The Notion of Human Nature as a Theological, Historical and Philosophical Problem

The article problematizes the concept of human nature in three related fields of knowledge: theology, history, and philosophy. The main problem with "human nature" as a theological concept is that it was based on ancient anthropology, primarily Aristotle. However, modern intellectual culture is separated from antiquity by the "anthropological revolution" that occurred at the beginning of the twentieth century thanks to Freud, Heidegger, Lorenz, and others. As a result, a different idea of human nature has emerged, in which, for example, sexuality, mortality, and aggressiveness are understood not as defects of human nature, but as constitutive factors of human personality. From the perspective of modern anthropology, the concept of human nature as a tool of dogmatic theology needs to be rethought. However, this conclusion itself requires historical verification, and meaningful transformations of the concept of human nature require scrupulous historical research. In turn, the historical study of semantic transformations of the concept of human nature is complicated by the uncertainty of its boundaries and content. There are at least five ways of understanding human nature, dating back to ancient philosophy: nature as the antonym of art (technē), nature as a "scheme" of a thing, setting the direction of its transformations, nature as the goal of movement, nature as a measure of perfection, norm, and nature as an ensemble of typologizing signs. In contemporary debates, the validity of the concept of human nature is called into question. Constructivist criticism of essentialism is based on anthropological data, which testify to the diversity of ideas about man and, accordingly, reinforce the thesis that "human nature" is a cultural construct that does not have an ontological status. However, over the past few decades, evolutionary biologists have sought to give stable and "objective" content to the concept of human nature. However, the possibility of using the data of modern biology, which reveals the evolutionarily established species characteristics of a person (including those that are still considered cultural), to identify a cultural norm remains in question.