Philosophical View on Human Nature - Essay Example

Task: Give a critical analysis of one philosophical view on human nature. How close do you think it comes to the 'truth' Excerpt: This paper investigates the human tendency to indulge in criminal acts, whether biological factors play vital role in instigating the desire in the instinctive demand or social norms have significant characteristics to mould the habit of individuals in the society. Order#: 198872 Deadline: 2007-12-22 18:57 Style: General Language Style: English UK Pages: 6 Sources: 6 Writer ID: 6746 INTRODUCTION: THE RATIONALISTIC APPROACH OF HUMAN NATURE 'Every human is indeed a slave of circumstances.' An honest man commits cruel or socially unacceptable acts mostly when situations compel him. Nobody steals things out of instinct or out of fashion. They do so for one fundamental reason that is they need it badly. Sometime people may do so out of habit which is in fact a disease as per the psychological disorder. Sometimes they may do it out of certain traits of jealousy to harm the opponent. If they, do so out of habit than also it sights the reason what influenced them to indulge them to develop or acquire such habits! In fact, human nature is the set of psychological characteristics, including ways of thinking and acting, which all normal human beings have in common. The branches of science associated with the study of human nature include sociology, biology and psychology, particularly evolutionary psychology and developmental psychology. Philosophers have carried out research on human nature and set different schools of principles on human nature. According to the accepted modern scientific understanding, human nature is the range of human behavior that is believed to be normal and invariant over long periods of time and across very different cultural contexts. Further, Darwin gave a widely accepted scientific argument that humans and other animal species have no truly fixed nature. On the other hand, the non-scientific understandings of nature, human nature are understood with reference to final and formal causes. Such understandings imply the existence of a divine interest in human nature or the existence of an ideal, of a human, which exists independently of individual humans. THE NATURAL URGE TO CRIME: NEEDS PSYCHOLOGICAL ANALYSIS The habit to indulge in crime or the unconscious desire to indulge in socially unacceptable acts refers to mental disorder. Mental health can be seen as a continuum, wherein an individual's mental health may have many different possible values. Mental wellness is generally viewed as a positive attribute, such that a person can reach enhanced levels of mental health, even if they do not have any diagnosable mental health condition. This definition of mental health highlights emotional well being, the capacity to live a full and creative life, and the flexibility to deal with life's inevitable challenges. Many therapeutic systems and self-help books offer methods and philosophies espousing strategies and techniques vaunted as effective for further improving the mental wellness of otherwise healthy people. Positive psychology is increasingly prominent in mental health. A holistic model of mental health generally includes concepts based upon anthropological, educational, psychological, religious and sociological perspectives, as well as theoretical perspectives from personality, social, clinical, health and developmental psychology. It includes five life tasks namely essence or spirituality, work and leisure, friendship, love and self-direction. It also carries twelve sub tasks-sense of worth, sense of control, realistic beliefs, emotional awareness and coping, problem solving and creativity, sense of humor, nutrition, exercise, self-care, stress management, gender identity, and cultural identity-are identified as characteristics of healthy functioning and a major component of wellness. The components provide a means of responding to the circumstances of life in a manner that promotes healthy functioning. Precisely, human nature to crimes attributes to the external influences on habit formation, if the case is to consider on sympathetic ground. THE ADVOCATES OF EGALITARIANISM VIA MORAL VALUES We quite often believe that morality founded under the social institutions such as religion and other normal social codes govern our lives to maintain social harmony. Egalitarianism, in such case becomes factual promise, which is one-step ahead than a moral claim. One of the striking feature of western civilization is truth are derived primarily based on reasoning. Greek and roman philosophers set this school of thought. Greek scholar Plato took a conception of reason and the examined life that he learnt from Socrates and built both metaphysics and, more to our point, anthropology around it. There was an intellectual soul, resident in the human head, and there was an appetitive beast, resident in the belly and genitals. The duty of the former is to keep the latter tamed and, in time, to welcome death as an escape from this uncomfortable co-habitation. Plato's dualism was immensely influential. It insinuated itself deeply into Christian theology - a process that began, perhaps, as early as the Gospel of John. What all these views have in common is the following structure: "there exists an invariant human nature, and my theory discloses it better than other theories.. Nevertheless, human nature itself, as the object of that knowledge, is considered a constant. Plato's most famous student of Aristotle made some of the most famous and influential statements about human nature. According to him man is a conjugal animal meaning an animal which is born to couple when an adult, thus building a household and in more successful cases, a clan or small village still run upon patriarchal lines. He further argues man is a political animal, meaning an animal with an innate propensity to develop complex communities the size of a city or town. As a political animal, in contrast to his family