Human nature is one of the most controversial yet significant topics that philosophy has traditionally taken up. Just as the study of it has branched out into other fields, many discussions—both in academia and out—deal with the question in some way. To give just one example, the current debate over whether socialist-inspired policies will work relies to some extent on whether humans will be motivated to work if they are not given strong individual incentives. In short, are humans inherently self-interested?
If we’ve learned anything about human nature, it is that it’s complex and variable. Attempts to describe it pithily leave out a lot. Additionally, it is hard to identify one, common human nature given the significant differences between personality, desire, taste, etc. These days discussions of human nature are often informed by sciences like neurology, sociology, and psychology. While it may be true that each one of us are inclined towards certain things over others, evidence also shows our ability to overcome such inclinations. Perhaps that’s what the study of human nature is most useful for: revealing to us the next hurdle we should be trying to surmount. With that in mind, enjoy the following pieces about theories of human nature.
- Leslie Stevenson, David L. Haberman, and Peter Matthews Wright, Twelve Theories of Human Nature, Oxford University Press, 2012.
- Lisa Levers, “In What Sense are Errors in Philosophy ‘Only Ridiculous’?,” Journal of Scottish Philosophy, September 2014.
- Brian Carey, “Justice for Jerks: Human Nature, Selfishness, and Noncompliance,” Social Theory & Practice, October 2016.
- Pavel Gurevich, “New Versions of the Interpretation of Human Nature,” Russian Social Science Review, Nov/Dec2014.
- Marc Lampe, “Science, Human Nature, and a New Paradigm for Ethics Education,” Science & Engineering Ethics, September 2012.
See the Routledge APA member page for more books on human nature. APA members get a 20% discount on all books.
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Hi there Nathan, good topic!
You wrote, “..it is hard to identify one, common human nature given the significant differences between personality, desire, taste, etc.”
What we all have in common is that we are made of thought psychologically. We can most efficiently investigate our shared human nature by trying to understand the properties of thought.
As a place to start, we can observe that a key expression of thought is language, and that the noun serves as a building block of language. The function of nouns is to divide reality in to conceptual objects. That is, thought operates by a process of division.
It’s this process of division which is the source of both our genius and madness.
We are genius in that we can rearrange the conceptual objects in our heads to imagine forms of reality that don’t yet exist, that is, we can be creative.
We are insane in that this process of division which we are made of creates an experience of reality as being divided between “me” (very very small) and “everything else” (very very big), a perspective which gives rise to fear, and from that most other human problems.
As one example of the genius madman nature of our human condition, we are genius enough to know how to build nuclear weapons, and insane enough to actually build them.
As another example of the divisive nature of thought at work, we can observe that while ideologies can vary greatly on the surface, what they all have in common is that they inevitably sub-divide in to competing internal factions. Remarkably, this division process happens even to ideologies such as Communism and Christianity whose explicitly stated goals are to unite human beings in peace.
Whatever the properties of thought may be determined to be they have a profound influence upon the human condition because we don’t only use thought as a tool, but we the thinker is also made of thought. And because this fundamental reality applies to every human being, it seems a good place to begin an investigation of human nature.
Thanks for your thoughts, Phil. I’m glad you enjoyed the topic I chose. If you ever have an idea for a topic, please share it with me (there’s a link at the bottom of every post that can take you to a place where you can submit ideas; thus far I think I’ve received one).
I am hesitant to accept the claim you make about humans being primarily “made of thought.” While if we’re studying humans from a psychological standpoint beginning with thought is important, from a biological one it is wrong. And it would imply that people in comas, who to the best of our knowledge lack thought, are not human. (Or, for that matter, than animals which do think are.)
I’m not going to attempt a definition of what it means to be human here, but I believe it’s a complicated question, and we should be skeptical of any simplistic answers.
Dear Nathan:
The current debate,, that you mention, over whether socialist-inspired policies will work, if individuals are not given strong individual or at least collective incentives, is a one sided one, without a simultaneous debate over why the today dominant neoliberal inpired policies are already not working at giving persons any sort of community or personal incentives.
In short, are us human beings inherently selfish or altruistic?
It appears that the only common characteristic of our human nature, is, that every one of us, is a selfish individual, that imitates and competes with other individuals because it covets and likes to get as many and as much of everything as possible; inhabited by an altruistic person, that emulates and reveres others because she yearns and loves to serve and give herself away to her neighbor.
