting from a long evolutionary period, which unfolded over millions of years from the point of divergence from our most recent common ancestor with the chimpanzees, our closest phylogenetic cousins.

Our lineage originated with a particular species, it did not give it origin.

Put that way, it would seem that biology does indeed do away with any idea of human nature: whatever characteristics our species possesses are the result of a continuous process of evolutionary differentiation from other species of primates, and there is no reason to believe that such process is over, or will be any time soon.

That is irrelevant. What matters is whether we can have a 'buck-stopped' rigid designator for human beings- in which case 'human nature' is well specified. But such a designator would be idiographic and have its own internal quid juris/quid facti resolution mechanism. So Philosophy has nothing to contribute here.

Moreover, people are fond of citing the famous figure that humans and chimpanzees differ ‘only’ in about 1-2 per cent of their genomic sequence, implying that we are not really as special as we’d like to think.

I'm very special. Mummy said so. That's why she sent me to a special school. The authors too are peddling a paideia which is actually a type of 'Special Ed'.

But as Kevin Laland has pointed out in his book Darwin’s Unfinished Symphony: How Culture Made the Human Mind (2017), that small percentage translates into thousands of structural changes at the genetic level, which in turn can be combined to yield millions of ways in which humans are distinct from chimpanzees. Just because the difference is small in percentage, it doesn’t mean it is not both very obvious and highly consequential.

Sadly, it also means the reverse because only the fitness landscape matters. Cultures turn out to be more about Capacitance Diversity than Canalisation. That's why Culture isn't a driver for speciation.

In light of this, we think that the picture emerging from evolutionary and developmental biology is – contrary to the widespread opinion among contemporary philosophers – one that very much supports the notion of human nature, just not an essentialist one.

Essentialism can be a Scientific Research Program. What the authors are saying is it can't be a Philosophical Research Program. But then nothing can. The Principle of Explosion rules every synthetic a priori proposition unless Phenomenology is non empty. But we have no reason, since about the mid Fifties, to believe this is the case.

Human nature is best conceived of as a cluster of homeostatic properties, ie of traits that are dynamically changing and yet sufficiently stable over evolutionary time to be statistically clearly recognisable.

The same thing can be said of Gaia's nature or the nature of the Nicaraguan horcrux of my neighbour's cat or the nature of Donald Trump's comb-over.

These properties include characteristics that are either unique to the human species, or so quantitatively distinct from anything similar found in other animals that our version is unquestionably and solely human.

But only if there is a juristic 'buck stopping' mechanism in which case Philosophy can go hang. Thus iff this rigid designator for Human beings exists such that a set of creodes are buck-stopped as Human Nature, then Philosophers can't subscribe to it because their distinctions correspond to actual differences. Collingwood made this point long ago- but it is there in the Phaedrus.

Take language, for instance. Plenty of other animals (and even plants and bacteria) communicate, meaning that they exchange signals aimed at improving their own or their kin’s survival. But no other living species has anything even remotely like human language, with its complex grammar and high levels of recursion (where a linguistic rule can be applied to the results of the application of the very same rule, and so on). Other animals, such as octopuses, have large, complex brains and nervous systems, but no other animal has both the size (relative to the body) and especially the structural asymmetry and layering of the human brain; for instance, its enormously developed frontal cortex, which is in charge of reward, attention, short-term memory tasks, planning and motivation.

This is a bad example. We communicate with beasts- dogs, cats, even ex-spouses- so as to improve inclusive fitness.
Genetic engineering has opened new horizons- as has A.I- in a manner that makes it unlikely that some humans might not be worse at using language with respect to some other humans than a particular type of genetically modified animal or appliance endowed with A.I.

The list could go on and on, but the basic point is that it is fallacious to state that there are no fundamental differences between humans and other animals just because the boundaries are fuzzy and dynamic (over evolutionary time).

This is only the case if there is some buck-stopping procedure which solves an urgent coordination problem.

