Perhaps he meant that humans can make tools which they can use to alter nature to their advantage, like building a concrete home instead of a grass hut or making a washing machine instead of going to the river and beating our clothing on rocks to clean them.:shrug:
or making a pen with a digital clock in it instead of just a normal pen Please Register or Log in to view the hidden image! Or even engineering new ways to employ and manufacture snowballs that do away with our previous primitive instincts on the matter Please Register or Log in to view the hidden image!
There might be an argument for snowball makers and clock pens pushing back the parameters of a universe that encroaches on our external and internal comfort zones Please Register or Log in to view the hidden image!
I'm not all that interested in Fraggleian exegesis, since I don't think that Fraggle was using using the phrase "transcend nature" in the same way that I would. To Fraggle, it looks like it means something like 'do something unsual or extraordinary', something that wouldn't have happened had not a human being taken some action. Apparently Fraggle is thinking of 'nature' in sort of an everyday-language sense as referring what exists/happens in the universe apart from human intervention. Nature refers to to the realm of untouched wilderness, as opposed to cities and human artifacts, which aren't natural. An implication seemingly lurking in that kind of view is that human beings are the agents of non-naturalness and are themselves non-natural. As for me, I guess that I'd define 'nature' in a different and perhaps more philosophical way. For me, the word 'nature' refers the physical universe. To be 'natural' is to be part of this universe that we live in and experience, to be subject to its laws and principles. 'Naturalism' is the idea that everything that exists is natural and can be studied by the methods appropriate for studying nature. (Science most obviously.) Naturalism is related to materialism, but broader since it needn't insist that everything that exists is matter. It can admit the reality of space, time and so on. What it does insist on is that the world of nature form a single ontological realm without incursions from outside. Religions often (but not universally) imagine other realms of being different from, and usually superior to this physical plane of nature. There's the Judeo-Christian-Islamic Creator/creation distinction. There's Vedanta's Brahman and maya. There's Neoplatonism's ineffable One and its emanations. Humanity is often imagined as being somehow uniquely related to the higher realm of existence and our religious goal is to win through to it somehow, leaving this lesser world of natural reality behind. That's our salvation.
I think it means we aren't locked as other animals are into evolved behaviors, we have culture and minds that can improvise to a remarkable degree, hence our accelerating development as a society.
As long as one is subject to aging, illness and death, one has not "transcended nature," I would think.
How on earth do snowball makers and clock pens (help us) "transcend nature"? And how on earth does the universe encroach on our external and internal comfort zones if we have to make a snowball with bare hands or carry an ordinary pen and clock?
I'm referring both to external nature, the physical universe in which we must survive, and internal nature, which includes both our physical nature as a species of Great Ape and our psychological/mental/emotional nature, a combination of the fundamental programming of our brains plus the instincts that have accrued over the millennia either through natural selection or genetic bottlenecks. We began to transcend external nature when one of our ancestral species discovered that it was possible to knap flint into blades and points. (Actually other primates have learned to fashion twigs into simple tools, probably before our evolutionary lines split apart since other species still do it. Even a few birds use sticks for digging and sea otters use rocks as hammers.) These new sharp tools allowed those pre-humans to scavenge the meat left on bones by predators, increasing the protein in our diet and allowing our brains to grow larger. I'll come back to this, but a later transcendence of external nature was the invention of clothing (by genuine Homo sapiens) around 70KYA (this is when body lice speciated). This allowed us to thumb our noses at winter weather and even migrate north into snowy climes where the prey animals all come with rich, tasty layers of fat. Back to those ancestral species for a moment... By attaching those flint blades and points to sticks