Reason, Descartes believed, 'is the noblest thing we can have because it
makes us in a certain manner equal to God and exempts us from being his subjects'.
For much of the past 500 years, scientists and philosophers took it for granted
that human beings were exceptional creatures because of our possession of
reason and consciousness, language and morality.
This was the philosophy of humanism - a desire to place human beings at the
centre of philosophical debate, to glorify human abilities and to view human
reason as a tool through which to understand nature; a conviction that humankind
could achieve freedom, both from the constraints of nature and the tyranny
of Man, through the agency of its own efforts. It was the philosophy at the
heart of both the scientific revolution and the Enlightenment.
But no longer do we think this way. Today, the idea of humans as exceptional
beings is seen as both scientifically false and politically dangerous. For
most scientists, exceptionalism smacks of mysticism. Their Holy Grail is to
understand humans in the same language as the rest of physical nature - what
we might call a naturalistic view of humanness. Recent advances in evolutionary
biology, neuroscience, genetics, and AI seem to make possible the understanding
of humans as simply as a sophisticated animal or a sophisticated machine.
And politically, there is an increasing tendency to see human hubris as the
root of most of the ills of the world, from global warming and species depletion
to ethnic cleansing. 'We need protection from ourselves', as the biologist
Lynn Margulis has put it.
I want to argue that the retreat from human exceptionalism makes for both
bad science and bad politics. It might seem perverse for someone like me -
rationalist, materialist, atheist - to argue against a naturalistic view.
After all, naturalism has been the key means of expunging mysticism from our
understanding of humanity, of allowing us to talk about humanness in the absence
of God. The trouble is, though, the attempt to understand humans in the same
language as the rest of nature ignores an essential quality of being human
- our subjectivity. Humans simply are not like other animals, and to assume
that we are is irrational.
A paradox of science is that its success in understanding nature has created
problems for its understanding of human nature. The success of science derives
from the way that it has 'disenchanted' the natural world. Whereas the prescientific
world viewed the universe as full of purpose and desire, the scientific revolution
transformed nature into an inert, mindless entity.
At the heart of the scientific methodology is its view of nature, and of natural
organisms, as machines; not because ants or apes are inanimate, or because
they work like watches or TVs, but because, like all machines, they lack consciousness,
foresight and will. Animals are objects of natural forces, not potential subjects
of their own destiny. They act out a drama, not create it.
Humans, however, are not disenchanted creatures. We possess purpose and agency,
consciousness and will, qualities that science has expunged from the rest
of nature. Uniquely among organisms, human beings are both objects of nature
and subjects that can shape our own fate. We are biological beings, and under
the purview of biological and physical laws. But we are also conscious beings
with purpose and agency, traits the possession of which allow us to design
ways of breaking the constraints of biological and physical laws. We are,
in other words, both inside nature and outside of it. We are both immanent
in nature and transcendent to it.
To talk of humans as 'transcendent' is not to ascribe to them spiritual properties.
It is, rather, to recognise that as subjects we have the ability to transform
our selves, our natures, our world, an ability denied to any other physical
being. In the six million years since the human and chimpanzee lines first
diverged on either side of Africa's Great Rift Valley, the behaviour and lifestyles
of chimpanzees have barely changed. Human behaviour and lifestyles have clearly
transformed out of all recognition. Humans have learnt to learn from previous
generations, to improve upon their work, and to establish a momentum to human
life and culture that has taken us from cave art to quantum physics and the
conquest of space. It is this capacity for constant innovation that distinguishes
humans from all other animals.
All non-human animals are constrained by the tools that nature has bequeathed
them through natural selection. They are incapable of striving towards truth;
they simply absorb information, and behave in ways useful for their survival.
The kinds of knowledge they require of the world have been largely preselected
by evolution. No animal is capable of asking questions or generating problems
that are irrelevant to its immediate circumstances or its evolutionarily-designed
needs. When a beaver builds a dam, it doesn't ask itself why it does so, or
whether there is a better way of doing it. When a swallow flies south, it
doesn't wonder why it is hotter in Africa or what would happen if it flew
still further south. Humans do ask themselves these and many other kinds of
questions, questions that have no relevance, indeed make little sense, in
the context of evolved needs and goals. What marks out humans is our capacity
to go beyond our naturally-defined goals - such as the need to find food,
shelter or a mate - and to establish human-created goals.
This transformative quality of being human is why the so-called nature-nurture
debate, the dominant way of understanding what it means to be human, has,
while creating considerable heat, thrown little light on what it means to
be human. The question of whether we are determined by our genes or our environment
is misleading. We are, as many have observed in recent years, shaped by both.
But we are also defined by our ability to transcend both. Unlike any other
creature, humans have developed the capacity to overcome the constraints imposed
both by our genetic and our cultural heritage.
It is not that human beings have floated free of the laws of causation. It
is rather that humans are not simply the passive end result of a chain of
causes, whether natural or environmental. We have developed the capacity actively
to intervene in both nature and culture, to shape both to our will.
