The cat is happy to reside within his limits: he does not aspire. He is incapable of hubris. There are no feline tragedies. A cat can be miserable, and so can a man, but only a man can be wretched. A man is an animal, but an abyss separates him from the other animals. It is this abyssal difference between man and animal, a difference appreciated from Genesis to Heidegger, that justifies the distinction between animalic misery, which man shares with animals, and spiritual wretchedness, which he does not.
Fear and anxiety
A cat can experience fear (Furcht), but he cannot experience anxiety (Angst). I borrow Heidegger's terms for a distinction already to be found in Kierkegaard. The cat, however, experiences fear and does not merely exhibit fear-behavior: an animal is not a machine. Philosophical behaviorism is as false of the cat as of the man. A cat can feel and show fear and other emotions just as a man can. 'Just as a man can' does not mean to the same degree or in the same way as a man can; it means that both man and cat feel and show fear and other emotions. Both suffer and enjoy mental states. Cartesius take note.
But a man can fake emotion-exhibiting behavior without feeling the corresponding emotions. This is beyond the cat. He cannot dissemble, not because he is sincere, but because he is beneath dissemblance and sincerity.
Respect
A cat can neither feel nor show respect. A man can feel respect, show respect, but also dissimulate by faking respect. Do I respect my cats? If respect is of persons, then I respect them at best analogously: cats are not persons. Some of us have and express self-respect; no cat does either. Since a cat cannot respect himself, he cannot disrespect himself. Respect is connected with standards and norms and ideals that a man feels himself to be under and beholden to.
Ideals and time
Having no ideals, the cat does not face the problem of false ideals. This is because he does not strive or aspire. His life is not a project in pursuit of Jungian individuation or any other form of self-integration. He remains within his natural limits in the moment. He cannot feel anxiety in the face of death, for he has no future. But he also has no past. He abides in the abode of the Now. He cannot, however, experience this Now as a nunc stans, the standing Now of eternity. For he is time-bound to the core. A man, as a spiritual being, is not time-bound to the core: he is not spiritually bound to any particular time, and he is not spiritually bound to time in general. Man is a pan-optic, syn-optic spirit, capable of surveying the entire ontological 'scene' including himself and everything else. He is "a spectator of all time and existence." (Plato)
But he is at the same 'time' -- speaking analogically -- embedded in the biotic. For he too is an animal. He is a spiritual animal. No cat is a spiritual animal. And so no cat shares the human predicament. Life for a man is a predicament, not a mere condition. 'Predicament' suggests a state that is unsatisfactory, problematic, transitional: not a status finalis, but a status viatoris. 'Predicament' suggests a condition from which we need to be released or saved if we are to become what we most truly are. Man is homo viator, on the way, spiritually speaking. A cat may be on the prowl, but no cat is on the way. No cat is in statu viae. A pilgrimage is a physical analog of a man's being metaphysically on the way. But no cat makes a pilgrimage. For what could be his Mecca, his Jerusalem, his Santiago de Compostela? Buddy the cat may be on the road, but he is not on the way.
I said that the cat abides in the abode of the Now, but not the standing Now, but the moving Now. That is not to say that he experiences the nunc movens, the moving Now: if he did he would feel regret for the past and both hope and fear for the future. Have you ever met a regretful cat, or a hopeful one?
Self-degradation
Unlike a man, a cat cannot degrade himself. This is because he is an animal merely, unlike a man who is a strange hybrid of animal and spirit. Belonging to both orders, a man is neither an animal merely nor a spirit merely.
And so he is a riddle to himself. The human condition is a predicament; the animalic condition is not. A man asks: What am I? and Who am I? These are two different questions that no cat poses.
