Human Nature

Human Nature, essential qualities shared by all humans. Philosophy has often been concerned with identifying what constitutes and drives human nature and with determining whether human nature is essentially good or evil.

For information on:

• the impermanence of what is generally thought of as human nature, see Michel Foucault
• human nature as constituting formed habits and the desire for happiness, see Aristotle: Ethics
• human nature as driven toward pain, suffering, and death, see Arthur Schopenhauer; Pessimism
• human nature as essentially evil, see Original Sin; Chinese Philosophy: Legalism
• essential goodness of human nature, see Confucianism: Confucian Schools of Thought;Pelagianism
• human nature as a struggle between good and evil, see Western Philosophy: Augustinian Philosophy
• human nature as controlled by natural selection, see Sociobiology; Naturalism (literature)
• human nature as the result of environment and experience, see Ludwig Feuerbach
• creating one's own nature through free choices, see Existentialism; Søren Kierkegaard: The Choice of Life
• human nature as resulting from the struggle to fulfill a hierarchy of human needs, see Abraham Maslow
• human nature as the product of innate drives conflicting with the requirements of social living, see Psychoanalysis: Id, Ego, and Superego
• human nature as deriving from the collective unconscious, a shared body of recurring images about life's basic experiences, see Carl Jung