Good Human

Philosophical anthropology?

I missed publishing yesterday! I was hard at work on this post, and it turned out to be much more difficult than I thought, as explained below. An ongoing project is going to be necessary here to do justice. I hope you don’t mind hearing my cogitations along the way!

I realized yesterday also that we’re already in week 3 of my new publishing cadence of 3 weeks on, 1 week off. Tomorrow there will be a second Index forthcoming. The first index of Resources was published a month ago!

Okay, here we go. Bear with me.

The stated mission of Pose Ponder, both for the blog and for my personal handle @poseponder is to try to be a good human in the Anthropocene.

Over the last few months, I’ve been sharing readings and resources to think through what that might mean, to be in the Anthropocene. I’ve taken it for granted that whatever we as humans do about being in it — this new era named after our species anthropos — there will be economic and political, as well as technological, activity required. In line with that, the way I’ve tended to think through the human side of the questions so far corresponds with what’s come to be known as “PPE” in certain circles, that is: Philosophy, Political Economy.

Human Nature?

But there’s a gaping hole in all this, which has to do with the good human part of the equation. What does it even mean? There’s a problem here not simply of ethics, emphasizing the good part, but also a problem for the human being part. That’s not a fixed thing, as should be obvious after a moment’s thought that our species now has a new geological era named after it.

(Or rather, it should. I’m not even going to address the recent judgment of the “Subcommission on Quarternary Stratigraphy” that recently voted "no" to recognizing and renaming a new geological era. Sigh.)

I rather like this quote from Karl Marx, although it needs a lot of unpacking.

All history is nothing but a continuous transformation of human nature. ~ Karl Marx

I’m not an old-fashioned essentialist, thinking there is a fixed thing, “human nature,” whether given by God, or given by Nature or Nature’s Laws.

On the other hand, neither am I a complete constructionist, neither social constructionist (“your society constructs and determines who you are”) or a hyper-individualist identity politics constructionist. The latter would run something like: you get to choose who you are, no holds barred. All that counts is how you feel about it, what you want, along with maybe some “aesthetics” and the “optics” of it all.

These kinds of questions about fixity vs flexibility used to be a kind of mechanistic discussion about nature vs nurture, or genes vs environment. How far we’ve come!

In any case, I’m not a proponent of making definitional pronouncements on “human nature” without a lot of further consideration and discussion about the impact of history, the role of societies and communities and their belief systems, including religions and philosophies and other sorts of collective wisdoms, the place of psychology, biology, evolution, and so on.

Humans could not have initiated a new Anthropocene era ex nihilo. Clearly we have, and at present are, evolving and transforming as a species.

Hockey-stick shaped curves… hockey-stick shaped curves… Sweeping planetary-scale change of whole environments to suit human needs and desires…

Seeking Understanding

Combining, somehow, an ethical call to be good with the fraught problem of what it might mean to be human, the over-riding claim might simply be that as humans, trying to be good, we bear responsibility. I keep finding myself quoting from Hannah Arendt (On the Human Condition): we must, at the very least, think what we are doing.

One way of seeking the requisite understanding is to assert that we need to find, or to work out, an adequate anthropology for the Anthropocene.

We need a good “theory of the human” — the good human — to understand our increasingly vast place in the scheme of things. I’ve chosen to call that theory an anthropology.

I had hoped it would be possible to approach the task of finding it as a matter of sorting out a Big Question from lots of different contributory angles, from various sub-fields of anthropology proper and from many other perspectives that certainly should have lots to say, for example a political anthropology, philosophical anthropology, theological anthropology.

In researching this post, however, in which I had hoped to lay some groundwork for a wisdom quest of this kind, the effort has been pretty much a bust. I’m not happy with what I’m finding.

I guess I shouldn’t be too surprised.

Let’s do a quick survey. All the following is tentative, and I’m still trying to work through it.

Anthropology Proper?

Anthropology proper, as an academic field, whether in the guise of cultural anthropology, archaeology, biological anthropology, linguistics, and so on, has basically focused on “primitive” human societies living before the evolution of the modern state or outside major civilizational centers, starting from ancient times to the present. The rationale for delimiting the field this way is, I presume, to distinguish it from the study of history. History, in contrast, would apply to human societies living within the purview of a major civilization, or in the modern(ish) age where few, if any, humans can possibly live outside the partition of the entire globe into modern nation states.

