I'd Rather Just Devolve, Thank You: Gilgamesh, Enkidu, and the Ambiguous State of Nature
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Thomas Hobbes famously used the State of Nature as a rhetorical device to justify his version of political society. By depicting the condition of humans without laws he enlisted the imagination of his reader to witness the horrors of a human world absent political order, creating in the reader a subjectivity receptive to Hobbes’s particular vision of sovereignty as supreme authority. But if Hobbes’s treatment of the State of Nature was profoundly unique, Leviathan was hardly the first text to make use of the asocial potential of humans in the service of a higher vision of the human good. In fact the first extant literary text in human history, the Epic of Gilgamesh, gives a vivid portrayal of the uncivilized human through the character of Enkidu, the rival and friend of Gilgamesh, as it reveals to its reader the human place in the cosmos. Examining the figure of Enkidu and the relation between his initial role as friend-to-animals and enemy of human civilization and his subsequent transformation into the fully human friend of Gilgamesh, we see a very different picture of political subjectivity than that portrayed in State of Nature tradition. Using the recent work of Giorgio Agamben as a foil in viewing this text, I argue that in Gilgamesh we find a concept of humanity that is both more porous and more tenuous than that seen in Hobbes and other State of Nature thinkers (though perhaps approaching Rousseau). Enkidu presents the spectacle of a living transitional figure between nature and culture who celebrates the achievements of political order while at the same time revealing (and lamenting) the costs of becoming human. In presenting to its readers this liminal personage the Epic is an education in the tragic sacrifice of animality and nature, both within and without. This sacrifice opens a gulf between humans and nature, but also renders both the linkages and discontinuities between the natural and political worlds highly visible, creating a political subjectivity that is more paradoxical and open to revision than we see in later social contract thinkers. Reading Gilgamesh reveals a vision of politics as the art of domestication, but it is a domestication whose explicitly tragic quality is an open invitation to question the norms of the human political order.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.006 | 0.015 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.006 | 0.005 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.004 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.003 | 0.001 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".