The right to ignore: An epistemic defense of the nature/culture divide

If we are lucky, we experience ourselves as a unity-as human beings. Yet, the moment in which the phenomenon of “being human” is transferred to science, this unity gets lost. In the disciplinary differentiated science of today, this unity has no home. As an epistemic object (i.e., an entity studied by sciences) human beings get lost. They literally disappear on their way to science. The phenomenon of “being human” becomes cut into pieces, apportioned, fragmented-into an evolved human nature, a culture, an immune system, a neuronal system, a mind, a society, etc. Through this epistemic fragmentation (as I call it) humans become epistemically “available” for science, but not as humans. In this sense, there is no unitary account of being human, no anthropology in the all-inclusive sense, no simple answer to what it means to be human in contemporary science. Evolutionary thinking, anthropology, sociology, psychology, history, philosophy, etc.- provide separate fragments of knowledge about humans, with often complex relations among the fragments.