Major Theories of Human Nature - Essay Example

Theories of Human Nature "Two things fill the mind with ever new and increasing admiration and reverence, the more often and more steadily one reflects on them: the starry heavens above me and the moral law within me." (Kant, Critique of Practical Reason, Conclusion). What does Kant mean? Explain how his view implies a fundamental duality in human nature, between rationality on the one hand and animal or physical nature on the other. Is it a plausible theory? Kant compares the moral and physical sciences which start from wonder sources of self-evidence. Despite the fact that they are both present for us, it is not easy to find a true understanding of either of them. They have both been lost in blind speculation and superstition for a long time. The moral sciences have not reached a point where they are developing rationally like the physical sciences. In his work however, Kant hopes to steer a scientific rational approach to ethics. The difference between humans and animals is that humans have a capability to reason. Moral law within is generated from the reason capability, which brings questions like what is moral or what is not? When defining morality and goodness how do we conclude? What moral scope do we use? This description of the two magnificent aspects of thinking of human is very powerful and summarizes the philosophical project of Kant. The starry heavens above means the outward opening in mysterious and infinite relations connecting the sensual impression on a bright night of the smallest village’s outskirts with systems on systems, worlds upon worlds. In comparison to this impression that is overwhelming, human beings appear extremely small. The starry heavens remind humans of their limits of their capacity. The universe has something that is fundamentally mysterious, which somehow seems to avoid human individuals, because they are finite beings. However, the fact that humans have ability to think and reason about these issues elevates them; they are filled with unending awe and admiration. The ability to think great things is made personal by the moral law, which begins from the unseen self, personality, and brings one into a true infinity world. In a nutshell, starry heavens give human individuals negative elevation because they are all about what is beyond them, while moral law awareness gives them a positive elevation which reveals animality life independent and the sensible world as a whole which is not beyond them but is present in their lives. It brings a true infinity because it is a direct and an actual presence of something that is more than limitation than finitude, which does not evade their grasp or evade them forever. The critique shows that human beings are alone in the universe in tremendous and infinite loneliness. There is nothing remaining to live for as there is no purpose he has outside himself. He has moved beyond desiring to be a slave and becoming a slave; he is all alone far beneath him as all ethics have sunk and human society vanished. However, the human being is one and all for the first time because there is a moral law within him and is all the law himself with no unpredictable willfulness. The human being himself demands himself to obey the law that is within him, his own law, and that he is nothing but law without considering what is behind him. This is what is perplexing and yet so great. Immanuel Kant noted that within a human being there is a fierce battle as a member of both a natural species and a moral species, a battle from which all arises evil that dishonors human life and oppresses it. There is however a fundamental duality in human beings which remains. Human beings are both moral and animal beings who produce a culture. Human duality shows the existence of humanity in animality. One part of the nature of human is beyond his control and reach, while the other part is actually made by him. The identity of human that is mobile is part of human nature which is determined by his moral choices and reveals itself as a set of achievements and accomplishments. According to Kant, human beings have an animal or physical nature which is purely sensuous and has animal consciousness and contributes to the empirical world, but not in the way humans behave or are. The animal nature of human beings has nothing to do with application of wrongness and rightness to situations human beings have control over. When leopards kill their young ones or a gazelle, they are not morally at fault, however, when a purely rational being acts they are in light with moral principles. Whatever the moral being does conforms to what reason dictates. Human beings are between two worlds of nature, as they are not expected to act by natural impulse, and neither are they free of impulses that are not rational. They thus need rules of conduct. Rational beings are compelled to use reason to provide a principle that will guide them on how to act when in a position to choose. The duality of human nature examined by Hyde and Jekyll also showed that there is a battle between a primitive nature of human being and its intellectual or rational humanity side. From the beginning there is a contrast between intellectual thought and the animal nature (irrational) of human being. The animal nature is cold and crusty on the outside, but well thought and loveable on the inside. One of the things that amaze people is how the body interacts with the mind. The mind is known to exercise fundamental powers over the body yet it is an immaterial substance and does not have physical properties. The duality nature of human beings is a paradox that continues to awe the minds of many philosophers like Plato who describes human beings as irrational and yet rational. Diotima, a teacher of Socrates gives an example of what parents do for their children, where their irrationality is puzzling for someone who does not understand the nature of love, with the ultimate motivator being happiness. The ways in which human beings pursue happiness makes them look irrational. The things they pursue with passions can bring much unhappiness and sorrow in that particular point and beyond the boundaries of their lives. According to Plato, these pursuits include becoming heroes, attaining virtue and knowledge, having children, becoming inventors, and so on. While people pursue these things, some of them don’t take up, while others decide to live different kinds of lives. Many think pursuing these things provide a good life, and though they are undertaken with this hope they come with risk of failure, potential harm and exhaustion. Irrationality of human beings is also seen when they strive to have for example happiness, they instead pursue other things. Instead of pursuing for a car or family in themselves as something valuable, they make those things to be the happiness they have been pursuing. Plato also observes that when human beings pursue something they assume to be good, they loose their focus on their own happiness along the way. For example, when working hard to own a big house, this pursuit takes over the pursuit for happiness. People don’t assess to know whether the pursuit for the big house is still making them happy, and they still don’t back off from the pursuit when they come to the realization that they are worried and exhausted constantly, but still stick to it as something good. On the other hand it is for example irrational to give up on children because a person is miserable raising them up, but by embracing them and holding on to them no matter what, makes a person become rational. Theoretical reason had been distinguished from practical reason by Kant. Jesus Mosterin on the other hand made a parallel distinction of practical and theoretical rationality. By defining that humans are not rational, though