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Apprehending Human Form

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  08 January 2010

Michael Thompson
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Extract

My immediate aim in this lecture is to contribute something to the apt characterization of our representation and knowledge of the specifically human life form, as I will put it—and, to some extent, of things ‘human’ more generally. In particular I want to argue against an exaggerated empiricism about such cognition. Meditation on these themes might be pursued as having a kind of interest of its own, an epistemological and in the end metaphysical interest, but my own purpose in the matter is practical-philosophical. I want to employ my theses to make room for a certain range of doctrines in ethical theory and the theory of practical rationality—doctrines, namely, of natural normativity or natural goodness, as we may call them. I am not proposing to attempt a positive argument for any such ‘neo-Aristotelian’ position, but merely to defend such views against certain familiar lines of objection; and even here my aims will be limited, as will be seen.

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Papers
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Royal Institute of Philosophy Supplements , Volume 54 , March 2004 , pp. 47 - 74
Copyright
Copyright © The Royal Institute of Philosophy and the contributors 2004

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References

1 The next three sections and the first part of the next to last section adhere closely to the claims of my essay ‘The Representation of Life’, Reasons and Virtues, Hursthouse, R., Quinn, W. and Lawrence, G. (eds.) (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995)Google Scholar, though the discussion is structured differently and much abbreviated. I hope that it is independently intelligible and persuasive.

2 Of course we have plenty of use for a past tense version of natural historical propositions, for example in the description of extinct life forms. But I think that this is a secondary conceptual development (see the paper mentioned in note 1 above, section 4.1). It seems we could enjoy the capacity for just this form of judgment though the formation of past tense expressions of it is grammatically excluded or nowhere envisaged. In this respect natural historical judgment is unlike, say, present progressive judgment (X is doing A), which presupposes the possibility of forming the opposing past perfective (X did A). I should perhaps rather speak of a ‘relative atemporality’ than of ‘atemporality’ simply. Consider that in statements of exemplification a past particular fact can here be used to illustrate a ‘present’ generalization: ‘S’s characteristically do F,’ I might say, ‘-for example, this S did F just yesterday.’ The forms of generality described in logic textbooks do not admit of this phenomenon.

3 Anscombe, G. E. M., ‘Modern Moral Philosophy,’ Ethics, Religion and Politics (Minneapolis: Minnesota University Press, 1982), 26–42, 38.Google Scholar

4 Darwin, Charles, The Origin of Species (1876), Barrett, P. H. and Freeman, R. B. (eds.) (New York: New York University Press, 1988), 386Google Scholar. He is discussing the principles of hierarchical classification, defending a genealogical or historical conception as ideal.

5 The linguistic analogy might make clearer the priority of a sort of ‘atemporal’ use of the present tense in these two connections (life form and language). Part of our linguist's task, it is natural to suppose, is to give propositional representation to the knowledge that her informants possess as competent speakers of the language under investigation. But it does not seem that this ‘implicit’ knowledge operates with an opposition between what is past and what is present in the use of language. It is not part of linguistic competence to know anything that a linguist might report in a past tense use of her sort of generality. Thus our linguist's inevitable use of some sort of grammatical present in the representation of this competence should not be taken as committing her to the attribution of robustly temporal contents.

6 The linguistic analogy suggests a slight rectification of vocabulary. I have been making a somewhat crude use of the words ‘life form’, ‘species’ and ‘kind’ (of living thing) as more or less equivalent. This seems to me justified for present purposes, and I will retain it, but sharper metaphysical implements would incline us to split things up, as we certainly would in the case of language: the concept life form might be kept strictly parallel to the concept language or form of discursive interaction; the concept species might then be understood as parallel with the concept linguistic community; finally the concept of a given kind of living thing would be parallel to that of a given ‘speaker-kind,’ i.e., the concept speaker of L for a given language L. The first of these is the principal object of my attention in this essay.

7 On Virtue Ethics(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998)Google Scholar; Natural Goodness (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000)Google Scholar.

