Encyclopedia of Psychology Alan E. Kazdin, PhD, Editor-in-Chief
PSYCHOLOGY: Renaissance Through the Enlightenment
Human Nature, Morality, and Society
The following describes philosophical developments in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.
The Enlightenment Project. In the wake of scientific revolution, social thinkers of the eighteenth-century Enlightenment - the philosophes - began to rethink morals and government along scientific lines. Especially in France, where the most radical ideas abounded, they rejected tradition and religion. The key question was that of moral authority: Why should I do what society tells me to do?
...As psychological inquiry into the nature of the mind issued in a skeptical crisis, psychological inquiry into human social nature issued in a moral crisis
...Examining Human Nature. Modern inquiry into humans as social creatures began with the English thinker Thomas Hobbes (1583-1679). Hobbes was a devotee of the new mechanical-mathematical philosophy and functionally an atheist. He asked a question central to psychology: What would people be like as animals, living without society or culture? He thought he had an empirically confirmed answer. Having survived the horrors of the English Civil War, in which the governmental institutions ceased to function, Hobbes thought that without government there would be “war of every one against every one,” making human lives “solitary, nasty, brutish, and short.” Hobbes depicted human nature as violently dangerous, needing to be checked by strong, even authoritarian, governments. More disturbingly, Hobbes suggested that moral authority is a chimera: the only reality is force. Hobbes’s unpleasant analysis of human motives, human society, and the illusion of morality has haunted social thought ever since. And it rests on psychological conclusions about human nature.
...Romantic ideas cropped up in various places. Hume wrote that “reason is and ought only to be the slave of the passions.” Passion gives us goals, reason calculates how to achieve them. The concept of causality has irrational roots in the human feeling that effects must follow upon causes. The Scots’ moral sense was an intuitive, nonrational perception of right and wrong.
...According to the Marquis de Condorcet, “The time will come when the sun will shine only on free men who have no master but their reason.” As the claims of reason are universal, there is only one rational way of life, to be discovered and maintained by science. Against this, Herder asserted that humans are not fully human unless they participate in a living. developing, culture of their own in which they find meaning and inspiration. To abolish tradition (culture) was to abolish humanity.