Two Orientations Toward Human Nature

Our culture entertains a schizophrenic attitude towards human nature. On the one hand egoism is held to be our most powerful motive playing a crucial cultural role by explaining the appeal of capitalism and providing a foundation for individualism. By contrast much of the continental intellectual tradition speaks of wholeness and alienation seeing human nature not as self-interested but as herd-like. Guldmann argues that this schism reflects two diverging conceptions of human agency and that the attempt to locate human nature somewhere along a continuum between egoism and altruism presupposes a misleading picture of what it is to be a human being. The second ’continental’ tradition is more illuminating because it recognizes that human beings are necessarily committed to some conception of the ultimately significant.