Rights
Do cats and other non-human animals have rights? Here is a quick little argument contra. Rights and duties are correlative: whatever has rights has duties. No cat has duties; ergo, no cat has rights. But if so, then no cat has a right to life or a right not to be harmed which would induce in us the obligation not to harm him. Does it follow therefrom that it is morally permissible to torture a cat? Kant faces the difficulty. Jonathan Birch:
Kant himself grapples with this problem in the Metaphysics of Morals (Kant 1797/2017) although he does not, I think, appreciate its gravity. He offers a partial solution: we may not owe obligations to animals, but we can have obligations in regard to animals that we owe to ourselves. The idea is that, in torturing animals, killing them inhumanely, hunting them for sport or treating them without gratitude, one acts without due respect for one’s own humanity. Why? Because mistreating animals dulls one’s “shared feeling of their suffering and so weakens and gradually uproots a natural predisposition that is very serviceable to morality in one’s relations with other human beings” (Kant 1797/2017, 6:433).
Kant’s position is not simply that in mistreating animals I make myself more likely to wrong other people. It is rather that, in mistreating animals, I violate a duty I owe to myself by weakening my disposition for “shared feeling”, or empathy. From the formula of humanity (discussed in more detail in the next section), I have a duty to cultivate morally good dispositions, and I violate this duty if I erode dispositions that are “serviceable to morality”. This has come to be known as the “indirect duty” view.
More on this later, perhaps. I will give Schopenhauer the last word:
To which I add: A man who is gratuitously cruel to men is not a man at all but a demon. Homo homini lupus does not capture the depravity to which humans can sink. Man is not a wolf to man, but a demon to man.
It is perfectly stupid to refer to a human savage, such as a Hamas terrorist, as an animal. Again, no animal has the power of self-degradation: that is a spiritual power.
Too much attention is wasted on what we did do and what we will do, and not enough on what we are doing. Age quod agis. "Do what you are doing." A excellent maxim. A non-philosopher will take it as such and then move on. The philosopher lingers and goes deeper.
Verbally a tautology, the admonition expresses a non-tautological truth: attend to what you are doing. I cannot fail to do what I am doing, but I can fail to attend to what I am doing. The admonition is in the same logical boat with "Be here now!" and "Live in the present!"
How could I fail to be here now? Where else would I be? And when else would I be? But that would be to miss the point. The tautological form of words expresses a non-tautological thought: Attend to the moment and be aware of your situation.
For a human being, to be is not merely to exist as a thing among things, but to be aware. The Being of a human being involves an element of material facticity -- you are this indigent material thing right here -- but also an element of transcendence in that, as aware, you are way beyond the miserable chunk of matter your awareness inhabits. You are way beyond it by being aware of the not-self. The not-self includes not only everything other than your body, but also your body inasmuch as your body and its parts are objects of awareness and thus not identical to you as subject of awareness. You are not merely a thing in the world, but also, as the subject of awareness, a being for whom there is a world.
As for living in the present, this is not a mere biological living. As a bit of nature's fauna, how could you biologically live other in the temporal present? To live in the present, as per the admonition, is to attend to the present, to impede the outward scatter of your thoughts, to bend back the outward intentionality (object-directedness) of mind to the present moment and its contents. You draw in your thoughts from the diaspora of the past and the future and the elsewhere in space and the elsewhere in general and bring them home. You could call it 'bringing it all back home.' You could call it spiritual intro-version, or swimming upstream to the Source of thought's river. ("Man is a stream whose source is hidden" (Ralph Waldo Emerson).
The Being of the human being is a living, but not a merely biological living, not a mere living as understood by the objectifying natural science of biology. The ineluctable subjectivity ingredient in the Being of human beings cannot be understood from the point of view of biology.
Consider now the sentence 'I am hungry' asserted by BV. It is true now at 12:45 PM. What is it about? It is about BV, a publicly identifiable person. What does it predicate of BV? It predicates the property of being hungry. The predicational tie is signified by the copula 'am.' Does this copula express merely the object BV's instantiation of the property? No, it also expresses the speaker's awareness that he himself is hungry. Property-possession in a human being is more than a merely objective relation. This fact complements the earlier one about the ineluctable subjectivity of the Being of human beings. Both the Being and the Being-propertied of human beings is unlike anything else in the world.
