Probably no one needs to be convinced that people are biological creatures. No matter what the Church says about this, the proximity of the anatomical structure, physiology of homo sapiens to higher primates is obvious. The biological nature of man is clearly inherited by us from the animal kingdom. All people have a nervous and circulatory system, have a certain set of internal organs, which are also present in the bodies of not only humanoid monkeys, but also other mammals and even birds. To some extent, this essence derived from animals is rigidly determined. Parent genes transmit to us growth, color of skin, hair and eyes, and even hereditary diseases.
But of all philosophical movements, only behaviorism reduces the nature of people only to their nature, arising from biological nature. Humans are also social creatures. The philosophical concept of “man” includes both the body (organism) and the individual (personality, subject). And if certain chemical processes occur at the level of the body’s vital functions - glucose uptake, oxygen enrichment, the production of toxins, carbon dioxide, and so on, then completely different, much more complex processes operate on the personality level. The social nature of man is not limited to the life of the organism. The meaning of life, the place of an individual in society excites people no less than questions of saturation and procreation.
If the biological properties of an organism are inherited, then the social ones are acquired by the individuals themselves. There is no place for discussion about exactly what factors are involved in creating a personality - cultural unconsciousness, upbringing or stress experienced in childhood - something else is important: all these factors lie not in the material world, but in a completely different plane. Thus, the nature of man is twofold: with his body he belongs to the material world, and with his heart and mind - to another, different. And how much is this socio-biological or biosocial being striving for something else? We can say that the biological nature of people is a prerequisite for their existence in this world, but the essence of the human race is in its sociality.
A child, being born, does not recognize himself as a person. Instincts rule him: the desire to be warm, dry and full. Later, he begins to recognize the source of this heat and satiety - the mother. But he empirically learns other manifestations of this world: cold, hunger, danger. Against these troubles mother and father save again. Communicating with his parents, entering into these simple social relations with them, the child is already “humanizing”. Sociocultural factors begin to dominate. It is not enough for a child to be fed and warmed up, it is important for him to feel loved. Thus, the nature of man, starting from biology, rushes to the sphere of spirituality, where such non-material concepts as love, tenderness, responsibility play a key role.
As a child grows up, he realizes his finiteness as a biological being in this world. But the human soul is always aimed at infinity, at eternity. We can say that human nature is a heavy cross of estrangement from nature. The material kingdom pushes a person out of himself, and over the years (and illnesses) a person feels alien to this world, abandoned in the "vale of sorrow". If the soul associates itself with its carrier - the body, tragedy cannot be avoided: the shadow of death will haunt the personality and poison its entire existence.
Maybe it’s worth considering: where does this ability come from us to love, to be grateful, why do we have an aesthetic sense of beauty, moral values? After all, none of this exists in material and inanimate nature. Standing out from the world of simple biological beings through evolution, homo sapiens to some extent ceased to be just a biological being - he began to confront the material world, redrawing it “for himself”. Not without reason existentialists noticed that we feel here not at home, but in a foreign land and are fighting for the right to have this house. We can say that the nature of man is outside the material world, in the spiritual world. “I won’t die all,” Horace wrote, “my best part will escape destruction.”