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'.1
For much of the past 500 years, scientists and philosophers have taken it
for granted that human beings are exceptional creatures because of our possession
of reason and consciousness, language and morality. The philosophy of humanism
expressed a desire to place human beings at the centre of philosophical debate,
to laud human abilities and to view human reason as a tool through which to
understand both nature and human nature. It demonstrated a conviction that
humankind could achieve freedom, both from the constraints of nature and from
human tyranny, through the agency of its own efforts.
Humanists viewed science as the greatest expression of human reason, and hence
also as an expression of the exceptional character of human beings. Science
allows us to understand human beings not as special, divine creations but
in materialist terms as part of the natural order. But the very capacity for
such an understanding makes humans exceptional beings, and in a certain sense
outside that natural order. This was the philosophy at the heart of both the
scientific revolution and the Enlightenment.
But no longer do we think this way. We live today in an age that is deeply
pessimistic about the human condition. Whereas the deeply religious Descartes
was happy to see humans as 'in a certain manner equal to God', today in a
supposedly secular age, there seem to be few things we fear more than the
idea of humans playing God.
A century of unparalleled bloodshed and destruction has created a widespread
skepticism about human capacities. Every impression that humans make upon
the world seems for the worse. The attempt to master nature appears to have
led to global warming and species depletion. The attempt to master society,
may feel, led directly to Auschwitz and the gulags. The result has been a
growth of anti-humanism, of despair about human capacities, a view of human
reason and agency as forces for destruction rather than for betterment.
'For the first time since 1750', Michael Ignatieff has observed of the post-Holocaust
world, 'millions of people experience history not running forwards from savagery
to civilisation, but backwards to barbarism.' We no longer believe, that 'material
progress entails or enables moral progress.' We eat well, we drink well, we
live well, but he suggests 'we do not have good dreams'.2
'In a real sense', the late ecologist Murray Bookchin noted, 'we seem to be
afraid of ourselves - of our uniquely human attributes. We seem to be suffering
from a decline in human self-confidence and in our ability to create ethically
meaningful lives that enrich humanity and the non-human world.'3
The retreat from humanism and from the idea of human exceptionalism expresses
itself in a number of, sometimes seemingly contradictory, ways. One is in
the popularity of naturalistic, or mechanistic, views of what it is to be
human, the belief that humans can be understood simply as sophisticated animals
or as sophisticated machines.
Human culture, the argument goes, is part of human nature, and human nature
can be understood through 'a combination of neurophysiology and deep genetic
history', as EO Wilson has put it. Hence all that appears distinctive about
human beings - culture, language, morality, reason - is not in fact that exceptional,
and can be understood in the same way as can all natural phenomena. As John
Tooby and Leda Cosmides, two of the founders of evolutionary psychology, put
it, 'Human minds, human behaviour, human artefacts, and human culture are
all biological phenomena.'4
A second expression of the retreat from exceptionalism are the anxieties about
the ways in which science, and biotechnology in particular, robs us of our
humanity. From cloning to genetic engineering, the new biotechnologies have
given rise to all manner of dystopian visions and have created great apprehension
about the future of our lives as human beings. 'What will become of love and
loss, of the sanctity of human life?', the UK chief Rabbi, Jonathan Sacks,
asked in the wake of the unveiling of the first draft of the human genome
in June 2000. 'If persons are no longer individuals but rather genetic types
that can be replicated at will, what then becomes of our most central values?'
It's an argument echoed by Francis Fukuyama in his latest work, Our Posthuman
Future. Biotechnology, Fukuyama warns, will destroy our basic values and
transform the very character of humanity, propelling us from humans into posthumans.
'What is ultimately at stake with biotechnology', he declares, 'is... the
very grounding of the human moral sense.' We need to prevent any technological
advance that might 'disrupt either the unity or the continuity of human nature,
and thereby the human rights that are based upon it.'5
The arguments of Sacks and Fukuyama may seem a world away from those of Wilson
and Cosmides and Tooby. One side suggests that humans are little more than
sophisticated animals, the other wants to save humanity from being treated
as if we were simply animals. One side suggests that science can tell us everything
about our humanity, the other wishes to protect our humanity from the clutches
of over-eager scientists.
However, both the belief that natural science can tell us everything we need
to know about our humanness, and the belief that science can undermine the
very character of our humanity, draw upon, I believe, a debased vision of
what it means to be human and an exalted view of nature. Both are responses
to the widespread skepticism about human capacities that pervades our age,
expressions of what Murray Bookchin called 'the decline in human self-confidence'.
While one side denies human agency, the other fears it.
I want to argue that - whether expressed through a naturalistic vision of
humanness, or through a fear of the consequences of biotechnology - the retreat
from humanism, and the rejection of human exceptionalism, makes for both bad
science and bad politics. It makes for bad science because the attempt to
understand humans in the same language as the rest of nature ignores an essential
quality of humanness - human subjectivity. And it makes for bad politics because
once we accept that human agency - and human reason - are forces for destruction
rather than betterment, then we lose the only means we possess for human advancement,
whether social, moral or technological.
To make my case I want to look at the relationship between humans and nature,
to explore what makes humans exceptional, and to understand how and why it
that so many today baulk at the idea of human exceptionalism.
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, to borrow a phrase
from Max Weber. 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 self-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 - or believe we
possess - purpose and agency, self-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, to some extent at
least, shape our own fate. We are biological beings, and under the purview
of biological and physical laws. But we are also reflexive, rational, social
beings, able to design ways of breaking the constraints of biological and
physical laws. We are, in other words, both immanent in nature and transcendent
to it.
