HUMAN BEINGS, AND BEING HUMAN

By and large, philosophers have sought to discover the essence of humanity in men's heads rather than in their tails (or lack thereof). But in seeking this essence, they did not ask: 'What makes humans animals of a particular kind?' Instead they turned the question around, asking: 'What makes humans different in kind from animals?' This inversion completely alters the terms of the inquiry. For once the question is posed in the latter form; humanity no longer appears as a species of animality, or as one small province of the animal kingdom. It refers rather to a principle that, infused into the animal frame, lifts its possessors onto an altogether higher level of existence than that of the 'mere animal'. Humanity, in short, ceases to mean the sum total of human beings, members of the animal species Homo sapiens, and becomes the state or condition of being human, one radically opposed to the condition of ani-mality (Ingold 1988: 4). The relation between the human and the animal is

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thus turned from the inclusive (a province within a kingdom) to the exclusive (one state of being rather than another).

The great French naturalist, Count de Buffon, writing in 1749, was in no doubt as to the immensity of the chasm that separates the most primitive human from the ape, 'because the former is endowed with the faculties of thought and speech' whereas the latter is not. Yet in bodily form they are not very much different, and 'if our judgement were limited to figure alone, I acknowledge that the ape might be regarded as a variety of the human species' (Buffon 1866, 2: 43). Lord Monboddo, having read Buffon's Histoire naturelle, was of precisely this opinion. At that time the anthropoid apes were generally known as orang-utans - the term is of Malay origin, meaning 'man of the woods', and nowadays denotes a particular species (Pongo pygmaeus) native to Borneo and Sumatra (on the past significance and contemporary taxonomic status of the orang-utan, see Tobias's discussion in Article 3). Monboddo was firmly convinced that orang-utans were human:

They are exactly of the human form; walking erect, not upon all-four, like the savages that have been found in Europe; they use sticks for weapons; they live in society; they make huts of branches of trees; and they carry off negroe girls, whom they make slaves of, and use both for work and pleasure But though from the particulars above mentioned it appears certain, that they are of our species, and though they have made some progress in the arts of life, they have not come the length of language. (Burnet 1773: 174-5) Unlike Buffon, Monboddo believed that man's humanity was not installed from the start by an act of divine intervention, but was acquired by degrees, and was only completed with the emergence of reason and intellect, the twin foundations for that uniquely human achievement, the faculty of language.

Apart from occasional discoveries of solitary 'wild men' — the quadrupedal savages of his account - orang-utans furnished Monboddo with as close a living approximation as he could find to an entire human population existing in an original state of nature. Lacking language and intellect, orang-utans were human beings that had not yet reached the stage of being human.

They belonged to our species, yet had advanced only a little way towards the condition of humanity.

Primordial human beings, of which Monboddo could find no direct evidence but whose nature could easily be inferred through a backward extra-polation, would have been wholly 'without arts or civility', governed in their actions by instinct rather than custom, existing in a state that 'is no other than that of the mere animal' (Burnet 1773: 218, 291; see also Bock 1980: 19-26).

The same, of course, might be said of the human infant, supporting an analogy that has a long pedigree in Western thought, between the maturation of the particular human being and the passage of humanity at large from savagery to civilization. 'Savages', as Sir John Lubbock declared in 1865, 'have often been likened to children, and the comparison is not only correct but also highly instructive… The life of each individual is an epitome of the history of the

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race, and the gradual development of the child illustrates that of the species… Savages, like children, have no steadiness of purpose' (1865: 570).

As a condition opposed to humanity, animality conveys an idea of the quality of life in the state of nature, where we encounter human beings 'in the raw', impelled in their conduct by brute passion rather than rational delibera-tion, and totally unconstrained by moral or customary regulation. This view of animal life and of 'human animality' is an extraordinarily pervasive one in the history of Western thought, which even today colours much ostensibly scientific discussion in the study of animal and human behaviour. A prominent feature of the Western tradition is a propensity to think in parallel dichoto-mies, so that the opposition between animality and humanity is aligned with those between nature and culture, body and mind, emotion and reason, instinct and art, and so on. It is even enshrined in the academic division of labour between the natural sciences, in their concern with the composition and structures of the material world (including human organisms), and the humanities, embracing the study of language, history and civilization. And it underlies the continuing arguments between scholars on both sides of this academic fence about the meaning of 'human nature'.

