The seven conflicts of man?

Question

When I was in high school, I remember reading something in english class regarding the seven conflicts of humanity. They included man vs. himself, man vs. nature and I can't remember the rest.

Can anyone tell me the other conflicts of man and where I can obtain the literature?

Answer 1

http://everything2.com/index.pl?node_id=1435775

This should answer your question. I studied the same concepts while i was in school and this article actually answers and gives you a description of each.

Answer 2

Actually, what you are describing was an attempt to describe the basic kinds of plots that occur in stories.

Arguably it is somewhat arbitrary... there's no reason why you have to simplify to these exact seven. As one article points out (link 1), if you wanted to you could boil it down to just one plot: CONFLICT! Likewise, I can think of some stories that don't really have appreciable amounts of conflicts... they end up being a different kind of story.

But since you asked, here they are:

- man v self - in some ways the simplest and in others the most complex. The character is trying to improve or better himself as the main struggle.

- man v nature - survival away from civilization or against an overwhelming manifestation of nature (arguably many Titanic stories are an example of this).

- man v man - a struggle on any of the variety of ways people compete with each other, from two kids running a lemonade stands on the same corner to two nations warring for a hundred years.

- man v environment - here the enemy is not man or nature specifically, but a generalized construct of many elements. These include stories about 'fighting the system', 'changing your way of life', and so on.

- man v supernatural - ghosts, magic, and anything else that is beyond understanding and explanation (as opposed to nature, environment, man, etc, etc).

- man v god - arguably the ultimate conflict, though this isn't necessarily punching a god in the snoot... it may also include trying to conform to the will of the Divine as well.

- man v machine - the newest addition involves trying to outdo the products of man's ingenuity either for his own good (John Henry is a classic example) or because those things have turned bad (like the thousand versions of the Frankenstain story).

As you can see, there's easily a substantial amount of overlap here. Some would just lump gods in with the supernatural. And is a machine-run society gone bad a man v environment or man v machine? Ultimately these categories just provide different ways to look at and pick out some of the things that go on in stories. Make your own set that works best for you!

Hope that helps!

Answer 3

Man vs himself
Man vs man
Man vs nature

I think that sums it up. How can there be seven? I'll try to make up some more...
Man vs machine? (Sci-fi movies)
Man vs God?
I can't think of a seventh because everything else would fall under one of the others. Unless they split nature into man vs animal & man vs the elements/environment/nature.

It's been a long time since High School English for me! :)

Answer 4

Man vs. Nature
Man versus nature is one of the very first struggles faced. It is especially prominent in an uncivilized world. In modern times, this theme is primarily seen when civilized man is put into a less civilized setting - Tarzan, Robinson Crusoe, The Call Of The Wild and Moby **** would all be excellent examples of this battle.

Man vs. Man
Man versus man epitomizes the daily troubles we have with others. Although plenty of books have had more resourceful and intriguing plotlines, books driven by this conflict primarily revolve around resolution via violence or defeat. Some good literature that falls under this genre includes Shane, Othello, and Les Miserables.

Man vs. Environment
After man has conquered nature (through civilization and order) and has conquered other men (or, better still, has learned to get along with him), he now must succeed in his new environment. Many times your environment is stacked against you: the stories of Dickens - Oliver Twist or David Copperfield, for example - often show the dangers inherent in one's environment. On the opposite end of the spectrum, we see the jaded cynicism of Alan Ball's haunting American Beauty as another man whose environment has seemingly failed him. Often this conflict is seen vividly in the oppression of minorities - Ralph Ellison's The Invisible Man and Kate Chopin's The Awakening both have protagonists struggling against environments specifically and explicitly set up to restrain and dominate them.

Man vs. God
Once man has conquered the external and physical elements of his world, he turns to the spiritual side. Frequently in modern literature this struggle has been transmogrified into a man vs. self conflict - stories such as Hermann Hesse's Siddhartha and the classic Zen And The Art Of Motorcycle Maintenance rely on the internal battle of spirituality. For more overt battles with the heavens, see Homer's The Odyssey or the Book of Job in The Bible.

Man vs. Supernatural
Although God is by far the most important supernatural being in terms of dealing with the day to day doings of mankind, occasionally lesser powers come into play as combatants to the success of man. Sometimes they are a direct antagonist, as in H.G. Wells' War Of The Worlds and Washington Irving's The Legend Of Sleepy Hollow. Often instead the supernatural in turn act as a catalyst for other conflict - William Peter Blatty's The Exorcist causes Father Mike to question himself, and Edgar Allan Poe's The Tell-Tale Heart uses the spectral beating of a dead man's heart to illustrate a murderer's descent into madness.

Man vs. Self
Having now conquered all things that man cannot directly control - nature, God, other men, his environment, and the supernatural - he now finds that he must not be in conflict with himself in order to attain happiness. Sometimes these conflicts can be desperately dark and painful - Requiem For A Dream's sordid display of addiction and Hamlet's suicidal thoughts over the anguish of his mother's betrayal and father's death are eerie in that they touch close to home about the suffering of life. Other books which center on this conflict include Salinger's The Catcher In The Rye, Christopher Marlowe's Faust, Virginia Woolf's The Voyage Out, Wharton's Ethan Frome and John Updike's Rabbit, Run.

Man vs. Machine
For some unseemly reason, once man has conquered the things he cannot control, and has mastered his own self, he is still unsatisfied. His stasis is immediately dropped so that he may invent new things with which he can conflict. One can only wonder if man is doomed to conflict by its very recidivism, or if in some sad masochistic existentialism, the reason we spend so much time analyzing and writing about (and, in this case, creating) our conflicts is that to be is to suffer. As the wise Buddha said, "All is suffering." Still, it seems almost maddening to think that we were not content with the struggles listed before, but have since added machines to our list. The battle with the machines usually arises out of a dystopia that occurs as appearance and reality are blurred. Of course, the first real exploration of this conflict lay in a novel based on the first invention of ourselves - Mary Shelley's Frankenstein. Some other excellent pieces on this include Arthur C. Clarke's 2001: A Space Odyssey, Philip K. ****'s Man, Android, and Machine, and Kokaku Kidoutai's 1995 film Ghost In The Shell.