I read the Sufi mystic Rūmī (1207-1273) when I lived in Turkey, 1995-1996. The following observation from my Turkish journal is surrounded by quotations from him so he may have been the source of the idea.
Angels were created with reason, brutes with lust, man with both. A man who follows reason is higher than the angels, but a man who follows lust is lower than the brutes.
The angels face no ongoing battle with sensuality; so we who after long struggle master ourselves are greater than angels in self-mastery. We humans have both the vices of the flesh (lust, greed, gluttony) and the vices of the spirit (pride, envy, anger, and sloth) to combat whereas the angels are tempted by only the latter four. The man who empties himself into the diaspora of the sense pleasures, however, has degraded himself, reaching a nadir inaccessible to any mere animal. While we, in our present state, cannot reach the celestial zenith, we can all-too-easily 'achieve' the sublunary nadir.
Such is man, a strange hybrid, amphibious as between the realms of spirit and matter. Some will say that he is a sick animal, sickened by spirit (Ludwig Klages, Geist als Widersacher der Seele.Others that he is a fallen spirit.
Theodor Haecker, Journal in the Night (tr. Alexander Dru, Pantheon Books, 1950, p. 67, #263, written 1940):
The man who explicitly does not believe and does not will to believe (for the will to believe belongs to believing) in an eternal life, that is to say in a personal life after death, will become an animal, an animal being which among other things, man is. Man is 'planned as spirit,' as Kierkegaard puts it, but that includes the immortality of the soul. Whoever relinquishes that also gives up the spirit of man.
Man alone among the animals raises the question whether he is more than an animal. His raising of this question does not prove that he is more than an animal; perhaps it proves only that he is the most pretentious of all animals, a crazy animal, an evolutionary fluke who merely fancies himself more than an animal. Such a fanciful conceit might even be accorded survival value within a naturalist scheme. Thinking himself the crown of creation, a child of God, with divine sanction to lord it over, but also cherish and protect the critters beneath him, this lofty self-conception, even if false, might enhance his chances of survival. It could be like that, or at least I cannot see a way definitively to exclude this epistemic possibility.
Or it could be like this: Man's having a world (Welt) and not merely an environment (Umwelt) like the animals points to a higher origin, a spiritual origin, and a higher destiny. Elsewhere I catalog twelve meanings of 'world'; here I am using the term in my twelfth sense, the transcendental-phenomenological sense. It remains an open question whether the world in this sense has an ontic anchor in God, whether the light of the transcendental-phenomenological Lichtung (clearing) has an onto-theological Source. We cannot know it to be the case, but we can reasonably believe it to be the case. That is as good as it gets here below. And so I am brought around, once again, to the fact that, in the end, one must decide what to believe and how to live.
Haecker is right to point out that "the will to believe belongs to believing." Not all belief is voluntary, but religious and anti-religious belief is. The will comes into it, as it does not in the case of some such mundane belief as that the Sun has risen. You are free to believe that you are a complex physical system slated for utter annihilation in a few years, months, days, minutes, and you are free to believe that you are "planned as spirit." Either way reasons can be adduced, reasons that are not obviously bad reasons.
Man is neither angel nor beast; and the misfortune is that he who would act the angel acts the beast.
The first half of the thought is unexceptionable: man is indeed neither angel nor beast, but, amphibious as he is between matter and spirit, a hybrid and a riddle to himself.
The second half of Pascal's thought, however, is unfair to the beasts. No beast can act the beast the way a man can. No beast is bestial in the way a man can be bestial. The difference is that while the beast acts according to his nature, man freely degrades himself contrary to his nature. Having done so, he allows his freely indulged passions to suborn his intellect: he constructs elaborate rationalizations for his self-degradation.
It is not our animality that corrupts us but our free misuse of our animality, a misuse that derives from our spirituality.
Self-love can extend to love of the smell of one's own excrement, at which point self-respect raises an eyebrow. But are we not just clever land mammals? How is self-respect possible for such critters? It is actual, so it is possible.
