Immanuel Kant drew a distinction between physiological accounts of human nature – what biology makes of us; and pragmatic accounts – what we can and should make of ourselves. Philosophers have been most interested in the second type of theory, exploring human nature as it expresses itself through our lived experience. Questions of genetic inheritance or nature/nurture are relevant but not central to this discussion.
An understanding of human nature in this pragmatic sense has far-reaching implications for broader questions, particularly concerning ethics and politics. This essay provides a brief introduction to three very different conceptions of human nature.
One of the fullest and most influential accounts of human nature was provided by Plato. His theory is essentially teleological – that is, it assumes an ideal to which we aspire and which allows us to measure our progress as human beings. This position is neatly described in the allegory of the cave (Republic 514a). According to Plato, the human condition is one of ignorance: like the prisoners in the cave, we see only shadows but believe them to be reality. To be liberated from the cave we must proceed towards the light, dismissing appearances as mere illusion and seeking true knowledge. When we emerge from the cave and can see clearly in the sunlight, we have reached our goal, or telos.
The faculty of this enlightenment is reason. It is reason which separates us as humans from the rest of the world and which enables us to discover the truth about the universe. Of course, we often make the wrong decision and our reasoning lets us down, and this is because reason is not the only faculty that motivates us. For Plato, the human soul or psyche has three aspects: reason, spirit (emotions like pride and courage) and appetite (bodily and worldly desires). These three aspects seek knowledge, reputation and material gain respectively, and each can come to dominate our behaviour. Plato uses two famous analogies to describe this inner conflict. In the first, he suggests that a person is composed of a little man (reason), a lion (spirit) and a many-headed beast (appetite), and prescribes how these three creatures should interact:
... we ought to say and do all we can to strengthen the man within us, so that he can look after the many-headed beast like a farmer, nursing and cultivating its tamer elements and preventing the wilder ones growing, while he makes an ally of the lion and looks after the common interests of all by reconciling them with each other and with himself. Republic 589a trans. Desmond Lee
In a similar analogy (Phaedrus 246a) Plato compares the soul to a chariot pulled by a white horse (spirit) and a dark horse (appetite) and driven by a charioteer (reason). In the best life, the charioteer curbs the excesses of the horses and guides the chariot successfully to its destination. Both appetite and spirit have a role to play (the chariot is unable to move without them), but the harmony between the three is maintained by submission to reason. These analogies help explain why sometimes we behave wrongly or experience conflict between different desires, and both indicate that only under the sway of reason can we master ourselves and ascend smoothly to the divine heights.
Plato’s account of human nature is part of a larger framework of thinking. Just as the individual soul must harmonise its competing elements, so must society. A just and functional state is one in which everyone fulfils the role best suited to them: the more spirited protect the state, the more acquisitive engage in trade, and so forth. The job of government is given to the most rational – that is, the philosophers. Only the philosophers have left the cave and see the world as it truly is. For Plato, the universe is essentially rational and true knowledge is to be found not through our senses, but through contemplation of the Forms. These Forms are universals, idealised concepts like beauty and justice that are separate from, and prior to, beautiful things and just states. The model here is mathematics: a mathematician does not derive geometric principles from real, existing lines or circles, but from ideal forms (lines without width, perfect circles). So while other people may engage in just or unjust actions, the philosopher contemplates justice itself and as a result understands the nature of justice completely. The primary Form is Goodness, knowledge of which allows for certainty in moral matters. The philosophers therefore govern the state to create justice through internal harmony, and themselves represent the telos of human nature.
Philosophers have found this account of human nature attractive, not least because it prioritises reason and philosophy in our development. But because of this, Plato’s account appears too elitist: on balance, it seems unlikely that such highly specialised philosophical training is necessary for human goodness. The account also suffers from difficulties common to any dualist account of our nature. Plato posits another transcendent world of Forms, but does not fully explain how contact or acquaintance with this world is possible. The problem of interaction between soul and body is also relevant here – indeed, if the soul is immortal and non-physical it is hard to see how it has ‘parts’ as Plato suggests. More generally, Plato tends to be dismissive of this world and particular human desires: he locates truth and permanence in another realm and exalts reason and transcendent thinking over the individual’s experience. This renders his account impersonal and, to many, unsatisfying.
