On Human Nature Read online

  This reaching for that which is both transcendental and personal engages also with the ethic of pollution and taboo. It animates the distinction between the sacred and the profane. And it gives sense to the ideas of good and evil. The supreme blessing, the forgiveness of the Redeemer, is also a purification, a cleansing of the spirit, and an overcoming of alienation. It is this that we glimpse and reach for in prayer and in those moments when our spirit opens to the sublime. In those moments we accept our being as a gift—it has been bestowed on us, and this bestowal is the primary act of creation. And in the encounter with evil we see the opposite of this gift, the negative force that takes away what has been given and which focuses especially on the person, the soul, the place where the givenness of being can be most clearly revealed and understood and most spectacularly destroyed.

  Those thoughts and experiences represent a kind of deposit in the mind of the moral being—not an explicit theory of the world but a residue of individual existence, which gathers like leaf mold in the forest, feeding the plants that feed it. Religion, seen in this way, is both a product of the moral life and the thing that sustains it. By understanding the world as the gift of a transcendental person, whose real presence is displayed in sacred moments and who cleanses those who pray, we plant our moral thinking in the fertile soil of religious practice. Good and evil, sacred and profane, redemption, purity, and sacrifice all then make sense to us, and we are guided along a path of reconciliation, both to the people around us and to our own destiny as dying things. Even for those who do not consider the dogmas of religion to be literally true, the religious posture, and the rituals that express it, provides another kind of support to the moral life. Religion, on this understanding, is a dedication of one’s being.

  Those thoughts are suggestions only. Rather than burden this short work with my own attempts to explain them, I refer instead to the two great works of art that have attempted to show what redemption means for us, in the world of modern skepticism: Dostoevsky’s Brothers Karamazov and Wagner’s Parsifal. In the wake of these two great aesthetic achievements, it seems to me, the perspective of philosophy is of no great significance.

  1John Rawls, A Theory of Justice (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1971; revised ed., 1999); Nozick, Anarchy, State, and Utopia.

  2David Gauthier, Morals by Agreement (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1986); Loren Lomasky, Persons, Rights, and the Moral Community (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1987); Darwall, The Second-Person Standpoint; Martha Nussbaum, Frontiers of Justice: Disability, Nationality, Species Membership (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2006).

  3Aurel Kolnai, Sexual Ethics: The Meaning and Foundations of Sexual Morality, trans. Francis Dunlop (London: Ashgate, 2005).

  4Examples include Igor Primoratz, Ethics and Sex (London: Routledge, 1999); Richard Posner, Sex and Reason (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1992); Alan Soble, Sex from Plato to Paglia: An Encyclopedia, 2 vols. (Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 2006); and so on.

  5Jean-Paul Sartre, Being and Nothingness, trans. Hazel Barnes (London: Methuen, 1960), p. 424.

  6Roger Scruton, Sexual Desire: A Moral Philosophy of the Erotic (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1986).

  7G.H.W. Hegel, Hegel’s Philosophy of Right, trans. and ed. T. M. Knox (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1952).

  8Edmund Burke, Reflections on the Revolution in France (London, 1790).

  9See René Girard, Violence and the Sacred (1972), trans. Patrick Gregory (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1977).

  10See David Sloan Wilson, Darwin’s Cathedral: Evolution, Religion, and the Nature of Society (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2002).

  11Roger Scruton, Beauty: A Very Short Introduction (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009).

  12Immanuel Kant, Idea for a General History with a Cosmopolitan Purpose (1784), in On History, ed. Lewis White Beck (New York: Bobbs-Merrill, 1964), Thesis 6.

  13Hannah Arendt, Eichmann in Jerusalem (New York: Viking, 1963).

  14See Bettina Stangneth, Eichmann before Jerusalem: The Unexamined Life of a Mass Murderer (London: Bodley Head, 2015).

  15Jean-Paul Sartre, L’Etre et le néant (Paris, 1943), trans. Hazel E. Barnes (London: Methuen, 1957), pp. 393–407.

  16Anne Applebaum, Gulag (London: Penguin, 2010).

  17I have developed this point in my The Soul of the World (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2014).

  18Arthur Schopenhauer, Die Welt als Wille und Vorstellung, book 3, 51, in Sämtliche Werke, ed. Arthur Hübscher (Wiesbaden: Eberhard Brockhaus Verlag, 1940), vol. II, p. 300, writing of tragedy, which concerns the original sin, “die Erbsunde, d.h. die Schuld des Daseins selbst.”