He is an animal, but also a spirit -- and thus a riddle to himself. He reasons and speaks, he objectifies, he says 'I' and he means it. He does not parrot the word 'I' in the manner of a parrot or a voice synthesizer; uttering 'I' he expresses self-awareness. Man has a world (Welt), not merely an environment (Umwelt). Man envisages a higher life, a higher destiny, whether within history or beyond it. And then he puzzles himself over whether this envisagement is a mere fancy, a delusion, or whether it presages the genuine possibility of a higher life.
More than an animal, he can yet sink lower than any animal which fact is a reverse index of his spiritual status. He can as easily devote himself to scatology as to eschatology. The antics of a Marquis de Sade are as probative of man's status as the life of a St. Augustine. It takes a spiritual being both to willingly empty oneself into the flesh and to transcend it.
Kierkegaard writes that "every higher conception of life . . . takes the view that the task for men is to strive after kinship with the Deity . . . ." (Attack Upon Christendom, p. 265) We face the danger of "minimizing our own significance" as S. K. puts it, of selling ourselves short. And yet how difficult it is to believe in one's own significance! The problem is compounded by not knowing what one's significance is assuming that one has significance. Not knowing what it is, one can question whether it is.
Kierkegaard solves the problem by way of his dogmatic and fideistic adherence to Christian anthropology and soteriology. Undiluted Christianity is his answer. My answer: live so as to deserve immortality. Live as if you have a higher destiny. It cannot be proven, but the arguments against it can all be neutralized. Man's whence and whither are shrouded in darkness and will remain so in this life. Ignorabimus. In the final analysis you must decide what to believe and how to live.
You could be wrong, no doubt. But if you are wrong, what have you lost? Some baubles and trinkets. If you say that truth will have been lost, I will ask you how you know that and why you think truth is a value in a meaningless universe. I will further press you on the nature of truth and undermine your smug conceit that truth could exist in a meaningless wholly material universe.
The image is by Paul Klee, Engel noch tastend, angel still groping. We perhaps are fallen angels, desolation angels, in the dark, but knowing that we are, and ever groping.
My brand of conservatism is personalist, which may help explain why I find myself at loggerheads with those on the so-called 'Alternative Right.' And my brand of personalism is conservative which may help explain why I look askance at libertarianism and at 'mainstream conservatism' to the extent that the latter is libertarian and insufficiently attentive to the importance of national sovereignty and the right of a nation to preserve its culture from dilution and indeed subversion. The libertarian overemphasizes the economic. He is followed in this by the mainstream conservative. The alt-rightist rightly resists this overemphasis but runs the risk of falling into an excessive and morally obnoxious particularism. One form this particularism takes is in the alt-right's anti-egalitarianism. See here:
The Alt Right is anti-equalitarian. It rejects the idea of equality for the same reason it rejects the ideas of unicorns and leprechauns, noting that human equality does not exist in any observable scientific, legal, material, intellectual, sexual, or spiritual form.
We are being told that there is no non-trivial sense in which human beings are equal. This, I take it, is a characteristic and defining Alt Right claim to which I oppose the Trad Right thesis that there is a sense in which all human beings are equal, namely, as persons. I suspect that this may be the main difference between the Alt and the Trad versions of conservatism. Or if not the main difference, then an important one.
But my concern is not to oppose the Alt Right, whatever exactly it is supposed to be, but to defend the thesis that human beings are equal, not as animals in nature, but as persons. Here, as elsewhere, my aim is clarity, not agreement. Agreement is out of reach, but clarification of differences is an achievable and worthwhile goal.
Empirical Inequality is a Fact
Empirical inequality cannot be denied: by the various empirical measures there is plenty of inequality among individuals and groups. (Trivial example: men on average are taller than women. Height is an example of an empirically measurable attribute.) So if human beings are taken solely in their empirical and material natures, or if human beings are nothing more than material beings, then talk of the equality of all human beings is either false or trivial. (That all human beings are equal in that they all have been born at or near the surface of the earth is empirically true, but trivially true.)
