‘On Human Nature’: Re-enchanting 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, if you like, the spots of paint on the canvas and the picture of the smiling woman that those spots make. Personhood exists, Scruton says; and whatever this quality is, it seems to appear the moment we are able to say ‘I’ — and to see others as ‘I’s, too.
This is the central claim of On Human Nature, a slim, well-argued book whose author’s stated aim was to ‘re-enchant’ a human being made at times to seem as though he were a mere assembly of cogs and springs. Certainly we should not do away with the scientific view of things, including of ourselves, Scruton says: 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 a person — an individual with a sense of being a separate self — ought to deal with others. It is not prideful to point out that the human being is special; it is simply true. And at any rate, even if we wished that it were not, we could hardly live in any way 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 limits.
Scruton’s project in this book thus has two sides. On the one hand, he aims to show that we are not just animals. On the other, he wants to say what we are instead. This may strike one as somewhat unnecessary: almost all of us think it a crime to kill an innocent person but, with a few exceptions, not to swat a fly. Many think that human beings have special entitlements; it is there in the American Constitution, with all that talk of what is self-evidently true, and that is the least contentious bit. Yet, at one and the same time, there are those who will describe eating meat as ‘murder’ and influential thinkers, such as the utilitarian Peter Singer, who claim that humans have no more worth or moral standing than our animal friends. 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 — the non-believers — perhaps there is a need to justify that gut feeling that we are indeed special.
Most of us believe that human beings have special rights. At the same time, some describe eating meat as ‘murder’.
One of the problems Scruton makes for himself is persuading the scientific naturalist, who thinks all truths are scientific truths, that he can believe both the account of human life put forward by psychology and that which seems worryingly close to the old idea that the human being has a divine spark within him, that he has a soul, or self, detached from the natural order. Not that the hard problem of consciousness has been solved, but I fancy that the ruling view now is that if science has yet to prove something, it will do so sooner or later. Hence, the scientific naturalist, unless he is Daniel Dennett, will accept that we do not know what consciousness is or where it comes from; but he will have faith that by means of science we will. There is a kind of ‘godlessness of the gaps’ here, to steal a term: we used to think that if we could not grasp some fact of our experience, then God was at work; now, we think that the scientists just have not got round to working it out yet. For Scruton, the task of philosophy is to describe the world not as science describes it, as a world of ‘things’, but as it seems to us, in our mutual dealings, as organised by language. This 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 not just an feeling of harmony, or Hamlet not just a playwright’s invention.
This is all got across with typical clarity, which is just as well, and makes a welcome change from the clotted prose that regrettably we now encounter in much academic writing. Scruton takes little about his reader for granted, writing always for a curious and intelligent audience whether discussing wine or defending classical architecture. In the end, one is put in mind of Iain McGilchrist and his hemisphere hypothesis: how each side of the brain attends differently to the world, one closing down to a certainty; the other opening up to possibility (to simplify things). We are clever monkeys, in other words (though perhaps not that clever, some of the time). But we are also something more, much more.
