Hieronymus Bosch, Triptych of Garden of Earthly Delights (detail of central panel), c. 1500.
Oil on panel, 220 x 195 cm. Museo del Prado, Madrid.

Between Gods & Beasts: The Struggle for Humanity

Centuries ago, Plotinus famously wrote that humanity was “poised midway between gods and beasts” (Enneads 3.2.8). Some individuals “grow like to the divine,” he asserted, and “others to the brute.” Approximately thirteen hundred years later, Italian Renaissance philosopher Giovanni Pico della Mirandola imagined God telling Adam that he had the power to determine his own nature: “We have made you neither of heaven nor of earth, neither mortal nor immortal, so that you may, as the free and extraordinary shaper of yourself, fashion yourself in whatever form you prefer” (Oration 22). Since antiquity, many different societies, east and west, have pondered the factors influencing whether individuals became fully realized as human beings or something less. This book attends to that history. 

Between Gods & Beasts: The Struggle for Humanity is a transhistorical and transcultural study through literature, philosophy, science, and the arts of the conceptual entanglement of humans, gods, and beasts from classical antiquity to the present. In the west, humanity (humanitas) has often been defined in relation to divinity (divinitas) and to animality understood as ferity (feritas), a base condition which education helped one to overcome. Looking both backward and forward from the humanitas-divinitas–feritas conjunction in Renaissance humanism and related visual, verbal, and kinesthetic cultural production, this book explores past and present narratives about human nature, potential, and creativity, and the possibilities for their corruption and cultivation.

Between Gods & Beasts: The Struggle for Humanity emerges from my course for Stanford’s “Education as Self-Fashioning Program,” in which students are invited to reflect critically on human nature and on historical and contemporary ideas regarding education, self-development, and living well. At present, I envision it as a trade publication.