  INDEX OF NAMES

  Adorno, Theodor W., 74n

  Anscombe, Elizabeth, 67, 94n

  Applebaum, Anne, 139n

  Aquinas. See Thomas Aquinas, Saint

  Arendt, Hannah, 136–137

  Aristotle, 30, 99–100, 103, 112

  Armundsen, Ron, 15n

  Arnold, Matthew, 11–12

  Aunger, Robert, 10n

  Austin, J. L., 48, 84n

  Averroës (Ibn Rushd), 48

  Avicenna (Ibn Sīna), 48

  Axelrod, R., 6, 16

  Beethoven, Ludwig van, 19

  Bennett, Jonathan, 44

  Bergson, Henri, 20

  Block, Ned, 33n

  Boethius, 75–76, 81

  Bowlby, John, 2–3

  Boyd, Robert, 43n

  Brentano, Franz, 23, 35

  Broome, John, 94n

  Buber, Martin, 51

  Buckley, Frank, 20

  Buffon, Georges-Louis Leclerc, Comte de, 94

  Burke, Edmund, 126, 127

  Burkhardt, Jacob, 79

  Butler, Joseph, Bishop, 61

  Chisholm, Roderick M., 35n

  Chomsky, Noam, 7, 44

  Churchland, Paul, 39–40

  Cohen, G. A., 15n, 16n

  Confucius, 126

  Conrad, Joseph, 103

  Cronin, Helen, 5n

  Darwall, Stephen, 50–51, 114

  Darwin, Charles, 3–5

  Davidson, Donald, 70n

  Dawkins, Richard, 7n, 9–12, 14, 15n, 18n

  de Waal, Frans, 84

  Dennett, Daniel C., 10, 13, 34–35, 36

  Descartes, René, 33, 56

  Dickens, Charles, 104

  Dilthey, Wilhelm, 22

  Dostoevsky, Fyodor, 144

  Douglas, Mary, 87

  Dutton, Denis, 65

  Dworkin, Ronald, 114

  Eichmann, Adolf, 136, 139

  Eliot, T. S., 19, 128

  Fārābī, al-, 47, 48

  Fichte, Johann Gottlieb, 29, 32, 44, 55

  Fisher, R. A., 5, 44

  Foucault, Michel, 13

  Frankfurt, Harry, 44

  Freud, Sigmund, 2–3, 13, 20, 87, 120

  Gauthier, David, 114

  George, Robert P., iv

  Gertler, Brie, 68n

  Gescinska, Alicja, iv

  Ghazālī, al-, 142

  Giorgione, 76

  Girard, René, 128–129, 130, 131, 133

  Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von, 135

  Goodman, Lenn E., 47n

  Grant, Robert, iv

  Grice, H. P., 44

  Griswold, Charles, 85n

  Hacker, Peter M., 72

  Haidt, Jonathan, 64

  Hamilton, W. D., 6n

  Hare, R. M., 94n

  Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich, 29, 32, 38, 44, 52, 56, 79, 110, 126–127

  Heidegger, Martin, 32

  Hobbes, Thomas, 20

  Homer, 24

  Hume, David, 44n

  Husserl, Edmund, 37, 57

  Hutcheson, Francis, 44n

  Jocasta, 120

  John Paul II, Pope (Karól Wojtyła), 19n

  Kant, Immanuel, 17, 28, 29, 32, 43–44, 50, 55, 57, 71, 74, 75, 76, 93, 101, 102, 103, 109, 116, 118, 121, 124–125, 134n, 140

