Normative and Natural

Robert Pippin
Evelyn Stefansson Nef Distinguished Service Professor
University of Chicago

As a representative of the humanities, I understood my charge this afternoon to be to offer some sort of response to what is at the very least a book publishing or market phenomenon – the flood of recent books especially in the last decade by neuroscientists, primatologists, computer scientists, evolutionary biologists and economists about what had traditionally been considered issues in the humanities – issues like morality, politics, the nature of rationality, what makes a response to an object an aesthetic response, and value theory – and the incorporation of such research methods by academics traditionally thought of as humanists. The organizers of our symposium have singled out for special attention the themes of autonomy, creativity and singularity, as these have come to be treated in these new interdisciplinary ways. I do not in any way count myself an expert in this emerging literature, but I do want to try to offer some initial and very general reasons to hesitate before jumping on this particular bandwagon.

I write about, and see myself as working within, a strand of the modern philosophical tradition that can be said to have begun with two extremely influential essays by Jean-Jacques Rousseau. In 1749, Rousseau won first prize in a contest held by the Academy of Dijon in answer to the question: “Has the progress of the sciences and arts contributed to the corruption or to the improvement of human conduct?” Rousseau’s famous answer was “corruption” rather than “improvement.” And in 1754, responding again to an Academy question, he wrote his Discourse on the Origin and Basis of Inequality Among Men, another blistering attack on modernization, including scientific and technical modernization. These two essays represented one of the first attempts to mark out the limits (the limits in principle, not limits based on temporary empirical ignorance) of modern scientific understanding in contributing to human self-knowledge, and so to insist on an unusual sort of necessary independence and privileged importance of moral and normative matters. (His argument was unusual because it did not rely on theology or revelation (as in much of the European counter-enlightenment) or any form of traditional metaphysical dualism; he appealed to no immaterial mind or soul in the traditional scholastic or Cartesian way.) Rousseau’s influence was decisive in the romantic movement that is largely responsible for the interest in one of the topics announced in our program’s title – creativity – and for a way of arguing for the distinctness of the human in the classical period of Germany philosophy from the end of the 18th to the first third of the nineteenth century that is responsible for the salience of another issue – autonomy. (The post-Kantian romantics had a great deal to say about the moral significance and unique nature of human singularity too, just to complete the genealogy of these interests.)

Perhaps it is somewhat counter to the interdisciplinary and cooperative spirit of this NHC project, but as noted at the outset I thought it might be useful for someone to address these modern (and still much discussed) objections to so-called naturalist accounts of human mindedness and agency.

Of course, the vast majority of such objections to the natural scientific paradigm as wholly adequate for human self-knowledge were nowhere near as radical as Rousseau’s. He seemed to be decrying the ethical insufficiency of modernity itself, claiming that its social organization and division of labor were creating forms of human dependence that weaken and enervate and degrade and immiserate, that we were busily creating a whole novel way of life as unsuited for real human flourishing as the life of animals in zoos was for them. But in the tradition I am interested in, there was a common narrower concern that often derived from Rousseau and that persists as a complex problem.

Let us say that the problem is the status of normative considerations, considerations that invoke some sort of “ought” claim, and, in order to get to the distinctly modern context for such an issue, let us ascend to an even higher level of abstraction. Two such claims have always been more important than any other : what ought to be believed and what ought to be done. These claims are, I believe, at the heart of what we call in this country the humanities; what are elsewhere called the Geisteswissenchaften or les sciences humaines and contribute to the traditional case that the humanities form the indispensable core of any credible university education. That is, while these seem like distinctly philosophical questions, and while philosophers have often been rightly accused of imperialist ambitions – treating everything else in the humanities as bad versions of philosophy, rather than as possible good versions of what they are – I don’t think the questions are rightly confined to philosophy. They turn up everywhere: how a text ought to be interpreted (that is, what it means to get a text wrong), how a character’s professions of love in a novel ought to be assessed (is he lying, a hypocrite, self-deceived, honest but naïve? etc.), whether and if so how an abstract expressionist painting can be said to mean something, and if so of what significance or importance is such painterly meaning; what ought we to believe about the significance of the crisis of modernism in music in the late nineteenth century (why does so much contemporary art music sound so different from the way music had almost always sounded; what is of value in the new music?), and of course on into traditional philosophical issues, like: under what conditions is the state’s use of coercive power justifiable?

