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Human Nature and the Transcendent

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  12 April 2012

John Cottingham
John Cottingham
Affiliation:
Heythrop College, University of [email protected]
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Extract

Let me start with the enigmatic dictum of Blaise Pascal: ‘l'homme passe l'homme’ – ‘man goes beyond himself’; ‘humanity transcends itself’. What does this mean? On one plausible interpretation, Pascal is adverting to that strange restlessness of the human spirit which so many philosophers have pondered on, from Augustine before him, to Kierkegaard and many subsequent writers since. To be human is to recognize that we are, in a certain sense, incomplete beings. We are on a journey to a horizon that always seems to recede from view. Unlike all the other animals, who need nothing further for their thriving and flourishing once the appropriate environmental conditions are provided, human beings, even when all their needs are catered for – physical, biological, social, cultural – and even when they enjoy a maximally secure and enriching environment, still have a certain resistance to resting content with existence defined within a given set of parameters. They still have the restless drive to reach forward to something more.

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Papers
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Royal Institute of Philosophy Supplements , Volume 70 , July 2012 , pp. 233 - 254
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Copyright © The Royal Institute of Philosophy and the contributors 2012

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References

1 Pascal, Blaise, Pensées [c. 1660], ed. Lafuma, L. (Paris: Editions du Seuil, 1962), no 131Google Scholar.

2 St Augustine of Hippo, Confessions [Confessiones, c. 398], Book I, Ch. 1; Søren Kierkegaard, Sickness Unto Death [Sygdommen til Døden, 1849].

3 Wordsworth, William, The Prelude 12, 208–218 [1805 edition]Google Scholar.

4 ‘Inest enim homini naturale desiderium cognoscendi causam, cum intuetur effectum; et ex hoc admiratio in hominibus consurgit. Si igitur intellectus rationalis creaturae pertingere non possit ad primam causam rerum, remanebit inane desiderium naturae.’ Aquinas, Thomas, Summa theologiae [1266–73], Ia, q.12. a.1Google Scholar.

5 A simplified version of the argument from the ‘non-emptiness of natural desires’ is canvassed by C. S. Lewis: ‘Creatures are not born with desires unless satisfaction for these desires exists. A baby feels hunger; well, there is such a thing as food. A duckling wants to swim; well, there is such a thing as water. Men feel sexual desire; well, there is such a thing as sex. If I find in myself a desire which no experience in this world can satisfy, the most probable explanation is that I was made for another world.’ Lewis, C. S., Mere Christianity [1952; based on radio talks of 1941–44] (London: Fontana, 1960)Google Scholar, Bk. III, Ch. 10: ‘Hope’. See further Haldane, J., ‘Philosophy, the Restless Heart and the Meaning of Theism’, Ratio 19:4 (December 2006)Google Scholar, repr. in Cottingham, J. (ed.), The Meaning of Theism (Oxford: Blackwell, 2007)Google Scholar.

6 Indeed some philosophers might be inclined to go further and question the very intelligibility of the idea of the transcendent – of a reality ‘beyond’ or ‘behind’ the natural world. Compare Bede Rundle, Why is There Something Rather than Nothing?, Oxford: Oxford University Press (2004)Google Scholar.

7 ‘The Existence of God’. Debate with Fr Fredrick Copleston originally broadcast on the Third Programme of the BBC in 1948. Reprinted in Russell, Why I am Not a Christian (London: Allen & Unwin, 1957), Ch. 13, p. 152Google ScholarPubMed.

8 There are however, important distinctions between different kinds of naturalist; a point to which I shall return.

9 Camus, Albert, Le Mythe de Sisyphe (Paris: Gallimard, 1942), final chapterGoogle Scholar.

10 ‘It is necessary to posit something which is necessary in its own right, and does not have the cause of its necessity from elsewhere but is itself the cause of necessity in other things; and this everyone calls “God”.’ Aquinas, Summa theologiae, Part I, question 2, article 3. There are complexities in Aquinas's ‘third way’, ‘from the contingency of the world’, which it is not part of my purpose to examine here. I am most grateful to Brian Davies for illuminating several aspects of the argument for me. I should add that he regards my reservations about the argument from contingency as misguided; though I am not so far convinced, it would not affect the argument of the rest of this paper were I to become so.

