What would humans be like if we were not a product of evolution? Naïve answers include ‘we would be less selfish’ or ‘we would be less interested in sex’. The correct answer is that the question makes absolutely no sense: everything human, everything that differentiates us from quasi-living sludge, is a product of evolution. This is a fact that the academic study of humanity still struggles with, a century and a half after Darwin. And it is striking that Midgley’s Beast and Man, published over 40 years ago, reads almost like it was written for today.
Philosophy, the social sciences, and similar practices tend to err on human nature in one of two ways. Either explanations are given which seem to presume an excessive plasticity of nature (although no one actually says these days that we are born as a ‘blank slate’, this would seem to be implied), allowing people to do whatever rational argument or social forces dictate. Or, simple and often quite silly ‘evolutionary’ explanations are presented as a stopgap for the real answers which we seek. There are doubtless many reasons for this, but one reason is surely a desire for big simple answers, and the fact that simply saying ‘it’s complicated’ is no answer at all.
My favourite lesson of Beast and Man is that different sorts of explanation can have tremendous scope and explanatory power without annulling other sorts of explanation. Different discussions about our nature and how we should live should complement each other, and if they genuinely do not, that may be a sign that we have run into trouble. One clear example of this is framed as a difference between explanations of cause and reason: “Reasons and causes are parallel ways of explaining conduct. They do not compete.” (63, the words are put into the mouth of a fictional character in a dialogue, but are clearly Midgley’s own). This seems to get directly at the problem of including evolutionary explanations in discussions of humanity – evolutionary causal stories, and physiological causal stories of behaviour, might each offer in some sense a complete story, but neither alone or in combination offer the only story.
Very closely adjacent to this is a real practical problem in academia, seemingly as prevalent in the 70s as it is today. Suppose we feel we have completely resolved the science of, say, genetics internally to the science of genetics; that still doesn’t tell us completely what the role of a geneticist is when, say, informing a different scientific discipline or when called as an expert witness in a court case. Within a disciple people tend to gravitate towards discipline-friendly concepts and methods – philosophers are at least as bad at this as anyone else, probably usually worse. This can be limiting at best (hiding promising lines of enquiry), or erroneous (mistaking the map for the territory, etc.), or really bad when one discipline tries to colonise another (as did some of the socio-biology which Midgley is responding to).
That, anyway, is my favourite theme of the book: its anti-reductionism. Midgley’s most central and substantive lesson, developed on the basis of this, is that Darwin (and to a decent extent the Scottish Enlightenment before Darwin) has allowed a return to a more Aristotelian method discussing what we are and what we should do. In slogan form: ‘we are not tourists here’: we are ‘designed’ for life on Earth, and this should be at the forefront of our minds during any discussion of how we ought to live.
The third major project of the book is correcting some long-standing misunderstandings we have about ourselves. This in particular is where the ‘beasts’ come in, as Midgley links misunderstanding of humans to misunderstanding of animals:
“Understanding is relating; it is fitting things into a context. Nothing can be understood on its own. Had we known no other animate life-form than our own, we should have been utterly mysterious to ourselves as a species. And that would have made it immensely harder for us to understand ourselves as individuals too. Anything that puts us in context, that shows us as part of a continuum, an example of a type that varies on intelligible principles, is a great help.” (17, emphasis in original)
Now, the problem is that humans have been trying to do this and getting it very wrong. Plato in particular is singled out here (and plausibly so, I think, for his influence via Christianity).
Some other key lessons I take are the following:
- In the Aristotelian vein, we should expect that rationality is not just a feature of our cognitive processes, but of our wider nature as well. (Even Hume gets a grilling here, with one of the most memorable lines from the book: “There is something comic in Hume’s picture of Reason as the slave of the Passions—how is it supposed to know which of them to obey? Slaves have a bad time in such circumstances.” (176)). While Herbert Simon is not mentioned in the bibliography, I think that his work from around the same time on ‘bounded rationality’, which helped instigate the field of behavioural economics, among other things, would complement what Midgley is saying here quite well.
- Because so much of our self-understanding has conceptual baggage of Platonism and Cartesianism “we badly need new and more suitable concepts for describing human motivation” (13).
