Theme
Human nature
22 philosophers, 6 traditions
Are human beings born good, bad or neither, and what does that mean for how they should live and be governed? Chinese, Greek, Islamic and European thinkers answered very differently.
Claims about human nature rarely stay descriptive: whether people are naturally cooperative or quarrelsome, good or bad, is often taken to settle what kind of ethics or society is possible for them. The question was argued most directly in early China. Mencius held that human nature is good, meaning that people tend to become good in conditions that suit them; Xunzi answered that what we are born with leads us into harm unless ritual and teaching reshape it, though both agreed that anyone can become good. The Analects of Confucius had said little, but stressed habituation over birth.
Later Chinese thinkers kept the question alive. Zhu Xi followed Mencius while explaining wrongdoing by the different endowments of qi that people are born with, and Dai Zhen defended ordinary desires and feelings as part of a good human nature rather than obstacles to it.
Elsewhere the question took other forms. Aristotle thought human beings political by nature, able to flourish only in a community. Ibn Taymiyya held that people are born with a natural disposition towards God. In early modern Europe, Hobbes argued that without government human beings would fall into a war of all against all, while Rousseau insisted that they are naturally good and that society corrupts them.
Through time
6th century BCE
Confucius
The Analects says little about human nature, but one remark puts the weight on nurture: “By nature people are close, by habituation they are miles apart.” What we become depends on training our dispositions through ritual and the classics.
4th century BCE
Aristotle
Human beings are political animals by nature, in the strong sense that they can flourish as humans only within a political community, not merely because they enjoy company or gain from trade.
Mencius
Human nature is good: people tend to become good when raised in conditions that suit them, as an orange seed tends to become a fruiting tree even though many never do. When people go wrong, the fault lies with their surroundings and their own neglect.
Drew on Confucius
3rd century BCE
Xunzi
Human nature, what we have from birth, is bad: followed without reflection, our inborn desires lead us to harm one another. Yet anyone can become good, by reshaping that nature through ritual, music and teaching.
1st century BCE
Yang Xiong
Human nature is neither good, as Mencius held, nor bad, as Xunzi held, but a mixture of good and bad tendencies. Which a person becomes depends on which tendencies they cultivate.
3rd century CE
Zhong Hui
Natural capacity and human nature coincide: we are born with potential, which only learning and effort can bring to completion.
About 600 years later
9th century CE
Zongmi
The human mind cannot come from an unconscious vital force shared with plants and stones. Confucian and Daoist accounts of our origins, for all their ethical worth, leave consciousness unexplained.
Argued against Confucius
11th century
Cheng Hao
Human nature is good, being nothing but principle in us, and its heart is humanity (ren). Evil is not part of our nature but comes from the vital force we live among, as mud from a river’s course clouds water that is clear at its source.
Drew on Mencius
12th century
Zhu Xi
Following Mencius, people are basically good, well-meaning and moved by others’ suffering. But each is born with a particular endowment of qi and raised in a particular setting, which explains why some become bad and why self-cultivation is needed.
14th century
Ibn Taymiyya
People are created with a natural constitution (fiṭra) turned towards God. As an infant instinctively seeks milk, human beings are disposed to believe in and worship God alone, and many basic truths of reason come with that inborn nature.
16th century
Desiderius Erasmus
Humans are rational beings, made of spirit, soul and flesh; the soul can rise towards the spirit or sink to the level of the body. Since the will is free, education counts for more than nature in making us what we are.
Wang Tingxiang
Goodness is not built into human nature. Moral feelings such as shame, which Confucians took as signs of innate goodness, respond mainly to social norms and expectations.
Yi Hwang
Human nature is principle, and principle is perfect. People act badly not because of their nature but because material force, varying with circumstance, carries it out imperfectly, a failing that mindful self-cultivation can correct.
Drew on Zhu Xi
17th century
Thomas Hobbes
Without a common authority to settle disputes, people’s fear of one another, their competition for scarce goods and the vanity of a few would turn their natural liberty into a state of war.
Argued against Aristotle
Itō Jinsai
Human nature is not a single good principle shared by all, but the particular physical disposition each person is born with, which differs from one person to the next.
Antoinette Deshoulières
Human beings are animals of a higher degree, not of a different kind; their thinking, choosing and loving are the work of matter and instinct.
18th century
Montesquieu
Human character varies with climate and geography: cold makes people bold and frank, heat makes them more sensitive and fearful. These influences are real but not irresistible, and good laws can counteract them.
Jean-Jacques Rousseau
Human beings are good by nature and corrupted by society. Their original drives are self-preservation and compassion; social life adds amour propre, the need to be valued by others, which Rousseau often treats as the root of our ills.
Drew on and argued against Thomas Hobbes; drew on Montesquieu
Adam Smith
Humans are social through and through: all our feelings, selfish or kind, are shaped by our constant effort to share others’ feelings and have them share ours. Against Hobbes and Mandeville, self-interest is not the whole of human nature.
Drew on Aristotle; argued against Thomas Hobbes
Dai Zhen
Our shared desires and feelings belong to our nature and are no enemy of morality; rightly understood, they guide us to the patterns of a good life. Earlier Neo-Confucians were wrong to treat sensory desire as an obstacle to goodness.
19th century
Alexander Crummell
Reason, not instinct or passion, is the governing part of human nature; it lets us recognise moral truth directly, and education exists to free it.
20th century
Xiong Shili
Human nature is pure and undefiled. Evil comes from acquired habits, not from anything innate, and can be removed so that one returns to one’s original nature.
Terms on this page
- qi
- Vital force or material force (氣), the stuff of which all things are made. Neo-Confucians paired it with principle (li), and explained the differences between people by the qi each is endowed with.
- ren
- Humaneness or benevolence (仁), the cardinal Confucian virtue. Cheng Hao treated it as the whole of human nature, by which a person forms one body with all things and feels their pain as their own.
- fitra
- Natural constitution: the inborn human disposition towards belief in God and the worship of God alone, which Ibn Taymiyya counted among the ways of knowing.
- amour propre
- Rousseau’s term for the self-interested drive, arising in society, to be recognised by others as worth something and to be respected, often translated as pride or vanity.
Sources
- Neil Roughley, Human Nature, Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy