Nature and Human Nature
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He published with Friedrich Engels Manifest der Kommunistischen Partei , commonly known as The Communist Manifesto , the most celebrated pamphlet in the history of…. Humans have free will and determine their own destinies….
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Yet most human concepts are expandable way beyond their present state, so that human experience could be infinitely richer than it is. When human beings suffer from discontent and inner tension they, fundamentally, always do so because they deeply sense that more expansion is possible than they avail themselves of. And all too often their searching goes in the wrong direction. In order to make this possible, your feelings must come alive. In this work, and in these lectures, we have often discussed the issue of feelings from various angles.
But how exceedingly difficult it is for humans even to find the subtle, hidden area where they discourage the full natural flow of feelings, where they deliberately numb them. It is usually easier to become aware of an apparent inability to feel more, although, at first, this, too, may be covered up by counterfeit feelings. You feel like a cripple who is different from others, born with less capacity for rich, warm feelings. But this is never so, and there is always a more hidden level where the numbness is very deliberately instituted.
When this is finally uncovered, you have indeed proceeded very well on your path.
The deliberate numbing occurs because you believe life is your enemy, and your life-affirming feelings would deeply involve you with this feared enemy. In order to avoid this, the feelings must be clipped, stilted, hindered. With some individuals this is true in certain aspects only, while they are free in others, finding a harmony between their unhampered, spontaneous feelings and life.
With others, this is true as an overall attitude to life.
Human nature is a bundle of fundamental characteristics—including ways of thinking, feeling, and acting—which humans tend to have naturally. The questions. In this essay I would like to discuss some aspects of the nature and human nature in their unity and interconnection from the personal.
Whatever the case may be, the following preposterous, paradoxical situation arises in the human soul. You fear life as an enemy. This takes your life from you. Since the feelings naturally affirm life, your feelings become your enemy also. Consequently, you proceed to deaden them and deliberately institute non-life, out of fear of non-life. As with every issue in the human psyche, this misconception is bound to bring about the very aspect one fears and tries to avoid.
The defense against a dreaded misconception must be as erroneous as the misconception itself: Anyone observing a child can see this natural quality of joyful outreaching and gusto. Only when pain, misconception and misinterpretation of pain arise, is the natural flow diverted or stopped altogether. As life is essentially buoyant, so are the feelings. As life is essentially positive, so are the feelings. As life is essentially rich and involving, so are the natural feelings when they are not tampered with.
There the immediate correlation is obvious. To the extent people allow themselves to feel in any given area of life, they are fearless, trustful, and positive, and to the extent they consequently involve themselves with their total being, bringing the most positive and constructive aspects of their personality to bear on the situation, their experience in this particular area will be correspondingly joyful and positive. When you fear life because you suspect it to be against you, you proceed to numb your feelings.
As I have said before, you fear life because you fear non-life. If you analyze the naked fear of life, it is really a fear of its opposite. I have often mentioned that people who fear life must fear death, and vice versa. But any apprehension, aside from death, when you truly analyze it, always boils down to a personal annihilation, a personal form of nonlife. Perhaps you fear a negation of your dignity, of your essential value; or perhaps a denial of wishes.
Your original wishes are always for a greater aliveness. Even though the form these wishes take in an immature being may be damaging and unrealizable, their essence always remains intact and realizable, provided one takes the trouble to crystallize it. Any fear is actually the opposite of life, in one form or another.
The struggle between acceptance of and fear of life is going on in practically every human being on this planet. Only the degree varies. There are rare individuals for whom this preposterous and tragic situation is much less true than for the average person, but it still must exist to some minor extent; otherwise, this individual would not assume human form. The consciousness would not seek this particular expression. When you go deep enough in your work of self-search, my friends, sooner or later you will discover where you hold back, where, instead of affirming life and your feelings, and instead of expanding with your feelings into life, you negate life and your feelings and retract from life, from your feelings, and consequently lose contact with them.
You do not feel at home in your life. You feel anxious, persecuted, ill at ease. Negation of life, negation of feelings, and negation of self are all one and the same. And because negation implies non-life, fear arises. Out of fear one proceeds to do the very thing that aggravates the condition of non-life and non-self. When you find these areas within yourself, you have taken a major step that leads you directly back into yourself.
The many possibilities existing on this earth for human concern and philosophies can all be abused to avoid facing where you, and you alone, deny life. But often, where the human experience requires the most direct, spontaneous freedom of feelings, where the joy and the involvement is most immediate and least conceptualizable, you resist seeing your impoverishment, so that you are unable to find the self-induced stoppage.
Blessed are those who are aware of what they miss in life and proceed to remedy the situation. In what area of your life do you deny life? How do you do this? In what way does the denial take place? Strangely enough, it seems painful to admit such denials, until you have reached the total vision of yourself. The moment you can really see yourself in this negating process, you are already in a more affirming process, because you no longer delude yourself about yourself.
