The god whose doings are recounted in the Torah does not, at first sight, look very much like the god of the philosophers. Yet, in his own way, he is hidden and, despite his busy and all-encompassing interest in worldly affairs, he acts at a distance from his devotees. In Exod. 33.20 God says to Moses ‘Thou canst not see my face, for there shall no man see me and live’ – although Moses is permitted a rear view of the Lord, as he passes by. The imagery throughout the book of Exodus is strange and disturbing: God stands proxy for all that we do not know and cannot control, for all the areas of life in which we might unknowingly step on ground that gives way beneath us to our ruin. He is nowhere and everywhere, lying in wait for us and also fleeing as soon as he is sensed.1
Yet there is one thing that God says about himself which is of universal significance, and this he says on his first encounter with Moses, speaking from the burning bush. Moses seeks to know the name of God, in order that he can testify to the authenticity of his vision. But God refuses to name himself, saying instead ‘I am that I am’; adding that, if the Israelites ask for some guarantee of his mission, Moses is to say that he has been sent by ‘I AM’.2 Everything else about God is accidental; this alone is essential: that he refers to himself in the first person. In other words he, like us, is a person, who can utter the word ‘I’ and relate to his worshippers I to you. He is to be addressed as another subject. Hence he reaches out to his people not through coercion and force, but through a covenant – in other words, a mutual agreement, in which he makes himself accountable to those who accept his terms.
Talmudic authorities regard the Torah (the first five books of the Old Testament) as a record of revelations granted to Moses and first set down by him. Modern biblical scholarship regards the Torah rather as a compilation, put together during the Babylonian exile from four or more earlier sources. However you look at it this document contains, in narrative and imagistic form, profound truths about God’s relation to the world, expressed in a way that immediately engages the emotions of the reader. God is a person, an agent, and an ‘I’. And he relates to his people through promises, obligations, laws and covenants – all of which presuppose that both he and they are free agents, able to change the flow of events, and at the same time to take responsibility for doing so. In this chapter I want to say something about what that involves. In particular I want to raise the question: what and where am I, in the world of objects? That question, I maintain, is a necessary preliminary to the question of God’s presence: the question what, and where, is God? The question of God’s presence often looks insoluble. Rightly understood, however, it resembles the question of your and my presence. And we must try to answer them both together.
The Torah constantly returns to the paradox of the transcendental God who is immanent in the world of his creation. God is shown as ‘moving among’ the Israelites. He is a real presence (shekhinah) in their midst, and his covenant requires not merely that they obey his laws, but that they erect a house for him, a place in which he can be encountered (even if never ‘face to face’). But God’s emphasis on ritual, cleanliness, and the punctilious arrangements for housing him, which are supposedly the conditions of his presence, also emphasize his absence. The temple is God’s point of entry into this world, the ‘point of intersection of the timeless with time’, to borrow Eliot’s words. It is the place of a God who acts in this world, while being impassably removed from it. The ritual is designed to show this – to keep the people at a distance from the Holy of Holies, shut off from God by everything except their obedience. The paradox of the transcendent God who is immanent in the world of his creation, of the eternal and immutable who moves and changes in time, of the remote sustainer who is an object and subject of love – this paradox is symbolized in the rituals of the temple and also resolved there. Do we just say that these are things we cannot understand, and that the ritual is there to rescue the incomprehensible by re-presenting it as a mystery? That is often said of the Christian Eucharist. But it makes the dividing line between faith and scepticism too fine.
Let us look again at God’s response to the question posed by Moses. Moses asked for God’s name: in other words for an identification – something that would enable Moses to know who it is that he is talking to. And God responds by identifying himself in the first person. He is saying to Moses that he, God, is a self-conscious subject. Like Moses, God has a subjective point of view. He does not exist only outside the world, with a view from nowhere that he can never share. He moves in the world, in a somewhere of his own.
