‘On Human Nature’: Re-enchant the Human Being
A review of ‘On Human Nature’, by Sir Roger Scruton; Princeton University Press, 2017.
Are we human beings just clever monkeys? Or is there something special about our species? Are we animals, governed by the laws of biology? Or are we persons, bound by the moral law? For Sir Roger Scruton, the late philosopher, the answer is: we are both. We are both the spots of paint on the canvas and the image of a smiling woman that they make. Personhood exists, Scruton says; and it appears at the moment that we can say ‘I’ — and see others as ‘I’s, too.
This is the basic claim of On Human Nature, a slim and tightly argued book whose author aims to re-enchant a human being often made to seem as if it were a mere assembly of cogs and springs. For Scruton, we should not do away with the scientific view of life; it has much to tell us about how one ‘thing’ connects to another. But it does have limits, and nothing at all to say about how persons — individuals with a sense of themselves — deal with one another. It is not prideful to say that the human being is unique, argues Scruton. It is simply the case. And even if we wished it were not the case, we could not live in any way that was consistent with the view that we did not matter.
For Scruton, the scientific view of life is not to be dismissed. But it does have limitations.
Scruton’s project in this book therefore has two sides. On the one hand, he aims to show that we are not just animals. On the other, he aims to say what we are instead. This may strike you as unnecessary: almost all of us think it a crime to kill an innocent human being but not to swat a fly. Many of us believe that human beings have special rights; it is there in the American Constitution (and it is the least contentious bit). Yet, at the same time, people describe eating meat as ‘murder’ and influential thinkers, including Peter Singer, claim that humans have no more worth or moral status than animals. If we believe there is a god, and that God made us in His image, then the question of our uniqueness is settled. But for the rest of us — the non-believers — there is a need to shore up the theoretical basis of our instinctive feeling that we are special.
Most of us believe that human beings have special rights. At the same time, some describe eating meat as ‘murder’.
Scruton’s challenge is to persuade scientific naturalists that they can believe both the account of human life put forward by evolutionary psychology and one that seems perilously close to the old claim that human beings have a divine spark within them, that we have a soul (or ‘self’, if you prefer) that is detached from the natural order. Luckily for him, he is a philosopher, and as he himself has said, it is the task of philosophy to describe the world not as science describes it, as a world of facts and ‘things’, but as it seems to us, in our mutual dealings, organised by language. His argument is compact, and needs close reading to follow, but it is persuasive. For it lends weight to our intuitions that we are not just animals, much as love is not just a chemical reaction, or beauty ot just an impression of harmony, or Hamlet not just a playwright’s invention.
This is all expressed with typical clarity and elegance, which is just as well given the subject matter, and makes a welcome change from the clotted prose we now expect from most academic writers. Scruton takes little about his reader for granted, writing always for a general educated audience whether discussing wine or defending classical architecture. In the end, one is put in mind of Iain McGilchrist and his theory as to the role of the two hemispheres of the brain: how each attends to the world differently, one closing down to a certainty; the other opening up to possibility. We are clever monkeys, Scruton says (though, in my view, not that clever, most of the time). But we are also something more, much more.
