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- Herausgeber: John Wiley & Sons
- Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
- Sprache: Englisch
- Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2024
The climate crisis has forced us to recognize that we are not separate from nature but are part of the natural world on which we depend: human beings are animals and we must understand much better our place in nature and our impact on our environment if we are to avoid our own annihilation as a species. And yet we feel nevertheless that we do not entirely fit into nature, that we stand apart from other animals in some way – in what way, exactly?
Markus Gabriel argues that what distinguishes humans from other animals is that humans are minded living beings who seek to understand the world and themselves and who possess ethical insight into moral contexts. Mind is the capacity to lead one’s life in the light of a conception of who or what one is. The undeniable difference between us and other animals defines the human condition and places a special responsibility on us to consider our actions in the context of other living beings and our shared habitat. It also calls on us to cultivate an ethics of not-knowing: to recognize that, however much we may seek to understand the world, we will never completely master it. Our grasp of reality, mediated by our animal minds, will always be limited: much is and will remain alien to us, lending itself only to speculation – and to remember this is to stand us in better stead for carving out an existence among the environmental crisis that looms before us all.
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Table of Contents
Cover
Title Page
Copyright Page
Dedication
Epigraph
Notes
Introduction
Notes
Part I: We and the Other Animals
The Logical Animal – How Humans Became Animals
The Specific Something
Nature is Not a Safari
The Anthropocene as Hubris
The Network: Plants, Bats, Fungi
Continuity, Discontinuity, or Somehow Both?
Shadowboxing
What Does it Actually Mean to Understand Oneself as an Animal?
Why We are Not Amphibians
The Animal Word – Why the Zoo Does Not Exist
Animalism
, The Prestige
and
The Anomaly
The Human Animal as Machine?
Animals Like Us? Korsgaard’s Values
Alice Crary
– Inside Ethics
Subjectivity and Objectivity – Why We Aren’t Strangers in Nature
The New Enlightenment in the Age of Living Beings
Kant’s Four Questions – Being Human is an Answer to a Question
The Human Being as the Animal Who Doesn’t Want to be One
Notes
Part II: Social Freedom and the Meaning of Life
The Basic Idea of Liberal Pluralism
The History of Life
The Idea of Life
To Live and to Survive – The Basic Form of Human Society
Do We Want to Live Forever?
The Meaning
in
Life
The Meaning of Life is Not Nonsense
Nonsense is Sense-Deprivation
Limits of Liberal Pluralism?
Who We Are and Who We Want to Be – Radical Autonomy and the New Enlightenment
Social Freedom and the Meaning of Life
Why Science Has Not Discovered That Life Has No Meaning
From Mind Back to Nature
Notes
Part III: Towards an Ethics of Not-Knowing
Nature, Environment, Universe
In-Itself and For-Itself …
Is Science Fiction?
Limits of Scientific Knowledge
Otherness – Towards an Ecological Ethics
Under-Complex, Complex, Hyper-Complex
Homo sapiens,
or, The Wise Words of Socrates
Opinions, Knowledge and the Idea of the Good
Moral Reality and Ethical Facts
Not-Knowing
Towards an Ethics of Not-Knowing
Notes
Acknowledgments
Glossary
Index
End User License Agreement
Guide
Cover
Table of Contents
Begin Reading
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The Human Animal
Why We Still Don’t Fit into Nature
Markus Gabriel
Translated by Karl von der Luft
polity
Copyright Page
First published in German as Der Mensch als Tier. Warum wir trotzdem nicht in die Natur passen © by Ullstein Buchverlage GmbH, Berlin. Published in 2022 by Ullstein Verlag
This English edition © Polity Press, 2024
Excerpt from The Poetry of Rilke: Bilingual Edition by Rainer Maria Rilke, translated and edited by Edward Snow. Translation copyright © 2009 by Edward Snow. Reprinted by permission of Farrar, Straus and Giroux. All Rights Reserved.
Polity Press
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All rights reserved. Except for the quotation of short passages for the purpose of criticism and review, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of the publisher.
ISBN-13: 978-1-5095-5803-2
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
Library of Congress Control Number: 2024934655
by Fakenham Prepress Solutions, Fakenham, Norfolk NR21 8NL
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Dedication
For Leona Maya
You outshine logic with life.
Epigraph
and the sly animals see at once
how little at home we are
in the interpreted world.*
Rainer Maria Rilke
Notes
*
Excerpt from the “First Elegy,” trans. Edward Snow, in
The Poetry of Rilke: Bilingual Edition
(New York: North Point Press, 2011)
Introduction
We find ourselves in a complex crisis scenario. Our habitat, our natural environment as human beings, is threatening to collapse in plain view under the pressure of our modern way of life. Thanks to science and technology, we have rapidly improved our survival conditions. But, by the same means, we have made them worse even more rapidly – a dilemma that is exacerbated with every contemporary crisis.
In the meantime, the civilizational model of modernity, which consists of bringing the resource problems of the survival of our species under control through science and technology, has brought us to the brink of self-extermination. Our instruments of natural and social domination (nuclear power, automobiles, airplanes, smartphones, artificial intelligence, weapons systems, the internet, etc.) are turning against us. It is almost paradoxical. Our technological knowledge, thanks to which we have the internet, AI and social networks, is also the reason why fake news, propaganda and conspiracy ideologies are spreading like wildfire. Through automobiles, airplanes and our fossil fuel way of life, we are better connected than ever and able to interact with spatially distant cultures and people. And yet through these same means we are also destroying our shared environment and our sense of a shared reality.
