Two Orientations Toward Human Nature

Our culture entertains a schizophrenic attitude towards human nature, vacillating between egoism and wholeness, seeing human nature not as self-interested but as herd-like. Guldmann argues that this schism reflects two diverging conceptions of human agency and that the attempt to locate human nature somewhere along a continuum between egoism and altruism presupposes a misleading picture of what it is to be a human being.