- we should not be too quick to moralise about or suppress parts of our nature, as they likely play some sort of important role (the example given is aggression (see 67-8)). I think that this is a particularly interesting topic with the arrival of moral bio-enhancement – something which gets a mention but was a far more speculative topic when Beast and Man was written.
- An account of human nature places limits on what can be expected of people, but these limits are fairly broad and so cannot answer all of our questions. This is not the only constraint on us: “it is the business of any culture to simplify, to narrow down the options considered to those that the times most call for”. (158) There is a similar effect at an even smaller scale carried out by something like the ‘personality’. These limitations aren’t such a bad thing though: it is less interesting to see them as a limitation on choice, than to see them as structure within which meaningful choice can take place.
- We have developed as part of a large and diverse world, and should resist the twin mistakes of failing to recognise the similarities we share with other life, and of failing to value what is different from us in the world.
All of these are great lessons, which, again, seem to be needed just as urgently now as they were 40 years ago.
Reading Beast and Man: Human nature theories and ‘genealogical’ theories
It might help when reading Beast and Man to contrast two approaches to social philosophy. The purpose of the contrast is not to encourage the reader to choose one over the other. If used in moderation, and assuming that we accept them as worthwhile lines of enquiry, they can presumably complement each other quite well. I hope this will be helpful for the following reasons: At first glance, a genealogical argument might appear to be simply a very bad human nature argument (and perhaps vice versa). I want to make sure that this mistake isn’t made in interpreting Midgley. Second, Midgley’s statement of intent suggests that she is concerned with human nature theories. However her sources and examples often seem far more suited to a genealogical theory. So, there is a puzzle here for the reader to unpack, and I believe this terminology will help to articulate and address the puzzle. Finally, having tried our best to clear up the intentions behind the use of historical, scientific, literary, hypothetical, and anecdotal examples in the text, we may find that there is some residual confusion. If so, this could be a good place to begin a critique of the book, or to start again assessing whether we have really understood it.
There has been no shortage of human nature theories. Moral philosophers are probably committed to some sort of human nature theory, at least implicitly, unless they take the drastic step of denying that humans have a nature. But a paradigms teachable example in Western discourse might be a figure like Aristotle, who moves seamlessly from individual growth, to purpose, to social organisation, and to what we owe each other. But we do not need an Aristotelian worldview to do this; even the most austere and scientistic worldview could allow some progress to be made. We begin with an account of human psychology and psychological development. Now, a number of questions can be posed. What sorts of social and political organisation are compatible with our nature? How can theorists make prescriptions for behaviour which work with, rather than against, this nature? What harms occur when we do not act in accordance with our nature, and what sort of normative force might the threat of these harms have? A lot depends on how substantive our account of human nature is. But even a very limiting and exact account of human nature, when combined with the above questions, is unlikely to completely resolve many questions of social philosophy. At this point other methodology can be brought on board to help. But this doesn’t mean that appeal to human nature is over. New questions will arise in our enquiries, and behind many will be assumptions about human nature which we may need to explicitly test.
Genealogical theories are comparatively rare, and the methodology as a whole is far more contentious than human nature theory. The term is popularly associated with the work of Nietzsche, though the approach is not unique to him. The method involves historical analysis of the development of our concepts, norms, or institutions. This could be a productive activity simply because it gives us a bit more perspective on our topic. It is very useful to be reminded that others do not share our conceptual scheme or life plans, and indeed that others may struggle to make sense of what we in our less reflective moments consider obvious or universal. The genealogical theorist will often want to do more than this. They may try to create a crisis of confidence in our values, forcing into dispute values that we were content to leave unchallenged. They may be seeking a rationale for our values, one that was once recognised but has been widely forgotten, or looking for now-hidden motives for our practices which continue to operate beyond our understanding. Genealogical theory is acutely aware that the future will not be identical to the past, but that it will be a product of our past and present. If we are unsatisfied with the present (perhaps because our genealogical enquiry has weakened our confidence in our moral schema), the past could give us a sense of our options going forward, and perhaps even the cultural capital to pursue some of these paths, assuming that tradition links our community to the appropriate past practices.
