The historicity of the human essence is revealed in a number of different
ways. One lies in the way that universal social forms are often the product
of social and historical, not biological, development. The fact that humans
are rational, social beings places certain constraints and creates certain
opportunities that can shape the way we think about the world and organise
our collective lives. Being rational we are able to apprehend the regularities
of the objective world and to draw conclusions from them. Being social creates
certain opportunities common to all societies - the possibility of a division
of labour, for instance - and imposes certain universal restrictions - such
as the need for social order. Being both social and rational means that the
common social goals, opportunities and constraints are often tackled in a
similar fashion in different societies.
In 1945 the anthropologist George Murdoch set out a group of items which he
believed occurred in 'every culture known to history or ethnography'. More
recently Donald Brown has updated this with considerably more comprehensive
list.12
These list of universals have become celebrated and are often cited by sociobiologists
and evolutionary psychologists making the case for the evolved character of
human psychology. What is striking about these lists, however, is how many
of these universals can be understood in social or cultural terms, rather
than necessarily as evolved adaptations.
The apparent universal classification of weather conditions, for instance,
relies on objective regularities in the world, the capacity of humans to apprehend
such regularities and the social need for humans to understand such regularities.
Creation of regimes of cleanliness is crucial given that humans live in communities,
fear the spread of disease and have the rational capacity to design ways of
avoiding this. The practice of using personal names becomes important in a
species in which individuals not only have distinct characters but distinct
duties and responsibilities for which they can be held to account. And so
on. In each case, the criteria for the development of these traits are social
needs and opportunities that are universal. In other words, the universal
existence of these needs and opportunities within human communities means
that it is quite possible for every human culture to have developed such traits
(or to have appropriated them from other cultures) without these having been
designed by natural selection.
A second expression of the historicity of the human essence lies in the way
that human nature is often normative. Salman Rushdie has suggested that if
human nature did not exist, then 'the idea of universals - human rights, moral
principles, international law - would have no legitimacy.'13
This idea has become central to the contemporary science of human nature.
A number of evolutionary psychologists have suggested, for instance, that
revulsion at the practice of slavery is part of human nature because we have
a natural aversion to being humiliated and imprisoned. Francis Fukuyama has
taken this argument to show that liberal capitalism lies at the end of history
because its beliefs and institutions 'are grounded in assumptions about human
nature that are far more realistic than those of their competitors'.14
For most of human history, though, slavery was regarded as natural as individual
freedom is today. Only in the past two hundred years have we begun to view
the practice with revulsion. We have done so partly because of the political
ideas generated by the Enlightenment, partly because of the changing economic
needs of capitalism, and partly because of the social struggles of the enslaved
and the oppressed. Certainly, today we view opposition to slavery as an essential
aspect of our humanity, and see those who advocate slavery as in some way
inhuman - but it's a belief that we have arrived at historically, not naturally.
To understand human values such as the belief in equality we need to explore
not so much human psychology as human history.
A final illustration of the historicity of the human essence lies, paradoxically,
in the universality of great art. Many thinkers from George Steiner to EO
Wilson have suggest that great artists such as Dante, Shakespeare or Beethoven
are appreciated across cultures and over time because their work taps into
the universal features of human nature. In his book, The Blank Slate,
Steven Pinker argues that art is 'in our genes', because nature endows us
with an innate aesthetic sense. Hence Shakespeare is appreciated in 21st century
Japan as much as it was in 17th century England. Modernism, on the other hand,
has been an aesthetic failure, Pinker suggests, because it developed out of
what Pinker calls the 'militant denial of human nature'.15
This is no place to enter here into a discussion about the merits - or otherwise
- of Pinker's understanding of modernism. But I do want to suggest that his
is a misunderstanding of Shakespeare's genius. Shakespeare did not simply
articulate universal themes of love, lust and power; he also helped fashion
a new vision of what it is to be human. Shakespeare's characters speak to
us in an entirely different way because, unlike previous literary figures,
they possess a self-consciousness as we possess self-consciousness. As the
American critic Harold Bloom puts it, 'Insofar as we ourselves value, and
deplore, our own personalities, we are the heirs of Falstaff and Hamlet, and
of all the persons who throng Shakespeare's theater of what might be called
the colors of the spirit'.16
Shakespeare was not alone in developing a new language through which to understand
our emotions and feelings. The kind of sensibility that Shakespeare brought
to the stage, his near-contemporaries Rembrandt and Vermeer worked into a
canvas. Rembrandt is regarded as the first, perhaps the greatest, of all self-portraitist
because when we view his paintings we come face to face, for the first time
in history, with a person, a self. It is impossible to look at his self-portraits,
especially of old age, and not see Rembrandt himself. In a similar way, Vermeer's
paintings reveals the new eyes through which painters now viewed their subjects
as persons.
