On Human Nature

by Roger Scruton

  SEX, ART, AND THE SUBJECT

  That is only a sketch of the many distinctions that we can make, and ought to make, when considering human pleasures. But it already complicates the approach adopted by evolutionary psychology, which sees all pleasure in the same way, as the residue of an adaptive process, whereby an organism became hardwired to behave in ways that further the reproduction of its genes. For my brief survey suggests that pleasures arise in completely different ways and that adaptations that serve one function from the genetic point of view might be put to other uses by our social evolution or entirely prized free from their biological function by the demands of individual life.

  The example of sexual pleasure is additionally interesting because it concerns a pleasure that is tied up with our nature as reproducing animals. Hence we would be surprised if we could not give an evolutionary account of it. Yet evolutionary accounts seem to fall short of describing what it is that human beings want from sexual activity. Sexual pleasure is focused upon another person, conceived not as an object but as a subject like me. It is not exactly pleasure over or about the other (and so is not exactly like other emotional pleasures); but it is a kind of pleasure in the other. And it is conditional on seeing the other as another—that is to say, not as an object like this (my body) but as a subject like me.

  Hence when we encounter forms of sexual interest that are focused on the other as an object (as a this and not a you), we regard them as perverted or forms of abuse.8 The paradigm case is necrophilia, in which the object of interest is a human being reduced to the status of an object and sex is engaged in as a kind of triumph: a victory over another life. Rape—which is an easy way to genetic investment on the part of the male—also involves a triumph over the other’s subjectivity, a delight in wresting sexual pleasure from an unwilling donor. And rape awakens revulsion for that very reason—not just outrage on the victim’s behalf but a visceral recoiling from the perpetrator.

  As Jonathan Haidt has made clear in his writings on morality, evolutionary psychology makes considerable room for these hard-to-rationalize and instinctive revulsions, such as the revulsion against incest.9 But it falls short of accounting for their intentionality. These revulsions are not just gut reactions, like the revulsion against excrement. They involve the judgment that pleasure is arising in the wrong way, as a pollution of those who pursue it. Evolution tells us that human beings are unlikely to be necrophiliacs—this kind of pleasure is not a good genetic investment—and that we are likely to be repelled by incest. But it won’t tell us why incest, rape, pornography, adultery, pedophilia, and a host of other things are regarded as offenses against interpersonal being.

  The same kind of falling short can be observed in evolutionary accounts of aesthetic pleasure—a pleasure that has often been compared with sexual pleasure (as it was, for example, by Plato), since it arises from our delight in the look, feel, sound, and texture of our world. Geoffrey Miller, in his book The Mating Mind, makes much of a thought first put about by Darwin, to the effect that the contemplation of appearances might have a role to play in sexual selection. The gorgeous tail of the peacock is a sign of reproductive fitness, precisely on account of its redundancy—only a creature with a good stock of genes could waste so much energy on useless displays. And in his book The Art Instinct, Denis Dutton offers to explain our taste in landscapes as being implanted in us by the habitat requirements of Pleistocene man.10 Our ancestors spent their time looking for places at the edge of the forest, where there was water to drink, open meadows to offer sight of game, and trees in which to escape from predators. So, Dutton says, we should hardly be surprised that landscape paintings with trees, water, and some open vistas are the default preference of people today when it comes to furnishing a room. But again the explanation falls way short of the thing to be explained. The kind of motel kitsch that Dutton is describing is precisely the stuff we learn to discard as we exercise our aesthetic faculties. The person whose walls are covered with sylvan scenes is one who has yet to learn that aesthetic pleasure involves judgment, discrimination, an ability to distinguish true from fake emotions, a responsible and adult attitude toward the world of nature, and a thousand other things that distance the true goals of art from the survival needs of our hunter-gatherer ancestors.

  I don’t accept the view that I attributed to Wallace, that there is an impassable gap in the evolutionary process. Language, self-consciousness, moral judgment, aesthetic taste, and so on emerged in some way, and Darwin’s suggestion—that things emerge by random variation and survive by selection—has yet to be refuted. But I remain wedded to the old call of philosophy, which tells us to distinguish things and not to elide them and in particular to dwell on those features of our own life that are not to be found among the other animals and which seem to define the human condition as distinct and distinctively meaningful. Even if there is no impassable gap, there is a gap, and it is a significant one.

  OVERREACHING INTENTIONALITY

  This point is brought home more urgently by what I call the “overreaching intentionality of interpersonal attitudes.” In all our responses to each other we look into the other, in search of that unattainable horizon from which he or she addresses us. We are objects, caught in the currents of causality, who relate to each other in space and time. But each human object also addresses us in looks, gestures, and words, from the transcendental horizon of the “I.”11 Our responses to others aim toward that horizon, passing on beyond the body to the being that it incarnates. It is this feature of our interpersonal responses that gives such compelling force to the idea of the soul, of the true but hidden self that is veiled by the flesh. And because of this our interpersonal responses develop in a certain way: we see each other as wrapped within them, so to speak, and we hold each other to account for them as though they originated ex nihilo from the unified center of the self.

