Neo-Existentialism

by Markus Gabriel

  IV Reply to Kern

  Kern challenges a core structure at the center of the conceptual architecture of my view with her formulation of a dilemma, which I will call the anthropological dilemma. She then sketches a view she dubs “Aristotelianism” and argues that this view is not subject to the anthropological dilemma. I will take up the issues in that order.

  The motivational structure of the alleged dilemma Kern presents draws on a series of assumptions many of which I do not share. She claims that “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” (p. 66). Yet, how exactly would one support this somewhat surprising claim? This claim is surprising because it seems to be presented as an empirical fact that someone cannot have the concept of a human being without thinking of themselves as an animal. Without having to delve deeply into speculative paleoanthropological or actual ethnological research on such matters, it should be clear that it is not at all hard to imagine human beings that have a conception of themselves without thinking of the human being as an animal. Suffice it to mention hard-nosed religious fundamentalists of all the stripes that define themselves by the very negation of Darwinism. Many Christians, for instance, actually believe that humans are not animals in the sense that Darwin claimed. Regardless of the actual biological facts about the human species, it should be obvious that there is a natural fact settling whether we are animals or not. What it is to be an animal, then, consists in that fact. In other words, qua animals we do indeed have an essence, an essence picked out by those biological terms that refer to a natural kind. Let us assume that current biological science roughly tracks that essence in terms of its ontological commitments to protein production, RNA, DNA, cells, and so forth. Kern certainly does not want to deny this, as she wants to subsume DNA under her Aristotelian concept of a life form.

  On many accounts of the semantics of natural-kind terms, our ancestors and contemporaries, who were ignorant of these facts or respectively deny them, nevertheless refer to an arrangement of natural kinds, for they use the term “animal.” Yet, they disagree with us when it comes to the question whether they are animals. This is why they are subject to normative evaluations from the other side of the debate concerning the question whether we are animals.

  There is ample space for views that accept that humans have an animal side but that the human being is not at all animalistic. Suffice it to mention unabashed forms of ontic dualism according to which humans have an animal part and a non-animal part – say, their immortal soul.

  Those who do not think of themselves as animals in the right way (whatever the right way is) make a mistake. This mistake can assume various shapes. All that Neo-Existentialism claims on that front is that any such mistake will not be a mistake merely about natural kinds but also a mistake about ourselves, as it will have severe repercussions in our self-conception as human beings. Therefore, I do not see why it should be impossible to live one’s life according to a conception of the human being while being in explicit denial or simply ignorant of the fact that, as a human being, one is a kind of animal.

  As a matter of fact, there is a sense in which my Neo-Existentialism makes explicit room for such an option without denying that every human being is an animal. For a human being to be an animal is not for it to be identical with an animal. As a human being, among other things, I am an animal. The meaning of “animality” is fixed by natural science. Let me mention in passing that, on my reading, Aristotle would agree and that he ought to revise his conception of animality in light of the empirical knowledge he did not possess. Were he to know what we know, Aristotle would have to change his views about animals.

  Kern is right that I run “into difficulties comprehending the thought that a human being is an animal” (p. 61). But the reason for this is that I disbelieve that the human being is an animal. A human being – i.e., a case of human being – is a case of Geist. Nevertheless, in order for the concept of a human being to be instantiated, there are necessary natural realization conditions. Every human being is necessarily incarnated. Our incarnation is a condition of the life of the mind. Mental events have natural and non-natural parts. The whole of a mental event, however, is not natural. The whole of the human being has the shape of Geist. But Geist cannot exist without drawing on natural resources. Evidently, this does not mean that every human being knows that there are natural resources required for her mindedness. What is even more obvious is that no human being currently knows where exactly to draw the line in her life between the natural and the geistig parts. All that we can know from the conceptual point of view of Neo-Existentialism is that the synchronic and diachronic divergence in our mentalistic vocabularies is not a function of natural changes alone.

  This allows me to accommodate the thought that our animality is “a distinctive manifestation of ‘Geist’” (p. 61) in the following sense: how we incorporate our incarnation into our self-portrait as human beings is not a natural fact, but a geistig one. In general, Geist is the capacity to draw a distinction between the human and the non-human. In particular, Geist actualizes itself in specific accounts of that distinction. These accounts draw on empirical material, including existential experiences of giving birth, life, suffering, health, happiness, and death. The full array of human experience, as it is articulated in our manifold aesthetic, religious, scientific, philosophical, etc., expressions, is a manifestation of Geist. Geist necessarily has animal parts regardless of the degree to which human beings are fully and adequately aware of them.

