On Human Nature Page 4

  Personality, as I have described it, is an adaptive trait, and all those studies that argue for a cultural input into the evolutionary process can be seen as recognizing this truth.49 A creature with personality has ways of calling on the help and cooperation of others, ways of influencing them, ways of learning from and teaching them, which are maximally responsive to changes in external circumstances and internal goals. If, by incremental steps, a set of genes can make the “transition from quantity to quality” that has personality as its end point, it has scored an enormous evolutionary advantage. It now has fighting for it, in the sunlit world of rational agency, a knight in armor who has his own compelling reasons for advancing the cause of friends, family, and offspring. He does not need to rely on the strategies implanted in his genes in order to be motivated toward altruism, forgiveness, and the pursuit of virtue: if Kant is right, the motive toward these things is implicit in the very fact of self-consciousness.50

  Taking a sober look at the many attempts to describe some part of what is distinctive of the human condition—the use of language (Chomsky, Bennett), second-order desires (Frankfurt), second-order intentions (Grice), convention (Lewis), freedom (Kant, Sartre), self-consciousness (Kant, Fichte, Hegel), laughing and crying (Plessner), the capacity for cultural learning (Tomasello)—you will surely be persuaded that each is tracing some part of a single holistic accomplishment.51 Now there is nothing in the theory of evolution, either in its original Darwinian form or in the form of Fisherian genetics, that forbids the jump from one mode of explanation and understanding to another. To believe that incremental change is incompatible with radical divides is precisely to misunderstand what Hegel meant by the transition from quantity to quality. There are no intermediate stages between the conscious animal and the self-conscious animal, anymore than there are intermediate stages between patterns in which you cannot see a face and patterns in which you can. Once arrived on the scene, however, the self-conscious creature has an adaptation that will cause it to populate the earth and bend it to its purposes. And, as we know all too well, not all those purposes will be adaptive.

  VERSTEHEN AND FAITH

  If we now turn back to the question of human nature, we find ourselves equipped to say something about the kind to which we belong. We are the kind of thing that relates to members of its kind through interpersonal attitudes and through the self-predication of its own mental states. Now the intentional states of a creature reflect its conceptual repertoire. To understand your emotions I must know how you conceptualize the world. I cannot simply describe your behavior as though it were a response to the-world-as-science-would-describe-it. There are concepts that direct our mental states but which can play no role in an explanatory theory, because they divide the world into the wrong kinds of kind—concepts such as those of ornament, melody, duty, freedom. The concept of the person is such a concept, which does not mean that there are no persons but, rather, that a scientific theory of persons will classify them with other things—for example, with apes or mammals—and will not be a scientific theory of every kind of person. (For example, it will not be a theory of corporate persons, of angels, or of God.) Hence the kind to which we belong is defined through a concept that does not feature in the science of human biology. That science sees us as objects rather than subjects, and its descriptions of our responses are not descriptions of what we feel. The study of our kind is the business of the Geisteswissenschaften, which are not sciences at all but “humanities”—in other words, exercises in Verstehen, which is the kind of understanding exhibited in my account of laughter.

  I have argued that, while we human beings belong to a kind, that kind cannot be characterized merely in biological terms but, rather, only in terms that make essential reference to the web of interpersonal reactions. These reactions bind us to each other and also reach out to (even if they may not connect with) persons who are not of this world and not of the flesh. This thought may produce metaphysical qualms in the reader. After all, how can I be a member of a species while belonging to a kind that is defined not in terms of its biological constitution but in terms of its psychosocial capacities? It is helpful here to turn back to the case of the picture. A picture is a surface that presents to the normal educated eye an aspect of a thing depicted. That is the kind to which pictures belong, and we know that members of this kind include an enormous variety of objects: canvases, sheets of paper, computer screens, holographs, and so on. The behavioral complexity required to exemplify interpersonal responses, to entertain “I”-thoughts, and to hold oneself and others accountable for changes in the world is something that we witness only in members of a particular natural kind—the kind Homo sapiens sapiens. But could we not envisage other beings, members of some other species or of no biological species at all, who exhibit the same complexity and are able to engage with us, I to I? If so, they belong with us in the order of things, and there is a kind that includes us both.

