The Selfish Human Nature
Thursday, November 26th, 2009XunZi thinks that human nature is evil, and the good is fake. He means that people are born evil, even if they are led to good afterwards; it is the result of education.
“Man at birth, nature is good”, said The Three Character Primer in the first sentence. And more people accept this point, or to be more exact, more people comfort themselves by accepting this point. In this view of point, evil is perfectly justifiable to be the product of the enviornment that human survive in, or even the society, but not human themselves. In a word, the Plain Chinese Materialism Philosophy devides human nature into two categories: evil and good, namely, either evil or good.
Frankly speaking, I’d more likely to cater to the human nature theory prevailed in western countries. Just as the Bible said, people are born with original sin. What it call original sin are those come along with life including good and evil, spirit, personal wants, the pursuit of survival and the desire for death, while what we call selfishness is to put ourselves on the primacy of everything, thinking of our own benefits and feelings the first thing. However, in my opinion, selfishness is neutral; selfishness and good or evil are two concepts which could not be mixed up, as selfishness might due to evil, and might also due to good. Likewise, evil and good should not be defined merely by selfishness, but as well need to be discriminated by rationality, of which rational selfishness is good, and non-rational selfishness is evil.
All people are selfish, no matter how selfless you think you are.
Selfishness falls into two categories, one is the non-rational selfishness, the other is the rational selfishness. What is called non-rational selfishness is to blindly seek for individual benefits, even if it goes against the social values; while rational selfishness is to satisfy oneself based on social value and recognition. One example is the robbery, which is the direct seizure and infringement to private property of others . Another is the rape, which infringes bodies of others to content individual lust. Surely, these are crimes, the result of the selfishness booming to the utmost. And cheating, here means the hostile one, is to make interest flow to the party who cheats by getting the other party awared of false information. Littering is the spiteful treatment to the external enviornment (of others or public), being different from that to the internal environment one lives in…All those mentioned above are in the category of non-rational selfishness, and are easily understood by us, because our thought has been nationalized by social thought; we believe that all these conducts, which betray and destroy the social morality system, are selfish.
What I want to further talk about is the rational selfishness, which is generally based on the satisfaction of one’s own feeling, but not on material. The spiritual world, just as the material world, is a world with specific models. However, for one thing, spiritual world is abstract and invisible; thought of commom people is tend to be specific so that can not strictly naturalize the seemingly different emotions. For another, spiritual world is above material world, for in the real world, there is not enough material to form a mature spiritual world.
I’d like to state it one more time that selfishness has nothing to do with evil nor good, otherwise the following points will be of no value.
Lei Feng is well known to all Chinese people that he is a typical virtuous man and even a god for he is always ready to help others even when he had to give up his own benefits. But actually and basically speaking, he do all those good deeds in order to have a sense of satisfaction deep in his heart. By making others live better lives, he acquires the joy of being selfishless and a strong sense of existence and satisfaction in his mind, so strong and even stronger than life itself that he can do it while others can not, as nobody else feel it important enough to curb all other things in reality or even the life. However, his deeds stabilized social morality, and to some extent had play a part in the continuity of human, thus is a kind of deed should be followed by the people. Then this kind of selfishness becomes the qualification of being a hero.
Parents are considered the most selfishless in the world. I’d say, above all, nobody deserves our sincerest treatment more than our parents, even ourselves.But in the final analysis, parents’ love is selfish, too. What they call selfishless parental love refers to is that parents worry about their children, bustle about for their children for their whole life, devoting all they have to their children both spiritually and materially, yet not asking for any repayment; and these will not come to an end until parents pass away. To analyze it at great length, we will find the kind of giving, in fact, not really selishless. Children is the spiritual sustenance of parents; intentionally or unconsciously parents will regard children as the extention of their life, and the ultimate purpose of their self-giving material and spiritual offer is to subconsciously get the balance in spirit from the fact that their son is alive or alive and well, because the exsistence and the achievement of their son can continuously pass on to them the sense of happiness, which is all they want. As regards why human have emotional demand like that, probably it is the result of natural selection (will talk about it hereinafter). Moreover, in the ages when human terribly lack of material, we may say it is normal that parents sell their children, for at the time the reason to survive is stronger than the spiritual demand.
Now comes to that between husband and wife and the so-called love. What is love? From ancient times to the present, too many people have illustrated love, but with different versions. If I am required to offer an objective definition, I’ll say, love is the mysterious integration of physiological demand and spiritual demand of human. The integration is based on physiology and with spirit as the sublimation. And also, the interior driving force of the integration lies in the natural selection, or genetics. As to the love between husband and wife, I think there is no need to further talk about it. Why I differentiate marriage and love? Because comparing with love, there is one more thing in marriage. That is what people call obligation. Over here I think I should roughly talk about obligation. Obligation is a kind of morality, namely the above mentioned legal and conventional selfishness, which is in accordance with the survival and development of human. I am not willing to attack marriage. Actually marriage is good stuff which at least good for the stability of a society. However, i can not give up the selfish theory in spite of its beauty. If we say love is selfless, why there is break up? If we say the affection between the couple is selfless, so why there is divorce? All because one of the couple or both the couple couldn’t get satisfied in the deal(don not take ‘deal’ as a negative word; Actually not. Really not.)