Human Nature Aristotle vs Mencius

The Human nature

Aristotle view on human nature is very interesting because he is not making a claim as Mencius that human nature is good, as Xunzi that it is bad or even Gaozi that it is neutral. Instead he is including a lot of principles in the human nature:

-By nature Man is blind to morality suggesting that Man is naturally an amoral creature. The morality is the differentiation of intentions, decisions, and actions between those that are distinguished as proper and those that are improper: In other words, it is the disjunction between right and wrong. So we may suggest that having an amoral nature mean to have a human nature which is neutral as Gaozi think it is.

-By nature Man is a political animal which is also able to speak so he can communicate but also express ideas that animals don’t have as the idea of good and bad, just and unjust. That would mean that this difference between Man and animals is natural. So, does that mean that because Man are political animal by nature so we lives in society and are sociable? We could answer that some animals as bees or ants lives in society but, are not political animals, or we could even say the opposite that humans don’t support each other’s. In fact, Aristotle is talking about politics, not society; that is not only about the one living with others but one in a City with social rules and politics.

Aristotle says: “We are not born as a Man but we do become a Man by living in a house under the authority of laws and with the conscience to be the part of a lineage”. That is a point to compare with Confucius philosophers. When they agree about the fact that we are born as a Man, Aristotle here tend to suppose that we are not born as a Man but that we become one. Aristotle talks about men who are not living in a city as violent, as superhuman or even as gods. They would be from the human species but they won’t be consider as a Man. That definition is somehow confirmed by Victor de L'Aveyron. He was a wild child and after he got integrated in the society he never could speak or write well. However he had no disease.

So, does that mean that we can exclude some humans to be a complete Man because they didn’t accomplish their nature? To say that we only can become a Man if we have a social life is to say that we only can do so inside of a culture and so by education. By seeing the huge amount of different cultures and society that would explain why Man are so different from each other. So humans are only becoming a Man in a culture, but a culture is denaturing human. What is making a Man won’t be biology but learning process through assimilation. And so here we are joining back Confucian philosophers. But again that definition would exclude some human species to be a Man which is a strong impediment to this theory because it goes against our rationality. Moreover that would mean that we can deprive a Man from his statue. And in fact that happened quite a lot, with black people who were considered to don’t have spirit, with Jewish, with slaves (slavery wasn’t a problem to Aristotle), or even with whatever barbarians. That would mean that a difference of nature exist between humans and animals and at the same time a simple difference of degree between humans and animals. It would be possible that some human are just some kind of animals. But can we really be inhuman? Can we be consider as

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