  In addressing you in the second person I at the same time pick you out as a thing that addresses me in the second person and who does so only because you identify yourself in the first person. This thought connects with an argument of Elizabeth Anscombe’s about intention—in the sense of doing something intentionally or with a particular intention. Anscombe argued that an action is intentional if it admits of the application of a certain sense of the question “Why?” An intentional action is one concerning which the agent can be called upon to give reasons.12 Intentional actions fall within the sphere of subjective awareness. I am immediately aware of what I am doing and why, so that you have direct access, through the question “Why?” to my stance toward the world. Of course, there are cases of error, slips of the tongue, and self-deception. But they are deviations from the central case, in which the question “Why?” can be answered immediately, and with a special authority, so that sincerity is a guarantee of truth.

  This first-person privilege is so familiar a feature of our mental lives that we do not pause to question it. And attempts to explain it have a tendency to go around in circles or else to take refuge in the idea that I earlier associated with Wittgenstein, that first-person privilege belongs to the “grammar” of self-reference, without telling us exactly what “grammar” in such a context might mean.13 What is important from the point of view of my argument is that first-person privilege is the foundation of personal relations. In addressing you I am summoning your first-person awareness into the sphere of mine, so to speak. This enables me to discard scientific investigation, psychological theorizing, and the search for hidden motives and to engage with you directly. I can offer you reasons to change your mind or ask for the reasons that will persuade me to change my own. We stand before each other as in a special way in charge of ourselves, our sincere first-person statements being uniquely authoritative in the revelation of what we think, feel, and do.

  Hence the word you does not, as a rule, describe the other person; it summons him or her into your presence, and this summons is paid for by a reciprocal response. You make yourself available to others in
the words that call them to account to you. This would not be possible without the first-person awareness that comes to us with the use of I; but that use would in turn not be possible without the dialogue through which we fit together in communities of mutual interest.

  An intention is not the same thing as a desire: you can intend to do what you don’t want to do and want to do what you don’t intend to do. Intending something means being certain that you will do it and also knowing why. Intending is not predicting. I predict that I shall drink too much at the party tonight; but maybe I shall find the strength to go home sober. When making such a prediction I am seeing myself from outside, as it were, assessing the evidence, extrapolating from past observations, and drawing conclusions as I would draw them from observing another. My prediction might turn out to be right or wrong: but it is no more privileged from the point of view of self-knowledge than my predictions about the behavior of someone else. In predicting my behavior “I” becomes “he.”

  When I decide to go home sober I “make up my mind,” and this means being certain, on no evidence, that that is what I shall do. In such a case I answer the question “Why?” not by presenting evidence based on past behavior but by offering reasons for action. I am taking responsibility for my future, and that means bringing it within the purview of first-person knowledge, becoming certain that that is what I shall do. If I don’t after all go home sober, this is not because I was mistaken in my former assertion about my future action but because I changed my mind.14

  In the I-You encounter we act for reasons of which we are aware and which the other can ask us to declare. Trust depends on a truthful answer, and here truthfulness is the guarantee of truth. In other words, we can, through our dialogue, directly affect what each of us does. This applies to beliefs, thoughts, and feelings too. And from this ability to account to each other there grows the special kind of relationship of which persons alone are capable. We begin each to take responsibility for what we are, what we do, and what we feel. And by degrees our mutual responsibility is wound into the relation between us, to the point where we undertake the manifold obligations and commitments that distinguish human communities from all other social networks that we observe. We generate between us what Searle has called “deontic powers,” filling our world with obligations that would not exist but for our capacity to invent, accept, and impose them.15

  It is not that those features of our condition flow from our transcendental freedom, as Kant would put it. They are what freedom consists in. Giving each other reasons, holding each other to account, praising, blaming and negotiating, and working for the other’s acceptance and being in turn influenced to accept—these are all moments in an ongoing dialogue in which each of us aims attention not to the body of the other but to the first-person perspective that shines in it.

  RECENTERING AND DECENTERING

  THE PASSIONS

  Because we call each other to account in this way, our entire emotional life is recentered. It ceases to be attributed to the organism, the “it” that incarnates us, so to speak, but, rather, to the “I” that speaks and looks. By our use of the word I we set the body aside, replace the organism with the self, and present to others a target of their interest that is reserved and which must be brought forth in order to treat with those who address it. That is what I meant when I referred earlier to the overreaching intentionality of interpersonal relations. Others enter into dialogue with this thing called “I” and see it as standing in its sovereign arena, both part of the physical world and situated on its very edge. Of course, it is not a thing in any substantial sense, and readers of Wittgenstein and Hacker will be familiar with the misleading shadows that are cast here by our grammar.16 Nevertheless, it is true to say that, in a person, states of mind are recentered, self-attributed to the I, so as to become part of the interpersonal dialogue.

