Anthropocentrism in Philosophy

Realism, Antirealism, Semirealism

Panayot Butchvarov

• Publisher: De Gruyter
• Year: 2015
• Print ISBN: 9781614517924
• eBook ISBN: 9781614519478
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Epistemology in Philosophy

Anthropocentrism in philosophy is deeply paradoxical. Ethics investigates the human good, epistemology investigates human knowledge, and antirealist metaphysics holds that the world depends on our cognitive capacities. But humans' good and knowledge, including their language and concepts, are empirical matters, whereas philosophers do not engage in empirical research. And humans are inhabitants, not 'makers', of the world. Nevertheless, all three (ethics, epistemology, and antirealist metaphysics) can be drastically reinterpreted as making no reference to humans.

Chapter One: Introduction

1 Anthropocentrism

Anthropocentrism, the belief that humans enjoy special, central, even cosmic significance, is present in everyday thought as an attitude toward other animals and the environment generally, and in religion as the Biblical teaching that humans alone were made in the image of God. “I am unable to believe that, in the world as known, there is anything that I can value outside human beings, and, to a much lesser extent, animals,” wrote Bertrand Russell.1 Many think that such anthropocentrism mars our relationship to other animals and the environment, just as egocentrism mars our relationship to other humans. Speciesism, they would say, is no more acceptable than is egoism, androcentrism, or ethnocentrism. Many also think that the anthropocentrism in religion mars our conception of God. They would agree with Spinoza that, contrary to standard religious doctrine, “neither intellect nor will pertain to the nature of God,”2 and that “God is free from passions, nor is He affected with any emotion of joy or sorrow.”3 To attribute to God human characteristics such as intellect, will, joy, or sorrow, they would say, is to think of God as a sort of superhuman.

These instances of anthropocentrism are well-known and have been amply discussed for centuries. They are not the topic of this book. Its topic lies deeper: the anthropocentrism present, though seldom discussed or even acknowledged, in philosophy, the discipline charged with our most fundamental thinking – about knowledge (in epistemology), goodness (in ethics), and the world itself (in metaphysics).

Ethics is commonly understood as concerned with human well-being, even happiness, and epistemology with human knowledge, especially perception. But these are empirical matters, investigated today in psychology and neuroscience, philosophers generally lacking the qualifications or even inclination for empirical research. Ethics and epistemology remain anthropocentric even when concerned only with language, because the language in question is surely human and investigated properly in linguistics and lexicography. In metaphysics, anthropocentrism takes the form of antirealism, the orientation that has dominated philosophy since Berkeley and especially Kant. Broadly understood, it claims that the world depends, at least insofar as it is knowable, on our cognitive capacities. The claim seems absurd if taken to mean, as it often is, that we, humans, “make the world.”

I shall argue that, if properly understood, epistemology is not about human knowledge and ethics is not about the human good despite the fact that we all desire the human good and respect human knowledge, and that metaphysics is not about “us,” despite the tautology that we can know the world only as it can be known by us. My argument will rest not on abstract and often enigmatic philosophical premises but on specific and readily understandable truths.

Whatever the nature of the world may be, humans are only inhabitants of it. The world can hardly depend on them. And knowledge of humans, like knowledge of its other inhabitants, is credibly sought only by empirical, evidencebased methods. But philosophy is not an empirical discipline, and its claims are seldom supported with empirical evidence. Philosophers perform no experiments, maintain no labs, use neither telescopes nor microscopes, embark on no field trips. The moral to be drawn, however, is not that philosophers are experts on nonempirical things or facts. If numbers are such things, it is mathematicians, not philosophers, who specialize in them.

Concern with human beings, of course, is natural and morally expected of us all. It is a professional concern, however, only for some: neuroscientists, psychologists, psychiatrists, economists, sociologists, anthropologists, demographers, linguists, lexicographers, physicians. Aristotle did engage in biological investigations, but at the time biology was hardly a science. Today it is.