Let me make a couple more pedantic points just to make sure that the issue is clear. That we are not all empirically equal is of course consistent with two or more of us being equal in some measurable respect or even in all such respects. If it should turn out that Tim and Tom are alike in all empirical respects, that would be consistent with the denial that we are all empirically equal. A second point is that the denial that we are all empirically equally is not a normative, but a factual, claim and as such axiologically neutral. There is no implication that this is a bad, or a good, state of affairs. It is just a fact.
The Question
Given the plain fact of empirical inequality, is there any defensible sense in which human beings could be said to be equal and in possession of equal rights?
Equality is not a Matter of Abstraction
There is a misunderstanding that needs to be squelched at the outset. Talk of the equality of humans as persons does not involve abstraction from all the empirical differences that divide individuals and groups. No doubt there is the concept human being in general which every individual human animal falls under. We arrive at this concept by abstracting from all the differences between individuals to arrive at a determination common to them all. But to speak of persons is not to engage in such an abstraction. It is to refer to the unique subject of experience that each of us is, and to which each one of us can refer using the first-person singular pronoun. That to which I refer when I say 'I' is a unique personal reality, a concrete individual, not an abstraction.
The Concept of Person
A person, then, is a concrete subject of experience. By 'subject,' I don't just mean something that has or supports experiences as in the Aristotelian notion of a substrate or hypokeimenon, but something that is an initiator or enactor or source of experiences. Analogously as rays of light emanate from a light source, 'rays' of intentionality emanate outward from the subject (in the modern sense) toward objects. A person is a subject in both of these ancient and modern senses.
To unpack it a bit: a person is a conscious and thus sentient individual, capable of self-consciousness, possessing feeling and will and memory and the capacity to reason and plan and seek the truth about itself and everything else. I have just limned the concept of person in the descriptive sense of 'person.' We may now add the normative sense. A person in the normative sense is a rights-possessor which, in virtue of having rights, induces in other persons various duties. For example, my right to life induces in you the duty to refrain from taking my life, and your duty derives from my right. In this sense rights and duties are correlative.
Equality of Persons, not of Animals
So when I speak of the equality of persons, that does not mean that all human animals are empirically equal, either as individuals or as groups, which is plainly false, nor does it mean that all human animals are equal just insofar as they are instances of the concept human being. The latter is true of course: each instance of human being is the same as, and equal to, every other such instance qua instance. But while true it misses the point, namely, that each human being is a unique person.
We need to distinguish among: (a) All humans are empirically equal, which is false; (b) All humans are equally instances of the concept human being, which is true but trivial; (c) Each human being is a unique person.
My claim, then, is that we are all equal as persons in the descriptive sense, and therefore all equal in the normative sense. That is, if any one of us is a rights-possessor in virtue of being a descriptive person, then every one of us is a rights-possessor in virtue of being a descriptive person. And all of this regardless of sex, race, age, and any other empirical feature. We are equal as persons even if my will is stronger than yours and my intellect more penetrating. We are equal as persons even if you are more compassionate than me.
The point, then, is that equality is grounded in personhood, not in animal constitution. To clarify this, we need to think some more about the relation of persons and human beings or human animals when the latter are viewed from the angle of the natural sciences of biology and anthropology.
Persons and Human Animals
The above definition of 'person' allows for persons that are not human beings and human beings (genetic humans) that are not persons, as well as persons that are human beings. In the following Venn diagram, A = persons and B = humans. The intersection C represents persons who are human. God, angels, demons, and pre-embodied and disembodied Platonic souls are examples of persons that are not human. They are not human because they are not animals at all, but pure spirits. Also examples of persons that are not human are embodied persons whose personhood is realized in non-human material stuff, e.g. extraterrestrials and persons realized, not in living matter, but in computers. Examples of humans that are not persons, on my definition of 'person,' would be anencephalic human neonates. They would not be persons because of their lack of capacity to develop language and reasoning skills. (For more on the anencephalic business, see Potentiality and the Substance View of Persons, the comments to which were good.) But these anencephalic individuals are nonetheless genetically human as the offspring of human parents.