This is a radical thing for the causa sui to claim. It is precisely what sends shivers down the Islamic spine. How can God be greater than everything, a transcendental unity without parts or partners, if he is also in the world, addressing his creatures in the first person case? Sure, he occasionally lapses into the first person (usually the first person plural) in the Koran: but only in ways that make it clear that it is really the other, and not the self, that is speaking. He speaks through the angel Gabriel, and through the recitations of the Prophet – which is what the word ‘qur’ân’ (recital) implies. But he is not an ‘I’ among others in a world that he shares. The unity of God, in Islamic thought, is not simply a matter of God’s being the unique instance of something: it is a metaphysical condition that nothing else can manifest. Spinoza took this thought seriously, arguing that there is at least one causa sui and also at most one. Hence everything that exists is a mode of the one substance, and there is no distinction between God and the world. I find it hard to believe that the Islamic doctrine of tawHîd can avoid moving in the same direction. If we do go in this direction, however, God’s presence becomes an ubiquitous presence, in which we are all absorbed, and none of us relates to God as Moses thought he did, I to you and you to me.
Obviously, we need to get a little clearer about the meaning of the word ‘I’. Philosophers have frequently argued that ‘I’ does not function as a name, and does not provide an identifying description of the speaker. Moreover, when I refer to myself in the first person I do not apply some criterion of identity, some method or procedure that enables me to say ‘this thing, to which I am referring, is I’. If I used such a procedure, then I could misapply it: I could make mistakes, coming to the conclusion that this thing that I am referring to is not I but someone or something else. And that supposition is absurd.
This does not mean that the word ‘I’ is empty. ‘I’ is an indexical term, like ‘here’ and ‘now’; but it is also (although some philosophers have doubted this3) a referring expression, correctly used only of a certain kind of thing – namely of a self-conscious and self-referring subject. Moreover the word ‘I’ can be meaningfully replaced in all its occurrences by other pronouns or by a proper name. ‘I am Roger Scruton’ is a statement of identity, and one about which I could be wrong, even though I make it with special authority, having had a lifelong acquaintance with Roger Scruton.
When speaking in the first person I can refer authoritatively to an object in the external world. I know, for example, that I am sitting down at a desk, and from this I infer that a particular body – namely my body – is disposed in a particular way. When I move my arm I know immediately and on no basis that my arm has moved, and any error in this matter must be explained in some special way. I may see an arm in a mirror and wonder whether it is mine; but in all normal perceptions I have an immediate awareness of my body and can identify it without criteria as mine.
Likewise, when I attribute mental states to myself there is, over a large range of cases, both immediate awareness and also a kind of immunity to error. I know that I have a pain in my finger, that I am thinking of Sam, and that I am hungry. And I know on no basis, and without deploying a criterion of identity, that this pain, this thought and this hunger belong to one thing, which is I. Of course, I could be wrong in thinking that this I is Roger Scruton: I might in fact be Gordon Brown, suffering from delusions of grandeur. But I cannot be wrong in thinking that this unity that I identify is I. This recalls Kant’s ‘transcendental unity of apperception’. A self-conscious being, Kant argued, apprehends the unity of the I, and this unity is transcendental in that it is not something that the subject arrives at by way of a conclusion, but something presupposed in all his knowledge, including the knowledge that he has of himself.
So here is what God is saying to Moses: I am one thing, with the kind of unity that you discover in yourself, when you are alert and addressing another. This transcendental unity does not tell you to what kind you belong, or what role you have in the world of objects: it identifies you, rather, as a unique point of view upon the world of objects. And in that respect, God is saying, he is like us. He has that ‘transcendental’ and ‘original’ uniqueness which is implied by his mastery of the first person case. More, he can know himself as one without implying that there are others like him in any other respect. Maybe there is more to his unity than this – maybe he is ‘simple’ and ‘substantial’ as the medieval philosophers thought; maybe he has that ineffable tawHîd that the Muslims so fervently believe in. But what is interesting to me is that he is claiming to be present in our world in something like the way that we are present: through a view from somewhere that grants him a place as a subject in the world of things.
I can know myself as I only if I can spontaneously refer to myself, identify my mental states, situate myself in relation to others. All of those capacities involve mental acts that depend upon a shared public language. I must understand ‘I’ as a pronoun that others can use, which retains its sense as the speaker (and therefore the reference) changes, and which can be replaced by other pronouns without the resulting sentence ceasing to be syntactically well-formed. I am I to myself only if I am also you to others, and this means that I must be capable of that free dialogue in which I take charge of my presence before the presence of you. The same, surely, has to be true of God, if Moses is to encounter him.