and clan life, man thrives in his rationality - most fully in the making of laws and traditions. Aristotle advocated man as a mimetic animal emphasizing human reason in its purest form. Man loves to use his imagination, and not only to make laws and run town councils. It is clear that for Aristotle, reason is not only what is most odd about humanity, but it is also what we were meant to achieve at his or her best. The implication reveals we perform our action called nature out of our own inclination. LIBERAL PROPORTION OF HUMAN NATURE OF SELF-JUDGEMENT The answer leading to the question why people indulge in socially unacceptable acts such as stealing and robbery we have to conclude that they mostly commit such misdeed to defend their existence in proportion to the other fellow citizens in the society.Liberals assume human beings free, rational and self-improving given ample of opportunities to be free. Government should provide the conditions for people to enjoy the maximum possible freedom within a framework of the law. Liberals do not believe in 'natural' sociability - instead we are mutually indifferent - due to our free, independent nature. Long before Darwin shocked Western Civilization by proposing that humans had once been solitary animals, and had learnt to be political. The important point about this was the idea that human nature was not fixed, or at least not anywhere near the extent previously suggested by philosophers. While considering Mark's school of human nature we can sum up that human nature is constantly changing. Marx denied that there was any human nature, and said that human beings are simply a blank slate, whose character will depend wholly upon their socialization and experience. It is true that Marx placed enormous importance on the view that people are influenced and determined by their environments. He believed that under capitalism, we are alienated - that is, divorced from aspects of our human nature. He envisaged the possibility of a society following capitalism, which would allow human beings to exercise their human nature and individuality. Marx's understanding of human nature did not only play a role in his critique of capitalism, and in his belief that a better society would be possible. Marx says that two of the three aspects of social activity, which ground history, is the tendency of humans to act to fulfill their needs, and thereafter, the tendency to generate new needs. This human tendency, for Marx, is what drives the continuing expansion of productive power in human civilization. Sigmund Freud believed that the Marxists were right to focus on what he called "the decisive influence which the economic circumstances of men have upon their intellectual, ethical and artistic attitudes." However, he thought that the Marxist view of the class struggle was a too shallow one, assigning to recent centuries conflicts that were, rather, primordial. According to Freud, there stands the struggle between father and son, between established clan leader and rebellious challenger behind the class struggle. This drives the idea home that human nature or even ideology takes the shape of the nature under the influence of our dominant believes system. CONCLUSION: NATURE MAKES HUMAN BENEATH SOCIAL INFLUENCES. Human drives and instincts are not deterministic but propensities to learn at certain stages of development. Behavioralists think of the mind as a 'blank slate'. Whatever knowledge, habits, associations etc - entered the mind only after birth, are based wholly on experience, and form rational choice out of socialization. Since human nature exhibits its traits out of the external influences while an internal force pulls its ego towards the desire of the set pattern of the beliefs, it is an elastic mode of ideology. There are a number of perspectives regarding the fundamental nature and substance of humans. This egocentric human nature encompasses a set of views that humans are purely natural phenomena; sophisticated beings that evolved to our present state through natural mechanisms such as evolution. Humanist philosophers determine good and evil by appeal to universal human qualities, but other naturalists regard these terms as mere labels placed on how well individual behavior conforms to societal expectations, and is the result of our psychology and socialization. State of nature, therefore is philosophical assertions regarding the condition of humans before social factors are imposed, thus attempting to describe the "natural essence" of human nature. . According to Fukuyama described in 'The Great Disruption', biology governs the body but the Mind is 'different'. It is the source of culture, values and norms REFERENCES 1. Buller, David J. (2005). Adapting Minds: Evolutionary Psychology And The Persistent Quest For Human Nature.MIT Press: 428. 2. Brown, Donald (1991). Human Universals. McGraw-Hill. ISBN 007008209X 3. Noam Chomsky & Michel Foucault, The Chomsky-Foucault Debate: On Human Nature (New Press, 2006). 4. Sigmund Freud, The Future of an Illusion (Norton). 5. David Hume, A Treatise on Human Nature (Oxford University Press, 2007, originally 1739/1740). 6. Christopher J. Berry, Human Nature (MacMillan, 1986). 7. Martin A. Miller, Freud and the Bolsheviks: Psychoanalysis in Imperial Russia and the Soviet Union (New Haven, CT 1998). 8. Louis P. Pojman, Who Are We (Oxford University Press, 2005). Special Consulted Reading Trigg, Roger (1988): Ideas of Human Nature: An Historical Introduction, Blackwell Pinker, Steven (2002): The Blank Slate: The Modern Denial of Human Nature, Allen Lane Lopston, Peter (Ed) (1998): Readings on Human Nature, Broadview Press Fukuyama, Francis (2000): The Great Disruption: Human Nature and the Reconstitution of Social Order, Profile Midgely, Mary (1980): Beast and Man: The Roots of Human Nature, Methuen McGorry PD, Mihalopoulos C, Henry L et al (1995) Spurious precision: procedural validity of diagnostic assessment in psychiatric disorders. American Journal of Psychiatry 152 (2) 220-223 Read More