Natural & normative

The flood of recent books in the last decade or so by neuroscientists, primatologists, computer scientists, evolutionary biologists, and economists about issues traditionally considered of interest to the humanities–issues like morality, politics, the nature of rationality, what makes a response to an object an aesthetic response, and value theory– and the incorporation of such research methods by some academics traditionally thought of as humanists have provoked a great deal of discussion, some controversy, and a growing number of conferences about the “two cultures.” The great majority of this discussion has involved a kind of invitation to humanists to make themselves aware of the new discoveries and new possibilities opened up by this research, and to reorient their thinking accordingly. As far as I have been able to discover, relatively little of the discussion has been concerned with what scientists working in this area might profitably learn from humanists, or whether becoming better informed about traditional and modern humanist approaches might suggest some hesitations and qualifications about just what the phenomena actually are that our friends in the sciences are trying to explain. I do not in any way count myself an expert in this emerging literature, but I do want to offer some initial and very general reasons to hesitate before jumping on some of these particular bandwagons. 

I work within a strand of the modern philosophical tradition that can be said to have begun with two extremely influential essays by Jean-Jacques Rousseau. In 1749, Rousseau won first prize in a contest held by the Academy of Dijon in answer to the question, “Has the progress of the sciences and arts contributed to the corruption or to the improvement of human conduct?” Rousseau’s answer, famously, was “corruption.” In 1754, responding again to an Academy question, he wrote his Discourse on the Origin and Basis of Inequality Among Men, another blistering attack on modernization, including the presumptions of scientific and technical modernization. These two essays represented one of the first attempts to mark out the limits (in principle; not limits based on temporary empirical ignorance) of modern scientific understanding in contributing to human self-knowledge. The essays insisted on an unusual sort of necessary independence (unusual for not relying on theology or revelation, as in much of the European counter-Enlightenment, or any form of traditional metaphysical dualism), and they privileged the importance of moral and normative matters. In the way he argued for the distinctness of human beings, Rousseau became a major influence on German philosophy in its classical period from the end of the eighteenth to the first third of the nineteenth century, and many of the arguments, as formulated by Kant and Hegel especially, continue to be relevant to these new naturalizing enterprises. . . .

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