Not a blank slate

In defense of our uniqueness, a writer argues that the distinctiveness of human nature lies in the fact that it is not merely biological

May 13, 2017 06:36 pm | Updated 06:41 pm IST

Human nature is complex. Even if we do have inclinations toward violence, we also have inclination to empathy, to cooperation, to self-control. Steven Pinker

Unlike animals, humans do not tread the same path. We are animals and not quite so. Roger Scruton maintains “that quite clearly, although we are animals, bound in the web of causality that joins us to the zoosphere, we are not just animals.” It is clear that killing an innocent man is legally and morally culpable whereas killing a tapeworm is not. Surely a tapeworm is neither innocent nor guilty. Such characteristics do not apply to the non-human. The distinctiveness of human nature lies in the fact that it is not merely biological; the very foundations of our moral, legal, artistic and spiritual traditions bestow on us rights over the sovereignty of our beings and the option to enslave other fellows.Concluding from this argument that humans are not mere things but persons distinct from nature, Scruton believes that this could be the prime question that all philosophy seeks to answer but surely not in religious terms. Fundamentally, the secular view can be seen in the philosophy of Sartre and Merleau-Ponty and Emmanuel Levin who take up the face of man as a sign of human distinctness as apparent in the very intentions and interrogative gestures or in changing facial expressions. The face becomes the soul of the body as argued by Wittgenstein: “Human beings live in mutual accountability, each answerable to the other and each the object of judgment.” The eyes of others address us with an unavoidable question, the question “why?” On this fact is built the edifice of rights and duties. And this, in the end, is what our freedom consists of — the “responsibility to account for what we do.”

Embedded qualities

An Indian ragpicker rows his makeshift boat as migatory birds fly on the bank of the Yamuna river in New Delhi on February 3, 2017.  / AFP PHOTO / Prakash SINGH

An Indian ragpicker rows his makeshift boat as migatory birds fly on the bank of the Yamuna river in New Delhi on February 3, 2017. / AFP PHOTO / Prakash SINGH

 

If this is the case, humans possess the capacity to take cooperative non-violent action and resolve issues that bring conflict, disparity and suffering in the world. Humans are therefore accomplished in "adjusting to the demands that assail us from every side." However, unlike animals, humans do not consider themselves as members of a particular species. It is for this reason that the ‘I’ and ‘you’separation brings about conflict or mutuality: "We understand ourselves in the first person, and because of this we address our remarks, actions and emotions not to the bodies of other people but to the words and looks that originate on the subjective horizon where they alone can stand." Self-consciousness becomes the prime factor dictating to humans how they should live. The I-You confrontation points to the presence of a dialogue through which we become proficient at asking questions and giving answers. Scruton goes on to underscore the existence of a world where all is organised by language through which we deal with one another. And if this is a reality, "then there is something left for philosophy to do, by way of making sense of the human condition."

Scruton, a believer in conservatism, opposes liberalism as a philosophy of the self-possessed free to choose their ideological or material affiliations. Conservatives, on the other hand, are creatures with social roots that enforce responsibilities and duties. Within liberal thinking Scruton says the scientific approach is fallible on the ground and that it does not examine the emotional aspect of humans. Moreover, he holds libertarianism as another culpability as it ignores unchosen social ties that impose duties and define who we are.

Conservative leanings

He has taken up the concept of human nature to explain his leanings towards conservatism. This paradoxically takes a more socialist turn thereby clashing with the left theories that he seeks to dismantle. The arrogance of humans to consider them the centre of the universe rejects the human qualities of love, depression or anger in animals or in nature where the river or the winds or the larger world of the country and the city has begun to attain a ‘personhood’ demanding full legal rights to assert their equal status in the world. Moral strength. Though Scruton emphasises the moral equipment of humans including rights and duties, personal obligations, justice, resentment, judgment, forgiveness which has the genealogy of thousands of years of conflict and mutual interest as the basis of evolution, it cannot be denied that the non-human world has begun to assert its equal rights as visible recently in the landmark judgment by the Uttrakhand High Court declaring the rivers Ganga and Yamuna as ‘legal persons’. This is apparently based on the impact the rivers have on human nature as “they support and assist both the life and natural resources and health and well-being of the entire community.” Similarly, rivers elsewhere in the world have also been attributed with human qualities such as the Wanganui River in New Zealand. Environment and animals too have free will and legal duties.

Scruton may well be advised to read Christopher Stone’s Should Trees have Standing to further expand his argument and this time more polemical than philosophical to grasp the overlapping of the human and the animal as well as the left and right-wing ideologies which cultural conservatives like him have ignored till now. Faith and morality will indeed remain in conflict with politics, and a reconciliation has to be derived by overcoming narrow political leanings.

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