Nature and culture

Character is innate, constant, and beyond the reach of education: velle non discitur, willing cannot be taught. One can instruct the intellect and refine the means, never change the ground of what someone wills; nature commands, and circumstance only furnishes its occasions.

On the Freedom of the Will, ch. III

Hume aims to ground a science of human nature on the experimental method: the same springs (passions, habit, sympathy) govern human beings in all times and places, and history is a store of observations on constant features. This uniformity of human nature, indispensable to moral science, reflects a marked naturalism, even as he acknowledges the weight of mores and custom.

A Treatise of Human Nature, introduction (the project of a science of man) · Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding, sect. VIII, part I (the uniformity of human actions)

Man is by nature a being of reason, made to live according to the logos and for the society of his fellows: virtue fulfils that nature, it does not thwart it. Vices and passions stem from a reason gone astray rather than from a cultural second nature, a naturalist position.

Letters to Lucilius, LXXVI (man's proper good is reason) · On Anger, II, 31 (man is born for mutual aid)

Human nature reduces, for Bentham, to a constant and universal datum: sensitivity to pleasure and pain, the mainspring of all conduct in every place and time. It is on this natural footing, not on variable cultural determinations, that he founds his science of legislation, placing him clearly on the side of anthropological naturalism.

An Introduction to the Principles of Morals and Legislation, ch. I (the two sovereign masters, constant for all)

Man is by nature a being of reason made for society; virtue fulfils that nature, and vice is but a straying from it, not an acquired second nature. A naturalist position, in which living according to nature and living according to reason coincide.

Meditations, VIII, 12 · Meditations, V, 1 · Meditations, IV, 29

Nature, for Rousseau, is a norm: natural man, his simple needs and spontaneous feelings serve as the measure for judging social man and his artifices. If education and institutions shape man, they do so by drawing him from a primal goodness that must be recovered, not surpassed. Hence a naturalism in which culture is suspected of denaturing rather than fulfilling.

Rousseau, Discourse on the Origin of Inequality · Rousseau, Emile

The bedrock where justification ends is the forms of life: agreement in language is not an agreement in opinions but an "agreement in form of life", rooted in shared human reactions, "the common behaviour of mankind". His thought thus leans toward a naturalism of shared reactions, without denying the cultural variety of language-games.

Philosophical Investigations, §19, §23, §206, §241

The direct corollary of the thesis of existence without prior essence is the refusal of a fixed human nature determining in advance what we are: man is nothing other than what he makes of himself. What defines us belongs to self-construction and to the historical situation, not to an invariant biological given.

Existentialism Is a Humanism · Simone de Beauvoir, The Second Sex

By nature men are close to one another; by practice they grow apart: shared nature is not enough, it is study, habit and the li 禮 (rites) that make the moral difference between men. Confucius stakes everything on formation and culture (wen) more than on an innate endowment, hence a culturalist leaning.

Analects, XVII, 2 (by nature close, by practice far apart) · Analects, XVI, 9 (the grades of knowing: innate, gained by study, gained through difficulty)

For the empiricist Mill, the mind is largely shaped by experience, education and the association of ideas rather than by a fixed nature. In The Subjection of Women he argues that the alleged feminine nature is in fact a product of custom and education: a culturalism that makes character a modifiable social construction.

The Subjection of Women, ch. 1 (women's character as a product of upbringing) · A System of Logic, book VI, ch. 4-5 (ethology, the science of the formation of character)

If the mind is at birth a blank slate, then character, ideas, and mores are formed by experience, education, and habit. Locke draws from this an entire pedagogy in which people become what education makes them, tilting the school toward cultural shaping rather than a fixed innate nature.

Locke, Some Thoughts Concerning Education, §1 · Locke, Essay Concerning Human Understanding, II, 1

Husserl steadily opposes the naturalism that would treat consciousness as one psychic fact among the facts of nature, answerable to causal laws alone. The psychologism he combats is precisely this naturalising of mind. Consciousness has a mode of being of its own, that of meaning and intending, irreducible to the thing: it calls for an eidetic description, not a naturalistic explanation. Without denying that the human being is also a being of nature, he refuses to let spiritual life be absorbed into it.

Philosophy as Rigorous Science (1911)

What makes a human being is not a universal, fixed nature but their language, their traditions, the spirit of the people that formed them: Herder shows that to think, feel and judge are first of all inherited ways. Humanity exists only in the plural of its cultures, and one understands a person only by going back to the genius of their time and place.

Herder, Treatise on the Origin of Language · Herder, Ideas on the Philosophy of the History of Humanity

Montaigne holds two threads without cutting either. On one side there is indeed a nature, common to all human beings and even shared with the beasts, to which one should "let oneself go" as to a good guide. On the other, what passes for natural is most often the effect of habit: custom, that "second nature" and "violent and treacherous schoolmistress", shapes our judgments until it passes itself off as nature itself. Hence a central position, leaning slightly toward the weight of the cultural in what we believe innate.

Essays, I, 23, "Of Custom" and III, 13