Notes on Human Nature

It seems to me that many of our political views, especially the ones we find ourselves least willing to fudge, depend crucially on what we take human nature to be.  But we can ask a prior question, and I think asking it might be a better place to start.  

Is there a singular human nature, or or are people truly diverse?  Is each mind a new construction — an alien, finally, to her peers?  Or do we all have something very deep in common?  And is that deep commonality, should there be one, enough to justify a social order which cherishes its nourishment, or a revolution to install a social order which does?

To begin at the beginning . . .

Aristotle argued that in order to grasp true human happiness, one must first understand the function of a human being.  Aristotle did not mean: the function of this or that human being.  He meant the function of, as it were, all of them — the function of being human.  Happiness would be the fulfilment of that function, whatever it turned out to be.

Just as this or that profession, or this or that kind of tool, has each its purpose, to be performed well or badly, so too, thought Aristotle, did each species.  Human beings were no exception.  Happiness for humans, then, would be fulfilment of the human function.

Aristotle wrote, in the Nichomachean Ethics, Book 1, Chapter 7:

Presumably, however, to say that happiness is the chief good seems a platitude, and a clearer account of what it is still desired. This might perhaps be given, if we could first ascertain the function of man. For just as for a flute-player, a sculptor, or an artist, and, in general, for all things that have a function or activity, the good and the ‘well’ is thought to reside in the function, so would it seem to be for man, if he has a function. Have the carpenter, then, and the tanner certain functions or activities, and has man none?  Is he born without a function? Or as eye, hand, foot, and in general each of the parts evidently has a function, may one lay it down that man similarly has a function apart from all these? What then can this be?

What is the human function?  What is, to put it differently, our purpose?

Aristotle’s answer was:

[W]e state the function of man to be a certain kind of life, and this to be an activity or actions of the soul implying a rational principle, and the function of a good man to be the good and noble performance of these, and if any action is well performed when it is performed in accordance with the appropriate excellence: if this is the case, human good turns out to be activity of soul in accordance with virtue, and if there are more than one virtue, in accordance with the best and most complete.

The “best and most complete virtue” turned out, for Aristotle, to be “justice”.  This is why the Nichomachean Ethics is followed, with nary a pause for breath, by the Politics.  The function of the human is activity of the soul in accordance with “justice”.

But what interests me here, now, is not Aristotle’s conclusion but his method of argument.  He claims that to find human happiness, one must first establish the unique function of humanity.  On this line of thinking, if there is no species-determinate function, no human nature, then there is nothing to fulfill, and so no true happiness to be had.  

This is a bold claim.  It is a claim that there is a singular human nature which can be either fulfilled or not fulfilled by this Jane or that Tom.  

Leaping forward two-thousand, three hundred years, we find a contemporary of ours making a strikingly similar argument.

QUESTION [Kate Soper]: You have argued that any stance one takes on political, economic, social or even personal issues is ultimately based on some conception of human nature. Why is this?

[Noam] CHOMSKY: Any stance we take is based on some conception of what is good for people. This conception will tacitly presuppose a certain belief as to the constitution of human nature — human needs and human potential. You might as well bring them out as clearly as possible so that they can be discussed.

QUESTION: According to your view of human nature, all human beings possess certain biological functions endowing them with common mental capacities. How do you defend this position against postmodernist critics who argue that there is no such thing as human nature, and that all attempts to define it are guilty of reading other cultures in the light of Western perceptions and values?

CHOMSKY: Not even the most extreme postmodernist can seriously argue that there is no such thing as human nature. They may argue that the exact properties of human nature are difficult to substantiate — this is certainly correct. However, it is impossible to coherently argue that an intrinsic, universal human nature does not exist. This amounts to the belief that the next human zygote conceived might just as well develop into a worm or a crab as a human being. Postmodernists might limit their assertion to denying any effect of human nature on our mental make-up — our values, our knowledge, our wants, etc. This also makes no sense. The postmodernist will argue that a child growing up in New York will develop a certain way of thinking, and if that child had grown up amongst Amazon tribespeople she would have developed a completely different way of thinking. This is true. But we must then ask how a child could develop these different consciousnesses. In whatever environment it finds itself, the child will mentally construct a rich and complex culture on the basis of the extremely scattered and limited phenomena it is exposed to. That consideration tells us (in advance of any detailed knowledge) that there must be an extraordinary directive and organisational component to the mind that is internal. We can begin to see human nature in terms of certain capacities to develop certain mental traits. I think we can go further than this and begin to discover universal aspects of these mental traits which are determined by human nature. I think we can find this in the area of morality. For example, not long ago I talked to people in Amazon tribes and I took it for granted that they have the same conception of vice and virtue as I do. It is only through sharing these values that we were able to interact — talking about real problems such as being forced out of the jungle by the state authorities. I believe I was correct to assume this: we had no problem communicating although we were as remote as is possible culturally.

