On Human Nature

by Roger Scruton

  There is also the division that separates merely conscious creatures from self-conscious creatures like us. Only the second have a genuine “first-person” perspective, from which to distinguish how things seem to me from how they seem to you. Creatures with “I” thoughts have an ability to relate to others of their kind that sets them apart from the rest of nature, and many thinkers (Kant, Fichte, and Hegel preeminently) believe that it is this fact, not the fact of consciousness per se, that creates or reveals the central mysteries of the human condition. Although dogs are conscious, they do not reflect on their own consciousness as we do: they live, as Schopenhauer put it, in “a world of perception,” their thoughts and desires turned outward to the perceivable world.

  I have tried to illustrate the way in which, in order to construct vivid biological explanations of our mental life, we are tempted to read back into the biology all the things that it ought to be trying to explain. To aim for a plausible theory of human nature we must first of all resist that temptation. And we must be prepared to admit that such laws of species-being as we have established—the laws of genetics and the functional account of inherited characteristics—are not yet adequate either to describe or to explain our normal behavior. They fall short of the target, for the very reason that what we are is not the thing that they assume us to be. We are animals certainly; but we are also incarnate persons, with cognitive capacities that are not shared by other animals and which endow us with an entirely distinctive emotional life—one dependent on the self-conscious thought processes that are unique to our kind.

  THE EMBODIED PERSON

  This returns us to the problem of the relation between the human animal and the person. This problem, as I see it, is not biological but philosophical. I can make only a tentative suggestion in response to it—a suggestion that has something in common with what Aristotle meant when he described the soul as the form of the body and with what Aquinas meant when he argued that, while we are individuated through our bodies, what is individuated thereby is not the body but the person.39 I would suggest that we understand the person as an emergent entity, rooted in the human being but belonging to another order of explanation than that explored by biology.

  An analogy might help. When painters apply paint to canvas they create physical objects by purely physical means. Any such object is composed of areas and lines of paint, arranged on a surface that we can regard, for the sake of argument, as two-dimensional. When we look at the surface of the painting, we see those areas and lines of paint and also the surface that contains them. But that is not all we see. We also see—for example—a face that looks out at us with smiling eyes. In one sense the face is a property of the canvas, over and above the blobs of paint; for you can observe the blobs and not see the face, and vice versa. And the face is really there: someone who does not see it is not seeing correctly. On the other hand, there is a sense in which the face is not an additional property of the canvas, over and above the lines and blobs. For as soon as the lines and blobs are there, so is the face. Nothing more needs to be added in order to generate the face—and if nothing more needs to be added, the face is surely nothing more. Moreover, every process that produces just these blobs of paint, arranged in just this way, will produce just this face—even if the artist is unaware of the face. (Imagine how you would design a machine for producing Mona Lisas.)

  Maybe personhood is an “emergent” feature of the organism in that way: not something over and above the life and behavior in which we observe it but not reducible to them either. Personhood emerges when it is possible to relate to an organism in a new way—the way of personal relations. (In like manner we can relate to a figurative picture in ways that we cannot relate to something that we see merely as a distribution of pigments.) With this new order of relation comes a new order of explanation, in which reasons and meanings, rather than causes, are sought in answer to the question “Why?” With persons we are in dialogue: we call upon them to justify their conduct in our eyes, as we must justify our conduct in theirs. Central to this dialogue are concepts of freedom, choice, and accountability, and these concepts have no place in the description of animal behavior, just as the concept of a human being has no place in the description of the physical makeup of a picture, even though it is a picture in which a human being can be seen.

  There is another thought that is helpful in describing the relation between persons and their bodies, a thought first given prominence by Kant and thereafter emphasized by Fichte, Hegel, Schopenhauer, and a whole stream of thinkers down to Heidegger, Sartre, and Thomas Nagel. As a self-conscious subject I have a point of view on the world. The world seems a certain way to me, and this “seeming” defines my unique perspective. Every self-conscious being has such a perspective, since that is what it means to be a subject of consciousness. When I give a scientific account of the world, however, I am describing objects only. I am describing the way things are and the causal laws that govern them. This description is given from no particular perspective. It does not contain words such as here, now, and I; and while it is meant to explain the way things seem, it does so by giving a theory of how they are. In short, the subject is in principle unobservable to science, not because it exists in another realm but because it is not part of the empirical world. It lies on the edge of things, like a horizon, and could never be grasped “from the other side,” the side of subjectivity itself. Is it a real part of the real world? The question is surely wrongly phrased, since it misconstrues the deep grammar of self-reference and of the reflexive pronoun. When I refer to myself I am not referring to another object that is, as it were, hidden in the lining of the observable Roger Scruton. Self-reference is not reference to a Cartesian self but reference to this thing, the thing that I am, namely, an object with a subjective view.

