- Email: [email protected]
Handkind: on being human
Perspectives
Book Handkind: on being human It would be an ambitious undertaking —and in the present climate of thought, an unfashionable one—for a professional academic philosopher to attempt a system-building enterprise of the kind Raymond Tallis offers in these books. They constitute a trilogy he calls “Handkind” in summation of its premise, that the dexterity of the human hand is the root of human nature. Yet Tallis is a geriatrician with a full-time job, and he is a prolific essayist to boot. Even if it were merely as a mark of his work-rate, The Hand: A Philosophical Inquiry into Human Being, I Am: A Philosophical Inquiry into First-Person Being, and The Knowing Animal: A Philosophical Inquiry into Knowledge and Truth are a remarkable achievement. But it is an achievement for other reasons too. The admirable aim Tallis sets himself is to construct a philosophical anthropology—an account of the essential factors that make humanity what it distinctively is— that steers between the Scylla of supernaturalistic explanations and the Charybdis of reductive biologism. He argues that human beings are animals, but very different from the rest of the animal kingdom. The difference consists in the reflexive awareness that makes human beings explicitly self-conscious agents, existing in relationship with a circumambient world about which they can acquire objective knowledge. The spine of Tallis’s argument is that among the many differences between humans and other animals, two are especially notable: persisting self-awareness and agency. These have their origin in the opposability of the thumb, which makes the human hand an instrument capable of an amazing variety of skilful interactions with the physical environment. Evolutionary biology recognises the adaptive advantage this confers, but www.thelancet.com Vol 365 March 19, 2005
Tallis sees in it an additional and greater significance: it is the source of self-awareness. “Opposability, through its impact on the possibilities of the hand”, Tallis writes, “utterly transforms the hominid’s relationship not only to the external objects it is manipulating, but also to its own body and this in turn feeds back on to the relationship with those
“The admirable aim Tallis sets himself is to construct a philosophical anthropology— an account of the essential factors that make humanity what it distinctively is. . .” material objects”. This took human beings over the threshold that separates consciousness from selfconsciousness, instinctive behaviour from true agency. In the process of laying a middle path between the opposing temptations of scientism and theology, Tallis addresses three of the biggest questions in philosophy: personal identity, free will, and knowledge. The key to his account of them all is what he calls “the existential intuition”, an idea he explains in terms characteristic of a philosopher who has manifestly had a large influence on him, namely Heidegger. The existential intuition is: “That I am This”—a self-conscious awareness of first-person being and agency which, for Tallis, is what turns sentience into knowledge, and is therefore what distinguishes human from all other animal life. Tallis displays a wide acquaintance with the technical literature that surrounds these central philosophical topics, although his critics might say that he also displays the lack of what gives contemporary philosophy its character, namely, the process of offering ideas for critical discussion
at conferences, or given preliminary publication in journals, so that they can be subjected to refinement before appearing in finished form. There are many points in Tallis’s three volumes where a thorough challenge at an early stage might have helped matters greatly. Indeed, it might also have shown him that what he says about first-person being, agency, and knowledge in the second and third volumes does not depend quite so much, nor follow quite so seamlessly, from the premise set down in the first volume—that the opposability of the thumb is the source of human distinctiveness. A first thought that prompts reflection on the starting-point of Tallis’s enterprise is that by insisting upon the difference between human beings and other animals, he is at risk of failing to notice the distinction between stressing the similarity of human beings to other animals, and stressing the similarity of other animals to human beings. The first implies that human beings are governed by the same automatic and instinctual mechanisms as other animals, thus emphasising the bestiality and bovinity, the biological determinism and entrapment in genetics, that pessimists about human nature and destiny like to invoke. But the second formulation points to the fact that there is intelligence, subtle communication, memory, and emotion in other animals—in primates certainly, and perhaps other mammals besides: dolphins and elephants have been cited. According to this formulation, such animals have in kind, although in far lesser degree, the potential for at least some of those attributes that grace human beings, among them a sense of selfhood and a capacity for relationship, together with some concomitants of the latter, such as attachment and grief (observed
The Hand: A Philosophical Inquiry into Human Being Raymond Tallis. Edinburgh University Press, 2003. Pp 368. £19·99. ISBN 0-7486-1738-8.
I Am: A Philosophical Inquiry into First-Person Being Raymond Tallis. Edinburgh University Press, 2004. Pp 350. £19·99. ISBN 0-7486-1951-8.
The Knowing Animal: A Philosophical Inquiry into Knowledge and Truth Raymond Tallis. Edinburgh University Press, 2004. Pp 330. £19·99. ISBN 0-7486-1953-4.