QUESTION: Are you suggesting everyone agrees about the nature of vice and virtue?

CHOMSKY: In fact I think they probably have a very high measure of agreement. One strong bit of evidence for this is that everyone — a Genghis Khan, Himmler, Bill Gates — creates stories of themselves where they interpret their actions as working for the benefit of human beings. Even at the extreme levels of depravity, the Nazis did not boast that they wanted to kill Jews, but gave crazed justifications — even that they were acting in ‘self-defence’. It is very rare for people to justify their actions by saying ‘I’m doing this to maximise my own benefit and I don’t care what happens to anybody else’. That would be pathological.

That’s a pretty complicated exchange, to be sure.  I want, right now, just to point out that “the most extreme postmodernist” can indeed argue seriously that there is no such thing as human nature.  Not only can they, they have.

In a fairly famous debate with Chomsky, Michel Foucault (whether he would have liked the characterization “post-modern” I am not sure) argued as follows:

Where perhaps I don’t completely agree with Mr. Chomsky, is when he places the principle of these regularities, in a way, in the interior of the mind or of human nature.

  If it is a matter of whether these rules are effectively put to work by the human mind, all right; all right, too, if it is a question of whether the historian and the linguist can think it in their turn; it is all right also to say that these rules should allow us to realise what is said or thought by these individuals. But to say that these regularities are connected, as conditions of existence, to the human mind or its nature, is difficult for me to accept: it seems to me that one must, before reaching that point-and in any case I am talking only about the understanding-replace it in the field of other human practices, such as economics, technology, politics, sociology, which can serve them as conditions of formation, of models, of place, of apparition, etc. I would like to know whether one cannot discover the system of regularity, of constraint, which makes science possible, somewhere else, even outside the human mind, in social forms, in the relations of production, in the class struggles, etc.

Foucault thought that claims of human nature were likely as not impositions on freedom, from the outside.

Richard Rorty argues the point more directly when he argues that claims to have found the true human nature are necessarily impositions on freedom — freedom to create one’s own nature.

It is with this kind of background that Rorty begins to develop his argument that the best way to foster a human rights respecting society is through the use of educational sentimentality.  Rorty begins his argument in his paper Human Rights, Rationality and Sentimentality by making the bold claim that rather than asking the question “what is our nature?” we ought to ask the question “what can we make of ourselves?”  We should not take theories of human nature seriously, but rather come to see ourselves as malleable, flexible and self-shaping animals capable of morphing with the culture.  We are not to be viewed as rational or cruel animals, but rather as changing animals (169-170 [of Contingency, Irony and Solidarity]).  As discussed above, Rorty finds theories of the nature of humanity to miss the point entirely.  They presuppose that one could get outside of one’s own web of belief to discover exactly what it was based on.  

We can get a little into the weeds, here.  A libertarian might argue that there is no predetermined human nature, and so the only appropriate social order would be the one which most maximizes the freedom to construct natures, to find goods, to create meaning.

On the other hand, a libertarian could go so far as to agree with Karl Marx, who wrote that there is one human nature, and that it is to engage in creative work.  In the Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts of 1844, Marx wrote:

The animal is immediately one with its life activity. It is not distinct from that activity; it is that activity. Man makes his life activity itself an object of his will and consciousness. He has conscious life activity. It is not a determination with which he directly merges. Conscious life activity directly distinguishes man from animal life activity. Only because of that is he a species-being. Or, rather, he is a conscious being – i.e., his own life is an object for him, only because he is a species-being. Only because of that is his activity free activity. Estranged labour reverses the relationship so that man, just because he is a conscious being, makes his life activity, his essential being, a mere means for his existence.

In this way, a vision of human nature could be claimed to underwrite “true Communism” and, one assumes, its polar opposite, libertarianism.  Ayn Rand’s libertarianism was underwritten by a conception of human nature inspired, in part, by Aristotle, and Aristotle’s conception is not so radically different from Marx’s.

Whether the socialist, or the libertarian, or the liberal, or the fascist, can or ought to hang their claims from a conception of human nature is certainly open to debate.  But I am willing to bet that many, in fact, do, at least implicitly.  This is an invitiation to reflect on the matter.