The trouble arises because the legacy of dualistic thinking invades our very conception of what a human being is, for it has given us the vocabulary for expressing it. We are, according to this conception, constitutionally divided creatures, one part immersed in the physical condition of animality, the other in the moral condition of humanity. In which of these two parts, you may ask, does human nature reside? It all depends on what you mean by 'nature', a term that is perhaps one of the most multivalent in the English language. Of its many meanings we need at this point to distinguish just two (for these and other meanings, see Williams 1976: 184-9). First, the nature of a thing may be some essential quality that all and only things of its kind may be expected to possess. As such it is a 'lowest common denominator' for the kind, what is universal rather than particular to each of its constituent individuals. Second, nature connotes the material world, the macrocosm of physical entities as distinct from their microcosmic representation on the level of ideas. It is in this sense that nature stands classically opposed to culture, the former an external reality, the latter a reality only as it exists 'inside people's heads'.

Now to return to our question - does human nature reside in our humanity or in our animality? - we find that the two senses of nature adduced above give us conflicting answers. Recall Buffon's view, fairly representative of its time, that it is in their possession of the faculty of mind rather than in bodily form that humans are distinguished from apes. What is essential to human beings, then, is their humanity: the component which, following orthodox Christian dogma, they owe to God's preferential bestowal of divine spirit. On the other hand, human beings also partake of the material world - or of nature in the second sense - in their bodily organs, comprehended by the Creator along with the bodies of every animal species (as Buffon put it) 'under one

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general plan'. Accordingly, human beings may be revealed in their material generation as biological organisms, by stripping away their essential humanity to leave an innate residue that they have in common with other animals. This is the layer of 'human animality' to which Monboddo and many others, both previously and subsequently, have referred as the 'brutish state' of humankind, supposedly representing an original and universal baseline for all social and cultural evolution.

Despite the theological upheavals that followed in the wake of Darwin's theory of human evolution, which of course had no place for mind or spirit except as the output of a material organ (the brain), the terms of the contem-porary debate between 'scientists' and 'humanists' on the question of human nature are still very much the same as they were in the days of Buffon and Monboddo. Ethologists and sociobiologists, working within a natural science paradigm, explicitly identify human nature with what is animal in us, some-thing normally so overlain with cultural accretions that it is more directly observable in species other than our own. They have made it their business to discover the prototypes for universal human dispositions in the behavioural repertoire most notably of non-human primates, though the search for parallels often takes them much further afield. Indeed much of the intense popular interest in ethological work stems from the belief that by studying the behav-iour of other animals we can learn something important about ourselves. This is certainly true, yet when taken to excess it can lead us to rest our account of human nature on an amalgam of traits drawn from the repertoire of practi-cally any species except our own. The readiness with which some sociobiolo-gists are inclined to pronounce upon the human predicament on the basis of studies of such social insects as ants and bees puts one in mind of Will Cuppy's quip, in How to Tell Your Friends from the Apes, that 'the psychology of the Orang-utan has been thoroughly described by scientists from their observations of the Sea-urchin' (Cuppy 1931: 38).³

Anthropologists and others of a more humanist bent have naturally been concerned to recover the 'human essence' that is missing from sociobiological and ethological accounts. To adopt Eisenberg's (1972) phrase, they emphasize 'the human nature of human nature', replacing the ancient notion of spirit with what has come to be called 'the capacity for culture'. Just what this means is a matter of interminable dispute. Suffice to note, at this point, that in locating the distinguishing quality of human beings on the moral plane of culture, as distinct from the physical plane of nature, the eighteenth-century conception of man - as torn between the conditions of humanity and animality — is reproduced in all its essentials. Only when they are 'being human', it seems, do human beings show themselves for what they really are.

However there is not only one way of being human. Whatever else it may be, the capacity for culture is a capacity for generating difference. In and through that creative, generative process, played out in the ordinary course of social life, the essence of humanity is revealed as cultural diversity. For any

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particular individual, caught up in the process, 'becoming human' entails becoming different from other humans who speak different languages or dialects, practise different arts, hold different beliefs, and so on. If it is in their thus differentiating themselves from one another that human beings are essen-tially distinguished from animals, it follows, of course, that human animality is revealed as the absence of such differentiation, in sameness. Each one of us comes into the world as a creature born of man and woman, a biologically human organism whose physical constitution is entirely indifferent to his or her subsequent education into the code of conduct of one culture or another.

As far as my existence as a member of the human species is concerned, the fact that I happen to be English rather than, say, French or Japanese is quite incidental. But with regard to the expression of my humanity, it is vital. It makes me someone, rather than just something. Or to put the same point in general terms, culture underwrites the identity of the human being, not as a biological organism but as a moral subject. In this latter capacity, we regard every man or woman as a person. My personhood is therefore inseparable from my belonging to a culture, and both are crucial ingredients of my being human.

