Neo-Existentialism
Page 9
I will suggest that there is a way to keep much of the spirit of Gabriel’s account of “Geist” without running into difficulties comprehending the thought that a human being is an animal. However, this requires that one does not think of a human being’s animality as a “condition” of “Geist.” Rather, the animality of human beings has to be conceived as a distinctive manifestation of “Geist,” or so I will argue.
2
Gabriel draws on a philosophical tradition (including thinkers such as Kant, Hegel, Marx, and Nietzsche) which he characterizes by the common attempt to insist on the sui generis character of the feature that makes human beings unique, and which he calls, in accordance with the tradition, “Geist.” He thinks the most general characterization of this feature is to describe it as a “domain of phenomena that depend on their concepts” (p. 36). Proponents of this tradition typically use the term “intellect” or “understanding” or “reason” to designate this unique feature that distinguishes the human categorially from the rest of the animal kingdom. They share with Gabriel the idea that there is no single phenomenon or reality corresponding to this term but, rather, an indefinite variety of manifestations of it.
In what follows I will not address the question whether the tradition Gabriel invokes forms a homogeneous corpus with respect to the issue at stake. I assume he would agree that it does not. I will, rather, invoke another philosophical tradition in order to raise doubts about Gabriel’s manner of cashing out the sui generis character of “Geist.” I am thinking of the Aristotelian tradition, which denies that a human being’s animality is a “condition” of “Geist.” Proponents of the Aristotelian tradition rather think that a human being is nothing other than a certain kind of animal. Let’s call this the identity claim. Gabriel thinks that, for a position to do justice to the sui generis character of “Geist,” it must deny the identity claim. Aristotelianism does not deny the sui generis character of “Geist”; rather, it denies the above conditional.
3
Gabriel defines mental phenomena by two criteria:
Mental phenomena are phenomena whose unity resides in the fact that they result from the “attempt of the human being to distinguish itself both from the purely physical universe and from the rest of the animal kingdom” (p. 10).
Mental phenomena are phenomena that are dependent on the concepts under which they fall.
In virtue of the first criterion, the concept of a human being enters into the definition of the mental. This raises the question as to the nature of the concept of a human being that is employed in this definition. Let’s imagine the concept of a human being is the concept of a natural kind, as Gabriel understands “natural kind.” Then the subject of the “attempt” to distinguish itself from “the purely physical universe and from the rest of the animal kingdom” would be something whose existence and identity is independent of the concepts that articulate what it is to be a human being. This, according to Gabriel, defines a natural kind. For a natural kind is such that something of such a kind can fail to agree with any specific description attached to the ordinary use of the term with which “the ordinary speaker” identifies that kind (p. 34).
If the concept of a human being that enters Gabriel’s definition of mental phenomena were the concept of a natural kind in Gabriel’s sense, then human beings might fail to agree with any specific description attached to the ordinary use of the term “human being.” Now, the specific description that is attached to the ordinary use of the term is its description as a being who has the capacity to think of itself, and specifically to think of itself as something that differs from “the purely physical universe and from the rest of the animal kingdom.” If the concept of a human being were a natural-kind concept in Gabriel’s sense, we would have to allow for the possibility that human beings do not have the capacity to think of themselves and to conceptualize themselves in this manner. However, this would undermine the possibility of accounting for mental phenomena in terms of this capacity in the way that Gabriel suggests. Therefore Gabriel denies, and is committed to denying, that the concept of a human being is a natural-kind concept.