You may wonder how God can be free to act, in a world in which everything is governed by scientific laws. You may think that the relation of dependence, which binds the world as a whole to the necessary being, leaves science in charge, when it comes to saying what causes what. And science cannot, in the nature of things, trace an empirical event to a transcendental cause. But there is a way out of that objection – or at least, a way of postponing the answer to it. As I argued in the last chapter, the human being is situated in the world of objects, and is himself an object in that world. All attempts to pin-point his freedom and agency in the world of objects will lead to the kind of nonsense that we find in Libet’s account of the neuroscience of decision. Look for God’s will in the physical world and you will certainly find it, just as you will find my will in the world in which I move. But look for the ‘gap’ in the physical order, the inexplicable departure from the laws of nature, which is the physical ‘reality’ of God’s will, and you will find nothing. Freedom, action and accountability are properties of the person, and it is only when we see God as a person that we will understand that this is true also of him. He is present in our world in the same sense that we are: as a subject. And when we attribute an event to his will, we are saying that there is a reason for it, and that this reason is God’s answer to our own question ‘why?’. We are not describing it as a miraculous intervention, and we can accept Hume’s scepticism about miracles, while acknowledging God’s presence as an agent in space and time.
This does not mean that there is no puzzle about God’s agency: of course there is. But it is a special case of the puzzle about agency as such. What is it, to act in the world, and how is the capacity for action connected with the first person point of view? Clearly, it would be a mistake to approach this question by starting from the problem of God’s agency, which is a limiting case. We need to begin from our own position, and ask how it is that we act in the world, and what makes action possible.
The first thing to note is that persons are not only subjects: they are objects among others in a world that they share. They are living, breathing, acting beings, embodied and occupying physical space. Moreover, they are not two things: a human body and a soul inside. To think in that Cartesian way is to ‘reify’ the subject – in other words to commit the error that Kant identified, in the Paralogisms chapter of the Critique of Pure Reason. This is the error of supposing that the subject can be understood as objects are understood, through categories of substance and cause. The subject is the view from somewhere, but does not appear within that view: for if it did so I might misidentify it, or even conclude that there is no such thing.
It is just as possible to develop a science of the human being as it is to develop a science of any other animal. The theory of evolution and the science of the brain promise to show what makes this peculiar organism ‘tick’: and maybe it will turn out to be not so very different from what makes other organisms tick – in particular those organisms that are close to us on the evolutionary tree. If we deny that, then we deny the best explanations so far given of man’s place in nature. Creationists think they have a better explanation: but that is because they fail to see that they have no explanation at all, but merely a formula for translating the unexplained into the inexplicable.
At the same time we are presented with a problem, when it comes to accounting for our ways of understanding and relating to each other: for we don’t relate to each other as animals, not even when doing the things – fighting, grooming, copulating – that dominate the social lives of animals. We see each other as the originators of our acts: the person comes before us as a thing that enters the world through his actions. The causal chains that bind past to future run through us as they run through everything. But we do not refer our thoughts, actions and emotions to their endless prelude in the world of objects, but to the subject who accounts for them, and within whose first person perspective they lie. Hence we make, or ought to make, a metaphysical distinction between the acts of humans and the doings of animals. It is true that animals have beliefs and desires as we do, and that their wants, needs and feelings cause their behaviour. But they are not revealed in their behaviour as we are in ours. They do not ‘intervene’ in the world as we do: they do not take charge of the future or make themselves accountable for it. The person is revealed as an individual in his actions, and for this reason there exists in all natural languages the idiom of ‘agent causation’, as it has been called.4 We refer to actions as events; but we identify their causes not as events but as agents. It is not the movement of John’s arm that caused Mary to fall, but John, who pushed her. John is the cause of all those things that immediately issue from his will.
Moreover, while we all belong to a natural kind – being members of the species homo sapiens – it is not as members of that kind that we identify ourselves, when we refer to ourselves in the first person. We identify ourselves as persons, and assume that we endure as persons. As a human being I have a past and a future; as a person I lay claim to that past and that future as mine – as things that originate in me, in this very subject who must account for them. Persons do not form a natural kind, and the concept of personal identity is problematic in a way that the concept of animal identity is not. This we have surely learned from countless thought experiments, from John Locke to Sydney Shoemaker and Derek Parfit.5
Other animals are conscious: which is to say that they respond to their environment by responding to how it seems. Animals are repositories of ‘seemings’, and this lifts them, to a certain extent, from the world of objects and sets them nearer to ourselves. We can relate to them not by pushing them around, as we relate to ordinary physical things, but by changing the way things seem to them. We offer rewards and punishments; we address them with shouts and murmurs; we stroke them, feed them and get them to see the world in a way that makes them pliable to our interests – including our interest in their well-being.