  On the basis of her disagreement with me concerning the question of whether there could be human beings who live their lives according to a conception of the human being that does not include thinking of themselves as animals, Kern formulates the following problem.

  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. (p. 66)

  This follows only if one assumes – like Kern but unlike my Neo-Existentialism – that human beings essentially think of themselves as animals. Yet, Neo-Existentialism has room for rejecting that. What speaks in favor of the Neo-Existentialist position here are empirical facts concerning our knowledge acquisition of our animality, together with ethnological facts concerning human beings who explicitly live their lives according to a conception of the human being that excludes the concept of animality from the portfolio of their self-consciousness as humans. Now, they might be wrong (as I believe). Nevertheless, they are human beings. One of their existential problems is that their mistake about themselves affects the core of their being, as they instantiate the concept of a deluded human being. Human beings are in a fallible position with respect to themselves, including their animal parts. It could, thus, indeed, “well have happened that, for whatever reason, we humans had never scientifically established this fact” of our own animality.

  In this connection, it is important to remind ourselves of the further fact that there is a host of different conceptions of our animality. As modern conceptions emerged in the eighteenth and nineteenth century there was – and still is – significant disagreement between positions such as that of Marx and Engels, Darwin, Nietzsche, and contemporary views in, say, evolutionary psychology, cognitive science, psychoanalysis, behavioral economics, and so forth. When it comes to animality, I am happy to defer to the life sciences – not because of their conceptual clarity, which is often lacking when it comes to the philosophical interpretation of their implications for Geist. The reason we should simply accept established scientific facts
about our animality on the level of Geist is that they tell us something about the shifting border between the animal and non-animal parts of Geist. For instance, we now know that human behavior is often caused by non-conscious biochemical events for which an agent is not responsible. To be sure, our current knowledge is a long way from providing justification for reductive generalizations (Gabriel 2017: ch. 5). Nevertheless, what we find out about the human body often leads to a renegotiation of the conceptual border between the natural and the non-natural. Recognition of new borders is not necessary. When presented with conceptual change of this kind on the level of Geist, many reactions are possible. We cannot predict how exactly humans will take the news. After all, think of how long it took for the German legal system finally to recognize the biological fact that human animals are not born with two sexes expressed only in the exact shapes a male or a female body can take. Until 2017, human babies born in Germany were regularly mutilated on the ground that certain natural facts were not recognized on the level of Geist – not to mention all the further issues of race, gender, body shape, health, disease, etc., that are currently up for grabs in socio-political reality and discourse. None of these issues can be settled a priori. We need to bring in “established scientific facts” and figure out how to incorporate these in our self-portrait as human beings.

  Neo-Existentialism charges those who do not subject themselves to the progressive forces of border renegotiation in light of the scientific progress of modernity with a mistake on the level of the human being. Neo-Existentialism is a modern stance. Nevertheless, it makes room for its own fallibility. Should it turn out that modern science produced mistakes that had relevant repercussions for Geist and were incorporated, we would have reasons to withdraw these mistakes from our self-portrait. This holds, in my view, for neurocentrism, as I call a certain ideology whose most famous expression is the thought that we have no free will because our animal conditions are supposed to be incompatible with the possession of such an extraordinary power (Gabriel 2017).

  Kern devises another subtle version of the anthropological dilemma. She presents an argument based on her reconstruction of premises from my view designed to support the conclusion that “the fact that a human being ‘belongs to a certain animal species’ can be neither a natural fact nor concept-dependent” (p. 67) in my sense. Here is my reconstruction of her argument, drawing on pp. 67–8 in her reply.

  P1 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 established by science.

  P2 All mental activity is defined in terms of the human capacity to distinguish the human being from the non-human.

  P3 It would have been logically impossible to (empirically?) establish the fact stated by P2.11

  P4 The fact stated by P2 is concept-dependent. This means that the fact 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.

  P5 The fact stated by P2 cannot be concept-dependent, because the existence of a human being is already presupposed in the account of what it is to be concept-dependent.

  C The fact that a human being “belongs to a certain animal species” can be neither a natural fact concept-dependent in Gabriel’s sense.

  This argument cannot justifiably claim to be based on a collection of premises from my account of the human being. There are many details in this reconstruction that I do not share. Evidently, I explicitly deny P1. The only legitimate question is whether acceptance of some of the other premises commits me to P1 after all.