In order to avoid seeing the negation of the self, of feelings and of life, you produce a false self, false feelings, and therefore a false life. The real is denied and the false substituted — and this is the answer. This explains the conflicts arising from the false feelings. This is why conflicts seem to be created when one trusts the feelings. It is never the real feelings that produce conflicts.
Human nature
There must always be a denial of something in the self and in the relationship between the self, life, or others. False feelings are created because nothing is as frightening as numbness. Even though you created the numbness to protect yourself from the supposed dangers of life, you do not know this and you are compelled to go on numbing your real feelings. You are just as much frightened of awakening your feelings as you are of their deadness. You then proceed to create false feelings.
These false feelings parallel other illusions — about your spiritual development, your character, your fulfillment, your sufferings, your state of happiness or unhappiness, the reactions of other people to you. Then you believe these reactions to be either better or worse than they really are.
Allen E. Buchanan
Being aware of the deliberate intent to numb feelings, and of the poverty-range of the feelings, constitutes a major step in self-realization, because the most difficult thing for you is to penetrate these illusions. Most people would rather do anything than that. Some find certain facets of their idealized self-image, for example, and content themselves with that, not wanting to see the rest of their illusions, which they unconsciously believe they cannot live without.
Those people who have reached the point where they no longer fear facing any illusion they may have are fortunate indeed.
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Their path lies before them unobstructed. From then the work becomes a question of building up, for the tearing down is over. What must be torn down are only illusions, falseness; never real positivity, affirmation, or constructiveness. Those who are most confused about the real and the false in themselves therefore often believe this pathwork to be destructive or negative. It must appear that way from the viewpoint of their illusions. When you suffer an unfulfillment, you hesitate and often even battle against recognizing it.
The Nature of Life and Human Nature
For recognizing it would be admitting to nonlife, admitting unhappiness or some form of deadness. This, in turn, brings you face to face with the fact that you fear life and run from it and yourself. Facing this would require you to stop doing so, but you are too fearful to risk. Neither biology nor natural obstacles limit our futures to a great extent, and how we live out our human nature will vary because we give different meanings to our facticities.
An authentic life is about acknowledging these differences, and stretching ourselves into an open future. It does not follow that this openness is unlimited or unconstrained. We are limited, but mostly by our own imagination. For the Stoics, human nature circumscribes what humans can do, and what they are inclined to do. An interesting contrast here is provided by a philosophy that is in some respects very different, and yet shares surprising similarities, with existentialism: The Stoics thought that there are two aspects of human nature that should be taken as defining what it means to live a good life: At first glance, it might seem that human nature plays a far more crucial role in Stoicism than in existentialism.
Indeed, it is tempting to accuse the Stoics of committing an elementary fallacy, to argue for a particular way of life by appeal to nature. But Seneca, Epictetus and co were excellent logicians, which should make us pause before dismissing their philosophy so quickly. On closer examination, it is clear that for the Stoics, human nature played a similar role to that played by the concept of facticity for the existentialists: But the parameters imposed by our nature are rather broad, and the Stoics agreed with the existentialists that a worthwhile human life can be lived by following many different paths.
Indeed, Stoic literature even features a story similar to the debate between de Beauvoir and Sartre on seasickness. It is told by the Latin author Aulus Gellius, who writes about a Stoic philosopher experiencing a severe storm while on a ship. Gellius noticed how the philosopher became pale and trembled in the midst of the storm. Once things had calmed down, he asked the philosopher how come his Stoicism had not prepared him better to withstand those frightening moments. His response is illuminating:. T he Stoics grounded that teaching in an approach most famously associated with Epictetus, the 2nd-century slave-turned-teacher who became one of the best-known philosophers of antiquity.
He developed a whole ethics based on the idea that we play a multiplicity of roles in life: How we play these roles is up to us. What determines the difference is how the slaves see themselves as human beings, a concept not that different from the existentialist notion of authenticity.
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Epictetus concludes the analysis of that example by admonishing his students in a way that Sartre and de Beauvoir might have approved of: No philosophy of life — not just existentialism or Stoicism — could possibly exist without it. If we were truly tabulae rasae , why would we prefer certain things to others? What could possibly urge us to seek meaning, to build relationships with other people, to strive to improve ourselves and the world we live in?
We do all that because we are a particular kind of intelligent social animal, just as the Stoics thought. And we do it within the broad constraints imposed by our biological as well as contingent facticity, as the existentialists maintained. There is no single path to a flourishing human life, but there are also many really bad ones.
The choice is ours, within the limits imposed by human nature. Support Aeon this December Every donation makes a difference. About Donate Newsletter Facebook. Become a Friend of Aeon to save articles and enjoy other exclusive benefits Support Aeon. A family gathering near Tehran in