Essays in Anthropology

Variations on a Theme

Spaemann, de Graaff

• Publisher: Cascade Books
• Year: 2010
• eBook ISBN: 9781621891116
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Religion

The question of the nature of humanity is one of the most complex of all philosophical and theological inquiries. Where might one look to find a decent answer to this question? Should we turn to an investigation of genetics and DNA for such answers? Should we look to the history of humanity's adaption and evolution? Should we look to humanity's cultural achievements and the form of its social life?In this intriguing and provocative collection of essays, philosopher Robert Spaemann reacts against what he calls scientistic anthropology and ventures to take up afresh the quaestio de homine, the question of man. Spaemann contends that when it comes to the nagging question of what we truly are as human beings, understanding our chemical make-up or evolutionary past simply cannot give us the full picture. Instead, without doing away with the findings of modern evolutionary science, Spaemann offers successive treatments of human nature, human evolution, and human dignity, which paint a full and compelling picture of the meaning of human life. Crucial to any anthropology, he demonstrates, is our future as well as our past. And our relationship to God as well as to our next-door neighbor. All of these themes coalesce in a vital contribution to the question of what it means to be human.

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Human Nature

What is a human being?” This question from the eighth Psalm is posed by Kant in his lecture on logic as the fourth question, following the questions of metaphysics, “What can I know?”; morality, “What ought I to do?”; and religion, “What may I hope for?” He then immediately adds: “Fundamentally, however, we could reckon all of this as anthropology, because the first three questions relate to the last one.”1

In the Critique of Pure Reason, where it is claimed that the “interests of reason unite in the first three questions,” this fourth question is not yet mentioned. But in the lecture on logic, even though Kant begins by making “What is a human being?” the central question of philosophy, in line with the theme of this lecture, he simply leaves it there. So the theoretical status of anthropology, its place within the wider system of philosophical thought, remains unclear. “All such attempts to arrive at such a science with thoroughness,” writes Kant in the Preface to Anthropology in Pragmatic Perspective, “encounter considerable difficulties that are inherent in human nature itself.”2 The fundamental difficulty arises with the fact that it’s not at all clear what someone who asks “What is a human being?” actually wants to know. What would he consider a decent answer to his question? Would the chemical formula of the DNA-structure of the human gene satisfy him (which, by the way, is very similar to that of domestic pigs)? Would he like to learn about all the specific ways in which the human organism has adapted to its surroundings, that is, its “ecological niche”? Would he feel he had only really understood human cultural achievements when he had interpreted them in terms of how they serve the preservation of the species? And does he want to interpret human self-understanding, emerging so many times in history, on the basis of one principle alone? Or does he try to conceive of the human being as a rough draft, only understood when its full realization is revealed, so that only Pilate’s Ecce homo reveals who and what the human being really is?

Now, in the preface to his Anthropology in Pragmatic Perspective, Kant also refers to a basic dualism in perspectives that characterizes our anthropological inquiry—the “physiological” and the “pragmatic.” “Physiological knowledge of the human being concerns the investigation of what nature makes of the human being; pragmatic, the investigation of what he as a free-acting being makes of himself, or can and should make of himself.”3 But the question is, How do these two forms of knowledge relate to each other? Is there a bridge between physiological knowledge and pragmatic knowledge of the human being? Can a “free-acting being” in any way be conceived as a product of nature? Can freedom, moreover, be understood as a “natural product,” or should nature instead be thought of as a “substrate of freedom,” if, that is, we want to have a conception of freedom at all?

This question is not peculiar to Kant. Descartes had already identified the dilemma. This was, for him, the impossibility of conceiving of the unity of soul and body, res cogitans and res extensa. This union does not correspond to a “clear and distinct idea” (clara et distincta perceptio); it can only be experienced empirically. “That is why,” wrote Descartes to Elizabeth of Bohemia, Princess Palatine,

people who never philosophise and use only their senses have no doubt that the soul moves the body and that the body acts on the soul. They regard both of them as a single thing, that is to say, they conceive their union; because to conceive the union between two things is to conceive them as one single thing. Metaphysical thoughts, which exercise the pure intellect, help to familiarise us with the notion of the soul; and the study of mathematics, which exercises mainly the imagination in the consideration of shapes and movements, accustoms us to form distinct notions of bodies. But it is the ordinary course of life and conversation, and abstention from meditation and from the study of the things which exercise the imagination, that teaches us how to conceive the union of the soul and the body.4

In other words, philosophical anthropology, in its true sense, is impossible for Descartes. In the morning, one can only swing one’s legs out of bed insofar as one refrains from reflecting about how one does it. We cannot reconcile these two perspectives on ourselves: object, and our consciousness of this object (or, more simply, object and subject).

The aftermath of this dualism is well known. Our historical self-experience was to be explained according to Dilthey’s dictum: “What man is, only his history tells him.”5 And Heidegger’s phenomenological approach also ended up as a theory of historicity (involving a refusal, energetic as it was unsuccessful, of being taken for “anthropology”). He started off by appreciating the dualism: so, in Being and Time a human being is a transcendental presupposition of the world, and his language “the home of being”; but he also finds himself in the world as an occurrence amongst occurrences. But then, under the notion of “thrown-in-ness,” Heidegger brought the contingency human beings share with all that exists back into the hermeneutic of Dasein, that is, making contingency an inner moment of self-experience. Heidegger’s effort, however, remains only the dialectical counterpart to the various forms of natural reductionism, both interpreting human beings as products of nature programmed for survival, and integrating the whole “realm of the spirit” into this interpretation. In doing so, these forms of natural reductionism can formally appeal to Heidegger’s fundamental explanation of Dasein as “concern” (Sorge).