  Here is a line of thought that could motivate me to accept a version of P2. My Neo-Existentialism departs from a two-tiered anthropological premise. This premise states (1) that there is widespread synchronic and diachronic variation in our mentalistic vocabularies and (2) that this variation presupposes a shared invariant ground. The shared invariant of human mental activity is the capacity to render intelligible the fact that we do not merely blend in with inanimate nature. As far as we know, our deep historical past is one dominated by mythological and religious instances of such an account. These accounts are not empirical in the sense that they are not attempts at explaining natural events pertaining to the universe.

  The argument for this relies on my version of what I call “the gap.” According to this version, the gap separates natural kinds from the human being in that the human being changes in light of its beliefs about the human being. From this line of thought I do not draw the conclusion that the human being belongs to an animal species that has a place in the natural order. Once more, I conceive of the relation between our animality and the human being in terms of a structure of necessary and jointly sufficient conditions. Our animality is a necessary condition of a whole (Geist) that cannot be reduced to natural conditions. Animality is not sufficient for human being. This means that there is no specific human animality. Qua animals, we do indeed blend in with the rest of the animal kingdom regardless of whether we accept this or not on the level of the human being. Qua human beings we can be deluded about our place in nature, which is a concept-dependent fact.

  The fact expressed by P2 is, thus, concept-dependent. The naturalist and the anti-naturalist Neo-Existentialist disagree about human mindedness. The anti-naturalist Neo-Existentialist claims that there is no specifically human mental event that can be reduced to its natural conditions. The naturalist disagrees. According to the Neo-Existentialist, the naturalist does not make a mistake about a natural kind but, rather, is deluded in various ways. This is why he treats naturalism as an ideology rather than as an empirical or metaphysical thesis about the universe. Naturalism is not merely false; it is a pathological form of deception.

  Regardless of the details of Kern’s argument, and my rejection of some of its premises as well as its motivational apparatus, it might be useful to make my stance towards the conclusion more explicit. Is the fact that a human being “belongs to a certain animal species” a natural fact or concept-dependent in my sense? Or to put this in a way more congenial to my actual position: how do we integrate the fact that we belong to a certain animal species into our self-conception as human beings? Clearly, we can account for the natural conditions of human existence in terms of evolutionary biology. We possess a certain biological equipment without which we would not be in any position to acquire perceptually based knowledge about the universe. Our bodies are selection-functions whose programs are written in biological code. To put it bluntly, I am a happy naturalist about our (and any other) animality. The human animal, to the extent to which it is an object of biological science and medical knowledge, is a complex arrangement of natural kinds, a causal web.12

  At the same time, there is another dimension of intelligibility in which our bodies make an appearance, the field of sense of the human being. This is where my ontological background theory, the ontology of fields of sense, enters the stage. The universe (or nature, for that matter) is not all there is. The field of sense of the human being overlaps with the universe. We leave traces in the universe that are not visible from the standpoint of natural science unaided by knowledge that has a geistig shape. Yet, this line is not immune to empirical revisions. The overlap of the fields of sense denoted by “the universe” and “Geist” respectively is not a top-down affair but a hybrid of conditions that play together in contingent ways.

  Let me resort to my preferred example of cycling. If I ride a bike in order to go to Koblenz, say, you can look at what takes place in the universe as this happens. This will involve knowledge of the air pressure in my tires, gravity, electric charges in neurons, radiation patterns on my retina, the other forces of the universe, and whatever might be going on at scales that are currently beyond physical knowledge. Yet, no collection of facts about the arrangement of natural kinds in that situation will ever be a complete description of what is going on as I am riding m
y bike to Koblenz. For one thing, the city of Koblenz involves legal concepts, a history, vague delineations of its borders, romantic musings about the Rhine, and so on. My wish to ride to Koblenz will have something to do with my sensibility to the Rhine valley on account of the fact that I grew up there. It involves my currently existing capacity to ride a bike and my knowledge of the way to Koblenz along the river’s bank. It is impossible in principle to know that I am riding my bike to Koblenz on the basis of any knowledge of the universe alone. This is why Neo-Existentialism is anti-naturalist.

  At the heart of this anti-naturalism is a version of an indispensability thesis: our non-naturalistic knowledge of the human being is an indispensable starting point for any investigation into the composition of the universe (Gabriel 2017). We simply cannot eliminate the human being from our view of what there is. Obviously, this alone does not have metaphysical anthropic consequences precisely because the universe is the domain of objects that cannot comprise the human being. We leave traces in the universe that are only visible from the standpoint of a human being, invisible otherwise.

  I would like to conclude my response to Kern with some reflections on Aristotelianism, as she introduces it. First of all, I reject the identity claim, which should be obvious from both my chapter and the outlines of the present response. It is not the case that the human being is nothing other than a certain kind of animal. Kern presents the identity claim as

  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. (p. 69)