Submitted by Jacob Weiskopfh Ph.D on
Image by David MAITRE from http://Pixabay.com
We human beings have been fascinated with ourselves for a very long time. In particular, we’ve been interested in what’s called “human nature.” But the idea of human nature is also riven with controversy. Some scholars—often those in the humanities—argue that there’s no such thing as human nature, while others—often those in the social and biological sciences—regard the “denial” of human nature as an egregiously retrograde, anti-scientific move.
I think that a lot of the human nature enthusiasts have gotten things backwards. Rejecting human nature isn’t necessarily anti-scientific, because ideas about human nature are often incompatible with what our best biological science tells us. There is a scientifically acceptable conception of human nature, but it just can’t do the job that we look to the concept of human nature to do.
Let’s start by asking a very basic question. What’s the point of being interested in human nature? Perhaps the main reason for appealing to the concept of human nature is for the purpose of self-knowledge. Human nature offers an explanation why we are the way that we are. A second reason is that it promises to explain what it is that sets us apart from other beings. And a third reason is that a conception of human nature seems to provide us with existential guidance. If it’s true that we all have a human nature then perhaps it is also true that we can only be fulfilled to the extent that we conduct our lives in harmony with that nature.
Most often, people seem to think of human nature as that which makes us human understood as the characteristics that all and only humans possess. This might sound fine in the abstract, but major problems crop up when we try to put our finger on what, exactly, these uniquely human properties are. As political scientist Anne Phillips points out in her book The Politics of the Human, as soon as we start to put flesh on the bare bones of this idea, some members of our species get excluded from the category of the human, while some non-humans get in. For instance, if we say that bipedalism is one such defining property (as Plato did), then the Ulas family of Southeastern Turkey, who walk on all fours, are non-humans, while my friend Ruth’s chickens might stake a claim to humanness. And if the property is something fancier such as “rationality” (a traditional candidate) then neither infants nor the severely mentally impaired would qualify as human.
In fact, this whole way of construing human nature is a throwback to a pre-Darwinian vision of the natural world. It’s an example of what the great evolutionary biologist Ernst Mayr called typological thinking. If you have a typological view of species you think that each member of a species must satisfy a set of species-defining criteria. The whole species, then, is just the collection of all the individuals that can check off all of the definitional criteria (Bipedal? Check! Rational? Check! Tool user? Check! Language speaker? Check!). Mayr pointed out that Darwin showed us that this way of thinking is dead wrong. He taught us that, far from conforming to a set of necessary and sufficient conditions, every group of organisms is a mish-mash of variation. As philosopher of science Subrena Smith is fond of saying, difference is the norm in nature.
Mayr argued that Darwin replaced typological thinking with population thinking. Population thinking is statistical. It concentrates on the frequency of traits in a group rather than focusing on its individual members. Looked at from this perspective, human nature can be understood as the sum of those traits that are common in our species, but which don’t have to be possessed by every one of its members. The philosopher Edouard Machery has developed a conception of human nature along these lines.
This way of looking at human nature has some major advantages over the typological approach. One is that it allows that human nature can change. Looked at from a typological perspective, human nature is static, because the necessary and sufficient conditions for being human are, like Platonic forms, fixed in conceptual space for all eternity. But from a population perspective, the characteristics that are prevalent among humans can and do morph over time. And it’s also less parochial than the typological approach, because it doesn’t require that human nature traits can’t be shared with other creatures.
But the population account also has some significant down sides. A big one is that it need not have anything to say about any particular individual. Just as the average American family has 1.9 children, but no actual family has 1.9 children, the “average” human being has a collection of traits that may not be fully realized by any individual. This means that even an accurate understanding of human nature can mislead us about ourselves and others. A second disadvantage is that the population approach can’t do the job of explaining what sets us apart from other creatures. And finally, the population approach doesn’t provide existential guidance, because the fact that a trait is common amongst Homo sapiens says nothing at all about its relevance to living a fulfilling life.
The concept of human nature confronts us with a dilemma—a fork in the road where each pathway leads to an undesirable destination. Take the typological route, and you end up with an unworkable, anti-scientific approach. Take the population route, and you end up with a conception that can’t tell us about ourselves, doesn’t distinguish us from other kinds of beings, and doesn’t give us guidance on how (and how not) to live. If these are our only options—as they appear to be—then there doesn’t seem to be much point in hanging on to the idea of human nature. Perhaps it’s time we let it go.
David Livingstone Smith