As Justice Potter Stewart said, in a case about pornography versus art in 1964: ‘I shall not today attempt further to define the kinds of material I understand to be embraced within that shorthand description; and perhaps I could never succeed in intelligibly doing so. But I know it when I see it.’

Judges aren't philosophers. Their job is to discriminate a deciding ratio on the basis of stare decisis 'artificial reason'. But those judgments are defeasible in a protocol bound fashion. Philosophy, by contrast, is concerned with developing obiter dicta to the point where they compete with the stare decisis ratio. Philosophy, since Socrates, has been about developing both sides of the argument till they are equally persuasive.

A modern biologist and a scientifically informed philosopher could say something very much along the same lines about human nature. We all know it when we see it.

The philosopher can't say that. His job is to imagine a situation where, with equal probability, we might see or not see what was previously buck-stopped and certain.

Now, if human nature is real, what are the consequences from a philosophical perspective? Why should a philosopher, or anyone interested in using philosophy as a guide to life, care about this otherwise technical debate? Let’s explore the point by way of a brief discussion of two philosophies that provide particularly strong defences of human nature and that are aligned with cognitive science: existentialism and Stoicism.

Existentialism means having to grapple with Heidegger's misological critique of Husserl- which had actually misfired for a different reason. That's difficult stuff. Similarly to engage with Stoicism would require a knowledge and appreciation of Greek and Latin literature as well as of developments in modern Set theory which tackles problems like the 'sorites' which the Stoics pondered.

The temptation to link existentialism with the idea of a tabula rasa is understandable. At the heart of existentialism is Jean-Paul Sartre’s idea that ‘existence precedes essence’, meaning that we didn’t choose to be born, but we’re free to figure out what to do about it. Sartre took this very seriously, speaking of freedom as a lack – or a gap – at the heart of consciousness, and claiming that we’re free even when in chains. In one of his more radical statements, he wrote: ‘Never were we freer than under the German occupation. We had lost all our rights, and first of all our right to speak. They insulted us to our faces … They deported us en masse … And because of all this we were free.’ It is perhaps not surprising that Sartre is frequently mocked for overstating the extent to which we are free.

Sartre was a good writer but he was scarcely up to speed on Husserl vs Heidegger. The same was true of the Beaver.
Phenomenology was not shown to be wholly futile till the Wu experiment. Otherwise, it seemed that it could discover a priori synthetic truths- e.g. 'incongruent counterparts'- by means of pure ratocinative 'bracketed' introspection.
Satre and the Beaver may have wanted to have sex with Madam Wu, if they had ever heard of her, but they couldn't understand what she had done. They were ignorant and stupid- i.e. jumped up pedagogues in a country foolish enough to make Philosophy a compulsory subject at High School.

Even Simone de Beauvoir thought he took it too far, particularly when he told her that her seasickness was all in her head. In her autobiography ThePrime of Life (1960), she wrote: ‘If you gave way to tears or nerves or seasickness, [Sartre] said, you were simply being weak. I, on the other hand, claimed that stomach and tear ducts, indeed the head itself, were all subject to irresistible forces on occasion.’

Although de Beauvoir also accepted that existence precedes essence, she was more attuned than Sartre to the ways in which our ‘facticity’ – the facts of our existence – influence our lives. For example, we can’t choose our bodies or the economic and social situations in which we find ourselves, and often we see other people as the immutable banes of our existence. De Beauvoir argues that although we’re not free from our natural condition, it doesn’t define our essence, which is how we create ourselves out of our facticity. We don’t live only to propagate the species as animals do; rather, we are beings who look for meaning in our lives, and we do it by taking risks to overcome ourselves and our situations. This is human nature: perpetually seeking to escape our natural condition, to transcend – surpassing the given – towards self-chosen, concrete goals. But this isn’t at all easy, and is one of the reasons why anxiety is a fundamental theme of existentialism. To be human is to live in ambiguity because we are forever caught in a tension between the facts of our lives and the will to overcome them.