Now first, well before we reach any question of interdisciplinary cooperation with the sciences, I should note that it has become extremely controversial within the humanities to treat the humanities like this, as if all were contributing to a conversation about various “live” normative issues. For one thing, the idea that literary products, say, could be said to imply truth claims has of itself very little purchase on the contemporary academic mind; the idea that these are truth claims about normative matters – that there simply could be truth claims about normative matters that ought to be pursued – and that these ought to be discussed and assessed as such, rather than only as deeply historically contextualized bits of evidence about what people believed at a time and place, all now sound like a rather stale “humanism,” as it is sometimes put, and it is often immediately assumed that any proponent of such views must serve a conservative agenda. This is so for a number of complex reasons. One is a great suspicion that there is any way to address or engage these normative issues (“ought claims”) at a first-order level; that is,  by simply taking them on, trying to think about them and making up one’s mind what one ought to believe or what one, or some character, ought or ought not to do. The idea is that this would be naïve, uncritical or unreflective. This suspicion derives from the collapse of the notion of objective natural moral order, a hierarchical chain of being and of natural purposes linked in this harmonious whole, providing a basis for such normative judgments. Without such a secure natural whole and harmony, how could there be any “objective” basis, any independent “truth makers,” for such a conversation? (I’m not saying that this is a particularly good objection; just that it has been extremely influential.) Another is the suspicion that first order normative claims have been so various and have changed so often, that it is much more likely that we might have much more of a chance to explain why people have come to have various views about what ought to be believed or ought to be done than we do of assessing the quality of their answers. Paul Ricoeur once referred to the 19th Century thinkers who inspired this skepticism as the “Masters of Suspicion” : that is, Marx, Nietzsche and Freud. And it is such a suspicion that has had the most lasting impact on the study of art, literature and some philosophy in the Western academy, prompting sometimes a kind of shadow scientism, tracing the meaning of various representative activities to the psychological or social conditions of their production. In fact, I would suggest that this skepticism about the independent or autonomous status of the normative, the world that the philosopher Wilfrid Sellars described as “fraught with ought,” is something like a necessary condition for the ever more popular empirical study of why people have come to believe what they generally do believe or did believe at a time. That’s all one would really think there is actually to study, to “research,” as we say, if there is no way to resolve first order questions of normative truth. (In addition to all this, many people have also come to believe that any defense of anything other than a strictly naturalist perspective on human animals will unfairly and dangerously and for many immorally privilege the human animal above all others and so plays an ideological role in farming and eating them. Others believe that such an enterprise must be ideological, uncritically accepting the views of the modern West, unaware of how contingent, possibly otherwise, such views are.)

This is all understandable in a more general sense too. A great deal of the humanities are devoted to the study of objects not created to be studied, not academic research projects, but Greek plays written for communal religious festivals, church music, wall hangings for the rich and mighty, commercial story writing, Hollywood films, and so on. It is only very recently in the long history of the university that it came to be considered appropriate to devote university resources to the study of not merely Greek and Latin classics, but vernacular art and literature; to study not just Christian texts and Christian apologists but the issue of secular morality. It is perhaps understandable that while we have some vague sense that an educated person should be familiar with some such famous objects, we have not yet settled on anything remotely like a common “research” program for studying them. (Even though I am proposing one here, I’ve no illusions about any sudden consensus emerging.) And this sort of uncertainty (accompanied often by a vague lack of confidence) have recently led to these even more serious qualifications on any putative “independence” of such normative issues, all in favor of more naturalist accounts.

That is, if truth claims are at issue, if we want to know why a particular picture of human life appeals to us, or not; why a certain character repels us; why we cannot make up our mind about another; whether a character’s sacrifice of his self-interest for a greater good was rational or foolish, what form of pleasure we take in reading a poem or looking at a Manet, then, so goes an often unexpressed assumption, why shouldn’t we assume that some advanced form of the evolutionary-biological and neurological, or at least the social sciences, will explain that to us?

