Ridling Zaine. Philosophy: Then and Now. A look back at 26 centuries of thought

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Ridling, Philosophy Then and Now: A Look Back at 26 Centuries of Thought

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way that knowledge of any other natural object is obtained. One infers from

their behavior that they have minds like one’s own and on this basis attributes

psychological states to them.

In keeping with this bifurcation Locke distinguished between the terms

“man” and “person,” reserving “man” for the animal species, an object of

study for natural historians. “Person” is used to denote the moral subject, the

being who can be held responsible for his actions and thus praised, blamed, or

punished. According to Locke, what constitutes a person is a characteristic

continuity of consciousness, which is not merely rational thought but the full

range of mental states accessible to introspection. Just as a tree is a

characteristic organization of life functions sustained by exchanges of matter,

so a person is a characteristic organization of mental functions continuing

through changes in ideas (the matter of thought). A person can be held

responsible for an action only if he acknowledges that action as one which he

performed; i.e., one of which he is conscious and remembers having

performed.

The empiricist position thus opens up the possibility of empirical studies

both of man as a natural and as a moral being and puts these studies on a par

with the natural sciences. But it does so in such a way that the resulting

picture lacks any integral unity, for man is an incomprehensible union of body

and mind.

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Development of Anthropological Studies

A renewed study of the natural history of man was stimulated by

European encounters with the great anthropoid apes of Africa (Angola) and

Asia (the Sunda Islands) at the beginning of the 16th century. Until then

Europe had known only the smaller monkeys, which were too far removed

from the human species to present any confusion. The discovery of the

chimpanzee and the orangutan (meaning “man of the woods” in Malay) raised

such questions as whether the anthropoid, who resembles man, is an animal or

a man, and why it should be considered an ape and not a man. In the climate

of opinion – typified by Locke and fostered by the Royal Society of London,

with its enthusiasm for empirical observation – these questions prompted the

detailed observational studies of a leading member of the society, Edward

Tyson.

Work of Tyson

Tyson had the opportunity to study the remains of a young chimpanzee

(named Pygmie) from Angola that had died in London several months after its

arrival. His research was published by the Royal Society in 1699 under the

title Orang-Outang, sive Homo Sylvestris: or, The Anatomy of a Pygmie

Compared with That of a Monkey, an Ape, and a Man. This treatise, a

landmark in anthropology and comparative anatomy, is remarkable for the

empirical approach used in the investigation. Tyson’s precise measurements,

his complete exploration of the external and internal structures of the animal,

and his minutely detailed sketches permitted him to pose what is perhaps the

central problem of physical anthropology: whether it is possible to find among

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the anatomical or physiological characteristics of the ape the justification for

asserting a radical difference between ape and man, notwithstanding all their

similarities. He analyzed in great detail the similarities and dissimilarities

between a chimpanzee and a man. He emphasized the fact that the ape is a

quadrumane (having four hands) rather than a quadruped (having four feet);

unlike the human foot, its foot has an opposable, and thus thumblike, big toe.

The arrangement of the internal organs allows the erect posture that makes the

ape similar to man. But on an analysis of the form and mass of the brain and

speech apparatus, Tyson concluded that he was unable to determine, from a

strictly anatomical point of view, why the ape is incapable of thinking and

speaking.

Integral to the empiricism that forms the philsophical background to

Tyson’s work was a rejection of the whole notion of forms or essences as

objectively determining fixed and strict demarcations within the natural world.

Classification was the work of man imposed upon a natural continuum, which

replaced the older ladderlike conception of the Chain of Being. This

encouraged a quest for “missing links,” examples of intermediary forms

between those already recognized. For example, zoophytes (invertebrate

animals resembling plants, such as sponges) were said to form the link

between the vegetable order and the animal order. For Tyson, the chimpanzee

was the missing link between animal and man.

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Emergence of Cultural Anthropology

If physical anthropology was born out of Western man’s encounter with

the anthropoid apes, cultural anthropology was made necessary by his

encounter with people in the rest of the world during the great voyages of

discovery begun in the 15th century. Cultural anthropology became the

product of the confrontation between the classical values of the West and the

opposing values and customs of newly discovered civilizations.

The “savage” appeared to manifest a style of humanity that was a

contradiction of the certainties that had sustained Europeans for centuries. The

shock was such that the naked Indian and the cannibal were at first assumed

not to belong to the human race; this approach enabled Europeans to avoid the

problem. This solution was, however, rejected by Pope Paul III in 1537 in his

bull, or decree, Sublimus Deus (“The Transcendent God”), according to which

Indian savages were human beings; they had souls and, as such, could be

initiated into the Christian religion. This left the problem of how to reconcile

the increasingly manifest human diversity with the theological requirement of

human unity. One solution was to account for diversity in terms of

environment, including cultural environment, and to regard the “savage” as a

“primitive,” as a “man of nature,” who remained close to an initial state from

which a privileged part of humanity had been able to remove itself by a

continued effort at community and individual advancement. A study of the

history of man endeavored to bring to light the successive stages through

which the human species had passed along the way to the present civilized

societies. The themes of “civilization” and “progress” were among the

principal preoccupations of the Enlightenment.

