timelets

“The true criteria for differentiating man and animal were to be sought elsewhere. Rousseau came to locate the difference in terms of man’s liberty of action, what he called ‘perfectibility’ – broadly speaking, the capacity to improve oneself over the course of a lifetime; whereas the animal is guided from the outset by ‘instinct’ – is, in a manner of speaking, perfect ‘from the start’, from birth.”
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Man, on the contrary, has the capacity to forge a personal history, whose progress is by definition open-ended and unlimited."

--- Luc Ferry. “A Brief History of Thought.”