8 The special logical character of ‘considerations of justice’ is addressed in my essay ‘What is it to Wrong Someone?’ in Practical Reason and Value, Wallace, R. J., Pettit, P., Scheffler, S. and Smith, M. (eds.) (Oxford: Oxford University PressGoogle Scholar, forthcoming.).

9 David, Wiggins, ‘Truth, Invention and the Meaning of Life,’ in his Needs, Value and Truth, 2nd ed. (Oxford: Blackwell, 1991), 87–138Google Scholar, 134 note 53; McDowell, John, ‘Two Sorts of Naturalism,’ in R., Hursthouse, W., Quinn and G., Lawrence, (eds.) Op. cit., 149–80Google Scholar, see, e.g., 150–1.

10 This point is laboured with numerous examples in my essay ‘The Representation of Life’, part 3. The language of ‘externalism’ is perhaps inapt, suggesting as it might that the vital description of an individual depends somehow on facts about other ‘external’ individual bearers of the life form in question. The look beyond the individual in the framing of a vital description is not to the ‘community’ of bearers of the life form but to the life form itself. (The parallel distinction should be observed in the interpretation of Wittgenstein: an appeal to features of the ‘practice’ into which the use of a word is inserted, or of the ‘form of life’ of which it is a part, is very different from an appeal to facts about the ‘community’ of bearers of that practice or form of life considered in extenso. A form must in general be distinguished from the manifold of its bearers.)

11 It might be suggested, in view of the linguistic analogy developed above, that a similar argument could show that the concept language is a pure or a priori concept. It may be so, but it seems clearer that the superordinate concept of a ‘practice’ or ‘social practice’ possesses the desired apriority, as is shown again by the distinctive turn taken by the intellect in apprehending such a thing, in particular by the distinctive form of generality contained in the propositions that describe it. See my ‘Two Forms of Practical Generality,’ Practical Rationality and Preference, C., Morris and A., Ripstein (eds.) (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002)Google Scholar.

It is of course clear that the words ‘species’ and ‘life form’ might be assigned a content that presupposes facts of terrestrial biology. In the literature on method in biology there is a contest among various ‘species concepts,’ and the contestants inevitably contain some empirical content. Consider, for example, Ernst Mayr's famous ‘biological species concept.’ A ‘species,’ he says, is a group of interbreeding populations. This can be criticized on the ground that not every kind of organism breeds: dandelions don't for example. But it works in many terrestrial cases and where it does it gives clear answers to the question whether two organisms belong to the same or different species. But it seems to me to presuppose the vaguer more abstract conception we are after, a conception for which we might reserve the title ‘life form’; it presupposes it because it presupposes vital description, e.g. in the use of the concept of breeding, and this is everywhere form dependent. But this more primitive concept would not lead us a priori to expect that sameness and difference of life form should be clearly specifiable, a task empirically informed definitions like Mayr's are attempting to execute.

The idea of a language might once again be used as a model here. We do not expect that the question whether two speakers speak the same or different languages should always have a clear answer. But this unclarity does not lead us to drop the idea of language in philosophy. We say, despite this inevitable vagueness, that it is only because they are speaking a common language, or inhabit a common discursive structure, that any determinate content can be assigned to the noises traded by the parties to a discussion.

12 Kaplan, David, ‘A Logic of Demonstratives,’ Themes from Kaplan, J., Almog, J., Perry and H., Wettstein (eds.) (New York: Oxford University Press, 1989)Google Scholar.

13 Intention (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2000)Google Scholar.

14 Very much less, of course, can a manly wisdom about the bloody course of human history be set against the claim that, say, justice belongs ‘according to nature’ to the human practical understanding; no more than knowledge of the bloody—well, not exactly bloody—course of umbrella jelly history considered in extenso—in which what happens in your natural history has so rarely happened, almost everything having been thrown against rocks, starved, or eaten by predators—be brought as proof of Pollyannaism against your monograph. This point does not turn on epistemological subtleties, but on the logical form of the propositions in question.

15 To paraphrase Gottlob Frege's summary remark about our apprehension of the numbers, The Foundations of Arithmetic, trans. Austin, J. L. (Oxford: Blackwells, 1974), 115Google Scholar.