QuestionsAre humans good by nature?Homo homini lupus: a share of aggression is in our nature
Are humans good by nature?Prone to evil

Homo homini lupus: a share of aggression is in our nature

"Man is a wolf to man"; civilization and its discontents; the aggressive drive

Sigmund Freud 1856 · 1939Religion is an illusion born of the wish to be protected, as a child by its father.
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What it claims

Human nature includes a primary hostility of people towards one another: society is constantly threatened with disintegration, and civilization must contain it through renunciations.

Why

Man is not gentle: he has a strong share of aggression, which shows when nothing restrains it and precedes property.

The same idea through history
Thomas Hobbes1642The phrase comes from the Latin comic poet Plautus (c. 200 BC), where it only says that a stranger is a wolf to another. Hobbes takes it up in the dedicatory epistle of De Cive and splits it in two: among citizens man is a god to man, among states man is a wolf. Freud keeps only the second half.
Sigmund Freud1930Freud (1856-1939) takes it up to say that aggression is a primary tendency in each person, which civilization must constantly contain at the price of discontent. In the next chapter he links it to his theory of the death drive.
In short

"Homo homini lupus: a share of aggression is in our nature" is an argument by Sigmund Freud (Das Unbehagen in der Kultur (Civilization and Its Discontents), 1930, ch. V, 1930) on the question "Are humans good by nature?" (answer: prone to evil). Its claim: Human nature includes a primary hostility of people towards one another: society is constantly threatened with disintegration, and civilization must contain it through renunciations. According to AskPhilosophy's logic check (Z3 solver), the argument is valid only if one grants a premise the author leaves unstated (P5). AskPhilosophy presents 5 objections, 3 of them with a documented reply, and the original text behind each premise, checked word for word.

Das Unbehagen in der Kultur (Civilization and Its Discontents), 1930, ch. V
Valid with an implicit premise

Freud writes in 1930, after the First World War. In chapter V of Civilization and Its Discontents, he starts from the command "Love thy neighbour as thyself" and asks why we find it so hard to follow. His answer is a thesis about human beings: we are not gentle creatures who defend themselves only when attacked. Among our endowments there is a strong share of aggressiveness, which makes the neighbour a temptation as much as a helper. For him civilization does not exist to make this tendency disappear, but to contain it, and it does so by imposing renunciations, hence the "discontent". The text does not set out the argument as premises: the P1 to P5 form is our reconstruction. We cite the German text, the translation is ours.

P1Man is not a gentle creature who needs love and only defends himself when attacked. Among his instinctual endowments there is a strong share of aggressiveness.
P2The neighbour is therefore also a temptation: one can exploit him, humiliate him, hurt him, torture him, kill him. "Homo homini lupus": who, after the experience of life and of history, has the courage to dispute this sentence?
P3When the inner counterforces fall away, aggression shows itself spontaneously and reveals man as a wild beast to whom sparing his own kind is foreign: the invasions, the crusades, the last war show it.
P4This aggression is not created by private property: it ruled almost without limit in primeval times, when property was still poor, and it shows itself already in the nursery.
P5 · implicit premiseA tendency that is primary (earlier than property and society), present in everyone, and that shows itself as soon as nothing holds it back, belongs to the nature of man.
Therefore human nature includes a primary hostility of people towards one another: society is constantly threatened with disintegration, and civilization must contain it through renunciations.

click a premise to reject it

If you accept every premise, logic forces you to accept the conclusion. So the debate is about the premises.
Checked by a logic solver: the premises cannot all be true while the conclusion is false.
Without the implicit premise: Without P5, the computer finds a case where aggression is real, spontaneous when nothing holds it back and earlier than property, but where it is only a reaction to conditions of scarcity and fear, not a trait of nature: the conclusion no longer follows.
With its five premises, the conclusion follows. The most fragile point is P4. Freud asserts that aggression is primary, but the passage gives no proof for "primeval times": he appeals here to experience and history, whose data are debated. P5 also needs examination: a tendency present in everyone is not necessarily the only or the deepest one. Freud does not say, moreover, that man is only aggressive: he speaks of an aggressive share alongside Eros, and says that civilization relies on bonds of love limited by aggression.
Analogy. A dam holds back a river. Freud says: the river existed before the dam, it does not come from it, and it keeps pushing. Someone answers: the river is only rain fallen on certain slopes, it might have flowed elsewhere. Both look at the same dam and describe the river differently.

Objections

5

Each objection is a conversation: click to see who replies and where the debate stands.

The communists, as Freud presents them attacks premise 4

Summary: Freud reports the communists' thesis. Man is entirely good and well-disposed towards his neighbour, but the institution of private property has corrupted his nature. Property gives one person the power and the temptation to mistreat another, and the excluded person revolts against the oppressor. If property is abolished, ill will and hostility will disappear.