I am not trying to dispute that there are valuable things that can be learned when some of the social and natural sciences take as their object of study various representational and imagination directed human activities. It is a strange thing for people to gather in the dark and watch other people pretend to be yet other people and do ghastly things to each other (sometimes while singing about it all) or to care so much about what happens to little Nell or Hedda Gabler or to travel thousands of miles to stand in front of a temple in Kyoto, and these aesthetic appreciators are all human animals who occupy space and time like other bits of extended, causally influenceable matter. The problem I am interested in is what happens when such explanatory considerations are understood to have replaced or superceded or actually to contribute to what I have been calling “first order” normative questions (what ought to be believed and/or done), all in favor of so-called “sideways on” or second order questions (what explains why people do this or that, believe this or that, where “explains” means what it does in the natural sciences, nomological, ultimately causal explanation.)

What problem? Well, simply that the two sorts of questions are logically distinct and irreducibly different. Normative questions, I mean, are irreducibly “first-personal” questions, and these questions are practically unavoidable and necessarily linked to the social practice of giving and demanding reasons for what we do, especially when something someone does affects, changes or limits what another would otherwise have been able to do. By irreducibly first-personal, I mean that whenever anyone faces a normative question (which is the stance from which normative issues are issues)  – what ought to be believed or what ought to be done – no third-personal fact about “why one as a matter of fact has come to prefer this or that” can be relevant to what I must decide, unless (for good practical reasons) I count it as a relevant practical reason in the justification of what I decide. Knowing something about evolutionary psychology might contribute something to understanding the revenge culture in which Orestes finds himself in Aeschylus’s Oresteia, and so why he feels pulled both to avenge his father’s murder by his mother Clytemnestra, and also feels horrified at the prospect of killing his mother in cold blood. But none of that can be, would be, at all helpful to Orestes or anyone in his position.  Knowing something about the evolutionary benefits of altruistic behavior might give us an interesting perspective on some particular altruistic act, but for the agent, first-personally, the question I must decide is whether I ought to act altruistically and if so why. I cannot simply stand by, as it were, and “wait” to see what my highly and complexly evolved neuro-biological system will do. “It” doesn’t decide anything; I do, and this for reasons I must find compelling, or at least ones that outweigh countervailing considerations. It is in this sense that the first-personal perspective is strictly unavoidable. I am not a passenger on a vessel pulled hither and yon by impulses and desires; I have to steer.  (I might come to think that since it has been demonstrated that altruistic behavior results in an adaptive advantage, I should act altruistically, but aside from the fact that this is not a very good reason to act and betrays a great deal of confusion about the factual claim, it is altogether, root and branch, different from instantiating a law about social behavior.)  Kant’s famous formulation of all this was: everything in natures happens according to law; human actions happen in accord with some conception of law.

There is another fine example of all of this in Freud’s famous remark about psychoanalysis, and the third-personal, explanatory stance it seems to encourage persons to adopt toward their own motivations. The remark is in effect to confirm the unavoidability of the distinction we have been discussing if one is actually to take up the position of, as we say, leading one’s life: “wo Es war, soll Ich werden,” “what was It (or Id) should become I (or Ego).” The subject’s evaluation of herself and of what attitudes should be taken up towards herself and others is one such an “I” or ego must make. Something is going wrong, haywire, if these determinations are the result of the “it” or id. Precisely what is going wrong when a subject experiences her own deeds as not hers, as the product of such psychological forces “from outside” her intentional control, is what psychoanalysis is trying to “cure.”)

This is all compatible with the possible discovery of neurologically based dispositions to have certain attitudes or act in certain ways. The point is just that no such discovery can of itself count as a reason to do or forebear from doing anything; it cannot eliminate the agent’s perspective whenever she has to decide what to believe or do. It is also compatible with the fact that people are often self-deceived or even grossly ignorant of why they do what they do, and that they very often fabulate afterwards in what we have come to call the process of rationalization. But there is simply no translation or bridge law that will get one, qua agent, from such facts to “Well, they have discovered at MIT that people often act without being able to explain or justify what they do, so, the hell with it: I’m just going to steal Sam’s idea and pass it off as my own.” The claim is: I can no more say – it would be incoherent to say – in answer to “Why did you do that?” “No reason; I just did” than one can say (it is impossible to say) in answer to the question “What caused the fire to start?” “There was no cause; it just started.”