It is pointless to try to cope with the complex crisis situation of late modernity in which we find ourselves by doing more of the same.1 What we need instead is a reorientation of our image of the human being and our place in nature. That is what this book is about.
Its point of departure is a radicalization of the insight that we humans are animals. The French philosopher Corine Pelluchon has sharpened this point in a series of books with the concrete demand for a new New Enlightenment, at the center of which stands the human animal.2
This New Enlightenment, to which in the meantime many global thought leaders on all continents are committed,3 starts not with reason in general but, rather, with our nature. It is essential to bring ourselves as minded living beings, i.e. as whole human beings, back into the center. We have unjustly distanced ourselves from this center in favor of a mechanistic conception of the world as a structure that can ultimately be controlled and predicted.
This, in turn, raises an old question that we have to ask ourselves again: What does it actually mean to regard humans as animals?
This question is so important because our self-image as animals makes a significant contribution to the socio-political steering mechanisms of the present and future. We can easily see this in the way we deal with pandemics and other natural disasters: disease and (human-induced) climate change are perceived as evils that can be avoided in principle, problems which should be technically remedied as quickly as possible. This has not been achieved in the case of SARS-CoV-2, let alone in the case of climate change. So far, we’ve handled both almost exclusively reactively rather than proactively.
Our prognostic models and approaches to solutions fail because of the challenge we face as animals that can never entirely figure out, let alone technically control, their ecological niche. We must therefore free ourselves of the illusion that our guidelines for the time of crisis and catastrophe in which we find ourselves can be obtained merely through yet another combination of science, technology, economics and politics. The daily shifting of the boundaries of knowledge does not consist in the fact that we approach omniscience. We are always learning more about what we don’t know through scientific progress. (This applies to all disciplines, including the humanities and social sciences.) There is no such thing as omniscience. And there is also no meaningful way technocratically to manage the conditions of human survival in complex systems. Life cannot be contained, nor can it be predicted. The recent virus pandemic with its many variants demonstrates this impressively. We only ever know excerpts of our own form of life. The human animal cannot be overcome by technology. Homo Deus, which the famous historian Yuval Noah Harari envisages as the human of the future in his book of the same name, will never arrive.
In fact, this is precisely what was always known, from Socrates to the famous naturalist Carl Linnaeus, to whom we owe our species name Homo sapiens. Because we cannot completely comprehend ourselves, the self-models on which we depend are prone to error. Linnaeus defines the human being by its capacity to form an image of itself. The entry Homo, which Linnaeus assigns to the primates in his system of nature (thereby clearly locating the human being in the animal kingdom), is supplemented by the characteristic of the capacity for wisdom, sapientia, which, according to him, is our summum attributum, our most excellent quality. The human being is defined in this way by the demand to know itself. And so next to the entry “Homo” in his system stands succinctly: nosce te ipsum, know thyself, with which Linnaeus alludes to Socrates. The motto and the task of philosophy is and remains, according to Socrates, “Know thyself (gnôthi sauton)” – a saying of the Delphic oracle, which Socrates associated with wisdom (sophia). Linnaeus merely translates this into Latin. Because they are committed to the love of wisdom, which is a possible translation of the Greek word philo-sophia, philosophers are sought after wherever the question arises of who we, human beings, are.
Philosophy is about self-knowledge. This includes insight into our freedom. As minded living beings, we are free; from this follows the value of autonomy, of responsible action. At present this value is also coming under pressure in the heart of Europe, and elsewhere in the so-called free world. In order to place values such as freedom, equality and solidarity in an appropriate relationship, and thus to regain confidence in the problem-solving competence of liberal democracy, humans as free, minded living beings must once again be brought to the center of society. Freedom is thereby always also social freedom. For we are prosocial creatures, who can do nothing without doing so in association with others. Freedom and society, individual and collective, do not contradict each other. We are not freer when we are alone, for we simply cannot do most of what interests us as human beings without others. Freedom is something we realize together, not something that positions us against each other.
There is much that you and I have in common. At the very least, we share the quality of being human. Therewith we have much else in common. We have desires, hopes and anxieties, and we are embodied as finite, transient living beings. We belong to nature. Modern physics teaches that there are forces and natural laws which determine everything material. Insofar as we are material, embodied as animals, we are no exception to this. Modern biology and human medicine have also shown us that our bodies are “animal”4 on an elementary level and share many basic structures with other living beings.
All living things known to us consist of cells (or, like unicellular organisms, they are identical with a single cell). These in turn consist of building blocks that can be investigated biochemically and physically. These are the issues addressed by what are now known as the life sciences (medicine, biochemistry, molecular biology, bioinformatics, genetics, pharmacology, zoology, nutritional science, neuroscience, etc.), whose subject matter consists of processes and structures of living beings.
In the course of modernity, discoveries about the behavior of humans and other living beings have been added to physics and the life sciences, and today these are being researched in behavioral sciences such as psychology, cognitive science, behavioral economics and sociobiology. It turns out that we as human beings are to a certain extent decipherable and thus controllable on various levels of our existence (from the cell to social formations such as the family, friend group, or even an entire society). Many of the countless decisions we consciously and unconsciously make every day (when we eat breakfast; whom we date; for how long we wash our hands; on which side of the street we walk; whether we fall asleep on our stomach or on our back, etc.) can be scientifically explained by discerning more or less general patterns in them.
The human being is thus accessible from the third-person standpoint,5 as it is called in philosophy; we are an object of natural- and social-scientific research, one object of research among others. The title of this book alludes to this dimension of being human: The Human Animal.
