The Nature of Man

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In effect, I can only relate myself in a human way to a thing when the thing is related in a human way to man. For Marx, "Communism is the positive abolition of private property, [44] of human self-alienation, and thus the real appropriation of human nature through and for man. It is, therefore, the return of man himself as a social, i. Communism as a fully developed naturalism is humanism and as a fully developed humanism is naturalism.

It is the definitive resolution of the antagonism between man and nature, and between man and man. It is the true solution of the conflict between existence and essence, between objectification and self-affirmation, between freedom and necessity, between individual and species. It is the solution of the riddle of history and knows itself to be this solution. In the type of life activity resides the whole character of a species, its species-character; and free, conscious activity is the species-character of human beings.

1. The Concept of Human Nature

From this concept of human self-realization, Marx arrives at a new concept of wealth and poverty, which is different from wealth and poverty in political economy. The wealthy man is at the same time one who needs a complex of human manifestations of life, and whose own self-realization exists as an inner necessity, a need. Not only the wealth but also the poverty of man acquires, in a socialist perspective, a human and thus a social meaning. Poverty is the passive bond which leads man to experience a need for the greatest wealth, the other person.

The sway of the objective entity within me; the sensuous outbreak of my life-activity, is the passion which here becomes the activity of my being. It is only in a social context that subjectivism and objectivism, spiritualism and materialism, activity and passivity, cease to be antinomies and thus cease to exist as such antinomies. The resolution of the theoretical contradictions is possible only through practical means, only through the practical energy of man. Their resolution is not by any means, therefore, only a problem of knowledge, but is a real problem of life which philosophy was unable to solve precisely because it saw there a purely theoretical problem.

Corresponding to his concept of the wealthy man is Marx's view of the difference between the sense of having and the sense of being. Although private property itself only conceives these various forms of possession as means of life, and the life for which they serve as means is the life of private property -- labor and creation of capital. Thus all the physical and intellectual senses have been replaced by the simple alienation of all these senses; the sense of having.

2. Man's self-activity

The human being had to be reduced to this absolute poverty in order to be able to give birth to all his inner wealth. Marx recognized that the science of capitalistic economy, despite its worldly and pleasure-seeking appearance, "is a truly moral science, the most moral of all sciences.

Its principal thesis is the renunciation of life and of human needs. The less you eat, drink, buy books, go to the theatre or to balls, or to the public house [ Br. The less you are, the less you express your life, the more you have, the greater is your alienated life and the greater is the saving of your alienated being. Everything which the economist takes from you in the way of life and humanity, he restores to you in the form of money and wealth.

And everything which you are unable to do, your money can do for you; it can eat, drink, go to the ball and to the theatre. It can acquire art, learning, historical treasures, political power; and it can travel. It can appropriate all these things for you, can purchase everything; it is the true opulence. But although it can do all this, it only desires to create itself, and to buy itself, for everything else is subservient to it.

When one owns the master, one also owns the servant, and one has no need of the master's servant. Thus all passions and activities must be submerged in avarice. The worker must have just what is necessary for him to want to live, and he must want to live only in order to have this. The aim of society, for Marx, is not the production of useful things as an aim in itself. One easily forgets, he says, "that the production of too many useful things results in too many useless people.

It is particularly important to understand this position of Marx today, when both the Communist, and most of the Socialist parties, with some notable exceptions like the Indian, also Burmese and a number of European and American socialists, have accepted the principle which underlies all capitalist systems, namely, that maximum production and consumption are the unquestionable goals of society. One must of course not confuse the aim of overcoming the abysmal poverty which interferes with a dignified life, with the aim of an ever-increasing consumption, which has become the supreme value for both Capitalism and Krushchevism.

Marx's position was quite clearly on the side of the conquest of poverty, and equally against consumption as a supreme end. Independence and freedom, for Marx, are based on the act of self-creation. A man who lives by the favor of another considers himself a dependent being.

But I live completely by another person's favor when I owe to him not only the continuance of my life but also its creation; when he is its source. My life has necessarily such a cause outside itself if it is not my own creation.

For Marx the aim of socialism was the emancipation of man, and the emancipation of man was the same as his self-realization in the process of productive relatedness and oneness with man and nature. The aim of socialism was the development of the individual personality. What Marx would have thought of a system such as Soviet communism he expressed very clearly in a statement of what he called "crude communism," and which referred to certain communist ideas and practices of his time.

This crude communism "appears in a double form; the domination of material property looms so large that it aims to destroy everything which is incapable of being possessed by everyone as private property. It wishes to eliminate talent, etc. Immediate physical possession seems to it the unique goal of life and existence.

