Why does Aristotle have to be so bad on human nature?

Yesterday I finished up my discussion of Aristotle in two of this semester's classes. I am sympathetic to much in the Aristotelian tradition. So, I always try to make him appealing; there is a lot to say in favor of his ethical theory and his theory of the soul comports much more with modern thought and scientific accounts of the place of humans in the animal kingdom than theories of much more recent thinkers. In short, I like him a lot. And, I think he has a lot to offer my students.

But, if we are going to talk about Aristotle's view of human nature, we have to talk about the dark side of his view, too. This is a thinker who thought that women—being men who hadn't fully formed—and "natural slaves" were not fully in possession of reason, the distinguishing mark and telos of humans. Because of this, they can never be fully happy—those men who are capable of such happiness thus have obligations to take care of and correctly utilize women and these slaves and to give them as large a share in human happiness as possible—and we have to say that they really aren't fully human or that they aren't and can't be flourishing humans. That is a sort of elitism that is deeply troubling.

And, this raises two problems: one general and pedagogical and the other more specifically philosophical. 

The first one is how to talk about thinkers or figures who—having had the misfortune of having been born human—were deeply flawed. It is hard to talk about any historical figure let alone a philosophical one—it is the job of philosophers to have opinions—who doesn't have truly horrible skeletons in his or her closet. How can we honestly present them without having the negative parts of their views overshadow the main thrust of their ideas in the minds of students new to their thought? 

The temptation is to gloss over those bumps. At least, I know that is my temptation. But at some point, either during the class or after, at least one student will discover that Heidegger unapologetically joined the Nazi Party, or that Socrates praised Sparta—and that is wasn't quite the same city as that portrayed in 300—or that Mill seemed to favor imperialism, or ... some other view that it was too uncomfortable to cover in class. And, they will wonder then whether there is any point in thinking about them and why exactly I hid it from them. I am assuming that at least some students will continue to think about what we've discussed; that may seem optimistic, but this rare optimism has been borne out in the past.

I don't have a solution, other than to honestly present the warts and try to tease out, with the students' help, whether we can separate the wheat from the chaff. Sometimes, we are able to, sometimes we are not; in either case, some pedagogical purpose might have been served.

The second problem has to do with giving accounts of human nature, so it is both a more narrow question and one with broader implications, i.e., it matters even if we don't spend much time behind a lectern. Since it is probably more important, I have left it to last and will have less substantive to say about it; such is my way. 

Aristotle, like quite a few philosophers, focused his account of human nature—of what is essential about us, what separates us from the rest of the animals—in the faculty of reason. We have reason and the other animals do not. Of course, others have placed that difference somewhere else, whether in language, abstract thought, or someplace else. A problem with any such defining characteristic, apart from a merely biological one, is that it will admit of degrees: some people are more capable of reasoning than others, some people gain only rudimentary language, and so on. If our account of humanity—or personhood, to make it clearly not just biological—ties it to some characteristic that only humans have what does that say about those humans who don't have it or who have it to a lesser degree? In other words, can we give an account of human nature that doesn't end up, as Aristotle's does, being a graded account of that very humanity? How can we make it work—as most surely we must—that even those who don't share to a very high degree in reason or communication or even emotionality—are still fully human and fully persons?

There are a few strategies that have been tried here. One can say that even the person who does not, in fact, share in the capability or characteristic still has it potentially. How that is supposed to work I never quite understand. If I lack a capability and it is, in fact, impossible for me to develop that capability, the fact that my conspecifics have it doesn't mean that I have it potentially. I don't inherit a potential talent for musicality from the fact that some humans have it; yes, it is a characteristic of the species, but not of this member. 

Alternatively, one can try to solve this problem by adverting to souls or spirits. Of course, there are important problems with that as a philosophical move, but let me point out just one. Since I have no evidence of any souls except for maybe my own, the existence of souls will never tell me of a difference between humans and any other animals. I have as much reason to think that my dog has an immortal, or merely mortal, soul as that my partner does, unless I am basing my judgment of soul possession on some other characteristic, but then we are right back to our initial difficulty.

