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Sartre and Fukuyama
With particular reference to human nature
And the social consequences of this conception
There is a school of philosophical thought that explicitly denies that there is any such thing as “human nature” (and so we must put the very idea in scare quotes). I do not know if anyone has given a name to the diverse representatives of this school of thought, but there ought to be a name for it, and if I could come up with a clever moniker I would offer it up myself (though for lack of a better term we could simply call them “human nature skeptics”).
One could argue that human nature is an idea that belongs with “folk psychology,” and from this point of view one would expect the critics of human nature to come from physicalism and related trends in philosophy of mind. There probably are emphatic denials of human nature from this school of thought, but I think the most eminent denier of human nature is Jean-Paul Sartre.
Sartre put his denial of human nature in explicit terms:
What do we mean by saying that existence precedes essence? We mean that man first of all exists, encounters himself, surges up in the world — and defines himself afterwards. If man as the existentialist sees him is not definable, it is because to begin with he is nothing. He will not be anything until later, and then he will be what he makes of himself. Thus, there is no human nature, because there is no God to have a conception of it. Man simply is. Not that he is simply what he conceives himself to be, but he is what he wills, and as he conceives himself after already existing — as he wills to be after that leap towards existence. Man is nothing else but that which he makes of himself. That is the first principle of existentialism. And this is what people call its “subjectivity,” using the word as a reproach against us. But what do we mean to say by this, but that man is of a greater dignity than a stone or a table? For we mean to say that man primarily exists – that man is, before all else, something which propels itself towards a future and is aware that it is doing so. Man is, indeed, a project which possesses a subjective life, instead of being a kind of moss, or a fungus or a cauliflower. Before that projection of the self nothing exists; not even in the heaven of intelligence: man will only attain existence when he is what he purposes to be.
Sartre’s denial of human nature is thus understood to be a corollary of his famous dictum that existence precedes essence.
As is to be expected in philosophy, for every human nature skeptic there is another philosopher who emphatically affirms the reality of human nature. Here I will take Francis Fukuyama as the figure to exemplify the affirmation of human nature.
Fukuyama stakes our a fairly sophisticated position vis-à-vis human nature in The End of History and the Last Man:
“Our present desires are conditioned by our social milieu, which in turn is the product of the entirety of our historical past. And the specific objects of desire are only one of the aspects of ‘human nature’ that have changed over time; the importance of desire in relation to the other elements of human character has also evolved. Hegel’s Universal History therefore gives an account not only of the progress of knowledge and institutions, but of the changing nature of man himself. For it is human nature to have no fixed nature, not to be but to become something other than it once was.” (pp. 63-64)
This is not all that different from my own point of view, though in other contexts Fukuyama is not quite so careful:
An alternative approach to determining whether we have reached the end of history might be termed a “trans-historical” one, or an approach based on a concept of man. We would look not simply at empirical evidence of popular discontent in the real-world societies of, let us say, Britain or America. Rather, we would appeal to an understanding of human nature, those permanent though not consistently visible attributes of man as man, and measure the adequacy of contemporary democracies against this standard. (p. 138)
And Fukuyama went on to add:
“The mere fact that human nature is not created ‘once and for all’ but creates itself ‘in the course of historical time’ does not spare us the need to talk about human nature, either as a structure within which man’s self-creation occurs, or as an end point or telos toward which human historical development appears to be moving.” (p.138)
And in Our Posthuman Future: Consequences of the Biotechnology Revolution Fukuyama expresses the dependency of political rights upon a particular doctrine of human nature:
“…any meaningful definition of rights must be based on substantive judgments about human nature. Modern biology is finally giving some meaningful empirical content to the concept of human nature, just as the biotech revolution threatens to take the punch bowl away… the fact that there has been a stable human nature throughout human history has had very great political consequences, As Aristotle and ever serious theorist of human nature has understood, human beings are by nature cultural animals, which means that they can learn from experience and pass on that learning to their descendants through nongenetic means.”
It would not be too far wrong to characterize Fukuyama’s Our Posthuman Future as an extended meditation on human nature, since the theme runs through much of the book. In this respect, then, viz. his repeated appeals to human nature, Fukuyama represents a position antithetical to that of Sartre and other human nature skeptics.
Even if Fukuyama recognizes that human nature changes and therefore is no Platonic form of man in the mind of God (which is the sort of idea that Sartre explicitly repudiated), human nature seems to serve a regulative and indeed a robustly regulative function in Fukuyama’s thought.