1021
Perspectives
among chimpanzees and elephants, for two examples.) This thought should anchor our endeavour to construct a philosophical anthropology far closer to the biological than the theological end of the spectrum. Tallis is, however, right to say that it is a bad mistake therefore to slip into uncritical biologism, because the differences at stake, though ones of degree not kind, are huge, and obviously central to explaining the agency and knowledge that seem crucially definitive of human experience, and which other animals palpably lack. Other difficulties with Tallis’s account relate to the first issue I raised. What is the status of Tallis’s claim that the opposable thumb is the source of self-awareness, agency, and knowledge? Is an opposable thumb a necessary condition for these latter— so that, if there is “intelligent life” elsewhere in the universe, the beings manifesting it must have opposable thumbs too? If this thought seems absurd—as, alas, it does—the implication is that intelligence (using this as shorthand for selfhood, agency, and possession of knowledge as opposed to mere sentience) is not logically tied to a specific physical capacity, but could arise from any one or combination of them. Tallis could, and perhaps should, reply that any finely discriminatory way of interacting with a physical environment is an important part of the aetiology of intelligence. Vision and audition are good candidates for sensory powers with remarkable aptitude for the required kind of finetuning. Even taste and smell (as possessed by moles) might yield the subject-object distinction—the sense of the contrast between self and other—that is key to agency and knowledge. In fact, if one thinks of what vision provides, Tallis’s dismissal of it as a candidate for the primary source of the growth of intelligence seems odd; information about distances beyond the reach of the 1022
fingers, recognition of psychological states of others in facial expressions, the significance of colour discrimination for evaluating and interacting with the world—the list of things for which vision is the necessary source (even for blind people—indirectly via the language they learn from sighted people) is interminable. But if one concedes that sight or another sense, or (more likely) some combination of them, could do what he claims in effect the activity of the hands uniquely does, the problem arises: why is it only human beings that have evolved to possess agency, knowledge, and so rich a sense of self? Actually, a version of this question can even be asked about the opposable thumb argument itself. Why is it (as Tallis acknowledges) that so many hundreds of thousands of tool-making years passed before our ancestors acquired, or, if they had it early, began to benefit from, the intelligence made possible by dextrous hands? The fact that our earliest ancestors had them without having what we have in the way of mental powers seems to suggest that some additional factor is in play—and in the light of thoughts about the possible role of other senses, perhaps it is this other factor, whatever it is, that is the crucial one. One reason why Tallis’s work has so far gained little purchase on the attention of professional philosophers is doubtless their characteristic attitude to amateurs, namely, a mixture of suspicion and snobbishness. In my view Tallis is an amateur in the best sense: a lover of the enterprise of philosophy, with a keen and inventive desire to state a position on crucial matters, and the talent to defend it with real eloquence and—especially in the second and third volumes, where personal identity and agency and the question of knowledge are in focus— insight. But it has to be said that disadvantage of being outside the guild can show. For example, Tallis criticises the “linguistic turn” in 20th-century
analytic philosophy, predicated on the work of Gottlob Frege, which seemed to abandon the task of wrestling with the problem of what knowledge is and how, in the face of sceptical challenge, we can reliably get it, and proceeded to focus instead on the question of how meaning attaches to words. Tallis fails to see that the turns first to philosophy of language and, more latterly, philosophy of mind are different routes to the same target as the one he aims at. The alternative strategy on offer starts from the idea that if you want to understand the world and our relation to it, you have to look at how we think about them both—for thought either conforms to, or (a minority view now) creates, the world. But to understand thought you have to examine language, which embodies and expresses thought. So the theory of meaning is an alternative way of treating the traditional problems of metaphysics and epistemology, whose votaries thought that it would—as indeed it does—shed fresh light on them. Tallis sees the “linguistic turn” as an aberration rather than an ally. The fact that there is much to comment upon, and within that to criticise, in Tallis’s endeavour is a mark of its richness, not of poverty. For his is a bold effort to contribute to a fundamental matter—the debate about what it is to be human. Moreover, Tallis’s standpoint is absolutely the right one: he seeks to capture the human essence from a non-reductive naturalistic standpoint that at the same time repudiates the pessimism and nihilism of those who say that because we are animals, we are doomed to their fate of powerlessness and eventual extinction in the ineluctable mills of deterministic nature. Tallis seeks to articulate a different and better vision, and to do it in detail and with careful argument: it is an endeavour to applaud.
