Feb 02 2010
An Antiquated Humanism
Last week I finished reading a book called The History of Nature and drew surprising insight from it. I found the obscure tome in the science section of a used bookstore a few years ago. The book was published in 1949 so you can imagine how out of date the science in it is. But the last few chapters – “The Soul,” “Man: Outer History” and “Man: Inner History” – looked interesting. I bought the book and read it despite its age.
The book was written by C. F. von Weizsacker, a German nuclear physicist. Von Weizsacker was the first to identify nuclear reactions as the energy source for the sun and stars, so he was no slouch when it came to science. The first three-quarters of The History of Nature is a good review of what humankind had learned about Earth and the cosmos by 1949. But this heavyweight scientist wasn’t much of a philosopher, as the last quarter of the book clearly illustrates.
This comes as no surprise. Few heavyweight scientists are heavyweight philosophers, as well. In this age of specialization, we don’t even expect it. As C. P. Snow pointed out a half century ago, science and the humanities have developed into two separate cultures. Therein lies the problem. The more we compartmentalize knowledge, the harder it is for any of us to see the big picture. I give von Weizsacker credit for attempting, at least, to bring all knowledge together in a synoptic view of things. Most thinkers don’t even try.
That said, what struck me about von Weizsacker’s worldview was the inconsistency of it. “Body and soul are not two substances but one,” he states outright, suggesting a worldview one that would expect from a Platonic thinker, a Rationalist from the Enlightenment, or a Buddhist. Then he blathered on about the rise of free thought over instinct, good and evil, and the virtues of the Christian love, as if this kind of dualism wasn’t at odds with his original body/soul statement. Fuzzy thinking at best.
As I finished this book, it suddenly occurred to me that Humanism, preached by religious and secular thinkers alike in the middle of the 20th Century, is now antiquated. The contradictions of it have simply become too glaring. That we, Homo sapiens, are qualitatively different from the rest of nature is something any informed person living today must find very hard to swallow. What basis is there in science for this kind of thinking? At what point did we abandon our animal selves? When exactly did we divorce nature and become human – when we turned to agriculture and started building towns, or when we started burying our dead and painting on cave walls? How about when we fashioned the first tool? When Lucy walked upright across the savanna, was that the beginning our separation?
No, I don’t see it. I don’t see human nature apart from Nature. Nor do I see human progress as the gradual removal of our selves from the physical environment. Certainly, our ability to think abstractly – to love, hate and reason – is an integral part of our humanity, but so is eating, sleeping, dreaming, bleeding and sex, to name but a few of our more down-to-earth attributes.
If we are serious about being fully human, then we must cultivate our affinity with wild nature instead of alienating ourselves from it. Besides, the wild is as much within us as it is out there. Like all things in nature, we are evolving, but the words “progress” and “human” do not go together very well. For better or worse, a human being will always be an animal to some extent. And I for one revel in that fact.
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