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The Return of Human Nature
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13159 |
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Section : |
MODERN THOUGHT
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| Issue
Date : |
11 / 1987 |
9,023 Words |
| Author
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Michael Levin
Michael Levin is professor of philosophy at City University of
New York and the author of Feminism and Freedom. |
Can there be a revolution nobody knows about? A virtual revolution in the human sciences has taken place in the last two decades, word of which is only now beginning to spread--no doubt because of its embarrassing implications for some fashionable ideologies. To coin a slogan, the revolution is the rediscovery of human nature.
For most of intellectual history, it was taken for granted that man has a "nature" and that accurate knowledge of it is necessary for understanding human society and formulating reasonable prescriptions about the good life. Aristotle asked, rhetorically, "Have the carpenter and the shoemaker certain distinctive functions, while Man as such has none, left by Nature a functionless being?" Two millennia later, Davie Hume--whose skeptical spirit opposed Aristotle on almost every specific issue--wrote a Treatise of Human Nature. Although most are now forgotten, works with similar titles proliferated throughout the Age of Reason.
The assumption that an identifiable core of drives and intellectual capabilities unite all mankind was dislodged by two forces during the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The first was Hegelian historicism. Hegel maintained that the thoughts, feelings, and ideals of all men were completely determined by the particular historical epoch in which they found themselves. In Hegel's disciple Marx, this became the assumption that the "consciousness" of each individual was a function of the economic relations he bore to other, similarly shaped individuals. Hegel undoubtedly caught something his predecessors missed, since it really is quite impossible for a modern New Yorker, with al the attitudes, values, and expectations his station implies, to project himself back into the mindset of an Egyptian slave working on the pyramid of Cheops. At the same time, Hegel grossly overstated his case. Despite a flourish of erudition, the historical evidence Hegel marshaled for his sweeping conclusion was entirely convincing. What is more, it is plainly fallacious to infer from the existence of great differences between people of different historical periods that they are similar in no way at all. Finally and most crucially, Hegel wrote before Darwin created evolutionary biology.
The second attack on human nature came from behavioral psychology. When the empirical study of the mind began to separate from philosophical speculation in the middle of the nineteenth century, its principal observational tool was introspection. Since you are in no position to verify my introspective reports, this emphasis violated scientific norms of objectivity and repeatability, and it came to seem preferable to
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