Since in order to formulate this basic paradox of our human nature, in just a few sentences and in black and white, I didn’t need to write a paper, never mind a book; my answer to your question is that I am not reading any academic books on the subject. I much rather relationate, rationalize and conversate about more important and interesting matters with other anonimous street philosophers that neither read nor write papers or books.
Thanks for your thoughts, Jose. I enjoyed hearing your views about the “paradox” of human nature. While I think it often appears that way, I would caution against trying to reduce human nature to one thing, even if what you’re reducing it to is a paradox. My observations of others would indicate that some people hate the idea of getting a lot, while some people hate the idea of giving to others (especially people they don’t know). While selfishness and altruism are both present in society, I don’t think we can say they are present in every individual person, and certainly not to the same extent.
While I am glad you’re enjoying your conversations with anonymous street philosophers, I hope you change your mind about reading books. There is a lot of information that can’t easily be communicated in conversation; you’re going to miss out on it if you never read.
The ever interesting David Brooks is spearheading Weave, The Social Fabric Project which he describes as…
“The Weaver movement is repairing our country’s social fabric, which is badly frayed by distrust, division and exclusion. People are quietly working across America to end loneliness and isolation and weave inclusive communities. Join us in shifting our culture from hyper-individualism that is all about personal success, to relationalism that puts relationships at the center of our lives.”
https://www.aspeninstitute.org/programs/weave-the-social-fabric-initiative/
Here’s a wonderful interview with Brooks on PBS. The great insights of religion, minus the religion.
https://www.pbs.org/newshour/show/david-brooks-on-emerging-from-loneliness-to-find-moral-renewal
Hi there Nathan,
We perhaps have a healthy and productive difference of perspective in a variety of ways. As example, while you are wary of simplistic answers, I am wary of complication for the sake of complication. It seems good that we can balance each other in that way.
If we wish to better understand human nature and human behavior what I’m suggesting is a shift of focus away from the content of thought towards the nature of thought.
As I see it, the content of thought and the behaviors that arise from it, are symptoms of the nature of thought, ie. the way that thought operates. Put another way, the analysis of the content of thought is a surface level operation.
I shouldn’t try to write a book on the subject in this limited space, so I will suggest it as a topic to be explored in more depth. But, I’m not sure that’s really possible in the blog format honestly. If you’d like to give me access to the APA forum I’d be happy to expand at length there so we can go back and forth on the topic for as long as there is interest.
We are made of thought psychologically Nathan. And thought operates by a process of division. Once these fundamental facts are grasped many important aspects of human behavior, like religion for example, come in to much sharper focus.
As for books, well, they aren’t written for we non-academics, so I don’t bother with them either honestly. I’ve never understood the rational basis for writings which only the tiniest fraction of humanity will ever be able to use. So, here we find another example of where our perspectives can help balance each other.
As always, Phil, I appreciate your interest in engaging with others. I don’t have much time, so I’m going to make a few brief points.
1) Many books philosophers write are for non-academics. There’s a whole category of books meant to introduce non-philosophers to philosophical concepts. Just search for introductory philosophy books, and you’ll see many with titles like “Introduction to Ethics,” “Introduction to Greek Philosophy,” etc. There’s still a good reason for philosophers to write books for each other (it’s one way we communicate new ideas with each other), but we’re not neglecting–though we may be failing to reach–the public.
2) Your analogy between human nature and human bodies may possibly be a “false analogy” fallacy. If you’re unfamiliar with this idea, see here and here. I’m not sure it is as I haven’t considered it enough. But I’m reluctant to accept the analogy before thinking through whether nature and bodies have enough similarities to warrant saying that they also have the one you attribute to them.
Finally, I have no control over the APA forum, but if you’d like to continue the discussion, you have my email. You can elaborate at length, and I’ll respond to your thoughts as time allows.
Mr. Tanny,
This comment of yours is illuminating. If you are on this site and want to learn about academic philosophy, you should read philosophy books.
Start wherever it works for you and ask for suggestions as you go.
Also, don’t be put off by being confused. A good philosophy book often will be very hard to understand on a first, even second, or third reading. But the work is rewarding in the end.
Have you taken a philosophy class at a local college? My late aunt and uncle used to do that at Ashland College in Ohio. They took dozens of classes during their retirement and gradually developed a sense of scholarship in the humanities. Or, have you taken one of the many online philosophy classes designed for introductory students? There are classes from Yale, Harvard, Stanford, and many more. They’re free.
