PKU4 HUMAN NATURE The Western Tradition
Human Nature according to the Western Tradition
To keep in mind as you read: Human Nature has long drawn more attention
from Western thinkers than from Chinese. Why should that be?
Selfhood is a key element in Western ideas about human nature. In Western
civilization human nature traditionally implies in-born characteristics that come to
humans by the very fact of their being born human. The ancient Greeks, having
conceived of matter as purely physical and subject to the laws of nature, created an
enduring separation in Western ideas of human nature between material and nonmaterial aspects, between bodies and intangible elements evoked by the word selfhood
[link: traditional ideas of selfhood]. Physical things could be perceived by the senses.
Immaterial things were no less real but instead of being perceptible, they were
intelligible, that is, able to be understood by the mind. Selfhood was one of the ways
you and those around you could know who you were.
Even among the ancient Greeks there was no stable consensus about how to
understand the intangible components in human nature. Different conceptions have
continued to surface over time even to this day [link: modern ideas of selfhood E3.2]. In all
cases, however, the impulse to fraction human nature into component parts is itself a
characteristic of Western mentalities [link: Western thinking in categories]. Also characteristic
are the disagreements about how to define the parts and to understand how they relate
to each other [link: agon]. Below appear several of the most influential of the traditional
concepts about the immaterial aspects of human selves
1 Psychĕ (Ancient Greek) [pronounced psee-chay]
Plato (427?-347 BCE) identified the non-physical, the psychĕ, as having three
subdivisions (Republic, Book IV): reason (intellect or mind), spirit, and appetite. Appetite (Greek:
epithumetikon), which is tied to the senses, is the lowest, most animal-like faculty of the
three. Spirit (Greek: thumos) is higher, the locus of courage and will power that translates
plans into action. Reason (Greek: logistikon) is the highest human faculty for Plato because
by way of reason one can understand logos [link: logos], the fundamental organizing
principle of the cosmos (everything that exists). For Plato, the logos resided in
transcendental Eternal Forms of which all things on earth are merely flawed imitations
[link: cave allegory]. Because the logistikon part of the psychĕ could grasp the idea of these
timeless forms, that part of the psychĕ, thought Plato, could be in touch with immortality.
Aristotle (384-322 BCE), Plato’s student and later rival, focused more tangibly on living
beings. Psychĕ for him was a word for what animated living beings, but he categorized
three levels of being based on progressively higher forms of animation. The lowest form
of life (plants) exhibit nutritive powers implying growth and reproduction; the next higher
forms (animals) also have sensitive powers implying sense perception and movement;
the highest forms (humans) add rational powers because they are capable of thought by
means of their reason (mind or intellect). The presence of psychĕ is what makes any
individual plant, animal, or person alive for as long as it is alive (Latin: anima). Aristotle
further subdivided the rational psychĕ into five faculties, the highest of which, active
intellect, had potential for immortality.
Note that modern English usage of psyche [pronounced sigh-key] differs greatly [link:
Sigmund Freud E3.2].
2 Mind
Both Plato and Aristotle give high place to the rational faculties of humans – the
intellectual reasoning power that they saw as the highest aspects of psychĕ. But these
thinkers also admit the existence of the irrational, particularly in the form of madness.
Aristotle spells out two types of madness: one divinely inspired as in prophecies, the
other resulting from disease. Plato shares approximately the same view [link: Plato]. To
these highly rational philosophers, the irrational could include religious sentiments,
particularly if they were intensely emotional. In short, it would be misleading to refer to
these dominant Greek thinkers using the modern English word soul, because the latter
carries strong Christian connotations of personal immortality after the death of the body.
3 Soul (Christian)
The Soul hovering over the Body reluctantly parting with Life
William Blake (1757-1827), 1808
The Christian tradition adapted Greek ideas into a new idea of soul that suited its
religious concerns. When the New Testament Bible says one should love God “with all
your heart, with all your soul and with all your mind” [Matthew 22: 37, New Revised Standard
Version], soul refers to the eternal aspect of the individual human, the part presumed to
live on after death. Mind in this tradition, as among the Greeks, focuses on reason or
the intellect that allows the person to think logically and rationally. Heart in this context
refers, as usual in Western contexts, to an emotional or feeling commitment, though
long ago the heart was also sometimes thought of as the locus of understanding.
A related word in this semantic field, spirit, is in religious contexts a rather vague and
general term for the non-physical part of humans, typically encompassing heart, soul,
and mind. Spirit often points diffusely to the spiritual, that is, the religious capacities of
humans.
4 Will
Another aspect of personhood that is especially important in the Christian tradition is
the notion of will, that is, of a person’s faculty for deciding what actions to perform. Will
seems separate from mind, because mind can determine what one should do, but the
will decides what one actually does. Christian moral accountability depends on the
notion of free will – the idea that individuals are free to choose what actions they
perform [link: Western morality E6.1]. Therefore, if they choose bad actions (sin) over good,
the responsibility and the fault is theirs, and punishment is appropriate, whether through
human laws or divine justice. St. Augustine (354-430) is one of the first great theorists of
free will [link: text]. Christian thinkers like him asked why humans perversely choose to
perform actions they know to be sinful and hence harmful to their souls. Augustine
concluded that the “original sin” of Adam and Eve meant that their descendants would
all suffer from a fallen human nature.
Commentary:
All the above notions presume a distinction between the physical person (body) and
the inner person (mind or spirit). In all cases these Western traditions differ markedly from
the Chinese way, in which head-and-heart, thoughts-and-emotions, are closely bound
together in the notion of xin (心, heart-and-mind) [link: xin]. In Encounter 3.2 we will trace
the more recent evolution of Western ideas about human nature [link: modern ideas of
selfhood].
Throughout these alternative distinctions among ways of conceiving the immaterial
part of human beings, there is one consistency: the sharp distinction between the
physical matter of human bodies and the impalpable nature of the meta-physical
components. To dramatize this distinction, here is a startling painting by René Magritte
(Belgian, 1898-1967).
Decalcomania (1966)
This surrealist painting confirms visually the two aspects of human nature
as understood in the Western tradition
Westerners today, depending on their individual orientation, may actively believe in
any or all of the above concepts. The religiously inclined continue to emphasize their
free will to perform good actions or bad; ultimate divine judgment of an eternal soul is
traditionally part of this belief. The more secularly inclined are more likely to emphasize
how social conditions or childhood experiences affect adult behavior. Still others profess
loyalty to one or another political doctrine, claiming that the world’s problems would
come to an end if only everyone shared their particular commitments.
Thus Western civilization continues to live with diverse understandings rather than a
consistent view of what makes human beings human and how they should live. The
concepts individuals rely on for understanding themselves and others depend on how
they were raised and what principles their later experience has led them to find credible.
As in many aspects of Western civilization, there is no one authoritative vocabulary that
everyone uses or feels they ought to use [link: postmodern appendix].
Study Questions:
1. What difference does it make to put so much emphasis on reason over other
aspects of thinking/feeling? Is such a distinction consistently useful or could it have
negative effects? Why or why not?
2. Why has the West given such prominence to Nature if there is such widespread
disagreement about the nature of human nature?
Excerpt from Western Civilization with Chinese Comparisons, 3rd ed.
(Shanghai: Fudan University Press, 2010), pp 205-08.