So let us suppose that the concept of a human being does not describe, in Gabriel’s sense, an element of “the natural order” but something of a different kind: an item which, according to Gabriel’s definition of the term, is dependent on its concept. This is how Gabriel must think of it when he describes the life of human beings in the following way: “Humans live their lives in light of a conception of what the human being is. This conception does not pick out a natural kind” (t/s p. 41). I take this to mean that the term “human,” which figures twice in this phrase, is a natural-kind term in none of these uses. When a human being lives her life in light of her conception of a human being, then she does not live her life according to a natural-kind concept. However, this raises a question that was at the center of a debate among those who belong to the idealist tradition with which Gabriel wants to associate himself. The question that was at the center of their debate, most notably between Kant and Hegel, is the question of how those who live their lives according to a conception of what a human being is can understand the thought that they, in living their lives in that manner, whatever else they are, are also a kind of animal. How do those, of whom it is said that they live their lives according to a conception of what a human being is, know that a human being, whatever else it is, is an animal of a certain kind?
Hegel blamed Kant for thinking of a self-conscious being as a being that, fundamentally, thinks of herself not as a living being but as a merely thinking thing.1 The fundamental thought that this self-thinking being has of itself is the thought of an “I,” which, as Kant emphasizes, is a “simple, and in itself completely empty, representation.”2 The thought that this self-thinking thing is a power that can be actualized in “various phenomena” is not necessarily contained in the fundamental thought that this self-thinking thing has of itself. Rather, it is a thought that this self-thinking thing has qua being dependent upon sensible conditions.
According to the Kantian picture, a self-conscious being’s thought that its existence and identity is dependent upon sensible conditions is not something that it entertains qua being self-conscious. For it is not self-contradictory to think of an infinite intellect, as Kant understands this term, whose thought is not bound by the manifold that it thinks, since, on the contrary, this manifold is brought about by it. The infinite intellect, as Kant defines it, has an original intuition of objects (intuitus originarius) – “i.e., one that can give itself the existence of its object,” which is “a mode of intuition which, so far as we can judge, can belong only to the primordial being.”3 Thus, that she who thinks “I” thinks of herself as dependent upon sensible conditions is not a thought that she has qua self-conscious being. Rather, what she thinks of herself qua self-conscious being does not exclude the possibility that she who thinks this thought could be independent of such conditions.
Self-conscious beings, according to this view, come in two varieties: one that is dependent upon sensible conditions and one that is not. Since the thought of its dependence on sensible conditions is not a thought that the dependent variety of self-consciousness has of itself qua self-consciousness, its dependence on sensible conditions must be, and hence must be thought of as, a limitation of its self-consciousness. According to this view the human intellect, when it thinks of itself as a distinctively human intellect, must think of itself as something that is enabled by sensible conditions that the intellect can only come to know empirically.
Consequently, a human being does not, qua being self-conscious, have knowledge of the sensible conditions of its existence and identity, let alone knowledge of the fact that it belongs to a “certain animal species” (p. 39). A human being does not, qua being self-conscious, know that she who is self-conscious exists in the sensible world, let alone that she exists as a human being. That is, a human being is, in principle, incapable of knowing that she falls under
the very concept according to which she lives.
Hegel thinks that this picture is deeply dissatisfying. He argues that it contradicts the very idea of a consciousness that is nothing other than what it is a consciousness of – i.e., self-consciousness. Hegel concludes that it is wrong to conceive of self-consciousness as a capacity which, in order to fully account for itself, would need to presuppose the existence of something other than this capacity, namely a “certain animal species.” A conception of self-consciousness that presents it as a consciousness that is dependent upon such a presupposition, he thinks, must be a misconception.4
Gabriel’s position, I think, is vulnerable to a similar worry. The worry can be expressed as follows. If it is right to think, as Gabriel does, that “we humans” “belong to a certain animal species” with which we, at the same time, are not “identical” (p. 39), then the question arises as to how “we humans” come to know what “we” ourselves are. This question matters for Gabriel, because he characterizes a human being in terms of a being who lives her life according to a conception of what it is to be a human being. Thus, for there to be a distinctively human being, there must be a living being that has a conception of the human – i.e., of what it is to be a human being – under which she brings her life. This conception of the human under which she brings her life must entail the thought that a human being, whatever else it is, is a kind of living being. For, otherwise, she who lives her life according to such a conception could not bring her life under this conception and conceive of her life as an instantiation of it. However, this makes urgent the question of how “we humans” come to have this conception of a human being (according to which it “belongs to a certain animal species”) that we, indeed, must have if our life has the form that Gabriel ascribes to it. Some passages suggest that Gabriel thinks of this conception as a piece of empirical knowledge. For example, when he writes: “I do not intend to deny that humans are animals and, therefore, in part objects governed by the parameters articulated by evolutionary theory” (p. 19), and then continues this phrase by saying: “I am not interested in undermining scientifically established facts” (ibid.).
