The question "what is human nature?" usually arrives as a fight between two old answers. Thomas Hobbes wrote in Leviathan (1651) that without government, human life would be "solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short". A century later Jean-Jacques Rousseau argued the reverse: that society, property and the arts had corrupted people who were better without them. One side says we are dangerous and need restraint, the other that restraint is what made us dangerous.
That argument still runs, but it hides the more interesting disagreements underneath it. Five answers are still in serious competition today. Each one explains something the others miss, and each one runs into a fact it cannot easily explain. Here they are in their strongest form, with the trouble each one meets.
1. We are driven by forces older than our choices
The answer. Before you decide anything, you already want things. Hunger, fear, desire and rivalry arrive before reasons do. Charles Darwin made this a scientific claim: our powers and weaknesses could be studied as part of the natural world, with no exemption for us. Arthur Schopenhauer saw beneath all life a blind striving that reason serves rather than rules. Friedrich Nietzsche asked what forces lie behind the values we profess. Sigmund Freud described a mind in conflict, with drives that do not wait for permission and a conscience that punishes them.
What it explains. Why intention so often loses to impulse. Why people act against what they say they believe, and why self-knowledge is hard: much of what moves us never presents itself for inspection.
The trouble. These thinkers disagree with each other about almost everything except the suspicion they share, and the suspicion can become too convenient. If every act is the expression of a hidden force, choice becomes a performance whose result was settled in advance, and the theory can explain any outcome after the fact. An account of where a desire came from is also not a judgment of whether acting on it is right. Explanation can slide into excuse.
2. We are made by our surroundings
The answer. What looks like nature is mostly upbringing, habit and reward. John Locke compared the mind at birth to white paper. In the twentieth century B. F. Skinner's behaviorism made the case experimentally: behavior that is rewarded is repeated, and change the rewards and you change the person. Many of the traits we call innate turn out to vary with the institutions, incentives and relationships people live inside.
What it explains. Why people raised in different places become so different, and why changing a situation often changes behavior faster than any amount of willpower. It also carries a hopeful political message: if circumstances made us, better circumstances can remake us.
The trouble. Twin and adoption studies keep finding that a large share of the difference between people is inherited. A 2015 review of fifty years of twin research covering almost every trait studied put the average heritability close to half. Children raised in the same house turn out strikingly different, and identical twins raised apart turn out strikingly alike. Surroundings matter enormously, but the white paper was never blank.
3. We want what other people want
The answer. René Girard argued that most of our desires are borrowed. We want things because someone we admire or envy wants them, and we rarely notice, because we prefer to think our desires are our own. Two people imitating each other's wants end up wanting the same thing, and rivalry follows. Earlier, Gustave Le Bon had described how individuals in a crowd begin to feel and act as one mind, capable of things none of them would do alone.
What it explains. Fashion, status races, the way a thing becomes valuable the moment someone else reaches for it, and why rivals so often come to resemble each other. Girard found the pattern in great novelists, from Cervantes to Dostoevsky, whose characters believed their desires were spontaneous.
The trouble. Not every desire is borrowed. Hunger is not imitation, and neither is pain. The theory is strongest for the desires that confer status and weakest for the ones the body supplies. Combined freely with other theories it can explain everything, which is the point at which it starts to explain nothing precisely.
4. We are divided and looking for wholeness
The answer. Carl Jung argued that the conscious identity a person presents is only part of them, and that what it excludes, which he called the shadow, does not disappear. It returns in dreams, projections and the traits we hate most in others. A healthy life integrates the excluded parts rather than denying them. Ernest Becker added a starker version in The Denial of Death. Human beings, he argued, are animals who know they will die, part beast and part god. Much of culture is an elaborate way of not looking at that fact.
What it explains. Why people are so often their own opponents, why we react most strongly to faults we share, and why the search for meaning feels urgent rather than optional.
The trouble. Some of its central claims are hard to test. Jung pointed to recurring images in myths across the world as evidence of a collective unconscious. Recurrence has plainer explanations: shared bodies and life stages, stories passing between cultures, and interpreters sorting very different material into the same boxes. A theory that every exception can be absorbed into deserves the same suspicion as one that has never met a counterexample.
5. There is no fixed self at all
The answer. The oldest version comes from Buddhist teaching. In the early discourses, experience is analyzed into five groups: form, feeling, perception, mental formations and consciousness. Each is examined and found to be changing, outside full control, and unsuitable to be called a permanent self. What we call "I" is a process taken for a thing. Many modern thinkers, from philosophers of mind to neuroscientists, have arrived at related conclusions by other routes.
What it explains. Why the self feels solid and yet changes so much over a life. Why attachment to a fixed picture of yourself causes so much suffering, and why letting go of it can feel like relief.
The trouble. A person who rejects a fixed self still has to explain why yesterday's promises bind them today. You cannot change without also remaining the person responsible for what you did before. There is also a popular misreading worth avoiding: the idea that the personality is false but a watching awareness behind it is the true self. The early texts include consciousness in what they examine, so that reading rebuilds the very thing the teaching takes apart.
What the five answers share
They are not five discoveries of the same hidden mechanism, and forcing them into agreement would make them less useful. They disagree about what is real, what can be known and what a good life is. But read together they share one observation: a person is not a single, settled thing. We want freedom and security, belonging and independence, change and something dependable to remain.
That is the argument of The Dichotomy of the Self. I take that dividedness to be fundamental to being human, and treat these thinkers as a conversation about it rather than a contest with one winner. The book is the long version of this page: each of these answers in its own chapter, and the tensions they reveal in the choices people actually make.
For more on individual thinkers, see What Are Subpersonalities?, Girard's mimetic theory, Le Bon's The Crowd, The Denial of Death and How to Read Carl Jung. The psychology and philosophy reading routes go further.
Sources
- Thomas Hobbes, Leviathan, 1651, Chapter 13.
- Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Discourse on the Arts and Sciences, 1750, and Discourse on Inequality, 1755.
- John Locke, An Essay Concerning Human Understanding, 1690, Book II.
- B. F. Skinner, Science and Human Behavior, 1953.
- Tinca J. C. Polderman and others, "Meta-analysis of the heritability of human traits based on fifty years of twin studies", Nature Genetics, 2015.
- René Girard, Deceit, Desire and the Novel, 1961 (English translation 1965).
- Gustave Le Bon, The Crowd: A Study of the Popular Mind, 1895.
- C. G. Jung, The Archetypes and the Collective Unconscious and Aion, Collected Works, volume 9, parts 1 and 2.
- Ernest Becker, The Denial of Death, 1973.
- Anatta-lakkhana Sutta (the Discourse on the Not-Self), Samyutta Nikaya 22.59.