The point of departure for this essay is a comment an e-mail correspondent of mine recently sent me about the German philosopher, Nietzsche. According to this comment, Nietzsche believes human nature is just a euphemism for inertia, cultural conditioning, and what we are before we make something of ourselves. I start out with a bad taste in my mouth because of Nietzsche's association with Nazi ideology, but my correspondent assures me he really is a humanist at heart, and that many of his ideas are important and worth considering. All right, give the devil his due, I guess Herr N, like almost everyone else, has some good in him. But I still have a bone to pick about the idea that human nature is something we have to overcome, extirpate, and replace with something better.
Humans are like other animals in just about every significant physical attribute.
What distinguishes us is not the structure of our cells, not the way our metabolism works, and certainly not the way we are born, live, and die. What distinguishes us is the fact that we are programmed even before we are born to learn the language and culture of our family and peers. Other animals have traces of these capacities but we are the only species to have taken language and culture and create out of them a new form of evolution, social as opposed to biological. We are, as far as we know, the only animals to establish self-conscious volition as a driving force behind evolution. And that makes us special.