Human Nature According to Machiavelli, Bacon, and Descartes

For thousands of years, human beings try to understand their nature, at some point almost every single person must have thought about why and how humans exist. We now will see three of the most important ideas about human nature. First idea is suggested by Bacon who suggested four categories (idols) for understanding human nature. He claimed that humans perceive the world through their five senses and those senses are not reliable. Humans tend to make incorrect decisions under uncertainty. There are also interpersonal differences in beliefs, experiences, education, social class, and family backgrounds and these differences affect the way humans think and thus all of them are distorted. And he also stated that the limits of interpersonal communication and semantics cause misunderstandings and distorted reality perceptions. Moreover, there are culturally imposed schemas and these schemas force people to think within a certain area and thus limit the thinking in that area causing incorrect judgments. This idea of flawed human nature is highly accepted yet controversial. Bacon's idols can help or harm us along these difficult and perilous paths to the accurate, factual knowledge of nature. Idols of the tribe may lie deep within the structure of human nature, but we should also thank our evolutionary constitution for another ineradicable trait of mind that will keep us going and questioning until we break through these constraining idols--our drive to ask and to know. We cannot look at the sky and not wonder why we see blue. We cannot observe that lightning kills good and bad people alike without demanding to know why. The first question can be answered; the second cannot, at least in the terms that prompt our demands. But we cannot stop asking.

Second idea is suggested by Machiavelli whose understanding of human nature was a complete contradiction of what humanists supported. He did not support the idea that state being a necesary creation for human beings'...