Who is human person thru theories of human nature?

When you look in the mirror, you are checking how you appear, what you seem to be, and
whether it matches how you feel inside. Thinking about human nature is the equivalent of our
whole species looking in the mirror to check its identity. Just as we all react differently to our
own reflections in the mirror, the reflection we call human nature is also often disputed.

By definition, human nature includes the core characteristics (feelings, psychology, behaviors)
shared by all people. We all have different experiences of the humans in our life, and this is
where the disputes begin. Some people will tell you humans are 'good' or 'bad', or 'predators' or
'capable of great kindness.' These views are colored by the influence of the people we know
and what our culture and subcultures tell us. The group you are born into will pass on its
particular ideas about what makes humans 'human.'

Philosophers and scholars tend to talk human nature based on major schools of thought from
human history. Some religion scholars argue that spiritual or religious natures are the key trait in
human nature. For example, Judeo-Christian belief presents humans as creations of God that
have free will, which provides them both dignity and ethical dangers. Buddhists think that to be
human is to be aware (conscious) and to desire.

More broadly, in Western cultures, the discussions usually begin with Plato and Aristotle in
classical Greece. Plato thought that humans were rational, social animals, and he connected
our nature with our souls and ability to reason rather than our bodies. Aristotle differed primarily
in his belief that both body and soul contributed to our human identity. These theories are not
mutually exclusive, but have been built upon each other and adapted over time.

Other ideas about human nature have been discussed by historically important figures including
Rene Descartes, Charles Darwin, Karl Marx, and Sigmund Freud. The following items represent
changes in theories from the 1500s to the 20th century.

Descartes (1596-1650) expanded Plato's ideas, describing people as thinking spirits. He was
later critiqued by Gilbert Ryle, who, like Aristotle, could not completely separate human mental
processes from physical ones. By way of example, Aristotle and Ryle would agree that the
action of hammering a nail when building a house inherently weaves mind and body together.

According to Darwin (1809-1882) and the logic of evolution, humans are described as another
form of primate. Human life, like any animal's, is experienced as a series of problems to be
addressed and resolved. Darwinian thinkers do not raise humans above other animals, but
recognize that human characteristics are a product of nature, developed through circumstance
and physical characteristics that affect behavior.
Who is human person thru human condition?

The human condition is "the characteristics, key events, and situations which compose the
essentials of human existence, such as birth, growth, emotionality, aspiration, conflict, and
mortality".[1] This is a very broad topic which has been and continues to be pondered and
analyzed from many perspectives, including those of religion, philosophy, history, art, literature,
anthropology, psychology, and biology.

As a literary term, "the human condition" is typically used in the context of ambiguous subjects
such as the meaning of life or moral concerns.

Each major religion has definitive beliefs regarding the human condition. For example,
Buddhism teaches that life is a perpetual cycle of suffering, death, and rebirth from which
humans can be liberated via the Noble Eightfold Path. Meanwhile, some denominations of
Christianity teaches that humans are born in a sinful condition and are sent to hell in the afterlife
unless they receive salvation through Jesus Christ.

Philosophers have provided many perspectives. An influential ancient view was that of the
Republic in which Plato explored the question "what is justice?" and postulated that it is not
primarily a matter among individuals but of society as a whole, prompting him to devise a utopia.
Two thousand years later René Descartes declared "I think, therefore I am" because he
believed the human mind, particularly its faculty of reason, to be the primary determiner of truth;
for this he is often credited as the father of modern philosophy.[3] One such modern school,
existentialism, attempts to reconcile an individual's sense of disorientation and confusion in a
universe believed to be absurd.

Many works of literature provide perspective on the human condition.[2] One famous example is
Shakespeare's monologue "All the world's a stage" that pensively summarizes seven phases of
human life.

Psychology has many theories, such as Maslow's hierarchy of needs and the notion of identity
crisis. It also has various methods, e.g. the logotherapy developed by Holocaust survivor Viktor
Frankl to discover and affirm human meaning. Another method, cognitive behavioral therapy,
has become a widespread treatment for clinical depression.

