Kant & The Human Subject
Brian Morris compares the ways Kant’s question “What is the human being?” has been answered by philosophers and anthropologists.
It has long been recognized, by thinkers as diverse as Edmund Husserl, Erich Fromm, and Lewis Mumford, that there is an essential ‘paradox’ or ‘contradiction’ at the heart of human life. For humans as organisms are an intrinsic part of nature, while at the same time, through our conscious experience, symbolic life, and above all, our culture, we are also in a sense separate from nature.
The mystery of mind. The far more highly evolved self-conscious minds of the human species. In fact, who really knows what the minds of "lesser creatures" perceive and/or conceive about the world around them. We know that we share more "primitive" brains functions with many other animal species. And we often make that distinction between creatures able to grasp on at least some level the existence of "I" -- orangutans, chimpanzees, gorillas, bottlenose dolphins, elephants, orcas, bonobos, rhesus macaques, European magpies -- and those creatures that seem to be propelled/compelled entirely by biological imperatives embedded in instincts and drives.
We have instincts and drives as well. But, unlike most other animals, we are, given some measure of human autonomy, actually able to react to and to judge the behaviors of those who, in embodying their own more primitive brain functions, don't choose the same values and behaviors as we do.
I merely focus the beam here on the extent to which these interactions are rooted more in dasein -- "I" -- than in what philosophers can tell us about, among other things, the moral obligations of so-called "rational" minds.
In this light humans have been described by Raymond Tallis as an ‘explicit animal’. We have what Cicero described as a ‘second nature’. This duality or dialectic is well expressed in the famous painting in the Vatican by Raphael, The School of Athens, which depicts Plato pointing up to the heavens while Aristotle points down to the earth.
Still, once again, take this particular "intellectual contraption" down off the skyhooks, and integrate the words out in particular worlds understood in conflicting ways by the only species, capable of communicating memes as well. Historical, cultural and interpersonal in any number of particular human communities.
Instead, the discussion continues on -- in articles such as this -- only up in the clouds of scholastic abstraction:
Human duality is also reflected in the fact that the human brain is composed of two distinct hemispheres, with distinct functions, and two very different ways of being in the world. The left hemisphere is associated with language, symbolic thought, analysis, facts or things in isolation, focussed attention, and the non-living aspects of the world; while the right hemisphere is associated with visual imagery, pre-linguistic thought, synthesis, patterns and relations, things in context, and organic life. Reason, science, creativity and selfhood all involve both sides of the brain, and there is no simple relationship between the hemispherical differences and ethnic, class or gender affiliations. It is significant however that if the right side of the brain is severely damaged, the left side becomes overactive, and an ultra-rationalist sensibility may develop. This sensibility is manifested in a predilection for abstraction and geometric patterns, a flight from the body, a feeling of fragmentation, a lack of empathy for others (egoism), and alienation from the natural world – the postmodern condition, or the schizophrenic personality lauded by Gilles Deleuze?
Whereas the "duality" that I am most intrigued by revolves around the distinction between
I in the either/or world and "I" in the is/ought world.
These biological elements/imperatives are important to grapple with and to grasp but once one is convinced they have the clearest possible understanding of them, how is
this knowledge applicable to identity as an existential contraption confronting conflicting goods out in a particular political economy?
Always assuming of course that the is/ought world reflects the actual existence
of free will in our own species. In other words being able to explain scientifically how the evolution of biological life on Earth actually resulted
in the autonomous mind.