As I make progress on this book, I grow increasingly doubtful that it will ever be published. It just seems to me to be such an unusual kind of book, and so at odds with the agenda of most publishers, that I cannot quite conceive of it ever getting into print in any traditional way. But perhaps many people feel that way as they work on long writing projects.
One concern I have is the imagined audience. As I’ve mentioned before, I envision this book as recording what I would hope to be able to tell my daughters as they finish college. I try to write in a way that I believe they would be able to understand, if they put in a little effort, and at the same to to make it clear why that effort is worth expending. I’m not sure if I’ve succeeded in this, or if I have correctly assessed the capacities and interests of a college senior today.
Nevertheless, I persist.
Here is one of the short chapters from Part II. This is not one that appeared in the original outline I posted a few weeks ago. I’ve added some chapters, cut others, as I’ve worked through the various arguments.
This one seems to me particularly important. To avoid the common postmodern argument that any position is merely subjective, so there is no arguing for one ideological position against another, it is essential to recognize that, pace Nietzsche, interpretation does not go all the way down.
This should give an indication of the length and level of difficulty of the short chapter that make up Part II of the book. Any constructive feedback would be appreciated.
Human Nature
There are generally two broad approaches to human nature popular today.
One is to assert a rigidly determined human nature, the result of evolution, written in our genes at the moment our species first evolved on some Paleolithic plain. Evolutionary demands can then account for our every behavior, from child rearing to video-game preferences, from our taste for sweets to our tendency to violence. Of course, as we saw in discussing reductivism in Chapter 2, there is always an out. Our every behavior, up to and including our impulse purchases on the internet, are as predictable as the sunrise because they are irresistibly forced by the instincts of our stone-age ancestors. But we can always, with that completely free and unconstructed mind the reductivists always have recourse to, understand and manipulate these irresistible tendencies for our advantage—provided we are one of the special few who have such a mind, a mind completely free of all social, cultural, and biological determinations. (Of course, advocates of this position do agree that they also have the same instinctive programming as the rest of us; it is just that they also have this un-programmed higher intellect that allows them to rise above their instincts.)
The other approach is to claim that there is no human nature at all. All of our supposedly inherent tendencies are actually learned from our particular culture. As the existentialists would put it, for humans existence precedes essence: we have no essential nature, we have only the kind of “natural” tendencies we produce in ourselves. For the existentialist, and for the social constructionist, the goal is to abandon our conditioning and self-consciously choose the life we want. But how exactly are we able to do that, if we are socially constructed? And how could we decide what kind of a life it would be best to want, anyway?
Of course at this point many sociologists and social psychologists would want to insist they have solved this problem: they engage in the perennial nature-nurture debate, in which we endlessly try to figure exactly which of our behaviors are a result of biological necessity and which are caused by our personal experiences. This debate, however, is exasperating and never goes anywhere. One reason is the failure to notice that in any given phenomenon under debate there are both Mi and Md causes at work. We can’t decide whether something like your musical ability is genetically determined or learned, because those are the wrong terms in which to discuss such things. We cannot say musical ability is genetic, in the way your eye color is, because it is not a thing passed down from parents but a capacity that inheres in all members of the species—it is more like having eyes than having an eye color. And we cannot say an individuals passion for music is “learned,” because the definition of this term in psychology and education refers to things trained into us by rote, like teaching a dog to sit, and certainly the social determinates of someone’s passion for music are mostly outside what would count as “learning” to the psychologist.
So let’s set aside the tired old nature-nurture terminology, and figure a better way to address the problem of whether there is anything that might count as human nature. I am going to take an Aristotelian approach to this problem, and ask: What kind of a thing is it that a human animal is? That is, metaphysically (in the sense we defined that term in chapter 2), what is it that a human animal is attempting to continue being, in resistance to all contingent external forces? Aristotle offers two suggestions, which have been widely cited but not widely understood: humans are social animals, animals “of the city”, by which he means not just that humans, like bison, are gregarious, but that we are animals that create a city, as social organization in which to live together; and humans are “zoon logikon,” or animals of the logos, meaning something like thinking and reasoning in language. If we accept these both as true, what would we have to assume is the basic nature of the human being to do in the world? What would it need to go on doing in order to continue to be a human? The answer I hope to arrive at is quite minimalist. It won’t include most of the things listed in a book on evolutionary psychology, for instance. On the other hand, it will be much more constraining than the approach of most existentialists and social constructionists. In order to get at my answer, then, I want to work dialectically, and begin by coming to an understanding of exactly why these common approaches to the problem fail.