We are now in a position to resolve a paradox at the heart of Western thought, which insists with equal assurance both that humans are animals and that animality is the very obverse of humanity. A human being is an individual of a species; being human is to exist as a person. In the first sense humanity refers to a biological taxon (Homo sapiens), in the second it refers to a moral condition (personhood). The fact that we use the same word 'human' for both reflects a deep-seated conviction that all and only those individuals belonging to the human species can be persons, or in other words that personhood is conditional upon membership of the taxon. 'All human beings', as Article 1 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights states, 'are endowed with reason and conscience'. By implication, all non-human animals are not (Clark

1988: 23).

If we accept this tenet as an article of faith, then certain questions cannot be asked, at least not without compromising the principles of genealogical clas-sification generally adopted in the definition of biological species. We cannot ask, as Monboddo did, how reason and speech were acquired in the history of human populations, or how these faculties may be lacking or deficient in particular individuals of human parentage. Nor can we ask whether, or to what extent, animals of other species may be endowed with the faculties of language and thought. Yet these are legitimate questions that cannot be resolved a priori but only through empirical investigation. It is perfectly reasonable to enquire, for example, whether chimpanzees or dolphins have language, or whether they engage in rational deliberation. It may turn out that they do not, except perhaps under quite artificial conditions, and that these capacities are indeed possessed only by biologically human animals. But who is to say that they will not eventually evolve, in future times, among species descended from the

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chimpanzees and dolphins of today? If this comes to pass, we would have grounds for treating such thinking and speaking animals as persons. They could not, however, be regarded as members of the human species, since they would not be of human descent.

Rigid adherence to the doctrine that only human beings can be persons would therefore lead us to the absurd situation of having to deny the possibility of an evolution that we cannot, at this stage, know anything about. Once again, in his discussion of the humanity of the orang-utan, Monboddo was wrong for the right reasons: wrong because anthropoid apes do not belong to the human species; right because although he lacked the vocabulary to express the point without contradiction, he recognized that membership of the taxon we now call Homo sapiens does not automatically confer qualities of personhood. This conclusion immediately opens up a field of inquiry of potentially inexhaustible scope, into the personhood of non-human animals or, if you will, into animal humanity rather than human animality. It suggests that the boundary between human and other animal species does not run alongside, but actually crosscuts the boundary between humanity and animality as states of being. And by the same token, we cannot just assume that approaches from the humanities are appropriate only to understanding the affairs of human beings, and that the lives and worlds of nonhuman animals can be fully comprehended within a natural science paradigm (Ingold 1989: 496).

One consequence of this assumption is that whereas human actions are gen-erally interpreted as the products of intentional design, the actions of other animals - even when ostensibly similar in their nature and consequences — are typically explained as the automatic output of a 'wired-in' behavioural programme (Ingold 1988: 6). Of course, when it comes to those few animals with which we have close and enduring relationships, such as our domestic cats and dogs, we are quick to make exceptions, attributing to them intentions and purposes just as we do to other humans. For people of many non-Western cultures, whose practical involvement with other species vastly exceeds our own, our exceptions may very well be their rule. For example, among the Ojibwa, native hunters of subarctic Canada, personhood is envisaged as an inner essence, embracing the powers of sentience, volition, memory and speech, which is quite indifferent to the particular species form it may out-wardly assume. The human form is merely one of the many guises in which persons may materially manifest themselves, and anyone can change his or her form for that of an animal more or less at will. When you see an animal, and particularly an animal that is behaving in an unusual way, you wonder who it is, for it may be somebody you know. Thus for the Ojibwa, there is nothing especially 'human' about being a person (Hallowell 1960).

My purpose in presenting this example is to emphasize that our conven-tional notion of personhood as a prerogative of human beings is just as much embedded in the Western worldview as is the contrary notion of the Ojibwa in theirs, and we have no more cause to attribute any absolute validity to the

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former than to the latter. In his Critique of Judgement of 1790, the German philosopher Immanuel Kant summed up Western orthodoxy in the following words: 'As the single being on earth that possesses understanding, [man] is certainly titular lord of nature, a n d … is born to be its ultimate end' (Kant 1952, II S431). This imperialistic conception of 'man's place in nature,' with its dogmatic denial (accompanied by no evidence at all) of non-human forms of understanding, has done a great deal of damage in its time. Pragmatically, the Ojibwa level-pegging of humans and animals in relations of mutual inter-dependence enshrines a sound ecological wisdom, and with regard to the long-term survival of our species it has much to commend it. Scientifically, the investigation of the real nature of the similarities and differences between our-selves and other animals remains in its infancy, and should not be foreclosed by a priori assumptions about human pre-eminence. Such investigation, which anthropologists have tended to treat as somewhat marginal to their concerns, is in fact of crucial significance, since it strikes at the heart of the dominant conception of human uniqueness. It is to this that we now turn.