But that is not the end of the story. For in spite of the above-mentioned modern natural-, life- and behavioral-scientific discoveries about the human being as an animal, we feel that we nevertheless do not fit into nature. The human being is not just an animal. The subtitle of the book alludes to this.
We are not just natural phenomena, which one can deduce from the fact that we explain natural phenomena. The explanation of natural phenomena and so also of those aspects of our life which are irrational is, after all, not itself irrational.
This has also been pointed out recently by the famous cognitive scientist Steven Pinker, who reminds us that logic, mathematics and critical thinking are rational and were also used by our ancestors to hunt, feed themselves, and build a stable relationship over thousands of years with other groups of people and the shared environment. Human beings are and remain fundamentally rational, which does not mean that they are error-free, as the findings of modern behavioral research, psychology, and so on, demonstrate. However, to conclude from these findings that we are unfortunately not rational after all – a conclusion that would itself be rational – is not justified.6
Even if we have discovered in the modern age that the ‘animal in us’ is controlled by non-rational impulses, instincts, processes and forces, this cannot generalize to our existence in its entirety. Otherwise, this would also apply to scientific explanation itself. Thus, on the one hand, we know that our decisions are based on cognitive biases as well as on “noise,” that is, on decision-making principles that are arrived at according to irrational rules. On the other hand, this knowledge, this self-knowledge, is not subject to these very cognitive biases, since otherwise we would not be able to give rational information about the limits of our rationality. This knowledge of the limits of knowledge is rather objective, backed up by scientific methods; it is arrived at from the point of view of the third person, from the outside of our experience, as it were. In short: there is objective knowledge about us as objects and subjects.
Evolutionary theory, psychology, sociology and behavioral research, and above all behavioral economics, have indeed shown how much our thinking and our individual and collective actions are determined by forces and lawful regularities that we cannot completely control. At least since the international bestsellers of the psychologist and Nobel laureate Daniel Kahneman, it has become common knowledge that we are not quite as rational and reasonable as we like to think.7 Our impulses, desires and inner mental states are always also part of natural phenomena and are thus shaped by principles which we do not have in our hands. A part of ourselves, our ‘animality,’ seems simply to be controlled from the outside – by natural laws, by evolution, by society, and so on.
For example, we stubbornly persist in beliefs even when we already have information that contradicts them, which is called confirmation bias. The list of cognitive illusions or biases is long, and we all know that we have a perspective on social and natural reality that is by no means automatically correct and that we are therefore continually correcting. Still, we can correct our limitations in collaboration with others and by working on ourselves.
The fact that we can correct cognitive biases psychologically, social-scientifically and through everyday practices of decision-making, demonstrates that cognitive biases are not a natural necessity. We are and remain free, which is not changed by the fact that, because we can only ever perceive and think selectively, we can deceive ourselves.
The question as to what or who the human being is, is by no means finally answered. For we don’t know today wherein our consciousness or our rational mind consist, thanks to which we can consider ourselves as a natural phenomenon in the first place. There is not only the standpoint of the third person, the outside perspective on us, but there is also: us (i.e., for example, you and me). We share not only biochemical structures such as the human genome but also the fact that we are subjects, that is, that we each occupy our own first-person standpoint (subjectivity). This includes the reality of our feelings and thoughts and also our sensory perspective and our perception of reality. The riddle of being human cannot be solved purely objectively, from the standpoint of a third person. There is no external perspective on being human that we could take in order from there to gauge the meaning of life or to see that our life has no meaning at all.
Even the most objective natural scientist, say a consultant performing open heart surgery, has her subjective perspective on what is happening. The surgeon must, after all, see the heart she is operating on and be internally composed and professional while doing so, which involves a lot of training of her subjectivity. The historians of science Lorraine Daston and Peter Galison have impressively demonstrated in their book Objectivity that the history of objectivity consists in designing an ideal of behavior for the scientist in order to be able in this way to recognize natural phenomena as neutrally as possible.8 There is no objectivity without a subjectivity to match it; objectivity remains an ideal to which we aspire without ever fully achieving it in general.
This book aims at nothing less than examining the relationship between nature and mind on the basis of the human–animal interface. In the human animal, nature and mind join hands. I will call the self-investigation of human beings anthropology; if we consider ourselves as animals, we also speak of anthrozoology. Anthropology in that sense is not to be confused with the discipline we call anthropology. When in the following we deal with the human being as an animal, I am guided by confrontations with contemporary scientific findings as well as by contributions of contemporary philosophy.
The human being is the transdisciplinary theme per se. Who we are and who we want to be cannot be measured from the perspective of a single science or a single kind of science (such as the natural sciences). And the sciences that we promote as academic disciplines in teaching and research do not exhaust our humanity either. The arts, politics, common sense, the economy and the workplace, the media and our life experience are all, as human activities, also forms of human self-knowledge.