The very development of the scientific method has exacerbated this paradox
of being human. To study nature scientifically requires us to make a distinction
between a humanity that is a thinking subject and a nature that presents itself
to thought but is itself incapable of thought. When studying 'external' nature
the distinction between the thinking subject and the object of study is easy
to make. But with the study of humans, such a neat division becomes impossible:
human beings are simultaneously the subject that thinks and the object of
that thought. We can understand humans as beings within nature that can be
studied by science. But the very act of studying humans in this fashion takes
them in a sense outside of nature because of the distinction we must make
between an objective nature and a thinking humanity. This is, in philosopher
Kate Soper's words, 'the paradox of humanity's simultaneous immanence and
transcendence'. Nature 'is that which Humanity finds itself within, and to
which in some sense its belongs, and also that from which it seems excluded
in the very moment it reflects upon either its otherness or its belongingness'.6
In other words, our very capacity to reflect upon nature takes us in some
sense outside of nature, for if we could not view nature from the outside
we could not reflect upon it objectively.
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 seven million years or so since the evolutionary lines of humans
and chimpanzees first diverged on either side of Africa's Great Rift Valley,
both chimpanzees and humans have evolved. In comparative terms, however, 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
animals have an evolutionary past. Only humans make history.
Uniquely among organisms, then, human beings are both objects of nature and
subjects that can shape our own fate. Science has expunged conscious and teleology
from the natural world. But consciousness and teleology remain crucial aspects
of the human world. Any mechanistic account of humanness, therefore, has to
account for human teleology in non-teleological terms. Mechanistic thinkers
have risen to this challenge in two ways. One is to deny teleology. The other
is to ignore it.
Some scientists and philosophers argue that conscious and teleology are illusions,
phenomena that natural selection has designed us to believe in, not because
it is true, but because it is useful. As the neuroscientist Colin Blakemore
has put it, when 'we feel ourselves to be in control of an action, that feeling
itself is the product of our brain, whose machinery has been designed, on
the basis of its functional utility, by means of natural selection'. According
to Blakemore, 'To choose a spouse, a job, a religious creed - or even to choose
to rob a bank - is the peak of a causal chain that runs back to the origin
of life and down to the nature of atoms and molecules.'7
We think we are in charge, but in reality there is no self which can take
charge. There is simply the machinery of the brain churning away, thanks to
a chain of causal links that goes back to the Big Bang itself.
A variation on this argument is provided by the psychologist Susan Blackmore
who adopts Richard Dawkins' notion of a meme, a unit of culture that inhabits,
or rather parasitises, our brains. Blackmore suggests that 'Instead of thinking
of our ideas as our own creations, and working for us, we have to think of
them as autonomous selfish memes, working only to get themselves copied.'
Since 'we cannot find either beliefs or the self that believes' by looking
into somebody's head, she argues, so we must conclude that there are no such
things as beliefs or selves, 'only a person arguing, a brain processing the
information, memes being copied or not'.8
In such mechanistic accounts, not just Cartesian dualism but the Cartesian
subject - the active, conscious agent of human action whom Descartes introduced
into modern philosophy - has disappeared.
There are many arguments against this view. But consider just this one. From
an evolutionary point of view, truth is contingent. Darwinian processes are
driven by the need, not to ascertain truth, but to survive and reproduce.
Of course, survival often requires organisms to have correct facts about the
world. A zebra that believed that lions were friendly, or a chimpanzee that
enjoyed the stench of rotting food would not survive for long. But although
natural selection often ensures that an organism possesses the correct facts,
it does not always do so. Indeed, the argument that consciousness and agency
are illusions designed by natural selection relies on the idea that evolution
can select for untruths about the world because such untruths aid survival.
If, then, our cognitive capacities were simply evolved dispositions, there
would be no way of knowing which of these capacities lead to true beliefs
and which to false ones. As the philosopher Thomas Nagel points out, there
would be no basis on which to trust reason itself. To accept the truth of
reasoning, Nagel observes, 'I have to be able to believe... that I follow
the rules of logic because they are correct - not merely because I am biologically
programmed to do so.'9
In other words, if we were simply natural beings like every other natural
being, then science would simply be an evolved way of looking at the world,
not a means to ascertain objective truths. The logic of the argument put forward
by Colin Blakemore and Susan Blackmore undermines our confidence in its own
veracity. For if we are simply sophisticated animals or machines, then we
cannot have any confidence in the claim that we are only sophisticated animals
or machines. We are only able to do science because we are able to transcend
our evolutionary heritage, because we are able to act as subjects, rather
than as objects.
For this and many other reasons, many find implausible the idea that human
agency is just an illusion. They therefore adopt a different approach - accepting,
in principle, the existence of consciousness and agency, but ignoring them
in practice when formulating scientific concepts of human nature. The psychologist
Steven Pinker, for instance, points out that moral reasoning, depends upon
our acknowledgement of ourselves as sentient beings. The concept of sentience
'underlies our certainty that torture is wrong and that disabling a robot
is the destruction of property but disabling a person is murder'. Pinker acknowledges
that, as yet, we have no idea how to explain sentience scientifically. But,
he argues, 'Our incomprehension of sentience does not impede our understanding
of how our mind works.'10
It seems odd to hold that sentience is both central to human thinking and
also irrelevant to our understanding of how the mind works. As the neurologist
Raymond Tallis points out, to construct a theory of the human mind while ignoring
sentience is a bit like 'trying to build a house by starting at the second
floor'. Sentience, Tallis observes, 'is the first, not the last, problem of
psychology. It is not merely the most difficult of the problems of consciousness
or mind; it is also the pivotal one and addressing it cannot be postponed
until one has solved the "easier" problems such as those pertaining
to... intelligence, memory, thinking etc.'11
Consciousness and agency, in other words, are not phenomena tacked on to human
nature; they are at the heart of what it is to be human.