But consciousness is not the same as self-consciousness. It involves sensitivity to information, an ability to respond to stimuli, and a repertoire of needs and desires. But it does not involve the crucial thing that God claimed in addressing Moses – the ability not merely to have mental states, but to attribute them to a centre of consciousness, and to identify that centre of consciousness in the first person, as a person like you. Anthropomorphism does not consist in attributing mental states to animals, or in imagining them to be thinking and feeling as we think and feel. It involves seeing them as persons, who identify themselves in the first person, and divide the world into ‘I’ and ‘not-I’, self and other, me and you. To think of animals in that way is to suppose that they, like we, have the ‘point of view of the subject’, that they, like we, address the world of objects from a place at its edge. And that is to assume something for which we have, and could have, no grounds.6
This division between I and not-I, which Fichte rightly saw as the distinguishing feature of the rational intellect, lies also at the root of the moral life. For with the idea of the self comes that of the other – of the other who is another like me. That is what God was pointing out to Moses, and what the Jewish revelation has transmitted down the centuries – that the free being, who can say ‘I’, must acknowledge the equal existence of the other. It is why the original commandment, to love God entirely, contains the second, to love your neighbour as yourself.
This takes us back to a point that I dwelt on in the previous chapter, which is that of the essential relationality of the person. Persons are the kind of thing that can recognize others as persons and be recognized in turn as persons.7 Persons are accountable to others, and see themselves as others in the eyes of others. They enter the world of objects as ‘things to be judged’, and are therefore encumbered by duties and gifted with rights. This point goes radically against the fashionable, but to my mind nonsensical, habit of seeing moral problems in utilitarian terms, as problems that we solve by a kind of economic calculus. Real morality begins where economics stops: at the threshold of the other. Through the ideas of right and duty we set the ground rules for a negotiated life among strangers. These rules tell us that rights are to be respected, and duties obeyed. They confer equality of moral status on all participants to the moral dialogue, and impose on us an obligation to justify our conduct in the face of adverse criticism. They bring with them a battery of concepts that entirely transform the worldview and emotions of those who possess them: concepts like justice, desert and punishment, which lie at the heart of our inter-personal responses.
Because they must think in that way, self-conscious subjects enter the world of objects already equipped for tragedy. They know that they are judged, just as they judge. They know they must account for their actions, and that mistakes and defects will be laid at their door. They feel shame – the Schutzgefühl as Max Scheler describes it, which protects them from adverse judgement8 – and guilt, the self-punishment that comes from the consciousness of wrong. The original sin is not one committed by their distant ancestors in the Garden of Eden. It is, to repeat Schopenhauer’s words, das Schuld des Daseins – the guilt of existence itself, existence as a someone.
There is another and yet more puzzling feature of the concept of the person that we need to notice. Persons are not just particulars: they are individuals. We distinguish them and count them, as we do the animals. But they also have, or seem to have, a robust identity through time of which they themselves are the producers. Derek Parfit and others have tried to replace the concept of personal identity with that of the momentary self. But there can be no such thing as a momentary self. Being a self is not just a matter of consciousness: it is a matter of taking responsibility for one’s acts and passions, of recognizing the long beams cast into past and future by the ‘I’ that shines in the now. I can act in the present only if I take responsibility for the future, and this means that I must recognize my identity as a person through time. Any attempt to dispense with identity through time amounts merely to empty scepticism of the kind expressed by Hume, who was sceptical about personal identity for the reason that he was sceptical about all statements of identity, namely, that they involve claims about other times than now. That scepticism is too general to distinguish a special problem about personal identity, and it surprises me that its application by Parfit and others has been received as anything more than a game.
