A nature that binds?
On the axis: Essence and existence · a human nature
Supposing we have a nature, does it tell us how to live? Does knowing what we are settle what we ought to become, or is there a leap from the one to the other?
Justification
Aristotle turns 's own demand for essence against him: if the essence of a thing is what makes it what it is, lodging it in a separate world of makes it unable to explain the sensible thing, from which it is then cut off. The form must therefore be in the individual, as the soul is in the body: every sensible substance is a compound of matter and form, . Essence is no longer a celestial model but the what-it-was-to-be, what the thing is in itself, grasped in the definition, without thereby denying that form is the most real and most knowable thing in it.
Metaphysics, VII (Zeta).4 and 17
Justification
Hume dissolves fixed essences: we know no real essence of substances, and the self itself is but a bundle of perceptions in flux, with no permanent core. What we become is forged by custom and habit more than by an assigned nature, without amounting for all that to a free self-fashioning, the human being remaining largely shaped.
A Treatise of Human Nature, I, 4, 6 · An Enquiry concerning Human Understanding