So, the question becomes whether we can give an account of humanity that captures all humans but excludes the animals or whether we are stuck with one of what seem to be two equally unpalatable options: a graded approach even within the species that counts some humans as more human than others; or, the view of Peter Singer and others, that we can make no important distinctions between all humans and the rest of the animals on which we might be able to base, for instance, moral considerations.

Just a couple of thoughts at the end of the semester

There are so many joys in teaching that they almost always outweigh those moments when some friend reminds me that he makes more than twice what I do, and still thinks he is underpaid. However, those moments--seeing the spark of curiosity or learning something from the fresh and incisive perspective of an undergraduate--are hard to remember at the end of term, when the pain of grading and realizing that this has almost no part in the real intellectual and educational work the university can achieve at its best is compounded by the emails of complaint about grades and the catching of students at plagiarizing and cheating.
At these moments--as in those when I suspect that I am the only one who had read the assignments or who has read any of the classics of the canon--I mourn just a little for the notion of the educated person and the liberal education that was once meant to create her.

Atheists and Christ

One of the classes I was assigned this semester was Twentieth Century Continental Philosophy. For non-philosophers it might not be obvious that contemporary philosophy has divided itself into two different traditions that, all in all, don't much talk to each other. Almost any philosopher you find teaching in a department anywhere in the US has been trained, unless she does history of philosophy, as an analytic philosopher. The Continental tradition is the dark, bad-poetry Other, that we are trained to ignore, scoff at, or try to forget. It is also the one that non-philosophers are much more likely to think of as contemporary or roughly contemporary philosophy. There you find Sartre and Camus and Heidegger and (shudder) Zizek. But, it has to be taught, and someone has to teach it. And, this year, that someone was me.

One thing that is notable about this tradition--though it doesn't greatly differentiate it from the analytic tradition--is that most of the Continentals are stridently atheistic. There's a good deal of "God is dead and we have killed Him," starting with dear old Nietzsche, but not ending there. And, this can be offputting for a lot of students, especially when I am yelling "God is dead" near the top of my lungs.

But what is also notable is the way that members of this tradition, Nietzsche among them, have more to say of value about Christ and the Christian idea (not so much Nietzsche there, but still) than the majority of stridently Christian thinkers. Nietzsche thinks of Christianity as a misnamed religion, because he can think of only one Christian, the one who was crucified. Camus speaks of the genius of Christianity in tying together heaven and earth, an incarnational theology from a non-religious man, and speaks solemnly of the feeling of abandonment on the Cross as the most profound moment of the Gospel narrative.

How much is lost when we fail to engage with those we disagree with, those whose worldviews are different to ours, those who start with assumptions we have already ruled out. And, how much that might be of value for our very own worldview.

In many ways, I am not a conventionally religious man; I am also not spiritual, because I have never understood what that was supposed to me, as a contrast to "religious." But, in other ways, I have a religious outlook, if not quite theistic. I can say though, I have never been as touched by some of the deepest beauties of religion as when reading the most strident atheists.

Libertarian or just bourgeois?

Some of my students like to engage in political sparring with me, especially during the election season. And, since they tend to assume I'm a far-left liberal—they tend to have a very skewed idea of what my views actually are—they like to try out right-wing or libertarian or conservative arguments on me.

One quite intelligent student, who wears campaign shirts to class every day and self-identifies as a libertarian, was talking to me about the various propositions on the ballot in California this year and asking me what my vote would be on several of them. I told him my general dislike of propositions, because of the way they lead to inconsistent legislation, the writing of legislation by interest groups, and because of the way they allow the Legislature to avoid dealing with any hard issues, the very job for which they are paid.

So, he asked me in particular what my vote would be on California's Prop 34, a measure intended to effectively repeal the death penalty. I told him I would probably vote for that one, because I'm opposed on practical, though not clearly theoretical, grounds to capital punishment. And, I threw in, that I am also opposed to the three-strikes law that California enacted through the proposition system.