The Nature of Man

The role of worker is not abolished but is extended to all men. The relation of private property remains the relation of the community to the world of things. Finally, this tendency to oppose general private property to private property is expressed in an animal form; marriage which is incontestably a form of exclusive private property is contrasted with the community of women, [54] in which women become communal and common property. One may say that this idea of the community of women is the open secret of this entirely crude and unreflective communism. Just as women are to pass from marriage to universal prostitution, so the whole world of wealth i.

This communism, which negates the personality of man in every sphere, is only the logical expression of private property, which is this negation. Universal envy setting itself up as a power is only a camouflaged form of cupidity which reestablishes itself and satisfies itself in a different way. The thoughts of every individual private property are at least directed against any wealthier private property, in the form of envy and the desire to reduce everything to a common level; so that this envy and levelling in fact constitute the essence of competition.

Crude communism is only the culmination of such envy and levelling-down on the basis of a preconceived minimum. How little this abolition of private property represents a genuine appropriation is shown by the abstract negation of the whole world of culture and civilization, and the regression to the unnatural simplicity of the poor and wantless individual who has not only not surpassed private property but has not yet even attained to it.

The community is only a community of work and of equality of wages paid out by the communal capital, by the community as universal capitalist. The two sides of the relation are raised to a supposed universality; labor as a condition in which everyone is placed, and capital as the acknowledged universality and power of the community. Marx's whole concept of the self-realization of man can be fully understood only in connection with his concept of work. First of all, it must be noted that labor and capital were not at all for Marx only economic categories; they were anthropological categories, imbued with a value judgment which is rooted in his humanistic position.

Capital, which is that which is accumulated, represents the past; labor, on the other hand is, or ought to be when it is free, the expression of life. In communist society the present dominates the past. In bourgeois society, capital is independent and has individuality, while the living person is dependent and has no individuality.

Marx originally called man's function "self-activity," not labor, and spoke of the "abolition of labor" as the aim of socialism. Later, when he differentiated between free and alienated labor, he used the term "emancipation of labor. He opposes himself to nature as one of her own forces, setting in motion arms and legs, head and hands, the natural forces of his body, in order to appropriate nature's productions in a form adapted to his own wants.

By thus acting on the external world and changing it, he at the same time changes his own nature. He develops his slumbering powers and compels them to act in obedience to his sway. We are not now dealing with those primitive instinctive forms of labor that remind us of the mere animal. An immeasurable interval of time separates the state of things in which a man brings his labor power to market for sale as a commodity, from that state in which human labor was still in its first instinctive stage.

We presuppose labor in a form that stamps it as exclusively human. A spider conducts operations that resemble those of a weaver, and a bee puts to shame many an architect in the construction of her cells. But what distinguishes the worst architect from the best of bees is this, that the architect raises his structure in imagination before he erects it in reality.

At the end of every labor process, we get a result that already existed in the imagination of the laborer at its commencement. He not only effects a change of form in the material on which he works, but he also realizes a purpose of his own that gives the law to his modus operandi, and to which he must subordinate his will. And this subordination is no mere momentary act. Besides the exertion of the bodily organs, the process demands that, during the whole operation, the workman's will be steadily in consonance with his purpose. In his works, apart from using a similar scheme of a divided human soul, some clear statements about human nature are made:.

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": 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.

The cultivation of learning and intellectual growth of the philosopher, which is thereby also the happiest and least painful life. Human nature is a central question in Chinese philosophy. 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". 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". The Bible contains no single "doctrine of human nature". Rather, it provides material for more philosophical descriptions of human nature. Catechism of the Catholic Church [26] 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. As originally created, the Bible describes "two elements" in human nature: By this was created a "living soul", that is, a "living person".

Genesis does not elaborate the meaning of "the image of God", but scholars find suggestions.

Human nature

One is that being created in the image of God distinguishes human nature from that of the beasts. A third is that mankind possesses an inherent ability "to set goals" and move toward them. 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". 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". Such a "recognition that there is something wrong with the moral nature of man is found in all religions".

This condition is sometimes called " total depravity ". Adam embodied the "whole of human nature" so when Adam sinned "all of human nature sinned". 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 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.

A number of experts on human nature have described the manifestations of original i. Empirical discussion questioning the genetic exclusivity of such an intrinsic badness proposition is presented by researchers Elliott Sober and David Sloan Wilson. In their book, Unto Others: The Evolution and Psychology of Unselfish Behavior , they propose a theory of multilevel group selection in support of an inherent genetic "altruism" in opposition to the original sin exclusivity for human nature.

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 According to the Bible, "Adam's disobedience corrupted human nature" but God mercifully "regenerates". 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: 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.

Although this new realism applied to the study of human life from the beginning—for example, in Machiavelli 's works—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: 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. 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". 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. 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.

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". Hume—like Rousseau—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.

We needn't push our researches so far as to ask "Why do we have humanity, i. 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.

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