What we are witnessing in Shakespeare, Rembrandt, Vermeer, and countless others,
are the beginnings of the modern idea of subjectivity, of the individual as
a rational agent, and of the marking out of the private sphere as we conceive
of it today. It was in this period that the idea of the 'inner man' began
to take shape, an idea that, most importantly, was given philosophical shape
through Descartes' concept of the thinking subject. When Descartes suggested
that cogito ergo sum he helped create the idea of 'I' in a modern sense.
The motor for these changes in self-conception lay in particular social and
economic developments in early modern Europe - the spread of market relations,
the creation of a merchant class, the belief that wealth and privilege was
the product of an individual's activities, not simply a divine gift or the
result of one's social status. The consequences was to establish a notion
of self and of personality that today we take to be natural because we cannot
imagine any other way of thinking about such concepts.
Human emotions are the product of our evolutionary heritage. But the self
that possesses those emotions has been forged in the furnace of history. That
is why Shakespeare's work is paradoxically both universal and contingent.
It is universal because today, whether we live in Britain or in Japan, we
are able to recognise in his characters the workings of our own self. It is
contingent because this concept of the self was not given by nature but made
in history.
Human nature, then, cannot simply be understood as a natural phenomenon because
it is also historically constituted. And this historicity of human nature
establishes limits to naturalistic explanations of what it is to be human.
Someone might say, 'Hold on, does not a scientific view of the world require
a naturalistic philosophy? In questioning naturalism, are we not in danger
of invoking supernatural or divine explanations of how the world operates,
opening the way to, say, Creationism and the like?'
The answer to this depends upon the definition of naturalism, or rather upon
the redefinition that has taken place in recent decades. Originally, as the
concept developed through the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, 'naturalism'
meant the ability to explain all events and phenomena without recourse to
the supernatural and the divine. It came to be understood as a liberation
from the dogmas of religion and the conservative social order for which they
served as an ideology, as well as a declaration of independence for scientific
inquiry into both the nature of the world and human nature. In this sense
I consider myself a naturalist.
In recent decades, though, there has been redefinition of naturalism which
is now widely taken to mean not simply the rejection of supernatural accounts
but also the acceptance of the idea that the explanations of natural science
suffice to explain all phenomena, not just the phenomena of nature; in other
words that mental and social phenomena can be reduced to the physical. Naturalism
has been reformulated as an all-embracing physicalism. For a contemporary
naturalist the only conceptual system in terms of which the world and its
processes can be reliably characterised is that of the physical sciences of
nature. In contemporary naturalism, as Frederick Olafson has put it, 'The
world and nature are one and the same, and everything in them is of the same
ontological type.'17
Thus EO Wilson suggests that 'sociology and other social sciences, as well
as the humanities, are the last branches of biology'. And Richard Dawkins
believes that 'Science is the only way to understand the real world.'18
It's a view, I believe, that confuses the physical world with the 'real' world.
For, as Mary Midgley has pointed out, 'Toothache is as real as teeth' and
'debt is as real as the house that was bought with it.'19
The social and the mental are as real as the natural. But the social and the
mental cannot be understood as if they were simply natural.
The irony of such naturalism is that, while its starting point is a rejection
of Cartesian dualism, its inability to make sense of agency leads it back
into the Cartesian swamp. 'We are built as gene machines', Richard Dawkins
wrote in The Selfish Gene, but we also possess 'the power to turn against
our creators.' And according to Steven Pinker he is 'by Darwinian standards...
a horrible mistake'. Why? Because he has chosen to remain childless. 'I am
happy to be that way', he adds, 'and if my genes don't like it they can go
and jump in the lake.'20
For thinkers like Dawkins and Pinker, human values and human nature are not
rooted in nature but are non-natural creations.
But if we are built as gene machines how do we possess the power 'to turn
against our creators', or to tell our genes to 'go jump in the lake'? Presumably
such a capacity must itself be an evolved trait. But how could such a trait,
which by definition reduces biological fitness to zero, survive? If a horse
or a chimp told its genes to go take a jump, it would not survive very long
in evolutionary terms. So how is it possible for humans to act like this,
if we are simply natural creatures?