  Religious people, by holding onto their faith, hold onto that kind of deep, but metaphysically unsettling, truth about the human condition. They have no difficulty in understanding that human beings are distinguished from other animals by their freedom, self-consciousness, and responsibility. And they have a ready supply of stories and doctrines that make sense of those truths. But those truths would be truths even without religion, and it is one task of philosophy in our time to show this. On the other hand, philosophical reasoning often filters through to the lives of ordinary mortals through the channels afforded by doctrine, and one of the problems for the religious believer is that of understanding the precise relation between the conclusions of philosophy and the premises of faith.

  The problem here is not a new one. Plato had an inkling of it, and it is Plato’s influence that can be discerned in al-Fārābī when he claims that the truths furnished to the intellect by philosophy are made available to the imagination by religious faith.52 This thought, developed by Avicenna and Averroës, entered the consciousness of medieval Europe. In the writings of Averroës it borders on the heresy of “double truth”: the heresy of believing that reason may justify one thing, and faith, another and incompatible thing. This idea, ascribed to the troublemaker Siger of Brabant, called forth a round condemnation from Aquinas. And it is one that no modern philosopher is likely to find congenial. The point made by al-Fārābī is the more measured one, that truths discoverable to reason may also be revealed—but in another, more imagistic, more metaphorical form—to the eye of faith. Those incapable of reasoning their way to the intricate truths of theology may nevertheless grasp them imaginatively in ritual and prayer, living by a form of knowledge that they lack the intellect to translate into rational arguments.

  The work of philosophy that I have sketched stands to be completed by a work of the imagination. For the person with religious faith this work has already been accomplished; for skeptics, however, it must begin anew. The philosophical truth that our kind is not a biological category is swept out of view by scientistic “clairantism” (to use J. L. Austin’s felicitous word). It can be conjured back by stories, images, and evocations, in something like the way that Milton conjured the truth of our condition from the raw materials of Genesis. Milton’s allegory is not just a portrait of our kind; it is an invitation to kindness. It shows us what we are and what we must live up to. And it sets a standard for art. Take away religion, however, take away philosophy, take away the higher aims of art, and you deprive ordinary people of the ways in which they can represent their apartness. Human nature, once something to live up to, becomes something to live down to instead. Biological reductionism nurtures this “living down,” which is why people so readily fall for it. It makes cynicism respectable and degeneracy chic. It abolishes our kind—and with it our kindness.

  1John Bowlby, Attachment and Loss, vols. 1–3 (New York: Basic Books, 1969–1980); John Bowlby, A Secure Base (New York: Routledge, 1988).

  2Bowlby, Attachment and Loss, vol. 1, p. 183.

  3A. R. Wallac
e, Natural Selection and Tropical Nature: Essays on Descriptive and Theoretical Biology (London: Macmillan, 1891). See also A. R. Wallace, Darwinism: An Exposition of the Theory of Natural Selection with Some of Its Applications (London: Macmillan, 1889), chapter 15.

  4Charles Darwin, The Descent of Man, vol. 1 (New York: Appleton and Co., 1871).

  5Ibid., pp. 71–72.

  6Steven Pinker, How the Mind Works (London: Allen Lane, 1997), pp. 522–524; Geoffrey Miller, The Mating Mind: How Sexual Choice Shaped the Evolution of Human Nature (New York: Doubleday, 2000).

  7Charles Darwin, The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals (New York: Appleton and Co., 1898).

  8R. A. Fisher, The Genetical Theory of Natural Selection (1930), revised ed. (New York: Dover, 1958).

  9See the lively account in Helen Cronin, The Ant and the Peacock: Altruism and Sexual Selection, from Darwin to Today (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991).

  10J. Maynard Smith and G. R. Price, “The Logic of Animal Conflict,” Nature 246 (1973): pp. 15–18.