Anthropology as a field in this temporally or geographically limited sense probably can’t help much to understand humanity as it has developed so far beyond early or “primitive” pre-state conditions as to have unified the world, globalized it, and launched a whole new geological era now branded in its own image.¹ Anthropology has also billed itself, since its origins as a field in the 19th century, as scientific and empirical, and it has self-consciously tried to be non-judgmental and non-prescriptive regarding what might make for a good humanity. It’s primarily a descriptive and explanatory endeavor.

Political Anthropology?

If we can’t go with anthropology per se, what other options are there?

Political anthropology is a little better, especially time wise. There was a conscious shift in anthropology studies starting in the 1960’s to consider societies with modern states and markets, as well as peripheral villages that were tied to those states and could not be treated as isolated “islands.” Increasingly, there are no isolated human societies to study in any case.

While for a whole century (1860 to 1960 roughly) political anthropology developed as a discipline concerned primarily with politics in stateless societies, a new development started from the 1960s, and is still unfolding: anthropologists started increasingly to study more "complex" social settings in which the presence of states, bureaucracies and markets entered both ethnographic accounts and analysis of local phenomena.

Source: Political anthropology - Wikipedia

Up to the 1980’s, for example, an anthropology of states, political institutions, borders, and so on developed, as in the work of Clifford Geertz on the Balinese. Work done in the field and the library by prolific and innovative thinker James C. Scott contributed to a theory of human societies not only living on the periphery of large states but having chosen to live there. Some peripheral political cultures are hardly “primitives” and “not yet assimilated”; they are active escapees who have chosen not to submit!

Political anthropology’s focus soon shifted, starting in the 1980’s and ’90’s, to problems of identity politics, ethnicity and cultural differences, nationalism (e.g. Benedict Anderson’s famous book Imagined Communities, published in 1983), and increasingly to bureaucratic structures and companies. As erstwhile independent peoples came rapidly into contact with modern states and a global economy, concerns for their political representation and economic development have led anthropologists to focus on post-colonialism, migration, and the fallout from globalization.

Political anthropology starts to get at what an anthropology for the Anthropocene might need, but the emphasis is generally on the victims of modernization, not the perpetrators, the recipients of global shifts, not the causal actors of them: colonial powers, technological and corporate hegemons, the humans responsible in general for driving the world into the Anthropocene in the first place.

At least, though, in political anthropology there is no lack of a value-laden approach, to help evaluate good from bad humans!

One final thing for this section. Recently, the political anthropology of David Wengrow and the late David Graeber, published as The Dawn of Everything, is well worth grappling with.

Philosophical Anthropology?

Anthropology as a modern science thus seems like it’s slowly coming closer to what might be needed, as it shifts to studying contemporary societies in a broad diversity of present-day human states, cultures, and contexts. But along with empirical descriptions and ethnography, don’t we need workable principles? Something more philosophical to help figure out who we are and what our responsibilities might be?

What about philosophical anthropology?

Unfortunately, an article at Encyclopedia Britannica by Frederick Olafson (originally published in 1998) starts off by arguing that a philosophical anthropology cannot even exist.²

Originally in the history of western thought, there were various branches of philosophy dealing with what later become separate subject matters, many of which would have implications for any theory of the human. As some branches of classical philosophy become modern sciences, they evolved into their own disciplines. “Natural philosophy,” for example, became the science of physics. Anthropology, says the author of the Britannica article, would have been “the branch of philosophy that gave an account of human nature.” But such an account wouldn’t have been the branch (of philosophy) “where the main work of philosophy was done.” It would have offered merely a “kind of review of the implications for human nature of philosophically more central doctrines.” (!)

One might assume here that Olafson is referring to problems of metaphysics or epistemology, problems central to philosophy today, set far apart from anything empirically human. Whatever real life data classical philosophy might have taken into account (presumably not much?), now it’s regarded in any case as the essential part of the human or social sciences, for instance economics or psychology. By the late 19th century anthropology, focused on “less highly developed societies,” became a branch of the social sciences, along with sociology.

(Modern empirical sciences of humanity might thus be divided into anthropology, sociology, psychology, economics, and so on, according to the author of the Britannica article. History, as mentioned earlier, distinct from anthropology, might bridge a divide between proper social sciences and “humanities.”)