If one explicitly repudiates human nature (as was the case with Sartre), then there is no regulative idea of human nature upon which to construct a human social order that is derived from and therefore consonant with human nature. From this it follows that there is no natural order of society. All social models are equally the free construction of free human beings.
As Sartre said in his Existentialism is a Humanism lecture (from which the above Sartre quote is also taken:
“You are free, therefore choose, that is to say, invent. No rule of general morality can show you what you ought to do: no signs are vouchsafed in this world.”
The imperative to invent applies equally to individuals and societies.
If, on the contrary, one explicitly presupposes human nature as a regulative conception in social, economic, and political life, then one is less free to invent oneself and the social milieu through which one moves. One may well be so constrained by human nature that freedom disappears altogether (which was obviously Sartre’s concern).
Whether or not there is any such thing as human nature, a society can be organized as if there were a human nature. This was obviously the case during the European Middle Ages, when all society was predicated upon the Augustinian conception of man as fallen in consequence of Original Sin. It could be argued that this conception of human nature was, at least in part, responsible for what I have called the Agricultural Macabre. The important thing here, though, is that a human nature need not be intrinsic to human beings in order for it to be acted upon as a presumptive (even if false) basis of society. It is entirely possible to construct an essentially false society on the basis of an essentially false conception of human nature.
Marxists, too, seek to organized society around a dubious conception of human nature (Marx calls this “species-being,” which is something I have been meaning to write about but haven’t yet fully developed my ideas on the topic), and perhaps it is generally true that eschatologically motivated ideologies seek to propagate a social order that reflects a particular conception of human nature consonant with their particular cosmogony and cosmology, and then further seek to force individuals to conform to that which is believed to be “natural” for human beings. I believe that this tendency is one of the primary sources of miserable and unhappy civilizations.
While there is a sense in which I think that Sartre has seized on the essential terms of the problem, I think that his concern is largely misplaced. Precisely because individual human beings are free to choose and to invent themselves, even within a society governed with an eye toward putative human nature (and even if this putative human nature is false, or only applicable to a certain class of individuals within a given society), individuals will continue to invent themselves. That is to say, some individual human beings will continue to act as though they are free even if their society tells them that they are not free.
Did not Sartre himself eloquently describe exactly this experience in his essay “The Republic of Silence”? Here he wrote:
We were never more free than during the German occupation. We had lost all our rights, beginning with the right to talk. Every day we were insulted to our faces and had to take it in silence. Under one pretext or another, as workers, Jews, or political prisoners, we were deported EN MASSE. Everywhere, on billboards, in the newspapers, on the screen, we encountered the revolting and insipid picture of ourselves that our oppressors wanted us to accept. And, because of all this, we were free. Because the Nazi venom seeped even into our thoughts, every accurate thought was a conquest. Because an all-powerful police tried to force us to hold our tongues, every word took on the value of a declaration of principles. Because we were hunted down, every one of our gestures had the weight of a solemn commitment. The circumstances, atrocious as they often were, finally made it possible for us to live, without pretense or false shame, the hectic and impossible existence that is known as the lot of man.
At times the assertion of freedom takes the most banal forms — such as someone working within the infrastructure of a deeply compromised society (perhaps a spectacularly false society), who invents a disruptive technology, the consequences of which eventually force changes to that same compromised social order — so much that that we might speak of the banality of freedom as Hannah Arendt spoke of the banality of evil.
There is a passage from Marx that I have quoted several times, and which is particularly appropriate once again, so I quote it once again:
Men make their own history, but they do not make it as they please; they do not make it under self-selected circumstances, but under circumstances existing already, given and transmitted from the past. The tradition of all dead generations weighs like a nightmare on the brains of the living.
Marx here is concerned to demonstrate both human agency and constraint upon human agency. In the same spirit, but starting from freedom rather than from constraint, we could say that Men make their own freedom, but they do not make it as they please; they do not make it under self-selected circumstances, but under circumstances existing already.
We do possess the kind of absolute freedom that the early Sartre repeatedly stressed was the essence of the human condition, but the exercise of freedom is distinct from the possession of freedom. Someone locked in prison possesses the same absolute Sartrean freedom, but obviously has a lot less latitude for the exercise of that freedom than someone who is not incarcerated. Similarly, someone in a highly compromised society also possesses absolute freedom, but the exercise of that freedom comes at a higher cost than the exercise of freedom in a less compromised society.
What has all this to do with human nature? Fukuyama wrote, as I have already quoted above, that human nature can be, “a structure within which man’s self-creation occurs,” and we could find common ground between Sartre and Fukuyama if we identify this structure with Sartrean freedom.
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