Few people would deny that humans are animals, evolved beings with evolved
bodies and evolved minds. Equally, few would deny that humans are in some
fashion distinct from other animals. In part, at least, the debate about what
science can or cannot tell us about human nature is a debate about how we
should understand the relationship between continuity and distinctiveness,
and about whether we can explain what is distinctive about humans in the same
terms as we explain the continuity of humans with the rest of the natural
world - in other words, can the distinctive aspects of being human be explained
in naturalistic terms? Those are the two questions I want to consider here.
In recent decades there has been a conceptual shift in the way we approach
these two questions. There has been an increasing tendency to deny the exceptional
character of being human and to view humans as little more than sophisticated
animals - in other words to stress the continuities at the expense of the
discontinuities. Driving this shift have been both scientific and political
arguments. Let me deal with the scientific arguments first; I will return
to the political issues later.
For many natural scientists, any acknowledgement of human exceptionalism smacks
of mysticism. The primatologist Frans de Waal, for instance, suggests that
the traditional distinction between nature and culture is one more expression
of 'outdated Western dualism'. Natural selection, he argues, 'has produced
our species, including our cultural abilities. Culture is part of human nature.'1
And since human nature can be understood through 'a combination of neurophysiology
and deep genetic history', as EO Wilson has put it, so all that appears distinctive
about human beings - language, morality, reason, culture itself - is not in
fact that exceptional, and can be understood in the same way as can all natural
phenomena.
The naturalistic viewpoint, the biological anthropologist Rob Foley suggests,
'turns every large philosophical and metaphysical question into what are often
straightforward and even boring technical ones'. For example, Darwinism turns
the question 'Where do humans come from?' into a specific discussion about
the time and the place where humans evolved. Similarly, Darwinists deal with
the question 'What is unique about humans?' by comparing human anatomy, physiology
and behaviour with that of non-human animals. 'Human origins and ultimately
human nature', Foley insists, 'are not philosophical questions.'2
Yet Foley himself concedes that matters are not so simple. Darwinists cannot
simply ignore wider philosophical issues when they consider human evolution.
For instance, Foley observes that 'the question "When did we become human?"...
may appear a straightforward question about the fossil record.' In practice,
however, the answer 'turns out to hinge not just on the technicalities of
dating fossils, but on the criteria by which humanity is defined... Is it
language, culture, bipedalism, intelligence, tool-making, or any other number
of characteristics?'3 And, as even a cursory glance at the
history of debates about human evolution reveals, these criteria are often
shaped by wider social influences.
There is, I think, a more profound problem, too. It is not simply that the
data of science require an interpretative framework. The very character of
natural science, I believe, constrains what it can tell us about what it is
to be human.
A paradox of natural 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
Max Weber's phrase. 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 and will.
Humans, however, are not disenchanted creatures. We possess - or, at least,
we 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, who can design ways of breaking the constraints of biological and
physical laws. We are, in other words, both immanent in nature and, in a certain
manner, 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 certain sense outside of nature because of the distinction we must
make between an objective nature and a thinking humanity.
This is, in 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 it belongs, and also that from which it seems excluded
in the very moment it reflects upon either its otherness or its belongingness'.4
Our very capacity to reflect upon nature, then, 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.
Humans, in other words, have a 'dual character', as both object and subject.
And this dual character necessarily shapes the debate about continuities and
discontinuities between the human and non-human world. Over the centuries
many thinkers have pointed to some specific quality - culture, reason, tool-use,
language, morality - as that which makes humans distinct. Others, especially
in the wake of Darwin, have argued that each of these qualities can also be
found in non-human animals: that many animals use tools, act according to
reason, have the capacity for language, act morally and possess culture.
I don't want to enter this debate. But I do want to suggest that the meaning
of all these qualities is different for humans than it is for non-humans,
because only humans exist as subjects. For humans, such phenomena cannot be
understood simply from a naturalistic viewpoint.
Take for instance culture. Frans de Waal defines culture as 'knowledge and
habits [that] are acquired from others'. It explains why 'two groups of the
same species may behave differently'.5 Under this - very
reasonable - definition many species of animals can be viewed as cultured.
Humans, however, do not simply acquire habits from others. We also constantly
innovate, transforming ourselves, individually and collectively, in the process.
There is a fundamental difference between a process by which certain chimpanzees
have learnt to crack open palm-nuts using two stones as 'hammer' and 'anvil',
and a process through which humans have engineered the industrial revolution,
unravelled the secrets of their own genome and developed the concept of universal
rights.
Many animals may well be cultural creatures under a naturalistic definition.