  11Konrad Lorenz, On Aggression, trans. Marjorie Kerr Wilson (New York: Harcourt Brace, 1966).

  12R. Axelrod, The Evolution of Cooperation (New York: Basic Books, 1984).

  13See, for example, Matt Ridley, The Origins of Virtue: Human Instincts and the Evolution of Cooperation (London: Viking, 1991). It is important to recognize that the game-theoretic approach to altruism is distinct from the theory of “inclusive fitness,” defended in W. D. Hamilton, “The Genetical Evolution of Social Behaviour,” Journal of Theoretical Biology 7 (1964): pp. 1–16, according to which altruism extends to kin and in proportion to the degree of kinship.

  14V. C. Wynne-Edwards, Animal Dispersion in Relation to Social Behaviour (Edinburgh: Oliver and Boyd, 1962). The original inspiration here is Lorenz, On Aggression. Wynne-Edwards is somewhat cantankerously criticized by Richard Dawkins in The Selfish Gene (1976), revised ed. (New York: Oxford University Press, 1989), pp. 7–10.

  15See especially Noam Chomsky, Language and Mind (1968), 3rd ed. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006), in which language is described as “an example of true emergence—the appearance of a qualitatively different phenomenon at a specific stage of complexity of organization” (p. 62).

  16For the attempts, see Eugene Linden, Apes, Men and Language (New York: Saturday Review Press, 1974); for the enthusiasm, see Mary Midgley, Beast and Man: The Roots of Human Nature (London: Routledge, 1978), pp. 215–251.

  17See, for example, John Maynard Smith and Eörs Szathmáry, The Major Transitions in Evolution (Oxford: W. H. Freeman, 1995), pp. 303–308.

  18As exemplified, for instance, by Kim Sterelny, in his theory of cumulative niche construction. See his Thought in a Hostile World: The Evolution of Human Cognition (Oxford: Blackwell, 2003).

  19For various attempts to give a memetic theory of culture, see Robert Aunger, ed., Darwinizing Culture: The Status of Memetics as a Science (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000). The theory of the meme is dismissively criticized by David Stove in “Genetic Calvinism, or Demons and Dawkins,” in Darwinian Fairytales: Selfish Genes, Errors of Heredity, and Other Fables of Evolution (New York: Encounter Books, 2006), pp. 172–197.

  20Dawkins, Selfish Gene.

  21Daniel C. Dennett, Breaking the Spell (London: Allen Lane, 2006).

  22Matthew Arnold, Culture and Anarchy: An Essay in Political and Social Criticism (London, 1869).

  23Though David Stove takes Dawkins to task for his constant reference to “selfishness” and his failure to say what it could possibly mean in this context: see Stove, “Genetic Calvinism.”

  24How teleological thinking can be replaced by functional explanation is one theme of Richard Dawkins’s subsequent book, The Blind Watchmaker (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1986). For an illuminating discussion of functional explanations and their application outside biology, see G. A. Cohen, Karl Marx’s Theory of History: A Defence (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1978).

  25See Ron Amundson and George V. Lauder, “Function without Purpose: The Use of Causal Role Function in Evolutionary Biology,” in D. Hull and M. Ruse, eds., The Philosophy of Biology, Oxford Readings in Philosophy (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998), pp. 227–257.

  26A similar objection can be mounted, it seems to me, against the defense of Marx’s theory of history presented by G. A. Cohen (Karl Marx’s Theory of History). That dysfunctional institutions disappear is no ground for thinking that the existence of an institution is caused by its function.

  27Immanuel Kant, Anthropology from a Pragmatic Point of View, ed. Robert Louden and Manfred Kuehn (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006), p. 1.

  28E. O. Wilson, On Human Nature (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1978), p. 168.

  29This accusation was strongly made against Dawkins, in the context of the original TV series of The Selfish Gene, by Mary Midgley (Beast and Man, pp. 102–103). Whether Midgley’s objections are fair is a moot point; but she deserves credit for recognizing that the challenge presented by Dawkins goes to the heart of philosophical anthropology. Her criticisms of sociobiological writers are more pertinent and have been amplified in her Evolution as a Religion, revised ed. (London: Routledge, 2002).