they can behave and think rationally or irrationally depending on how they apply it. Human beings are rationally aware of their limitations and abilities. They have abilities to show true empathy, joy and great contentment to others plight. Human beings self-esteems accept that life of human is the greatest on earth and this makes them appreciate others, and thus capable of love. Donald Davidson a modern philosopher highlights that human beings feel the need to feed, evolve, reproduce, grow, adapt and respond to the surroundings. This does not make it different to animals except that animals cannot think with their own conscience like human beings. Human beings have a “sapient quality” (sound judgment or wisdom) that makes them become rational. They have primary reason action which describes the relation between pursuit of an action and a belief or desire (Davidson, 1982a). For example, people go to school because of a belief that education will provide them with good life with a desire to have a great job. Human beings are capable of generating causes to their actions, descriptions and reasons. They also have ability to think and find solutions to their problems because they have highly adaptive intelligence. As they get to know their own environment, they adjust and change to make life the way they think is convenient to them. All through the existence of human beings science and technology, language and culture have been developed through their ability of being rational. Necessary information of their surrounding is provided by the five senses they possess; touch, hearing, smell, sight and taste, and generated within their minds. They therefore influence their surrounding environment through problem solving and thinking to fit their way of living by inventions and developments. Before, human beings used to tell stories by carving a cave’s stone, but then came writers and publishers to tell stories in books and magazines and now with the emergence of sophisticated phones like Blackberry, people can connect to almost everyone and tell their stories. Animals are driven unconditionally by the impulse to protect their own lives; however, human beings have ability to master these impulses. They can control their will to live and their sexual desires. Human beings have ability to commit suicide or dye for a cause when it seems intolerable to preserve their lives. For human beings to live is as a result of judgment of value or of a choice. This is also the same with human’s desire to live in prosperity which is as a result of a choice as many prefer wealth to poverty and life to death. However, human beings’ decision-making exhibits some setbacks that portray them to be irrational at the same time. This is evident in their daily life through their biases and errors. They involve themselves in unhealthy activities like drug abusing, drinking, and smoking, and so on. They solve their differences through fighting and going to war. Millions of people are killed, many become displaced, dehumanize others by torturing them and destroying everything that they built by their own rationality. The other worrying trend is that though human beings have made up their minds to create a better place for themselves to live, many leaders in power practice dictatorship on other beings without putting the consequences into considerations. For example Amin the dictator of Uganda in Africa killed all the poor and disabled people by throwing them in the ocean as a way of eradicating poverty in the country. Several leaders in Africa recruited forced children out of school to join the army in the fight against rebels and the like. About 30,000 kids were abducted by Lord’s Resistance and its leader Joseph Kony and trained them as soldiers. He raped some of them, tortured them, introduced them to destruction and death and even forced brothers to kill each other. Hands, eye-lids, legs, lips and body parts were taken from some children. This act makes Joseph Kony and his Lord’s Resistance Army irrational. People are assumed by science of economic to act rationally according to their own interest which is intention of actors of economic where companies maximize on profit while individuals maximize on utility. An example is given where a poor farmer who does not have left overs to sell after feeding his family is given land by the government to grow food and have surplus to sell. The intention of the government is for the farmer to cultivate the land, sell the left over to generate income and improve the standard of living of the farmer’s family. Rationally, the farmer will be expected to cultivate the land, plant crops, harvest, sell the left overs and enjoy profits. But in many cases the farmer is expected to cultivate part of the land, grow crops that can only take care of the family and leave the rest uncultivated, with no surplus to sell, thus continuing to live poorly. The farmer reasons that by cultivating all the land, his neighbors would sabotage him by using for example witchcraft because of jealousy. Economically, the farmer acted irrationally by avoiding profit maximization, but to the villagers’ perspective, it would seem irrational if the farmer cultivated the whole land making himself susceptible to his neighbours’ jealousy. What seems irrational to some people is rational to others. Human beings are different from animals due to the fact that as thinking organisms, they have evolved and developed so much. They are also capable of obtaining culture and ideas within themselves. Rationality is exclusive to human as it makes them superior than other animals. However, they can also be irreversibly irrational in choosing their actions in life. Human beings have the bad side and good side in their personalities, and have portrayed dualism between irrational and rational. Human beings are both rational and irrational, and this wonder is what Kant means when he says "Two things fill the mind with ever new and increasing admiration and reverence, the more often and more steadily one reflects on them: the starry heavens above me and the moral law within me." (Kant, Critique of Practical Reason, Conclusion). The theory of duality in human nature in reference to rational and physical nature is reasonable. It acknowledges the animality nature of human beings but exhibits the differences between humans and animals. The theory clearly explains the composition of mind and body of humans, the difference in their properties and nature and yet they affect each other. The capability of humans to think about the solutions to the problems they face in their surrounding elevates them over animals. The ability they have to react to what the environment has to offer through thinking and reason brings about development. The theory also clearly brings forth the ability of human beings to ignore the good and take on the bad and thus becoming irrational. Their irrationality hurts other people and destroys everything that their rationality built. The duality in human nature is practical and not just theoretical. The consequences of their rationality and irrationality can be seen and felt; organizations providing homes for street and poor children, scholarships provided to poor bright students, parents taking good care of children and ensuring they have everything they need (rational), and drug trafficking to the youth, increased corruption, grabbing land of other people, fighting others for oil regions, raping women during war (irrational) among others. The theory is lived, is practical and is plausible. Reference Davidson D. (1982). Paradoxes of Irrationality, in Philosophical Essays on Freud edited by R. Wollheim and J. Hopkins, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press. Stich S. (1985). Could a man be an Irrational Animal? Synthese, Vol.64, 1985, pp. 115-135. Read More

