WHAT THE MAN IS

 excerpt: WHAT THE MAN IS

he couldnt help it he felt proud of her. the eagle was a thief intent on stealing the big fish caught square by the skill of the osprey. he knew that was the skill of the eagle, that it took courage at least equal to the osprey’s to take it from him. and could the eagle invent another way? so he wouldnt refuse the eagle. what about the courage of the osprey’s mate to dive on a dangerous foe? there was no chance he would refuse her. but why values? why an order? a hierarchy? why did he favor the vultures, in comparison to eagles so patient, so polite? wasnt that just a tactic? to avoid danger? werent they all just expressing their genes? and he who had long ago given up killing any animal, even his cabin houseflies, out of some human form of respect, how did he make evolutionary sense of that? for he believed absolutely that darwin above all had got it right. so what genes of his was that expressing? or was it possible to step beyond? to perhaps employ the greater information stored in the memory of his experience, to override genetic expression. but even the ability to do that might be just an expression of another genetic capability, so that free will, if not intentionality, would once again have to be questioned. the idea of islands, of each man being an untouchable island, began to chafe. more and more he had observed his thoughts and actions to be largely genetic. and where free will really ran into trouble was when one faced that influence honestly. it blurred the line most uncomfortably between inherent actions and intentional actions. it could be argued that dna did not really belong to us, we didnt initially and could never during our lifetime choose anything about it, it came down to us as merely the collected surviving strategies of our species and what that really led to was not a discussion of free will at all but a larger and more radical discussion of what exactly constituted an individual. this individual, upon which the moral and governing principles of our modern western states was based, was itself a fiction. there really was no such thing — a person existing unbegotten, without issue from other people or the collected experience of the past, both externally and most importantly, internally — genetically.