Against this background, the book addresses itself from a philosophical perspective to all who ask themselves in what being human and the meaning of life consist and how our knowledge society is compatible with the fact that we are presumably infinitely far from omniscience. Whether we like it or not, the complex crisis situation in which humanity finds itself in the twenty-first century demonstrates not only our knowledge (regarding the ecological crisis, for example) but also our ignorance and powerlessness. That is why we must rethink and adapt our actions to the new circumstances of this century, which also implies finally learning from those who were and are victims of the modern mania for control and destruction of nature. Human self-knowledge and rationality can take many forms from which we can learn, as Tyson Yunkaporta has shown in his remarkable book Sand Talk, in which he recommends the indigenous knowledge of the Aborigines (he himself is a member of the Apalech clan) as a dynamic model of dealing with complexity and crises.9
The thesis that the human being is the transdisciplinary theme per se, the theme which concerns us all, is thereby taken from the standpoint of the humanities [Geisteswissenschaften], which – as their German name quite rightly indicates – have the mind [Geist] as their subject and object. In this context, I evidently do not understand “mind” [Geist] to refer to a ghost or some relic of an allegedly past and vanquished metaphysical or religious thinking. Mind is, rather, the capacity in general to lead one’s life in the light of a conception of who or what one is. That we are minded living beings is the principal thesis of neo-existentialism.10
The human being is the animal par excellence: what we know about being an animal results from our self-investigation, because we have been interested in ‘animals’ for millennia mainly because it is unclear how humans and animals are related to each other. Thus, in thinking about ‘animals’, we are always also thinking about ourselves. Thanks to our self-understanding as animals, we are the prototype of animality. The concept of an animal, I will argue, says more about humans than it does about the ‘animals’ from which we have been distinguishing ourselves in a false way for millennia.11
Because, as animals, we are a part of nature, we are interwoven with other living beings, so our actions must always be considered ecologically, in the context of other living beings and our shared habitat, planet Earth. Who we are and who we want to be also shows us, then, what we should do or refrain from doing.12 In human self-knowledge what is and what ought to be join hands.
The currently operative view of humanity and its place in reality has reached its planetary limits. In the meantime, it is generally known and even acknowledged by economic ministers and leading economists that there are “limits to growth,” as the Club of Rome report on the state of humanity and the world economy stated as early as 1972, over fifty years ago now.13
We must overcome the idea that scientific-technological progress as a driver of purely quantitative economic growth can be decoupled from human and moral progress. This erroneous idea leads to the self-destruction of human beings. It is an expression of a disturbed self-relationship which needs to be figured out and overcome.
We express our self-relationship individually and collectively, as individuals and as a society, in the form of strong value judgments. Visions of the good life circulate in every society. Against this background, this book deals with the meaning of life. Because the human being is an ‘animal,’ but not only an ‘animal,’ the meaning of life is not exhausted in the individual and sociopolitical planning of our survival. Life is more than survival.
I will try to connect the liberal pluralism of individual forms of life – which I consider sustainable even in the twenty-first century – with the question of the meaning of life. Contemporary philosophy can help with this. The American philosopher Susan Wolf has suggested that liberal pluralism (“Each one should be blessed after his own fashion”) be regarded as a search for meaning in life. This can turn out different for everyone. However, it does not exclude the possibility that there is a meaning of life that we all share and on which liberal pluralism is based. The German Basic Law [Grundgesetz] expresses this with a strong commitment to human dignity, in which the Enlightenment tradition continues to have an impact. Reflection on our animality, on life and on its meaning has political consequences; it affects our understanding of ourselves as having dignity.
In the context of a New Enlightenment in the age of living beings,14 as Corine Pelluchon recently aptly described it, we can understand the meaning of life as our moral mission. This corresponds to the currently perceptible socio-ecological awakening, which is connected with the longing to find a new commonality among human beings in order to overcome the complex crisis situation in which we find ourselves. Following Tyson Yunkaporta, we can attach the same idea of a human mission to the fact that we are “custodians of reality.”15
The ecological transformation that humanity will inevitably have to undertake in this century will require a normative design for social change, and thus also for ethics. We can no longer rely on the false modern promise that the natural sciences and engineering, together with economists, will solve the fundamental political problems and thus relieve us of the actual normative decisions about who we are and want to be.
The self-understanding of human beings has political consequences. The palpable crisis of democracy observed by many sociologists and political scientists also stems from the fact that people demand more from politics than a clever distribution of resources. In times of crisis, what matters most is what is too uncritically called “communication.” Politicians should not only communicate their decisions cleverly in order to lull the population into a sense of security, but they should also justify their decisions and in this way make the value judgments they undertake explicit. For example, the people affected by the devastating floods in the Ahr Valley in Germany in the summer of 2021 (I happen to be from that region) demand not only that political decisions be communicated well in the aftermath of the disaster but that value-driven solutions be sought together. The reconstruction of this and other destroyed regions should be done in the light of ecologically sustainable models.
To modern science also belongs the realization of the limits of scientific knowledge. We know that there is a lot we do not know. The crisis situations in which we find ourselves also consist in the fact that we have to deal with complexity, uncertainty and not-knowing. This requires an ethics of not-knowing.
The underlying thought that runs through this book is the idea that, through self-investigation of our animality, we can learn to recognize nature within us and outside us as something profoundly alien that we both cannot and should not master. We can never fully decipher nature and bring it under our control. We human beings depend on natural processes that we cannot concretely begin to comprehend to the extent that we could establish a technocratic paradise on Earth. We must say goodbye to vain hopes such as the idea that we could colonize other planets (such as Mars) to begin anew, or the even more far-fetched fantasy that we could upload our consciousness as software to indestructible plastic bodies, as in the TV series Westworld. The Covid pandemic has palpably disclosed our vulnerability and social complexity to all of us.
