Boundaries of Humanity: Humans, Animals, Machines - Hardcover

Sheehan

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0520071530 ISBN 13: 9780520071537

Publisher: University of California Press, 1992

Synopsis

To the age-old debate over what it means to be human, the relatively new fields of sociobiology and artificial intelligence bring new, if not necessarily compatible, insights. What have these two fields in common? Have they affected the way we define humanity? These and other timely questions are addressed with colorful individuality by the authors of The Boundaries of Humanity.

Leading researchers in both sociobiology and artificial intelligence combine their reflections with those of philosophers, historians, and social scientists, while the editors explore the historical and contemporary contexts of the debate in their introductions. The implications of their individual arguments, and the often heated controversies generated by biological determinism or by mechanical models of mind, go to the heart of contemporary scientific, philosophical, and humanistic studies.

About this title

About the Author

James J. Sheehan is Dickason Professor of Humanities at Stanford University. Morton Sosna is a Fellow of the Stanford Humanities Center.

From the Back Cover

"An excellent interdisciplinary collage . . . of considerable interest to philosophers, psychologists, computer scientists (of a theoretical stripe), sociologists, and others. . . . Rethinking our relationship to animals is very relevant, I believe, to thinking clearly about our current relationships to current (and future) machines."—Keith Gunderson, University of Minnesota

From the Inside Flap

"An excellent interdisciplinary collage . . . of considerable interest to philosophers, psychologists, computer scientists (of a theoretical stripe), sociologists, and others. . . . Rethinking our relationship to animals is very relevant, I believe, to thinking clearly about our current relationships to current (and future) machines."Keith Gunderson, University of Minnesota

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

The Boundaries of Humanity: Humans, Animals, Machines

By James J. Sheehan and Morton Sosna, editors

University of California Press

Copyright 1991 James J. Sheehan and Morton Sosna, editors
All right reserved.
ISBN: 0520071530
One
Introduction
James J. Sheehan

In 1810, William Blake painted a picture that came to be known as Adam Naming the Beasts . Blake's portrait of the first man reminds us of a Byzantine icon of Christ: calm, massive, and immobile, Adam dominates the science. One of his arms is raised in an ancient gesture signifying speech, while around the other a serpent meekly coils. In the background, animals move in an orderly, peaceful file. Of course, we know the harmony depicted here will not last. Soon Adam and his progeny will lose their serence place in nature; no longer will they be comfortable in their sovereignty over animals or secure in the unquestioned power of their speech. Our knowledge of what is coming gives blake's picture is special, melancholy power.1

Since the Fall, man's place in nature has always been problematic. The problems begin with Genesis itself, where the story of creation is told twice. In the second chapter, the source of Blake's picture, God creates Adam and then all other living things, which are presented to man "to see what he would call them: and whatsoever Adam called every living creature, that was the name thereof," The first chapter, however, has a somewhat different version of these events. Here man is the last rather than the first creature to be made; while still superior to the rest by his special relationship to God, man nevertheless appears as part of a larger natural order. A similar ambiguity can be found in Chapter Nine, which begins with a divine promise to Noah that all beings will fear him but then goes on to describe a covenant between God and Noah and "every living creature of all flesh." From the very start of the Judeo-Christian tradition, therefore, humanity is at once set apart from, and joined with, the realm of other living things.2

In Greek cosmology, humanity's relationship to animals was yet more

uncertain. Like the Hebrews, the Greeks seemed eager to establish human hegemony over nature. Animals sacrifice, which was so central to Greek religion, ritually affirmed the distinctions between humans and beasts, just as it sought to establish connections between the human and divine. Aristotle, the first great biologist to speculate about human nature, developed an elaborate hierarchy of living beings, in which all creaturesbeginning with human femaleswere defined on a sliding scale that began with adult males. But the line between humanity and its biological neighbors was more permeable for Greeks than for Hebrews. Gods frequently took on animals form, which allowed them to move about the world in disguise. As punishment, humans could be turned into beasts. Moreover, a figure like Heracles, who was human but with supernatural connections, expressed his association with animals by wearing skins on his body and a lion's head above his own. And if animal sacrifice set humans and animals apart, there were other rituals that seemed to blur the distinction between them. Dionysus's Maenads, for instance, lived wild and free, consumed raw flesh, and knew no sexual restraint. By becoming like beasts, the Maenads achieved a "divine delirium" and thus direct contact with the gods.3