What kind of things, according to the evolutionary psychologists, are hard wired into our natures since cave-man times? Consider one example from the book Evolutionary Psychology: a beginner’s guide. The authors of this book suggest that when looking at “lonely hearts advertisements” we can see how our present day mating behaviors are completely determined by our Paleolithic origins. Men, they find, are interested in attractiveness and youth, while women are interested in wealth and status. The argument is that this is perfectly explained by the need to successfully reproduce the species in our cave-man stage. Women who are young and attractive are more likely to be fertile (if we assume that signs of fertility and health are what we mean by attractive), and men who have more resources will better provide food and protection during the child-rearing years. Makes sense, right? Most people are immediately convinced by this, it seems. Evolutionary psychology is enormously convincing to undergraduate college students.
But is there really any correspondence between modern day career success and primitive abilities to hunt successfully? Is the interest here really survival of the child, or the comfort and affluence of the woman? And can we really suggest that cave-men mated only with women that seemed likely to produce healthy offspring? Does that even seem at all plausible? In addition, is it likely that early members of the genus Homo lived in fierce financial competition with their neighbors, as we do today? Perhaps the survival of the child may have depended on the cooperation of the entire band, not of the individual? Why would we assume that the instincts of Homo Habilis, for instance, evolved in a social climate very much like our modern capitalist society, with a focus on monogamy, competition, and individualism? Yet if we don’t assume this, the entire theory falls apart.
Or consider another example from one of the major promoters of evolutionary psychology today, Robert Wright. In Why Buddhism Is True, he argues that road rage can be explained by our primitive need to stand up for ourselves. Anyone who “stole your food, stole your mate…you needed to teach him a lesson”(31). Perhaps, again if we assume a primitive world in which we are all competitive possessive individuals. Or, perhaps not even then. Is road rage really of the same nature as defending your share of food from a greedy tribemate? Think about what people get into road rage about. For instance, I’ve had many people become passionately enraged with me because I tend to stop at yellow lights. Countless times I’ve had drivers hitting their horn, screaming obscenities, flipping the finger, because I stopped at a red light they planned to run—and after the light turns they often pass me illegally screaming in anger. Is this situation in any way similar to stealing their mate?
This is a case of a common rhetorical strategy I think of as the cow and the boulder. From a distance, and in bad light, if we squint, a cow and a boulder are both big brown things out in a field. So we can say that they are in some sense the same kind of thing. But you cannot make a wall out of cows, or cheese from a boulder. Similarly, we can find some vague way in which road rage looks a bit like something a caveman might have done to survive; but that similarity is found at the cost of forgetting anything of real use we might learn about a more thorough examination of the kind of thing road rage really is.
On the other hand, we can point to all kinds of forms of life people have adapted to and endured, and suggest there must be no such thing as human nature if we can live in such diverse cultural conditions. But again, this ignores the many situations which human beings could not tolerate, which they would rather die than endure. Not just conditions like slavery, but even our own current American way of life. The dramatic increase in drug addiction, use of psychiatric medications, and suicide that have occurred in recent decades should be sufficient evidence that we are not infinitely malleable beings. There are some basic needs that must be met, and by blindly asserting that we have no essential nature at all we are failing to examine exactly what those might be.
So let’s take a closer look. What, for instance, might be the real cause of road rage? Perhaps the powerlessness we feel at having to adapt to a way of life we did not choose, have no control over, and which makes us into anonymous operators trying to interact with countless other anonymous operators in a system not well suited to any of us really achieving what we are after. Perhaps driving becomes simply one more place where we are forced into an endless and tedious task, one more place where our interactions are with anonymous others who are usually not only indifferent to us but to whom we are merely in the way. If we think about this more carefully, see the dramatic differences between road rage and defending our food from a very specific aggressor who is not at all anonymous, then we might begin to see what kind of thing we cannot, in fact, adapt to despite a century now of doing it every day.