This suggests that, according to Gabriel, the fact that a human being is a kind of animal is a “scientifically established fact” that we humans happened to find out. It could thus well have happened that, for whatever reason, we humans had never scientifically established this fact. However, if we humans had never scientifically established the fact that a human being is a kind of animal, then there would never have been a living being that had a conception of a human being under which she could bring her life and, hence, there would never have been a human being in the first place. For, according to Gabriel, one cannot be a human being without living one’s life according to the concept of a human being; and one cannot live one’s life according to the concept of a human being without thinking of a human being as a kind of animal. For otherwise my conception of a human being could not be that “in light” of which I live; it could not be that which orients or guides my life in the manner that Gabriel describes. Because it would then be logically impossible for me to think of my life and its activities as something that instantiates the very conception in light of which I live. Only the conception of a human being that entails that it is an animal of a certain kind can guide or orient my life and its activities in a manner that enables me to think of my life and its activities as an instantiation of it. For my conception of a human being to enable me to bring my life and its activities – such as, for example, my breathing and digesting, my sleeping and being awake, my perceiving and desiring, etc., – under it in a manner that entails that I think of my life and its activities as an instantiation of this very conception, my conception of a human being must entail the thought that a human being, whatever else it is, is a living being, a kind of animal.
Thus, by Gabriel’s own lights, the thought that a human being “belongs to a certain animal species” cannot enter a human being’s thought on empirical grounds – e.g., as something that has been established by science. Rather, since all mental activity, including scientific activity, according to Gabriel, is defined in terms of the human capacity to distinguish the human being “both from utterly non-organic, anonymous processes and from organic non-human life” (p. 40), it would have been logically impossible ever to establish this fact. This suggests that he must think of it as a fact that is concept-dependent – that a human being “belongs to a certain animal species” that has a place in the natural order is not itself a fact of the natural order but depends on a conception of what a human being is.
However, this option is equally unavailable to Gabriel. The fact that a human being “belongs to a certain animal species” cannot be a concept-dependent fact in Gabriel’s sense because the existence of a human being is already presupposed in his account of what it is to be concept-dependent. Thus the fact that a human being “belongs to a certain animal species” can be neither a natural fact nor concept-dependent in Gabriel’s sense.
I cannot see how Gabriel can avoid this dilemma. His position cannot account for the intelligibility of a human being’s thought that a human being is an animal of a certain kind. Yet, at the same time, his account of the mental presupposes the intelligibility of this thought. Kant never found a solution to it.
4
In his Encyclopedia, Hegel remarks at the beginning of his treatment of “Geist” that contemporary accounts of “Geist” have no speculative content. “For this reason,” he writes, “the books of Aristotle on the soul … are still the most excellent, or rather the only work of speculative interest on this object” (Hegel 2010: §378). In the remainder of this chapter I will expose concisely what it would mean to treat “Geist” in the Aristotelian manner that Hegel praises in this passage. Aristotelianism, as will become clear, does not think that one has to give up the identity claim in order to hold on to the uniqueness of the human in terms of its mindedness. Rather, to think of a human being is to think of nothing other – nothing more and nothing less – than a distinctive kind of animal.
Thus, a human being is identical to a kind of animal, yet it is a distinctive kind. This is so because the vital activities of humans have a “form” that the activities of non-human animals do not have: they have the “intellect” as their “form.”