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The 18th-Century Enlightenment

What has come to be known as the Enlightenment is characterized by an

optimistic faith in the ability of man to develop progressively by using reason.

By coming to know both himself and the natural world better he is able to

develop morally and materially, increasingly dominating both his own animal

instincts and the natural world that forms his environment. However, the

divergence between rationalist and empiricist traditions continues, giving rise

to rather different interpretations of this theme.

The Natural History of Man

The writings of the Scottish philosopher David Hume give a clear

statement of the implications of empiricist epistemology for the study of man.

Hume argued first that scientific knowledge of the natural world can consist

only of conjectures as to the laws, or regularities, to be found in the sequence

of natural phenomena. Not only must the causes of the phenomenal

regularities remain unknown but the whole idea of a reality behind and

productive of experience must be discounted as making no sense, for

experience can afford nothing on the basis of which to understand such talk.

Given that this is so, and given that man also observes regularities in human

behavior, the sciences of man are possible and can be put on exactly the same

footing as the natural sciences. The observed regularities of human conduct

can be systematically recorded and classified, and this is all that any science

can or should aim to achieve. Explanation of these regularities (by reference

to the essence of man) is not required in the sciences of man any more than

explanation of regularities is required in the natural sciences.

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Man thus becomes an object of study by natural history in the widest

possible sense. All observations – whether of physiology, behavior, or culture

– contribute to the empirical knowledge of man. There is no need, beyond one

of convenience, to compartmentalize these observations, since the method of

study is the same whether marital customs or skin color is the topic of

investigation; the aim is to record observations in a systematic fashion making

generalizations where possible. Such investigations into the natural history of

man were undertaken by Linnaeus, Buffon, and Blumenbach, among others.

In his Systema Naturae (1735), the Swedish naturalist Carolus Linnaeus

(Carl von Linné) gave a very precise description of man, placing him among

the mammals in the order of primates, alongside the apes and the bat. But the

distinguishing characteristic of man remains his use of reason; something that

is not dependent on any physiological characteristics. Moreover, the variations

that are to be found within the genus Homo sapiens are the product of culture

and climate. In later editions of Systema Naturae, Linnaeus presented a

summary of the diverse varieties of the human species. The Asian, for

example, is “yellowish, melancholy, endowed with black hair and brown

eyes,” and has a character that is “severe, conceited, and stingy. He puts on

loose clothing. He is governed by opinion.” The African is recognizable by

the color of his skin, by his kinky hair, and by the structure of his face. “He is

sly, lazy, and neglectful. He rubs his body with oil or grease. He is governed

by the arbitrary will of his masters.” As for the white European, “he is

changeable, clever, and inventive. He puts on tight clothing. He is governed

by laws.” Here mentality, clothes, political order, and physiology are all taken

into account.

The French naturalist Georges Leclerc, comte de Buffon, devoted two of

the 44 volumes of his Histoire naturelle, général et particulière (1749-1804)

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to man as a zoological species. Buffon criticized Linnaeus’ system and all

other systems of classification that depended only on external characteristics;

to force individual objects into a rational set of categories was to impose an

artificial construct on nature. He was echoing arguments that Locke had used,

arguments based on the conception of the Great Chain of Being as a

continuum, not as a sequence of discrete steps. An artificial taxonomy came

from the mind, not from nature, and achieved precision at the expense of

verisimilitude. Buffon’s answer was to determine species not by

characteristics but by their reproductive history. Two individual animals or

plants are of the same species if they can produce fertile offspring. Species as

so defined necessarily have a temporal dimension: a species is known only

through the history of its propagation. This means that it is absurd to use the

same principles for classifying living and nonliving things. Rocks do not mate

and have offspring, so the taxonomy of the mineral kingdom cannot be based

on the same principles as that of the animal and vegetable kingdom. Similarly,

according to Buffon, there is “an infinite distance” between animal and man,

for “man is a being with reason, and the animal is one without reason.” Thus,

“the most stupid of men can command the most intelligent of animals...

because he has a reasoned plan, an order of actions, and a series of means by

which he can force the animal to obey him.” The ape, even if in its external

characteristics it is similar to man, is deprived of thought and all that is

distinctive of man. Ape and man differ in temperament, in gestation period, in

the rearing and growth of the body, in length of life, and in all the habits that

Buffon regarded as constituting the nature of a particular being. Most

important, apes and other animals lack the ability to speak. This is significant

in that Buffon saw the rise of human intelligence as a product of development

of an articulated language. But this linguistic ability is the primary

manifestation of the presence of reason and is not merely dependent on

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physiology. Animals lack speech not because they cannot produce articulated

sound sequences, but because, lacking minds, they have no ideas to give

meaning to these sounds.

