Vision of humanity

Evil does not come from a corrupt human nature but from what corrupts it: affected knowledge, craving, institutions that pit a person against their naturalness. "Abolish wisdom, discard knowledge, and the people will benefit a hundredfold": it suffices to cut away artifice for an original goodness to reappear, like uncarved wood before it is sculpted. This trust in the natural, close to Rousseau, sets him apart from pessimism.

Dao De Jing, ch. 19 and 28 · Dao De Jing, ch. 3 and 65

The vices imputed to human nature, selfishness, greed, aggression, are for Marx products of alienating social conditions, not a fatality of the species: change the relations of production and you change men. This hope of an emancipated human being, able to develop his faculties freely in a classless society, expresses a conditional anthropological optimism, suspended on the transformation of conditions.

1844 Manuscripts (species-being and the overcoming of alienation) · Theses on Feuerbach, III (circumstances are changed by men)

Heir to Rousseau, Romanticism holds the human being to be naturally good and the spontaneity of the heart surer than the artifices of civilization: the child, the common people and the poet are nearer the truth than polished man. Yet this confidence is doubled by a fascination with the abysses of the soul, the demonic and evil, which tempers its optimism.

Rousseau, Emile, or On Education · Schiller, On Naive and Sentimental Poetry

Evil lies not in a corrupt human nature but in what denatures it: affected knowledge, ambition, hierarchies and moral codes that turn each one away from his native cast. Left to his naturalness, the human is neither good nor wicked in the moral sense, but spontaneously attuned to the course of things; it is civilization that tears him apart. This trust in the pre-cultural natural sets Zhuangzi apart from anthropological pessimism, without making him the theorist of an original goodness as sharply drawn as in Rousseau.

Zhuangzi, ch. 9 (Horses' Hooves)

Confucius holds man to be perfectible: any human being can, through study and effort, rise toward ren 仁 (humaneness), and he teaches without distinction of class. This optimism stays measured: the wise are rare, most betray the Way, and the master laments never having met one who loves virtue as much as pleasures. Yet trust in educability prevails.

Analects, XV, 38 (in teaching there are no distinctions of class) · Analects, IX, 17 (I have not seen one who loves virtue as he loves pleasure)

Moral intellectualism entails a fairly optimistic view of humankind: if we do evil only through ignorance, no one is bad by nature, and every person can be improved by knowledge. Vice is not an ineradicable wickedness but a failure of knowledge, which makes the human being educable and turns examination into a therapy of the soul.

Plato, Protagoras, 345d-e; Meno, 87b-89a (virtue, an acquirable knowledge)

For Beauvoir, the human being is neither good nor bad by nature, since it has no nature: it is what it makes of itself, capable of the noblest engagement as of the basest complicity with oppression. Moral worth depends on the use one makes of one's freedom, which forbids any blanket verdict, optimistic or pessimistic, on human nature.

The Ethics of Ambiguity (1947), freedom between engagement and evasion

Marcus oscillates: the morning meditation forecasts meddling, ungrateful and violent men, an unillusioned look at conduct; yet he holds their fault to be a correctable ignorance, not a malice of nature. This tension places him at the median point, where human nature is neither good nor evil but educable.

Meditations, II, 1 · Meditations, IX, 42 · Meditations, XI, 18

Everyone, if they dared, would pursue their own advantage and want to possess more than others: displayed moderation is only an admission of weakness or a ruse. This bedrock of egoism and rivalry, which law contains without abolishing, places him on the side of an anthropological pessimism.

Plato, Gorgias, 483b-c; 491e-492a

Montaigne deflates man's pretension to think himself the masterpiece of creation, "the most calamitous and frail of all creatures", vain, inconstant, more often led by custom and fancy than by the reason he claims. But this indictment of pride is no black pessimism: man remains capable of goodness, measure and joy, provided he accepts his condition and stops trying to be an angel. It is less a verdict on his wickedness than an acknowledgment of his plasticity and weakness.

Essays, II, 12, "Apology for Raymond Sebond"

Man is a rope stretched between beast and overhuman, something that shall be overcome: Nietzsche casts a severe gaze on the gregarious, mediocre humanity of his age, marked by ressentiment. But this critical diagnosis comes with confidence in the possibility of an elevation, which tempers the pessimism.

Thus Spoke Zarathustra, Prologue, §3 and §4 · On the Genealogy of Morality, I, §11

Kant maintains a radical evil: there is in human nature a propensity to subordinate the moral law to self-love, and "unsocial sociability" mixes in each a tendency to oppose others. This diagnosis, tempered by the predisposition to good and by perfectibility, leans toward a moderate anthropological pessimism.

Religion within the Bounds of Bare Reason, Part One · Idea for a Universal History with a Cosmopolitan Purpose, Fourth Proposition

The ordinary person is a prisoner in the cave, chained to shadow and opinion, and most souls are ruled by the appetites: the ascent toward the true is rare, hard and reserved for a few. Without being a dark pessimism, this view stresses the soul's spontaneous blindness, which only a long education can set right.

Republic, VII, 514a-517a · Phaedrus, 248a-249d

Odysseus trusts no one on their word: he tests loyalty before revealing himself, sounds out his servants, tries even Penelope and his aged father. This methodical wariness betrays a cautious, unillusioned view of men, quick to treachery once the chance offers; but it does not amount to a settled pessimism, since the poem also grants him, in a few, an unfailing fidelity.

Odyssey, XIII-XXIV (the disguise and the testing of loyalties) · Odyssey, XXIII (the test of the bed, which Penelope turns back against him)

Camus believes neither in man's natural goodness nor in his radical corruption: his thought of measure sets a human limit against the excess that, in the name of an absolute, ends by justifying murder. This sense of the human leaning toward excess keeps him from anthropological optimism, without tipping into pessimism.

The Rebel (1951), "Thought at the Meridian"