The overall point is: this blog is just a small and very recent piece in the world of academic scholarship in and around philosophy. It is thoroughly indebted to the books people write and the discussions here in miniature are not fully comprehensible without the wider context of scholarship. Blocking out that scholarship and not putting in the work to engage with it will make this blog in many ways arbitrary.
Also, (the following is my assessment from observing the blog), this blog is a corrective. The discipline of philosophy has an exclusivity problem. The blog is strongly inflected toward addressing that in a modest way. That’s why there are so many posts on inclusion. And it’s why there are accessible posts, too. But one shouldn’t infer that this blog represents the profession, and one shouldn’t read this blog as detached from scholarship. It’s meant to give a new entryway into the profession and to lead people deeper into doing scholarship, beyond this blog. It’s not an opinion site.
And as to scholarship, remember how I recommended Darwall and Strawson? You can add RJ Wallace’s new book to that list — the one just posted on, “The Moral Nexus.” Reading that book, which seems plainly written, might provide some answers to the questions and misconceptions you have about morality.
Finally, just a heads up. I’m not going to get into a long debate with you on what I write here, as it hasn’t been productive in the past. I just wanted to make this observation.
With best wishes,
Nathan, you write…
“If we’ve learned anything about human nature, it is that it’s complex and variable. ”
If we were to be addressing the nature of any particular person or group of people then, yes, a great deal of variety exists.
But doesn’t the term “human nature” point the inquiry at what we all have in common? As example…
Human bodies come in very many different shapes, sizes and colors etc. But all human bodies are made up of roughly 50% water. Thus, the nature of all human bodies is to be partly soft and partly hard. That is, the nature of human bodies, all of them, is determined by what all human bodies are made of.
If by human nature you are referring to human behavior the same equation applies. At it’s heart the behavior of all human beings springs from what all human beings are made of psychologically. Every human being lives in an experience of reality as being divided between “me” and “everything else”. This universally shared experience is generated by the divisive nature of thought, by the way thought works.
The great variety of behavior you point to are all just symptoms lying on the surface of the universally shared underlying mechanism from which they all spring.
Fundamentally, I feel alone, and you feel alone. All that’s different are the myriad of ways that shared experience of isolation is expressed.
I realize the interest in this is limited, but I’ll continue on for a bit until the editors decide it’s enough.
Religion is perhaps the largest cultural event in human history, so that’s one lens through which we might examine human nature. In the West, we could examine Christianity and ask what it was about this ideology, which explicitly seeks to unite human beings in peace, which caused it to break up in to a thousand different competing, sometimes warring, factions.
A typical philosophical analysis might examine the tenets of Christianity in a search for an answer, perhaps comparing these tenets to those of other religions etc. That is, a typical philosophical analysis would examine the content of thought.
But if we step back just a bit, we can see that pretty much every ideology ever invented has inevitably gone through a similar process of subdividing in to competing internal factions.
The universality of this subdivision process suggests the source is something other than the tenets of any particular ideology, but is instead something that all ideologies have in common. The only thing they all have in common is thought itself. And so we can reason that the subdividing and resulting conflicts arise not from the content of thought, but from the nature of thought.
And the nature of thought is to divide.
By digging below the surface of ideology where a great deal of complexity and variety does of course exist, we come to a single unifying factor, the nature of thought.
My argument is that all human nature arises from a single source, the properties of that which all human nature is made of, the electro-chemical information medium we call thought.
By shifting some focus from the content of thought to the nature of thought we can learn not just about this or that philosophy, but about what all philosophies have in common. This seems a more efficient approach because instead of investing a huge amount of time examining a billion surface details, we would be sharpening our focus by looking at where all these details come from.
We can better understand each other by examining what each of us produce. In the same way we can better understand thought by examining what it produces. Language is a key expression of thought, and the noun is the building block of language. The function of nouns is to divide the single unified reality in to conceptual parts.
Thought operates by a process of division. Human nature arises from that process.
Bendik-Keymer, your observation is noted.
Although this may not apply to you, which is great, please note that when I’m on this site I tend to invest more time and attention to it than almost all members of the APA put together.
What I see here on this blog at least is that professional philosophers tend not to be interested enough in each other’s articles to comment on them. In that context my decision not to read their books may make more sense.
I am however quite eager to engage in conversation with professional philosophers, as you can see.