and clubs, they invented weapons that could be used for hunting. Suddenly they didn't have to subsist on nuts and berries and the shreds of meat they could scavenge from the lions' garbage. They could eat a diet that was primarily meat! Now this was a transcendence of our internal nature. Those early hominids were not hunters by temperament. They were gatherers. To suddenly start chasing and killing large animals went against their nature. They had to learn to organize hunting parties, they had to develop ways of preserving meat, they had to study the behavior and migration patterns of the herbivores. None of this came naturally to them. They had to use those uniquely large forebrains to override their instinctive behavior--in other words, to transcend their own nature. Eventually these two transcendences became so thoroughly intertwined that we might as well talk about "transcending nature" without trying to figure out if it's external or internal. This happened at the Agricultural Revolution, the cusp between the Paleolithic and Neolithic Eras. The first extended-family clan of nomadic hunter-gatherers who discovered that they could cultivate plants and grow their own food faced a couple of really agonizing choices. First, if they wanted to take advantage of the first food surplus the planet had ever seen, and transcend external nature by never again being at the mercy of the feast/famine cycle, they had to stop being nomads! Farmers have to stay with their crops and tend them. We're nomads by instinctive programming! Even a few hundred generations haven't been able to change that programming. We yearn to "go on vacation." Sometimes we just quit our job and hit the road. How many other sedentary species of animals do that? Second, we had to stop living in little extended-family units. Tiny farming villages don't grow much of a surplus. By inviting the guys in the next valley to come live with us, we were able to take advantage of division of labor and economies of scale, and make that food surplus large enough to never again worry about a famine. (Yes we've had famines in historical times, but for different reasons that will need their own thread on the History board.) But wait, we hate those guys! During hard times we fight with them, trying to kill them off and appropriate their food for our own survival. We are not programmed to trust and care for strangers! This was arguably the greatest transcendence of our internal nature since the species Homo sapiens arose. Other major transcendences have occurred since the Neolithic. We built houses. We were now almost completely separated from external nature. We learned to make friends with wolves. (Interestingly, since dogs breed through fifteen or twenty generations to every one of ours, their instincts have actually evolved and this multi-species community is now "natural" to them. We built cities. The people we shared our Neolithic villages with weren't really strangers after a while, just people we didn't know as well as our own families. But in a city, we really had to learn to live in harmony and cooperation with completely anonymous strangers. This was quite a stretch for a pack-social species. We established governments. Rather than deferring to a patriarch whom we all knew personally and was probably even a member of our family, we allowed ourselves to be ruled by some guy we never heard of, and a bunch of subordinates who "kept the peace." Today, we are on the verge of building a single planet-wide civilization. Soon we will all be members of the same clan. We respect and work with people on the other side of the planet who are nothing more than abstractions to us. Even more amazing, we have actual "friends" whose names we don't know, with whom we never speak, whom we've never seen, and who communicate with us only by typing on a screen. This is nothing like the life our Paleolithic ancestors lived! We sit in chairs, "cooking with microwaves food that's never seen the soil" (to quote The Fixx), nonetheless feeling like a community because we all watch the same TV shows. And it works--most of the time. I'll once again cite the incident that brought this home to me. When Neda Agha Soltan was gunned down in the streets of Tehran by the agents of a repressive government, hundreds of her people sent out real-time cellphone videos of the event. We Americans cried for her, a person who lived in a country that our government keeps telling us that we don't even like! Country-western singers, representing the most conservative, xenophobic people in America, wrote songs about her! This really is one world. That is what I call transcendence over nature.
