Beyond Human Nature: Cloud Atlas
The Question of Human Nature in David Mitchell’s Cloud Atlas
… an’ tho’ a cloud’s shape nor hue don’t stay the same it’s still a cloud an’ so is a soul.1
This is how author David Mitchell introduces his central metaphor for the human: complex arrangements of atoms, at once endlessly malleable and yet at the same time defined by an essential essence. It is this tension between conceptions of an inherent human nature and the manifest diversity of human cultural expression that drives and underlies Cloud Atlas’s philosophical meditations. As George Gessert observes in his review of the novel, its scope – both spatial and temporal – allows it to explore ‘the human condition’ in such a way as to
‘suggest patterns that transcend historical circumstance’, and indeed the novel’s very title would seem to indicate that Mitchell is attempting nothing less than a mapping of those underlying inherencies.2
Turning to the contemporary sciences with questions of human nature, one cannot go far without encountering the name Edward O. Wilson. Author of On Human Nature (1978) and father of the body of theory now known as ‘evolutionary psychology’ (a discipline born of out of his own 1975 synthesis, ‘sociobiology’), Wilson has perhaps done more than anybody else in recent decades to empirically ground and theoretically refine the ‘hereditarian’ position on human mental development while simultaneously collapsing its artificial distinction from the seemingly-opposed ‘nurturist’ argument. 3 His work has certainly given the debate an unprecedented prominence in intellectual circles.4
1 David Mitchell, Cloud Atlas (London: Sceptre, 2004), p.324.
2 George Gessert, ‘Cloud Atlas (review)’, Leonardo, 38 (2005), 425-426 (p.425).
3 Edward O. Wilson, On Human Nature (Harvard: Harvard University Press, 1978).
Edward. O Wilson, Sociobiology: The New Synthesis (Harvard: Harvard University Press, 1975).
Regarding his own selection of the terms ‘nurturist’ and
… an’ tho’ a cloud’s shape nor hue don’t stay the same it’s still a cloud an’ so is a soul.1
This is how author David Mitchell introduces his central metaphor for the human: complex arrangements of atoms, at once endlessly malleable and yet at the same time defined by an essential essence. It is this tension between conceptions of an inherent human nature and the manifest diversity of human cultural expression that drives and underlies Cloud Atlas’s philosophical meditations. As George Gessert observes in his review of the novel, its scope – both spatial and temporal – allows it to explore ‘the human condition’ in such a way as to
‘suggest patterns that transcend historical circumstance’, and indeed the novel’s very title would seem to indicate that Mitchell is attempting nothing less than a mapping of those underlying inherencies.2
Turning to the contemporary sciences with questions of human nature, one cannot go far without encountering the name Edward O. Wilson. Author of On Human Nature (1978) and father of the body of theory now known as ‘evolutionary psychology’ (a discipline born of out of his own 1975 synthesis, ‘sociobiology’), Wilson has perhaps done more than anybody else in recent decades to empirically ground and theoretically refine the ‘hereditarian’ position on human mental development while simultaneously collapsing its artificial distinction from the seemingly-opposed ‘nurturist’ argument. 3 His work has certainly given the debate an unprecedented prominence in intellectual circles.4
1 David Mitchell, Cloud Atlas (London: Sceptre, 2004), p.324.
2 George Gessert, ‘Cloud Atlas (review)’, Leonardo, 38 (2005), 425-426 (p.425).
3 Edward O. Wilson, On Human Nature (Harvard: Harvard University Press, 1978).
Edward. O Wilson, Sociobiology: The New Synthesis (Harvard: Harvard University Press, 1975).
Regarding his own selection of the terms ‘nurturist’ and
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