Human nature refers to the distinguishing characteristicsâ€"including ways of thinking, feeling, and actingâ€"which humans tend to have naturally.
The questions of whether there truly are fixed characteristics, what these natural characteristics are, and what causes them are among the oldest and most important questions in philosophy and science. The concept of human nature is traditionally contrasted not only with unusual human characteristics, but also with characteristics which are derived from specific cultures, and upbringings. The "nature versus nurture" debate is a well-known modern discussion about human nature in the natural science.
These questions have particularly important implications in economy, ethics, politics, and theology. This is partly because human nature can be regarded as both a source of norms of conduct or ways of life, as well as presenting obstacles or constraints on living a good life. The complex implications of such questions are also dealt with in art and literature, the question of what it is to be human.
Overview
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The concept of nature as a standard by which to make judgments is traditionally said to have begun in Greek philosophy, at least as regards the Western and Middle Eastern languages and perspectives which are heavily influenced by it.
The teleological approach of Aristotle came to be dominant by late classical and medieval times. By this account, human nature really causes humans to become what they become, and so it exists somehow independently of individual humans. This in turn has been understood as also showing a special connection between human nature and divinity. This approach understands human nature in terms of final and formal causes. In other words, nature itself (or a nature-creating divinity) has intentions and goals, similar somehow to human intentions and goals, and one of those goals is humanity living naturally. Such understandings of human nature see this nature as an "idea", or "form" of a human.
However, the existence of this invariable and metaphysical human nature is a subject of much historical debate, continuing into modern times. Against this idea of a fixed human nature, the relative malleability of man has been argued especially strongly in recent centuriesâ€"firstly by early modernists such as Thomas Hobbes and Jean-Jacques Rousseau. In Rousseau's Emile, or On Education, Rousseau wrote: "We do not know what our nature permits us to be". Since the early 19th century, thinkers such as Hegel, Marx, Kierkegaard, Nietzsche, Sartre, structuralists, and postmodernists have also sometimes argued against a fixed or innate human nature.
Charles Darwin's theory of evolution has changed the nature of the discussion, confirming the fact that mankind's ancestors were not like mankind today. Still more recent scientific perspectivesâ€"such as behaviorism, determinism, and the chemical model within modern psychiatry and psychologyâ€"claim to be neutral regarding human nature. As in much of modern science, such disciplines seek to explain with little or no recourse to metaphysical causation. They can be offered to explain human nature's origins and underlying mechanisms, or to demonstrate capacities for change and diversity which would arguably violate the concept of a fixed human nature.
Classical Greek philosophy
Philosophy in classical Greece is the ultimate origin of the Western conception of the nature of a thing. According to Aristotle, the philosophical study of human nature itself originated with Socrates, who turned philosophy from study of the heavens to study of the human things. Socrates is said to have studied the question of how a person should best live, but he left no written works. It is clear from the works of his students Plato and Xenophon, and also by what was said about him by Aristotle (Plato's student), that Socrates was a rationalist and believed that the best life and the life most suited to human nature involved reasoning. The Socratic school was the dominant surviving influence in philosophical discussion in the Middle Ages, amongst Islamic, Christian, and Jewish philosophers.
The human soul in the works of Plato and Aristotle has a divided nature, divided in a specifically human way. One part is specifically human and rational, and divided into a part which is rational on its own, and a spirited part which can understand reason. Other parts of the soul are home to desires or passions similar to those found in animals. In both Aristotle and Plato, spiritedness (thumos) is distinguished from the other passions (epithumiai). The proper function of the "rational" was to rule the other parts of the soul, helped by spiritedness. By this account, using one's reason is the best way to live, and philosophers are the highest types of humans.
Aristotleâ€"Plato's most famous studentâ€"made some of the most famous and influential statements about human nature. In his works, apart from using a similar scheme of a divided human soul, some clear statements about human nature are made:
- Man is a conjugal animal, meaning an animal which is born to couple when an adult, thus building a household (oikos) and, in more successful cases, a clan or small village still run upon patriarchal lines.
- Man is a political animal, meaning an animal with an innate propensity to develop more complex communities the size of a city or town, with a division of labor and law-making. This type of community is different in kind from a large family, and requires the special use of human reason.
