On Human Nature

by Roger Scruton

  47See Ludwig Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1953), part 2, section xi.

  48Paul Churchland, “Eliminative Materialism and the Propositional Attitudes,” in W. Lycan, ed., Mind and Cognition (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1990), pp. 206–221.

  49For example, Robert Boyd and Peter J. Richerson, Culture and the Evolutionary Process (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1985); and Sterelny, Thought in a Hostile World.

  50If it were only Kant who thought this, then of course there is an opening here for the skeptic. The thought is, however, common from Kant, Fichte, Hegel, and Schopenhauer to Shaftesbury, Smith, Hutcheson, and Hume and to countless contemporary thinkers.

  51Chomsky, Language and Mind; Jonathan Bennett, Linguistic Behaviour (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1976); Harry G. Frankfurt, “Freedom of the Will and the Concept of a Person,” Journal of Philosophy 68, no. 1 (1971): pp. 5–20; H. P. Grice, “Meaning,” Philosophical Review 66, no. 3 (1957): pp. 377–388, and its many sequels; David Lewis, Convention: A Philosophical Study (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1969); Michael Tomasello, The Cultural Origins of Human Cognition (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2000).

  52Al-Fārābī, Fī Tahsīl as-Sa‘ādah, quoted in Lenn E. Goodman, Islamic Humanism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003), p. 9.

  CHAPTER 2

  HUMAN RELATIONS

  Ever since Kant, it has been clear that “I” thoughts are fundamental to the life of the person, committing us to the belief in freedom and to the appeal to reason. Just as fundamental, Stephen Darwall has argued, are “you” thoughts—thoughts about the person to whom I am accountable or to whom my reasons are addressed. The moral life depends on something that Darwall calls the “second-person standpoint”—the standpoint of someone whose reasons and conduct are essentially addressed to others.1 In this chapter I wish to develop that idea.

  When I give another person a reason for action, I am assuming that I have the standing, the authority, and the competence to do this. And I also confer standing, authority, and competence on the other. It is not that I draw the other’s attention to some reason that exists independently, in the nature of things. The moral dialogue is one in which I give reasons to you and these reasons have weight for you precisely because that is what I am doing. Suppose you are standing on my foot. There is a reason for you to remove your foot from mine—namely, that this will relieve me of the pain. But there is a reason that I can also give to you that has quite another authority—namely, that I don’t want you to stand on my foot. This reason is addressed from me to you, and its force depends upon the shared assumption that you are accountable to me for your voluntary actions insofar as they affect me.

  The I-You relation was singled out in a famous book by Martin Buber, a Jewish philosopher and theologian who wrote between the two world wars and whose ideas had a powerful influence in literary circles of the day.2 What Buber never made clear, however, was that the I-You relation enters essentially into every aspect of the moral life. This is what Darwall has set out to show, arguing that moral norms owe their force ultimately to the second-person reasons that are marshaled by them, that the relations that invite moral judgment and make it possible are relations built upon the second-person standpoint, and that concepts vital to the moral life—such as responsibility, freedom, guilt, and blame—all get their sense, in the end, from the I-You relation in which the giving and receiving of reasons is part of the deal. Adopting and adapting a famous argument of Peter Strawson’s, Darwall shows that emotions such as resentment, guilt, gratitude, and anger are not human versions of responses that we might observe in other animals but ways in which the demand for accountability, which arises spontaneously between creatures who can know themselves as “I,” translates into the language of feeling.3 At the heart of these emotions lies the belief in the freedom of the other, a belief that is irreducible, in that we cannot discard it without ceasing to be what we fundamentally are. For what we are is what we are for each other—relation is built into the very idea of the human person, who is a first person held within the second-person standpoint like a lodestone in a magnetic field.

  THE FIRST-PERSON CASE

  The moral truth that our obligations are derived from the I-You relation is founded on a metaphysical truth, which is that the self is a social product. It is only because we enter into free relations with others that we can know ourselves in the first person. The arguments for this metaphysical conclusion are many, and two in particular appeal to me. One is the argument from language, associated with Wittgenstein; the other is the argument from recognition, associated with Hegel. Both arguments deserve a book-length exposition, and here I must content myself with the briefest summary, in order to suggest that if these arguments are valid, then a morality of the I-You relation has just the metaphysical foundation that it needs.

  The argument from language tells us that first-person declarations exhibit a special kind of privilege. If I am in pain, then I don’t have to find out that I am in pain, and I know that I am in pain on no basis. Not to use the words “I am in pain” in this way is to misunderstand their meaning. In particular it is to misunderstand the word I. This word gets its sense from the rule that truthfulness and truth coincide; a speaker who does not obey this rule would be using the term I to mean he or she: the speaker would show that he or she had not grasped the grammar of the first-person case. First-person awareness arises with the mastery of a public language and therefore with the recognition that others are using the word I as I do, in order to express what they think and feel directly.