Philosophers’ willingness to assume authoritative stands on human beings became especially incongruous when the experimental sciences devoted to the study of humans emerged. For most of the history of philosophy and science, if a topic did not belong in mathematics, astronomy, medicine, or theology, it was dispatched to philosophy – there seemed to be no other place to put it. Even today, in some institutions psychology is called “mental philosophy” and physics “natural philosophy.” But neither is considered part of philosophy, and few philosophers today can claim expertise in psychology or in physics.

I shall be concerned here with the ways anthropocentrism has affected epistemology, ethics, and metaphysics, arguing that it has no place in them, that all three should be radically refocused. The same reasoning would apply, directly or indirectly, to the other branches of philosophy – from the philosophy of art and of science to political philosophy and the philosophy of education – but they will not be discussed here. They all depend in part on theories developed in metaphysics, epistemology, or ethics, but also on developments in fields like history, economics, or psychology. Logic is an exception, for reasons to be explained shortly. Suffice it to note here that, insofar as it belongs in philosophy rather than mathematics, it is a part of metaphysics.

Some may say that not all of human nature is empirical, that humans also have immortal nonphysical souls. But this is a matter of faith, not investigation, empirical or not. Others may say that even if humans have no immortal souls they have nonphysical minds, entirely distinct from both their brains and their behavior. But there has been an empirical science investigating such minds: the introspective psychology of James, Wundt, Titchener, and many others. To be sure, it was largely unsuccessful, though not because its subject matter called for nonempirical investigation – the introspective psychologists explicitly relied on experience, often in collaboration with others, sometimes in “laboratories.” Much the same can be said about continental phenomenology in its early stages, which was a close relative of introspective psychology and was summed up in Husserl’s slogan “We must go back to the things themselves,” back to what we actually find before us, rather than what philosophical or scientific theory, or even common sense, says is there.

In Husserl’s later works, and especially Heidegger’s and Sartre’s, phenomenology evolved into a kind of metaphysics, similar to Kant’s transcendental idealism, Hegel’s absolute idealism, or even Nelson Goodman’s “irrealism.” Its chief tenet became that the empirical world itself is in some sense human, “made by us,” as Goodman put it. This was essentially the thesis of antirealism, in a very broad sense of the term that would apply to Berkeley’s “immaterialism” as well as to Kant’s, Hegel’s, and Goodman’s views. Much of this book will be devoted to that thesis.

More likely today is to be told that in fact philosophical inquiries are not about human beings, that they really are conceptual or linguistic. They are about concepts or words, not about the things or facts, human or nonhuman, those concepts or words stand for. For example, it would be said, in ethics philosophers investigate the concept of happiness or the use of the word “happiness,” not any facts about happiness, which indeed are usefully investigated today by psychiatrists and pharmacologists, and in epistemology they investigate the concept of perception or the use of “perceive,” not any facts about perception, which for centuries have been investigated by psychologists and in recent years also by neuroscientists. But surely the concepts and words in question are themselves human, not platonic or divine, and thus are part of an empirical subject matter. The investigation of them calls for observation and sometimes experiment – as in psychology, neuroscience, linguistics, and lexicography – not philosophical speculations, intuitions, a priori arguments, analyses, or definitions.

That this is so is hardly news. It was powerfully argued more than half a century ago by W.V. Quine in “Two Dogmas of Empiricism,” where he attacked philosophical appeals to meanings. At about the same time Wittgenstein’s Philosophical Investigations was published, arguing in part that words in ordinary language are not used in accordance with necessary and sufficient conditions, and therefore that their use cannot be captured in definitions. In the same decade Gilbert Ryle castigated “the confusion between a ‘use’, i.e., a way of operating with something, and a ‘usage’…. A usage is a custom, practice, fashion or vogue…. The method of discovering linguistic usages are the methods of philologists.”4 Also in that decade, Chomsky began publishing articles and books that stressed the biological, largely inherited, core of linguistic competence, and urged that the study of language employ the standard methods of scientific research.