To repeat, our equality is grounded in our shared personhood despite our considerable empirical differences. Personhood cannot be understood in natural-scientific terms.
I am not commited to saying that we can exist as persons without animal embodiment. I am committed to saying that persons cannot be reduced to animals.
Equality in the Declaration of Independence
The first sentence of the second paragraph of the American Declaration of Independence reads, "We hold these Truths to be self-evident, that all Men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness." Clearly, on a charitable interpretation, what this affirms is not (a) or (b) but something in the vicinity of (c). We are equal as persons, as subjects of experience and as rights-possessors, not as animals in nature. As objects in the natural world having natural and empirically detectable properties, we are obviously not all equal.
Our equality is grounded in our being, not objects in the world, but subjects for whom there is a world. Subjectivity looms large on the personalist conception. It is only as conscious and self-conscious subjects that we are purposive beings who pursue things, including happiness, and have a right to the sort of life that conscious beings enjoy. This is life via intentional acts emanating from a personal center and not life in a merely biological sense. Human living cannot be exhaustively understood biologically, and this despite the plain fact that we are animals in nature.
That empirical equality is not at issue should also be obvious from the talk of a Creator. We are said to be created equal. If we are created equal, but are at the same time plainly unequal empirically speaking, then the respect in which we are created equal cannot be an empirical respect. We are not equal as specimens of a biological species, but equal in some other respect. What respect could that be?
Talk of a creator brings a purely spiritual being, God, into the picture. In the context of Christianity, which is the context in which the Founders operate, that means that we are created in the image and likeness of God. And what that means is that we too are spiritual beings possessing free will and the dignity and worth that comes with it, despite our embodiment in nature.
On this scheme, political equality and equality of rights rest on a metaphysical foundation, namely the metaphysics of persons, where persons are spiritual individuals with a destiny that transcends their animal mortality. We are all equal as creatures of the same Creator.
Interim Conclusion
Our problem was to explain how how humans could be said to equal when they are manifestly unequal empirically speaking. The classical theist will have no trouble answering. We are more than animals. We are spiritual individuals created by God in his image and likeness. As such we are equal in dignity and worth and equal in rights, whether tall or short, white or black of brown or yellow, male or female young or old, etc.
If it is essential to the Alt Right to deny that there is any sense in which humans are equal that is not either false or trivial, then the Alt Right view excludes classical theism and conversely.
An Objection and a Reply
Correspondent Jacques raises the following objection:
Let's agree it's ["All men are created equal"] a normative claim to the effect that all 'persons' have certain 'rights'. What then entitles all of them to these rights? A normative fact like that doesn't float free from all empirical facts. There's got to be some reason why all normal human adults have these rights but chickens or pencils don't, some empirical property of these beings only that generates or confers certain rights. Is it the shared property of being a person? Or the shared property of being human? Something else? I suspect that any of the candidate properties will be either morally irrelevant, even by liberal-leftist standards, or else relevant but distributed so unequally that it will be hard to understand how it could be the basis for 'equal' rights.
This is a fair question. We do not ascribe rights such as a right to life to chickens. We raise them to eat them. We treat them as mere means to our ends, even if we treat them humanely. Why is it morally permissible to eat chickens but not to eat humans? Why is it morally permissible to force animals to work for us but impermissible to enslave humans? What grounds the normative properties?
I agree with Jacques that normativity does not "float free": it needs anchorage in the non-normative. But the non-normative need not be observable by the senses. The non-normative is not equivalent to the empirical. It is open to me to say that the moral impermissibility of eating humans is grounded in the non-normative fact of their being persons in the descriptive sense. Humans are persons while chickens are not; this factual difference grounds the normative difference. It also explains why it is permissible to make a beast of burden of a donkey, but not of a man. I may agree to carry your load, but if you force me to carry it, then you violate my normative personhood which is grounded in my descriptive personhood.
Jacques also asks, "Why should we think there is any suitable empirical basis for the normative claim that 'all men are equal' or that such normative claims could be true regardless of any empirical facts?" I agree that there is no empirical basis for the normative claim. But it doesn't follow that it has no basis. The normative claim has a metaphysical basis in the nature of persons.
