open call

For the autumn issue of Mosaïek, we’ll explore HUMAN/NATURE. Through this short essay, we hope to inspire and encourage you to join us in our exploration of this theme. A theme like human nature can be taken in a myriad of directions, from questions concerning humanity’s self-understanding to questions about our relationship with nature. With that breadth in mind, we want to establish some common ground: a shared starting point that might help us approach the idea of human nature without taking too much for granted, and from which you’re free—and encouraged—to roam in whatever direction you’re inspired to. The common ground we’re looking for isn’t a suggestion of what to think about human nature—a served-up conclusion you’re expected to swallow—but rather a cautious reflection on how we might think about it.

Before we can recognize something as an expression of human nature, or invoke human nature to explain it, we must already have some conception of what human nature is. When you’ve formed a concept of something, it conditions your sensitivity to experience and the way you organize it. We form concepts through our ongoing involvement in the world; our concepts therefore bear the imprint of the experiences, practices, languages, and social environments through which they take shape.

Suppose, through experience, you’ve gradually come to think that people are fundamentally selfish. Once formed, that idea becomes part of how you make sense of what you experience; what you already believe about human nature affects what becomes salient in what you encounter and what you infer from it. You may be especially capable of noticing selfishness, particularly cases that resemble those that informed your initial understanding of the concept. An understanding of selfishness can also help you reason about what you encounter, and the concept itself can become an object of inquiry.

However, a concept you formed in response to your experiences can subsequently harden into an assumption through which you organize experience in ways that affirm it. The understanding you’ve formed helps you make sense of experiences but becomes limiting when it ceases to be answerable to them—when new experiences and information no longer prompt its revision. An act of generosity might strike you as an attempt to gain approval, affection as a form of self-interest, cooperation as something people engage in only when it benefits them.

Your concepts of selfishness and human nature may make these interpretations seem not only explanatory but self-evident: people do that because they’re selfish, and people are selfish because that’s just human nature. The issue here is not that we use concepts to render the world around us intelligible, but that they can begin to function as dead ends: when treated as exhaustive explanations of experience, they hold us back from inquiring further into it. Yet a concept need not end an inquiry. It can just as readily begin one. Instead of settling on a particular conception of human nature and imposing it on how we understand ourselves, others and the world around us, we can use the concept to generate questions. The idea of human nature opens onto a family of questions, one that branches in different directions as we inquire further.

Your particular reading of the theme shapes the path along which you pursue the topic. The idea of human nature seems to imply that there is something shared across human beings. In light of that assumption, one might come upon questions such as: What makes us human? How should we relate to what we take to be human in ourselves and one another? How do the societies we live in shape human potential? Which human capacities do they cultivate, and which do they leave less developed? By reading the slash in human/nature as a juxtaposition of human and nature, a different set of questions comes into view: Why do certain cultural traditions imagine “nature” as something outside us? How else might we imagine our relationship with nature? What becomes possible if we stop imagining human life as separate from the environments that sustain it? Those questions, however, are just examples. The point is that a concept can open many different lines of inquiry; it is up to you to pursue those that draw your interest.

What we hope to have shown is that turning our attention back on the concepts through which we understand the world can loosen assumptions that have come to seem self-evident. In becoming more aware of the concepts we’ve formed, and in reflecting on and revising them, we open up new possibilities for understanding and inquiry. You’re free to explore those possibilities through whatever creative form best suits your interests and strengths. We mean that as openly as it sounds: whether your way into the theme is written, visual, performative, documentary, abstract, or something harder to categorize, we’re curious to see where you take it. We encourage you to discover which questions the theme inspires you to explore, and to pursue them with creativity and curiosity!


questions to -> hello@mosaiekmagazine.nl
submissions to -> submissions@mosaiekmagazine.nl