A C Grayling [email protected]
www.thelancet.com Vol 365 March 19, 2005
Book Handkind: on being human It would be an ambitious undertaking —and in the present climate of thought, an unfashionable one—for a professional academic philosopher to attempt a system-building enterprise of the kind Raymond Tallis offers in these books. They constitute a trilogy he calls “Handkind” in summation of its premise, that the dexterity of the human hand is the root of human nature. Yet Tallis is a geriatrician with a full-time job, and he is a prolific essayist to boot. Even if it were merely as a mark of his work-rate, The Hand: A Philosophical Inquiry into Human Being, I Am: A Philosophical Inquiry into First-Person Being, and The Knowing Animal: A Philosophical Inquiry into Knowledge and Truth are a remarkable achievement. But it is an achievement for other reasons too. The admirable aim Tallis sets himself is to construct a philosophical anthropology—an account of the essential factors that make humanity what it distinctively is— that steers between the Scylla of supernaturalistic explanations and the Charybdis of reductive biologism. He argues that human beings are animals, but very different from the rest of the animal kingdom. The difference consists in the reflexive awareness that makes human beings explicitly self-conscious agents, existing in relationship with a circumambient world about which they can acquire objective knowledge. The spine of Tallis’s argument is that among the many differences between humans and other animals, two are especially notable: persisting self-awareness and agency. These have their origin in the opposability of the thumb, which makes the human hand an instrument capable of an amazing variety of skilful interactions with the physical environment. Evolutionary biology recognises the adaptive advantage this confers, but www.thelancet.com Vol 365 March 19, 2005
Tallis sees in it an additional and greater significance: it is the source of self-awareness. “Opposability, through its impact on the possibilities of the hand”, Tallis writes, “utterly transforms the hominid’s relationship not only to the external objects it is manipulating, but also to its own body and this in turn feeds back on to the relationship with those
“The admirable aim Tallis sets himself is to construct a philosophical anthropology— an account of the essential factors that make humanity what it distinctively is. . .” material objects”. This took human beings over the threshold that separates consciousness from selfconsciousness, instinctive behaviour from true agency. In the process of laying a middle path between the opposing temptations of scientism and theology, Tallis addresses three of the biggest questions in philosophy: personal identity, free will, and knowledge. The key to his account of them all is what he calls “the existential intuition”, an idea he explains in terms characteristic of a philosopher who has manifestly had a large influence on him, namely Heidegger. The existential intuition is: “That I am This”—a self-conscious awareness of first-person being and agency which, for Tallis, is what turns sentience into knowledge, and is therefore what distinguishes human from all other animal life. Tallis displays a wide acquaintance with the technical literature that surrounds these central philosophical topics, although his critics might say that he also displays the lack of what gives contemporary philosophy its character, namely, the process of offering ideas for critical discussion
at conferences, or given preliminary publication in journals, so that they can be subjected to refinement before appearing in finished form. There are many points in Tallis’s three volumes where a thorough challenge at an early stage might have helped matters greatly. Indeed, it might also have shown him that what he says about first-person being, agency, and knowledge in the second and third volumes does not depend quite so much, nor follow quite so seamlessly, from the premise set down in the first volume—that the opposability of the thumb is the source of human distinctiveness. A first thought that prompts reflection on the starting-point of Tallis’s enterprise is that by insisting upon the difference between human beings and other animals, he is at risk of failing to notice the distinction between stressing the similarity of human beings to other animals, and stressing the similarity of other animals to human beings. The first implies that human beings are governed by the same automatic and instinctual mechanisms as other animals, thus emphasising the bestiality and bovinity, the biological determinism and entrapment in genetics, that pessimists about human nature and destiny like to invoke. But the second formulation points to the fact that there is intelligence, subtle communication, memory, and emotion in other animals—in primates certainly, and perhaps other mammals besides: dolphins and elephants have been cited. According to this formulation, such animals have in kind, although in far lesser degree, the potential for at least some of those attributes that grace human beings, among them a sense of selfhood and a capacity for relationship, together with some concomitants of the latter, such as attachment and grief (observed
The Hand: A Philosophical Inquiry into Human Being Raymond Tallis. Edinburgh University Press, 2003. Pp 368. £19·99. ISBN 0-7486-1738-8.
I Am: A Philosophical Inquiry into First-Person Being Raymond Tallis. Edinburgh University Press, 2004. Pp 350. £19·99. ISBN 0-7486-1951-8.
The Knowing Animal: A Philosophical Inquiry into Knowledge and Truth Raymond Tallis. Edinburgh University Press, 2004. Pp 330. £19·99. ISBN 0-7486-1953-4.