It brings a true infinity because it is a direct and an actual presence of something that is more than limitation than finitude, which does not evade their grasp or evade them forever. The critique shows that human beings are alone in the universe in tremendous and infinite loneliness. There is nothing remaining to live for as there is no purpose he has outside himself. He has moved beyond desiring to be a slave and becoming a slave; he is all alone far beneath him as all ethics have sunk and human society vanished.

However, the human being is one and all for the first time because there is a moral law within him and is all the law himself with no unpredictable willfulness. The human being himself demands himself to obey the law that is within him, his own law, and that he is nothing but law without considering what is behind him. This is what is perplexing and yet so great. Immanuel Kant noted that within a human being there is a fierce battle as a member of both a natural species and a moral species, a battle from which all arises evil that dishonors human life and oppresses it.

There is however a fundamental duality in human beings which remains. Human beings are both moral and animal beings who produce a culture. Human duality shows the existence of humanity in animality. One part of the nature of human is beyond his control and reach, while the other part is actually made by him. The identity of human that is mobile is part of human nature which is determined by his moral choices and reveals itself as a set of achievements and accomplishments. According to Kant, human beings have an animal or physical nature which is purely sensuous and has animal consciousness and contributes to the empirical world, but not in the way humans behave or are.

The animal nature of human beings has nothing to do with application of wrongness and rightness to situations human beings have control over. When leopards kill their young ones or a gazelle, they are not morally at fault, however, when a purely rational being acts they are in light with moral principles. Whatever the moral being does conforms to what reason dictates. Human beings are between two worlds of nature, as they are not expected to act by natural impulse, and neither are they free of impulses that are not rational.

They thus need rules of conduct. Rational beings are compelled to use reason to provide a principle that will guide them on how to act when in a position to choose. The duality of human nature examined by Hyde and Jekyll also showed that there is a battle between a primitive nature of human being and its intellectual or rational humanity side. From the beginning there is a contrast between intellectual thought and the animal nature (irrational) of human being. The animal nature is cold and crusty on the outside, but well thought and loveable on the inside.

One of the things that amaze people is how the body interacts with the mind. The mind is known to exercise fundamental powers over the body yet it is an immaterial substance and does not have physical properties. The duality nature of human beings is a paradox that continues to awe the minds of many philosophers like Plato who describes human beings as irrational and yet rational. Diotima, a teacher of Socrates gives an example of what parents do for their children, where their irrationality is puzzling for someone who does not understand the nature of love, with the ultimate motivator being happiness.

The ways in which human beings pursue happiness makes them look irrational. The things they pursue with passions can bring much unhappiness and sorrow in that particular point and beyond the boundaries of their lives. According to Plato, these pursuits include becoming heroes, attaining virtue and knowledge, having children, becoming inventors, and so on. While people pursue these things, some of them don’t take up, while others decide to live different kinds of lives. Many think pursuing these things provide a good life, and though they are undertaken with this hope they come with risk of failure, potential harm and exhaustion.

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