Worthless verbiage! To be human is to shit upon such stupidity- unless you are French and need to get into a University so as to gain white collar employment.

Biology might seem to offer a simple explanation for some limitations. For example, consider the old-school argument that women are ‘naturally’ suited for caregiving roles.

There was no such argument. Some women were excellent care-givers in certain situations. Such women were able to extend the number and type of such situations for economic reasons and thus achieved other, essentially political and sociological, objectives of their own.

Consider Florence Nightingale. The 'lady with a lamp' mythos enabled her, though confined to an invalid's bed, to set up what was essentially a Think Tank which better mobilised statistical and technical information so as to gain a countervailing power over even the War Office! Nightingale used the power and influence she had won for all sorts of other progressive causes- including that of the Indian National Congress. She wrote more perspicaciously about India's economic development- including the problem of Famine Relief- than Amartya Sen. Indeed, she helped end the cycle of famine in Sen's Bengal which only recurred after a transition to Democracy, first in the late Thirties, and then again, in Bangladesh, in the early Seventies.

Donald Trump, similarly, has used the myth of the Property Developer as ultimate Deal Maker, in order to occupy the White House on behalf of Hilary's 'deplorables'.

Nightingale and Octavia Hill and so on were well known to British philosophers and economists. Still, some rejected Female Suffrage- indeed Octavia herself turned hostile- because there is no necessary link between phusis and nomos.

This is both a wrong and a harmful way to think about our nature.

Really? Can it be 'wrong and harmful' to think something in every possible circumstance? If so, Phenomenology would not be empty. Some Categorical Imperative exists.

It’s wrong because, as de Beauvoir points out in The Second Sex(1949), gestating babies is a biological female function, but rearing children is a social commitment.

But, females can raise children without any help from men. Are the authors saying lesbian couples should not be allowed to raise a child because child rearing is 'social' and so at least one man- a father, or brother, or priest- must figure in their household?

And it’s harmful because the assumption that biology sets our destiny is oppressive.

Some people believe that theology sets our destiny. No doubt, our authors would find that oppressive as well. So what? They suffer no harm by it. Furthermore, their pointing to harm done to others is likely to be mischievous and itself harmful.

It may be wrong or harmful for a given person to think a given thing but only under certain highly specific circumstances. However, even then, no actual wrong or harm will occur unless authority, or immunity, has been improperly vested or regulated. But, in that case, better mechanism design- not denouncing thoughts as wrong or harmful- is what is required.

Historically, women have been defined primarily by the same biological functions they share with other animals, tethered in myths about femininity, and robbed of the opportunity to transcend.

Nonsense! There is no history primer which contains sentences similar to - 'Women are animals whose dung can be used to manure the crops. Their pelts provide protection against inclement weather.'

Natural obstacles provide a different sort of limitation. It might be absurd for de Beauvoir to persist with sailing if she vomits constantly, but giving up on her goals because of seasickness is stupid, too.

So what she should do? Give up sailing not because it makes her vomit but so as to strike a blow against Adam Smith's 'deer and beaver' model?

Sometimes, we don’t have the power to break our chains, and we fail in our projects, but resignation is not the answer. To transcend is to recognise our resistances and failures, and to rebel against them creatively.

By writing shite.

This perspective matters because it emphasises that, while there are fixed elements to our being, we are not fixed beings, since we are (or ought to be) free to choose our projects. Neither biology nor natural obstacles limit our futures to a great extent, and how we live out our human nature will vary because we give different meanings to our facticities. An authentic life is about acknowledging these differences, and stretching ourselves into an open future. It does not follow that this openness is unlimited or unconstrained. We are limited, but mostly by our own imagination.

OMG! That's exactly what happened to me when Tracy called me a big fat Lezza! I was limited by my imagination- so my comeback was- 'sod off you big moo,' rather than 'That's not what your Mum called me when I was fisting her last night!'

An interesting contrast here is provided by a philosophy that is in some respects very different, and yet shares surprising similarities, with existentialism: ancient Greco-Roman Stoicism, which has seen a remarkable revival in recent years.