Nevertheless, the concept of personal identity creates a striking philosophical problem. Personhood is not a property that I possess, but my way of being me. I am a person only because there is a compromised individual who I am. In the world of objects there is the animal, the member of the species homo sapiens, which you can single out as you single out any other individual thing. But in my world, the world of the subject, there seems to be something else, not a ‘reidentifiable particular’, but a free individual, whose identity through time is his own responsibility and in some sense his own creation. Somehow the human animal in the world of objects is identical with the person who I am: but how, under what sortal, and with what criterion of identity? There are those who follow Locke, arguing for personal identity as ‘the continuity of consciousness’, and believing that, in some way, the self-revelation of the subject in memory and intention establishes another kind of durability from that of the embodied human being. Locke’s argument was famously accused of circularity by Bishop Butler. More interesting, from my point of view, is the fact that it repeats the error diagnosed by Kant – the error of situating the subject in the world of objects as one object among others.9 Just as we search the world of objects in vain for the place where freedom enters, so do we search it in vain for the self. Yet selves are also persons, who exist and act in that world, which is the only world that we have. How is this possible?
The paradox can be softened through a concept that has played a large part in post-Kantian philosophy, and which has been a constant theme of modern art and literature – the concept of self-realization. Through our actions we do not merely express our states of mind and intentions: we make ourselves present in the world. And in the course of doing this we also change. What we are for ourselves minutely reflects what we are for others, since it is through our dialogue with others that we understand how we appear in the world. The I–You encounter shapes both me and you, and freedom should not be seen as the premise of this encounter but as its conclusion. By learning to see myself as you see me, I gain control of my situation, as a being in the world. And I learn what I am by imprinting myself on what I am not. Through the life of civil society, through religion, art and institutions, I shape myself as an other in the eyes of others, and so gain consciousness of myself as a subject who acts freely in a world that I share.
In a famous passage of The Phenomenology of Spirit 10 Hegel argues that I–You encounters, which begin in conflict and pass through a stage of subjection, intrinsically tend towards justice – towards the situation in which each party acknowledges the other’s right to equal treatment, and in which relations are founded not on coercion but on consent. This is not the place to rehearse Hegel’s complex argument. Suffice it to say that while we are persons by nature, this nature is realized or actualized in what we become. And Hegel shows, to my satisfaction at least, that the process of becoming fully individual and self-aware involves coming to see myself as others see me, as a ‘you’ in the world of others, as well as an ‘I’ in the world that is mine. Through our free actions we are present in the world as persons. But we can be present only because we are present to others, and that means present objectively, in human form. The identity of the person and the human being is therefore something that we achieve, by putting the ‘I’ on display in the visible ‘he’ or ‘she’. This is the process that Fichte and Hegel call Entäusserung, the ‘outward-forming’ or objectification of the subject, who comes to know himself in just this way. And it connects with what other thinkers have called ‘positive freedom’.11
An analogy might help. When painters apply paint to canvas they create physical objects by purely physical means. Any such object is composed of areas and lines of paint, arranged on a surface that we can regard, for the sake of argument, as two-dimensional. When we look at the surface of the painting, we see those areas and lines of paint, and also the surface that contains them. But that is not all we see. We also see – for example – a face that looks out at us with smiling eyes. In one sense the face is a property of the canvas, over and above the blobs of paint; for you can observe the blobs and not see the face, and vice versa. And the face is really there: someone who does not see it is not seeing correctly. On the other hand, there is a sense in which the face is not an additional property of the canvas, over and above the lines and blobs. For as soon as the lines and blobs are there, so is the face. Nothing more needs to be added, in order to generate the face – and if nothing more needs to be added, the face is surely nothing more. Moreover, every process that produces just these blobs of paint, arranged in just this way, will produce just this face – even if the artist is unaware of the face. (Imagine how you would design a machine for producing Mona Lisas.)
The person emerges in the human being in something like that way. It is not something over and above the life and behaviour in which we observe it, but not reducible to them either. Once personhood has emerged it is possible to relate to a human being in a new way – the way of personal relations. (In like manner we can relate to a picture in ways that we cannot relate to something that we see merely as a distribution of pigments.) With this new order of relation comes a new order of understanding, in which reasons and meanings, rather than causes, are sought in answer to the question ‘why?’: the order of the covenant. With persons we are in dialogue: we call upon them to justify their conduct in our eyes, as we must justify our conduct in theirs. Central to this dialogue are concepts of freedom, choice and accountability, and these concepts have no place in the description of animal behaviour, just as the concept of a human being has no place in the description of the physical make-up of a picture, even though it is a picture in which a human being can be seen.
