Quote of the Day: Man vs Animal (per Rousseau)

[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.”
...
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.”