He seemed amazed that I would be opposed to the three-strikes law and the death penalty. I told him that, apart from the fact that the three-strikes initiative was bankrolled by the Prison Guards' Union whose members have a financial interest in longer sentences—and, he had just told me how unions have too much influence in society—I have little faith in the police or the courts or prosecutors and certainly not enough faith in them to allow them to take lives. He seemed to find this surprising. And, then I realized, he isn't really a libertarian at all. Like many anti-government Americans, he doesn't like government when it interferes in his life in any way, but the idea that government is corrupt in those instances never bleeds over to the idea that it might be corrupt in its exercise of the police power or military adventures.

Not unlike the common belief in some circles of socialism for business and libertarianism for the individual, there is a theoretical inversion with the same result: libertarianism for the middle and upper classes and authoritarianism for the poor and delinquent and the foreign. But that's just to say, that too many of our political commitments are nothing more than rationalizations for whatever we think will benefit ourselves. 

A puzzle about property rights

Frank lives on a roughly triangular plot of land bordered on each side by a different neighbor: Joanna, Therese, and William. That is, his property is completely surrounded by the property of others. 

When he purchased this property, there was a well on the property. Through no fault of his own, nor through any actions of his neighbors, the water in the well has become undrinkable.

Because of some unchosen characteristic of Frank’s—his ethnicity, his sexual orientation, his nationality, … you may pick—his neighbors have taken a dislike to him. This dislike is so strong that they would just as lief that he be dead. However, his neighbors all respect his (negative) right to life as much as they respect property rights, absolutely. 

Thus, when Frank comes to them asking to buy water, they refuse to sell the water to him. No price that Frank is able to pay is a price that they are willing to take. There are more distant sellers willing to sell Frank water at a price agreeable to him, but they would have to cross the property of Joanna, Therese, or William to do so. And, none of these are willing to allow access at an agreeable price.

What may Frank justly do to rectify the situation and obtain water? And, why?

Why the gay panic? Or, why the right still smears the queer.

Just why is it that gays and lesbians loom so large in the heterosexual imagination? Why does such a tiny minority—somewhere between two and ten percent, but surely closer to two—figure in culture wars again and again?

It can’t be a fear that we will somehow take over. Unlike racial or ethnic minorities, we don’t increase by reproduction. And, given our presence in almost every historical society in always the same relatively small numbers—even in Classical Greece, the number of exclusive homosexuals was notably small—it isn’t that we attract others to join our ranks. We have always been present and always will be, barring attempts to find and remove whatever genetic dispositions there might be, but we will always be a permanent and small minority. So, what exactly is the fear?

I have a few different, though not mutually exclusive theories. Because I believe that it is gay men rather than lesbians who tend to be more feared, at least by the men who largely still run our world, and because I myself am a gay man, I am going to focus on the fear of gay men, though I will say something about the fear of the lesbian at the end.

Many heterosexual men objectify women. That is, they treat them as something other than real, full human beings. Women aren’t subjects, they are merely objects. This probably comes as no surprise to anyone. So, those men at least believe that this is the way men always think of sexual partners. And, if that’s the way that men think, then there are men, gay men, who want to objectify them. There are men who want to treat them the way that they treat women, and that is absolutely horrible! Horrible, I say.

I think there is an interesting parallel to this line of thought in the way that some feminist scholars think about gay porn. I have heard it argued that even gay porn is discriminatory to women, because even when no women are present, someone is taking the role of the woman and being objectified. But, just like the fear of objectification that underlies much anti-gay animus, this anti-porn thought gets things wrong. It may well be that gay men objectify one another and that gay porn does the same thing, but this is an objectification that, to use the parlance of de Beauvoir, doesn’t make the objectified into the Other.

There’s no objectification of something or someone significantly different, so no separation between the subject and the object. That this is possible, that one can objectify in the moment of sex someone that is still a subject, a real living human being, for you, is a matter of surprise both for the fearful heterosexual man and for a certain kind of theorist.

Many men—and some of those same theorists, for what it’s worth—view penetration as violence, as really tantamount to rape, and as the assertion of power over a weak and vulnerable victim.