That is only an analogy, however, and we should not think that it solves the deep metaphysical problems that have been occupying me. The face in the picture inhabits an imagined world; the person before me lives in the real world of space and time. I have been discussing the place of freedom in the world of causality, and the place of the subject in the world of objects. Language seems to fall silent at the threshold of these problematic notions: they lie at the limit, and can be grasped only by one further step that we cannot take, the step beyond the edge of the world. We know that the two problems – freedom and causality, subject and object – have a common structure, and that they must have a solution. But perhaps it is beyond the power of the human mind to find that solution.
A picture is a surface, which presents to the normal educated eye an aspect of a thing depicted. Pictures therefore form a functional kind: the kind of thing that presents an aspect to the self-conscious observer. Members of this kind include an enormous variety of objects: canvases, sheets of paper, computer screens, holographs, and so on. The functional kind subsumes things that belong to many different natural kinds.
Likewise persons are a kind – though not a natural kind. It is true that the behavioural complexity required to exemplify inter-personal responses, to entertain ‘I’-thoughts, and to hold oneself and others accountable for changes in the world, is something that we witness only in members of a particular natural kind – the kind homo sapiens. But could we not envisage other beings, members of some other species or of no biological species at all, who exhibit the same complexity and are able to engage with us, I to I? If so, they belong with us in the order of things, and there is a kind that includes us both. I doubt that dolphins are like us in the relevant respects. To become like us they would have to live with each other face to face, and how is that possible for a creature without a face? In the cartoon films, however, animals acquire faces, by speaking from their mouths, addressing each other through their eyes, reshaping their heads to exhibit facial movements and self-conscious expressions, and claiming the voice that speaks from within them as the voice that is ‘mine’. The same is true of the more plausibly ‘personal’ of the aliens that are conjured in science fiction films.
Return for a moment to the evolutionary theory of altruism. The soldier ant who marches vainly into the fire, under the genetic imperative to defend the ant-heap, is doing something that superficially resembles what the officer does, who throws himself on to a live grenade in order to protect his troops. The ant dies in the service of its genes. And the evolutionary psychologists would like to say something similar of the officer. But that is not true. He dies in the service of others. His motive is one of self-sacrifice, on behalf of his troops – a motive that is available only to a subject who distinguishes self and other, who has the concept of sacrifice, and who can make a gift of his life to another like himself. ‘Greater love hath no man than this, that he lay down his life for his friend,’ said Christ. The world of the self-conscious being is a world in which there is love as well as attachment, and in which others exist as objects of obligation, places in the web of objects where light streams in from another source. Hence it is a world in which just and unjust, virtuous and vicious, beautiful and ugly, right and wrong are all distinguished.
The example shows how the ‘I’ concept penetrates the human world. The world perceived from this perspective makes demands that no animal can recognize, and is arranged according to concepts and kinds that no animal can perceive. We should not be surprised, therefore, that our understanding of the human world cannot be captured by the science of objects. The self-conscious mind paints the world in the colours of subjectivity – and the result is in no way to be dismissed as an illusion, any more than the face in the picture is an illusion. For a long time philosophers have been aware of these facts, recognizing that self-conscious beings live in a world that is to be interpreted, and not merely to be explained. Unfortunately, those who have taken this distinction seriously, from Wilhelm Dilthey to Paul Ricoeur, have not always written clearly about the meanings that they allege to be so important to us.12
This brings me to another argument that might help to soften the paradoxes that I have been placing before the reader. I have argued that there is more than one meaning to the question ‘why?’ and that the ‘why?’ of science, which looks for causes, should be distinguished from the ‘why’ of reason, which looks for arguments, and the ‘why?’ of understanding, which looks for meanings. It is not only our enquiries that follow these separate paths; so too do our ways of ordering the world. Science attempts to divide nature at the joints, to group together those things that have a shared structure and a shared causal history. Its theories deploy concepts of natural kinds and primitive variables, and respect the surface phenomena only so far as is necessary to explain them. Things that we group together for our purposes, such as tables, weapons and amusements, may have nothing in common from the point of view of science, while things which science groups together for the purpose of explanation, such as fungi, silicates, and electromagnetic waves, may have nothing significant in common from the point of view of human uses.