  Hegel’s argument is similar, though presented in a very different idiom. In the state of nature, motivated only by my desires and needs, I am conscious, but without the sense of self. Through the encounter with the other, which begins in a life-and-death struggle for survival, I am forced to recognize that I too am other to the one who is other to me. Hegel spells out, in poetic steps, the gradual emergence from this encounter of the moment of mutual recognition, in which one comes to know oneself as a free self-consciousness, by recognizing the free self-consciousness that stands over and against one. Self and other come into consciousness in a single act of recognition, which bestows on me the ability to know myself in the first person at the same time as demanding that I recognize the first-person being of you.4

  Both arguments acknowledge that first-person knowledge is peculiarly privileged—a matter not of observation but of the spontaneous ability to declare, without evidence, our beliefs, feelings, sensations, and desires. It is on this spontaneous ability that the I-You relation is built, and terms such as I and You get their sense from the resulting dialogue. But then, do they describe objects in the world of observation? Certainly, they express the point of view of the subject; but, as we have seen, subjects are not objects, and points of view are not in the world but on the world. Maybe, in any science of the human species, pronouns would drop out of consideration altogether. But if that is so, how can a science of the human being ever reach out to accommodate the moral life, as we understand it?

  When I talk about myself in the first person, I utter propositions that I assert on no basis and about which, over a vast number of cases, I cannot be wrong. But I can be wholly mistaken about this human being who is doing the speaking. So how can I be sure that I am talking about that very human being? How do I know, for example, that I am Roger Scruton and not David Cameron suffering from delusions of grandeur? In referring to myself perhaps I am referring to something other than the human being to whom you refer when you point at me: maybe I am doing exactly what I say and referring to a self, an entity of which I am immediately and incorrigibly aware.

  To cut the story short: by speaking in the first person we can make statements about ourselves, answer questions, and engage in reasoning and advice in ways that bypass all the normal methods of discovery. As a result, we can participate in dialogues founded on the assurance that, when you and
I both speak sincerely, what we say is trustworthy: we are “speaking our minds.” This is the heart of the I-You encounter. But it does not imply that there is some cryptic entity to which I refer as “I” and which is hidden from your perspective: I am this thing that you too observe and which can be understood in two ways—as an organism and as a person. In addressing me as “you,” you address me as a person and are asking me to respond as an “I.”

  SELF AND OTHER

  Kant held that the moral life arises from the subject’s self-identification as “I.” This idea made a deep impression on his immediate successors, notably on Fichte and Hegel. But they held that my self-identification as “I” is in some deep way dependent on my encounter with and identification of others. From the attempts of the post-Kantian idealists to convey this idea there arose a long tradition that has seen the relation between self and other as the fundamental challenge to philosophy, replacing in this regard the old and discarded problem of the relation between soul and body. And the relation between self and other was further associated, by Hegel, among others, with that between subject and object: between the observer and the observed.

  If I were a pure subject, Hegel argues, existing in a metaphysical void, as Descartes imagined, I should never advance to the point of knowledge, not even knowledge of myself, nor should I be able to aim at a determinate goal.5 My awareness would remain abstract and empty, an awareness of nothing. But I do not merely stand at the edge of my world. I enter that world and encounter others within it. I am I to myself because, and to the extent that, I am you to another. Self-consciousness depends upon the recognition accorded to the self by the other. I must therefore be capable of the free dialogue in which I take charge of my presence before the presence of you. That is what it means to understand the first-person case. And it is because I understand the first-person case that I have immediate awareness of my condition. The position that, for Kant, defines the premise of philosophy, and which is presupposed in every argument, itself rests on a presupposition—the presupposition of the other, the one against whom I try myself in contest and in dialogue. “I” requires “you,” and the two meet in the world of objects.

  Kant argues persuasively in “The Paralogisms of Pure Reason” that we cannot know the subject under the categories of the understanding—that is, we cannot look inward so as to identify the I as a substance, a bearer of properties, and a participant in causal relations.6 To identify the subject in that way is to identify it as an object. It was Descartes’s mistake to look on the subject as a special kind of object and thereby to attribute to it a substantial and immortal nature of its own. The subject is a point of view upon the world of objects and not an item within it. Kant refers in this connection to the “transcendental subject”—the center of consciousness that lies beyond all empirical boundaries. But this expression, later adopted by Husserl and given a prominent place in Husserlian phenomenology, might seem to imply that we have positive access to the transcendental. Better to refer to the subject as a horizon, a one-sided boundary to the world as it seems.

  Nevertheless, even if the subject is not a something, it is not a nothing either. To exist as a subject is to exist in another way than ordinary objects. It is to exist on the edge of the world, addressing reality from a point on the horizon, which no one else can occupy. We each address the world from a standpoint that accords a special and privileged place to our thoughts and feelings. What most matters to me is present to me, in thought, memory, perception, sensation, and desire, or can be summoned into the present without any effort of investigation. Moreover, I respond to others as similarly present to themselves, able to answer directly to my inquiries, able to tell me without further inquiry what they think, feel, or intend. Hence we can address each other in the second person, I to you. On those facts all that is most important in the human condition has been built: responsibility, morality, law, institutions, religion, love, and art.