There are a number of things which make genealogical theory controversial. Many will simply deny that this is where the important work of moral philosophy is to be done, believing that logical argument from foundational principles (for example) is where the real action of moral philosophy is, and so many topics central to genealogical theories are of historical but not philosophical interest. Let’s leave aside this objection, and focus on some which more directly confront genealogical theory’s precise methods. First, genealogical theory must grapple with the claim that it is engaged in a form of ‘genetic fallacy’. Of course it would be too quick to simply say that the impure origins of a practice mean that it should be abandoned; genealogical theorists will not be doing this, but they may disagree amongst themselves on what their project is or needs to be. Second, genealogical theory has a history of focusing enormously on the power of ideas. It is disputable whether ideas have this sort of power. The archetype genealogical theory is written by a person with extensive historical knowledge and a ‘Great Books’-style education, and tends to stress the influence of similar people throughout history. Perhaps this isn’t the only option. Marx’s account of morality stresses moral change following on from economic change. The intention is, on some level, remarkably like Nietzsche’s. But the two are obviously competing theories, both in their prescriptions, but more interestingly in their claims concerning what drives moral change. So whether we consider Marx a genealogy theorist regarding morality or not (and I can’t see a good reason not to, and I take it this is probably the dominant view since Foucault), big questions are posed regarding what counts as an adequate input into a convincing genealogical theory. We might not need a one-size-fits-all answer, however. Just as there are many purposes to a genealogical theory, there will be a variety of helpful inputs. This may be simply putting the question back a step. We can reject the grand clash of economics versus ideas, but still be faced with the question of what the interesting forces are which lead us to the particular situation which a particular genealogical theory seeks to assess. Whatever one’s preferred modes of historical explanation, they will doubtless be thoroughly critiqued when used to upset an existing order.
Although the subtitle of the book is ‘The roots of human nature’, and the roots of human nature are clearly agreed to be evolutionary, and the booking is partially a response to the socio-biologists and others, there is surprisingly little biology here (though where it does appear, it seems that Midgley can equal the best sociobiologists in their own field). Rather, we are asked to accept Darwinian picture, and some implications of this are spelt out piecemeal as we go, and some examples are given of what Darwinian discussion of human nature might look like. (I suggest in the next section that some of these example are not really strengths of the book.) There is a lot of debunking to be done though, of features social philosophy and scientific culture that are really hard to square with a developed Darwinian worldview, and the genealogical approach can play an important part in such debunking. Chapter 2, for example, makes much use of Homer, Plato, Kant, and Nietzsche – none of whom have much in the way of biology credentials – and it is also the most obviously ‘genealogical’ (in the philosophers’, not biologists’, sense). But a lot of the work is really of the more small-target philosophical kind – weeding out claims with unacceptable suppressed premises from several millennia of discourse, but particularly late 20th century discourse. It is a testament to the urgency of this task that this can be done without appeal to any particularly rigorous research, and anecdotes and hypotheticals are usually ample support for the claims made. I say all of this order to draw readers’ attention to how the types of arguments are arrayed through the book – if you are uncertain about what sort of argument is being made, look at the sort of evidence appealed to, because human nature arguments, philosophical-genealogical arguments, and small-target philosophical arguments all use very different kinds.
The Place of Beast and Man in Social Studies
There has been a lot of empirical work done since Beast and Man was written. It will of course be worth bringing some of that to bear to see how it affects the conclusions of some of the book’s arguments. For example, I think that some of the claims about violence and aggression in humans are mistaken. Midgley writes that the human “often deliberately kills or injures members of his own species—not, of course, all the time, but still much more often than other creatures on the planet” (57) and calls “exceptional ruthlessness to one’s own species” something in which humanity “seems to be unique” (43). (These claim are developed throughout the early parts of the book, but not fully evidenced). I take it that this comparison with other animals is incorrect, though how incorrect exactly is hard to say. If the comparison were specifically between Midgley’s 20thC Western European contemporaries and many species of wild mammals, measured in terms of deaths from intraspecies violence as a percentage of total deaths, it would be wrong by (as far as I can tell) several orders of magnitude (yes, factoring in WWII, and the Holocaust!). Grossman’s On Killing is a sophisticated account of aggression and violence in humans which throws doubt on many of the claims about human violence in Beast and Man. But the basic forms of Midgley’s arguments regarding violence hold up remarkably well despite this, to the book’s credit – the arguments are good, just input-sensitive.
