Nature with Human Nature

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Indeed, the great hope, faith, trust and in fact belief of the human race has been that redeeming, psychologically rehabilitating and thus transforming understanding of the human condition would one day be found — which, most relievingly, it now finally has been! Again, it has to be stressed that this explanation of our deeply psychologically troubled condition is not the psychosis-avoiding, trivialising, dishonest account of it that E.

Wilson has put forward in his theory of Eusociality, but the psychosis-addressing-and-solving, truthful, real explanation of it. Certainly, we have invented excuses to justify our seemingly-imperfect competitive, selfish and aggressive behaviour, the main one being that we have savage animal instincts that make us fight and compete for food, shelter, territory and a mate. Firstly, it overlooks the fact that our human behaviour involves our unique fully conscious thinking mind. Descriptions like egocentric, arrogant, deluded, artificial, hateful, mean, immoral, alienated, etc, all imply a consciousness-derived, psychological dimension to our behaviour.

A brief description of the theories of Social Darwinism, Sociobiology, Evolutionary Psychology, Multilevel Selection and Eusociality that blame our divisive behaviour on savage instincts rather than on a consciousness-derived psychosis is presented in the What is Science? And nor are they derived from warring with other groups of humans as advocates of the theory of Eusociality would have us believe.

No, we have an unconditionally selfless, fully altruistic, truly loving, universally -considerate-of-others-not-competitive-with-other-groups, genuinely moral conscience.

Our original instinctive state was the opposite of being competitive, selfish and aggressive: How we humans acquired unconditionally selfless moral instincts when it would seem that an unconditionally selfless, fully altruistic trait is going to self-eliminate and thus not ever be able to become established in a species is briefly explained in the above-mentioned What is Science? The answer begins with an analysis of consciousness. If you can remember past events, you can compare them with current events and identify regularly occurring experiences.

This knowledge of, or insight into, what has commonly occurred in the past enables you to predict what is likely to happen in the future and to adjust your behaviour accordingly. Once insights into the nature of change are put into effect, the self-modified behaviour starts to provide feedback, refining the insights further.

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Predictions are compared with outcomes and so on. Much developed, and such refinement occurred in the human brain, nerves can sufficiently associate information to reason how experiences are related, learn to understand and become CONSCIOUS of, or aware of, or intelligent about, the relationship between events that occur through time.

Thus consciousness means being sufficiently aware of how experiences are related to attempt to manage change from a basis of understanding. Basically, once our self-adjusting intellect emerged it was capable of taking over the management of our lives from the instinctive orientations we had acquired through the natural selection of genetic traits that adapted us to our environment. HOWEVER , it was at this juncture, when our conscious intellect challenged our instincts for control, that a terrible battle broke out between our instincts and intellect, the effect of which was the extremely competitive, selfish and aggressive state that we call the human condition.

To elaborate, when our conscious intellect emerged it was neither suitable nor sustainable for it to be orientated by instincts — it had to find understanding to operate effectively and fulfil its great potential to manage life. The existence of something like a human nature that separates us from the rest of the animal world has often been implied, and sometimes explicitly stated, throughout the history of philosophy.

Human nature matters

The Epicureans argued that it is a quintessential aspect of human nature that we are happier when we experience pleasure, and especially when we do not experience pain. In contrast, many contemporary philosophers, both of the so-called analytic and continental traditions, seem largely to have rejected the very idea of human nature.

We beg to differ. What exactly does science tell us about the idea of a human nature? From Charles Darwin onward, the scientific consensus has been pretty clear: Our particular lineage gave origin to the species Homo sapiens at least , years ago, resulting from a long evolutionary period, which unfolded over millions of years from the point of divergence from our most recent common ancestor with the chimpanzees, our closest phylogenetic cousins. Put that way, it would seem that biology does indeed do away with any idea of human nature: How Culture Made the Human Mind , that small percentage translates into thousands of structural changes at the genetic level, which in turn can be combined to yield millions of ways in which humans are distinct from chimpanzees.

In light of this, we think that the picture emerging from evolutionary and developmental biology is — contrary to the widespread opinion among contemporary philosophers — one that very much supports the notion of human nature, just not an essentialist one. Human nature is best conceived of as a cluster of homeostatic properties, ie of traits that are dynamically changing and yet sufficiently stable over evolutionary time to be statistically clearly recognisable.

These properties include characteristics that are either unique to the human species, or so quantitatively distinct from anything similar found in other animals that our version is unquestionably and solely human. Take language, for instance. But no other living species has anything even remotely like human language, with its complex grammar and high levels of recursion where a linguistic rule can be applied to the results of the application of the very same rule, and so on.

Other animals, such as octopuses, have large, complex brains and nervous systems, but no other animal has both the size relative to the body and especially the structural asymmetry and layering of the human brain; for instance, its enormously developed frontal cortex, which is in charge of reward, attention, short-term memory tasks, planning and motivation. The list could go on and on, but the basic point is that it is fallacious to state that there are no fundamental differences between humans and other animals just because the boundaries are fuzzy and dynamic over evolutionary time.

As Justice Potter Stewart said, in a case about pornography versus art in But I know it when I see it. We all know it when we see it. Now, if human nature is real, what are the consequences from a philosophical perspective? Why should a philosopher, or anyone interested in using philosophy as a guide to life, care about this otherwise technical debate?

T he temptation to link existentialism with the idea of a tabula rasa is understandable. In one of his more radical statements, he wrote: We had lost all our rights, and first of all our right to speak. They insulted us to our faces … They deported us en masse … And because of all this we were free. Even Simone de Beauvoir thought he took it too far, particularly when he told her that her seasickness was all in her head.

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In her autobiography The Prime of Life , she wrote: I, on the other hand, claimed that stomach and tear ducts, indeed the head itself, were all subject to irresistible forces on occasion. This is human nature: To be human is to live in ambiguity because we are forever caught in a tension between the facts of our lives and the will to overcome them. Biology might seem to offer a simple explanation for some limitations.

This is both a wrong and a harmful way to think about our nature. Historically, women have been defined primarily by the same biological functions they share with other animals, tethered in myths about femininity, and robbed of the opportunity to transcend. Natural obstacles provide a different sort of limitation. It might be absurd for de Beauvoir to persist with sailing if she vomits constantly, but giving up on her goals because of seasickness is stupid, too. To transcend is to recognise our resistances and failures, and to rebel against them creatively.

This perspective matters because it emphasises that, while there are fixed elements to our being, we are not fixed beings, since we are or ought to be free to choose our projects. 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.

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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.

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