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Descriptive

Is there a human nature?

On the axis: Vision of humanity · a human nature

Asking whether humans are good or evil assumes they have a nature. But perhaps there is no given essence: humans would then make themselves, with no received model.

Philosophers' positions

Sartre

Major
+1.0
Justification

Sartre denies any human nature: lacking a God to conceive it, there is no common essence fixing in advance what humans are. He does distinguish a human condition, the set of a priori limits of existence (being in the world, laboring there, dying there among others), which is not a given nature but the common frame within which each person makes himself. The position is therefore strongly culturalist, man being what he makes himself, not what he is by nature.

Existentialism Is a Humanism (there is no human nature, but a human condition)

Aristotle

−0.5
Justification

Man is by nature a political animal endowed with , and his ends are inscribed in that nature. But virtue is not given: it arises from habit, which forms a kind of second nature, and it is the city, through laws and education, that shapes character. This is a naturalism, then, in which human nature needs habituation and education to reach its fulfilment.

Politics, I, 2 · Nicomachean Ethics, II, 1

Anchors: Sartre · Aristotle

leads to: Nature and culture