Understanding Human Nature: Identity, Freedom, and Responsibility
What is the essence of human nature? It is divided into the novel individual subject and an awareness that requires coherence and cohesion in what we say. This includes the novel social, cultural, and historical aspects.
The Problem of Personal Identity
This is a complex topic. There are realities to consider: the psychological, mental, physical, social, cultural (including genetics), economic, religious, and ethical. All these factors are developing and evolving.
People need answers to questions like: Who are we? What do we want to be? Can we live differently? What is most important in our lives? The answers should not be fixed but should be re-evaluated throughout our lives.
When trying to find an answer to the question of human nature, we must know that:
- We are consequences of our actions.
- We must be able to act consistently with those consequences.
Each human is a different individual with a different personality and possibilities. Our life is an existential process connected to the duration and deepening of our personality and identity. Identification processes occur in childhood, adolescence, and during the search for development and maturation as adults. We share a series of natural features and possess cultural and personal differences. According to Leopoldo Zea, “Equality is based on deficiencies or characteristics of individuals or peoples.”
The essence of human nature is connected to freedom. From an anthropological perspective, human nature requires the development of culture and freedom as a consequence of Pericles or a regression of instincts. From an ethical perspective, freedom requires the development of critical rationality, knowledge, responsibility, empathy, the power to discern the universality of the human condition, and knowledge of information and media that allow us to be discerning. The freedom to be oneself is connected with responsibility for overcoming all difficulties. One cannot separate the right to be free to be yourself.
The Problematic Nature of Freedom
The problematic nature of human freedom demands a great effort and a serious commitment to being oneself in the face of the advertisement and the show, which present everything as simple and comfortable. Being yourself means trying to give meaning to the whole show, instead of something fatal, simple, and comfortable. Giving full meaning requires developing our skills and abilities for the best of ourselves, others, and everything around us. It requires an impressive effort.
Living fully and satisfactorily, developing the good that our nature contains, requires self-awareness that is partially rational and critical. In this regard, some criticisms presented to the dehumanization of the historical stage we live in are:
- The inability to explain a situation in which one does not experience, feel, see, or live their own skills.
- The problem of being free: According to Nietzsche, the fear from security in the modern world, suffering discrimination, exclusion, marginalization, etc., makes us dependent on accepting the blackmail that is accepted and enforced by the system.
- The human being is simply translated as an instrument, not an end. The subject is converted into an instrument. In this process of instrumentalization of persons, it is accompanied by a process of impersonation.
- Self-deception and social deception show how today’s culture is wrapped in a false illusion that leaves us with hazards and suffering. This situation entails the inability to take responsibility itself, which requires human nature based on freedom.
- The emergence of fanaticism: the power of rational control and the manipulation of the population in the service of selfish interests.