Virtue Quest

Just act naturally...?

Amy noted that some of the posts and comments were becoming “a bit too philosophical for [her] bent.” By that, I think she meant that the conversation had grown so abstract that it was no longer connected to real life.

There’s probably some truth in her observation. I tend toward abstraction – or, as my grade school teachers put it, I’m a space cadet. At the same time, I insist that abstract philosophy is not, or at least should not be, opposed to practical action in everyday life. My goal for myself is to think clearly and live according to what I think.

One of the areas my own thought gets awfully muddy is around the question of what it is to be human. That’s why it’s important to me to make sure my thinking is clear. Otherwise I start acting, well, inhumanely.

The human creature in its native environment

The first thing that I forget about human nature is that I am finite: I am limited, mortal, not self sufficient. Now, all this is normal and natural; it’s actually good, because connection with other people is included in the very definition of humanity. But I find myself awfully attracted to those fantasies of unlimited, immortal, sufficient people like James Bond or Odysseus or Fitzwilliam Darcy. (Granted that none of them are fully self-sufficient or properly immortal, but their stories do not die, and give them the illusion of perfection.)

So when I start acting as if I know everything, or like I am the hero of some grand epic, I wind up looking foolish. I say something stupid, showing the limits of my knowledge; or I do something that hurts either myself or someone else, betraying my lack of heroism.

And the reason this happens is because my actions run contrary to my nature; they defy reality. Reality sets limits to what I can do. Reality demands that I ask others for help, that I admit when I am wrong, that I defer to those more skilled or more experienced than myself. When I refuse to act in accordance with reality, when I contradict my nature, then the inevitable result is failure and harm.

How to know nature

Now, bob (and others) raised a very good point: sure it’s easy to claim something like mortality as a universal aspect of human nature; but seeing how widely human culture varies around the globe, how can we know what really is “human nature” (and therefore what are rights, duties, just laws, etc.) and what is just local custom?

My answer is, basically, not to use the variations as a distraction from what we have in common. All of us are mortal. All of us are dependent on one another. This alone is sufficient, it seems to me, to justify a promotion of community and a prohibition against murder. All of us are dependent on using things: tools, clothing, and other objects; this means that morality has to deal with the notion of property and prohibit theft.

It goes further, though: it is part of human nature to think, to communicate, to engage in relationships that go beyond mere practicality or survival. We have more ways to engage in these human acts than there are grains of sand on the beach, but we all do them. A person who has lost the ability to communicate has lost one of the essential activities that we call “human.” Such a person is tragic, and the magnitude of his or her loss is itself an indication of the centrality of thought, communication, relationship to living a fully human life.

Let me be clear: such a person is still fully human; but handicapped, in the way that an amputee is fully human, but lacking a limb. Morality still applies in a complete way to this person. There is no excuse for considering someone “less than human” or “no longer human” just because he or she is injured or disabled.

But an injury or a disability – by the very fact that we recognize it as “bad” and as a loss – is itself an indicator of where the full nature lies. And this is not something contingent on culture or opinion: there is no culture that recognizes someone with only one arm as “normal,” to say nothing of “privileged.” Whether they treat the disabled with special respect or with derision, the recognition of disability is one of the constants across cultural lines. It is therefore one indicator of the reality and objectivity of human nature.