  Kierkegaard, Søren, 142r />
  Kitcher, Philip, 28n

  Kolnai, Aurel, 117–118

  Korsgaard, Christine, 101n

  Langton, Rae, 74n

  Lauder, George V., 15n

  Legrand, Pierre, 86n

  Lenin, V. I., 97, 98, 139

  Leslie, Alan, 37n

  Lewis, David, 44

  Linden, Eugene, 7n, 21n

  Locke, John, 28, 76

  Lomasky, Loren, 114

  Lorenz, Konrad, 6, 7n, 84

  Lucretia, 62

  MacFarquhar, Larissa, 106n

  Maistre, Joseph, Comte de, 126, 127

  Makkreel, Rudolf, 22n

  Mao Zedong, 97, 98

  Marx, Karl, 13, 74, 97

  Maynard Smith, John, 5, 8n, 16

  Midgley, Mary, 7n, 18n

  Mill, John Stuart, 109

  Miller, Geoffrey, 4, 65

  Milton, John, 24, 48–49

  Munday, Roderick, 86n

  Nagel, Thomas, 32, 64n

  Nietzsche, Friedrich Wilhelm, 26–27, 34, 128, 129, 130

  Novalis (Georg Philipp Friedrich, Freiherr von Hardenberg), 142

  Nozick, Robert, 61, 109, 113, 114

  Nussbaum, Martha, 114

  Oedipus, 86–87, 120

  Orwell, George (Eric Blair), 139

  Parfit, Derek, 77n, 9, 92–95, 97, 104, 105

  Petrarch (Francesco Petrarca), 82

  Pinker, Steven, 4

  Plato, 1, 25, 47, 65, 105, 141

  Plessner, Helmuth, 20, 44

  Posner, Richard, 118n

  Price, G. R., 5

  Primoratz, Igor, 118n

  Rawls, John, 109, 114, 126

  Raz, Joseph, 103n, 114

  Richerson, Peter J., 43n

  Ridley, Matt, Viscount, 6n

  Roth D., 37n

  Rousseau, Jean-Jacques, 127

  Rückert, Friedrich, 73

  Sartre, Jean Paul, 25, 32, 44, 123–124, 138

  Scanlon, Tim, 95, 114

  Schopenhauer, Arthur, 20, 29, 32, 44n, 141

  Schubert, Franz, 73

  Searle, J. R., 71

  Shaftesbury, John Ashley Cooper, third Earl of, 44n

  Shakespeare, William, 89, 136

  Shoemaker, Sydney, 76

  Siedentop, Sir Larry, 79n

  Siger of Brabant, 48

  Singer, Peter, 91, 92, 97, 104–105, 113

  Smith, Adam, 44n, 90

  Smith, Barry, 35n

  Soble, Alan, 118n, 120

  Solzhenitsyn, Aleksander, 139

  Sophocles, 129

  Stalin, Josef, 139

  Stangneth, Bettina, 136–137

  Sterelny, Kim, 8n

  Stove, David, 10n, 14n

  Strawson, Sir Peter, 37n, 51–52, 99

  Szathmáry, Eörs, 8n

  Taylor, Charles, 54n

  Thomas Aquinas, Saint, 28, 30, 48, 76, 81

  Tolstoy, Leo, 95–96

  Tomasello, Michael, 44

  Tye, Michael, 33n

  Valberg, J. J., 67n

  Verdi, Giuseppe, 10

  Wagner, Richard, 120, 144

  Wallace, Alfred Russel, 3–4, 9, 14, 66

  Wiggins, David, 28n

  Wilhelm II, Kaiser, 98

  Williams, Sir Bernard, 87, 88

  Wilson, David Sloan, 132n

  Wilson, E. O., 18n

  Wittgenstein, Ludwig, 33, 38, 52, 68, 72

  Wollheim, Richard, 77n

  Woods, Allen, 94n

  Wynne-Edwards, V. C., 7n

  INDEX OF SUBJECTS

  accountability, 37–38, 42–43, 51ff, 69, 70, 77, 88–89, 91, 98, 110

  addiction, 59

  aesthetic pleasure, 60–61, 65–66

  altruism, 5–8, 16–17, 43–44

  amusement, 19–20

  animal versus person, 17, 19ff, 38–42

  art, 12, 63–66

  aspects, 30–31, 38–39, 46, 76–77

  attachment, 3

  autonomy, 102

  beauty, 115

  biology, 1–25, 30–34, 46–47, 49, 78, 139

  blame, 25, 82–86, 99

  calculus of rights and duties, 107–112

  cardinal virtues, 100

  Cartesian subject, 32–33, 55

  Christianity, 26

  common law, 89–91

  Communist Manifesto, 97

  communitarians, 110–111

  community, 79–80

  consciousness, 29ff

  consequentialism, 91–94, 104–107

  contract, 99, 125

  contractarians, 113–114, 115, 133

  courage, 100–102

  culture, 11–14

  decentering, 71, 100, 102, 104, 111–112

  decision, 69–70

  deontological morality, 91–93

  deserts, 107–112

  desire, 69, 123

  dilemmas, 92, 95–96

  doing good, 104–107

  duties, 107–112

  eliminative materialism, 39–40

  emergence, 30–34, 37, 38ff

  Enlightenment, 76, 89, 126

