human nature

Human nature is the concept that there are a set of characteristics, including ways of thinking, feeling and acting, that all 'normal' human beings have in common.^[1] The branches of science associated with the study of human nature include sociology, sociobiology and psychology, particularly evolutionary psychology and developmental psychology. Philosophers and theologians have also carried out research on human nature

In pre-modern and non-scientific understandings of nature, human nature is understood with reference to final and formal causes. Such understandings imply the existence of a divine interest in human nature, and/or the existence of an ideal, "idea," or "form" of a human which exists independently of individual humans.

The existence of an invariable human nature is a subject of much historical debate, particularly in modern times. Most famously, Darwin gave a widely accepted scientific argument that humans and other animal species have no truly fixed nature. Before him, the malleability of man had been asserted by Jean Jacques Rousseau.^[2]

Since the mid-19th century, the concept of human nature has been called into question by thinkers such as Hegel, Marx, Nietzsche, Sartre, a number of structuralists and postmodernists.

Scientific perspectives such as behaviorism, determinism, and the chemical model within modern psychiatry and psychology, are ambivalent re human nature. They can be offered to explain its origins and underlying mechanisms, or to demonstrate capacities for change and diversity which violate the concept of human nature.