Relation to the world· Nature and the living

Anthropological optimism

Axis: Vision of humanity — Are human beings fundamentally good or inclined toward evil?

Human beings are naturally good, or at least inclined to pity and benevolence: it is society, with its inequalities and rivalries, that corrupts them. Wickedness is a product of history, not of nature.

Who holds this position

Movements 2

The Enlightenmentexplicit

Against the dogma of original sin, which makes man a corrupt creature to be redeemed, the Enlightenment wagers on his : his vices owe less to his nature than to bad institutions and to ignorance. If the mind is a , then education can do almost everything, holds : change the laws, the enlightenment and the mores, and you change men. radicalizes the wager, man being naturally good and corrupted by society, while , more sombre, keeps it within measure. Hence a tempered optimism, founded not on what man is but on what he can become.

Helvétius, On the Mind · Rousseau, Discourse on the Origin of Inequality · Locke, Some Thoughts Concerning Education

Show inferred positions (1)

Romanticisminferable

Heir to , 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

Philosophers 6

Rousseauexplicit

« Man is naturally good »: his vices lie not in his nature but in the history that has drawn him from it. In the state of nature, self-love and reign, not wickedness; it is property, comparison and that breed inequality and domination. Rousseau thus overturns the dogma of original sin and shifts the fault from nature to society: it is not men who must first be corrected, but institutions.

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

Show inferred positions (5)

Laoziinferable

Evil does not come from a corrupt human nature but from what corrupts it: affected knowledge, craving, institutions that pit a person against their . "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 , sets him apart from pessimism.

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

Marxinferable

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 , suspended on the transformation of conditions.

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

Zhuangziinferable

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 , 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)

Confuciusinferable

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)

Socratesinferable

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)

Arguments and objections

ArgumentMan is good, society corrupts him — In the state of nature, man has only self-love and pity, neither of which makes him wicked. Wickedness presupposes comparison, amour-propre, which arises with social life and inequality: what is taken for an evil nature is the effect of a history.

In the state of nature, before society, man has only two springs: self-love, the care of his own preservation, and pity, the reluctance to see a fellow creature suffer. Neither of the two makes him wicked: pity, on the contrary, holds him back from harming others.
Wickedness, envy, cruelty, the thirst to dominate, presupposes comparison: one must measure oneself against others, wish to be preferred, in order to wish them harm. Now this comparison, amour-propre, arises with social life, property, inequality.
Where one thinks one sees an evil nature, one is really seeing the effect of a history: unjust institutions have set men against one another.

Therefore So evil is not in the depths of man but in the society that has disfigured him: to make men better is to that corrupt them, not to tame a perverse nature.

ObjectionAttacks the reasoningNo golden age — The argument assumes a peaceful state of nature. But two men who covet the same scarce thing, with no judge above them, become enemies; and the child is greedy before any upbringing. Society does not invent conflict, it contains it.

The argument assumes a peaceful state of nature, where man has only self-love and pity.
But two men who desire the same scarce thing, with no judge above them, become enemies: distrust, the pursuit of glory, and fear suffice for war, without any corrupting society having to intervene.
And the child, before any upbringing, already wants everything for himself, with no pity for the brother he bites: greed and comparison are there from the cradle, not laid down by institutions.

Therefore So man had no golden age to lose: society does not invent conflict, it contains it. Remove it, and it is the war of all against all that returns, not goodness.

ObjectionAttacks the position Thought experimentThe Milgram experiment — Ordinary people inflict the worst on a mere order, without hatred or grievance: if man were naturally good and only corrupted by an unjust society, how is it that he obeys so readily?

Ordinary volunteers, neither monsters nor wretches, inflict what they believe to be dangerous shocks on the mere order of an experimenter.
They do so without hatred, without grievance, without personal gain, in a peaceful setting where no inequality or misery drives them to it.
If man were good by nature and only corrupted by an unjust society, whence would come his obeying so readily an order to harm? The disposition to do evil is closer to the surface than optimism admits.

Therefore So primal goodness is not so assured: neither misery nor injustice is needed for the ordinary man to do the worst, a mere authority suffices.

Foundations and implications

This is a root foundation — nothing grounds it further.

↓ What it implies

↑ What grounds it

This is a root foundation — nothing grounds it further.

↓ What it implies

Relation to authority

If human beings are naturally good and it is society that corrupts them, authority imposed from above looks less like a remedy than the source of the evil. Anthropological optimism feeds anarchism: the fundamental goodness affirmed by Rousseau opens the way to the idea of a society that would organize itself without domination, through free association.

Problems

Descriptive Scientific experiment
Ordinary people, an order to carry out
That ordinary people inflict the worst on a mere order: is it a latent cruelty waking up, or proof that circumstances, not nature, decide our acts?
the ordinary person under authority
Descriptive
Where does evil in humans come from?
If humans do evil, is that bent in them from the start, a drive or a fallen nature, or does it arise from without, from social comparison and inequality? Depending on the answer, wickedness is our depth or our product.
the source of our bad acts
Descriptive
How far can human beings be changed?
The wager of education assumes we can remake people, soften them, better them. But are there immovable flaws, a "crooked timber" that no education ever straightens?
the human capacity to change
Descriptive
Half angel, half beast
Is the human a divided being, capable at once of the highest and the lowest, great through the very thing that makes it wretched, or is this dramatic image merely a way of ennobling a mere animal by calling it fallen?
the divided human being