When describing the human world – the world as we interact with it – we frequently replace the ‘why?’ of explanation, which leads the scientist towards the fundamental structures of the world, with another question ‘why?’, turned back from the world towards our interests. We classify things under concepts of functional, moral and aesthetic kinds, and of kinds that are themselves changed by our concept of them, like the kind ‘person’ to which we belong.13 These concepts inform our states of mind, and we perceive the world in terms of them. I look about me and see tables and chairs, ornaments and symbols. I read the world as a sign and an invitation, and the concepts that I use focus my emotions and interests on what is useful and meaningful to me. The fearful, the tragic, the amusing, the delightful: who is to say that these categories denote anything deep in the things to which they apply, rather than in the experience of the one who applies them? We distinguish just and unjust, comfortable and uncomfortable, shameful and respectable, just as we distinguish colours and patterns, without inquiring into the underlying motion that throws up these appearances in its wake.
Here is an example of what I have in mind: the concept of a melody. Every musical person can distinguish melodies from mere sequences of notes. Melodies have a beginning, a middle and an end; they begin and they continue until they stop; they have an individual identity and atmosphere, can be combined and developed according to their inner logic; they can be taken apart, amplified, augmented and diminished. They are the stuff of music and unless you can identify them you will be deaf to what music means. But no science of sound has use for the concept of a melody. As far as acoustics is concerned, melodies are sequences of pitched sounds like any other. Sequences that we hear as melodies are not a different kind of thing from sequences that we hear as meaningless successions, and phenomenal features like tension and release, forward motion, gravitational attraction and sounding through silence don’t appear in acoustics. The concept of melody classifies sounds according to a highly sophisticated human interest, and that interest is an interest in surfaces and signs, not in the physical facts that underpin them.14 Yet melodies are musical individuals, which endure through change, and can be identified as ‘the same again’.
The example shows that there are concepts which direct our mental states but which can play no role in an explanatory theory, because they divide the world into the wrong kinds of kind – concepts like those of ornament, melody, duty, freedom. The concept of the person is such a concept, which does not mean that there are no persons, but only that a scientific theory of human persons will classify them with other things – for example, with apes or mammals – and will not be a scientific theory of every kind of person. (For example, it will not be a theory of corporate persons, of angels, or of God.) Hence the kind to which we belong is defined through a concept that does not feature in the science of human biology. Biology sees us as objects rather than subjects, and its descriptions of our responses are not descriptions of what we feel. The study of our kind is the business of the Geisteswissenschaften, which are not sciences at all, but ‘humanities’ – in other words, exercises in inter-personal understanding. I have in mind the kind of understanding exhibited when we explain why King Lear is a tragic figure, why ‘smiling through tears’ is an apt description of the Cavatina in Beethoven’s B-flat quartet, why Rembrandt’s self-portraits show death and decay as a personal possession, and all the other matters that form a true éducation sentimentale.
The kind-concept under which we assemble human beings influences our understanding of their psychological states. These are understood as the states of persons, and not as states that non-personal animals might equally exhibit. And the way we understand them influences the way we experience them. The example of sexual feelings provides a vivid illustration of what I mean. Sexual relations, the biologist might argue, are to be explained in terms of genetic strategies. There is no difficulty in accounting for phenomena like jealousy, female modesty, male predatoriness, and the well-known typologies of attraction, once we see these things as aspects of genetic ‘investment’. My response to this is to say: that is fine, so far as it goes. But the explanations given under-determine the behaviour to be explained. The feature that most needs explaining is precisely the inter-personal intentionality that distinguishes us from our evolutionary neighbours, and causes our attachments to ‘reach through’ the empirical circumstances that give rise to them towards the free subject who is their target. Sexual jealousy in a person is not like its simulacrum in a bonobo, since it involves the thought of betrayal, for which another person is answerable. Monogamy in a person is not like the monogamy of geese or gibbons, in that it involves a vow of lifelong devotion, often conceived in sacramental terms.
