The Trace of Debate on Human Nature in Modern Philosophy

Abstract

If the debate on human nature is nothing but the question “what human being is” this, without doubt, does not belong to modern philosophy solely. By asking the question “what am I?” it is Descartes who made this debate known in modern philosophy. Descartes who took himself to be “a thinking being”, inherited certain postulates from his predecessors and passed them onto his successors. This study aims to put forward these postulates related to the human understanding of modern philosophy and the Enlightenment. In fact, these postulates which take human being as “a rational being” and prescribe that “only by following the voice of reason, she can get closer to God” are theological. The postulates of Christian theology, in its general representation, express the root of modern philosophy and the Enlightenment with regard to “reason/faith division”. This study investigates what these theological roots are in truth and to what extend modern western philosophy went beyond them. In fact, this study depends on the presumption that the relation between “reason” and “faith” is essentially the criterion that determines the horizon of the debate on “human nature” and attempts to demonstrate this. For this reason, the traces of the transformation of the debate about the relationship between reason and faith into a debate about human nature has been followed. The symbolic names of modern western philosophy has been studied only in this context. This discussion, including the topics of Cartesian philosophy, British empiricism, French and German Enlightenments, attempts to show how modern western philosophy, based on its theological roots, addresses the “human question” in the framework of “a general representation”.