Man

Plato holds that the human soul has three parts: reason, spirit, and appetite. In the Republic, the just man is one in whom reason rules, spirit assists, and appetite obeys; injustice consists in the overthrow of this natural order. The tripartite division is at once a theory of human psychology and the foundation of Plato's ethics and politics, for the same structure that defines the well-ordered soul also defines the well-ordered city. The question of what man is cannot, on this account, be separated from the question of what man ought to be.

In the Phaedrus, this analysis receives mythic expression. The soul is likened to a charioteer driving two horses, one noble and one unruly. Before its embodiment, the soul beheld the eternal Forms; incarnate in the body, it struggles to recollect what it once saw. Human life is thus a condition of aspiration and incompleteness. The soul's desire to recover its vision of the Good bears on questions discussed under the ideas of Knowledge and Beauty, for the love of wisdom and the love of the beautiful are, in Plato's account, closely related movements of the same rational faculty.

This picture places man in an intermediate position between beast and god. He shares appetite with the animals and reason, at least in part, with the divine. Whether the soul is immortal or perishes with the body, whether man can attain genuine knowledge or is limited to opinion, whether the rational element can in fact govern the irrational: these are questions that flow from the initial portrait of a creature divided against itself. The bearing of these questions on the idea of Soul is evident, as is their connection with issues treated under Immortality.

Plato thus establishes the terms in which much of the subsequent tradition discusses the nature of man. Aristotle will accept the hierarchy of faculties but ground it in biological observation. Augustine will reinterpret the internal conflict as the drama of sin and grace, locating the division not in the parts of the soul but in the will itself.

Aristotle defines man as the rational animal, and this definition carries implications for his ethics, politics, and psychology alike. The human soul, in Aristotle's account, possesses the vegetative powers shared with plants and the sensitive powers shared with other animals, but it adds what they entirely lack: the capacity for abstract thought, deliberation, and moral judgment. In the De Anima, Aristotle assigns to man alone "the power of thinking, i.e., mind," while granting that sensation, appetite, and locomotion belong to animals generally.

The political dimension of human nature is, for Aristotle, equally fundamental. "Man is by nature a political animal," he writes, and the proof lies in the power of speech. Other animals have voice and can signal pleasure and pain, but only man has logos, the capacity to articulate the just and the unjust, the beneficial and the harmful. The city exists not for survival alone but for the good life, and only man, the creature with language and moral perception, can participate in this common enterprise. A solitary being who needs no city is, in Aristotle's phrase, either a beast or a god. The bearing of this claim on questions discussed under the ideas of State and Language is considerable.

This double characterization, rational and political, generates Aristotle's ethics. Because man has reason, the good life is the life of activity in accordance with virtue; because man is political, virtue is exercised in community. The Nicomachean Ethics defines human happiness by reference to the function proper to man, and concludes that the highest happiness consists in the activity of contemplation, an activity in which the rational element operates most fully.

Aristotle's account raises questions that later thinkers take up with varying emphasis. Hobbes will reject the claim that man is naturally political and ground human association in fear and self-interest. Rousseau will argue that the political creature Aristotle observes is a product of civilization, not of nature. Aquinas will adopt the Aristotelian framework but develop it within a theological context that Aristotle himself did not envision.

Augustine inherits from Plato the sense that man is a divided creature, but he locates the division not in a tripartite soul but in the will itself. The scene in the garden at Milan, in Book VIII of the Confessions, illustrates the point: Augustine wills to turn to God and yet cannot bring himself to do so. "The mind commands the body, and it obeys forthwith; the mind commands itself, and is resisted." The conflict is not, as in Plato, between reason and appetite; it is the will struggling against itself, drawn simultaneously toward God and toward inferior objects of desire.