This is another way of saying that human actions are motivated by causes distinct
from those which motivate the rest of nature. All events have causes, but
only humans act by reason. A reason is a special kind of cause, one that is
only applicable to subjects; an act determined by reason we generally treat
as an act of free will. Animals are motivated by causes; human behaviours
have both causes and reasons. Causes belong to a physical world; reasons to
a moral one.
Free will, therefore, is not behaviour that is undetermined. A behaviour that
has no cause is not free, it is random. And as John Locke pointed out more
than three centuries ago, if free will is the freedom to act without cause,
then only madmen would be free. Free will takes place within a determined
universe. But it is determined by causes that have no place in the physical
world - it is an act of reason.
Humans are both determined and free because of the peculiar condition of human
beings: as both subject and object, as both in nature and out of it, as both
created by events external to us, and as creators of such events. Humans are
determined because we are objects, part of the natural order. Humans are free
because we are able to become subjects, to order nature and shape events external
to us.
How do humans become subjects? Think of how a child becomes an adult. To begin
with an infant has no control over itself; it is a creature of natural impulse.
At this point it is simply an object, not a subject. As it develops, an infant
learns first to control its gaze, its movements, to learn to crawl and then
to walk, to manipulate objects, to be toilet trained, and eventually to control
its behavioural impulses.
The process by which a child learns to control its natural impulses is also
the process by which its comes to construct its self. The self is not something
that is innate or pre-exists, or something that is to be found in a particular
part of the brain, or the body. Rather it is a description of the capacity
to control oneself. As a child develops into an adult it learns to construct
a self, which is another way of saying it learns to control its impulses.
Key to this process is the acquisition of language. Language helps structure
a child's thoughts, allows it to relate to others, enables it to understand
social conventions and norms, and the distinction between right and wrong,
and rational and irrational behaviour. The process of the creation of the
self is, therefore, also the process of socialisation, of being inducted into
society. It is the process whereby a natural creature is transformed into
a social being, an object transformed into a subject, an animal into a person.
It is also the process whereby one acquires freedom of will. For freedom of
will is expressed precisely through the power of self-control. An infant,
like an animal, has no freedom of will, because it has no self-control. To
become free, to be able to make choices, it has to learn to subjugate its
natural impulses to the needs of reasoned behaviour.
To understand how we are human, therefore, we need to understand how we are
simultaneously object and subject, how we are at the self-same time a physically
determined being and a social being and moral agent. The tools of natural
science, which have been developed for the understanding of inert objects
(animals included), entities without consciousness or subjectivity, are, therefore,
inadequate for fully understanding what it means to be human. Those who continue
to insist that we must understand human nature using the tools of natural
science, because these tools are the best at dismantling the secrets of nature,
are a bit like the drunk who loses his keys in the gutter, but searches for
them under the lamp-post fifty yards up the road because 'that's where the
light is'.
The distinction I am drawing is between a materialist and a mechanistic
view of humanity. A materialist view understands humans beings without resort
to mystical explanations. But it also sees humans as exceptional because humans,
unlike any other beings, possess consciousness and agency. And understanding
human consciousness and agency requires us to understand humans as not just
natural, but also historical and social beings. A mechanistic view, on the
other hand, sees the human beings largely as objects through whom nature (or
culture) acts.
Why have mechanistic views of humanness become fashionable? Because they chime
with the dominant cultural view of what it is to be human. Not just in science
but in politics and culture too we have moved away from viewing humans as
subjects, away from a faith in human-directed change. The barbarous history
of the twentieth century - two World Wars and the Holocaust, gulags and ethnic
cleansing - has left many people disillusioned about what it means to be human.
Every impression that Man makes upon the world, many have come to believe,
is always for the worse. The attempt to master nature seems to have led to
global warming and species depletion. The attempt to master society seems
to paved the way to Auschwitz and the gulags. The result has been a growth
of anti-humanism, of despair about human capacities, a view of human reason
as a force for destruction rather than for betterment. As we have become more
pessimistic about the human condition, as the exceptional status of human
beings has seemed at best self-deluding, at worst dangerously hubristic, so
the idea that humans are just animals or machines, objects rather than subjects,
has appeared both scientifically plausible and culturally acceptable.
The pessimism of contemporary culture has cleared a space for a more naturalistic
vision of humanity, a vision that seeks to deny the special, exceptional qualities
of being human. And, in turn, such a naturalistic vision of humanness reinforces
the pessimism about what is to be human, undermining further faith in reason
as a tool for human betterment.
But whatever calamities human beings have brought upon ourselves and our world,
it is not because we have tried to bring reason to bear on a problem, or tried
to impose greater control upon the world. It is rather because we have acted
irrationally, or ignorantly, or have had an insufficient means of control.
The barbarism of the past century, and the catastrophes of today, are the
products not of the quest for progress, but of the lack of it. It is when
we stop thinking of ourselves as conscious agents, with the capacity rationally
to change the world, and begin to believe that the answers to human problems
lie beyond the human sphere, in God or in Nature, that we unleash the monsters.
That is why the retreat from human exceptionalism makes for both bad science
and bad politics.