But humans are entirely different sorts of cultural beings. 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, chimpanzees have evolved, but,
in comparative terms, their behaviour and lifestyles 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. All animals have an evolutionary past.
Only humans make history.
Science has expunged consciousness and teleology from the natural world. But
consciousness and teleology remain crucial aspects of the human world. Any
naturalistic account of humanness, therefore, has to account for human consciousness
and teleology in non-teleological terms.
One approach has been to argue that consciousness and teleology are illusions,
phenomena that natural selection has designed us to believe in, not because
they are true, but because they are 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.'6
We think we are in charge, but in reality there is no self that 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'.7 In such naturalistic
arguments not just Cartesian dualism but the Cartesian subject - the active,
conscious agent of human action whom Descartes introduced into modern philosophy
- has disappeared.
The problem with arguments such as these is that, by their own criteria, they
provide us with no reason for believing in them. 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. Even defenders of the evolutionary hypothesis recognise
this problem. The late Robert Nozick, for instance, suggested that 'Reason
tells us about reality because reality shapes reason, selecting for seems
"evident".' But, he acknowledged, if this is the case, then the
evolutionary explanation of reason itself may be suspect:
The evolutionary explanation itself is something we arrive at, in part by the use of reason to support evolutionary theory in general and also this particular application of it. Hence it does not provide a reason-independent justification of reason, and although it grounds reason in facts independent of reason, this grounding is not accepted by us independently of reason.8
Evolutionary theory provides an explanation of, but not a justification for, reason. Although it grounds reason in certain evolutionary facts, this is causal grounding only. These facts are not supposed to provide us with grounds for accepting the validity or reliability of reason. But, as Thomas Nagel points out, without a justification for reason, we have no basis on which to accept the evolutionary hypothesis as an explanation for it:
Unless it is coupled with an independent basis for confidence in reason, the evolutionary hypothesis is threatening rather than reassuring... I have to be able to believe that the evolutionary explanation is consistent with the proposition that I follow the rules of logic because they are correct - not merely because I am biologically programmed to do so. But to believe that, I have to be justified independently in believing that they are correct. And this cannot be merely on the basis of my contingent psychological disposition, together with the hypothesis that it is the product of natural selection.9
What this means, Nagel point out, is that 'the evolutionary hypothesis is
acceptable only if reason does not need its support... One cannot embed all
one's reasoning in a psychological theory, including the reasonings that have
led to that psychological theory.' The epistemological buck, as Nagel puts
it, must stop somewhere.
The logic of the kind of argument put forward by Colin Blakemore, in other
words, 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 possess the capacity to transcend our evolutionary
heritage, because we exist as subjects, rather than simply as objects.
For this and many other reasons, many find implausible the notion that human
agency is just an illusion. They therefore adopt a different approach –
accepting, in principle, the existence of self-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. By sentience
Pinker appears to mean our existence as moral beings with self-consciousness
and agency. The concept of sentience, Pinker observes, '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
self-consciousness is a bit like 'trying to build a house by starting at the
second floor'. Self-consciousness, 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 "cognitive functions" like intelligence,
memory, thinking etc.'11 Consciousness and agency, in other
words, are not phenomena tacked onto human nature; they are at the heart of
what it is to be human.
The relationship between humans as physically determined beings, and humans
as conscious agents - between humans as objects and humans as subjects - is
clearly one of the most difficult problems for scientists and philosophers.
While analytically we can talk of humans either as subjects or as objects,
in reality humans are simultaneously both subject and object. We have at present
no conceptual framework within which to consider such an ontological peculiarity.
But denying one or other aspects of our humanness is not a way of solving
the conundrum. Those who insist that humans can be understood in purely naturalistic
terms are in practice forced to give up on the attempt to understand humans
as subjective beings, and compelled to view us simply as objects.
Another way of putting this is that human nature is not simply natural. We
often lose sight of this because of the ambiguity of the concept of human
nature. On the one hand, human nature means that which expresses the essence
of being human, what Darwinists call 'species-typical' behaviour. On the other,
it means that which is constituted by nature; in Darwinian terms, that which
is the product of natural selection.
In non-human animals the two meanings are synonymous. What dogs and bats or
sharks typically do as a species, they do because of natural selection. But
this is not true of humans. The human essence - what we consider to be the
common properties of our humanity - is shaped as much by our history as by
our biology.
he 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.'20 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.'21
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.22
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.'23
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.'24
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'.25 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'.26 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.'27 '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.'28
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.29
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'.30
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.
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30. ibid
This paper was presented to the Seminar i Vitenskapsteori, University of Oslo,
28 August 2002