This inner division is, for Augustine, the consequence of the Fall. God made man in His own image, endowed with reason, freedom, and the capacity for fellowship with the divine. But Adam's sin corrupted the will, so that man now loves inferior things in place of God. Concupiscence, the disordered desire that pulls the soul away from its proper object, is not a natural feature of human existence but a wound inflicted by original sin. The question thus arises whether man as he now is can be understood apart from the theological doctrine of what he was made to be. Issues bearing on this question are discussed under the ideas of Sin and Will.

The consequence, in Augustine's view, is that man cannot heal himself by philosophy or moral effort alone. The Greek philosophers were right that man has reason and desires the good, but they erred in supposing that knowledge suffices for virtue. Only divine grace can restore the will to its proper orientation. Without grace, even the most learned philosopher remains caught in disordered love, unable to turn wholly toward the object for which he was created.

Augustine thus transforms the philosophical question "What is man?" into a theological one: what has become of man, and what can restore him? Aquinas will organize this insight within a systematic treatment of human nature. Rousseau will offer a secular version, locating the fall not in sin but in the development of civilization. Freud will reinterpret the divided will in psychological terms, replacing grace with the work of analysis.

Aquinas undertakes to bring Aristotle and Augustine into a coherent account of human nature. With Aristotle, he holds that the soul is the substantial form of the body; man is not a soul using a body, as Plato seemed to suggest, but a genuine unity of matter and form. The powers of sensation, imagination, and appetite all require bodily organs and cannot exist apart from the body. With Augustine, Aquinas affirms that man is made in God's image, capable of knowing and loving God, and that this capacity distinguishes man from every other corporeal creature. "Man is said to be the image of God by reason of his intellectual nature," he writes.

On this account, man occupies the boundary between two orders of creation. He is the lowest of intellectual creatures and the highest of bodily ones. The angels know without sensation; the animals sense without understanding. Man alone must abstract universal concepts from the data of sensory experience. This dependence on the senses is not, for Aquinas, a defect; it follows from man's nature as a composite being. The immateriality of the intellect, however, provides the basis for arguing that the rational soul can exist apart from matter when the composite human substance is dissolved by death. The bearing of this argument on issues discussed under the ideas of Immortality and Soul is evident.

Aquinas also considers the question of human equality and inequality. All men share the same rational nature, and in this fundamental respect they are equal. Yet individuals differ in natural capacity, acquired virtue, and the grace they receive. These inequalities do not, in Aquinas's view, undermine the dignity that belongs to every bearer of human nature, for that dignity rests on the capacity for reason and free choice, which is common to all members of the species.

Aquinas's synthesis of Aristotelian and Augustinian elements constitutes the anthropology that prevails through the medieval and early modern periods. Descartes will reject the unity of soul and body in favor of a radical dualism of two substances. Hobbes and the materialists will reject the immaterial soul altogether, attempting to explain all human functions in terms of matter and motion.

Montaigne raises the most sustained doubts in the Renaissance concerning man's claim to a special rational dignity. In the "Apology for Raymond Sebond," the longest of his essays, he argues that animals display intelligence, sociability, and what appears to be moral virtue, and that man's presumption of superiority rests on little more than vanity. "When I play with my cat," he writes, "who knows if I am not a pastime to her more than she is to me?" The stories he collects from Plutarch and Pliny concerning the sagacity of animals are intended to show that the supposed gulf between man and brute may be narrower than the philosophical tradition has maintained. The question of whether man differs from other animals in kind or only in degree, discussed under the idea of Animal, receives in Montaigne one of its sharpest formulations.

The skepticism extends from reason to self-knowledge. Man, Montaigne contends, is radically inconsistent. He is brave in one moment and timid in the next, generous today and miserly tomorrow. There is no stable rational core that remains constant amid the flux of passions, opinions, and circumstances. "We are, I know not how, double in ourselves, so that what we believe we disbelieve, and cannot rid ourselves of what we condemn." Custom, he suggests, shapes human belief more than logic does, and desire moves men more than demonstration.

