What Does it Mean to be Human? (1st part)

 

It may be my imagination or peculiar reading habits but there seems to be a kindling of interest in how the world appears to non-humans. The technical term for this is umwelt. Originally coined by the 20^th century German biologist Jakob von Uexküll, it means how the world is experienced by animals can be very different to how it is experienced by humans.

Dogs, for example, have a much more powerful sense of smell than we do. So, if you have a dog and take it for a walk, even round the block, it will be a far more absorbing experience for the dog than it is for you – given the huge variety of smells that the dog will encounter (and despite the fact that it will frequently be dragged away by its human owner from lingering over them for more than a few seconds).

A seagull’s world

In his recent book This Life: Why Mortality Makes Us Free, the philosopher Martin Hägglund relates how he was sitting on a mountain in Northern Sweden, watching a seagull gliding in the wind and started to think about how the landscape appeared for the seagull.

But this leads him into an unusual, and quite unfashionable, train of thought. Rather than eulogising about the seagull’s incredible flying skills or sense of navigation, he starts to ponder how humans (like him) differ in fundamental ways from animals (like the seagull).

They are both, humans and seagulls, living beings and must do things to sustain their lives (finding food and sleeping for example). But while the seagull has what Hägglund terms natural freedom – it engages in “purposive” activities like avoiding predators and finding fish to eat – humans have spiritual freedom. They can also decide whether the ends they follow are the right ones.

“Even when we are socialized into an identity as though it were a natural necessity” says Hägglund, “there remains the possibility of transforming, contesting, or critically overturning our understanding of who we are.”

Many animals, he says, show evidence of mourning, deliberation, suffering, joy or conflict. They can also change their behaviour “but the principles in light of which they act remain the same for as a long as the species exist”.

With humans it’s different. The understanding of what it means to be human “varies dramatically across history and across the world at any given moment of history”.

Why such a view is unfashionable (and also controversial) is that there is a thin line between thinking that humans are different to all other known species of life and thinking they are superior to them. Historically, humans have seen themselves as the ‘Lords of Creation’. The contemporary incarnation of this attitude has been termed anthropodenialism, a stubborn refusal to see the similarities between animals and humans.

But, to Hägglund, also not seeing the profound differences between them is an “act of bad faith”.

The traits of spiritual freedom, he says, “are higher forms of the traits of natural freedom”. But to avoid supernaturalism, an account must be given of how spiritual freedom evolved from natural freedom (and in turn emerged from non-living matter).

Our family and other animals

Though unmentioned by Hägglund, someone, of a kindred philosophical background, has given just such an account. This is the American social ecologist Murray Bookchin (the mutual intellectual tradition is Hegelianism though, to be accurate, Bookchin, while profoundly influenced by Hegel’s logic, stridently denied being an ‘Hegelian’).

Bookchin’s equivalent of Hägglund’s natural and spiritual freedom is first and second nature (a distinction which originally comes from the Roman orator Cicero). First nature is a strictly biological, animalistic realm. Humans are clearly animals – we are mammals and primates. We exhibit biological traits and behaviours. Our dexterous fingers mark us out as primates for example – all primates have hands. First nature is the same as Hägglund’s natural freedom.

But, says Bookchin, humans also have a second nature which is not shared by any other species. This is the realm of conscious choice about how to live, a domain – unlike natural evolution – that can be subject to rapid change. In contrast to developmentally static animal “aggregations” humans form, or have formed, a wide variety of societies. These include tribes, bands, slave states, republics, democracies, market societies, dictatorships and centrally planned economies. “Each of which”, writes Bookchin, “has richly articulated structures, intersubjective relationships, and cultures, and which can be changed by popular actions, coups, and upheavals of one kind or another.”*

This is the counterpart of Hägglund’s spiritual freedom. While Bookchin talks about the ‘macro’ level – the diversity of human institutions and political structures – and Hägglund stresses the ‘micro’ – different personal proclivities and choices – they are essentially talking about the same thing.

Humans as the result of evolution

But one of the important features of Bookchin’s work, from Hägglund’s point of view, is that he meticulously details how second nature (spiritual freedom) has slowly graded from, rather than suddenly erupting out of, first nature (natural freedom).