But if it's found elsewhere in nature, it is not transcendent; it simply is a part of nature. Humans have the best tools, but we don't have the only ones. Neanderthals wore clothing as well. Again, this is not a transcendence. Nor does opening a milk bottle to a blue tit, or using a doorknob to a cat, and yet they do these things. You've mistaken a method by which humans acted upon an evolutionary impulse for the impulse itself; scavenging was simply the best means to an end--eating. Discovering a new means to that end does not require an "override" of any sort. This is false. Nomadic behavior was again simply the means to an end. We are instinctively programmed to eat, and until we learned how to farm, our food was not stationary. Hence, we had to follow it, and move with the seasons. There's nothing about human programming that demands us to be nomads; it's just one way to procure food. If there was, then permanent settlements never would have existed. Oh what a load of crap. Our nomadic behavior was the result of seasonal availability. Our prey migrated, plants died, and we had to move if we wanted to eat. It had nothing to do with an evolutionary push to be mobile. The desire to go on vacation is simply the desire to relax and be comfortable, in some cases to have an adventure and do something exciting. But one doesn't necessarily have to travel to have any of those things. So many things wrong with this. First, villages were not "invited to come live with us." Villages grew or did not grow depending on what was available there, not because of any other factors. Second, we still don't trust strangers. That hasn't changed. What has changed is our society, which now essentially mandates that you will have to encounter strangers on a daily basis. And we have adapted to this reality. But you wouldn't let a stranger watch your house while you were on one of your evolutionary-impulse vacations, would you? Of course not. We don't start trusting people until they are no longer strangers. And before you even say it, no, our impulse is not simply to kill whoever we don't know. So once more, we do not have transcendence. Not at all. The types of dwellings we build are entirely dependent on the climate in which we live, and are susceptible (to varying degrees) to the elements. This is no different than the bird building a nest, or a beaver building a dam. We still have to endure the elements, we simply have some protection against them. But then hasn't the wolf also transcended nature? I mean, there doesn't seem to be anything altogether special about these transcendent events, given how often they occur, and not simply in humans. Not really. For one, our existence in the presence of absolute strangers is hardly harmonious. I would venture a guess and say you don't live in an apartment building or complex, otherwise you might know just how frustrating and unnerving it can to surround oneself with people who are neither friend nor kin. Secondly, it isn't a stretch at all. We lived in those societies because that's what worked best. Our villages did not simply become cities; they grew into them as it became practical for more people to live in one particular area. We still do that. Depends on what part of the world you live in. But keep in mind that we are a rational, intelligent species. We have the ability to reason, and decide what is best for ourselves. You keep leaving that part out of the equation. That's not likely to ever happen, but even if it is, there would be nothing at all transcendent about it. It would be simply one huge village. Having better amenities due to our technological advancement has nothing to do with transcending nature. Does the cat transcend nature when it turns a doorknob? After all, this is nothing like how their Paleolithic ancestors lived! But how is that transcendent? You say yourself it's one world, so you're admitting our empathy for the woman is based on our instinct to be empathetic for our kin, our familiars. The global media simply expands the size of our village. There's nothing transcendent about that. I don't mean to downplay the achievements of Man, I simply want to demonstrate that we are not doing anything that should not happen, which is what transcendence implies. When we become sedentary rather than nomadic, we are adapting; when we hunt rather than scavenge, we are adapting; when we use microwaves and ovens rather than naked fire, we are adapting. Adaptation is not transcendence. It's amazing, yes, but it's not outside of what we should be capable of. In many cases, the concepts you mention (and sometimes literally the thing itself) happens elsewhere in nature. Transcendence is not the amazing or incredible, it's the impossible.
Besides, Fraggle Rock is implying that a whole species has transcended together. I would think a transcendence is a solo, holy, Orphic trip—not a crammed, plane loaded A380.
I took it to mean that humans have tamed many of the external and internal variables that challenge the survival of mammals.
Some certainly have. The buddhist monks who, through meditation, are able to temporarily shut down the ego centers of their brains have certainly "transcended" their nature(and this is something that just about anyone can do if they choose to). I, myself, transcended my basic nature the other day when I was struck in the face and I didn't strike back. If resisting the fight or flight urge isn't transcending our human nature then nothing is.
Last I checked, there are four automatic responses to threat: 1. fight 2. flight 3. freeze 4. tend and befriend Maybe you just froze. Please Register or Log in to view the hidden image!
I didn't freeze, I was just pissed and none of my instinctual responses would have ended favorably for anyone involved(especially considering that my first instinct was to bite out the woman's jugular vein). No, we humans along with the other Great Apes(albeit to a lesser degree) have long since demonstrated the ability to ignore our basic instincts even if this is an ability that few display.
I wouldn't word it that we transcend nature, but I would say that we transcend physics. We beat gravity to stand up for example. We memorise the past to beat time, and we can calculate the future a bit.
It means: to achieve a step change, through evolution, in brain power and its concomitant increase in awareness, intellect and reason. These attributes are not found in nature until humans evolved, thus early humans transcended their ancestral nature. We effectively transcended evolution itself, and will not likely be subject to natural selection again unless our predators and parasites should also evolve the capability to reason. Same as anywhere, nature is the physical world. The brain is a physical object that is part of that world, and its evolution arises out of a combination of genetics and selection, both of which are natural to the world. Our brains have transcended the natural world and supplanted it with an unnatural world, which only transcendent-brained animals can do.
