Kleinman, Arthur - The Tanner Lectures on Human Values

[KLEINMAN] Experience and Its Moral Modes 367say about suffering and moral disorder is meant to deny that moralprocesses also involve remorse, regret, endurance, aspiration, courage,transcendence, and other responses that have an ethical andreligious significance. 18An idea of “human nature” often underpins ethical discourse,and not just in the Western tradition, inasmuch as it naturalizesand universalizes ethical decision making. Behind the excruciatingdiversity of cultural contexts and the bewildering inexpediencesof social situations, the claim can be made that human nature providesa universal basis for ethical standards and actions. l9Jean de La Bruyère, writing in the seventeenth century, observed:“In short, Men’s souls and passions change not, they areyet the same still as they were. . . .” Denis Diderot, like the otherEncyclopedists, claimed : “Human nature is the same everywhere;it determines everything that matters in human behavior; scienceis the best way to know human nature; science must thereforegovern ethics and politics.” And reflecting on human nature froma comparative cross-cultural perspective that capaciously encompassesboth Brazilian aboriginal shamans and Parisian academicmandarins, Claude Lévi-Strauss insists: “the outer differences conceala basic unity.” 20 In psychology, in economics, in medicine,A. <strong>Kleinman</strong>, and N. Ware (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1994) ;Tala1 Asad, “On Torture, or Cruel, Inhuman, and Degrading Treatment,” in <strong>Kleinman</strong>et al., Social Suffering, pp. 285-308; J. W. Bowker, Problems of Suffering inthe Religions of the World (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1970) ; andWei Ming Tu, ed., <strong>The</strong> Living Tree: <strong>The</strong> Changing Meaning of Being ChineseToday (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1994).<strong>Kleinman</strong>, “Everything That Really Matters.”19 It is not my purpose here to comprehensively review the idea of humannature. It has, of course, an ancient provenance, even if Michel Foucault claimedthat in its eighteenth-century form of human nature underwriting the rights of manit is a historically recent arrival. During the nineteenth century especially it gotcaught up with the ramifying cultural discourse on natural history, which increasinglylent to it a biological significance, as in the natural history of plants, animals,and diseases (see N. Jardine, J. Secord, E. Sparry, eds., Culture of Natural History[Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 1996]).20 <strong>The</strong> quotations from La Bruyère, Diderot, and Lévi-Strauss are cited inTzvetan Todorov, On Human Diversity in French Thought (Cambridge, Mass.:Harvard University Press, 1993), pp. 3, 24, 61, respectively.