I am also not sure about the discussion of language. Midgley writes that: “Washoe [a chimpanzee] took to [language] like a duck to water. She acquired in five years a vocabulary of about 150 Ameslan words which she could use, and another 200 which she could understand. Moreover, she uses it constantly, freely and spontaneously in casual conversation, not just for tests or when rewarded.” (206) But this vocabulary would be an exceptionally poor achievement for almost any human, and more importantly, as Midgley is clearly aware, there is far more to the development of language than just acquiring a vocabulary. So, for those who really have nothing better to do than defending human exceptionalism, it looks like language-use might be a good place to start. Midgley is on much firmer ground when arguing that there is more to communication than just language, but there is still something to be said about the peculiar importance of language.
If I am correct that these are indeed weak claims in the book, would they seem to threaten the book’s general project? If not, it might be a bit petty bringing them up. But there may be a point to it, I think. It depends on how much work a theory of human nature is supposed to do. A dispute in social philosophy occurs between humans, and so within the context of human nature. This may at the front of the minds of the disputants, or it may not; either way, assumptions about human nature frame the dispute. But can claims about human nature resolve the dispute? Unless one side is relying on some deep confusion about human nature (as a Cartesian or a utilitarian might be!), we will need agreement on some fairly specific claims about human nature. And it is not clear that this level of specificity is even in-principle achievable. We can demonstrate that humans are not inclined to be particularly more violent than other mammals, but just how violent, exactly, are we, by nature? If that is the question we must answer, then the dispute will probably not be resolved. We have to find another way around. We might think of this as the problem caused by uncoupling Aristotle’s naturalism from his authoritarianism: we must act in accordance with our nature, but we must decide how to do this in cooperation with others.
Midgley seems to suggest that this itself is not a challenge to the book:
“The book will have done its job if it convinces its readers that there are… particular needs, for our species as for every other, and that they form a system that can guide us. People disagreeing about what they are can start a separate argument later. The specific expressions of our needs vary widely. So does the balance chosen among them. We have great freedom here. But the main structure and the main problems it sets are constant. So there are limits on what can constitute either a culture or a rational system of life—or indeed a language.” (309-10, emphasis in original)
The book achieves far more than just demonstrating the importance of needs, so there is a significant element of understatement here. But I am not so sure about this ‘separate argument later’ about what these ‘particular needs’ are – if we are talking about some social dispute of real importance, I don’t think that this is the argument which will resolve it. The talk of (mere?) ‘limits’ here and ‘great freedom’ suggests to me that there might be space for a very different style of argument to pick up the slack when we reach irresolvable disagreement about human nature. Whether Midgley would agree depends partly, I suppose, on to just what extent this is supposed to ‘form a system that can guide us’. There are obviously many hints about this throughout the book, but to my mind, this is a big puzzle that the book leaves us with – how much work can an argument from human nature do? And how much space does this leave the arguments from caricatures of human nature – like Hobbes’s model (mentioned throughout the book) and Homo economicus?
Beast and Man is 10/10 Good for Your Thinking
Stylistically, I think that Midgley has made a real effort to make the book accessible to a wide range of readers. It is still clearly written by someone with an Oxford great books education though, and there are plenty of Easter eggs throughout – examples and references which you don’t quite understand might be worth an internet search. The style is also, I think, playful and provocative. Daniel Dennett has warned about the use of the word ‘surely’ in philosophical writing, suggesting that it frequently signals a weakness in the argument. Words like this appear quite a bit in the book, but do not (to me) ring alarm bells in this way at all. What I perceive in Beast and Man is a willingness to pack as much high-quality argument in as possible, and a confidence in the book’s mission and paradigm, that allows a pacing which keeps the reader’s interest and provides continual challenges. There are not lazy attempt to paper over gaps in the account, but rather subtle prompts for the reader to think critically about what has been said and what is implied. Midgley has given us some wonderful scaffolding, but refuses to do all of our thinking for us, and in doing so has made the book a wonderfully productive experience for the reader.
The ArachneanMetaxion Point 