Anthropology an Intellectual Tradition and Contemporary Relevance

Abstract

The notion of invariable human nature has been an important subject of enquiry and continues even in the modern times. The relative malleability has been argued in recent centuries by the early mechanists Thomas Hobbes and Jean Jaques Rousseau. As Rousseau stated “We do not know what our nature permits us to be” thinkers like Hegel and Marx argued against invariable human nature. Still more recent scientific perspective such as behaviorism, modern psychology claims to be neutral in this regard. To them human’s origin posses underlying mechanism, having capacities for change and diversity, which ultimately is a violation of the classical philosophical anthropology. The resulting fragmentation, as a consequence, has impacted intellectual enquiry. It is pertinent to say that the new dialectics of change fail to comprehend ethics and moral values, which are associated with higher aim, realization of good life, politics implied to reach agreements on better conditions, and realization of rationality (which engages in enquiry to realize the common good), thereby jeopardizing place of humanity in the cosmos. The new global forces have made people powerless, reduced them to a cog in the environment of uncertainty, ultimately leading to a looming war of all against all that is inexorably destroying the conditions for life. The policies and characteristics of the modern state and their bureaucracies rather accelerate these sequences which may lead to eradication of humanity. In this paper we try to resolve issues of legacy, along with the new dialectical patterns of globalization.