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General Argument My aim is to survey some of the most influential philosophical writers on human nature from the time that Augustine codified Christian belief to the present. During this period philosophical opinions about human nature underwent a transformation from the God-centered views of Augustine and the scholastics to the human-centered ideas of Nietzsche, Freud and Sartre. While one aim has simply been to provide a handy survey, I do have three polemical purposes. One is to oppose the notion that the modernism of more recent writers was produced by methodological innovations. According to both Freud and Sartre, as well as other key figures like Lacan and Heidegger, their views were the product of new methods of investigating human nature, namely those of psychoanalysis and the phenomenological reduction. Psych,oanalysis claimed to use the interpretation of both dreams and the relationship between analyst and patient to penetrate the unconscious. Phenomenology has claimed that trained philosophers are able to obtain a privilege;d view of consciousness by a special act of thought called the phenomenological reduction which enables them to view consciousness without preconceptions. On many issues my sympathies are with Nietzsche rather than with Freud or phenomenology. This is also the case regarding methodology. Nietzsche saw quite clearly that the possibility of popularising the views he himself held came from the decline of ChristianitY. My rejection of exclusive reliance upon the methodologies of psychoanalysis and phenomenology is based on two lines of argument.
List of contents
1: Introduction.- The decline of Christianity as the key factor producing altered views of human nature; discussion of other views and delimitation of the scope of the coverage..- 2: Unreason and Self-Destruction.- Augustine's pessimistic view of human nature and its influence, particularly on the reformation of the sixteenth century..- 3: Reason and Self-Interest.- The more optimistic view of some scholastic philosophers and its development by metaphysical rationalism, British empiricism and Kant..- 4: The Origins of Modernism.- Origins of the idea of the unconscious and of a philosophy based on consciousness; coverage of some writers who directly influenced the writings of Nietzsche, Freud, Heidegger and Sartre..- 5: Nietzsche and Jaspers.- Nietzsche's emphasis on the overcoming of lower nature and the ruthlessness of creation; his use by Jaspers and others..- 6: Freud and his Followers.- Freud's invention of psychoanalysis, his use of deep interpretation and extension of the stoic attitude; his influence on Reich, Marcuse, Fromm and Lacan..- 7: Heidegger and Modern Metaphysics.- Heidegger's use of a metaphysics of consciousness and his neglect of lower nature; the extension of his ideas by Sartre, Merleau-Ponty and Baudrillard..- 8: Conclusions.- Against excessive reliance on methodology; critique of post-structuralism; review of seven issues relating to human nature..
