BEING HUMAN: HISTORICAL KNOWLEDGE AND THE CREATION OF HUMAN NATURE

Do we make history, or does history make us? While many paleontologists, anthropologists and evolutionary psychologists tend to argue the latter, naturalistic or 'biology is destiny' viewpoint, in Being Human Lancaster University historian of science Roger Smith takes the alternate view, that we make history, and states that 'this book's purpose is to put the historical point of view about the human subject in its rightful place.' Put another way 'People are knowledge-making subjects who make themselves as they make knowledge.' Thus 'human nature' is not bequeathed us by our Ice Age ancestors. The very concept is a dynamic historical creation, often distorted by various disciplines that 'see things differently.' Moreover, it is 'unhelpful, as well as inaccurate to subsume discussion about different forms of understanding being human under a supposed conflict between science and religion.' Being Human is an academic book and, although not light reading, most of Smith's points are cogent and persuasive. Ever since Darwin we have tended to interpret humans as products of nature, but Smith neatly inverts this assumption with: 'knowledge of nature needs reinterpretation in the light of the knowledge of people.' When Giambattista Vico (1670-1744) launched the social sciences 'he had in mind a science of people making themselves over time,' and not the passive and much later Darwinian view that we are mere products of natural selection. The modern equivalent would presumably be 'conscious evolution.' As Mary Midgley and others have noted, the word 'science' only contracted to mean 'natural science' in the second half of the nineteenth century. Problems of 'tunnel vision' arise when scientists, who are not competent historians, project their modern mindsets into the past. Nevertheless, evolutionary science 'has acquired a social function once carried out by religion, providing persuasive answers to questions about human identity in the form of a story of shared origins.'

Thanks to the 'persuasive' Darwinian emphasis on animal origins we tend to forget that for Darwin it was 'a matter of fact that there had been moral progress' and that 'the moral sense or conscience' separated humans from animals. Likewise Smith quotes the 'major insight' of Alfred Russel Wallace who recognised that with humans 'a being has arisen …in some degree superior to nature [and able to] control and regulate her action.' Despite those who link atheistic Marxism with Darwinism, Marx actually noted that humans have a 'social nature' more important than any abstract 'individual, biological, moral or spiritual essence.' We cannot 'shrink the problem of human self-understanding into an empirical, natural science theory of the brain's production of consciousness.' Thus, positivist and mechanistic science (scientism) may reasonably face charges of making little direct contribution to 'ethical and spiritual culture.'

Being Human has much for the philosopher to digest. In the chapter on Reflexive Knowledge we are reminded that in German the verb reflektieren refers to 'an active, constructive process' involving consciousness of the object and of oneself. Moreover, 'reflexivity is the favourite candidate for the property that makes the human sciences unique' and distinct from the natural sciences. Thus, in the nineteenth century 'the "I" first became the subject and object of the human sciences' which could in turn study how human beings changed themselves. Thus, 'changes in psychological language signify psychological change in their own right.' (original italics). In modernity, 'notions of the individual and of society developed together.' Thus 'society,' previously referring to court, fashion or private associations, became a general, abstract 'sociological' concept as a result of much wider collective 'self-reflective knowledge.'

In a chapter on Relations of the Natural and Human Sciences, Smith cites Oxford philosopher and historian R. G. Collingwood: 'historical knowledge consists of the rethinking of human thought.' Likewise we learn from Max Weber that 'culture' is that segment of the infinite world process on which 'human beings confer meaning and significance.' This makes 'historical research essential to the study of the natural and social sciences as human activities.' Thus, 'there is more to the history of knowledge than lies on the path laid down by the natural sciences.' Indeed it is the job of philosophers and historians to show that 'closure of meaning is never complete,' even while natural science actually attempts such closure. All this adds up to J. G Droysen's concise summary that 'History is the way in which humanity becomes conscious of itself.' History is humanity's very self-knowledge and self-consciousness. This again echoes Wallace regarding the coming into being of a life form that can comprehend its own coming into being! The implications for moral science, self determination and collective responsibility are far-reaching. Vico's original argument is that culture is a mirror of what we have created, and so we can know it better that that which we have not created. Vico also thought primitive mental activity unable to distinguish itself from the world of natural forces. [This anticipates the consciousness paradigms of Barfield, Gebser and Wilber – authors not cited by Smith]. Historical Knowledge is not 'out there' to be captured by narrative: it is 'in' the narrative. 'It is what actually gives language the capacity to make sense.' Smith concludes that natural scientists who seek the narrative 'out there' are like medieval scholars who believe that 'statements transcending the historically embedded construction of truth' are possible, and as if there is a 'progressive movement of knowledge' towards some absolute 'truth' or 'real entities' out there. 'The forward looking nature of consciousness' gives us our historical past, and 'Kant's question "What is man?" has turned into the question "In what story, told with what purpose, does the human have a part?"' In the final chapter on Values and Knowledge Smith goes after Dawkin's Selfish Gene as a conflation that 'clearly does not separate facts and values.' In general natural scientists fail to 'allow knowledge about their own knowledge as historically created and historically situated activity,' and so fail to see subjectivity in evaluations of one discipline as more rigorous than another. 'Most disciplinary knowledge is unreflexive about its most basic presuppositions.' In contrast, for Shelley, a man is 'greatly good' only if he can 'put himself in the place of another.' Ernst Cassirer wrote that 'it is characteristic of the nature of man that he is not limited to one specific and single approach to reality...' More poetically Goethe stated: 'No limit, no definition, may restrict the range or depth of the human spirit's passage into its own secrets or the world's.' As Whitehead noted, natural science has pursued precision at the expense of philosophical coherence, and has excluded the knowing agent from the realm of nature. To prevent humanity becoming a subcategory of nature, through 'objectification' of a 'meaningless external world,' we must invert the equation and admit that nature is a subcategory that we created! Meaning does not derive from nature but from humankind's story telling. 'It is in man's career…that we discern…his nature.' Smith has made his points admirably before his epilogue on Human Self Creation. Some analyses may represent human evolution as a by-product of biological origins, but ultimately we set out to discover these origins. However anti-religious some biologists may be this search has its historical roots in religion and our quest for meaning.