Then we can begin to arrive at a minimalist concept of human nature. One that doesn’t include any particular attempt to account for, by naturalizing, the kinds of undesirable behavior we find ourselves repeating.
My own ideas about what this might be have been inspired primarily by the seventeenth-century philosopher Benedict de Spinoza, and by Karl Marx. I’ll begin with Spinoza.
In his Ethics, Spinoza explains the crucial importance of our ability to act in the world. He argues that anything that increases our ability to act in the world produces Joy, and anything that decreases this ability to Sadness (160-161, 188-189). Further, for Spinoza the mind is inextricably part of the material world, so that anything that “increases or diminishes our body’s power of acting,” will produce in the mind a way of thinking which will also increase or diminish our “mind’s power of thinking”(P11, 160). What is he saying here? That our natural tendency, as humans, is to go on increasing our capacity to engage with the world. And this must not be understood merely physically, but also intellectually, because any increase in our intellectual understanding of the world is connected to an increase in our bodily capacity to do so. If we come to a better understanding of the basic elements, for example, we can begin to isolate and use different kinds of metals, and so ultimately construct things we would never have been able to make without this knowledge. We are Joyous, Spinoza tells us, when we are in the process of increasing our physical and mental engagement with the world around us. I would want to insist that this engagement must be not only with the Mi world of animals, plants and minerals, but also the Md world of other humans and our collective social institutions.
To put it simply, we are flourishing when we are able to actively engage with the world around us, remaking it and shaping it, rather than simply adapting to and enduring it.
Marx’s idea is quite similar here. Many have accuse Marx of buying into, even of originating, the idea that humans beings have not inherent nature. In an interesting short book on this question, Norman Geras refutes this misconception. As he explains, what Marx was interested in promoting was a society in which every individual would have
time available for ‘the free play of the vital forces of his body and his mind’; ‘scope for the development of man’s faculties’; and a variety of pursuit—for ‘a man’s vital forces…find recreation and delight,’ Marx says, in ‘change of activity.’ Of course, time, scope and variety do not necessarily mean the absence of all effort and are not proposed by him in that sense. The expenditure of labour-power, he contends, is ‘man’s normal life-activity’, some work and ‘suspension of tranquility’ a need, teh ‘overcoming of obstacles…a liberating activity’. Genuinely free work can require ‘the most intense exertion’. However, this is self-determining exertion and conceived as part of a breadth of individual development. (84-85)
We must remember that without making effort, we can never be fulfilled, because it is in our nature as humans to make an effort to increase our capacity for engaging the world. But the effort must be “self-determining,” not in the sense of radically individual but in the sense that every individual must be able to participate in the collective decisions as to what kind of social projects we will undertake.
This is the minimal sense of human nature we need to begin from. Once we accept that this is the nature of a human being, we don’t need to fear that we will have no solid ground on which to justify an objection to any kind of social agenda which happens to gain popularity and power. There may be many kinds of social projects, many ideologies, which will fulfill this demand of human nature, and there may be no rational argument to decide between them. However, we will always be able to justify opposing any social project which can be shown to deny this nature to those who participate in it. On this basis, if the ability of some people to increase their capacity to engage the world is gained only at the expense of some others being denied this capacity, we can legitimately take the position that this particular social formation is unacceptable, and those denied the opportunity to increase their powers of engagement, denied the development of their faculties in Marx’s phrase, should refuse to participate in it.
We will need to figure out just what all of our “faculties” are, what capacities to engage in the world humans need to develop. At the very least, we can agree with Aristotle that we are social animals, and language using animals. We need to develop our interaction with other humans, through the use of language. Since it is such a fundamental part of what makes us distinctively human, we will also need to be actively engaged in the construction of the language we use. To attempt to abandon language and pretend we can sink down into a pre-linguistic engagement with the world, or on th other hand to adhere overly rigidly to an existing language formation and deny our need to actively participate in constructing the languages with which we engage one another and comprehend the Mi world, would be to deny our human nature.
Because of the vital importance of language to the nature of our species, we will consider, and attempt to correct, some of our most common misconceptions about language in the next chapter.