The traditional claim of philosophy to a distinctive place among the cognitive disciplines has rested on its absolute fundamentality, supreme abstraction, and unlimited scope. In these respects it surpasses even mathematics: one of its topics is the subject matter of mathematics itself. Its scope includes that of physics and astronomy – space, time, and whatever is in them – but philosophy is also concerned with anything that is not or might not be in space and time. Philosophy presupposes nothing and conceals nothing. This is why philosophers court paradox when preoccupied with things as concrete, literally “down to earth,” as humans. The paradox is no less glaring than it would be if they were preoccupied with cetaceans. If some do not see the paradox, the reason presumably is that they are human. Had they been cetacean, they might have been preoccupied with cetaceans.

The concern in philosophy with humans is not a trivial consequence of its unlimited scope, of its interest in “all time and existence.” It is not the trivial application to humans of general philosophical propositions, like the application to humans of arithmetic by the Census Bureau or of physics by a pilot monitoring takeoff weight. It is supposed to be a substantive concern. It may be woefully misguided, but it is natural. The reason is obvious. Plumbers or philosophers, we all are humans. We are deeply interested in ourselves and other humans. We see ourselves as the center of the universe even when we know that we are at its periphery. To suggest that philosophy should not be about humans, that it ought to be in this sense “dehumanized,” may seem even offensive. “Dehumanized” is an ugly word, but it does capture literally and succinctly the aim of the drastic change needed in philosophy – freedom from anthropocentrism – just as “humanized” captures much of the current state of philosophy.

A familiar thesis in ethics is that one ought to treat others “humanely,” as ends, not just as means, perhaps even love them. The claims of kings and barons to special dignity were rejected in the past by declaring the dignity of all humans. “Inhuman” and “inhumanity” are standard terms of condemnation, “humane” and “humanitarian” of approbation. Politicians’ handlers try to “humanize” their clients in order to get them elected. The “human condition” is a perennial object of despair but sometimes of marvel. Works of art are often praised for their “human quality.” A favorable review of a recent novel emphasizes its being “deeply human.” Many demand that space exploration be funded only if it leads to cures for human diseases. A recent television commercial announces, “The human element, nothing is more fundamental, nothing more elemental,” and advocates adding it to the periodic table. A distinguished contemporary philosopher writes of the “heart-breaking specialness” of the human.5

Indeed, we all think humans are special, and even feel their specialness. But the reason is not that we think we are angelic and thus special in a way that, say, cetaceans are not, or that we are intellectually, aesthetically, morally, etc., superior at least to all other terrestrial life. The plain reason is that we happen to be human. We all desire and seek pleasure, happiness, well-being – for ourselves, for those we love, often for strangers. So, ethics has devoted itself to investigating the human good, even happiness and pleasures, and the habits, actions, and institutions conducive to it, rather than to the good of cetaceans, extraterrestrials, or angels. We all treasure our ability to see and hear, and to remember and think. So, epistemology has devoted itself to investigating the nature and sources of human knowledge, not cetacean, extraterrestrial, or angelic knowledge.

That human happiness and human knowledge are empirical matters, belonging today in the subject matter of developed empirical sciences, has been pointed out repeatedly and eloquently by the proponents of naturalism, the dominant orientation in current philosophy. Its most prominent defender, W.V.O. Quine, called it “the recognition that it is within science itself, and not in some prior philosophy, that reality is to be identified and described.”6 Quine limited the substantive claims in his “epistemology naturalized” to mentioning the role in cognition of what he called “surface irritations,” but wisely left the investigation of these irritations to biology.7 Other naturalists, however, seem to lack the courage of their convictions and continue to engage in “analyzing concepts” or describing the “workings of our language,” as if concepts and language were not themselves parts of nature and thus belonging in the province of empirical science, not philosophy.

Anthropocentrism has been fueled by various assumptions, some true and some false. We assume that – with the po...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Eide
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• Chapter One: Introduction
• Part One: Epistemology and Ethics Dehumanized
• Part Two: Metaphysics Humanized
• Part Three: Metaphysics Dehumanized
• Endnotes
• Bibliography
• Index