Understanding Human Nature: Insights from Diverse Fields

Posted on Dec 21, 2024 in Social sciences

Philosophical Anthropology: Integrating Knowledge of Humanity

Philosophical anthropology is a discipline responsible for integrating all that we know about humanity. It must fulfill three basic functions:

  1. Critical-dialectical: Critical analysis of scientific and philosophical theories about human beings, their conception of humanity, and their research methods. It is important to avoid reductionism, which reduces humans to a single dimension.
  2. Theoretical interpretation: Integrating the disciplines of the information base for a coherent and articulated vision, taking into account:
    • The ambivalence of human beings: the subject is both the researcher and the researched.
    • The indeterminacy of human beings: a permanent process of creation and modification of their reality.
    • The limitation of any interpretive framework: all interpretation is done from the available interpretive frameworks.
  3. Utopian-creative: The analysis of the reality of human beings must help shape, on a personal level, an ideal of human excellence, and on a social level, an ideal of justice.

Natural Science of Humanity

There are several trends in this study: comparative ethology, sociobiology, and cultural anthropology.

  • Comparative ethology and sociobiology share the effort to interpret the human being from the two basic concepts of the theory of Darwinian evolution: genotype and survival of the fittest. Comparative ethology posits that nature selects groups, while sociobiology posits that nature selects genes.
  • Cultural anthropology tries to interpret all manifestations of culture as a strategy for adaptation to the environment.

Comparative ethology and sociobiology have to address three objections:

  • Genetically encoded behaviors cannot be changed: All wolves express submission in the same way. However, there appear to be no behaviors of this style in humans because individuals can modify their behavior, giving rise to the enormous variety of human culture.
  • If we observe similar behavior between humans and animals, such as cannibalism, and if this behavior is genetically programmed in rodents, can we conclude that it is also genetically programmed in humans? Not necessarily.
  • Not all of our behaviors are directly related to mechanisms for adapting to the environment. We are capable of true “luxury life,” using our energy in activities that have nothing to do with survival. Cultural anthropology argues that culture is not only an adaptive mechanism.

Neuroscience: The Brain-Mind Connection

Neuroscience assumes the principle that there is no thought without a brain.

  1. It is possible that different “contents” of thought have the same physiological support. The thesis of neuroscience requires that the description of subject X’s brain activity allows me to “read” their thoughts through brain activity.
  2. Some aspects that are relevant to describing thought do not leave detectable “traces” in brain activity. It is not possible to determine the truth of a thought through the description of the brain activity that produces it.
  3. The neurosciences are dedicated to establishing the correlation between mental activities (thinking) and brain activity (an increase in temperature in certain areas of the brain when you’re thinking). To obtain this correlation, we need information about the psychic activity (PA) of a subject and their brain activity (BA). How do we become aware of a subject’s PA? We know it through the subject’s own experience and declaration.

Marxism: Society, Labor, and Alienation

Marxism was born out of the system of production and distribution of goods and the interests of its ruling class. The economic model of Marxism is capitalism, in which the population is divided into capitalists and proletarians. Society is governed by three levels: infrastructure, structure, and superstructure. Marxists claimed that religion was the opium of the people, serving to distract them from the oppression of society.

One could hear the names of many concepts, such as alienation or disposition: the phenomenon of suppressing personality, depriving the individual of their personality, or breaking an individual’s personality, controlling and reversing free will. However, Marx wanted to create class consciousness to achieve revolution and emancipation.

“Philosophers have hitherto only interpreted the world. The point is to change it.” – Marx

Philosophy was born in Greece because slavery was a system that allowed for the freedom of the thinking philosopher. Work is the essence of humanity. Marx’s conclusion is that the activity and understanding of humans as rational beings are only possible because they take advantage of a slave who forgets. Philosophy exists because there is no slavery.