Of course, complexity and vulnerability existed before the pandemic. But they were, so to speak, covered over “demo-bureaucratically” (Niklas Luhmann). That is, we were not aware of them because our healthcare system in particular functioned more or less smoothly for most people. The understanding that humans are vulnerable animals, subject to ecological transformations for which they are partly responsible, must always be inherent in politics. Since we are not only animals but also specifically minded living beings who possess ethical insight into moral contexts, anthropology, ethics and politics are inextricably intertwined in the human being.
To be sure, the New Enlightenment calls for us to use more scientific disciplines (above all including the humanities and social sciences on an equal footing with the natural-, life- and behavioral sciences) in order to develop an adequate self-portrait of the human being. Beyond this, however, it also calls for an ethics of not-knowing, based on the recognition of the fact that we are far from living in an age of complete knowledge and mastery of nature. The unquestionably impressive and in part desirable advances in knowledge and technology in the modern era must no longer obscure the fact that there is an indeterminate, perhaps even infinite, amount of facts that we do not know and will never know. However great our knowledge of nature is, our not-knowing is even greater (which we even know today, since it has become clear that the observable universe consists of 95 percent dark matter and dark energy, which we cannot directly explore experimentally). Reality exceeds our knowledge claims. This is not mere conjecture, but something we know. So we do really know that there is a lot that we do not know.
As we shall see, Socrates was right, though he did not say that we know nothing but, rather, that we can become aware that we do not know many things. Socrates’ wisdom is a form of knowledge, not a skeptical cult of ignorance. The human being as an animal can become aware of its own not-knowing. This is what Socrates called wisdom. And in this Carl Linnaeus followed him with his famous definition of the human being as Homo sapiens. For the Latin sapiens means “capable of wisdom,” not “wise.” The human being, as a minded living being, is the philosophical animal that can historically change both itself and non-human reality by forming an image of itself. So let us set out together to explore our humanity and animality, the meaning of life, and the depths of our not-knowing!
Notes
1
An earlier version of the first pages of this introduction first appeared in the
Neue Zürcher Zeitung
on 9 July 2021. On the concept of modernity and the diagnosis of the current complex crisis scenarios as “late modern,” see Andreas Reckwitz and Hartmut Rosa,
Spätmoderne in der Krise: Was leistet die Gesellschaftstheorie
(Berlin: Suhrkamp, 2021).
2
See in particular Corine Pelluchon,
Das Zeitalter des Lebendigen: Eine neue Philosophie der Aufklärung
(Darmstadt: wbg Academic, 2021).
3
In the following, I will not use grammatical genders throughout, but will vary them. In doing so, I am not expressing any opinion on the extent to which gender-neutral language is an ethically appropriate way to counteract the various forms of discrimination to which people are exposed on the basis of their gender and other factors of their humanity. Where it has been chosen, the choice of the generic masculine is only grammatically motivated, without this motivation implying that I want others or even the “English language” to adhere to this convention. In the examples and where more recent gender conventions are used, I try to balance out the use of the generic masculine (and feminine, which I also use from time to time) in order to counteract stereotypes that implicitly or even explicitly classify certain activities, professions, etc., as ‘male’ or ‘female,’ not least of which is the word “philosopher,” whose genus has been associated with ‘men’ for far too long.
4
In the book, single quotation marks signal a distancing. When I write ‘male,’ ‘female,’ ‘animal’ or ‘society,’ for example, I am distancing myself from the idea that ‘out there,’ ‘in reality,’ there is something that many people associate with these terms.
5
The expressions in bold are cornerstones of my thought process in this book. You can look up their meaning or definition in the glossary.
6
See Steven Pinker,
Rationality: What It Is. Why It Seems Scarce. Why It Matters
(London and New York: Random House, 2021).
7
Daniel Kahneman,
Thinking Fast and Slow
(New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2021), and also Daniel Kahneman, Olivier Sibony and Cass R. Sunstein,
Noise: A Flaw in Human Judgment
(Boston: Little, Brown, 2022).
8
Lorraine Daston and Peter Galison,
Objectivity
(New York: Zone Books, 2010).
9
See Tyson Yunkaporta,
Sand Talk: How Indigenous Thinking Can Save the World
(New York: Harper, 2020). See also similar reflections in Bayo Akomolafe,
These Wilds beyond Our Fences: Letters to My Daughter on Humanity’s Search for Home
(Berkeley, CA: North Atlantic Books, 2017).
10
See Markus Gabriel,
I am Not a Brain: Philosophy of Mind for the Twenty-First Century
(Cambridge: Polity, 2017), as well as Markus Gabriel,
Neo-Existentialism
(Cambridge: Polity, 2018), with contributions by Jocelyn Benoist, Andrea Kern, Jocelyn Maclure and Charles Taylor.
11
A further note: passages in italic type contain key statements.
12
And it is on this very basis, as described in Reckwitz and Rosa,
Spätmoderne in der Krise
, and proceeding from the anthropology of the Canadian philosopher Charles Taylor, that the authors derive a normative framework of social theory, thus avoiding
sociologism
, i.e. the thesis that sociology can only ever describe social, evaluative reality in a value-free way and has thus discovered that, in reality, there are no objective values but only the positings of subjects. “I would exclude these two phenomena, that interpretation must be interpreted and that interpretation implies values, from historicization and declare them to be universal: acting human beings are always and everywhere self-interpreting beings who orient themselves on the basis of a map of strong valuations” (p. 278).
13
Donella Meadows, Dennis Meadows, Jørgen Randers et al.,
The Limits to Growth: A Report for the Club of Rome’s Project on the Predicament of Mankind
(New York: Universe Books, 1972).