Dear Nathan:
When I said that I don´t read, I was really saying that I don´t trust the writen letter in general, and in particular the people who prefer writing over conversating, and in fact avoid any kind of chating or conversation about their own … BS articles, MS papers or Ph. D. books.
One of my many Canadian mentors would have been, more histrionic and brutal at the same time, and would have made a joke out of my last paragraph and would have ended it, his own way: … “bull shit” papers, “more of the same” papers and “piled higher and deeper” books.
However, even if I learnt to be a street philosopher, training with the best academic sparrings that money and technology can get, I want to share with you and the APA, a link to the best book I have ever read on this or any matter, and every wise philosopher should read, relationate and reason, before publishing her or his next book: https://idriesshahfoundation.org/books/the-book-of-the-book/
Summarizing, I very strongly believe that the only real purpose of a monologue, disguised as an article, a paper and particularly as a book is not to read them, but to write them, whenever the author needs doing it, and therefore should be given away free of charge. Publishing is not so important.
For dialoguing we have much more efficient means and tools.
For instance +56999290138, my glorified version of Mr. Bell’s never beaten invention, is a good one until we have a face to face conversation.
Nevertheless, I have to tell you, that for the same above reason, I am finishing writing my first and only book on “model relationing and reasoning our Human and Divine Nature”, because I was invited to write it and I also need doing it, to get it off my back.
Thanks for your response, Jose. If I’m understanding you correctly, I’m glad you’re not opposed to reading per se. And almost every philosopher I know is interested in dialogue with others. It’s wrong to say they’re in bad faith just because they are writing a book, article, or paper.
If you provided your phone number as an invitation for me to call you, I can’t tell. However, as I’m in China at the moment, doing that would be difficult because of the time difference. But perhaps we will someday have a face to face conversation.
Good luck with your book.
Dear Nathan:
Your reply reminded me of one of the most poetic tittles for a book that I have ever known: “Ha estallado la Paz” (I don´t even know if: “Peace has broken out”, would be a fair and also poetic translation).
In any case, since it looks like peace has broken out among us, I will mention that it is the tittle of the third book of a trilogy by José María Gironella on the Spanish revolution: Los cipreses creen en Dios (Cypresses believe in God), Un millón de Muertos (One million dead) y Ha estallado la Paz (Peace has broken out), that is in my by now gigantic reading backlog.
I apologize for forgetting that you should never try and KO your own sparring. But, the street boxer in me, sometimes forgets or purposely disrespects the simplest of rules.
Anyway, I am glad that I failed in knocking out my favorite sparring ever, and the way it looks, we will keep on training our boxing.
Providing my phone number, is in fact a direct an open invitation for you to call me, and I am very glad that you notice this little detail.
If you call me anytime from China or wherever you happen to be, even if I am trying to look asleep not to worry my wife, I will always get up, wash my face and start listening and talking to you.
I have been signing each Email that I write with my full name and cell phone number (open 24/7), because I hate to write without first hearing the voice of the people with whom I communicate.
I am looking forward to having a face to face conversation with you if this is meant to happen.
I promise to Email you the first electronic version of my book, if it ever gets published in Europe, or the last draft if it doesn´t, just in case the “tough editors” of the APA have the guts to accept the challenge.
Ok, so it appears we’re going to discuss reading instead of human nature. In that case, we might try this…
Imagine that your favorite philosopher from history shows up at your front door. What will you do? Will you let them and engage them in conversation? Or will you shut the door and instead return to reading a book about this favorite philosopher?
That is, the question here is, will you choose first hand or second hand information?
If the book you are reading is by the favorite philosopher then you can reasonably claim it is first hand information about the philosopher’s opinions. Fair enough. But it’s still second hand information regarding the reality the favorite philosopher is writing about.
So a new question might arise. Why not just mostly skip what everyone says about reality, and instead mostly focus on observing reality for yourself? Why not focus primarily on first hand information?
The real world surrounds us, and is in us, in every moment of our lives. There it is, staring us in the face, around the clock. Why not put down the book, open the door, and let it in?
Reading books, or this post, might be compared to focusing on photos of friends on Facebook instead of spending that time with the living friends. That is, one is choosing the symbolic over the reality the symbols point to.
And if one does observe reality directly and then focuses on one’s thoughts about what one has observed, one is still choosing the symbolic over the real.
What we are looking for at the most fundamental level is found in the real world, and our obsession with the symbolic realm is the primary obstacle to that discovery.
He said, while feverishly typing his latest huge pile of symbols…