Ever since 1859, when Charles Darwin published On the Origin of Species, the biological theory
of evolution has been significant. The theory posits that the human species is related to all
others, living and extinct, and that natural selection is the primary survival factor. This has
provided a basis for new beliefs, e.g. social Darwinism, and for new technology, e.g. antibiotics.

Who is human person thru human nature as freedom?

We are living through a period of rapid and perhaps unprecedented social and economic
change, and our established ways of thinking about public questions have not been serving us
well. Regaining our balance will require us to open our eyes to the simultaneously disturbing
and encouraging trends before us. But perhaps more than that, we are both required and have
the opportunity to reflect anew on who we are as free and relational persons. We can and must
think more deeply about the contents of a fully human life, as knowing who we are is an
indispensable prelude to figuring out what to do to sustain the future of personal and political
liberty.

Some of our most familiar political and intellectual categories, adapted to suit 20th-century
debates, now cause us to fall into a simpleminded individualism that we cannot really believe.
Too many conservatives, for instance, persist in the tired distinction between individual freedom
and collectivism. That unrealistic bifurcation helped discredit the communist or fascist reduction
of the particular person to nothing but an expendable cog in a machine, plugging away in pursuit
of some glorious paradise to come at the end of History. But today that distinction too often ends
up placing in the same repulsive category any understanding of the person as a relational part
of a larger whole — of a country, family, church, or even nature. It thus causes conservatives to
dismiss what students of humanity from Aristotle to today's evolutionary psychologists know to
be true: that we social animals are "hardwired" by instinct to find meaning in serving personal
causes greater than ourselves, and that reconciling freedom with personal significance is only
possible in a relational context that is less about rights than about duties.

Who is human person thru theories of human nature?

Human nature is a bundle of characteristics, including ways of thinking, feeling, and acting,
which humans are said to have naturally.The term is often regarded as capturing what it is to be
human, or the essence of humanity. The term is controversial because it is disputed whether or
not such an essence exists. Arguments about human nature have been a mainstay of
philosophy for centuries and the concept continues to provoke lively philosophical debate. The
concept also continues to play a role in science, with neuroscientists, psychologists and social
scientists sometimes claiming that their results have yielded insight into human nature.Human
nature is traditionally contrasted with characteristics that vary among humans, such as
characteristics associated with specific cultures. Debates about human nature are related to,
although not the same as, debates about the comparative importance of genes and
environment in development ("nature versus nurture").

The concept of nature as a standard by which to make judgments is traditionally said to have
begun in Greek philosophy, at least as regards the Western and Middle Eastern languages and
perspectives which are heavily influenced by it.

The teleological approach of Aristotle came to be dominant by late classical and medieval times.
By this account, human nature really causes humans to become what they become, and so it
exists somehow independently of individuals. This in turn has been understood as also showing
a special connection between human nature and divinity. This approach understands human
nature in terms of final and formal causes. In other words, nature itself (or a nature-creating
divinity) has intentions and goals, similar somehow to human intentions and goals, and one of
those goals is humanity living naturally. Such understandings of human nature see this nature
as an "idea", or "form" of a human.

However, the existence of this invariable and metaphysical human nature is subject of much
historical debate, continuing into modern times. Against this idea of a fixed human nature, the
relative malleability of man has been argued especially strongly in recent centuries—firstly by
early modernists such as Thomas Hobbes and Jean-Jacques Rousseau. In Rousseau's Emile,
or On Education, Rousseau wrote: "We do not know what our nature permits us to be"] Since
the early 19th century, thinkers such as Hegel, Marx, Kierkegaard, Nietzsche, Sartre,
structuralists, and postmodernists have also sometimes argued against a fixed or innate human
nature.

Charles Darwin's theory of evolution has changed the nature of the discussion, supporting the
proposition that mankind's ancestors were not like mankind today. Still more recent scientific
perspectives—such as behaviorism, determinism, and the chemical model within modern
psychiatry and psychology—claim to be neutral regarding human nature. As in much of modern
science, such disciplines seek to explain with little or no recourse to metaphysical causation.[15]
They can be offered to explain the origins of human nature and its underlying mechanisms, or to
demonstrate capacities for change and diversity which would arguably violate the concept of a
fixed human nature.