The German scholar Johann Friedrich Blumenbach is recognized as the

father of physical anthropology for his work De Generis Humani Varietate

Nativa (“On the Natural Variety of Mankind”), published in 1775 or 1776. He

also regarded language as an important distinguishing characteristic of man,

but added that it is only man who is capable of laughing and crying. Perhaps

most important is the suggestion, also made by the American statesman

Benjamin Franklin, that it is only man who has hands that make him capable

of fashioning tools. This was a suggestion that broke new ground in that it

opened up the possibility of speculating on a physiological origin for the

development of intellectual capacities.

Man the Rational Subject

The great German philosopher Immanuel Kant credited Hume with

having wakened him from his dogmatic slumbers. But while Kant concurred

with Hume in rejecting the possibility of taking metaphysics as a

philosophical starting point (dogmatic metaphysics), he did not follow him in

dismissing the need for metaphysics altogether. Instead he returned to the

Cartesian project of seeking to find in the structure of consciousness itself

something that would point beyond it.

Thus, Kant started from the same point as the empiricists, but with

Cartesian consciousness – the experience of the individual considered as a

sequence of mental states. But instead of asking the empiricists’ question of

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how it is that man acquires such concepts as number, space, or color, he

enquired into the conditions under which the conscious awareness of mental

states – as states of mind and as classifiable states distinguished by what they

purport to represent – is possible. The empiricist simply takes the character of

the human mind – consciousness and self-consciousness – for granted as a

given of human nature and then proceeds to ask questions concerning how

experience, presumed to come in the form of sense perceptions, gives rise to

all of man’s various ideas and ways of thinking. The methods proposed for

this investigation are observational, and thus the study is continuous with

natural history. The enterprise overlaps with what would now be called

cognitive psychology but includes introspection regarded simply as self-

observation. But this clearly begs a number of questions, in particular, how

the empiricist can claim knowledge of the human mind and of the character of

the experience that is the supposed origin of all ideas.

Even Hume was forced to admit that self-observation, or introspection,

given the supposed model of experience as a sequence of ideas and

impressions, can yield nothing more than an impression of current or

immediately preceding mental states. Experiential self-knowledge, on this

model, is impossible. The knowing subject, by his effort to know himself, is

already changing himself so that he can only know what he was, not what he

is. Thus, any empirical study, whether it be of man or of the natural world,

must be based on foundations that can only be provided by a nonempirical,

philosophical investigation into the conditions of the possibility of the form of

knowledge sought. Without this foundation an empirical study cannot achieve

any unified conception of its object and never will be able to attain that

systematic, theoretically organized character that is demanded of science.

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The method of such philosophical investigation is that of critical

reflection – employing reason critically – not that of introspection or inner

observation. It is here that the origin of what has come to be regarded as

philosophical anthropology in the stricter, third sense (i.e., 20th-century

humanism) can be identified, since there is an insistence that studies of the

knowing and moral subject must be founded in a philosophical study. But

there remain questions about the humanity of Kant’s subject. Kant’s position

was still firmly dualist; the conscious subject constitutes itself through the

opposition between experience of itself as free and active (in inner sense) and

of the thoroughly deterministic, mechanistic, and material world (in the

passive receptivity of outer sense). The subject with which philosophy is thus

concerned is finite and rational, limited by the constraint that the content of its

knowledge is given in the form of sense experience rather than pure

intellectual intuition. This is not a differentiated individual subject but a form

of which individual minds are instantiations. The ideals regulating this subject

are purely rational ideals. This tendency is even more marked in the

philosophies of Fichte, Schelling, and Hegel.

Humanist thought is anthropocentric in that it places man at the center

and treats him as the point of origin. There are different ways of doing this,

however, two of which are illustrated in the works of Locke and Kant,

respectively. The first, realist, position assumes at the outset a contrast

between an external, independently existing world and the conscious human

subject. In this view man is presented as standing “outside” of the physical

world that he observes. This conception endorses an instrumental view of the

relation between man and the nonhuman, natural world and is therefore most

frequently found to be implicit in the thought of those enthusiastic about

modern technological science. Nature, from this viewpoint, exists for man,