Thomas Hobbes lived through the violence of the English Civil War and offered a very different account of human nature. Unlike Plato, Hobbes was a materialist: he believed that we are physical creatures – ‘machines’ or ‘engines’, in his own words – whose behaviour can be explained by roughly mechanistic laws. Moreover, there is no ‘Form’ of human nature, only individuals who resemble one another to different degrees. The primary motivation of humans is self-interest, the drive to preserve our existence and seek our own advantage. Hobbes seems to subscribe (albeit inconsistently) to a form of psychological egoism: we are by nature driven to pursue our individual ends and will therefore seek advantage over others any chance we get. The facts of our nature make this inevitable: in a world of limited resources we are forced into competition; the ability of others to cause us harm provokes insecurity or ‘diffidence’ in us; and we therefore pursue power and glory to make us more secure. These facts of our existence, combined with generally poor judgement, inevitably leads to ‘a time of War, where every man is Enemy to every man’.
Hobbes famously wondered how humans would therefore behave if all laws, government and sanctions were removed. He called this ‘the natural condition of mankind’ or, more commonly, the ‘state of nature’. His conclusion is not a happy one:
In such condition there is no place for industry, because the fruit thereof is uncertain: and consequently no culture of the earth; no navigation, nor use of the commodities that may be imported by sea; no commodious building; no instruments of moving and removing such things as require much force; no knowledge of the face of the earth; no account of time; no arts; no letters; no society; and which is worst of all, continual fear, and danger of violent death; and the life of man, solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short. Leviathan I.xiii
Our competitive and egoistic nature is unsuited to society. To prevent such a civil war, Hobbes argues for an absolute sovereign who will safeguard the compromises we must all make for safety and security (the ‘social contract’). Morality therefore emerges from an external code of justice administered by the lawgiver, who enforces a collective rationality that would otherwise be undermined by our individual self-interest.
Later philosophers objected to Hobbes’ account of human nature and his unpalatable political conclusions. Jean-Jacques Rousseau in his Discourse on the Origin of Inequality described his own, very different, version of the state of nature. There is nothing ‘natural’, Rousseau argued, in Hobbes’ state of nature: he has merely presented civilised, sophisticated humans stripped of their laws. But it is society itself which encourages and develops this competitive and self-regarding behaviour, and a truly ‘natural’ human being – with no exposure to social living – would be peaceful, passive and timid. Rousseau acknowledges the importance of self-preservation as a motive, but insists that this is tempered by compassion, a repugnance towards the suffering of others. Humans are therefore naturally peaceful animals (‘noble savages’) endowed with reasoning, which leads them to build communities and ultimately civil societies which then force competitive urges to the surface. As Rousseau notes, along the way other bonds arise quite naturally – family, friendship etc – a fact which seems to contradict Hobbes’ view of humans as ruthlessly individualistic.
David Hume also found fault with the reasoning of philosophers like Hobbes:
... they found that every act of virtue or friendship was attended with a secret pleasure; whence they concluded, that friendship and virtue could not be disinterested. But the fallacy of this is obvious. The virtuous sentiment or passion produces the pleasure, and does not arise from it. I feel a pleasure in doing good to my friend, because I love him; but do not love him for the sake of that pleasure. Of the Dignity or Meanness of Human Nature
Although persuasive to some, the theory of psychological egoism seems too simple to account for the complexity of human motivation. Acts of compassion, self-sacrifice and generosity may be understood in terms of self-interest but such explanations seem limited and unsatisfactory, and evidence from evolutionary biology suggests that co-operation is more prevalent and ‘natural’ than Hobbes suggests.
