Summary of Charles Foster's Being a Human

Please note: This is a companion version & not the original book. Book Preview:

#1 I have tried to understand what humans are by immersing myself in the sensations, places, and ideas that characterised the first two periods of human history: the early upper Palaeolithic, when humans were wanderers intimately connected to lots of land and many species, and the Neolithic, when humans settled down and began to own things.

#2 The last period is the Enlightenment, in which humans have strangled themselves with codification and constriction. The universe was no longer pregnant with a soul, but with the laws of nature.

#3 The best hope for us, since Enlightenment reductionism has metastasized so far through our culture’s vital organs, is the Enlightenment itself. Scepticism and rigorous empiricism were central to the original Enlightenment manifesto. We see neither in the citadels of the modern Enlightenment.

#4 We are materially richer than ever before, but we are ontologically queasy. We feel that we’re significant creatures, but have no way of describing that significance. We are laughably maladapted to our current lives.

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