- Man is a mimetic animal. Man loves to use his imagination (and not only to make laws and run town councils). He says "we enjoy looking at accurate likenesses of things which are themselves painful to see, obscene beasts, for instance, and corpses." And the "reason why we enjoy seeing likenesses is that, as we look, we learn and infer what each is, for instance, 'that is so and so.'"
For Aristotle, reason is not only what is most special about humanity compared to other animals, but it is also what we were meant to achieve at our best. Much of Aristotle's description of human nature is still influential today. However, the particular teleological idea that humans are "meant" or intended to be something has become much less popular in modern times.
For the Socratics, human nature, and all natures, are metaphysical concepts. Aristotle developed the standard presentation of this approach with his theory of four causes. Every living thing exhibits four aspects or "causes": matter, form, effect, and end. For example, an oak tree is made of plant cells (matter), grew from an acorn (effect), exhibits the nature of oak trees (form), and grows into a fully mature oak tree (end). Human nature is an example of a formal cause, according to Aristotle. Likewise, to become a fully actualized human being (including fully actualizing the mind) is our end. Aristotle (Nicomachean Ethics, Book X) suggests that the human intellect (νοÏÏ‚) is "smallest in bulk" but the most significant part of the human psyche, and should be cultivated above all else. The cultivation of learning and intellectual growth of the philosopher, which is thereby also the happiest and least painful life.
In Chinese thought
Human nature is a central question in Chinese philosophy. Human nature was considered by Confucius and Mencius to be essentially good. From the Song dynasty the theory of the original goodness of human beings dominated Confucian thought. However, Hsun Tzu taught that human nature was essentially evil. As suggested by these contrasting views, the question of human nature has generated a long debate among Chinese thinkers.
Christian theology
In Christian theology, there are two ways of "conceiving human nature". The first is "spiritual, Biblical, and theistic", whereas the second is "natural, cosmical, and anti-theistic". The focus in this section is on the former. As William James put it in his study of human nature from a religious perspective, "religion" has a "department of human nature".
Various views of human nature have been held by theologians. However, there are some "basic assertions" in all "biblical anthropology".
- "Humankind has its origin in God, its creator."
- "Humans bear the 'image of God'."
- Humans are "to rule the rest of creation".
The Bible contains no single "doctrine of human nature". Rather, it provides material for more philosophical descriptions of human nature. For example, Creation as found in the Book of Genesis provides a theory on human nature.
Catechism of the Catholic Church in chapter "Dignity of the human person" has article about man as image of God, vocation to beatitude, freedom, human acts, passions, moral conscience, virtues and sin.
Created human nature
As originally created, the Bible describes "two elements" in human nature: "the body and the breath or spirit of life breathed into it by God". By this was created a "living soul", that is, a "living person". According to Genesis 1:27, this living person was made in the "image of God". From the biblical perspective, "to be human is to bear the image of God".
Genesis does not elaborate the meaning of "the image of God", but scholars find suggestions. One is that being created in the image of God distinguishes human nature from that of the beasts. Another is that as God is "able to make decisions and rule" so humans made in God's image are "able to make decisions and rule". A third is that mankind possesses an inherent ability "to set goals" and move toward them. That God denoted creation as "good" suggests that Adam was "created in the image of God, in righteousness."
Adam was created with ability to make "right choices", but also with the ability to choose sin, by which he fell from righteousness into a state of "sin and depravity". Thus, according to the Bible, "humankind is not as God created it".
Fallen human nature
By Adam's fall into sin, "human nature" became "corrupt", although it retains the image of God. Both the Old Testament and the New Testament teach that "sin is universal". For example, Psalm 51:5 reads: "For behold I was conceived in iniquities; and in sins did my mother conceive me." Jesus taught that everyone is a "sinner naturally" because it is mankind's "nature and disposition to sin". Paul, in Romans 7:18, speaks of his "sinful nature".
Such a "recognition that there is something wrong with the moral nature of man is found in all religions". Augustine of Hippo coined a term for the assessment that all humans are born sinful: original sin. Original sin is "the tendency to sin innate in all human beings". The doctrine of original sin is held by the Catholic Church and most mainstream Protestant denominations, but rejected by the Eastern Orthodox Church, which holds the similar doctrine of ancestral fault.