Montaigne does not deny that man has reason; he denies that reason has the sovereignty which philosophers from Plato onward have attributed to it. The philosophical tradition, in his view, has been constructing an ideal of man that no actual human being has ever resembled. Whether this skepticism leads to a new humility or to a kind of paralysis is a question that bears on issues discussed under the idea of Knowledge.

Montaigne's skeptical portrait of man prepares the ground for several lines of modern thought. Descartes will attempt to rebuild certainty from the very doubt that Montaigne cultivates. Rousseau will locate man's corruption in society rather than in reason itself. Freud will trace inconsistency not to the weakness of the rational faculty but to the structure of the unconscious.

Hobbes constructs his account of man from the principles of matter and motion alone. Sensation is the pressure of external objects on the organs. Imagination is decaying sensation. Thought is the trained succession of images. The passions are "interior beginnings of voluntary motions." There is no immaterial soul and no rational faculty distinct from the body. Man is, in this view, a natural machine, more complex than other animals but not different from them in kind.

What distinguishes man from the brutes, according to Hobbes, is speech. Language enables men to calculate, to reason about causes and effects, and to make contracts. But it also enables them to deceive, to dispute, and to form competing conceptions of the good. Hobbes seems to hold that "by the help of speech and method, the same faculties" shared by men and beasts "may be improved to such a height as to distinguish men from all other living creatures." Whether this amounts to a difference in kind or only in degree is a question on which Hobbes's position remains somewhat ambiguous. The state of nature, in which men are left without a common sovereign power, is a condition of universal insecurity, for each man is roughly equal in the capacity to harm any other. The bearing of this argument on questions treated under the ideas of State and Liberty is considerable.

Hobbes explicitly rejects Aristotle's claim that man is by nature a political animal. Men do not form societies out of natural goodwill or fellowship; they do so out of fear of death and the desire for commodious living. The commonwealth is an artificial creation, not a natural growth, and its purpose is not the good life in the Aristotelian sense but the preservation of life itself.

Hobbes's mechanical account of man stands at a considerable distance from Aristotle's rational and political animal. Locke will retain the emphasis on self-preservation while softening the portrait of the natural condition. Rousseau will argue that the competitive and fearful creature Hobbes describes is not natural man at all but the product of social corruption.

Descartes arrives at his account of man through the method of radical doubt. Everything may be doubted: the existence of the external world, the reliability of the senses, even the truths of mathematics. But the existence of the doubter cannot be doubted. "I think, therefore I am." And what am I? "A thing that thinks." The mind, the res cogitans, is known with certainty; the body, as an extended thing, is known only through the senses, which are fallible. From this Descartes draws the conclusion that mind and body are two entirely different substances.

The dualism breaks decisively with the Aristotelian and Thomistic tradition, in which the soul is the substantial form of the body and inseparable from it. For Descartes, the body is extended, divisible, and subject to mechanical laws; the mind is unextended, indivisible, and free. They are united in man, but they remain ontologically distinct. Animals, which lack rational souls, are in Descartes's account pure machines. "Even though I were to grant that thought existed" in apes and dogs, he writes, "it would in nowise follow that the human mind was not to be distinguished from the body." Man alone, of all things in nature, is composed of body and soul in the sense of a spiritual substance. The bearing of this position on questions treated under the ideas of Mind and Soul is direct.

If the mind is wholly distinct from the body, then everything that can be explained mechanically belongs to the body alone, and only the power of thought remains on the side of the mind. This elevates man above the entire material order, but it also renders his relation to his own body difficult to explain. Descartes acknowledges this difficulty when he writes that he is "not only lodged in my body as a pilot in a vessel, but I am very closely united to it, and so to speak so intermingled with it that I seem to compose with it one whole."

Descartes thus formulates the problem that later thinkers must address: if mind and body are truly separate substances, how do they interact, and what is the unity of human nature? Kant will relocate the problem from metaphysics to epistemology. The empiricists and materialists will attempt to dissolve it by denying the existence of an immaterial mind.