Who is human person thru human condition?

The truth is the human condition is the agonising, underlying, core, real question in all of human
life, of are humans good or are we possibly the terrible mistake that all the evidence seems to
unequivocally indicate we might be? While it’s undeniable that humans are capable of great
love, we also have an unspeakable history of brutality, rape, torture, murder and war. Despite all
our marvellous accomplishments, we humans have been the most ferocious and destructive
force that has ever lived on Earth—and the eternal question has been ‘why?’ Even in our
everyday behaviour, why have we humans been so competitive, selfish and aggressive when
clearly the ideals of life are to be the complete opposite, namely cooperative, selfless and
loving? In fact, why are we so ruthlessly competitive, selfish and brutal that human life has
become all but unbearable and we have nearly destroyed our own planet?!
Unable—until now—to truthfully answer this deepest and darkest of all questions of our
seemingly-highly-imperfect human condition, of are we humans fundamentally good or bad, we
learnt to avoid the whole depressing subject—so much so, in fact, that the human condition has
been described as ‘the personal unspeakable’, and as ‘the black box inside of humans they
can’t go near’. Indeed, the famous psychoanalyst Carl Jung was referring to the terrifying
subject of the human condition when he wrote that ‘When it [our shadow] appears…it is quite
within the bounds of possibility for a man to recognize the relative evil of his nature, but it is a
rare and shattering experience for him to gaze into the face of absolute evil’ (Aion in The
Collected Works of C.G. Jung, Vol. 9/2, p.10). Yes, the ‘face of absolute evil’ is the ‘shattering’
possibility—if we allowed our minds to think about it—that we humans might indeed be a terrible
mistake! Socrates famously said that ‘the unexamined life is not worth living’, and it’s true that
we needed to find understanding of ourselves, ‘examine’ the issue of the human condition, BUT,
it’s also true that trying to go anywhere near the subject, trying to conduct any ‘examin[ation]’ of
the human condition, raised such ‘shattering’ doubts about our meaning and worth as humans
that it wasn’t ‘worth’ doing if we were to actually continue ‘living’!! In fact, since almost any
thinking on any subject brought our mind one way or another into contact with the unbearable
issue of the human condition, even that most basic task for conscious humans has been a
nightmare—as the Australian comedian Rod Quantock once said, ‘Thinking can get you into
terrible downwards spirals of doubt’ (Sydney Morning Herald, 5 July 1986). Yes, the truth is the
human mind has had to live on the very surface of existence, live an extremely superficial,
escapist existence.
So even though the issue of the human condition has been the real, underlying issue we
needed to solve if we were to exonerate and thus rehabilitate the human race, we have been so
fearful and insecure about the subject that instead of confronting it and trying to solve it we have
been preoccupied denying and escaping it. The truth is that while much attention has been
given to the need to love each other and the environment if we are to ‘save the world’, the real
need if we were to actually succeed in doing so was to find the means to love the dark side of
ourselves—to find the reconciling understanding of our ‘good-and-evil’-afflicted human condition
that was causing so much suffering and destruction! Carl Jung was forever saying that
‘wholeness for humans depends on the ability to own their own shadow’ because he recognised
that only finding understanding of our dark side could end our underlying insecurity about our
fundamental goodness and worth as humans and, in doing so, make us ‘whole’. The
pre-eminent philosopher Sir Laurens van der Post was making the same point when he said,
‘True love is love of the difficult and unlovable’ (Journey Into Russia, 1964, p.145) and that ‘Only
by understanding how we were all a part of the same contemporary pattern [of wars, cruelty,
greed and indifference] could we defeat those dark forces with a true understanding of their
nature and origin’ (Jung and the Story of Our Time, 1976, p.24).
True compassion was ultimately the only means by which peace and love could come to our
planet and it could only be achieved through understanding. Drawing again from the writings of
van der Post: ‘Compassion leaves an indelible blueprint of the recognition that life so sorely
needs between one individual and another; one nation and another; one culture and another. It
is also valid for the road which our spirit should be building now for crossing the historical abyss
that still separates us from a truly contemporary vision of life, and the increase of life and
meaning that awaits us in the future’ (ibid. p.29). Yes, only ‘true understanding of the nature and
origin’ of our species’ ‘good-and-evil’-troubled, even ‘fallen’ or corrupt.