"The corruption of original sin extends to every aspect of human nature": to "reason and will" as well as to "appetites and impulses". This condition is sometimes called "total depravity". Total depravity does not mean that humanity is as "thoroughly depraved" as it could become. Commenting on Romans 2:14, John Calvin writes that all people have "some notions of justice and rectitude ... which are implanted by nature" all people.
Adam embodied the "whole of human nature" so when Adam sinned "all of human nature sinned". The Old Testament does not explicitly link the "corruption of human nature" to Adam's sin. However, the "universality of sin" implies a link to Adam. In the New Testament, Paul concurs with the "universality of sin". He also makes explicit what the Old Testament implied: the link between humanity's "sinful nature" and Adam's sin In Romans 5:19, Paul writes, "through [Adam's] disobedience humanity became sinful". Paul also applied humanity's sinful nature to himself: "there is nothing good in my sinful nature."
The theological "doctrine of original sin" as an inherent element of human nature is not based only on the Bible. It is in part a "generalization from obvious facts" open to empirical observation.
Empirical view
A number of experts on human nature have described the manifestations of original (i.e., the innate tendency to) sin as empirical facts.
- Biologist Richard Dawkins in his The Selfish Gene states that "a predominant quality" in a successful surviving gene is "ruthless selfishness". Furthermore, "this gene selfishness will usually give rise to selfishness in individual behavior".
- Child psychologist Burton L. White, PhD, finds a "selfish" trait in children from birth, a trait that expresses itself in actions that are "blatantly selfish."
- Sociologist William Graham Sumner finds it a fact that "everywhere one meets "fraud, corruption, ignorance, selfishness, and all the other vices of human nature". He enumerates "the vices and passions of human nature" as "cupidity, lust, vindictiveness, ambition, and vanity". Sumner finds such human nature to be universal: in all people, in all places, and in all stations in society.
- Psychiatrist Thomas Anthony Harris, MD, on the basis of his "data at hand", observes "sin, or badness, or evil, or 'human nature', whatever we call the flaw in our species, is apparent in every person". Harris calls this condition "intrinsic badness" or "original sin".
Realistic view
Liberal theologians in the early 20th century described human nature as "basically good" needing only "proper training and education". But the above examples document the return to a "more realistic view" of human nature "as basically sinful and self-centered". Human nature needs "to be regenerated ... to be able to live the unselfish life".
Regenerated human nature
According to the Bible, "Adam's disobedience corrupted human nature" but God mercifully "regenerates". "Regeneration is a radical change" that involves a "renewal of our [human] nature". Thus, to counter original sin, Christianity purposes "a complete transformation of individuals" by Christ.
The goal of Christ's coming is that fallen humanity might be "conformed to or transformed into the image of Christ who is the perfect image of God", as in 2 Corinthians 4:4. The New Testament makes clear the "universal need" for regeneration. A sampling of biblical portrayals of regenerating human nature and the behavioral results follow.
-
- being "transformed by the renewing of your minds" (Romans 12:2)
- being transformed from one's "old self" (or "old man") into a "new self" (or "new man") (Col.3:9-10)
- being transformed from people who "hate others" and "are hard to get along with" and who are "jealous, angry, and selfish" to people who are "loving, happy, peaceful, patient, kind, good, faithful, gentle, and self-controlled" (Galatians 5:20-23)
- being transformed from looking "to your own interests" to looking "to the interests of others" (Philippians 2:4)
Total transformation
The goal is to raise/transform human nature to a "higher level" than "before the Fall", a level in which people will no longer sin. Theology holds that this goal is not reached in this life where always "human nature is deficient". Thus, the goal cannot be reached until after one dies.
There are two views of reaching the goal in an intermediate state between earth and heaven: one Protestant, the other Roman Catholic. According to both views, the Christian goal of the transformation of sinful human nature will be met. The goal is that people will be "conformed to or transformed into the image of Christ who is the perfect image of God".
