Essays in Anthropology: Variations on a Theme

DULCISSIMAE MATRIS MEMORIAE

Translators’ Introduction

Though first composed separately, the four essays translated here have already been published in German as a quartet. In 1987 they were gathered into one volume, the collection given the title of its fourth and final essay, Das Natürliche und das Vernünftige (The Natural and the Rational). The question to ask, then, is why these self-standing essays were brought together in the first place? What have they to do with one another? What are they doing as a collection? The most obvious answer is that these essays are distinctly anthropological. What unites them is their shared concern with the question What is a Human Being? So, four years before this volume came out, in Spaemann’s reputation-making collection of essays, Philosophische Essays (1983), there had been a number of articles on Nature. Here, though, is an essay specifically on "Human Nature." And though the treatment of evolution here was later added to make up the expanded second edition of Philosophische Essays (1994), this quartet was its original context. Alexander Pope famously wrote that the proper study of mankind is man. If that English poet was right, then only in this slim volume does this German philosopher really find his subject.

Another way of getting at this collection’s overall objective is to identify the challenge these four essays are seeking to address. That challenge, as Spaemann himself announces in the Preface, is scientism. Scientism is not a vague umbrella-term for the totality of scientific endeavor as practiced today; it is rather the particular ideology that drives a good deal of scientific practice. Scientism champions the objectifying method peculiar to science—dissecting organisms, gathering data, inferring causal relations between material conditions, etc.—as the method for all understanding. With this claim scientism challenges (among other things) the traditional way we understand ourselves. Take, for example, the prohibition among scientists of anthropomorphism when studying animals—

that is, of yielding to the temptation of ascribing to other creatures human-like features such as the heart (our emotions) or the will (our agency). From a purely scientific viewpoint there is no reason why this prohibition shouldn’t be extended to the study of humankind. Thus today we find the widespread assumption, both scholarly and popular, that if we are really to understand ourselves we must pay attention not to what we think, desire, or do but rather to the blind biological processes that underlie those thoughts, desires, and actions. We are encouraged to do away with

sentimental anthropomorphism even when studying ourselves—the human being becomes an anthropomorphism to himself! Spaemann declares in the Preface (xxiv)—and thereby to pretend that the creature being analyzed is not also the agent interested in and undertaking that very analysis. That, then, the materialistic reduction of the human,

is the threat presented by scientism that Spaemann, in a variety of ways, tackles in these essays.

Before we briefly outline each essay it might be worth raising the question of classification. What sort of a thinker is Robert Spaemann? How should he be categorized? Where does he fit? Classification in Spaemann’s case is a challenging prospect because, intellectually speaking, he is a number of things at once. He is a post-war German public intellectual who has spent most of his academic career teaching at the University of Munich, yet he is also well versed in and constantly responsive to English-speaking analytic philosophy. Secondly, he is at once a modernity-critic who thinks that the profound ecological crisis that emerged at the end of the twentieth century signals the collapse of modernity (demonstrating once and for all the dire consequence of treating nature as a sheer resource for our projects). However, at the same time there are some of modernity’s achievements that Spaemann wants to protect against its own more self-destructive tendencies (for example, the idea that, with regards to . . . rights, equal minimal conditions should apply to all [68]). Finally, Spaemann is both a self-styled philosopher, presenting in this collection philosophical anthropology, yet he is also keen to clarify the key moments of Western philosophy’s indebtedness to irreducibly religious convictions, for example the Christian discovery of the person. In short, his preoccupations are varied and his influences are diverse—he interestingly acknowledged, for instance, that Adorno and Horkheimer’s Dialectics of Enlightenment (1948) and C. S. Lewis’s The Abolition of Man (1943) are the two books that had the greatest impact on his development. (They were, he felt, saying very much the same thing!) And so if eclectic can be used in a non-pejorative way, it might be the best word to describe Spaemann’s particular intellectual approach.

Now, stylistically, this eclecticism clearly has advantages and disadvantages. There are moments when Spaemann’s dance is hard to follow, the author’s mind proving so wide-ranging and fast-moving that an essay’s intellectual structure may not be immediately obvious, its paragraph detours can seem obscure, and the relevance of its introductory remarks sometimes difficult to see. That said, what we are offered in this collection is more than a series of unrelated aphorisms—Press on, dear reader! What’s more, it is this very eclecticism that enables Spaemann to draw such fascinating connections between disciplines, thinkers, and worldviews, which allows him, in Hopkins’s phrase, to find freshness deep down things. Notable examples are the comparisons Spaemann draws between evolutionism and Buddhism at the end of the second essay, or, in the essay on Human Dignity, between the justification of the violent termination of life and the logic underpinning artificially prolonging it.

The first essay, Human Nature, sees Spaemann in an archeological mode tracing the history of what we might call the double vision of humanity, the two different takes on the question of What is a human being?, the basic dualism in perspectives (2) that has always characterized anthropological enquiry. From one point of view, that is, humans are creatures conditioned by nature, their behavior reducible to a series of biological and physical processes. But from another point of view humans are persons, indeterminate agents who dispose of their existence as they choose. (In Kant’s summary, if the first perspective concerns what nature makes of the human being then the second is about what he as a free-acting being makes of himself [13].) Now, while Spaemann insists that this double vision is a constant in human self-experience ([i]n one way or another it has always been there), in this essay he is also keen to give names to faces, to attribute the two different perspectives to particular philosophical and theological traditions. And what emerges from this foray into intellectual history is the fact that, when taken to their extremes (in molecular biologist Dawkins and Jean-Paul Sartre respectively), the two perspectives become irreconcilable. When you push them to their limits the two visions of humanity present us with an insurmountable stalemate (5).

Yet Spaemann isn’t content simply to trace how we arrived at this stalemate in modernity. He also wants to dig up the different ways that dualism was managed before the two views were allowed to become mutually exclusive. Spaemann wants to draw our attention to historical attempts to hold in tension the two perspectives on human nature. It’s here that he brings into view the concept of human self-transcendence. The claim is that, according to the ancient and medieval ecstatic-teleological understanding thereof, human nature (and, through that, nature as a whole) intrinsically points beyond itself. The human being is not to be understood simply as found (i.e., in the state of deficiency in which he finds himself as a natural being [15]). Rather, human nature is always characterized by anticipation (20), always exceeding its material conditions. What does that look like? Well, through what I can do for myself (the use of my hands and my mind) as well as by way of what others help me to do (through social interaction, political association, and even friendship with God) I am able to reach beyond my starting-position as a creature of the world, yet, importantly, without ever leaving that belonging behind. The key here, Spaemann writes, "is that nature draws out from humankind something more than nature . . . a human is not this surplus; a human being is that creature in which nature transcends itself towards that surplus" (15–16).

The story doesn’t end there, though. Towards the end of the essay—and here Spaemann clearly demonstrates the commitment to modernity-criticism we mentioned above—he reviews the latest chapter in the fate of the double vision of humanity. This, he says, is the utopian interpretation of human self-transcendence (21). According to this, as developed by Marx and Nietzsche and then fatefully taken up by the various totalitarianisms of the twentieth century, humanity’s reaching beyond itself comes to be understood historically. Now it is humanity en bloc that can be said to transcend itself, with one race launching off from another to become something radically novel, a society of supermen or, in the communist vision, a reconciled society. For Spaemann, though, the problem with this particular way of trying to surmount the basic dualism in perspectives is that transcendence no longer constitutes a possibility that faces variously situated men and women in history; now transcendence is only an option for history’s last men for whom everyone else who ever lived was a "mere