11 In case of misunderstanding, these reservations about the argument from contingency should not be taken to imply any general denial of the possibility of natural theology, or of ‘reason based’ knowledge of God. Indeed, the considerations I shall be putting forward in the remaining sections of this paper do constitute, in my view, substantial rational support (though of a rather special kind) for theism. For a persuasive critique of the Kierkegaardian view that faith defies or overturns reason, see Davies, Brian, ‘Is God Beyond Reason?’ Philosophical Investigations 32:4 (October 2009), pp. 338–359CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

12 The phrase ‘there must be a reason’ is perhaps ambiguous in this context (I owe this point to Peter Dennis). As interpreted by philosophers since the Enlightenment, science makes things intelligible only in the relatively thin sense of subsuming them under general causal principles, not in the sense of uncovering rational explanations. For more on this distinction, see McDowell, John, Mind and World (Cambridge MA: Harvard University Press, 1994), pp. 70–71Google Scholar. I shall come on to discuss the ‘Enlightenment’ view of the limits of science in the next paragraph.

13 The Kantian tradition would of course construe this order as a mere function of the grid imposed by the human mind. But even if one were to accept that view (which runs counter to the strong common-sense intuition that science discovers order in things rather than imposing it on things), it simply shifts the focus of wonder from the particles and the galaxies to the human beings made out of those materials: how can the marvel of logos in the human mind arise from brute facticity?

14 David Hume, An Enquiry concerning Human Understanding [1748], Sectn IV, part 1, penultimate paragraph.

15 Wright, J., The Sceptical Realism of David Hume (Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, l983)Google Scholar.

16 Strawson, G., The Secret Connexion: Causation, Realism and David Hume (Oxford: Clarendon, 1989)Google Scholar.

17 Hume, Enquiry concerning Human Understanding, loc. cit.

18 Wordsworth, William, The Prelude 12, 208–218 [1805 edition]Google Scholar.

19 Thomas Traherne, ‘The Third Century’ [c. 1670], § 3, in Centuries, Poems and Thanksgivings ed. H.M. Margoliouth (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1958), vol. 1, p. 111. Quoted in J.V. Taylor, The Christlike God (London: SCM, 1992), p. 33.

20 Roger Scruton ‘The Sacred and the Human’ [2010] http://www.st-andrews.ac.uk/gifford/2010/the-sacred-and-the-human/ accessed 30 March 2010.

21 Nussbaum, Martha, Love's Knowledge (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1990), pp. 281 and 282 (emphasis added)Google Scholar.

22 Løgstrup, Knud E., The Ethical Demand [Den Etiske Fordring, 1956] ed. Fink, H. and MacIntyre, A. (Notre Dame, Ill.: University of Notre Dame Press, 1997)Google Scholar.

23 Cf. Holland, Alan ‘Darwin and the Meaning of Life’ Environmental Values 18 (2009) pp. 503–18Google Scholar, and the response in Cottingham, J., ‘The Meaning of Life and Darwinism’, Environmental Values 20 (2011)Google Scholar.

24 Darwin, Charles, The Descent of Man and Selection in Relation to Sex [1871; 2nd edn repr. 1879] (London: Penguin, 2004), Ch. 4, p. 143Google Scholar.

25 Darwin, Descent of Man, Ch. 5, p. 157–8. Modern evolutionary theorists would see this apparent endorsement of group selection as problematic, but, with the aid of genetic theory, could easily adjust the story, rewriting in terms of the advantages of prevalence within a given population of an individual gene or genes linked to altruistic behaviour.

26 Frege was talking about the laws of logic, which he regarded as wholly objective, holding independently of contingent facts about human psychology. They are ‘fixed and eternal … boundary stones set in an eternal foundation, which our thought can overflow, but not dislodge.’ Frege, Gottlob, The Basic Laws of Arithmetic [Die Grundgesetze der Arithmetik, Vol. I, 1893], transl. Furth, M. (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1964), p. 13Google Scholar.

27 Darwin, The Descent of Man, Ch. 4, p. 140.

28 Friedrich Nietzsche, On the Genealogy of Morals [Zur Genealogie der Moral, 1887], Preface, § 3.

29 ‘[A] truthful historical account is likely to reveal a radical contingency in our current ethical conceptions. Not only might they have been different from what they are, but also the historical changes that brought them about are not obviously related to them a way that vindicates them against possible rivals.’ Williams, Bernard, Truth and Truthfulness (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2002), Ch. 2, p. 20Google Scholar.