Christians saw nothing godlike in acting like a beast. To them, the devil often appeared in animal form, a diabolic beast or, as Arnold Davidson points out, in some terrible mix of species. Bestiality, sexual transgression across the species barrier, was officially regarded as the worst sin against nature; it remained a capital crime in England until the second half of the nineteenth century. Humanity's proper relationship to animals was that of master; beasts existed to serve human needs. "Since beasts lack reason," Saint Augustine taught, "we need not concern ourselves with their sufferings," an opinion echoed by an Anglican bishop in the seventeenth century who declared, "We may put them [animals] to any kind of death that the necessity either of our food or physic will require." Even those who took a softer view of humanity's relationship with animals believed that our hegemony over the world reflected our special ties to the creator. "Man not only rules the animals by force," the Renaissance philosopher, Ficino, wrote, "he also governs, keeps and teaches them. Universal providence belongs to God, who is the universal cause. Hence man who generally provides for all things, both living and lifeless, is a kind of God."4

Although set apart from the rest of creation by their privileged relationship with God, many Christians felt a special kinship to animals. As Keith Thomas shows in his splendid study, Man and the Natural Workd, so close were the ties of people to the animals among whom they lived that often "domestic beasts were subsidiary members of the human community." No less important than these pressing sympathies of everyday inter-

dependence were the weight of cultural habit and the persistent power of half-forgotten beliefs. Until well into the eighteenth century, many Furopeans viewed the world anthropomorphically, imposing on animals human traits and emotions, holding them responsible for their "crimes," admiring them for their alleged expressions of pious sentiment. Although condemned by the orthodox and ridiculed by secular intellectuals, belief in the spirituality of animals persisted. As late as the 1770s, an English clergyman could write, "I firmly believe that beasts have souls; souls truly and properly so-called."5

By the end of the eighteenth century, such convictions were surely exceptional among educated men and women. The expansion of scientific knowledge since the Renaissance had helped to produce a view of the world in which there seemed to be little room for animal souls. The great classification schemes of the late seventeenth and eighteenth centuries encouraged rational, secular, and scientific conceptions of the natural order. As a result, the anthropomorphic attitudes that had invested animalsand even plantswith human characteristics gradually receded; nature was now seen as something apart from human affairs, a realm to be studied and mastered with the instruments of science. Here is Thomas's concise summary of this process:

In place of a natural world redolent with human analogy and symbolic meaning, and sensitive to man's behavior, they [the natural scientists] constructed a detached natural scene to be viewed and studied by the observer from the outside, as if by peering through a window, in the secure knowledge that the objects of contemplation inhabited a separate realm, offering no omens or signs, without human meaning or significance.6

Within this new world, humans' claims to hegemony were based on their own rational faculties rather than divine dispensation. Reason became the justification as well as the means of humanity's mastery. Because they lack reason, Descartes argued, animals were like machines, without souls, intelligence, or feeling. Animals do not act independently, "it is nature that acts in them according to the arrangement of their organs, just as we see how a clock, composed merely of wheels and springs, can reckon the hours." Rousseau agreed. Every animal, he wrote in A Discourse on Inequality, was "only an ingenious machine to which nature has given sense in order to keep itself in motion and protect itself." Humans are not in thrall to their instincts and senses; unlike beasts, when nature commands, humans need not obey. Free will, intellect, and above all, the command of language gives people the ability to choose, create, and communicate.7

Not every eighteenth-century thinker was sure that humanity's unquestioned uniqueness had survived the secularization of the natural

order. Lord Bolingbroke, for example, still regarded man as "the principal inhabitant of this planet" but cautioned against making too much of humanity's special status.

Man is connected by his nature, and therefore, by the design of the Author of all Nature, with the whole tribe of animals, and so closely with some of them, that the distance between his intellectual faculties and theirs, which constitutes as really, though not so sensibly as figure, the difference of species, appears, in many instances, small, and would probably appear still less, if we had the means of knowing their motives, as we have of observing their actions.