Protestant view
Randy Alcorn says that "In heaven there will be no evil desires or corruption." Thus, because everyone's "human nature is deficient", no one can go to heaven immediately after death. Between death and the "final destination" (a sinless "New Earth"), there is an intermediate state: a temporary "intermediate Heaven". In the resurrection from this temporary state, "human nature" will be restored to "the state of its ultimate perfection". The resurrected inhabitants of the final Heaven will be "so constituted or reconstituted" that they cannot sin because they do not want to.
Catholic view
Jerry L. Walls agrees with the Protestant view that sinful human nature requires a "complete transformation" before admission into heaven. Earthly "regeneration begins this transformation" but does not complete it. Thus, as with the Protestant perspective, an intermediate state between earth and heaven is required. In Catholic doctrine, the intermediate state is called Purgatory, where the souls of those who have died in a state of grace but without having yet satisfied the temporal punishment for their respective sins. Purgatory is a "process of transformation" to fit its residents for heaven. The collection of souls residing in Purgatory is known as the Church Penitent.
Early Modern Philosophy
One of the defining changes that occurred at the end of the Middle Ages was the end of the dominance of Aristotelian philosophy, and its replacement by a new approach to the study of nature, including human nature. In this approach, all attempts at conjecture about formal and final causes were rejected as useless speculation. Also, the term "law of nature" now applied to any regular and predictable pattern in nature, not literally a law made by a divine lawmaker, and, in the same way, "human nature" became not a special metaphysical cause, but simply whatever can be said to be typical tendencies of humans.
Although this new realism applied to the study of human life from the beginningâ€"for example, in Machiavelli's worksâ€"the definitive argument for the final rejection of Aristotle was associated especially with Francis Bacon. Bacon sometimes wrote as if he accepted the traditional four causes ("It is a correct position that "true knowledge is knowledge by causes". And causes again are not improperly distributed into four kinds: the material, the formal, the efficient, and the final") but he adapted these terms and rejected one of the three:
But of these the final cause rather corrupts than advances the sciences, except such as have to do with human action. The discovery of the formal is despaired of. The efficient and the material (as they are investigated and received, that is, as remote causes, without reference to the latent process leading to the form) are but slight and superficial, and contribute little, if anything, to true and active science.
This line of thinking continued with René Descartes, whose new approach returned philosophy or science to its pre-Socratic focus upon non-human things. Thomas Hobbes, then Giambattista Vico, and David Hume all claimed to be the first to properly use a modern Baconian scientific approach to human things.
Hobbes famously followed Descartes in describing humanity as matter in motion, just like machines. He also very influentially described man's natural state (without science and artifice) as one where life would be "solitary, poor, nasty, brutish and short". Following him, John Locke's philosophy of empiricism also saw human nature as a tabula rasa. In this view, the mind is at birth a "blank slate" without rules, so data are added, and rules for processing them are formed solely by our sensory experiences.
Jean-Jacques Rousseau pushed the approach of Hobbes to an extreme and criticized it at the same time. He was a contemporary and acquaintance of Hume, writing before the French Revolution and long before Darwin and Freud. He shocked Western civilization with his Second Discourse by proposing that humans had once been solitary animals, without reason or language or communities, and had developed these things due to accidents of pre-history. (This proposal was also less famously made by Giambattista Vico.) In other words, Rousseau argued that human nature was not only not fixed, but not even approximately fixed compared to what had been assumed before him. Humans are political, and rational, and have language now, but originally they had none of these things. This in turn implied that living under the management of human reason might not be a happy way to live at all, and perhaps there is no ideal way to live. Rousseau is also unusual in the extent to which he took the approach of Hobbes, asserting that primitive humans were not even naturally social. A civilized human is therefore not only imbalanced and unhappy because of the mismatch between civilized life and human nature, but unlike Hobbes, Rousseau also became well known for the suggestion that primitive humans had been happier, "noble savages".
Rousseau's conception of human nature has been seen as the origin of many intellectual and political developments of the 19th and 20th centuries. He was an important influence upon Kant, Hegel, and Marx, and the development of German idealism, historicism, and romanticism.
What human nature did entail, according to Rousseau and the other modernists of the 17th and 18th centuries, were animal-like passions that led humanity to develop language and reasoning, and more complex communities (or communities of any kind, according to Rousseau).