Freud replies
Freud Freud's reply, further in the text
Summary: Freud says he does not judge the economic side, but that he recognises in the psychological premise a baseless illusion. Aggression was not created by property: it ruled almost without limit in primeval times, when property was very poor, and it shows itself in the nursery. He adds that even if property were removed, it would find other tools.
The debate goes on (our summary) Freud cites no study for "primeval times" or for the nursery: his reply rests on everyday observation and on his own theory of drives. The partisans of the communist thesis, or of a natural goodness corrupted (see Rousseau), may find this reply insufficient, and reproach it for assuming what needs proving.
Where the debate stands (our summary)Basic disagreement, not settled: does human aggression come from social conditions (property, inequality) or from a disposition that precedes any society? Archaeology and the study of stateless societies provide data, but how to read them is debated.
Rousseau 1755 · attacks premise 5

Summary: Rousseau grants that people are wicked, a sad and continual experience spares the need for proof. But he says that man is naturally good, and that what depraved him is the changes in his constitution, the progress he made and the knowledge he acquired. A tendency to aggression, found everywhere in societies, does not prove that it is natural.

no reply
see the argument
No reply possible: objection raised in 1755, after the author's death (1939).
The debate goes on (our summary) Freud writes one hundred and seventy-five years after Rousseau and does not cite him in this passage. His only possible reply is his claim about primeval times (P4), and the argument of the tendency that reappears as soon as the restraints go (P3). Rousseau, for his part, answered that the peoples observed by travellers are already far from the first state of nature. Each has an argument the other cannot verify.
Where the debate stands (our summary)A basic disagreement, not settled: one can observe neither the state "before society" nor a person with no learning at all. Each reads the same facts in his own way.
P
Peter Kropotkin 1902 · attacks the conclusion

Summary: Kropotkin writes that mutual aid is the real foundation of our ethical conceptions. He sees in it an instinct traced through the lowest stages of the animal world and through the whole of human development. He admits, however, that the other current, self-assertion, has always existed and that a single war may do more harm than centuries of mutual aid do good.

Freud replies
see the argument
Freud Freud, further on in the same chapter
Summary: Freud notes that it is always possible to bind a large crowd of people together in love, provided others remain to receive their aggression. He sees in this advantage of a restricted cultural circle a way to satisfy aggression at little cost, which eases the cohesion of the group. Mutual aid within the group therefore does not exclude hostility turned toward outsiders, and sometimes supposes it.
The debate goes on (our summary) Freud had not read this objection in particular, and Kropotkin himself admits war. The disagreement is about proportion and origin: is mutual aid an instinct on a par with aggression (Kropotkin), or a formation that depends on it (Freud)? Kropotkin, for his part, does not say that sociability excludes hostility to outsiders.
Where the debate stands (our summary)The two authors see the same facts: groups bound by mutual aid, and wars between groups. They order them in opposite ways: mutual aid first and aggression second (Kropotkin), or the reverse (Freud).
T
The signatories of the Seville Statement 1986 · attacks premise 5

Summary: an international group of scientists from several disciplines adopted in Seville in 1986 a text that holds it scientifically incorrect to say that we have inherited a tendency to make war from our animal ancestors, that war or any other violent behaviour is genetically programmed into human nature, or that war is caused by "instinct". They conclude that the species which invented war is capable of inventing peace.

a defender replies
No reply possible: objection raised in 1986, after the author's death (1939).
R
Richard Wrangham and Dale Peterson defender of the argument · 1996
Summary: in Demonic Males, Wrangham and Peterson argue that male chimpanzees, like men, form coalitions that attack other groups, sometimes to the death. They see in this the trace of a very ancient tendency to coalitional violence in males, shared with our closest relatives. For them war is not only a recent product of culture.
Where the debate stands (our summary)The facts are debated among specialists: violence between chimpanzee groups is observed, but its cause and its comparison with human war are discussed. Both camps admit that culture plays a part. They differ on the nature of the starting tendency: a constant "drive" (Freud), a capacity that depends on conditions (Seville).
John Dewey 1922 · attacks premise 5

Dewey writes, eight years before Freud, that war would not be possible without anger, pugnacity, rivalry, self-display, but that to fancy these tendencies must end in war is as if a savage thought that, because the fibres he weaves into baskets have fixed properties, the patterns of his tribe were also natural necessities. For him original nature supplies the materials, and custom supplies the machinery and the designs.

no reply
We have not yet found a direct reply by Freud in the texts.
The debate goes on (our summary) Freud does not cite Dewey. One can say that they agree on the material (anger and rivalry are natural) and disagree on what is imposed: a constant pressure that needs a dam (Freud) or an energy that can be redirected (Dewey).
Where the debate stands (our summary)Both positions recognise natural aggressive tendencies. The open question is that of their own strength: constant and primary, or dependent on conditions.