Great IdeasGod and the soul
What a human being is
What sets people apart, and what we share with other animals.
The question
What is a human being? What sets us apart from other animals, and are we good or selfish at heart?
How the books answer
Oldest first. Each stop is our own short summary of what the author argued; follow the link to the rung for the whole lesson.
c. 441–401 BC
Sophocles, Antigone
A chorus in Antigone sings of human wonder: people sail the seas, plow the land, tame horses, invent speech and build cities. Only death defeats them. But the song warns that this cleverness can serve good or evil.
“Wonders are many, and none is more wonderful than man.”
c. 340–322 BC
Aristotle, Politics and The Athenian Constitution
Aristotle says humans are the animal with reason and speech, made to live in communities and talk about what is just. Bees and cattle live in groups too, but only humans argue about good and bad.
written 1513; published 1532
Niccolò Machiavelli, The Prince
Machiavelli writes that, in general, people are ungrateful, changeable and eager for gain. A prince who counts on their goodness will fail. Whether he meant it as a full picture of human nature or a working rule for rulers is debated.
1580–1595
Michel de Montaigne, Essays
Montaigne studies human nature by studying himself, in all his changing moods. He finds people inconsistent, often foolish and not so different from animals. His honesty about it makes him kind toward others.
“Thus, reader, myself am the matter of my book: there's no reason thou shouldst employ thy leisure about so frivolous and vain a subject.”
1651
Thomas Hobbes, Leviathan
Hobbes paints people as driven by desire and fear, each seeking their own good. Without a government to keep order, they would live in constant fear of one another. His view is not that people are wicked, but that they need peace and rules.
1670 (published after his death)
Blaise Pascal, Pensées (Thoughts)
Pascal says a human being is both great and wretched: weak as a reed but able to think about the whole universe. That mix of greatness and misery is, for him, the key puzzle of human nature.
“Man is but a reed, the most feeble thing in nature; but he is a thinking reed.”
1726
Jonathan Swift, Gulliver's Travels
In the last voyage, Gulliver meets wise, calm horses and filthy, greedy creatures that look like people. He comes home so disgusted with humankind that he prefers his horses. Swift's satire asks whether people live up to the name of reasoning animals.
1755
Jean-Jacques Rousseau, A Discourse on the Origin of Inequality and A Discourse on Political Economy
Rousseau answers Hobbes. He imagines early people as simple, peaceful and kind, and blames society, property and competition for making them vain and cruel. Critics replied that his picture of natural goodness was a guess.
1871
Charles Darwin, The Descent of Man
Darwin argues that humans share ancestors with other animals and differ from them in degree, not kind. Yet he names the moral sense as the most important human trait, one that leads people to risk their lives for others.
“It is the most noble of all the attributes of man, leading him without a moment's hesitation to risk his life for that of a fellow-creature ...”
1910–1933
Sigmund Freud, A General Introduction to Psychoanalysis, Civilization and Its Discontents, New Introductory Lectures, and others
Freud claims that people are moved by unconscious wishes far more than they realize. He calls this a blow to human pride, like the discoveries of Copernicus and Darwin. Many of his theories are now doubted, but the debate he started about hidden motives continues.
“But the third and most irritating insult is flung at the human mania of greatness by present-day psychological research, which wants to prove to the "I" that it is not even master in its own home.”
For young readers
What makes people people? We can talk, laugh, make up stories, build things and ask big questions like this one. Other animals are amazing too, but they don't write books!
The great writers argue about whether people are good at heart or selfish at heart. Some say we're born kind, some say we need rules to be good, and many say we're a mix. What do you think?
Talk about it
- What can people do that no other animal can?
- Are people mostly kind or mostly selfish? Give examples.
- Pascal says we are weak like a reed but can think. Why does thinking make us great?
- Hobbes and Rousseau disagree about people without rules. What would happen at recess with no rules?
- What do people share with animals?
Where else on the site
- Comparing Body Structures
- Evidence: Fossils and Anatomy
- Kind and Cruel
- Natural Rights and the Social Contract
- Unusual
Every rung tagged with this idea:
- Euripides: The Plays
- Erasmus: The Praise of Folly
- Montaigne: Essays
- Calvin: Institutes of the Christian Religion
- Hobbes: Leviathan
- Pascal: Pensées
- Molière: The Comedies
- Swift: Gulliver's Travels
- Rousseau: The Discourses
- Nietzsche: Beyond Good and Evil
- Darwin: The Descent of Man
- Freud: The Interpretation of Dreams
- Freud: The Later Works
- Heidegger: What Is Metaphysics?
- Kafka: The Metamorphosis
- Beckett: Waiting for Godot
These pages are our own short synthesis, written for families. They were inspired by Mortimer J. Adler's Syntopicon, the index of great ideas in volumes 1 and 2 of Great Books of the Western World, but the questions, summaries and groupings are ours, not the Syntopicon's. Short excerpts come from public-domain translations, credited where they appear.