Human Nature, Empiricism, and Idealism

Today I was far more articulate in 10:00 than in 9:00. I'm trying to use our class's online discussion board to alleviate my ineptitude early, but I'm going to have to do some serious recovering in class Wednesday.

The discussion was supposed to be about Plato's critique of the sophists as moral empiricists, folks who look at the ways people live together and conclude that the best way of living must be the seizure of power within those groups. Plato, contrasting strongly, argues for a moral idealism, the evaluation of good or bad cities and people based on their proximity to or distance from a reasoned ideal of conduct.

So on our WebCT board, I posted this question for them:

What is human nature?

I don't think many of them read this blog (though I've posted a link to it on WebCT), so I'll go ahead and start some thinking on the question.

What I call in class "pop culture" meanings for words are often our launching-points for discussions. When I present the above question to the classes, my hunch is that their answers are going to come either from some sort of evangelical Protestant theology (Calvin lite, if you will) or from some sort of basic understanding of economics or Freudian psychology. What's going to bind them together (I'm guessing, of course) is that all of them will assume that "human nature" is a limiting factor on political possibilities, an insurmountable selfishness that makes sustained communal living impossible.

Plato, of course (along with the book of Acts, if I'm reading it right), denies the absoluteness of that determination, claiming instead that education (in Plato's system) or conversion (in Acts) makes a more real sort of community possible. In other words, what we see when we look at embodied communities is not human nature but human-nature-corrupted.

I'm not sure where I stand on this question, which will make leading the discussion easier. I've been just as influenced as anyone by the American project, a system of rules and checks that limits the ability of any one person to act too autonomously in matters of government. But I also think that genuinely good people can be genuinely good leaders, defying claims that human greed is insurmountable. I hope this discussion runs better than this morning's did.