  We are not entitled to reify the “self” as a distinct object of reference. Nor can we accept—given the force of Wittgenstein’s antiprivate language argument—that our mental states exhibit publicly inaccessible features that somehow define what they really and essentially are.40 Nevertheless, it is still the case that self-reference radically affects the way in which people relate to one another. Once in place, self-attribution and self-reference become the primary avenues to what we think, intend, and are. They permit us to relate to each other as subjects and not as objects only; and that is what lies at the heart of those ideas for which Nietzsche gave his pseudo-scientific genealogy: ideas of responsibility, accountability, guilt, praise, and blame. By relating to Jill in this way, I come face-to-face with her: her essential being as a person “emerges” from her bodily reality, in the way that the face emerges from the colored blobs on the canvas.

  INTENTIONALITY

  In a series of books and essays Daniel Dennett has argued for the view that human beings are “intentional systems”—organisms that exhibit intentional states that are systematically connected.41 The behavior of intentional systems can be explained or predicted by attributing “propositional attitudes”: by describing them as both representing the world and seeking to change it. Not all intentional systems are human: Some animals exhibit intentional states; maybe computers, when sophisticated in the way that Turing foretold, can exhibit them too. Dennett himself takes an easygoing attitude, allowing anything to be an intentional system if our treating it as such gives us some ability to predict its behavior—so that even a thermostat is an intentional system in Dennett’s view.42 His motive in taking this line is to make way for a “genealogy” of intentionality, building toward “aboutness” from simple feedback mechanisms that operate unmysteriously in the ordinary physical world. But it is not necessary to follow Dennett in this. Whatever the genealogy of the intentional, we must recognize the very real difference that exists between behavior that is caused by and expressive of an intentional state and behavior that is not.

  Brentano’s original insight has been taken by subsequent philosophy to imply that an intentional state is founded on a reference that may fai
l or a thought that may be false.43 We can attribute such a state only where there is the possibility of referential failure. Animals exhibit intentionality through their beliefs and desires; they may even exhibit the kind of nonpropositional intentionality in which an object is “before the mind” and mentally targeted—as when a dog barks at an intruder, whether or not an intruder is there. It is certainly true that we are intentional systems and that this is a feature of our biological organization. Our brains are not merely devices for mediating between stimulus and response but instruments that enable us to think about and perceive the world and which lead us at times to think about it and perceive it wrongly.

  In referring to the emergence of personality and self-consciousness, however, I am not referring only to this familiar feature of the human condition. I am referring, as Dennett has pointed out,44 to a higher level of intentionality, one that is only doubtfully exhibited by other animals and which has certainly not been simulated by a computer.

  A dog sees its owner as a living thing, capable of eye contact; but there is no place in its mental repertoire for the thought of its owner as a “subject of consciousness,” capable also of I-contact. By contrast, we humans respond to each other and to other animals as intentional systems, recognizing a distinction between how things are in the world and how they seem to other observers and adopting the “intentional stance” that Dennett again has emphasized in a series of books and essays.45 But once we admit the existence of the intentional stance—the stance that interprets the behavior of other creatures in terms of the propositional attitudes expressed in it—we must recognize a higher (because more conceptually complex) level of intentionality. Our attitude to a dog is toward a creature with beliefs and desires; our attitude toward a normal human being is toward a creature that attributes beliefs and desires to itself and to others and therefore to us.

  Recognizing that others take this perspective on us, we become accountable for what we think and do, and we try to understand and relate to one another as responsible subjects of consciousness, each of whom has a unique perspective that informs his or her thoughts and actions. By describing this personal perspective as an “emergent” feature of the organism I am offering no theory of its nature—anymore than I am offering a theory of pictures when I say that they emerge from the physical marks in which we see them. Rather, I am saying that at a certain level of complexity, a way of seeing others and ourselves becomes available to us and through this way of seeing we are confronted with another world than that described by evolutionary biology. This other world is the world in which we live—the Lebenswelt, to use Husserl’s term—the world of interpersonal attitudes.46

  EMERGENCE AND MATERIALISM

  Hard-line reductionists might respond in the following way: emergent properties, they might argue, are nothing “over and above” the physical properties in which we perceive them. The aspect of a picture, for example, emerges automatically when the shapes and colors are laid down on the canvas, and any other production of those same shapes and colors produces just that aspect. The aspect is “a mere appearance,” with no reality beyond that of the colored patches in which it is seen. Likewise with personality, which is nothing over and above the biological organization in which we perceive it, since all its features are generated by the biology of the body, and no other input is required.

