Human Nature and How it Gets That Way

All other animals have a nature, but this nature is fixed; to the extent that it evolves, it doesn't do so in the span of a single lifetime. Only in human beings do we see this peculiar combination of a fixed nature and open development that can persist throughout one's life. You might say we are necessarily contingent.

Indeed, there is something of a paradox at play here, since a human who is not actualizing his latent potential is failing to fulfill his nature. It seems that, as God's essence is to exist, our existence is to "essentialize," i.e., to actualize our essence in time -- which is why only man creates and exists in history. 

If a nature isn't fixed, is it still a nature? An existentialist would respond, No, and that's the whole point. We must choose, but on the basis of no nature, which is why we are condemned to freedom. 

The technical term for freedom + no nature is nothingness. For Sartre

[T]here is no human nature.... Man is nothing else but what he makes of himself. Such is the first principle of existentialism.

And existentialism itself "is nothing else than an attempt to draw all the consequences of a coherent atheistic position." 

Coherent? How's that working out? For if the first consequence of a consistent atheistic position is incoherence, the second is inconsistency, and the third is creepy men in sundresses using the girl's restroom. 

Sartre:

Existential philosophy is above all a philosophy that asserts that existence precedes essence.

This sounds like an academic abstraction, but it is the hinge upon which everything else... hinges, for to say that we exist without an essence is again to say that we are, uniquely among the animals, nothing. 

Now, while we are indeed -- obviously -- unique among the animals, we need to anchor this uniqueness in a sufficient reason. We can't just arbitrarily assert that we magically escape all definition and somehow create ourselves. By virtue of what principle? This is where existentialism goes off the cosmic rails into a parallel acosmos or chaosmos. 

Jumping ahead a bit, I'm going to go out on a limb and suggest that the only adequate -- consistent, coherent, and fruitful -- principle on which to base the human person is the transhuman Person. We can express this axiom in mythopoetic terms or we can do so in more purely metaphysical terms. Either way, we avoid the rudimentary error of attempting to derive the (infinitely) greater in the lesser. 

This is why we say that person is the ultimate category, not derived -- or derivable -- from anything else. 

Okay, but what is a person? I suppose it's easier -- because more experience-near -- to start with what we are and then deduce from this what God must be like by way of analogy. 

So, what are we like? What are our most striking attributes, those without which we aren't persons? Let's review them. Clarke begins with

the unrestricted range of man's intellectual power and interests, matched by the corresponding freedom of his will, [which gives] him an inexhaustible creativity to express himself in constantly new... cultural forms, instruments, and ways of interacting with nature.

That's a helpful list: reducing it to a more abstract expression, we can say intellect-freedom-creativity, which, as it so happens, corresponds to truth-virtue-beauty, respectively. Persons are free to know truth, free to choose the good, and free to create beauty. This elevates and confers an ultimate meaning upon the very freedom which, for the existentialist, equates to mere nothingness.  

Freedom in the absence of truth is not, and cannot be, free; rather, it is the freedom of a man lost in the desert or adrift at sea. Some freedom!

It is man's nature to be free, but freedom has its own telos or it is nothing. This dilates and widens out our existence, again, not only situating it in history but forging the basis of history; what we call "history" is freedom + essence deployed in time.  

Putting it all together, Clarke defines our nature as follows:

a human being is by nature a finite embodied spirit, in search of the Infinite, in social solidarity with its fellow human beings, on an historical journey through the material cosmos towards its final trans-world goal.

That's a pretty, pretty good definition, but I think we can do better. For starters, we need to flesh out what it means to be "in social solidarity with our fellow human beings," because it presumes something much deeper, touching on the very nature of I am and We are. For

the explicit awakening to self-awareness as an "I," as a self, can only be done by another human person, reaching out to us with love and treating us as a person, calling us into an I-Thou relation.

 Now we're getting somewhere. To be continued...