NATURE, PERFECTION, SELF-REALIZATION
115. HUMAN NATURE AS ACCEPTED STANDARD.—The
three doctrines, that the norm of moral action is
to follow nature, that it is to aim at the attainment
of perfection, and that it is the realization of one’s
capabilities, have much in common. They may conveniently
be treated in the same chapter.
Early in the history of the ethics we find the moralist
preaching that it is the duty of man to follow nature,
and branding vice as unnatural and, hence, to be abhorred.
The word “nature,” thus used, has had
a fluctuating meaning. Sometimes the thought
has been predominantly of human nature, and sometimes
the appeal has been to nature in a wider sense.
Aristotle, who finds the “good” of man
in happiness or “well-being,” points out
that this is something relative to man’s nature.
The well-being of a man he conceives as, in large
part, “well-doing,” and well-doing he
defines as performing the proper functions of a man.
[Footnote: Nichomachean Ethics, Book I,
chapters iv, vii, viii.] If we ask him what is proper
or natural to man, he refers us to what man, when
fully developed, becomes: “What every being
is in its completed state, that certainly is the nature
of that thing, whether it be a man, a house, or a
horse.” [Footnote: Politics, i, 2.]
He conceives man’s nature, thus, as that which
it is in man to become. Toward this end man strives;
and it is this which furnishes him with the law of
his action.
But, it may be asked, how shall this end be defined
in detail? Individual men, who arrive at mature
years, are by no means alike. Some we approve;
some we disapprove. We evidently appeal to a standard
by which the individual is judged. The appeal
to the nature of man helps us little unless we can
agree upon what we may accept as a just revelation
of that nature—a pattern of some sort,
divergence from which may be called unnatural, and
is to be reprobated.
Neither Aristotle, nor those who, after him, took
human nature as the moral norm, were without some
conception of such a pattern. They kept in view
certain things that men may become rather than certain
others. They accepted as their standard a type
of human nature which tends, on the whole, to realize
itself more and more in the course of development of
human communities. But as different human societies
differ more or less in the characteristics which they
tend to transmit to their members, in the kind of
man whom they tend to form, we find the ideal of human
nature, with which we are presented, somewhat vague
and fluctuating. Different traits are dwelt upon
by different moralists. Still, the appeals to
human nature have a good deal in common; upon man’s
rational and social qualities especial stress is apt
to be laid.
