ON HUMAN NATURE

...Accordingly, whatever else we may say about human nature, it is surely the case that without this liberal view of freedom—what may be called negative as distinct from positive liberty—there can be no humanity...

...Important, therefore, not only for an individual's but also for society's sense of justice...

...More than this: what distinguishes man from the other animals is that he not only acts, he gives, or is asked to give, reasons for his actions...

...To have moved from dynastic to democratic rule constitutes another great advance...

...He is also, perhaps distressingly but also challengingly, a responsible creature—both for what he does and, so far as it lies within his powers to control events, for what he allows to be done...

...Similarly, I must assume that you and I are not only rational but that in some measure at least our reason can indeed govern our passions...

...Now clearly, to discuss these questions at all, one must assume and not look for the answer, that is, one must begin by accepting as true, and therefore rejecting as false, one half of each dichotomy...

...Or what if one is a Christian but finds himself or herself psychologically unable to act according to the tenets of this admirable teaching...

...Liberty, if it means anything at all, entails the freedom to choose...

...even though the answer to this question might well determine the limits that man's nature would place on our ideal political and social arrangements...

...Or shall we, in this dire case, look with the Jesuit teacher Suarez to the Christian principle of charity...

...If by equality we mean equality of condition, then we make difficult if not impossible the emergence of individuality, of differences that enable one person to manifest special gifts and talents not possessed by another...

...This is not to deny that men are, as Hobbes and Hume argued, creatures driven by (perhaps insatiable) desires, and that reason then enters to show us how we may best or most effectively satisfy those desires...

...or, if we are to affect each other, this too is already given by the nature of what has previously been done to us...

...Why have you done, or why do you now want to do, A? Why have you not done, or why do you not now want to do, B? And since there is always a pleni400 tude of answers, since there are always reasons, we seek to discriminate among them: we seek to distinguish sensible from incoherent or illogical reasons...

...Is human nature permanent or changing...

...But important for what...

...Nor is it to deny that some men are often controlled by their passions, and perhaps all men are sometimes controlled by their passions...

...Will we not once again find force or guile to be the dominating principle...

...In order to choose, there must be alternatives from which to choose, and hence the very real possibility that in choosing one may choose wrongly...

...In our day, each person— male or female—is now required to grant the other merely an equal right...

...He is not solely any of these things because he is all of them, though clearly individuals possess and manifest these and other qualities in different combinations and degrees, and not always consistently but variously in response to diverse circumstances...

...It is only to insist that in order to understand even this much, in order to know that we are creatures of desire and that reason is an instrument for the satisfaction of those desires, we must do so rationally...

...that is, we rationally employ irrational methods to control irrational men...

...When, therefore, we speak of equality we can only refer to certain kinds of equality, or equality in what we take to be the important things...

...He is not only a rational, he is a moral creature...

...For then superior cunning or strength rather than (say) virtue prevails...

...otherwise we should have no problems with him, no collisions, no estrangements, no cause to like or dislike him...

...for then not only the mystery but life itself would be at an end...

...We seek to relate those facts to purposes, to ends on which men are sorely disagreed but with respect to which they cannot avoid taking a stand...

...But it was the realities of man's nobility that led Pietro Spina, the protagonist in Silone's novel Bread and Wine, to affirm his promise: "Man doesn't really exist unless he's fighting against his own limits...

...Without the right to choose, whether this be the right or wrong choice, without the right to be wrong, a person is not fully human...

...Hence they are really free...

...for equality of opportunity, from this standpoint, is no more than a fair instrument for determining allocations of place and power on the basis of natural rather than artificial differences...

...He is both enlarged and limited by circumstance and by his society's values and practices...

...Nor is he totally like everyone else...

...Nothing I may say can possibly change you, and nothing you may say can possibly change me...

...humanity entails likeness in other things...

...Even more, he can conjure up or consider moral principles by which to regulate and guide his behavior, that is, by which to restrain some impulses or desires and to indulge others...

...Let us look a little closer at this idea of liberty, which is surely central to any liberal or socialist idea of what it means to be human...

...In these terms, it is surely a mistake to ask whether man is solely good (or cooperative, or altruistic) or solely bad (or competitive, or driven only by self-interest) or solely indifferent (or amoral, or apathetic...

...Clearly, a man is what he is by virtue of the fact that he was born into, and raised in, a community...

...I use the term "man" here in its primary dictionary meaning, to denote the human species...

...If one person is old and the other young, it might be argued that the former has lived his life while the latter should not be denied an equal opportunity to achieve longevity...

...We need to look outside equality for a standard that will help us decide questions of equality...

...So it is that liberty, which seemed to mean the freedom to act as one wants, turns out to mean the freedom to act as Someone Else wants you to act, that is, coercion in a right cause...

...he is certainly not free...

...Shall we deprive society of a greater social good...

...we also require standards in terms of which, or grounds on the basis of which, we may properly evaluate, justify or condemn, that human behavior...

