Beyond Human Political Behavior to Post-Human Political Behavior
Two Volume Set

Book Abstract

Is political behavior really so significant that, as Aristotle wrote, “man is by nature a political animal”? This positive view on human political behavior can be contrasted with the opposing one by Will Vittery (2010), who critically rebuked that “this is a mistaken take on what is ‘natural’ to a human being. It suggests that simply by living in society is a political act, and argues that society is in itself natural―that man is almost biologically pre-determined to live in societies. Living in society does not necessarily make man political; it merely puts them in a political situation. Rather, society itself is completely man-made,…”

Contrary to these opposing views (and other ones as will be discussed in the book), human political behavior (in relation to enthusiasm and apathy—as well as other dichotomies) is neither possible (or impossible) nor desirable (or undesirable) to the extent that the respective ideologues (on different sides) would like us to believe, such that there is no enthusiasm without apathy (and vice versa), to be explained by the “enthusiasm-apathy principle” (and other ones) in “existential dialectics” (in Chapter Four).

As a reminder, this challenge to the conventional debate does not mean that political behavior, as a field of study, is useless, or that those diverse fields (related to human political behavior)—such as sociology, economics, political science, anthropology, history, philosophy, literary theory, religion, psychology, biology, and so on—should be rejected. (WK 2017) Needless to say, neither of these extreme views is reasonable.

Instead, this book offers an alternative (better) way to understand the future of human political behavior (and related fields) in regard to the dialectic relationship between enthusiasm and apathy (and those in other dichotomies)—while learning from different approaches in the literature but without favoring any one of them (nor integrating them, since they are not necessarily compatible with each other). More specifically, this book offers a new theory (that is, the theory of post-human political behavior) to go beyond the existing approaches in a novel way and is organized in four chapters.

This seminal project will fundamentally change the way that we think about human political behavior (in relation to the dialectic relationship between enthusiasm and apathy—as well as those in other dichotomies) from the combined perspectives of the mind, nature, society, and culture, with enormous implications for the human future and what I originally called its “post-human” fate.