14
This is the original French title (
Les Lumières à l’âge du vivant
) of Corine Pelluchon’s
Das Zeitalter des Lebendigen
.
15
Yunkaporta,
Sand Talk
.
PART IWE AND THE OTHER ANIMALS
… the same incomprehensibility, as to how connection is possible between matter and mind, continues to oppress us ….
We leave behind man, as evidently the most devious problem of all philosophy …
Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph Schelling
Since time immemorial, human beings have been concerned with the question of who or what they actually are. In order to give an answer to this question, we have to distinguish ourselves from something else. For to define something is to distinguish it from something other. So one of the oldest known definitions of human beings is that we are animals gifted with reason and language. The human being, according to Aristotle, is the zôon logon echon, the creature that has logos (language, reason), which in Latin became the animal rationale, the rational animal.2
Before we take a closer look at this feature of language and rationality that is supposed to distinguish the human being, it is important to note that the oldest known self-definition of humanity, thus the oldest anthropology, already determines the human being as a living being or as an animal, as zôon or as animal. Already before Aristotle, in the phases of humanity’s mythological consciousness, the human being is classified by itself as somehow part of the animal kingdom.
The biblical picture of humanity is an exception to this, as it strongly separates humans and animals from each other. Only the human being, as the image of God, is an outstanding inhabitant of paradise. Admittedly he is regarded as the inhabitant of a garden, as a part of nature, yet not only as the crown of creation – just think of the story of Noah’s ark – but also as the being who is responsible for the animals.
As a first observation, we can state that humanity has been conceived as a living being or as an animal long before the insights of evolutionary theory and the rapidly progressing differentiation of the life sciences (medicine, biochemistry, molecular biology, biocomputing, genetics, pharmacology, zoology, dietetics, neuroscience, etc.) that followed. Indeed, it is the default situation in human intellectual history for humanity to define itself as an animal.
Over millennia, the self-image of humanity has developed mainly because we have changed our image of animals. Through the progress of natural sciences and technology in modernity we have recognized how complex natural history is. In the nineteenth century, especially in the wake of the Darwinian revolution, we gained the insight that the manifold forms of life and thus also animal species are subject to processes of natural selection. Insofar as we are animals, we adapt to our environment on the different levels of our life, which we of course always shape at the same time. Nature, to which we belong, is not a static container but something that we change through our life processes. And today we know that this nature to which we are adapted has been modified for billions of years by life processes of other life forms, e.g. by the cyanobacteria that have been producing oxygen in the atmosphere over millions of years.
In the nineteenth century, alongside the pioneering theory of evolution, the view also prevailed that we understand our animality as something that is alien to us and that is beyond our conscious control. The then newly emerging sciences of biology, psychology and psychiatry held up a mirror to us, in which we didn’t see just mere rational actors (who react and act with consistent rationality) but also animals.
The impressive findings in the life sciences over the last two centuries have led us to believe that we are puppets of our life processes. So it is common today to believe that our genes, our instincts, our neuron circuits, or our biologically determined personality controls our decisions. For example, the renowned neuroscientist Eric Kandel, who was awarded the Nobel Prize, believes that what Freud called the unconscious can now be understood as an evolutionary inheritance using life-science methods.3 According to this view, it is not just that we are not “masters of our own house,”4 of the life of our own psyche, as Freud speculated, but we are even strangers in our own body, which produces our conscious experience, our ego, at best as a control center, in order in the ideal case to adapt even better to the environment.
We should note that Freud only apparently dethroned the human being. He only identifies the famous Id with the ‘animal in us,’ as it were, and beyond that attributes a complete psychic apparatus to us human beings. Although, like Darwin, Freud wants to include us in the “animal series,”5 he thinks that the other animals hardly have what he calls the Ego, not to mention the Superego. Freud’s conception of our psychic apparatus follows the model of demarcating the animal in us (the Id) from our rationality (the Ego and the Superego), which in his eyes, of course, is constantly disturbed by our being animals, by our drives, which is why he famously conjectured that our civilization is characterized by discontent.6
The history of our picture of nature, the body, animals and humans, which I can only touch on here, shows that, on the one hand, it is normal for humans to define themselves as animals but that, on the other, the image of humanity also varies with the respective formulation of the concept of an animal. The interdisciplinary field of research, recently characterized as Animal Studies and Anthrozoology, deals with exactly this topic. Depending on what we represent as an “animal,” our image of ourselves, i.e. our image of humanity, changes, and this in turn has ethical consequences. If, for example, one rightly insists that we need an animal ethics but then essentially thinks only of mammals and ignores insects because the concept of an animal is not understood sufficiently broadly, one will act quite differently than if, conversely, one considers almost all self-moving, non-plant forms of life (perhaps even bacteria) already to be animals with which one must deal ethically.
The sentence “The human being is an animal” accordingly needs more exact consideration – and that’s what we’re about in this part of the book. For it is decisive in the first place what we understand by “living being” or “animal” when we classify ourselves in this way as a natural phenomenon. And, moreover, it is at least as important to think more exactly about the further characteristic by which we differ from the other living beings or animals with which, as we say, we share our animal being or animality.
The Logical Animal – How Humans Became Animals
The history of logic is decisively pushed ahead by the self-definition of the human being as animal rationale. As mentioned, Aristotle defines the human being as the living being that has logos, from which the idea of logic is derived.
Logic is the basic discipline of philosophy, whose object is rational thinking itself. It is concerned with the question of how we think correctly (i.e. rationally), i.e. how we ought to think, and its form of implementation is thinking about thinking. The point of Aristotle’s definition of the human being as an animal with logos is that this also makes us a logical animal: to have a logos means to be able explicitly to distinguish oneself from other things, i.e. to have knowledge about oneself and other beings.