In contrast to Rousseau, David Hume was a critic of the oversimplifying and systematic approach of Hobbes, Rousseau, and some others whereby, for example, all human nature is assumed to be driven by variations of selfishness. Influenced by Hutcheson and Shaftesbury, he argued against oversimplification. On the one hand, he accepted that, for many political and economic subjects, people could be assumed to be driven by such simple selfishness, and he also wrote of some of the more social aspects of "human nature" as something which could be destroyed, for example if people did not associate in just societies. On the other hand, he rejected what he called the "paradox of the sceptics", saying that no politician could have invented words like "'honourable' and 'shameful,' 'lovely' and 'odious,' 'noble' and 'despicable'", unless there was not some natural "original constitution of the mind".
Humeâ€"like Rousseauâ€"was controversial in his own time for his modernist approach, following the example of Bacon and Hobbes, of avoiding consideration of metaphysical explanations for any type of cause and effect. He was accused of being an atheist. He wrote:
We needn't push our researches so far as to ask "Why do we have humanity, i.e. a fellow-feeling with others?" It's enough that we experience this as a force in human nature. Our examination of causes must stop somewhere.
After Rousseau and Hume, the nature of philosophy and science changed, branching into different disciplines and approaches, and the study of human nature changed accordingly. Rousseau's proposal that human nature is malleable became a major influence upon international revolutionary movements of various kinds, while Hume's approach has been more typical in Anglo-Saxon countries, including the United States.
Natural science
As the sciences concerned with humanity split up into more specialized branches, many of the key figures of this evolution expressed influential understandings about human nature.
Charles Darwin gave a widely accepted scientific argument for what Rousseau had already argued from a different direction, that humans and other animal species have no truly fixed nature, at least in the very long term. However, he also gave modern biology a new way of understanding how human nature does exist in a normal human time-frame, and how it is caused.
E. O. Wilson's sociobiology and closely related theory of evolutionary psychology give scientific arguments against the "tabula rasa" hypotheses of Hobbes, Locke, and Rousseau. In his book Consilience: The Unity of Knowledge (1998), Wilson claimed that it was time for a cooperation of all the sciences to explore human nature. He defined human nature as a collection of epigenetic rules: the genetic patterns of mental development. Cultural phenomena, rituals, etc. are products, not part of human nature. Until now, these phenomena were only part of psychological, sociological, and anthropological studies. Wilson proposes that they can be part of interdisciplinary research.
See also
References
Further reading
- Introduction and Updated Information on the Seville Statement on Violence
- www.human-nature.com
- Debate at Newcastle University on Steven Pinker's book The Blank Slate
- Abel, Donald C., ed. Theories of Human Nature: Classical and Contemporary Readings. New York: McGraw-Hill, 1992.
- Arnhart, Larry. Darwinian Natural Right: The Biological Ethics of Human Nature. Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 1998.
- Benthall, Jonathan, ed. The Limits of Human Nature. London: Allen Lane, 1973.
- Berry, Christopher J. Human Nature. Basingstoke: Macmillan Publishers, 1986.
- Cantril, Hadley. Human Nature and Political Systems. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1961.
- Chomsky, Noam. Powers and Prospects: Reflections on Human Nature and the Social Order. London: Pluto Press, 1996.
- Chomsky. Noam & Michel Foucault, The Chomsky-Foucault Debate: On Human Nature (Full Text) (The New Press, 2006)
- Coward, Harold. The Perfectibility of Human Nature in Eastern and Western Thought. Albany: State University of New York Press, 2008.
- Cumming, Robert Denoon. Human Nature and History: A Study of the Development of Liberal Political Thought. 2 vols. Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1969.
- Curti, Merle E. Human Nature in American Thought: A History. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1980.
- Davies, James C. Human Nature in Politics: The Dynamics of Political Behaviour. New York: John Wiley and Sons, 1963.
- Forbes, Ian, and Steve Smith, eds. Politics and Human Nature. London: Frances Pinter, 1981, ISBNÂ 0861873319.
- Freud, Sigmund, The Future of an Illusion (Norton).