When Alexander Pope put these ideas into verse, he added that the sin of pride that brought Adam's fall came not from his approaching too close to God but rather from drawing too far away from other living things:

Pride then was not, nor arts that pride to aid;
Man walk'd with beast, joint tenants of the shade;

And it was Pope who best expressed the lingering anxiety that must attend humanity's position between gods and beasts:

Plac'd in this isthmus of a middle state,
A being darkly wise and rudely great,
With too much knowledge for the sceptic side,
With too much weakness for the stoic pride,
He hangs between; in doubt to act or rest;
In doubt to deem himself a good or beast;
In doubt his Mind or Body to prefer;
Born but to die, and reas'ning but or err. . . .
Chaos of Thought and Passion all confus'd,
Still by himself abus'd, or disabus'd;
Created half to rise, and half to fall,
Great lord of all things, yet a prey to all;
Sole judge of Truth, in endless error hurl'd;
The glory, jest, and riddle of the world.8

In the second half of the eighteenth century, what Pope had once called the "vast chain of being" began to be seen as dynamic rather than static, organic rather than mechanistic. The natural order now seemed to be the product of a sosmic evolution that, as Kant wrote in 1755, "is never finished or complete." This meant that everything in the universefrom species of plants and animals to the structure of distant galaxies and the earth's surfacewas produced by and subject to powerful forces of change. By the early nineteenth century, scientists had

begun to examine this evolutonary process in a systematic fashion. In 1809, Jean Baptiste de Lamarck published Philosophie zoologique, which set forth a complex theory to explain the transformation of species over time. Charles Lyell, whose Principles of Geology began to appear in 1830, doubted biological evolution but offered a compelling account of the earth's changing character through the long corridors of geologic time. Thus was the stage set for the arrival of Darwin's Origin of Species, by far the most famous and influential of all renditions of "temporalized chains of being." With this book, Darwin provides the basis for our view of the natural order and thus links eighteenth-century cosmology and twentieth-century evolutionary biology.9

Even before Darwin formulated his theory of natural selection, he seems to have sensed this his scientific observations would have powerful implications for the relationship between humans and animals. In a notebook entry of 1837, Darwin first sketched what would beocme a central theme in his life's work:

If we choose to let conjecture run wild, then animals, our fellow brethren in pain, diseases, death, suffering and famineour slaves in the most laborious works, our companions in our amusementsthey may partake [of] our origins in one common ancestorwe may be all netted together.

When he published Origin of Species twenty-two years later, he approached the matter delicately and indirectly: "it does not seem incredible" that animals and plants developed from lower forms, "and if we admit this, we must likewise admit that all the organic beings which have ever lived on this earth may be descended from some one primordial form." In any event, he promised that in future research inspired by the theory of natural selection, "much light will be thrown on the origin of man and his history."10

The meaning of Darwinism for human history quickly moved to the center of the controversies that followed the publication of Origin . In 1863, T. H. Huxley, for example, produced Man's Place in Nature . Darwin himself turned to the evoluton of humanity in The Descent of Man, where he set out to demonstrate that "there is no fundamental difference between man and the higher mammals in their mental faculties." Each of those characteristics once thought to be uniquely human turn out to be shared by higher animals, albeit in lesser degrees: animals cannot speak, but they do communicate; they are intellectually inferior to humans, but they "possess some power of reasoning"; they cannot work as we do, but they can even use tools in a rudimentary way. Darwin's discussion of animal self-consciousness is worth quoting at length, not simply because it conveys the flavor of his argument but also because it illustrates the

ease with which he slipped from talking about differences between humans and animals to describing differences between "races" of men.

It may be freely admitted that no animal is self-conscious, if by this term it is implied that he reflects on such points, as whence he comes or whither he will go, or what is life and death, and so forth. But how can we feel sure that an old dog with excellent memory and some power of imagination, as shewn by his dreams, never reflects on his past pleasures and pains in the chase? And this would be a form of self-consciousness. On the other hand, as Bchner has remarked, how little can the hard-worked wife of a degraded Australian savage, who uses very few abstract words, and cannot count above four, exert her self-consciousness, or reflect on the nature of her own existence.

