The State of Nature Is Not the Best Way to Understand Human Nature

 In her work “Standpoint Epistemology as Ideology Critique,” Briana Toole emphasizes the value marginalized standpoints offer in criticizing society. While she draws on Marx, her account differs from Marx and other accounts of human nature we have read thus far in that it does not rely on an inaccurate account of history.

Marx, Locke, and Hobbes all construct elaborate tales of how man came out of the state of nature into modern society. They all believe their accounts to be empirically true. The problem for each of them is that they have no way of proving that their respective accounts are correct, rendering their accounts normative and unverifiable. They manufacture an unreliable tale to explain modern problems. As Rousseau points out, all accounts of history that depict man coming out of nature in a major, quick event are inaccurate. In reality, the departure from the state of nature was an eons long process of evolution.

Standpoint epistemology looks to modern marginalized groups to understand modern power structures. By doing so, it establishes that modern humans can understand human nature by observing their own society, and they do not need to rely on inaccurate history. This grounds the conversation in how human nature exists today, not how it may have existed thousands of years ago. 

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