No 'interesting contrast' can arise save where circumstances are similar. Existentialism arose out of the failure, save at the aggregate or stochastic level, of the Principle of Sufficient Reason and the shattered  Universal Peace its Liebniz promised, as well as the dystopian trajectory of the Republics Deists dreamed of. It is associated with a particular phase of the development of the Nation State, which featured the levee en masse & an industrialised total war.

By contrast, , Stoicism only flourished after Sparta's fall- and the Athenian Academy was downgraded to providing slave-tutors for adolescent Roman patricians.

The Stoics thought that there are two aspects of human nature that should be taken as defining what it means to live a good life: we are highly social, and we are capable of reason.

The Stoics were wrong. The two aspects of human nature which determine if humans have a good life are 'Exit' from places where you might get fucked over and 'Entry' to places where you can fuck over anyone who tries to fuck with you.
In the short run, Egypt has its fleshpots, but, long term, Exodus is Gospel.

Therefore, to ‘live according to nature’, as they advised us to do, means to apply reason to the improvement of the human polis.

By being a slave or tutoring a motherfucking Nero.

In turn, the way to accomplish the latter is to improve one’s judgment (the faculty of prohairesis, which distinguishes us from any other animal species), and to exercise the four cardinal virtues of practical wisdom, courage, justice and temperance.

There is only one cardinal virtue- run away from slavery if you can't beat the shite out of your oppressor.

At first glance, it might seem that human nature plays a far more crucial role in Stoicism than in existentialism. Indeed, it is tempting to accuse the Stoics of committing an elementary fallacy, to argue for a particular way of life by appeal to nature. But Seneca, Epictetus and co were excellent logicians, which should make us pause before dismissing their philosophy so quickly.

There are no 'excellent logicians' save those who admit their subject is anything goes. That's something we do know a priori because a priori is itself a logical category and thus has an inbuilt Principle of Explosion such that, once again, anything goes.

On closer examination, it is clear that for the Stoics, human nature played a similar role to that played by the concept of facticity for the existentialists: it circumscribes what human beings can do, as well as what they are inclined to do. But the parameters imposed by our nature are rather broad, and the Stoics agreed with the existentialists that a worthwhile human life can be lived by following many different paths.

Stoicism can have a principle of sufficient reason both for Nature and for Nous, whereas facticity or 'throwness' can't. The Stoics didn't really know what would happen if they went and settled amongst barbarians. The Existentialists did know they could always move to California and start up an Encounter Group or get tenure in a Liberal Arts College.

Indeed, Stoic literature even features a story similar to the debate between de Beauvoir and Sartre on seasickness. It is told by the Latin author Aulus Gellius, who writes about a Stoic philosopher experiencing a severe storm while on a ship. Gellius noticed how the philosopher became pale and trembled in the midst of the storm. Once things had calmed down, he asked the philosopher how come his Stoicism had not prepared him better to withstand those frightening moments. His response is illuminating:
When some terrifying sound occurs, either from the sky or from the collapse of a building or as the sudden herald of some danger, even the wise person’s mind necessarily responds, and is contracted and grows pale for a little while, not because he opines that something evil is at hand, but by certain rapid and unplanned movements antecedent to the office of intellect and reason. Shortly, however, the wise person in that situation ‘withholds assent’ from those terrifying mental impressions; he spurns and rejects them and does not think that there is anything in them which he should fear.

Everybody stops worrying about something which startles them once they realise they are in no danger. Why? There is no sufficient reason linking the unexpected sensory input to any action schemata.  Grazing animals show a like behaviour.

In other words, just as de Beauvoir explained to Sartre, the ‘facticity’ of our biology is here to stay, but we have a choice about how to regard it and manage it. And that’s what philosophy teaches us.

Very true. Such philosophy teaches us something cows already know.