  The most eloquent illustration of this recentering process is again given by sexual desire. In describing sexual desire we are describing John’s desire for Mary or Jane’s desire for Bill. And the people themselves will not merely describe their desires but also experience them in that way: as my desire for you. “I want you” is not a figure of speech but the true expression of what I feel. And here the pronouns identify that very center of free and responsible choice that constitutes the interpersonal reality of each of us. I want you as the free being that you are, and your freedom is wrapped up in the thing I want, the thing that you identify in the first person, when you engage with me I to I. And that is because I want you to want me in just the same way and likewise to want me to want you, in an escalating mutuality of desire. In popular culture love songs are therefore often elaborations of the second-person pronoun: “All the Things You Are,” “I’ve Got You under My Skin,” and so on. And in lyric poetry the second person becomes an invocation, using the familiar form, as in this famous poem of Rückert’s:

  Du bist die Ruh,

  Der Friede mild,

  Die Sehnsucht du

  Und was sie stillt.

  It is worth recalling the ineffable stillness imparted to those reflections by Schubert, the clever way of condensing an abstract thing yearned for (calm, peace), and even the yearning itself, into the concrete pronoun, which encloses the abstractions and walls them round. You here is the transcendental I of the other, not describable but the target of my yearning.

  Just as our animal feelings can be, and ought to be, recentered in the I, so can those same feelings be decentered, to become spectacles in the world of the “it.” That is to say, they can be experienced not as mine and as expressions of what I am, what I feel, and what I choose in relating to you but as forces that impinge on me from outside, that prowl like vagabond winds in the world of objects, sweeping I and you away together on the crest of their indifference. Several writers have drawn attention to the objectification of the other, and of women in particular, in the use of pornographic images.17 There is truth in the complaints, which have their roots in the Kantian intuitions that have animated our secular worldview since the Enlightenment. But I think that the complaints do not get to the heart of the matter. The real evil of porn lies not in its portrayal of other people as sexual objects but in the radical decentering that it effects in the sexual feelings of the observer. It prizes sexual excitement free from the I-You relation and directs it to a nameless scene of mutual arousal, in which arousal too is depersonalized, as though it were a physical condition and not an expression of the self. This decentering of arousal and desire makes them into things that happen to me, occurring under the harsh light of a voyeuristic torch instead of being part of what I am to you and you to me, in the moment of intimacy.

  This decentering of our vital passions is not confined to the sexual sphere, of course. Nor is the phenomenon entirely new. It is related to what Marx called fetishism and was discerned as such in the art of Hollywood by the somewhat censorious critics of the Frankfurt school.18 To some extent it has to happen, and it is not always a catastrophe. But we should recognize that if the feelings that serve most to attach us to each other—namely, sexual feelings—are decentered, and if children learn these feelings from their decentered versions, we are bound to experience a vast change in the nature of human communities and in the sentiments on which social reproduction depends.

  PERSONAL IDENTITY

  So far I have concentrated on the aspect of persons that was brought to the fore by Kant and the post-Kantian idealists—the presence in all of us of the first-person perspective, with its privileged judgments and overreaching intentionality. But there are other aspects too, as a glance at the history of the idea reveals. The term persona comes to us from the Roman and Etruscan theater, where it denoted the mask worn by the actor and therefore the character whom the actor portrayed. The term was borrowed by Roman law to describe any entity that has judiciable rights and duties, including corporate entities and other more abstract constructions. It was borrowed again by early Christian theologians in order to explain the d
octrine of the Trinity, by distinguishing the three persons of God. Discussions of the Trinity led to the view that personhood belongs to the essence of whatever possesses it, and the sixth-century philosopher Boethius took this as his cue in defining the essential nature of the human being. For Boethius the human person is “an individual substance of a rational nature.”19 That definition was adopted by Aquinas and remained in place until the Enlightenment, when two great philosophers—Locke and Kant—saw fit to reexamine the whole idea and untangle its many strands.

  According to Boethius’s definition, your being this person is what (or who) you essentially are. Hence you could not cease to be this person without ceasing to be. The connection of the person, so defined, with the subject, as described above, is not entirely clear. Nor is it clear how the person is related to the human being. You are essentially this human being and could not cease to be this human being without ceasing to be. But if that is so, must the human being and the person always coexist? Locke raised this question, though not in the terms that I have used, and came to the conclusion that the same person may not be the same human being and vice versa. Others have constructed thought experiments to similar effect—notably Sydney Shoemaker—and the resulting “problem of personal identity” has become a perennial topic of philosophical controversy, with no agreed solution among those who have discussed it.20

  Similar problems arise in aesthetics. Giorgione’s Tempest is a particular painting, identified by its pictorial aspect. It is also a physical object situated in the Accademia in Venice. It could not lose its aspect without ceasing to be the work of art that it is. Nor could it cease to be this particular physical object without ceasing to be. But suppose the aspect were transferred by some process onto another canvas and the original painting were destroyed. Does Giorgione’s Tempest survive or not? Yes, if you count paintings in one way—in terms of their presented aspect; no, if you count them in another way—as physical objects.21