Since Aristotle, logic teaches that the textbook case of a definition consists precisely in the fact that one first has to define a genus (Greek genos, Latin genus) to which something belongs in order to distinguish it further from other species (Greek eidê, Latin species). The origin of the scientific division of living things into genera and species is the logic of the ancient Greeks.
Since the ancient Greeks, the phylogenetic tree of life has been thought to be grounded in a supreme genus represented by divine living beings, which the human being is supposed to imitate in order to become like them. In this tradition, the order of genus and species is considered a hierarchy: the higher something is in the hierarchy, the closer it is said to be to the top of the value order, to the perfect being or to the good. Incidentally, hierarchy literally means “sacred order,” and the idea comes especially from angelology, i.e. from the late antique and then medieval discussion of how the human being relates to angels and ultimately to God as the source of all being and thought. The classic in this field is the writing De coelesti hierarchia by the so-called Pseudo-Dionysius of Areopagita. It dates from the fifth or sixth century and investigates the order of the angels. The author of this writing, whose true identity is unknown, coined the concept of hierarchy, which thus always exhibits a theological dimension. For thousands of years, humanity has defined itself not only in contrast to the animal (or to the other animals) but also in contrast to divine beings.
Even today, this aspect should not be brushed aside with the naïve reference to a widespread secular view of humanity, which regards us as a more or less normal element in the series of natural phenomena. For, even in our times, many if not most people believe that we occupy a privileged position in the animal kingdom and even that we have an immortal soul or that we will be reborn, that we therefore are in no way identical with our animal bodies, which perhaps will one day be able to be described completely in the language of today’s life sciences.
The concept ‘animal,’ which divides the realm of living things into genera and species, is therefore by no means value-neutral, as illustrated by its historical origin, its genealogy. Rather, from the outset it contains valuations which obtain on different levels. For example, it distinguishes between normal exemplars of a species and their deviations, so that the concepts of human being, lion, pigeon, etc., are understood as normal forms from which deficient exemplars deviate – a view that is rightly criticized by theories of gender or within more recent disability studies.
The Greek philosophers basically assumed that the fundamental principles of the order of reality are in their essence more powerful and also better than that which depends on these principles. Thus, for example, elements such as water, fire and air were placed at the top of the order of being as fundamental, while the individual things found in nature were conceived as manifestations of a deeper structure of fundamental elements that is more powerful than we are. This still reverberates today in the thought that the laws of nature, like divine laws, dictate what can happen. In the end, nothing and nobody could escape the force of gravity. The Greek concept of a principle (archē) means not only beginning but also empire. Life-scientific concepts of order and ideas of power are traditionally narrowly connected. This is still deeply inscribed in our thinking up to today, e.g. when we understand ourselves as the product of evolution and think that we are at the top of development, at any rate in a negative sense, as we hold that nature as a whole depends on how we live.
What distinguishes a species from all other species within the same genus is generally called thespecific difference. Here, we are interested in a specific specific difference (a typical philosophical nesting, not a printing error): theanthropological difference. It consists in how and in what humans differ from other living beings.7
The point of departure in this part of the book is the idea that the human being turned itself into an animal as soon as it started to distinguish itself from other living beings in a specific way, i.e. by defining itself. The classical concept of defining something is to identify a specific difference of the thing in question that sets it apart from similar things in the same genus. In this way, a definition carves out a species from a genus. As you can see at a glance from this vocabulary, the very definition of a definition since antiquity has involved the concepts of genus and species, what Plato and Aristotle, the inventors of the concept of a definition called the genos and the eidos respectively.
By defining itself, the human being introduces the idea that it is an animal plus something else (say, for example: language, reason, mind, immortal soul). To be human thus means to be a particular animal, an animal that is special in virtue of a specific something. The human being is an animal in light of the fact that it conceives itself as one. To paraphrase a dictum of the great existentialist philosopher Simone de Beauvoir, one might say that the human being is not born but, rather, becomes animal.8
To be sure, we do not first have to become living beings but are already human in some sense during our development in the womb, because we have a typical human DNA, which enables developmental steps that are first carried out in the womb and thereafter in larger communities. This expresses our biologically describable form of life. Whether this can be determined on the basis of a cell structure or a time scale that determines from when exactly a fertilized egg cell becomes a human being is a difficult and ethically significant question that I do not wish to pursue here. The only thing that is certain is that we are human beings many months before we are born, so that being human is not something that can first be learned and which we can therefore also fail at. Our humanity is inalienable and cannot be lost. On the other hand, our being an animal, i.e. our conception of ourselves as animals, is historically contingent. That means other conceptions of the human being were and are possible.9 For each conception of the human being as animal depends both on a specific concept of animal and on a specific concept of the specific something that accounts for the difference between us and the other animals.
The Specific Something
The human being is not born as an animal, nor does it develop into an animal in the womb in order to become part of a culturally and mentally formed human society through social training. Rather, as soon as a human being is a living being at all (again: starting in the womb), it is already a human being in the full sense. Thus, a human being doesn’t come into the world as biological hardware on which a cultural software has to be installed through education. Accordingly, human dignity is bound solely to being a human being and not to any other condition – such as the development of special abilities and higher capabilities. Everybody who comes into being by way of the usual evolutionary channel of sexual reproduction for living beings like us is a human (and has therefore grown in a mother’s womb for some time; at least, this is still state of the art).