This leads to a two-fold problem with gay men corresponding to two of the stereotypes of gay men: dangerous predator and effeminate target of ridicule.

In the first place, if all penetration is rape and violence, then gay men are not only dangerous predators (part of this relates to my third point below) but they also are so dangerous that they attack not only the weaker sex, in the eyes of the heterosexual man I have in mind, but the dominant one. Very little could be more frightening than this.

But, since some gay men allow themselves to be penetrated, they are themselves victims and have given up—horror of horrors, willingly—their position as the dominant sex. Thus, they are even worse, in this view, than women. They have chosen to let themselves be used and penetrated, and so they are rightful targets of ridicule as faggots and fairies.

On both these views, it is beyond the pale of conception that being penetrated does not alone make one a victim, that the penetrated could be partly or wholly in control, or that it could be enjoyed. Again, there is an explicit sexism is both these views, and so this is not so different to my first point above.

Homosexual men are often criticized by others and themselves as being narcissistic. And, we are. But a certain type of heterosexual man—the sort who argued that the repeal of DADT would lead to the ogling of poor helpless Marines by gay comrades in the showers—is even more narcissistic. He cannot imagine that any gay man in existence would fail to desire him as his prey.

Whether this is simply because these straight men have such a high estimation of themselves or because they themselves want every woman they see or believe they could have every woman they desire, I don’t know. But, this belief that the gays are out for every heterosexual man combines with the other fears to make gay men loom larger in the imagination than we ever could in the world and increases worries about the ubiquitous and nefarious gay agenda.

At our best, gay men and lesbians lead lives that are not exactly like everyone else’s.  We lead lives that are experiments in other ways of living, that don’t have to conform to the general form of life constrained by traditional marriage and family. If gays and lesbians have ever been more creative or added a special flavor to culture, it is largely because we have lived outside the normal boundaries of social life.

I know that the largest and most successful parts of the gay-movement industry have done as much as they can to claim that we are indistinguishable in every way from heterosexuals and many in the gay community have done all they can to “normalize” themselves. This is why we have the spectacle of GOProud demanding entry into CPAC claiming to be no less conservative and no different to the Heritage Foundation or the Eagle Forum and why mainstream gay rights groups do all they can to marginalize the queer, the effeminate, the transsexual, the drag queen, the butch dyke, the non-monogamous, etc. It is also why the acceptable gays are the married couples with children on sitcoms.

But , the fact that we can—whether we do or not—live outside those traditional forms of life that many people feel as burdens is a challenge. And, it can lead to ressentiment, a feeling that it isn’t fair that others can lead a queer life, when I can’t. And, ressentiment is hostile. If they can lead a life that is different, that is queer, that is not, I think, open to me, then that life must be bad and immoral and unnatural and it must be stopped.

It is not just different, but it is a contagion, a danger to rest of respectable society. The different is always a danger.

This has gone on long enough, but I want to say a word about lesbians. I think much of what I have said above applies to the way much of society feels about lesbians, as well.

But, two of the major drivers of opposition to lesbians, apart from those I have addressed above, are, first, the inability of heterosexual men to place lesbians. They don’t fit into any of the functional categories that a certain type of man places women. They are not the wife or the mother—except when they are—or the real or potential lover. Without a cubby in which to place them, lesbians are a challenge to a particular kind of heterosexual picture of the world. (The same can be said of gay men; apart from those who attempt to be “straight-acting”, gay men fail to fall either fully within or fully outside the stereotypes of masculinity.) And, no one like a challenge to his worldview.

And, lesbians provide a picture of relationships and a life in which intimate relationships with men are not necessary to happiness. If you are even the slightest bit insecure—and, if you are concerned so heavily with the way others lead their lives, you might have some worries about your own—the idea that any group of persons could live fully without you and do so without being incomplete or unhappy is a challenge. So, clearly, they can’t really be happy; their lives can’t really be complete. They surely need to be cured.