...We seek reasons that are empirically sound and philosophically sane...

...Then it doesn't really matter what you and I, for example, may say here: for I have to say what I am about to say, and you not only had to come here, not only have to listen to me (or not listen to me, as the case may be), but must react as you will...

...yet today it is abundantly clear that men and women are morally and intellectually alike...

...in satisfying their desires they fail to satisfy their needs...

...If both persons are equal to the point of identity— in age, sex, intelligence, talent, strength, virtue, and the like—there is clearly no ready answer...

...At a minimum, liberty seems to mean the freedom to do what one wants...

...Hence we are concerned not simply with facts but with ways of looking at facts, with categories that give meaning to those facts...

...The answer, I think, is not only that we don't know but that in some respects we don't want to know...

...He is the one creature on earth who asks the question, Why...

...Despite (perhaps because of) the Nazi experience, we do not wish to know the ultimate depths of cruelty and degradation to which man's nature can descend...

...No matter how socialized, conditioned, manipulated man might be, he still has a measure of choice: he has a mind with which to conceive or to entertain some alternatives, and freedom of will to make a judgment among them...

...I would dwell for a moment on this last point...

...But apart from the fact that not all men are likely to be gentlemen in such circumstances, the advent of the women's liberation movement renders such a gesture inadmissable...

...If so, shall we empty our jails, remove the traffic lights, and never, no matter what the circumstances, send men to die on the battlefield...

...Shall we then, with Carneades, argue that in such a situation the order of justice ends and the principle of self-preservation begins...

...otherwise we should not be able to communicate with him, understand him, relate to him...

...In the age of chivalry, if one of the two persons were a woman, the adult male would doubtless—as a gentleman—gallantly abandon himself to the deep...

...In fact, he is an individual only because he is a social animal...

...Men, or some men, often want what is not good for them...

...It is only the striving, the testing, the unfolding of that nature that makes possible the dignity and creativity of the creature we call Man...

...For what I contend is that we need not simply causal and functional hypotheses—theories, if you will—to explain human behavior...

...The plank will support one of NOTEBOOK 401 them, but not both...

...Assuredly, if a notion of human nature must accord with the realities of practical life as well as with the stipulations of justice, the principle of equality cannot by itself resolve such a conflict between competing egalitarian claims...

...and to whom...

...For if, to take the first question, man is a conditioned animal, molded by forces outside his control and in most cases—as with Freud's (or Marx's, or Marcuse's, or Skinner's) insistence on the importance of unconscious and irrational influences that dominate human behavior—beyond his knowledge, he can only think and act as he has been conditioned to think and act...

...mined for us by forces or actors somewhere out there...

...We do not know, and we do not want to know, the full nature of human nature...

...But then, the rational use of irrationality makes those irrational methods eminently rational...

...Now, if what I have said is at all persuasive, we must proceed on the assumption that the dichotomies I originally set forth are literally absurd...

...This, or at least this, is what it means to be human...

...But this is not merely a necessary risk...

...We hold to certain conceptions of humanity and dignity that preclude infinite experimentation...

...As Rousseau, Hegel, Marcuse, and others have argued, therefore, they should not be free to do what they want...

...And it would be hard to maintain that these shifts in economic and political arrangements, along with the rise of the great cities and the diffusion of cultures, did not have major effects on human nature, or at least on the natures of those men and women who were once subjects and are now citizens...

...We need to make judgments of right and wrong—about the war in Vietnam, about affirmative action, about cases of civil disobedience, and the like...

...they should be free only to do what they ought to want, and they ought to want it because it accords with their needs, and consequently with what is right and good...

...Even if we employ seemingly irrational means to move seemingly irrational men to what we take to be rational conduct, we must do so rationally...

...Unless there is some permanence to human nature, unless men today are in certain crucial respects very much as they were 500 or 2,000 or more years ago, we could not understand Socrates and Moses and Jesus, Homer and Dante and Shakespeare...

...Hence it is necessary for wiser and better men to compel them to act rightly...

...reasons that carry weight on moral and prudential grounds and do not rest merely on arbitrary preferences...

...Some once thought, and some still think, that half the human race is inferior to the other half...

...Is a lottery, then, the true principle of justice for a society of equals...

...Individuality refers to uniqueness in some things...

...For then no differences enter to justify preferential treatment for either...

...Man is a protean animal, all the things both noble and base that historians and philosophers have said of him...

...We do not wish to cultivate the kind of conditioning that a Skinner offers us, because we recognize that if man could be made into what Skinner would make of him, he would no longer be recognizably human...

...and these are surely as irrelevant to equality as they are to any conceivable principle of political right...

...The hangman who plays gently with children, the concentration camp commandant who listens sensitively to a Beethoven quartet—but the point is too obvious to warrant further elaboration here...

...Many, however, are too stupid or ignorant to know what they ought to want, and others are too selfish or wicked to do what they ought to, even though they know full well that they ought to do it...

