The authors which I will be discussing in this essay are Pico della Mirandola, John Stuart Mill, Karl Marx and Martin Heidegger and how their views on humanity differ from each other. From Pico della Mirandola we learn that he disagreed with how humans were viewed during the Renaissance time period in the text he tells us: “I was not satisfied by the many remarkable qualities which were advanced as arguments by many men- that man is the intermediary between creatures, the intimate of higher beings and the king of lower beings, the interpreter of nature by sharpness of his senses, by the questioning curiosity of his reasons, and by the light of his intelligence” (Excerpt, Mirandolla). His position on humanity is that every single human develops …show more content…
In the text we learn that Mill perceives that the actions that individuals take shouldn’t be as free as the opinions people have, and states that both should be limited when they would cause harm to others and that the human “must not make himself a nuisance to other people” (1, Mill). For Mill individuality is vital to the development of one self. The biggest problem for Mill was that individuality was not respected in the society, and was rather shunned or looked down upon. He then claims that children should be educated by the knowledge and experience of adults but the children should also be given the choice to understand it however they see fit. He then says “one whose desires and impulses are not his own, has no character, no more than a steam-engine has a character. If, in addition to being his own, his impulses are strong, and are under the government of a strong will, he has an energetic character” (5, Mill). From this we can see that he is strongly against accepting all social norms without questioning them or making the decisions for oneself. Mill writes that there are dangers to a new society and one of them is that there might be too much of individuality in those societies. With the individuality come the desires and impulses that people have, even though they might not be a bad thing like many people think. We also learn that according to Mill the people with distinguished individualities perceive themselves as more valuable and so does the