  That response is in fact irrelevant. For the argument concerns what Hegel would call a “transition from quantity to quality.” Incremental additions of colored patches to a canvas at a certain point produce a human face: and we are presented with the experience that Wittgenstein describes as “the dawning of an aspect.”47 From this point on we do not merely see the picture differently: we respond to it in another way. We find reasons for the disposition of colored patches that could not have been pertinent before; and we make a distinction between those who understand the picture and those who do not. The picture takes its place in another context, under another order of understanding and another order of explanation than that which pertains to colored patches on a canvas. And that is what happens to an organism when, as the result of whatever incremental steps, it crosses the chasm from the animal to the personal and the aspect of free self-consciousness dawns. Everything in its behavior then appears in a new light. It not only can but must be understood in a new way, through concepts that situate it in the web of personal accountability.

  There is an interesting response that might be made to the position I have adopted concerning the emergent nature of the human person—a response that picks up on an argument of Paul Churchland’s, in favor of “eliminative materialism.”48 Churchland believes that “folk psychology,” in which propositional attitudes play a major role, is a genuine theory of human behavior—and one that might turn out to be false. After all, folk psychology accounts for only a small segment of human mentality, containing no theory of memory retrieval, of image construction, of visual-motor coordination, of sleep and a thousand other vital aspects of the mind. Any theory that offered to explain those things, while also matching or outstripping the predictive power of our ordinary mental concepts, would replace folk psychology in the same way that relativity theory replaced Newtonian mechanics. We might hold onto folk psychology for simplicity’s sake, as we hold onto Newtonian mechanics; but this would not alter the fact that its ontological presuppositions might no longer be tenable. There are brain processes and their information-carrying potential. But maybe the true theory of our behavior makes no reference to beliefs, desires, intentions, and perceptions. Churchland gives reasons for thinking that we might come to this conclusion and that it is in fact the way in which cognitive science is going. Folk psychology might end up as a mere façon de parler.

  It seems to me that the developments predicted by Churchland would no more rid our world of propositional attitudes than the physical theory of the picture, in terms of the disposition of pigments, rids our world of the painted image. Suppose the true theory of Jill’s motive, when she helps me out of sympathy for me, mentions only digital processes in her brain and the muscular response to them. To those brain processes I have no emotional reaction: they could not be targeted by the emotions that I direct toward Jill and are an object at best of scientific curiosity. The intentional object of my own response to her—that toward which I feel, think, and intend on encountering her behavior—must be described in terms of folk psychology. It is only as so described that her behavior awakens my emotions. And these in turn are objects for Jill, only as so described. Now a third party, observing the relations between us, may be better placed to explain them in neurophysiological terms rather than by attributing propositional attitudes. However, we ourselves are not in the position of that third party. I understand Jill as motivated in just the way that I am motivated, and my own motives are given to me in consciousness only in folk-psychological terms. The pattern of my relations with Jill is built on the supposition that we conceptualize our own and the other’s behavior in personal terms. The neurophysiology may give a complete theory of what we so conceptualize, but we could deploy that theory only with the effect of changing our behavior, so that the theory is strictly useless to us in understanding and reacting to each other. What we are trying to describe in describing personal relations is revealed only on the surface of personal interaction. The personal eludes biology in just the way that the face in the picture eludes the theory of pigments. The personal is not an addition to the biological: it emerges from it, in something like the way the face emerges from the colored patches on a canvas.

  THE PERSON AND THE SUBJECT

  There is another, more interesting reason for thinking that the person cannot be eliminated from our account of human nature, which is the interconnectedness between the concept of the person and that of the subject. My reaction to you is dependent on the knowledge that you identify yourself in the first person, just as I do. The practice of giving, receiving, and criticizing reasons for action depends upon the self-attribution of tho
se reasons, and in general all our interpersonal responses are dependent on the belief that others attribute beliefs, attitudes, reasons, and emotions to themselves. I react to you with resentment because you consciously intended to hurt me, and that means that you consciously attributed to yourself just such an intention. I express my resentment with accusations of you, which I expect you to meet with a confession or plea phrased in terms of “I.” Those who respond to an accusation by describing themselves in the third-person case are either insane or avoiding the issue.

  If we are to relate to each other as I to I, then our self-attributions must obey the logic of the first-person case. We must ascribe intentional states to ourselves immediately, on no basis and with first-person privilege, if we are really to identify ourselves as “I” and not as “he” or “she.” But this first-person privilege is contained in the logic of folk psychology. It is a feature of the concept of intention that someone knows immediately and on no basis what his or her intentions are. This is not a feature of any of the concepts deployed by brain science: hence brain science could not replace folk psychology in first-person awareness without that awareness ceasing to be a genuine awareness of self. It follows that brain science cannot play the role in interpersonal relations that self-knowledge irreplaceably plays. Were brain science to replace folk psychology, the whole world of interpersonal relations would disintegrate. The concept of the person, and its attendant idea of first-person awareness, is part of the phenomenon and not to be eliminated by the science that explains it.