Moreover, human values, presumably, do not float down from the sky, but emerge
out of human thought and behaviour. How then do they originate if not through
'natural selection and neurophysiology' which Pinker and Dawkins hold to be
the basis of all other behaviours? Pinker explains it like this:
The mechanistic stance allows us to understand what makes us tick and how we fit into the physical universe. When those discussions wind down for the day, we go back to talking about each other as free and dignified human beings.21
But freedom and dignity seem here to have no relationship to the physical
world, and hence to human nature. They seem to float free in a universe of
their own. We have jumped headlong, in other words, back into the Cartesian
swamp where the physical is unconnected to the moral world. As Frans de Waal
has said of such arguments, 'These authors want to have it both ways: human
behaviour is an evolutionary product except when it is hard to explain.'22
De Waal's own solution is to see morality as natural, in the same way as is
culture. The trouble with this argument, however, is the same as with culture:
it ignores the dual character of being human. Morality in human life is based
on our existence as subjects - that is, as moral agents capable of taking
responsibility for our actions and who, through history, can develop our moral
sensibilities. What we might call morality in the non-human world describes
behaviours by beings that are objects - beings that do not possess agency,
cannot take responsibility, and for whom the notion of moral progress is inapplicable.
Once you fail to make such a distinction then you are forced to accept, as
Colin Blakemore does, that 'moral responsibility has no real meaning but it's
a fiction we've created because otherwise society could not work.'23
If, on the other hand, one believes that moral responsibility and political
agency are more than fictions, then one has to take seriously the existence
of humans as subjects.
What all this reveals is that the tension between scientific naturalism and
human exceptionalism remains unresolved. It seems crucial to think of humans
as conscious agents capable of rational thought and collective action if science
itself is to advance. Yet humanism appears to be an obstacle to the realisation
of a fully materialist science of Man. By making humans into conscious agents
we seem to separate them from the rest of nature, and hence suggest that the
language of natural science cannot fully encompass our humanness.
How this tension plays itself out at any particular moment depends not just
on the arguments of science, but also on wider cultural views of Man. What
underlies contemporary naturalism - the stress on human continuities with
the natural world at the expense of the discontinuities - are not simply scientific
developments (though there have been tremendous advances in recent years in
evolutionary biology, genetics, neuroscience, psychology, artificial intelligence,
etc) but also the cultural pessimism that infects our age. We live in an age
that is deeply pessimistic about the human condition. 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, many feel, led directly to Auschwitz
and the gulags. We no longer believe, as Michael Ignatieff has observed, that
'material progress entails or enables moral progress'. We eat well, we drink
well, we live well 'but we do not have good dreams'. The Holocaust 'remains
a ghost at our feast'.24
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.
Half a millennia ago, Descartes viewed reason as 'the noblest thing we can
have because it makes us in a certain way equal to God and exempts us from
beings his subject'. Today, many view human reason as a tool for destruction
rather than betterment. 'Progress and mass murder run in tandem', John Gray
writes in his provocative new book, Straw Dogs. 'As hope for a better
world has grown, so has mass murder.' Gray, Professor of Modern European Thought
at the London School of Economics, rejects the idea that human consciousness
and agency have any value, or indeed are any more than absurd illusions. 'The
freest human being', he suggests, 'is not one who acts on reasons he has chosen
for himself, but one who never has to choose. Such a human being has the perfect
freedom of a wild animal - or a machine.' '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.'25
As we have become more pessimistic about the human condition, as the exceptional
status of human beings has seemed at best mere self-delusion, at worst dangerously
hubristic, so the idea that humans are just beasts (literally and metaphorically)
has appeared both scientifically plausible and culturally acceptable.
The history of the twentieth century, the biological anthropologist Rob Foley
argues, has transformed scientists' vision of humanity, leading to 'a loss
of confidence in the extent to which humans could be said to be on a pedestal
above the swamp of animal brutishness':
The camps of Dachau and Belsen, the millions killed in religious wars, the extent of poverty, famine and disease, and the almost boundless capacity of humans to do damage to each other at national and personal levels have, in the twentieth century, rather dented human self-esteem.26
The Victorians believed that humans were closer to the angels than to the
apes. During the course of the twentieth century, however, Foley notes, 'apes
have become more angelic' while humans have become 'more apish'. 'Where it
was originally thought that humans were the advanced and progressive form
of life and other animals the more primitive', he concludes, 'now it may be
argued that the animal within us is our noble side, and humanity or civilisation
the blacker side - a complete reversal of the original Victorian image'.
The pessimism of contemporary culture, in other words, has cleared a space
for a more naturalistic vision of humanity, a vision that seeks to erase the
distinctions between humanity and nature and to deny the exceptional qualities
of being human.
This retreat from humanism, and the rejection of human exceptionalism, makes,
I believe, 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 agency. 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.
The tension between scientific naturalism and human exceptionalism is not
an embarrassment that needs to be swept away, but an important way of understanding
what it is to be human. We will, I believe, develop in time a conceptual framework
that allows us to mediate the two. In the meantime, we should recognise the
tension as a reflection of the dual character of being human, as beings both
in and out of nature, as both objects and as subjects.