1021
Perspectives
among chimpanzees and elephants, for two examples.) This thought should anchor our endeavour to construct a philosophical anthropology far closer to the biological than the theological end of the spectrum. Tallis is, however, right to say that it is a bad mistake therefore to slip into uncritical biologism, because the differences at stake, though ones of degree not kind, are huge, and obviously central to explaining the agency and knowledge that seem crucially definitive of human experience, and which other animals palpably lack. Other difficulties with Tallis’s account relate to the first issue I raised. What is the status of Tallis’s claim that the opposable thumb is the source of self-awareness, agency, and knowledge? Is an opposable thumb a necessary condition for these latter— so that, if there is “intelligent life” elsewhere in the universe, the beings manifesting it must have opposable thumbs too? If this thought seems absurd—as, alas, it does—the implication is that intelligence (using this as shorthand for selfhood, agency, and possession of knowledge as opposed to mere sentience) is not logically tied to a specific physical capacity, but could arise from any one or combination of them. Tallis could, and perhaps should, reply that any finely discriminatory way of interacting with a physical environment is an important part of the aetiology of intelligence. Vision and audition are good candidates for sensory powers with remarkable aptitude for the required kind of finetuning. Even taste and smell (as possessed by moles) might yield the subject-object distinction—the sense of the contrast between self and other—that is key to agency and knowledge. In fact, if one thinks of what vision provides, Tallis’s dismissal of it as a candidate for the primary source of the growth of intelligence seems odd; information about distances beyond the reach of the 1022
fingers, recognition of psychological states of others in facial expressions, the significance of colour discrimination for evaluating and interacting with the world—the list of things for which vision is the necessary source (even for blind people—indirectly via the language they learn from sighted people) is interminable. But if one concedes that sight or another sense, or (more likely) some combination of them, could do what he claims in effect the activity of the hands uniquely does, the problem arises: why is it only human beings that have evolved to possess agency, knowledge, and so rich a sense of self? Actually, a version of this question can even be asked about the opposable thumb argument itself. Why is it (as Tallis acknowledges) that so many hundreds of thousands of tool-making years passed before our ancestors acquired, or, if they had it early, began to benefit from, the intelligence made possible by dextrous hands? The fact that our earliest ancestors had them without having what we have in the way of mental powers seems to suggest that some additional factor is in play—and in the light of thoughts about the possible role of other senses, perhaps it is this other factor, whatever it is, that is the crucial one. One reason why Tallis’s work has so far gained little purchase on the attention of professional philosophers is doubtless their characteristic attitude to amateurs, namely, a mixture of suspicion and snobbishness. In my view Tallis is an amateur in the best sense: a lover of the enterprise of philosophy, with a keen and inventive desire to state a position on crucial matters, and the talent to defend it with real eloquence and—especially in the second and third volumes, where personal identity and agency and the question of knowledge are in focus— insight. But it has to be said that disadvantage of being outside the guild can show. For example, Tallis criticises the “linguistic turn” in 20th-century
analytic philosophy, predicated on the work of Gottlob Frege, which seemed to abandon the task of wrestling with the problem of what knowledge is and how, in the face of sceptical challenge, we can reliably get it, and proceeded to focus instead on the question of how meaning attaches to words. Tallis fails to see that the turns first to philosophy of language and, more latterly, philosophy of mind are different routes to the same target as the one he aims at. The alternative strategy on offer starts from the idea that if you want to understand the world and our relation to it, you have to look at how we think about them both—for thought either conforms to, or (a minority view now) creates, the world. But to understand thought you have to examine language, which embodies and expresses thought. So the theory of meaning is an alternative way of treating the traditional problems of metaphysics and epistemology, whose votaries thought that it would—as indeed it does—shed fresh light on them. Tallis sees the “linguistic turn” as an aberration rather than an ally. The fact that there is much to comment upon, and within that to criticise, in Tallis’s endeavour is a mark of its richness, not of poverty. For his is a bold effort to contribute to a fundamental matter—the debate about what it is to be human. Moreover, Tallis’s standpoint is absolutely the right one: he seeks to capture the human essence from a non-reductive naturalistic standpoint that at the same time repudiates the pessimism and nihilism of those who say that because we are animals, we are doomed to their fate of powerlessness and eventual extinction in the ineluctable mills of deterministic nature. Tallis seeks to articulate a different and better vision, and to do it in detail and with careful argument: it is an endeavour to applaud.
A C Grayling [email protected]
www.thelancet.com Vol 365 March 19, 2005