Rousseau takes issue with both Aristotle and Hobbes concerning the nature of man. Against Aristotle, he denies that man is by nature political or rational in the fully developed sense. Against Hobbes, he denies that natural man is aggressive and competitive. The state of nature that Hobbes described, the war of all against all, is in Rousseau's view a portrait of civilized man projected backward into the forest. To know what man truly is, one must strip away everything that society has added.

Natural man, as Rousseau conceives him, is a solitary creature moved by two basic sentiments: self-preservation (amour de soi) and pity, a natural compassion for the suffering of others. He has no language, no property, and no fixed relationships. He is neither good nor evil in the moral sense, because morality presupposes social life. "It is not, therefore, so much the understanding that constitutes the specific difference between the man and the brute," Rousseau writes, "as the human quality of free agency." On this account, what distinguishes man from other animals is not reason but freedom, and it is this freedom that civilization has obscured. The bearing of this claim on questions discussed under the ideas of Liberty and State is evident.

The transformation from natural to civilized man constitutes, for Rousseau, the true fall. The development of language, the institution of property, and the rise of inequality are the processes by which man loses his original freedom and becomes enslaved to opinion, comparison, and vanity. "Man is born free, and everywhere he is in chains." The creature we observe in society is not man as nature made him but man as civilization has deformed him. Rousseau thus holds that the question "What is man?" cannot be answered by observing existing societies, because every existing society has already corrupted its members.

Rousseau's account of natural man, innocent and self-sufficient, becomes a point of departure for several later thinkers. Kant will transform Rousseau's freedom into the principle of moral autonomy. Marx will develop the critique of property into a theory of class exploitation. Freud will reinterpret the tension between nature and civilization as the conflict between instinct and repression.

Kant grounds human dignity not in reason as a cognitive faculty but in reason as a moral one. Man is the being who can act from duty, who can recognize the moral law and submit his will to it regardless of inclination. This capacity for moral self-legislation confers on every human being an absolute and unconditional worth that Kant calls dignity. "In the kingdom of ends everything has either a price or a dignity." The bearing of this principle on questions treated under the ideas of Duty and Liberty is considerable, for Kant holds that moral freedom is the distinguishing attribute of man.

The theoretical side of Kant's account of man is no less important. In the Critique of Pure Reason, he argues that man cannot know himself as he is in himself, the noumenal self, but only as he appears to himself through the forms of intuition and the categories of the understanding. What Kant calls "rational psychology," the attempt to achieve knowledge of the soul as a substance, is impossible because it exceeds the boundaries of possible experience. An empirical psychology confined to phenomenal processes may be admitted, but it cannot discover properties that belong to the self as it is in itself. The self that acts morally and the self that appears in experience thus belong to different orders.

This double nature, phenomenal and noumenal, is Kant's version of the ancient division in human nature. Where Plato divided the soul into three parts and Augustine divided the will against itself, Kant divides man into two orders of being. As a natural creature, man is determined by causes and driven by desires; as a moral agent, he is free, self-governing, and answerable to no authority but the law he gives himself. Whether these two aspects of human nature can be reconciled, or whether they remain in permanent tension, is a question that bears on issues discussed under the idea of Will.

Kant's moral anthropology makes human dignity a principle independent of birth, talent, or social standing. Hegel will historicize it, arguing that human self-understanding develops through historical stages. Mill will attempt to ground dignity in utility rather than in pure reason. Freud will raise the question whether the moral self Kant describes is psychologically attainable.

Dostoyevsky's contribution to the idea of man is the showing, in the novels and in the shorter prose, of a type of man the philosophical tradition had not schematized: the self-conscious and isolated dweller of the modern city, whose inner life is more developed than his outward conduct and whose outward conduct is for this reason never adequate to what he is. The type is given its clearest presentation in the nameless narrator of Notes from Underground, who has retired from official service to a garret in Petersburg and who spends his days brooding on the injuries and humiliations of his earlier life. He is too intelligent to be content with any of the positions his contemporaries take and too much the prisoner of his intelligence to commit himself to the action by which a position would be tested. The portrait is not offered as a type to be admired. It is offered as a type the older categories of man could not have predicted and cannot quite explain.