Heidegger himself later abandoned the starting-point of his ontology, revolving as it did around subjectivity, a development that does not concern me here. What I do want to point out is that the dualism of perspectives in the question, “What is a human being?”—hermeneutic on the one hand, scientistic on the other—seems to speak of an insurmountable stalemate. But in order to differentiate clearly both extremes, as well as to clarify how they converge, I will mention two more authors—Jean-Paul Sartre, and molecular biologist Dawkins. Sartre understands a human being as absolute and purely formal freedom, as pure finite transcendence, thus radicalizing the “inner perspective” of res cogitans. The fact that a human being also has an outer surface—that she not only sees but is also seen—proves fatal for her freedom. The gaze of the other fixates me as what I am (rather than who am I), annexing my transcendence to the extent that it makes me into an object. When, in one of his texts, Sartre says that hell is to be understood as other people, he presupposes that the human gaze is a Cartesian one, always resulting in a total objectification of that upon which it falls. So the scientist’s gaze interprets my pain as only an “objective” phenomenon, as a “being” according to Quine’s definition: “To be is to be the value of a bound variable.” But I cannot view myself as a value of a bound variable! So the gaze that views me as such is indeed the gaze that annihilates me as a free being. Yet is that really the paradigm of the human gaze?

Sartre’s reaction against “being seen” is, of course, ineffectual. A human being does not only see; she is seen, by other humans, by animals, by God. She cannot don an invisible cloak, nor is she God, who has to show his face in order to be seen. Yet this finitude does not have the same import as hell. Neither is it the “metaphysical evil” (malum metaphysicum), as Leibniz had to admit. Even more than that, the gaze under which humans become human, the gaze of the mother upon the newborn child, is normally a gaze of love. Admittedly, for molecular biologist Dawkins even this gaze becomes a target for scientific reductionism: “I am treating a mother as a machine programmed to do everything in its power to propagate copies of the genes which ride inside it,” for “[w]e are survival machines—robot vehicles blindly programmed to preserve the selfish molecules known as genes.”6

So the extremes converge, as I said. An anthropology that views itself as a pure phenomenology of solipsistic self-experience by a purely formal subject (dismissing every objectification under the “gaze of the other” as either meaningless or destructive for one’s self-interpretation), such an anthropology cannot claim more truth than the scientistic reduction it cannot integrate and must therefore ignore. And the opposite also holds: the scientific reductionist can tolerate any “transcendental” self-interpretation as long as it claims no “objectivity” for itself. Indeed, what the scientific reductionist can concede to the transcendental self without hesitation is the indeterminacy claimed by this self, since that indeterminacy is merely existential and need not imply any ontological claims. The undetermined self thus becomes immune to naturalistic, relativizing explanations; it need have no quarrel with them. And likewise, the “transcendental” self-interpretation is happy to take on board naturalistic reduction as simply an “alternative truth” about being human: so Sartre saw no problem with political involvement in programmatic materialism despite his extremely “idealist” standpoint. Once again, then, we are confronted by the inaccessible place of humanity, beyond both the pure subjectivity of absolute freedom and the perspective according to which a human being is only an epiphenomenon (a more or less complicated aggregate state of something else, namely “matter”). We are clearly dealing with a new form of the double truth doctrine.

Recently, attempts to secure a new epistemic monism have appeared, emanating from scientific circles, seeking to clarify this dualism in terms of evolutionary theory, and to surmount it in terms of a system-theory (thus Rupert Riedl et al.). In the long term, it may be possible to accommodate a new convergence of perspectives. At present, however, we are further removed from this convergence than many would like to think. For, despite their intention, the attempts made thus far are in fact totally reductionist. They still explain the specific experiences of indeterminacy—be they aesthetic, cognitive, moral, or religious—as subservient to the survival of organic systems (albeit via various mediations), thus falling short of the self-understanding of those experiences. In reality, the new “epistemic monism” sticks to one side of the dualism, having failed to find a meaning for the word “good” apart from “good for . . . ,” and having failed really to understand Socrates’ appeal to Callicles: “But I beg you, my friend, to conceive it possible that nobility and goodness may be something different from keeping oneself and one’s friends from danger.”7 The process of surmounting the dualism will be more difficult, then, requiring from both sides not only intellectual effort but also the mobilizing of the full spectrum of human experiences.

Beyond that, what will be required is a deeper reflection on that particular history of thought that began with the concept of “nature” (physis). Today it is customary among Catholic theologians to pit the concept of person against the concept of nature; to question, for instance, the ...

Table of contents

• Essays in Anthropology
• Translators’ Introduction
• Preface
• Chapter 1: Human Nature
• Chapter 2: Evolution
• Chapter 3: Human Dignity
• Chapter 4: The Natural and the Rational