Above questions is fundamentally about human nature there are disagreements aplenty such as “What is man thou art mindful of him…Thou hast made him a little lower than the angels and hast crowned him with glory and honour,” written by the author in Psalm 8 of Old Testament.
The definite purpose of our life is to see human beings created by a transcendent God and the argument directly goes back to the Christian concept of original sin. Man (people who talk about human nature tend to forget women completely) is a fallen animal born with the Mark of Cain upon his brows whose only salvation lies outside the world in the grace of God. Adam Smith used a secular version of this argument to explain why the emerging capitalist society of eighteenth-century Britain was natural and inevitable. He traced the origin of the market economy to the “propensity in human nature…to truck, barter and exchange”.
Human nature is our instinctive reactions and urges and the preposition as to what we already are. The way in which we are programmed to do certain things. Man creates the environment he lives in, “The real nature of man is the totality of social relations,” written by Karl Marx in the mid-nineteenth century. Marx denied the existence of God and held that each person is a product of the particular economic stage of human society in which he or she lives, “Man is condemned to be free,” said Jean-Paul Satre writing in German-occupied France in the 1940s. Satre was an athetist, too, but he differed from Marx in holding that our nature is not determined by our society nor by anything else and he can indeed hold individual person is completely free to be able to decide what he or she wants to be and do.
In contrast to the recent sociobiological theorists have treated human beings as a product of evolution with our own biologically determined those species-specific patterns of behaviour. As Human Labour transforms nature. Marx ridiculed the idea of unchanging nature as much as he did that of eternal human ‘species-being’. He stated to “He does not see that the sensuous world around him is not a thing given direct from all eternity remaining ever the same but the product of industry and of the state of society; and indeed [a product] in the sense that it is a historical product the result of the activity of a whole succession of generations, each standing on the shoulders of the preceding one…Even the objects of the simplest ‘sensuous certainty’ are only given him through social development, industry and commercial development. The cherry-tree like almost all fruit trees was as is well- known only a few centuries ago transplanted by commerce into our zone and therefore only by this action of a definite society in a definite age has it become ‘sensuous certainty’ for Feuerbach.
I have found out that there are different conceptions of human nature, which can lead to different views about what we ought to do and how we can do it. For instance, if an all-powerful and supremely good God made us, then it is his purpose that defines what we can be and what we must look for him to help. On the other hand, we are products of society and if we find that our lives are unsatisfactory then there can be no real solution until human society is transformed. We are quite free and can never escape the individual choice of necessity and tends to accept this and make our choices with full awareness of what we are doing.
In our biological state of nature, it determines us to think, feel and act in certain ways then we must take realistic account of that is why humanity of history and the natural history is concerned with discovering what kinds of animals there are and with analysising their behaviour. Change enters the natural world only when a new species has organised to meet its needs.
About the human nature, In rival beliefs it is often embodied in different individual ways of life and in potential and economic systems. whereas, Marxist theory takes over the general public of humans in the society due to the fact that he dominated with his communist rules of the twentieth century that any kinds of questioning could have consequences and it can be quite serious to the questioner.
It can easily forget that, a few centuries ago, Christianity occupied a similarly dominant position in Western society that unbelievers and heretics were discriminated against, persecuted even burnt at the stake.
Even now, in some countries or communities there is a socially established Christian consensus that individuals can oppose only at some cost to themselves.
There are philosophy an “existentialist” such as Satre’s more or less likely to have a social interaction, but I can find one way of justifying modern “liberal” democracy is by the philosophical view that there are none objective values for human living and only subjective individual choices.
The assumption, which is incompatible with both Christianity and Marxism) is highly influential in modern Western society, far beyond its particular manifestation in French existentialist philosophy of the mid-century .whereas, in the contemporary society there were the philospher called Adam Smith has an ideas about free-market economics in the ways of monetarism and all sorts of ‘scientific’ which seeks to prove that competition and war are inherent in human nature, i.e pseudo-science known as socio-biology claims that human beings are really animals squabbling over patches of ground. The ramifications of this sort of idea are endless.
In order to conclude this issue, oldest argument against socialism, which is contrary to human nature but it is also the most popular. The good idea of Socialism, because we cannot change the human nature and any attempt to create a society free of poverty, exploitation and violence is bound to run up against the fact that humans tends to be aggressive, selfish and greedy. It is still a huge matter of deep difficulty and controversy of the human nature are to understood – what they study, their data and methods.
Bibliography
Books:
R.N.Berki (1998) The history of political thought: a short introduction
Maurice Cranston (1984) Philosophers and Pamphleteers
Leslie Stevenson (1998) Ten theories of Human Nature
Other references – Lecture notes:
Jenkins, Gareth (2001,November) Ideas in the Modern World
Reference for Electronic Citations:
(1999) Encyclopedia- Encarta Deluxe
Ideas in the Modern World - - Coursework 2