Herewith, some comments on and questions about Patrick Toner's fascinating paper, "Hylemorphic Animalism" (Philos Stud, 2011, 155: 65-81).
Patrick Toner takes an animalist line on human persons. Animalism is the doctrine that each of us is identical to an animal organism. A bit more precisely, "Animalism involves two claims: (1) we are human persons and (2) human persons are identical with animals." (67)
Animalism
Let's consider the second claim. Toner endorses Eric Olson's 'thinking animal' argument for (2). Based on Toner's summary, I take the argument to go as follows. I am now sitting in a chair thinking a thought T. There is also now an animal sitting in this very chair and occupying the same space. Is the animal also thinking T? There are four possibilities.
a. I am identical to the animal occupying my chair, and the thinker of my thoughts is identical to this animal.
b. I am not identical to the animal occupying my chair, but I share the space with an animal that thinks all my thoughts.
c. I am not identical to the animal occupying my chair, but I share the space with a nonthinking animal.
d. There is no animal in my chair; hence I am not not identical to it.
Of the four possibilities, Toner considers (a) to be actual. "It's the least ugly of the choices. Indeed, it's positively common-sensical, compared with the other rather nutty options." (70)
I agree that (b) and (d) can be excluded right away. But I don't see that (c) is 'nutty' and I don't see that (a) is "positively common-sensical." Common sense has nothing to say about abstruse metaphysical topics such as this one.
The Corpse Objection to Animalism
On (a), the thinker of my thoughts is numerically identical to this living human organsm with which I am intimately associated. But If I am (identically) my body, then me and my body ought to have the same persistence conditions. But they don't: when I die I will cease to exist, but (most likely) a corpse will remain. Now if a = b, then there is no time t at which a exists but b does not exist, and vice versa. So if there are times when I do not exist but my body does exist, then I cannot be identical to my body. On (a), I will not survive death, but my body will: it will survive as a corpse. Therefore I am not identical to my body.
Toner's Response to the Corpse Objection
The Corpse Objection, in a nutshell, is that I cannot be identical to my animal body because it will survive me. My body exists now before my death and it will exist then after my death. It is the same body dead or alive. Toner's response is a flat denial of survival. My body will not survive me. Death is a substantial, as opposed to an accidental, change. When I die the animal body that I am will cease to exist and one or more new bodies will begin to exist. So it is not as if one bodily substance undergoes an accidental change, going from being alive to being dead; one bodily substance ceases to exist and one or more others begin to exist. The change is not alterational but existential. This implies that the body itself did not exist while the animal was alive. As Toner puts it:
Neither the body itself, nor any of its atomic parts, existed while the animal was alive. This just follows from the account of substance I've given, according to which substances have no substances as parts, -- there is only one substance here in my boundaries, and it's an animal. When the animal dies, whatever is left over is not the same thing that was there before. (71)
Two Questions
1. One question is whether, assuming that I am just this living animal body, my dying is an accidental change or a substantial change. I will suggest that it is more plausible to think of it as an accidental change.
If my dying is an accidental change, then something that exists now in one form will exist post mortem in a different form. This something could be called the proximate matter of my body. This matter is organized in a certain way and its organs and various subsystems are functioning in such a way that the entire bodily system has the property of being alive. (For example, the lungs are oxygenating the blood, the heart is pumping the blood to the brain, the pathways to the brain are unobstructed, etc.) But then suppose I drown or have a massive heart attack or a massive stroke. The body then ceases to have the property of being alive. On this way of looking at things, one and the same body can exist in two states, alive and dead. There is diachronic continuity between the living and dead bodies, and that continuity is grounded in the proximate matter of the body.
If, on the other hand, my dying is a substantial change, and I am just this living body, then at death I cease to exist entirely, and what is left over, my corpse, is something entirely new, 'an addition to being' so to speak. I cease to exist, and a corpse comes to exist. But then the only diachronic continuity as between the live body and the corpse is prime (not proximate) matter.
