Humanity

While the Homeric religion of the ancient Greeks suggested that the gods and goddesses played with human events, the ancient Greek philosophers after Socrates (c. 470–399 B.C.E.) analyzed the parts of the human psyche to gain control over human conduct, and debated the highest good (eudaimonia). The Platonic Academy under Plato sought contemplation of the Forms such as Justice, Truth, and Beauty. Criticized not only by the Aristotelian Lyceum, but also by the Epicureans who proposed pleasure as highest good, and the Stoics who proposed virtue and the highest good, the Academy in its skeptical stage during the second century B.C.E. sought tranquility from doubt. Marcus Tullius Cicero (106–43 B.C.E.) passed on the heritage of the Hellenistic debates in numerous Latin dialogues wherein he proposed to fellow Romans of the Republic his goal of studia humanitatis, the studies appropriate to a free citizen. The particular set of disciplines constituting the humanities education have changed over the centuries but retain Cicero's educational goal to develop natural potentiality of humanity. Influenced by Greek Stoic imagery of notions imprinted on the mind, Cicero described the positive potential in human nature as the rudimentary beginnings of intelligence, right reason, or common notions that the mind naturally develops. Lucius Annaeus Seneca's (4 B.C.E.?–65 C.E.) Epistles passed down to medieval Christians the identification of common notions with seeds of virtue and knowledge. In this optimistic view of human nature, right reason is an internal access to natural law, and humans know to seek good and flee evil.

In contrast to the Greco-Roman tradition, wherein ethics and law developed without a heavy interference from religion, Hebrew scriptures provided a divinely revealed law code, on which rabbinical discussion ensued in the Babylonian Talmud. A basic premise of Judaism is that the created world of God is good and that humanity in particular is very good: "created in the image of God, male and female" (Gen. 1:26). Psalm one compares a righteous man to "a tree … that bringeth forth its fruit in its season," and the prophet Jeremiah holds man responsible for bringing forth sweet good deeds (Jer. 2:21).

St. Augustine of Hippo (354–430) reinterpreted Genesis in his development of the doctrine of original sin, a sin Augustine viewed as committed by Adam and passed down to offspring through male concupiscence in sexual intercourse. While through baptism, a Christian overcomes some original sin inherited from Adam through the grace of the new Adam, Jesus, humans are stained nevertheless and must be alert to temptations. In his Summa Theologiae, St. Thomas Aquinas (c. 1224–1274) utilizes the phrase "seeds of virtue and knowledge" to explicate the basis of natural law within human nature, and Thomism vied with Augustinianism. During the Italian Renaissance, a prosperous middle class rising into the nobility argued that nobility was based not on the "seed of lineage" but on the "seed of virtue." The further optimism concerning potentialities of human free will of the Renaissance neo-Platonists Ficino and Pico della Mirandola helped bring about a reemphasis on Augustinian original sin through Martin Luther (1483–1546) and John Calvin (1509–1564) and among Catholic Jansenists.

More radical than the Protestant and Catholic Reformations were the secular authors who attempted to describe human nature independently from the Judeo-Christian tradition. Niccolò Machiavelli (1469–1527) used ancient models to write about history and politics, and proposed autonomous principles governing the success of a new prince over the unruly human nature of his population. The Enlightenment thinkers sought to define human nature within a pregovernment ancient state of nature suggested by Cicero's description of the origins of government in the common notions of community. Following Machiavelli's negative view of human nature, Thomas Hobbes (1588–1679) suggested a war of each against all. In contrast, John Locke (1632–1704) transformed the natural law into natural rights within human nature, and a philosophical tradition developed that attributed ills of humankind to social arrangements. Jean-Jacques Rousseau (1712–1778) culminated this tradition in looking back to a golden age before inequality became so severe, and suggesting that human communities might make a new social contract, which would provide equality to male citizens. In the nineteenth century utilitarians worked out arrangements for the greatest good of the greatest number; utopian socialists developed schemes for community ownership of property; and Karl Marx (1818–1883) and Friedrich Engels (1820–1895) developed a historical theory for revolutionary change to result ultimately in such peaceful relations of humanity that the government would wither away. Twentieth-century behaviorist psychologists continued the nurture versus nature debate on the side of the malleability of humanity, while the testing industry attempted to measure more and more precisely the variations in abilities among students.

The beats of Igor Stravinsky's Rites of Spring (1913), as well as Expressionist art, evoke the transformation of views of human nature by authors exploring the irrational in antiquity as well as in modern clashes of world cultures. Friedrich Nietzsche (1844–1900) followed Machiavelli in criticizing the feminine weakness of Christianity and seeking to revive the masculine warrior courage of the Romans. Nietzsche provided an image of a human greater than ordinary for whom ordinary morality was too limiting. Such a person might transcend moral convention. Sigmund Freud (1856–1939) suggested that sexuality pervaded the human psyche. Humanity was driven by the sexuality and aggression of the id; the ego tried to control the id under guidance from the parentally socialized superego. These psychological explorations suggested a more sinister side of human nature, evident in the European colonial competitions in Africa and in the developments of totalitarian regimes in Europe.

Twentieth-century authors had to contend with the realization of the nightmare of two world wars fought on European soil. A revival of Augustinian notions of original sin developed within Catholic and Protestant theologians, yet the Second Vatican Council, 1962–1965, in its ecumenical discussions, did affirm "that God does not deny the possibility of salvation to all men of good will" (reaffirmed by Pope John Paul II, The Splendor of Truth, pp. 6–7). Most European theorists of human nature, absorbed in witnessing the atrocities of their times, concluded negatively on human nature. Yet in July 1944, Anne Frank, hoping the Nazis would not find her Jewish residence in Amsterdam, wrote "It's really a wonder that I haven't dropped all my ideals.… Yet I keep them, because in spite of everything I still believe that people are really good at heart" (p. 287).