In this respect, one can already see a shortcoming in Aristotle’s classical definition of the human being as distinguished from the other animals by the features of reason and political organization (which, along with reason, he considered characteristic).10 For many human beings (certainly those in the womb) are in his sense neither rational nor political animals. Aristotle’s definition of the human being therefore leaves out too many of us. Nor does any other traditional view of the human as animal cover humanity. No attempt to hit on the essence of the human being by way of identifying an outstanding feature, a definiens of humanity that clearly distinguishes us from all other animals, has ever been successful.
The human being is not in itself an animal but becomes one through its self-definition. In the context of answering the question who or what we are, the human being separates off a part of itself – animality. This separation is the origin of the erroneous concept of an animal kingdom, from which the human being stands out by special characteristics, by its specific difference.
By defining itself, the human being distinguishes itself from other animals. It understands itself as animal plus something. According to this logic, the specific something that distinguishes us must be missing in the other animals, because otherwise we would not have properly distinguished ourselves from them. This then means that other animals are humans minus something. They lack what we have got (even though they have their own specific something).
The real difficulty here is not, as many today believe, that there is in fact no special characteristic of being human (on the contrary, there are quite a few such characteristics) but, rather, that we identify in ourselves a core of being animal, the concept of animality. We share this animality with the other animals and yet we are supposed to distinguish ourselves from them by that specific something. But what exactly is the animality we are supposed to share with the other animals if our concept of an animal is that of a human minus our specific something? How can we share such a deficiency with other animals?
If the specific something consists in language and rationality, which the other animals lack per definitionem, then our own animality must also lack these capacities. The ‘animal in us’ therefore appears as an irrational part of the soul, a notion explicitly advocated by Plato, Aristotle’s teacher, and prominent until today’s idea that our bodies have evolutionarily old, irrational, purely animal parts (such as the amygdala, a part of our brain associated with certain instincts of flight when confronted with physical danger).
Animality is defined by the self-definition of the human being on its own part. For we delimit it in the self-definition from our specific something. But this means that the animality by which we define ourselves in this way is already deficient, i.e. it represents a lack, as it is not the whole human being. In short, the concept ‘animal’ that we obtain through the self-definition of the human being as animal plus something generates the idea of an animal kingdom to which all animals belong in the same way, but which are also distinguished from it by specific characteristics. Thus we project a part of our self-definition, our deficient animality, onto the other living beings. In contrast to the human animal, the animal-animals are defined, so to speak, as deficient entities, which lack that which distinguishes us. This is a consequence of our traditional self-conception as animals and not, as some believe, an artifact of a modern conception of rationality.
In a second step the concept of our own animality already contains an implicit or explicit valuation. For that which distinguishes and defines the human being has been regarded for millennia not only as a quality we have but as a special source of value. And quite rightly, for it is true that we humans are qualified for a special kind of moral reflection, i.e. for ethics.
In general, ethicscan be understood as a sub-discipline of philosophy that deals with the question of what we should do or refrain from doing insofar as we are human beings.11
Because we are capable of insight into the foundations of our actions and are able to define what we are like as human beings, we are also able to change. How we define ourselves as human beings helps determine who we are. Philosophical anthropology (any attempt to answer the question concerning our essence or nature as human animals) is a crucial source of value knowledge. We are human beings even without a definition, so our human dignity does not hinge on any definition or image of humanity. However, there are images of humanity that cast doubt on our human dignity or dehumanize people, which is why it is important critically to observe how exactly people distinguish themselves from other things or living beings. Our self-conception as animals reveals elements of our value system.
The American psychologist Barry Schwartz puts it in a nutshell when he states in his booklet Why We Work:
Ideas or theories about human nature have a unique place in the sciences. We don’t have to worry that the cosmos will be changed by our theories about the cosmos. The planets really don’t care what we think or how we theorize about them. But we do have to worry that human nature will be changed by our theories of human nature. … [I]t is human nature to have a human nature that is very much the product of the society that surrounds us.12
So it is absolutely true that we humans have a special responsibility for ourselves and other living beings. While lions do not consider becoming vegetarians, and chimpanzees do not work to establish gender justice by institutionally implementing the legitimate concerns of feminism, we humans are capable of such fundamental revisions of our social systems and, so too, of moral progress. We are therefore not only the problem that fuels climate change and environmental degradation, as many climate activists and anthropological pessimists believe, but the only solution that can save us. The other living beings will not work on their CO2 emissions or change their consumption habits. It is in our hands, and it is our responsibility to revise our view of nature, animals and human beings if we are to succeed in working together to ensure that as many people as possible on this planet can lead a life worthy of human beings in this highly industrialized, globally networked, technological modern age. Despite all modern progress, we are still far away from this goal, whereby we must always keep in mind that modern advances, which freed millions from extreme poverty, have also brought about climate change, environmental destruction and weapons of mass destruction, and thus new forms of poverty in the modern age in the first place. Modern famines are also the results of modern scientific and technological progress and global supply chains, which are closely intertwined with neoliberal ideas that global trade somehow provides for humane progress by itself, which is simply wrong, as recently proven once again by Russia’s brutal war of aggression against Ukraine. Global trade, unfortunately, does not automatically lead to eternal peace.
Our ability to be ethical does not raise us above the other living beings. It does not establish a claim to leadership or power on planet Earth but is at most the basis for us to deal responsibly with one another and with other living beings who share our habitat, i.e. the surface of planet Earth, with us.
