Philosophical Context: Human Nature

Human life is a balancing act. The cultures humans make are prone to imbalance.

The human creature contains various capacities and tendencies. Like all living beings, they have the capacity to regenerate. Additionally, they have the capacity to sense the outside world (sight, hearing, touch, taste, pain, pleasure, etc.) and the inside world (hunger, thirst, tiredness, etc.). Upon these senses are built the abstract capacities to emote, imagine, and rationalize.

The tendencies are psychological predispositions. The philosophical traditional with all of its disputants rarely agrees on any topic. In judging human nature, notably, most philosophers concede that humans are self-interested and social. By self-interested, they usually mean that a given individual will under normal circumstances do what is most advantageous for himself. By social, they usually mean that a given individual will under normal circumstances be happier and more prosperous should he be integrated into a social circle (both in the sense of friendships as well as societal relationships like those established in commerce and politics). The two are related insofar as the self does not contain enough material to meet all the needs of the self, and thus others are necessary for flourishing.

Beyond these well-documented tendencies, I would add two more: slothfulness and starvation. People, like all bodies, are given to taking the path of least resistance. Be it ease of physical progress (e.g. walking around a barrier rather than climbing over it) or mental progress (e.g. thinking of immediate, accessible subjects rather than training to think through more abstract subjects), people are prone to choose what is easiest. A person is more apt to find something to see or do than something to live for and more readily serves the seen rather than unseen.

People, like all bodies, are mired in a process of ultimate depletion. Like all life, humans are prone to disease and ultimately death. These can be hastened either by atrophy of the capacities or disregard for the tendencies. To subsist, people must replenish what they lose. Satiety does not only apply properly to the stomach. The eyes need to see enough, the ears need to hear enough, the flesh needs to be touched and to touch enough. (This is why we need the arts and natural beauty: because they provide for us that which sustains our most central outer senses.) The capacities exist in a range of fullness to emptiness.

The human heart abhors a vacuum and some form of discontent accompanies an intuition of a lack. As pain is the ambassador of physical regeneration, discontent is the ambassador of immaterial regeneration. With so many capacities that require filling, it is easy to become malnourished. Each of these facets requires specific sustenance with a specific material to make it healthy. Flourishing is a level of satiety across the span of personality. The multifaceted nature of humans gives provides a plurality of sources of discontent.

The individual is a whole made up of many parts: body and mind. We must refrain from taking the division too literally. The parts are interrelated; they form a plurality within the unity we call the self or soul. The individual is then like a web: when one point is pulled, the others are strained towards it. Pain often incites emotion. Depression soon becomes the mood of a person suffering from chronic undernourishment. The quality of his thoughts decreases and soon his body suffers from an immune system weakened by dejection.

All of the capacities share a need to be exercised and most share the quality of being intuitable (i.e., made conscious). Regeneration is the only unconscious, unwilled capacity. The ability to grow and heal is limited largely be uncontrollable factors. One has no direct (i.e., intuited) awareness of growing taller, of healing, of replenishing depleted nutrients. All capacities are capable of decaying, and thereby require regeneration. To see to it that the aspects of regeneration which are voluntary are take place, one of the capacities--the capacity for pain--often activates. Being self-interested, the subject is enticed to utilize the dormant capacity. The discomfort of prolonged hunger is one such instance that spurs a person to eat.

One form of straining upon the web we call stress. If there could be a national malady, ours would be stress. The basal discomfort associated with too many tasks, victimization by supervisors or siblings, health issues, and all other lamentable states, make us more susceptible to the slightest additional discomforts. What appears to reason alone as unrelated can nevertheless be causally significant. By the logic of human holism, one cannot tolerate silence because one has too many school assignments. A pebble in the shoe can make a tyrant.