Darwin carried on his examination of humans and animals in The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals. Here he seeks to demonstrate that basic emotions have common origins and a biological base by pointing out the similarity of emotional expressions among human societies and between humans and animals. Like reason, language, and consciousness, emotions such as love, fear, and shame are not the sole and undisputed property of humanity.11

The research program suggested in this work on human and animal emotions was not immediately taken up by Darwin's many disciples. There were, to be sure, many who sought to apply Darwinism to human society, but they usually did so without a systematic examination of the resemblances between human and animal behavior. To social scientists influenced by Darwin, what mattered was less that people were animals than that they were stillin Harriet Ritvo's phrase"the top animals," separated from the rest by what Dawwin himself had called man's "noble qualities" and "godlike intellect." Most of the natural scientists who followed Darwin turned in the opposite direction, away from humans toward other species with longer evolutionary histories and more accessible biological structures. As a result, empirical work on the connection between human and animal behavior, so central to Darwin's work on emotions, did not become an important part of his legacy until the second half of the twentieth century.12

The direct heirs of Darwin's research on human and animal emotion were scientists who studied behavioral biology, the discipline that would come to be called ethology. Although important research on ethology had been conducted during the 1920s and 1930s, the subject did not become prominent until the 1960s; in 1973, three leading ethologists shared the Nobel Prize. The new interest in ethology encouraged the publication of a variety of works of quite uneven quality, but all shared the conviction that studying the similarity of behavior existing across

animal species could yield important insights into the character of human individuals and groups. For example, Konrad Lorenz, a pioneer in the field and one of the Nobel laureates, maintained that, in both man and animals, aggressive behavior was instinctual. "Like the triumph ceremony of the greylag goose, militant enthusiasm in man is a true autonomous instinct: It has its own releasing mechanisms, and like the sexual urge or any other strong instinct, it engenders a specific feeling of intense satisfaction." Such deeply rooted instincts, ethnologists warned, will inevitably pose problems for, and set limits on, humans' ability to control themselves and their societies.13

By the 1970s, popular and scientific interest in ethnology had become enmeshed with a larger and more ambitious set of ideas and research enterprises conventinally called sociobiology. Edward O. Wilson, perhaps sociobiology's most vigorous exponent, describes it as the "scientific study of the biological basis of all forms of social behavior in all kinds of organisms, including man." Wilson began to define his view of the field in the concluding chapter of The Insect Societies (1971), which called for the application of his work on the population biology and zoology of insects to vertebrate animals. Four years later, he concluded Sociobiology: The New Synthesis with a chapter entitled "Man: From Sociobiology to sociology." This was followed in 1978 with the more popularly written Oh Human Nature, which examined what Wilson regarded as "four of the elemental categories of behavior, aggression, sex, altruism, and religion," from a sociobiological perspective. Wilson brought an ethnologist's broad knowledge of animal behavior to these subjects but added his own growing concern for the genetic basis of instincts and adaptations. This genetic dimension has become increasingly important in Wilson's most recent work.14

Sociobiology in general and Wilson in particular have been the subject of intense attacks from a variety of directions. In the course of these controversies, the term has tended to become a catchall for a variety of different developments in behavioral biology. Like many other controversial movements, sociobiology often seems more solid and coherent to its opponents, who can easily define what they oppose, than to its advocates, who have some trouble agreeing on what they have in common. It is worth noting, for example, that Melvin Konner, while sympathetic to Wilson in many ways, explicitly denies tht his own work, The Tangled Wing (1982), is sociobiology. But what Konner and the sociobiologists do share is the belief that most studies of human beings have been too "anthropocentric." If, as Wilson and others claim, "homo sapiens is a conventional animal species," then there is much to be learned by viewing the human experience as part of a broader biological continuum. Doing so will help us to understand what Darwin, in the dark passage at

the end of The Descent of Man, referred to as "the indelible stamp of his lowly origin" which man still carries in his body and what Konner, in a contemporary version of the same argument, calls the "biological constraints on the human spirit."15

We will return to some of the questions raised by sociobiology in the conclusion to this volume. For the moment, it is enough to point out that the conflicts surrounding itillustrated by the works of Konner and Dupr in the following sectionare new versions of ancient controversies. These controversies, while informed by our expandng knowledge of the natural world and expressed in the idiom of our scientific culture, have at thier core our persistent need to define what it means to be human, a need that leads us, just as it led the authors of Genexis, to confront our kinship with and differences from animals.

Continues...

Excerpted from The Boundaries of Humanity: Humans, Animals, Machines by James J. Sheehan and Morton Sosna, editors Copyright 1991 by James J. Sheehan and Morton Sosna, editors. Excerpted by permission.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.

Edition details

• Publisher: University of California Press
• Publication date: 1992
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0520071530
• ISBN 13: 9780520071537
• Binding: Hardcover
• Number of pages: 264