  30This view is eloquently defended by Pope John Paul II in the encyclical Veritatis Splendor, August 6, 1993, sections 47 et seq.

  31See R. Scruton, “Laughter,” in The Aesthetic Understanding (London: Methuen, 1982), pp. 180–194.

  32Helmuth Plessner, Laughing and Crying: A Study in the Limits of Human Behavior, trans. J. Spencer Churchill and Marjorie Grene (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1970).

  33F. H. Buckley, The Morality of Laughter (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2003).

  34For an example, see the case of Roger and Lucy—two chimpanzees with some competence in the “Ameslan” sign language—described in Linden, Apes, Men and Language, p. 97.

  35See Rudolf Makkreel, Dilthey: Philosopher of the Human Studies (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1993). Makkreel is currently editing an accurate and scholarly English edition of Dilthey’s works, which is in the course of publication by Princeton University Press.

  36Franz Brentano, Psychology from an Empirical Standpoint, trans. L. McAlister (London: Routledge, 1974), p. 77.

  37Nietzsche’s attempted derivation of the moral sense has been undertaken from the standpoint of evolutionary biology by Philip Kitcher, in The Ethical Project (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2011). It is for Kitcher’s readers to judge whether he succeeds in explaining the emergence of the moral sense without assuming it.

  38Moves toward an answer are given in David Wiggins, Sameness and Substance Renewed (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), chapter 7.

  39Aristotle, De anima; Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologiae, 1, 19, 4.

  40Though we should note the tenacity of the view that the felt “quale” of a mental state is a fact about it, inwardly but not outwardly observable, and bound up with its essential nature. It seems to me that the notion of qualia is an empty hypothesis, a wheel that turns nothing in the mechanism, as Wittgenstein would put it. In an interesting essay, however, Ned Block—one of the most sophisticated defenders of qualia in the current literature—argues that Wittgenstein inadvertently commits himself to the existence of qualia, in a form that goes against the tenor of his philosophy. Ned Block, “Wittgenstein and Qualia,” Philosophical Perspectives 21, no. 1 (2007): pp. 73–115. The debate here goes so far beyond the scope of these lectures that I can only refer the reader to the brilliant summary by Michael Tye (an equally sophisticated defender of qualia) in the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy: http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/qualia. The position I take can be gleaned from my “The Unobservable Mind,” MIT Technology Review, February 1, 2005, https://www.technologyreview.com/s/403673/the-unobservable-mind/.

  41D. C. Dennett, “Intentional Systems,” Journal of Philosophy 68 (1971), reprinted in Brainstorms (Camb
ridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1978).

  42See, for example, D. C. Dennett, Kinds of Minds (London: Weidenfeld, 1996), p. 34.

  43See the classic essay R. M. Chisholm, “Sentences about Believing,” Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society 56, no. 1 (1955–1956): pp. 125–148. It is doubtful that this interpretation represents what Brentano really meant, however. See Barry Smith, Austrian Philosophy (LaSalle, Ill.: Open Court, 1994).

  44D. C. Dennett, Consciousness Explained (London: Allen Lane, 1991).

  45D. C. Dennett, The Intentional Stance (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1987).

  46The view I am arguing for has some connection with that defended by P. F. Strawson in “Freedom and Resentment,” in his Freedom and Resentment and Other Essays (London: Methuen, 1974), pp. 1–28. Unlike Strawson, however, I believe that the human being is truly represented in our interpersonal attitudes and falsely represented in those attitudes Strawson calls “objective.” The higher-order intentionality to which I refer—which is the ability to form mental representations of mental representations (one’s own and other people’s)—has been described, in important psychological studies by Alan Leslie and others, as “metarepresentation.” See, e.g., A. Leslie and D. Roth, “What Autism Teaches Us about Metarepresentation,” in S. Baron-Cohen, H. Tager Flusberg, and D. Cohen, eds., Understanding Other Minds: Perspectives from Autism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1993).