  erotic love, 1

  evil, 116–117, 133–140

  evolution, 1–6, 8–11, 43–44, 59ff

  evolutionally stable strategy, 6–8, 16, 132

  evolutionary psychology, 22–23, 43–44, 59–61, 63–66, 83, 120, 131–133

  excuses, 84

  explanation, 22–23, 31–32, 45–49, 78

  faith, 45–49, 140–149

  family, 126–128

  fetishism, 74

  first person case, 42ff, 50–55, 56–57, 67–69, 110

  first person privilege, 54, 67–69

  folk psychology, 39–40

  forgiveness, 82–86, 141–142

  Frankfurt school, 74

  freedom, 25ff, 52ff, 53–54, 71, 79–80, 107–112, 116, 139–140

  functional explanation, 15–16, 24–25

  game theory, 5–8, 15, 16, 17

  Geisteswissenschaften, 46

  genealogical explanation, 25–28, 29, 33–34, 35, 128–129, 130

  genetics, 5–13, 22–23, 29, 44

  Good Samaritan, 106–107

  group selection, 7–8

  heteronomy of the will, 102

  honor, 102–103

  human being and person, 30–34, 76–77

  human being as natural kind, 24, 28, 47

  I and You, 50–70, 98ff, 110

  idealism, 56–57, 75

  ideology, 13

  incest, 64, 120, 132

  individual, the, 79–80

  individualism, 80ff

  individuality, 80–82, 124

  intention, 67–68, 69

  intentional pleasures, 60–61

  intentional stance, 36–37

  intentional systems, 34ff

  intentionality, 23, 34–37, 45–46, 58–71

  Jellybism, 104–107

  justice, 107–112, 114–115

  kinds, 45–47, 81–82

  Kinsey report, 119–120

  language, 7–8, 44, 52

  laughter, 19–25

  law, 89–91, 127

  Lebenswelt, 37

  libertarians, 109–110

  memes and memetics, 8–13

  morality, 5–8, 16–17, 18, 25–29, 50–55, 78–144

  natural justice, 89–90

  natural law, 90

  natural rights, 121

  “optimific” principles, 91, 96–97

  over-reaching intentionality, 66–71, 99, 140

  person as a kind, 17, 24, 28–30, 39–43, 45, 107–112, 120

  persona, 75

  personal identity, 75–78

  personality, 38, 43

  perversion, 63–64

  phenomenology, 57, 123

  piety, 125–128

  pleasure, 58–65

  political order, 127

  pollution, 86–88, 117, 119, 131, 142

  pornography, 64, 73–74, 122

  predicting and deciding, 69–70

  private language arg
ument, 33, 53–54

  propositional attitudes, 35–37

  punishment, 27, 83–84, 87, 131

  puritanism, 25

  qualia, 33n

  rape, 62, 64, 119–121

  rationality, 14

  reasons and causes, 31–32, 111

  reasons for action, 50–55, 67–68, 70, 101, 111

  recentering, 71

  reductionism, 38, 48–49

  religion, 12, 18, 47–49, 75, 88, 125–126, 128–130, 132, 140–144

  repentance, 83

  resentment, 26–27

  responsibility, 58, 70, 82–86, 87–88, 100–101

  rights and duties, 107–112, 114–115

  rights and responsibilities, 26–27

  rites of passage, 128

  Roman law, 75

  sacred, the, 116–117, 128–133, 140–144

  scapegoating, 129

  science versus culture, 11–13, 18

  second person standpoint, 50–55, 58, 82

  self and other, 55–58

  self-consciousness, 29–32, 36, 43–44, 45, 53–54, 56

  self-sacrifice, 2, 17

  sex, 1, 62–64, 72–73, 117–122

  sexual morality, 117–122, 123, 124, 132

  sexual selection, 1, 4–5

  sociobiology, 18

  sovereignty of the individual, 89–91, 107–112, 121

  stuffs and things, 81–82

  subject and object, 32–33, 54–55, 56, 57, 63–64, 71–72, 73–74, 110

  subjectivity, 36, 41–42, 135

  substance, 81–82

  taboo, 86–88, 117, 142

  teleology, 14–15

  tragedy, 86–88

  transcendental, the, 140–144

  transcendental freedom, 71, 102

  transcendental subject, 57, 67–69, 73, 100

  Trinity, 75

  trolley problems, 92ff, 96

  truth, 11–13, 47–49

  Verstehen, 22–23, 45–49, 78

  vice, 104

  virtue, 103–104, 111

  virtue ethics, 99–104, 111

  weakness of will, 70n

  Zeigeist, 79