As will become explicit in what follows, Aristotle thinks that, in order to account for the uniqueness of the human, it is not enough to draw a formal distinction between natural-kind facts and concept-dependent facts; rather, this distinction must have its place in the description of formal differences between different kinds of living. Aristotle formally distinguishes between three different kinds of living in terms of what he calls “soul.” He defines a “soul” as the form of a living being qua living being. It is that which answers the question “What is it by virtue of which this is a living being?” The Aristotelian idea of a “soul” is the idea of a form of life among which, he thinks, we can distinguish three different kinds. Aristotle calls them the vegetative life form, the animal life form, and the rational life form.
Before we can get a sense of the manner in which Aristotle draws the relevant distinctions, I want to highlight two things that – in the context of our topic – are significant for what it means to think about the human in terms of a difference in “form.” First, it means to think of this difference not in terms of certain capacities that a subject does or does not have but, rather, in terms of the principle in virtue of which certain capacities form a unity that constitutes a subject that can have, or not have, certain capacities. This entails a denial of a widely shared manner of thinking about the human: the idea that it is possible to account for the human in terms of an animal that, in addition to being an animal, possesses some further power such as the intellect or the power to conceptualize itself. This idea, I think, also underlies Gabriel’s conception. Second, and relatedly, it means that the concepts that designate the vital operations of the living, such as eating, dri
nking, digesting, perceiving, reproducing, sleeping and being awake, etc., do not have a determinate meaning unless their principle of unification has been specified. This entails a denial of a manner of thinking about life that characterizes both the positions that Gabriel forcefully criticizes and his own approach: it is the assumption that there is a determinate sense of what it means to be a living being that equally describes the life of a rose or the life of a rabbit or the life of a human being. Rather, what it means to be a living being, according to Aristotelianism, is determined differently by the three different “forms” that constitute a form of life.
Aristotle expresses this by saying that “life is said in many ways” (De Anima, 413a20f). According to this line of thought, the concept of life, taken as such, is an abstract concept of a unity of capacities that cannot be applied to any given living being without a specification of the principle in virtue of which those capacities belong to one and the same subject. The concept of life is abstract in that, according to Aristotle, it does not contain more than the thought of a unity of capacities and activities that explain the existence and identity of the living thing that falls under it. It is an abstract concept because it does not contain any specific conception of the shape that this explanatory relation takes in any given case. For example, it does not tell us which capacities and activities explain the existence and identity of a rabbit, which evidently differ from the ones that explain the existence and identity of a rose, which, in turn, differ from the ones that explain how a human being comes to be.
It follows that, although this abstract characterization is true of all life form concepts, we cannot apply this abstract concept of life to any given living being without specifying the shape that this explanatory relation takes in any given case by specifying the principle in virtue of which its capacities and activities form the unity of a living being whose existence and identity they explain. To be sure, any living being has the power of nutrition and reproduction. And there is a kind of life that has no more than that, which is the life of plants. Animal life is different from plant life in that it also has self-movement and perception. However, it would be a mistake to think of animal life as a species of vegetative life which has powers in addition to its vegetative powers. Rather, animal life is a formally distinctive kind of life in that the principle that unifies the capacities and activities to one and the same subject whose existence and identity they explain is different from the one that pertains to the explanation of the existence and identity of a plant.5 A vegetative form of life is one that does not, qua form of life, contain a differentiation between, on the one hand, an individual that manifests the relevant life form and, on the other, the life form itself. In vegetative life there is just constant vital activity, constant growing in all directions, all the time, and hence nothing that reflects a logical distinction between a principle of activities that pertains merely to an individual of that life form and a principle of activities that pertains to the life form itself. The activities of the life form and the activities of the individual entities that make up this life form, as Aristotle argues, are logically the same. Therefore a plant cannot be conceived as an individual being – i.e., something that manifests a principle of activity that is logically different from the one of its life form.