So much for a taxonomy and an evolution of philosophy into various sciences. The Britannica author goes farther. It’s not just that a name changed, what we call it, or that anthropology became more empirically based. Really, there really can be no such thing as a philosophical anthropology at all! Here’s how he argues it:

The term philosophical anthropology is not in familiar use among anthropologists and would probably not meet with any ready comprehension from philosophers either, at least in the English-speaking world. When anthropology is conceived in contemporary terms, philosophical thought might come within its purview only as an element in the culture of some society that is under study, but it would be very unlikely to have any part to play in an anthropologist’s work or in the way human nature is conceived for the purposes of that work. To put the matter somewhat differently, anthropology is now regarded as an empirical scientific discipline, and, as such, it discounts the relevance of philosophical theories of human nature. The inference here is that philosophical (as opposed to empirical) anthropology would almost certainly be bad anthropology.

If such a thing as a philosophical anthropology were even to exist, it would be bad anthropology!

What might be allowed — a consolation prize? — is a philosophy OF anthropology, basically a kind of philosophy of science. There’s still no such thing as a valid “philosophical anthropology.” The Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy (IEP) starts an article on “philosophy of anthropology” as follows:

The Philosophy of Anthropology refers to the central philosophical perspectives which underpin, or have underpinned, the dominant schools in anthropological thinking. It is distinct from Philosophical Anthropology which attempts to define and understand what it means to be human.

Source: Anthropology, The Philosophy of | Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy (utm.edu)

And there is no IEP article on philosophical anthropology.

Turning to the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (SEP) — the IEP and SEP are two standard philosophical reference works online, which complement each other nicely — the SEP has an article on Human Nature (Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy). But as above, doesn’t this already tilt the question towards older, classical, essentialist, anti-historical, definitional approaches?

Classically, you can take either a philosophical or a religious (theological) perspective on human being, or the human condition, depending on what tradition(s) you prefer: Plato, Aristotle, the Stoics; Moses; Jesus; Mohammed; Confucius; Buddha?

Classical philosophies dealing with questions of human nature, ethics, and politics — in both west and east — have much to say, of course, about humans (as such) vs. animals, or vs. God or the gods, and about the problems of being a good human. But again, political philosophy as we know it (≠ political science) begins well before the rise of modern nation states. It aims, surely, to address ancient and medieval civilizations, kings, and would be empire-builders, and it hardly shies away from making value judgments, to the point of focusing far more on an ideal state or ideal constitution than on the kind of realpolitik introduced by Machiavelli and Hobbes in the modern era.

There is a lot there, in a political philosophical anthropology. But it has limits, nonetheless.

Theological Anthropology?

Lastly. What about theological anthropology?

Shouldn’t it certainly be worthwhile to think about how to be a good human from a religious, spiritual, or otherwise god-related perspective?

It turns out that “theological anthropology” as taken today is overtly Christian. There seems to be nothing more generically religious, or theological. I guess this makes sense in that specifically Christian theology is interested in Jesus Christ, who is God become human, so Christianity should certainly be expected to have a strong theological anthropology! Oddly enough, in present guise, it seems Christian “theological anthropology” has also only just discovered that humans have bodies, and gender, and these are the current preoccupation. (See for example this article at Christianity Today.)³

I’m under-appreciating the potential for a theological anthropology based on classical or even contemporary theological anthropology (Christian). Even at its most persuasive, however, it won’t speak to all humans, adhering as they do to a wide range of religious and spiritual beliefs and practices.

A comparative anthropology, putting Christian theological anthropology in conversation with a wide range of ancient, medieval, and modern, philosophical and theological theories of the human, plus secular science, might well be fruitful.

It would need to be done in the context not of a search for other-worldly or eternal salvation (escape), but for the sake of present-day humans in the here and now, and for the sake of our non-human planet-mates, all of us together making a profound earthly sojourn.

Michelangelo, Creation of Adam, Sistene Chapel, public domain

1. Unless, of course, one wants to trace the “Anthropocene” back to the origins of agriculture, or to the origin of cities, or even further back to when hunter-gatherers profoundly altered the megafauna (big land animals) and landscapes of whole continents, as they certainly did in the Americas when humans migrated from Asia roughly 15,000 years ago.

As I’ve tried to contend with the Anthropocene as the new human and planetary context, I’m inclined to say the era begins either with the industrial revolution in the 18th century or in the mid-20th century when those hockey-stick curves start their geometric increase.

2. See Encyclopedia Britannica’s table on the article’s history.

3. In comparison, much early Christian theology (New Testament, patristic, monastic) is quite philosophic in its anthropology. It’s Platonic, Stoic, or Aristotelian, depending on Christian flavor: Latin Roman Catholic or Byzantine Eastern Orthodox.