Thoughts about human nature at the end of the semester

Because a few students asked what I think about some of the issues we have discussed through the semester, I put together a few of my (not necessarily consistent) thoughts about what we can know philosophically. I am leaving out all the argument that I think establishes these points. I am leaving out what additionally we might be able to know via faith, because I take that to be a separate realm from what can be known by more or less pure reason.

To know anything completely, we have to be able to step back from it and get an objective view of it. Our own humanity precludes us from taking just such an objective view of humanity. At one and the same time, we all are intimately aware of what it is like to be a human, but we may never be able fully to articulate what it is to be human. So, every attempt is going to give us the shape of the human condition without ever quite filling in all the detail. At least, I am going to use that claim to explain the way that I will fail to give a full and fully clear picture of human nature.

We are, by our biological and psychological natures, social beings. We cannot survive well alone, either as children or as adults. Our identities are formed in relation to others and continue, to some degree, in relation to others. For this reason, our ethics have to be concerned with others, but this is not somehow in distinction or opposition to our interests to ourselves. We don’t exist without others and our interests cannot be separated in some clear way from the interests of those around us. We are neither good nor bad by nature, but rather torn between our narrow self-interest and a wider interest, sometimes opting for one rather than the other. And, this connection is not just a matter of our reason, but also of our emotions, which also must have a part in our conception of humanity and in our ethics.

Similarly, though we like to think of our selves as entirely individual, we are communal and our identities are relational. There’s no hard and fast delineation of my “self” from those around me. This is another reason why concern with others is not opposite to concern with myself.

For these reasons, there is very little more important to a well-lived human life than friendship and the virtues that underlie it: courage, justice, honesty. 

I think we are more determined than the existentialists would have us believe. Our choices are often severely constrained by our situations, our backgrounds, and—as current neuroscience suggests—the operations of our brains below the level of our consciousness. We are not absolutely free. But, I believe that we are free—we certainly cannot help but feel free—that our conscious decisions make a difference to our action. In our conscious decisions, we need to be more aware of the ways that we are constrained in our decisions and assert our control in spite of these constraints. Freedom is a burden, but partly because we have to struggle against our unfreedom and because we have to be careful not to constrain the choices of others.

In one sense, there is certainly more to us than just our physical being. We are not merely matter; we are also conscious, we have minds. But, we cannot know whether this mind is some substance over and above the physical body. And, we have no evidence to think that it is, while believing in substance dualism has largely intractable problems. We do know that somehow, out of a very complex physical mechanism, a very complex mental mechanism arises. That makes us special, though perhaps not unique. It also means that we are on a continuum with the other animals, who resemble us physically and, to a lesser degree, psychologically. But, we are pretty distant from the other animals on that continuum, whether that is for better or worse.

That being said, I don’t think we can have any evidence that there is more to our lives than what we experience on this earth. That means that we should make this life the best life we can. In no way does this mean that everything is permitted or that there is no morality. Given our social nature, given our physical nature, given our interconnectedness, there are better and worse lives for us and there is no account of a good life for me that doesn’t take into account its effects on you and others around me. Many of us—perhaps most of us—don’t achieve a happy or fulfilled life, but it is what we all aim at.

Our consciousness is what makes each of us what she or he is. This consciousness is both intensely private and personal—making us each alone in it—and formed in our interactions with one another and in our presentation of ourselves to others—making us profoundly partial and interrelated. We are each individual and alone but driven by a need to connect; back to that idea of the importance of friendship.

This consciousness, at least as self-consciousness, is also a creation and a constantly changing creation of some part of us. The best evidence we now have tells us that even our memories are constantly in flux and not “stored” in the static way that external memory can be. So, we are always creating ourselves, in every moment. In a sense, there is only the me that exists at this moment, but a me that is generated by the same brain, the same mind, arising out of the same body, and with a sense of being the same self. One sense in which we survive is through the continued re-creation of this consciousness in the consciousnesses and memories of others. One way, for instance, that my grandfather lives on is through my memories of him and through the sharing of stories about him. If we survive in any other way that can matter to us, this consciousness must be part of that survival.