- Sigmund Freud, A Philosophy of Life, Lecture XXXV, The Question of a Weltanschauung (Hogarth Press, 1933).
- Freyberg-Inan, Annette. What Moves Man: The Realist Theory of International Relations and Its Judgment of Human Nature. New York: SUNY Press, 2004.
- Fruehwald, Edwin Scott. Law & Human Behavior. Vandeplas, 2011.
- Geras, Norman. Marx and Human Nature: Refutation of a Legend. London: Verso, 1983.
- Habermas, Jürgen. The Future of Human Nature. Cambridge: Polity, 2003.
- Hacker, P. M. S. Human Nature. The Categorial Framework. London: Blackwell Publishing, 2007.
- Heinze, Andrew R. Jews and the American Soul: Human Nature in the Twentieth Century. Princeton and Oxford: Princeton University Press, 2004.
- Hewitt, Martin. Welfare and Human Nature: The Human Subject in Twentieth Century Social Politics. Basingstoke: Macmillan, 2000.
- Hume, David, A Treatise on Human Nature (Oxford University Press, 2007, originally 1739/1740).
- Jaggar, Alison M. Feminist Politics and Human Nature. Sussex, UK: Harvester Press, 1983.
- Kaplan, Morton A. Justice, Human Nature, and Political Obligation. New York: Free Press, 1976.
- Loptson, Peter. Theories of Human Nature. 3rd ed. Peterborough, ON: Broadview, 2006.
- Low, Albert. 2008. The Origin of Human Nature: A Zen Buddhist Looks at Evolution, Sussex Academic Press. ISBNÂ 978-1-84519-260-0
- Miller, Martin A., Freud and the Bolsheviks: Psychoanalysis in Imperial Russia and the Soviet Union (New Haven, CT 1998).
- Niebuhr, Reinhold. The Nature and Destiny of Man, Vol. 1: Human Nature. London: Nisbet, 1941.
- Orudzhev, Zaid. Human Nature and the Sense of History. Moscow: Librocom, 2009. (Russian edition).
- Paul, Ellen Frankel, Fred Dycus Miller, and Jeffrey Paul, eds. Ethics, Politics, and Human Nature. Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1991.
- Pennock, J. Roland, and John W. Chapman, eds. Human Nature in Politics. New York: New York University Press, 1977.
- Pinker, Steven. The Blank Slate: The Modern Denial of Human Nature. New York: Norton, 2002.
- Pojman, Louis P., Who Are We? (Oxford University Press, 2005).
- Pompa, Leon. Human Nature and Historical Knowledge: Hume, Hegel and Vico. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002.
- Rosen, Stephen. War and Human Nature. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2005, ISBNÂ 9780691130569.
- Sarles, Harvey B. Language and Human Nature (University of Minnesota Press, 1985).
- Sayers, Sean. Marxism and Human Nature. London: Routledge, 1998.
- Schleidgen, Sebastian/Jungert, Michael (ed.): Human Nature and Self Design. Paderborn: Mentis, 2011.
- Schuett, Robert. Political Realism, Freud, and Human Nature in International Relations: The Resurrection of the Realist Man. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010.
- Smith, David Livingstone. The Most Dangerous Animal: Human Nature and the Origins of War. New York: St. Martin's Press, 2007 ISBNÂ 0312537441.
- Stephens, William O., ed. The Person: Readings in Human Nature. Upper Saddle River, NJ: Pearson, 2006.
- Stevenson, Leslie, and David L. Haberman. Ten Theories of Human Nature. 4th ed. New York: Oxford University Press, 2004.
- Stevenson, Leslie, The Study of Human Nature, 2nd ed. (Oxford University Press, 1999).
- Unger, Roberto Mangabeira. Passion: An Essay on Personality. New York: Free Press, 1986
- Wells, Robin Headlam, and Johnjoe McFadden, eds. Human Nature: Fact and Fiction. London and New York: Continuum, 2006.
- Wilson, Edmund O., On Human Nature (Harvard University Press, 2004).
External Links
- "Human Nature", BBC Radio 4 discussion with Steven Pinker, Janet Radcliffe Richards & John Gray (In Our Time, Nov. 7, 2002)