This all is also much clearer to us in social relations. None of us, I would venture to bet, when we offer what we take to be compelling moral reasons to a friend concerning an action the friend is contemplating, would be at all happy for our friend to respond with an explanation of why such reasons seem to us compelling. That is simply not an answer. It is in that context an evasion, and we would be right to feel “treated” like an object by such a claim, rather than as a co-equal subject.

The point I am making is a simple one – that the true autonomy at issue in our discussion is the autonomy of the normative – but it is apparently a point that needs to be made. I will close with an example “ripped from today’s headlines.” There was an article in the New York Times on October 31st of this year about a book published by the Harvard biologist  Marc Hauser called Moral Minds. (1) Dr. Hauser made his reputation in animal communication, working with monkeys in Kenya and with birds. His book is an almost perfect example of what often goes wrong with some of this purportedly interdisciplinary work. Hauser proposes that people are born with a “moral grammar” wired into their neural circuits by evolution and that this “grammar” generates “instant moral judgments which, in part because of the quick decisions that must be made in life-or-death situations, are inaccessible to the conscious mind.” Since Hauser argues that “this moral grammar operates in much the same way as the universal grammar proposed by the linguist Noam Chomsky as the innate neural machinery for language,” he has to claim some sort of common Chomsky-like moral universals for all suitably evolved human animals. This he does with breathtaking sweep, even while conceding some local variations of “emphasis.” Human behavior is said to be so “tightly constrained by this hard wiring that many rules are in fact the same or very similar in every society — do as you would be done by; care for children and the weak; don’t kill; avoid adultery and incest; don’t cheat, steal or lie.” Moreover, “the moral grammar now universal among people presumably evolved to its final shape during the hunter-gatherer phase of the human past, before the dispersal from the ancestral homeland in northeast Africa some 50,000 years ago.”

Nothing in this account of Hauser’s book seems to concede in the slightest that from the point of view of the agent one often does not do what one is powerfully inclined to do (however “quickly” comes the inclination), and that one can often do what one feels an aversion to, that the perspective of an agent is  that of a practical reasoner, not an animal responder. (Animals of course act for reasons – an animal takes feeling fear a reason to flee or fight – but not reasons as such, as deliberative considerations that may be acted on or not, depending on the justificatory force of the reason.) Not to mention that almost all great literature, from Sophocles to Shakespeare to Henry James to John Coetzee is about moral conflict and tragic dilemmas. Only the hopelessly jejune assumptions operative here about what the moral point of view consists in could allow Hauser even to begin to make his simplistic case about moral universals and evolutionary fitness.

What really takes one’s breath away, though, is the claim that we are “hard wired” with the moral universals: “do as you would be done by; care for children and the weak; don’t kill; avoid adultery and incest; don’t cheat, steal or lie.” This banal list of modern, Christian humanist values was written by a Harvard professor in a contemporary world still plagued by children sold into slavery by parents who take themselves to be entitled to do so, by the acceptability of burning to death childless wives, by guilt-free spousal abuse, by the morally required murder of sisters and daughters who have been raped, by “morally” sanctioned ethnic cleansing undertaken by those who take themselves to be entitled to do so, and one could go on and on.

Well over fifteen hundred years ago the Greek historian Herodotus reported with amazement about cultures where it was considered morally abhorrent to bury or burn one’s dead relatives rather than eat them, and the many others where nothing could be imagined more abhorrent than eating one’s dead relatives. If we are really talking about interdisciplinary collaboration on, say, moral universals, perhaps the first, most reasonable suggestion would be that Dr. Hauser spend a quiet Sunday with Herodotus. That is not what people usually have in mind when they encourage cooperation between contemporary science and the humanities. They usually mean something like “applying” “the exciting new discoveries” to that area of the academy that “does not seem to ever make any progress.” I want to say that this attitude reveals a profound confusion about the humanities from the outset, reveals especially a lack of appreciation for the permanently unsettled and irreducibly normative nature of much of the humanities.