Man, in a word, has no nature, what he has is — history. José Ortega y Gasset. History as a System
Existentialist philosophers reject all general theories about human nature and turn their attention instead to the individual: it is the uniqueness of each person and their situation in life that is most important. Consequently, there is a focus upon a person’s subjective experience of the world and not – as with other philosophers – on scientific or objective truths. How we experience the world is what matters, not any metaphysical account of the reality of that world (this attention to the contents of human consciousness is called phenomenology). The central experience of any human individual is freedom – freedom to act or not to act, and to choose how to live. It is in the exercise of freedom, and the consequences of this, that an individual’s nature is revealed.
Being human is radically different from being a thing, like a rock or a tree. Existentialists tend to draw a sharp distinction between conscious beings (what Sartre calls being-for-itself) and everything else (being-in-itself). Conscious beings exist differently from inanimate things: they have an awareness of themselves and the world that allows them to shape their lives as they see fit. However, there are no general truths about what sort of lives we ‘ought’ to lead; no Platonic Form to guide us or heavenly father to reveal our path. We are abandoned in the world and thus feel that the universe is ‘absurd’. As Albert Camus put it:
The absurd is born of this confrontation between the human need and the unreasonable silence of the world. The Myth of Sisyphus
The human condition is therefore undetermined and we must provide our own values to live by. We aspire to become God, in a sense, to create a foundation for our own existence. We are thrown into the world and find ourselves free to choose how to live. Sartre describes this situation with the famous claim that for human beings, ‘existence precedes essence’. Unlike a manufactured object (say, a paper knife) we do not have a purpose or essence that shapes our composition: the knife is created purely to cut paper, but humans simply exist and must choose their ‘essence’ through the act of living.
What do we mean by saying that existence precedes essence? We mean that man first of all exists, encounters himself, surges up in the world – and defines himself afterwards. If man as the existentialist sees him is not definable, it is because to begin with he is nothing. He will not be anything until later, and then he will be what he makes of himself. Thus, there is no human nature, because there is no God to have a conception of it... Man is nothing else but that which he makes of himself. Existentialism is a Humanism
The experience of freedom is at the heart of all existentialist thinking. Sartre places great importance on the concept of ‘nothingness’: just as we are aware of the world, we are also aware of what is not the case, which reveals our freedom and the possibility of acting to change the world. Of course, an individual is not free to do the impossible, and there are obvious and unchangeable facts about the world that limit our possibilities: our physiology, language, the time and place we were born, certain socioeconomic factors, and so on. Such ‘facticity’ circumscribes our actions, but how we act within those limits, and how we respond to them, is within our control.
The burden of freedom, of being fundamentally responsible for our own lives, is not easy to carry. At times we feel anguish at the thought of such responsibility, and try to escape this feeling by pretending that, after all, we are not responsible: we blame our character, our genes, our childhood, society, and so on. Such denial of responsibility is ‘bad faith’, and some existentialist philosophers have understood it as the characteristic mode of human existence. However, there is an assumed moral value in accepting our freedom and taking responsibility for our actions and choices – striving for ‘authenticity’ and acting in good faith. For Sartre, authenticity is the full and proper acceptance of what it means to be human because, in the end, each person is “condemned to be free”:
Condemned, because he did not create himself, yet is nevertheless at liberty, and from the moment that he is thrown into this world he is responsible for everything he does. Existentialism is a Humanism
The existentialist account of human nature is appealing but we may question some of its assumptions. The claim of radical freedom runs counter to more scientific approaches which stress the physical and deterministic aspects of our existence, and it is not always clear that we are wholly free to act or react as we wish. Many of our values seem to be a biological given, such as our sexuality or the concern we have for our children, and it is not clear that we can will ourselves to experience different emotional reactions to the world. In his later works, Sartre also began to question the absolute separation of the individual from his environment, recognising that social conditions can significantly narrow the range of human freedom, and seeking to change these conditions through revolutionary (Marxist) politics.