...Surely not simply to the individuals involved, but also to the society whose very notion of the structure of relationships requisite to the building and maintenance of community is at stake...

...reasons that take into account the consequences—as far as we can conceive them—of our actions...

...We must rationally understand the irrational...

...402 NOTEBOOK But this is surely an odd use of language and a mistaken idea of liberty...

...We need, no less importantly, to understand precisely what we mean when we talk about equality...

...we should all think alike, act alike, be alike...

...If, however, we are to engage in a meaningful discussion, we can only do so by assuming that we are autonomous or relatively autonomous men, not conditioned beings, or at best only partially conditioned and hence partially autonomous beings...

...And while it is true that human follies have led, in all too many cases, only to further follies, we believe—or some of us believe—that there has also been an appreciable increase in wisdom, or at least that the state of affairs in certain parts of the world today (say with respect to individual freedom) is appreciably better than it had once been...

...When they seize the plank, they quickly discover that it will not bear their combined weight...

...In effect, we are about to act out a charade, with all the words and actions predeterRead at a conference of the Democratic Socialist Organizing Committee, May 30, 1975...

...If by equality we mean equality of opportunity, we are committed, paradoxically, to inequalities of result...

...Does equality entail respect for every person's life and liberty...

...Clearly this is most acceptable, provided the person at the other end of the plank is a Christian, and that he will observe the requirements of his religion...

...Shall we deny a superior claim to genius...

...To have moved from slavery through feudalism to capitalism, for example, as even Marx emphasized, was a progressive act...

...it is precisely what differentiates an adult from a child, autonomy and responsibility from dependence...

...reasons that are grounded in empirical reality and not fanciful situations...

...But what if there are differences, say, of age or sex...

...If and as societies move closer to certain ideal conditions—the further removal of unwholesome restraints, the spread of knowledge, the assurance of peace and material security—the way will be opened for the emergence of new potentials that cannot now be fully anticipated...

...Surely they are not all equal (or unequal) in all things, or at least a man who is superior to another person in one thing (say medical knowledge) may be inferior to that person in other things (say political judgment...

...It was doubtless the realities of man's baseness that led Jeremiah to utter his terrible warning: "Cursed is every man that has faith in man...

...The answer, also, is that human nature is probably both, or, perhaps more accurately, it is our conceptions of human nature that are probably both...

...Consider two of the more perennial questions: Is man an autonomous or a conditioned being...

...But what if both are Christians, or neither is a Christian...

...Apart, perhaps, from the tossing of a coin or by resorting to the children's game of odd and even fingers, which is purely a matter of chance...

...Nor is it less absurd to treat seriously the alleged issue of individuality versus sociality, as if these were discrete and antagonistic terms...

...If to be human, in other words, is to be free, we can (in this construction) only be human if we correctly understand what freedom means and then act in accord with that understanding...

...Consider in these terms the problem posed by the plank of Carneades: Two persons, neither of whom can swim, are adrift in an open sea, with but a single plank at hand...

...But I said earlier that in some respects we do not wish to know the answer to the question, how malleable is man...

...He is not a man by himself, he is never totally different from everyone else...

...But in thus being forced to do what they ought to do, what in fact they would themselves do were it not for their ignorance or wickedness, they are actually being forced to do only what they really want to do, that is, they are satisfying not their false desires but their true needs...

...Let me explain...

...But what if the older person cherishes the prospect of a few remaining years, and is in addition an Einstein or a Toscanini, while the child is a cretin or an incorrigible scourge...

...In effect, we seek to make sense out of what would otherwise be a senseless world...

...But he is molded, above all, by the promises gleaned from the visions that man has held of Man, from moral conceptions of what it means to be a just and decent and complete human being...

...And this, I think, is where we properly end...

...And if changing, how malleable is man...

...What can it mean, for example, to ask whether men are equal or unequal, the same or different...

...Yet human nature, or at least our conception of human nature, has changed too...

...TAKE FINALLY the issue of malleability...

...If, or to the degree that, he is an autonomous being, is his reason the servant or the master of his passions...

...The terms "individuality" and "sociality," far from standing in inherent and consistent opposition to each other—though individuals may and at times do stand in opposition to particular social demands— are and must be mutually sustaining, because complementary, terms...

...NOTEBOOK 403...

...This oddity is particularly pronounced in discussions of human nature...

...If this is in fact the resolution, does it not shift the governing principle from equality to inequality...

...EVEN WHEN WE TURN to more sensible, though controversial, notions of human nature, we are plagued by similar oddities...

...There is, however, a problem...

...That we can read these forebears, understand and learn from them, that we can in fact accept their teachings, or some of their teachings, as relevant and applicable to our lives today, demonstrates that they were like us, they faced many of the same problems we face, and they resolved them in ways we are prepared to consider as appropriate today...

...Which of the two has a legitimate claim to its use, and on what grounds...

...he would be a robot...