What kind of creature is a human? If we don\'t know what we are, how can we know how to act? In Being a Human Charles Foster sets out to understand what a Human is, inhabiting the sensory worlds of humans at three pivotal moments in our history.
Foster begins his quest in a wood in Derbyshire with his son, shivering, starving and hunting, trying to find a way of experiencing the world that recognises the deep expanse of time when we understood ourselves as hunter-gatherers, indivisible from the non-Human world, and when modern consciousness was first ignited.
From there he travels to the Neolithic, when we tamed animals, plants and ourselves, to a way of Being defined by walls, fences, farms, sky gods and slaughterhouses, and finally to the rarefied world of the Enlightenment, when we decided that the universe was a machine and we were soulless cogs within it..
What kind of creature is a human? If we don\'t know what we are, how can we know how to act? In Being a Human Charles Foster sets out to understand what a Human is, inhabiting the sensory worlds of humans at three pivotal moments in our history.
Foster begins his quest in a wood in Derbyshire with his son, shivering, starving and hunting, trying to find a way of experiencing the world that recognises the deep expanse of time when we understood ourselves as hunter-gatherers, indivisible from the non-Human world, and when modern consciousness was first ignited