  THE INTENTIONALITY OF PLEASURE

  Our states of mind have intentionality and therefore depend upon the ways in which we conceptualize the world. Furthermore, we cannot assume that our emotions will remain unaffected when we learn to conceptualize their objects in some new and allegedly “scientific” way. Just as indignation at a villain is undermined by the description of him or her as an automaton obedient to impulses in the central nervous system, so does erotic love retreat when its object is described in the pseudo-scientific jargon of sexology. Maintaining rewarding human relations—relations that we understand and build upon—means conceptualizing each other in the ways implied by the honest use of “I” and “You.” It means distinguishing free from unfree actions, reasonable from unreasonable behavior, smiles from frowns, promises from predictions, contrition from regret, and so on—through all the complex ways in which we describe the conduct and responses of persons as distinct from the conduct and responses of organisms and of the inanimate world.

  It is for this reason that the adaptation story told by the evolutionary psychologists so often falls short of explaining them. For such a story will bypass the “how it seems” of our states of mind, replacing our own intentional descriptions with neutral scientific accounts of the kind that could be applied to a dog or a horse. Nothing illustrates this point more vividly than the experience of pleasure. An evolutionary theory of pleasure would show why certain things cause pleasure by explaining the reproductive advantage conferred on the genes of those who enjoy them. It would point to the mechanism in the brain that operates whenever enjoyment is felt and which has the function of turning the organism in the direction of repeating the experience. It would offer an explanation of addiction, which occurs when a once difficult reward becomes suddenly easy, so that the path to reward is, as it were, short-circuited. And it would explain the difference between constructive and destructive pleasures, since adaptive traits can become maladaptive as conditions change, so that the sweet tooth that ensured our ancestors’ survival now condemns us to obesity.

  However, we also take pleasure in things that have no obvious evolutionary significance and which it is difficult to connect in any direct way to some original adaptation. We take pleasure in golf, in jokes, in humiliating our enemies; in music, art, and poetry; in stamp collecting, bird-watching, and bungee jumping. Moreover, pleasure is not one thing but many. The pleasure of a warm breeze on the face is a pleasure that we feel in the face. There is a place in the body where this pleasure (or maybe we should say “pleasurable sensation”) is located. But the pleasures of the table are not like that. The pleasure that we take from the taste of food, for example, is not a “pleasurable sensation in the mouth.” There is no exact place where this pleasure is located. Likewise the pleasure in a delightful scent or a fine wine. When it comes to pleasures in visual and auditory impressions, any talk of a place where they are felt, or even of feeling at all, seems out of the question. My pleasure in the view from my window is not something that I feel in the eye. It is more like an affirmation of what I see—a joyous recognition that these things before me are good.

  Then there are the fully intentional pleasures, which, although in some way tied up with sensory or perceptual experience, are modes of exploration of the world. Aesthetic pleasures are like this. Aesthetic pleasures are contemplative—they involve studying an object outside of the self, to which one is giving something (namely, attention and all that flows from it), and not taking, as in the pleasure that comes from drugs and drinks. Hence such pleasures are not addictive—there is no pathway to reward that can be short-circuited here, and a serotonin injection is not a cheap way of obtaining the experience of Parsifal or The Merchant of Venice.

  Some pleasures are bound up with our evaluations in ways that place them quite beyond the reach of animal minds: the pleasure that a person takes in his or her career, marriage, children, and so on. We are not interested in a successful career or loving marriage in order to feel the pleasure that such things bring; we feel the pleasure (though again, feel
is not exactly the right word) because we value those things for what they are. The point, already made in other terms by Bishop Butler, is brought home to us by a well-known thought experiment of Robert Nozick.7 Imagine a device that, when placed on your head, produces all the beliefs and thoughts associated with a successful career, a loving marriage, beautiful children, and whatever else you have ever wanted. Of course this device would produce, in addition to those beliefs, a burst of pleasure. While the device is on top of your head you are on top of the world. But somehow this is not real pleasure. And the illusory nature of the pleasure means that you would not believe that there is any reason to aim at it. What you want is the reality of a successful career, loving marriage, and so on, and the illusion is not a second best but something that it is not rational to want at all.

  Among the many other puzzling cases, perhaps the most intriguing is that of sexual pleasure. This is like sensory pleasures in involving body parts, the excitement and tactile stimulation of which are bound up with the pleasure. But it is unlike the normal cases of sensory pleasure in being not only sensitive to thought but also in some way directed at or upon another person—it seems to have an object or at least is bound up with states of mind that have an object. Hence there can be mistaken sexual pleasures, in which pleasure comes as the result of an error or maybe even a deception. The sleeping woman who is awoken by someone whom she takes to be her husband and with whom she then experiences the pleasure of sex is a case in point. Her pleasure turns quickly to revulsion when she turns on the light. Her pleasure acquires, in retrospect, the character of a hideous mistake. Nor can it be cited in evidence against a charge of rape. This is a pleasure that ought not to have existed, that the woman might want to spit out but cannot, and the revulsion against it may haunt her forever after. Hence Lucretia’s suicide. A less drastic case is the pleasure someone might feel at a lover’s touch turning instantly to revulsion when he or she learns that the touch is that of an intruder.