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http://www.bartleby.com/61/37/S0233700.html Self-Esteem: Pride in oneself; self-respect

self-esteem n. One's attitude towards oneself or one's opinion or evaluation of oneself, which may be positive (favourable or high), neutral, or negative (unfavourable or low). Also called self-evaluation. See also ego involvement, positivity bias (1) , self-image self-esteem n." A Dictionary of Psychology. Andrew M. Colman. Oxford University Press, 2006. Oxford Reference Online. Oxford University Press. Portland Community College-Sylvania. 18 October 2007 

The Enlightenment Context Some conspicuous Enlightenment authors insisted that human behavior is motivated by benevolence rather than self-interest, but Voltaire was not alone in claiming both that human beings are motivated primarily by selfish impulses and that human nature deserves to be held in higher esteem than Pascal's pessimism would allow. The Enlightenment shift in attitude toward human nature is sometimes less a shift in psychological description than a shift in context that allows for a positive valuation of traits previously deplored.

For Pascal, self-love represented a radical alienation from God and an incapacity to achieve the more spiritual plane of the love of God and a divinely inspired love of one's fellow creatures. The Enlightenment rejected original sin; more important, it placed great value on human happiness and the social benefits that resulted from human actions. Thus, some Enlightenment writers cared less about whether humans loved their fellow creatures than whether they brought them happiness.

This higher opinion of selfish appetites and desires developed gradually, beginning with Christian moralists such as Pierre Nicole (1625–1695) and Pierre Bayle (1647–1706), who professed Augustinian theological dogma but nonetheless observed that selfish motives could be conducive to an orderly or prosperous society. Judging selfishness to be the mark of moral depravity, they nonetheless could attribute benign worldly consequences to such sinful impulses. A more dramatic version of this paradox was offered by Bernard Mandeville (1670–1733) in his Fable of the Bees: Or, Private Vices, Public Benefits (1714). Mandeville argued that a prosperous society depends precisely on “private vices,” those sins that Christianity had traditionally decried as symptoms of human depravity.

Later writers who valued a happy and prosperous society but discarded the notion that those who selfishly produce such benefits are morally blamable are often associated with the so-called radical Enlightenment. These writers, including Claude-Adrien Helvétius (1715–1771), Paul-Henri Thiry, baron d'Holbach (1723–1789), and Jeremy Bentham (1748–1832), were radical to the degree that they rejected transcendent principles in favor of a wholly natural morality. As in the less radical Voltaire, however, the radicalness of those thinkers resides not in their discarding Pascal's description of human nature but in their placing it in a new context.

Oscar Kenshur "Human Nature" Encyclopedia of the Enlightenment. Ed. Alan Charles Kors. Oxford University Press 2003. Portland Community College-Sylvania. 18 October 2007 