The philosophical truth, that our kind is not a biological category, is swept out of view by the evolutionary and neuroscientific picture of the human condition. It can be conjured back by stories, images and evocations, in something like the way that Milton conjured the truth of our condition from the raw materials of the Book of Genesis. Milton’s allegory is not just a portrait of our kind; it is an invitation to kindness. It shows us what we are, and what we must live up to. And it sets a standard for art. Take away religion, however; take away philosophy, take away the higher aims of art, and you deprive ordinary people of the ways in which they can represent their apartness. Human nature, once something to live up to, becomes something to live down to instead. Biological reductionism nurtures this ‘living down’, which is why people so readily fall for it. It makes cynicism respectable and degeneracy chic. It abolishes our kind, and with it our kindness.
Among the most interesting of the concepts that inform and give structure to the human world is that of the face. The science of the human being has no real use for faces. Of course, it recognizes all the components of the face and their disposition in space. It acknowledges that there is such a thing as recognition of the face and facial agnosia. But it does not acknowledge the thing that makes faces so important to us – namely, that they are the outward form and image of the soul, the lamp lit in our world by the subject behind. It is through understanding the face that we begin to see how it is that subjects make themselves known in the world of objects.
Notes
See, in this connection, Jack Miles’s riveting deconstruction: God: A Biography, New York, Alfred A. Knopf, 1996. | |
Hebrew (like other Semitic languages) has only a partially defined present-tense for the verb ‘to be’; hence the words that I have given in the King James translation are in the future tense in the original. But it is their first person grammar that God is emphasizing. | |
See, for example, G. E. M. Anscombe, ‘The First Person’, in Collected Papers, Oxford, Blackwell, 1981, vol. 2. The peculiarities of the first person case are not to be explained by saying that ‘I’ does not refer, but by specifying how the word ‘I’ refers. See Christopher Peacocke, ‘The First Person as a Case Study’, Chapter 3 of Truly Understood, Oxford, OUP, 2008. | |
See Timothy O’Connor, Persons and Causes, Oxford, OUP, 2002. | |
Sydney Shoemaker, Self-Knowledge and Self-Identity, Ithaca, Cornell University Press, 1963; Derek Parfit, Reasons and Persons, Oxford, Clarendon Press, 1984. | |
Arguments around this issue are endless, tedious and full of undigested venom. I have outlined my own position in Animal Rights and Wrongs, London, Continuum, 2003. | |
For the development of this idea, see Robert Spaemann: Persons: The Difference Between ‘Someone’ and ‘Something’, trans. Oliver O’Donovan, Oxford, OUP, 2007. | |
Max Scheler, Über Scham und Schamgefühl, 1913, in Gesammelte Werke, Bd. 10, Berne, Francke, 1957. | |
See the discussion by David Wiggins in Sameness and Substance Renewed, Cambridge, CUP, 2001, Chapter 7. Wiggins sides with Butler against Locke, but argues in opposition to Butler’s immaterialism that our identity through time is governed not by ‘same person’ but by ‘same human being’. A comparable position is taken, in the face of all the crazy thought experiments, some conjured by himself, by Mark Johnston, in Surviving Death, Princeton, Princeton University Press, 2011. | |
The Phenomenology of Spirit, trans. A. Miller, Oxford, Clarendon Press,1977, pp. 111–18. | |
See Isaiah Berlin’s classic essay on ‘Two Concepts of Liberty’, which is not, however, a defence of, so much as a warning against, the cult of self-realization. See also, for influential applications of Hegel’s argument to the basic forms of modern life, Alexandre Kojève, ed. Raymond Queneau, Introduction à la lecture de Hegel, Paris, Gallimard, 1947, and Ernst Bloch, ‘Phänomenologie des Geistes’ in Subjekt-Objekt: Erläuterungen zu Hegel (1951), second edn, Frankfurt am Main, Suhrkamp, 1962. | |
There is a by-way of the intellectual life here that I wish to avoid. The interested reader will see why by consulting the collection of Ricoeur’s writings edited by John B. Thompson, Paul Ricoeur: Hermeneutics and the Human Sciences, Cambridge, CUP, 1981. | |
Such ‘interactive kinds’ have been interestingly explored by Ian Hacking, ‘The Looping Effect of Human Kinds’, in Dan Sperber et al. (eds), Causal Cognition: An Interdisciplinary Approach, Oxford, OUP, 1995, pp. 351–83. | |
See Roger Scruton, The Aesthetics of Music, Oxford, OUP, 1997, Chapters 1 and 2. |