30 See F. Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil [Jenseits von Gut und Böse, 1886], § 37, and (for ‘inverting’ eternal values) § 203. For further discussion of the issues raised in this paragraph, see J. Cottingham, ‘The Good Life and the “Radical Contingency of the Ethical”,’ in Callcut, D. (ed.), Reading Bernard Williams (London: Routledge, 2008), Ch. 2, pp. 25–43Google Scholar.

31 There are complex philosophical issues involved in the move away from fixed essences, which I won't discuss here, except to say that they go way beyond the domain of pure natural science, and have important implications for ethics, and for our general conception of the human predicament. For example, if our human characteristics, including our deepest impulses, inclinations and intuitions, are not grounded in anything beyond the contingent flux of evolution, which itself is driven by blind and indifferent natural forces, then it becomes much harder to hold on to the kind of teleological framework for the guidance of life which informed so much philosophical writing on the good for humankind prior to the modern era. In the theistic worldview of Thomas Aquinas, or in the earlier Greek philosophical framework which strongly influenced him, the good for humankind consists in our following the telos or goal determined by our nature. By investigating the human nature, and our place in the overall scheme of things, we can see, in principle, the kinds of thing that are good for creatures like us to pursue. En tô ergô to agathon, as the Platonic and Aristotelian slogan has it: in the function lies the good. The function is related to the telos, and the telos is related to the essence. Ethical debate thus operates within a very stable metaphysical landscape.

32 Chapter 2, verse 7.

33 There is no space here to discuss the various reductionist or deflationary accounts on offer, from those (like projectivism) that effectively deny the reality of objective moral properties), to more recent ‘buck-passing’ accounts which make moral properties second order reason-providing properties based on natural properties. Some of these are discussed in Cottingham, J., The Spiritual Dimension (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005), Ch. 3Google Scholar, and Why Believe (London: Continuum, 2009), Ch. 2Google Scholar. It is interesting that many modern ethicists have moved away from naturalism altogether, but the resulting ‘non-naturalism’, in so far as it floats free from anything like a traditional theistic support, seems to me to reach a terminus of explanation rather too quickly for comfort. Thus Russ Shafer-Landau tells us that values are ‘a brute fact about the way the world works’; or, in a later formulation, ‘moral principles are as much a part of reality as … the basic principles of physics’. Moral Realism (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2003), p. 46Google Scholar; ‘Ethics as Philosophy: A Defense of Ethical Non-naturalism’, in Shafer Landau (ed.) Ethical Theory, Ch. 8. In fairness, Shafer-Landau concedes that his theory is one with ‘very limited explanatory resources’ (Moral Realism, p. 48). But in that case, the danger is that it will not come down to much more than the mere assertion that moral values really (mysteriously) exist. Another non-naturalist moral realist, Eric Wielenberg asserts that moral truths are ‘part of the furniture of the universe’, and indeed constitute the ‘ethical background of every possible universe.’ Value and Virtue in a Godless Universe (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005), p. 52Google Scholar. This latter phrase suggests that we should think of values as purely abstract objects, perhaps rather like triangles or prime numbers. So if we are prepared to accept that abstract mathematical entities exist (waiting to be discovered and investigated by mathematicians), could we not perhaps accept that abstract values exist (waiting to be investigated by moralists)? Yet this kind of approach seems to invoke one mystery (the existence in all possible worlds of objective mathematical realities) in order to explain another (the existence of moral realities). If eternal mathematical and logical and moral reality is somehow involved in the very existence of things, yet cannot be explained in naturalistic terms, then this is a remarkable fact (and, one might add, remarkably consistent with traditional theism); it seems the non-naturalist needs to respond to this, instead of just asserting that such realities are ‘part of the universe’.

34 McDowell, Mind and World, p. 83.

35 Williams, B., Ethics and the Limits of Philosophy (London: Collins, 1985), Ch. 10Google Scholar.

36 Augustine, Confessions Book I, Ch. 1: “fecisti nos ad te, et inquietum est cor nostrum donec requiescat in te.”

37 Cf. Cottingham, Why Believe?, Ch. 5, section 2.

38 Earlier versions of this paper were given at the 2010 Royal Institute of Philosophy Conference on Human Nature, at Oxford Brookes University, at the 2010 Sullivan Lecture delivered at Fordham University, New York, and at the Philosophy Department seminar at Stirling University in May 2011; I should like to thank the participants at those events for helpful discussion. I am also most grateful to Peter Dennis for substantial improvements arising from his detailed and acute comments on the penultimate draft.