Sketch-Map of Human Nature

Extract

The troubles of our time have many causes, economic, political, cultural. All are intimately connected. Of the cultural causes, one of the most important has been disillusionment about human nature. The old view which exalted man to something a little lower than the angels has given way in many quarters to the conviction that in essentials he is no higher than the beasts, and that anyhow the very notion that anything can be ethically higher than anything else is illusory. I believe that in each of these attitudes to human nature there is a distorted half-truth, in both a blindness to the half-truth of the other. In this essay I shall try to map out the main contours of human nature, so as to emphasize that, although man is at bottom identical with the beasts, he is also in a limited but all-important manner unique. I shall also argue that one consequence of his uniqueness is moral experience, and that in human nature properly understood, a moral goal is very clearly revealed.