The type recurs, with variations, across the longer novels. Raskolnikov in Crime and Punishment is an underground man who has passed from paralysis into action and who is destroyed not by the action but by the discovery of what the action has done to him. Ivan Karamazov is an underground man who has gained a hearing from his brother and who presents his rebellion in the form of a long and unanswered argument against the goodness of the world. Stavrogin in the Possessed is an underground man whose capacity for action is unbounded and whose capacity for belief is entirely absent. Each of these is a study in what a man becomes when the conditions under which the older conceptions of man had held have in some way been removed: when the community of the church has given way to the lonely apartment, when the father has ceased to be a figure of authority, when the reasons for action have come to be felt as arbitrary and the reasons for restraint as merely conventional.

The philosophical questions raised belong also to the treatments of Will, of Liberty, of Soul, and of Good and Evil, and are discussed under those heads. What Dostoyevsky contributes to the idea of Man is the recognition that the modern conditions of urban and intellectual life have produced a kind of man the older tradition had not anticipated, and that the description of this kind of man requires a form of writing, namely the psychological novel, which the philosophical tradition had not employed. The question whether the underground man is an aberration or the representative case of modern humanity is one the tradition has not settled. It is a question the twentieth century will find itself unable to evade.

Freud, who read Dostoyevsky with the close attention of one who had found in him a predecessor, will take the underground man as an early description of the neurotic personality and will argue that the inner life so minutely presented in the novels is a case of what the new psychology can describe in its own terms. Whether this is a translation of what Dostoyevsky had seen, or a reduction of it, is a question which the later treatments of the soul and of man will have to answer. Within the novels themselves, the type is not offered for diagnosis. It is offered as a standing description of a man whose condition the older philosophies had not been written to recognize.

Freud's account of man begins with what he calls the third blow to human narcissism. Copernicus showed that the earth is not the center of the universe; Darwin showed that man is not separate from the animal kingdom; psychoanalysis shows that "the ego is not master in its own house." The rational self that Descartes and Kant placed at the center of human nature is, in Freud's view, a comparatively thin formation, subject at every point to the pressures of unconscious forces it can neither fully perceive nor fully control.

The structure of the psyche, as Freud describes it, is tripartite, and the parallel with Plato's three parts of the soul has often been noted. The id is the reservoir of instinctual drives, operating below the threshold of consciousness. The superego is the internalized voice of parental and social authority. The ego mediates between these two, attempting to satisfy the demands of the id within the constraints the superego imposes. This mediation is never wholly successful; the result is anxiety, repression, and the formation of neurotic symptoms. The methods by which Freud investigates these processes, clinical and interpretive rather than introspective or speculative, represent a return to the broader conception of psychology discussed under the idea of Mind, though by means that the earlier tradition did not employ.

In Civilization and Its Discontents, Freud considers the bearing of his psychology on the question of man's social life. Civilization rests, he argues, on the renunciation of instinct. Men forgo the immediate satisfaction of their aggressive and sexual drives in exchange for the security of communal life. But the repressed drives do not disappear; they find indirect expression in neurotic symptoms, in the severity of the superego, and in the collective aggression that erupts periodically in war. The tension between instinct and civilization is, on this view, inherent in the human condition and admits of no final resolution. This position bears on questions discussed under the idea of Happiness, for it calls into question whether a lasting reconciliation between individual desire and social order is possible.

Freud thus turns the question of man's nature inward. The issue is no longer what faculties or powers man possesses, but what man does not know about himself and, perhaps, cannot bear to know. The possibility that the self is not transparent to itself presents a challenge to every earlier account, whether Aristotelian, Cartesian, or Kantian, that assumes the primacy of rational self-awareness in the definition of human nature.