But what makes the corpse that comes to exist my corpse? Suppose I am just a living animal and that I die at t1. A moment later, at t2, two corpses come into existence. Which one do you bury under the 'BV' tombstone? Which is the right one, and what makes it the right one? Or suppose Peter and I die at the same instant, in the same place, and that dying is a substantial change. Peter and I cease to exist and two corpses C1 and C2 come into existence. Which is my corpse and which is Peter's? Practically, there is no problem: we look different and our looking different and having different dimensions, etc. is due to our different proximate matter, matter that is the same under two different and successive forms.
What this suggests is that dying is an accidental change, not a substantial change. It is an accidental change in the proximate matter of a human body. But if so, then the Corpse Objection holds and animalism is untenable.
There is also the very serious problem that substantial change requires prime matter, and prime matter is a very questionable posit. But I won't pursue this topic at present.
2. My second main question concerns how animalism is compatible with such phenomena as the unity of consciousness and intentionality. On animalism I am just a living human animal. The thinker of my thoughts is this hairy critter occupying my blogging chair. Is it the whole of me that is the res cogitans? Or only a proper part of me? Presumably the latter. If an animal thinks, then presumably it thinks in virtue of its brain thinking.
The animalist thus seems committed to the claim that the res cogitans, that which thinks my thoughts, is a hunk of living intracranial meat. But it is not so easy to understand how meat could mean. What a marvellous metabasis eis allo genos whereby meat gives rise to meaning, understanding, intentionality! It is so marvellous that it is inconceivable. My thinkings are of or about this or that, and in some cases they are of or about items that do not exist. I can think about Venus the planet and Venus the goddess and I can think about Vulcan even though there is no such planet. How can a meat state possess that object-directedness we call intentionality? Brains states are physical states, and our understanding of physical states is from physics; but the conceptuality of physics offers us no way of understanding the intentionality of thought.
And then there is the unity of consciousness. Can animalism account for it? At Plato's Theaetetus 184c, Socrates puts the following question to Theaetetus: ". . . which is more correct — to say that we see or hear with the eyes and with the ears, or through the eyes and through the ears?" Theatetus obligingly responds with through rather than with. Socrates approves of this response:
Yes, my boy, for no one can suppose that in each of us, as in a sort of Trojan horse, there are perched a number of unconnected senses which do not all meet in some one nature, the mind, or whatever we please to call it, of which they are the instruments, and with which through them we perceive the objects of sense. (Emphasis added, tr. Benjamin Jowett)
The issue here is the unity of consciousness in the synthesis of a manifold of sensory data. Long before Kant, and long before Leibniz, Plato was well aware of the problem of the unity of consciousness. (It is not for nothing that A. N. Whitehead described Western philosophy as a series of footnotes to Plato.)
Sitting before a fire, I see the flames, feel the heat, smell the smoke, and hear the crackling of the logs. The sensory data are unified in one consciousness of a selfsame object. This unification does not take place in the eyes or in the ears or in the nostrils or in any other sense organ, and to say that it takes place in the brain is not a good answer. For the brain is a partite physical thing extended in space. If the unity of consciousness is identified with a portion of the brain, then the unity is destroyed. For no matter how small the portion of the brain, it has proper parts external to each other. Every portion of the brain, no matter how small, is a complex entity. But consciousness in the synthesis of a manifold is a simple unity. Hence the unity of consciousness cannot be understood along materialist lines.
Conclusion
I tentatively conclude that option (c) above -- I am not identical to the animal occupying my chair, but I share the space with a nonthinking animal -- is, if not preferable to Toner's preferred option, at least as good as it, and not at all "nutty.' The Corpse Objection to Animalism seems like a good one, and Toner's response to it is not compelling, involving as it does the idea that dying is a substantial change, a response that brings with it all the apories surrounding substance and prime matter. Finally, it is not clear to me how animalism can accommodate intentionality and the unity of consciousness.
But perhaps Professor Toner can help me understand this better.
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