Who is human person thru Human nature as freedom?

In this essay, I argue that we may not need to know much about human nature to have moral
concerns about changing it by means of biotechnology. Neither our conception of nature nor our
conception of hu­manity need to be—or can plausibly be—essentialist and static. To attach moral
significance to the condi­tions of our humanity, and to be wary of the techno­logical manipulation
of it, we do not necessarily need to specify exactly what it means to be human. We do not need
to have a full theory of human nature in order to have moral concerns about changing it.

Essentialist Versus Evolutionary Perspectives

According to one influential philosophical tradi­tion, to understand human nature is to grasp the
es­sence of what it is to be human. As typically under­stood, an “essence” is the fundamental
being or reality that a particular thing embodies. An essence explains the traits that a thing has.
It is not reducible to those traits, however; it is unchanging and timeless. An es­sence has an
existence of its own, and indeed it is, in a sense, more real than the items that partake of it.
Further, essences are often held to relate things of dif­ferent kinds to each other. An essence
connects indi­viduals into a larger class or kind; all the members of a given kind share an
essence, and members of other kinds lack it. According to an ancient lineage of schol­ars whose
work draws on Aristotle, a kind is what it is by rational necessity. It is part of this view that the
overall universe is rationally ordered and necessary, and we can understand the order and
necessity of the universe by grasping the essences that things in the universe embody.

However, essentialism is not the only way of un­derstanding the concept of “human nature.” An
alter­native view, now salient in all post-modern thought and very significant in the biological
sciences, is non-teleological evolution, pioneered by Darwin. When applied to the study of
human beings, an evolution­ary view makes no claim for the rational necessity of human nature,
or for its immutability and timeless­ness; nor does it claim that an account of human na­ture will
show that human nature is rationally related to the rest of the universe. There need also be no
requirement that what makes humans human is some trait that the members of other species
entirely lack. Typically, looking at traits allows one to recognize spe­cies, but the traits that allow
us to recognize humans as humans might be found in some measure in other animals. And
ultimately, in an evolutionary account, what really distinguishes species is not any claim about
what traits characterize the members of the spe­cies, but the causal story that can be told about
how the species appeared on the scene and how, through reproduction, it persists.

On an evolutionary view, then, “human nature” does not refer to an unchanging essence.
Instead, it describes functions; it tells us what the members of the kind happen to be like. From
this perspective we should expect to better understand human nature by studying our taxonomic
neighbors, as Mary Midgley argues in Beast and Man. What distinguishes human beings from
other animals is typically held to be their possession of various capacities related to cognition,
such as language, rationality, tool-making, morality, and culture, but there is no need to establish
that any of these capacities are possessed only by humans; in­deed, the evidence is mounting
that they are capacities or extensions of capacities that animals also possess in differing forms
and degrees. At the same time, as Midgley also emphasizes, we need not restrict our­selves to
biology to learn about human nature. We will have to study humans sociologically and
anthro­pologically, as Paul Ehrlich does in Human Natures: Genes, Cultures, and the Human
Prospect, in which he argues that there is no unitary account of human nature, and that, given
the significance of culture in human ways of living, there are instead multiple hu­man natures.

Moreover, the idea of “human nature” can refer both to how individual human capacities are
acquired and to general claims about human capacities. Human bodies and faces tend to look a
certain way, and that is a fact of nature. But there is also a surprising degree of variation, and
that, too, is a fact of nature. Plainly, there is no single, overarching definition of “nature” that
applies to all of the ways in which the term is used and always shows clearly what the correct
usage is. However, both in rejecting the essentialist under­standing of “human nature” and in
allocating only a limited role to assertions about human species norms, we shift the focus from
general claims about what hu­man beings are like to a recognition of diversity, com­plexity, and
individual variation. To do so is to give up pretensions to a commanding knowledge of what
human beings are really like.