The Stoics grounded that teaching in an approach most famously associated with Epictetus, the 2nd-century slave-turned-teacher who became one of the best-known philosophers of antiquity. He developed a whole ethics based on the idea that we play a multiplicity of roles in life: some of them are given (we are all human beings, sons or daughters of our parents, and so forth), and some are chosen (our careers, whether we wish to have children and become parents or not).

It seems likely that every Indo-European Culture had such a notion two thousand years before this slave started teaching.  But then so did every other culture- save that of the Iyengars of the Kilburn rain-forest. They believe all human beings at birth have only one role- viz. that of making fun of Iyers who happen not to be very good at econometrics and who might plausibly be suspected of putting garlic in the sambar.

How we play these roles is up to us. In Book I of the Discourses, Epictetus discusses the case of two slaves who react differently to the same demeaning situation (having to hold their master’s chamber pot while he’s relieving himself). What determines the difference is how the slaves see themselves as human beings, a concept not that different from the existentialist notion of authenticity. Epictetus concludes the analysis of that example by admonishing his students in a way that Sartre and de Beauvoir might have approved of: ‘Consider at what price you sell your integrity; but please, for God’s sake, don’t sell it cheap.’

Obviously, the smart slave should say 'Wow! That's an amazing turd you've just produced! It is well known, within the turd assaying community, that such a turd signals a dramatic improvement in one's fortunes. Indeed, the commode carrying slave of Octavian exclaimed upon just such a turd on the eve of the Battle of Philippi and the future Emperor, choosing to accept this augury, immediately  rewarded the slave with manumission and a big Estate- thus ensuring the prediction came true.'

Similarly, the editor of Aeon, says to the authors he publishes, 'OMG! What a wonderful turd you have produced here!', and- no doubt- they reward his highly refined coprophagic palate suitably.

It’s not only modern science that tells us that there is such thing as human nature, and it’s no coincidence that a number of popular modern therapies such as logotherapy, rational emotive behaviour therapy and cognitive behavioural therapy draw on ideas from both existentialism and Stoicism. No philosophy of life – not just existentialism or Stoicism – could possibly exist without it.

Charlatanry mobilises everything to justify itself. This does not mean anything is necessary to its existence save a tropism to coprophagy amongst some section of special little snowflakes such as our Credentialised Paideia so cunningly cons.

If we were truly tabulae rasae, why would we prefer certain things to others?

If we weren't, we would never prefer certain things to others. I say 'I prefer eating chocolate to eating shit' precisely because some people do eat shit.  They wouldn't if their mental tablet hadn't a blank where the instruction 'don't fucking eat shit you stupid cunt' should have been.

What could possibly urge us to seek meaning, to build relationships with other people, to strive to improve ourselves and the world we live in?

Mummy urged us and Daddy urged us and teachers and playmates and everybody else urged us. Still some of us end up talking shite and feeding on shite so as to talk more shite.

We do all that because we are a particular kind of intelligent social animal, just as the Stoics thought.

I know a lot of 'intelligent social animals' who are seeking nonsense, not meaning, and destroying relationships with other people on the basis of that nonsense. Their striving worsens the world we live in.

And we do it within the broad constraints imposed by our (biological as well as contingent) facticity, as the existentialists maintained.

We also do whatever it is we do subject to the broad constraints of Astrology and Voodoo, at least according to practitioners of those psilosophies. Stoicism and Existentialism are no different from any other availability cascade in this respect.

There is no single path to a flourishing human life, but there are also many really bad ones. The choice is ours, within the limits imposed by human nature.

Nonsense! If we confine the authors to a steel box which we bury in the ground, they will soon find that they have no choice at all as to how enjoy a flourishing human life.
However, if that were our aim, such an action would be otiose. These guys have fashioned themselves a cage out of coprolites as hard as steel and buried themselves far beneath such ground as upon which anything utile can occur. Their 'human flourishing' is an ignoble coprophagy upon which we can loosen our bowels of wrath or otherwise vent spleen without having injured them by adding materially to their stinky condition.