The emergence of humanity, he argues, is part of a strong biological trend spanning vast aeons of time that gave rise to a species within first nature that then “transcended its mere animality and produced a second, distinctly social nature”.

In this sense, we – human beings – are revealed to be, not some strange freak of organic evolution, but an intimate, indeed logical, part of it. Natural selection shaped the human ancestral line just as surely as it shaped that of wolves, tigers or bears.

But it shaped it in a way that eventually allowed for choice, both personal and social, to emerge, whose parameters are not dictated by biological imperatives or instincts.

The ability to reason and cooperate is an integral part of this freedom. Bookchin traces the ‘human line’ – from early hominids three million years ago, to Homo Erectus 1.5 million years ago to our own species, homo sapiens, who are 300,000 years old – to argue that traits such as the ability to communicate, guardianship, care and cooperation were essential to its survival and thus the fact that we exist now.

“Humans are immensely vulnerable animals” he argues and thus our ancestors had to rely on something other than physical strength or speed to remain alive amidst other animals seeing them as prey.

But it wasn’t until around 90,000 years ago – a mere blink of the eye in evolutionary terms – that, in Bookchin’s words, the human species crossed “the line between its animal ancestry and its human future”. This period saw the emergence of rudimentary art (cave paintings), bows and arrows, spears, weaving, clothing and complex shelters (given that our species is 300,000 years old it does beg the question of what was happening, if anything, in the intervening period).

If there is such as ‘natural’ human nature it probably can be located here. Human beings are so constituted by nature to reason and innovate, rather than merely passively dwell in nature as other animals do. They also live together in what Bookchin calls “quasi-biological institutions” around family, kinship, age and gender.

Second nature takes over

But plainly things did not stop there, and neither therefore did ‘human nature’ Henceforth – and certainly after the end of the Ice Age 20,000 years ago – Bookchin’s second nature took over resulting in an array of different institutions, societies and political formations held together by ideologies (thinking a certain way to live is the ‘correct’ way) rather than blind biological instincts. Now, in Hägglund’s terms, humans are spiritually free rather than merely naturally free. They can – potentially – decide whether the way they live – either personally or socially – is right or wrong and, if the latter, should be changed.

In an earlier work, The Ecology of Freedom, Bookchin gives some examples of how second nature made itself felt in antiquity (3,000 to 6,000 years ago):

We know that about the same time the ancient Egyptian peasantry rose against the entrenched class system of the Old Kingdom or possibly the nobility of the Middle Kingdom, a similar uprising occurred in the Sumerian city of Lagash. Judging from Athenian references, Sparta’s serf-like helots revolted with disconcerting frequency. So troubling was this history of underclass unrest that even the fairly benign Athenian polis lived in uncertainty about its own slave population. Rome, particularly, toward the end of the republican era, was apparently destabilized by a series of slave and gladiatorial revolts, among which Spartakus’s historic rebellion (73 b.c.) was apparently the most far-reaching and dramatic. This army of slaves and gladiators, later joined by impoverished free people, engaged in a series of major looting expeditions that swept over the Campania and southern Italy until it was crushed by Crassus and Pompey.

Clearly, we are talking about phenomena that are qualitatively different from animal behaviour. Zebras do not rebel against the organisation of their herds and nor, for that matter, do chimpanzees (humanity’s closest primate relative) – who do sometimes revolt against alpha male ‘rulers’ – ever question the nature of the chimp collectivity.

But the sheer variety of human second nature (in the above examples, Spartacus’s slave army [who rebelled against a republic] can be contrasted with the Egyptian peasantry who were neither slaves nor serfs [and rose up against a monarchy], Athens was a direct democracy, although slave-owning and intensely patriarchal, helots in Sparta were state-owned serfs, and many of the peasants in Lagash, one of the earliest civilisations, were technically free citizens) does invite a question. Is there a ‘right’ way to live?

With detours into Hägglund’s concept of “democratic socialism”, Bookchin’s idea of non-hierarchical participatory democracy and whether reason and logic can be deployed to evaluate the superiority of one social dispensation (in terms of meeting human needs and abilities) to another, this will be the subject of the second part.

*Most of the quotes come from the ‘Becoming Human’ chapter of Bookchin’s 1995 book Re-enchanting Humanity (and therefore I suppose could be classed his mature view – he started writing in the 1960s)