What is the human thing?
One way to approach this question
is to consider the nature of parts and wholes.
The one is fundamentally subordinate to the other. A doorknob is a part of and hence essentially
subordinate to a door because the definition of the former necessarily includes
the latter. You can’t understand what a
doorknob is unless you understand what a door is; however, you don’t have to
understand the knob in order to understand the door. The same is true of semicircles and
circles.
Applying this to biology, a hand
or a kidney is part of a body and cannot exist or be what it is without being
integrated into a body. Logos must proceed
from the whole to the parts in order to understand the phenomena. Aristotle also argues that the body is
essentially secondary and the soul primary, for a body without a soul (a
corpse) isn’t really a body anymore. It
is just a lump of interestingly shaped material. The soul, as he puts it in the De Anima, is the actuality of the body.
So what about the relationship
between the individual human being and the political community? In the Politics,
Aristotle famously states that an individual who is no part of such a community
is like a severed hand. Of course unlike
a severed hand, an isolated individual can go on living; however, he cannot
live a human life. He is like a beast or
a god, below or above the human thing.
That seems to answer the question decisively in favor of the polis as
the human thing.
In the Nicomachean Ethics, however, Aristotle takes the opposite
approach. He begins with the individual
as the primary thing and family, friendship, and citizenship emerge from the
individual’s pursuit of the good things for himself and for those he cares
about. So which is it?
Aristotle grappled with a similar
problem with various attempts to identify the fundamental unit of biology. At first glance it seems obvious. A horse is a horse, of course. From that fundamental thing, present to
observation, one can abstract in two directions. One can go downward to the parts of the
horse: legs and organs and organic matter.
One can go upward to the species to which the animal belongs and thence
to genus, etc. But these logical steps
are necessarily abstractions. A leg only
makes sense as a leg if it is part of a whole animal. The species, likewise is real only in the
sense that it is something true about this here animal: that it belongs in this
category.
Yet Aristotle was also drawn in
the other direction. What is most
knowable is that which is less subject to qualification. To say that a horse has four legs may not be
true of this particular horse since she might lose a leg and yet remain, for a
little bit at least, a horse. It is reliably
true of the horse species, however, and so the species is more knowable. If the knowable is the real, and this is a
necessary assumption for all rational understanding of nature, then the species
is more real than the individual.
This conundrum should be
understood in the context of Aristotle’s argument with Plato. Plato’s Socrates can down decisively in favor
of the species form. He argued famously
that the form is primary and exists independently of the individual. When Aristotle makes the individual primary
he is reducing the species form to a mere abstraction. When he makes the species primary, he is
nonetheless keeping his distance from Plato.
The horse species is nothing more nor less than all the horses present
in every place and time.
Aristotle’s equivocation on this
topic has its analogy in the problem of the species in modern biology. Is the species a set of characteristics by
which we place an individual into a more or less artificial class? If it looks like a duck and waddles like a
duck and quacks like a duck, then it’s probably… a duck. Alternatively, a species can be understood as
a large object scattered across time.
Chimpanzees are this branch of the ape clade and human beings are
another. A third alternative is Ernst
Mayr’s definition of an interbreeding population of sexually reproducing
creatures. Each approach has its
power. None can settle the matter in its
favor.
To ask what is the human thing is
to arrive at the same dilemma. The most
obvious answer is that it is the biological individual. Social groups, including the primary social
group which is the political community, are institutions. Individuals do the instituting. Yet Aristotle had a point in his Politics. If a linguistic community is an institution
then so is an individual linguistic animal, the latter cannot become what she
is without the former. Without a family
or its functional equivalent a human person can neither survive to adulthood
nor acquire that capacity for logos that is the definitive characteristic of
human beings. It is possible to go a
step further and point out that all human communities are possible because of
the history of the human species on earth.
Perhaps that is the human thing and particular societies stand towards
it just as individuals stand towards groups.
I will argue from Aristotelian
principles that the human thing is neither the individual nor the polis but,
instead, is the dynamic relationship
between the two. Individuals create
societies and vice versa. This is
possible precisely because the individual and the group are each asserting
themselves against the other. This is
not explicit in Aristotle’s writing; however, it is more or less intentionally
what his thinking is pointing toward. It
makes sense of Aristotle and, I will argue, it makes sense of both the
theoretical questions discussed above and of their explicitly political implications. Applying Darwinian biology to Aristotle’s
principles will allow us to understand both the human thing and, necessarily,
the political thing.
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