Based on the last journal, you might expect this journal to be dealing with some depressing aspect of human nature and the human experience. And, indeed, I have another journal draft just a page-break away that discusses school shootings that will be forthcoming soon. [I’m also working on a journal that applies the idea of the intellectual division of labor to education (which might end up being a supplemental piece), a journal on “the Singularity” that the AI community anticipates and how the limitations of the human mind shape that debate, and a supplemental post on relationships between teachers and students. I should also write something about humanity and comedy, so as to address Noah’s topic, but I’m awaiting inspiration there.] However, before we get to that, I wanted to trace out my theory of being human. While I believe it is implicit through my work thus far, I want to explicate it a bit and put it in order so that I can properly organize my final product. I’m going to begin clarifying my concepts here in this journal, so it might not comport perfectly to the rest of my past writings.
Here, on this site, I have stressed that what makes human beings different is our reason. I have usually described this reason as man’s ability to imagine, choose, and act rationally for the attainment of ends. I have also said that this reason is inseparably tied to the phenomenon of society, and I have mentioned that the idea of reason throughout the history of thought is one of a relational concept. I want to clarify this here, bring all of these concepts together. I will then proceed to step-by-step trace my theory of being human from this central idea of reason in ever-widening circles to capture the full nature and experience of man (as much as I’m able).
I think that what really distinguishes human beings from all other creatures is our imaginations, our ability to see things unseen, our capacity to invent and design and creatively problem solve. And I think that reason is, perhaps, merely the ability to follow a causal chain out of sight. That is, to abstract from the here-and-now and think through chains of reasoning to foresee the effects of present action, or to see what present action is required to attain certain future effects. To see what is unseen, of course, requires imagination. A dog can know that sitting in response to a command will likely result in a treat. But he does not wonder why. He does not trace the causal chain beyond the present moment. He can’t. One may say that he doesn’t have the context or higher reasoning necessary to understand that we are training him to behave in certain ways so as to be more comfortable having him around, etc., but really he just can’t imagine it. He cannot see what is unseen. Human beings can conceptualize phenomenon beyond our experience and reduce complex phenomenon to simpler relationships that can be subjected to logical manipulation and lead to greater understanding. We can imagine a triangle as an abstract concept, rather than as the triangular shape before us. And, more significantly for economics, man can imagine alternative future states that will bring him different levels of satisfaction. All animals do what they think is best for themselves; that very base rational action is not unique to humans. Deciding what is best for us, that is unique to us. Animals live in the moment and respond to what is seen; humans see what is unseen and act to bring it into sight. So imagination sets us apart. Causal relationships, abstract concepts, true phenomenon...these all exist whether we recognize and understand them or not. But we need imagination to see them, and only we possess this imagination.
The most fundamental and significant manifestation of this imagination-enabled reason is the recognition of the benefits of the division of labor. As I explained in...some journal or another, two elements lead to the formation and maintenance of society: the greater productivity of the division of labor, and the recognition of this fact. The greater productivity of the division of labor is a law of nature and logic, embodied most famously in the Ricardian law of comparative cost, and most completely in Mises’s law of association. But man alone, out of all the creatures on the Earth, recognized this law and took advantage of it. It seems obvious to us, now, to see the benefits of the division of labor. Actually, given the current popular policies of many governments throughout the world, this may not be true. But, even if all humans understood comparative advantage, such understanding would still be a very rare phenomenon. It was a tremendously difficult chain of reasoning to grasp, and perhaps the greatest feat of mankind. It certainly distinguishes us, and has allowed us to further distinguish ourselves, from the other inhabitants of our planet.
The tremendous benefits of the division of labor are realized through the development of a market economy. For the market to function effectively and generate increased wealth for its participants, it requires an atmosphere of relative peace and a respect for property rights. To encourage these elements, other social institutions are developed, such as law and religion and family. Additionally, as the division of labor intensifies and expands, each individual’s role becomes more specialized. The individual becomes one-sided, highly skilled in one task and rather helpless in all the others. He becomes more and more a part of the whole. At the same time, an intensifying and expanding division of labor indicates capital accumulation and advanced production processes, which means that there is an increased amount of wealth available to each individual with which the individual may attain his own subjective ends. That is, man becomes more and more able to express his individuality and shape his environment to suit his preferences and desires better. There’s an interesting tension here that is, in fact, no tension, but it should be explained more in the final product. Additionally, any intensification or expansion of the division of labor beyond the most basic level requires a medium of exchange, and eventually a common commodity money, which makes possible the rational action of man and the universe-altering flourishment of civilization. Therefore, I want my final product to include a discussion of the price system [and, new to this project, a discussion of the structure of production and its significance) and the relationship between economic calculation and human action.
It cannot be forgotten, in all this talk of reason and imagination and society and markets, what man’s reality is. Man lives in a world of ever-present scarcity. There are simply not enough means to be utilized for the attainment of every end an individual desires. Indeed, the human mind is incapable of even imagining a contrary state of affairs. The purpose of reason, and society, and the market, is to aid man in his struggle against the scarcity he faces. They are all tools for the satisfaction of his wants. But, as is true of all actions of man living in a world of scarcity, every choice necessarily involves a renunciation. To choose some ends, such as the increased material wealth generated by an advanced division of labor, means that some other ends, such as the ability to yield to one’s carnal and violent impulses, must be abandoned. Moreover, while the division of labor and society, over time, yield unmatched benefits for everyone, in the short run there is a temptation to disregard its required norms of conduct and to act outside of the market, i.e., through the use of force, to increase one’s personal wealth and satisfaction at the expense of others. This temptation is also supported by the game-theory dilemma wherein one individual’s disregard of social norms is not enough to really impact the flow of benefits from society, but if everyone disregarded these norms the society would collapse. So, there are choices, difficult choices, that need to be made in order to live in a society, and these choices need to be confronted and reaffirmed daily. Sometimes, the tradeoff is not worth it for the individual, and he descends into a fit of anti-social behavior. This can take the form of just being nasty to the people around you, to hurting people through private crime, to the institution of predatory governments. More fundamentally, this struggle to choose social over anti-social behavior is something that we all go through all the time, and it is significant in that it has effects on other people as well as ourselves. That is, choosing between ice cream and cookies for dessert does contribute to the demands for each product in the market nexus, but for the most part its effect is personal. Choosing between peaceful or violent resolution of a disagreement, on the other hand, can have implications for the entire social fabric which sustains the lives and livelihoods of every human being. An examination of this dilemma and the consequences of the choices made must be included in my theory of being human.
Additionally, while humans are unique in that we shape our environments to suit ourselves better, we are still products of our environment. We start from the world we find ourselves in, and make our valuations and choices and plans based on the data currently available to us. The satisfaction of some wants leads to the development of new wants. The changing environment around us changes the nature of some of our wants. As basic survival becomes more assured, less energy and focus need be paid to finding food and building shelter, leaving more energy for the attainment of higher ends, such as developing medications and inventing new therapies. We find ourselves in a world where, based on the level of capital accumulation we’ve achieved, 16-year-olds cultivate their efforts to obtaining a driver’s license and getting a car. We find ourselves in a world where, based on the advanced division of labor and the material wealth it creates, people are often more concerned with the quality of their relationships than almost anything else. So much of being human is simply adapting to the world we find ourselves in, a product of other men, and our attempt to change it for ourselves. But we ourselves are products of the world we’ve built. I might even argue that we’ve escaped evolution, in that now we turn to technology to equip us to face and conquer whatever environment we find ourselves in. And this world we’ve created, a product of the fact that we shape the world to suit ourselves rather than shape ourselves to suit the world, has in turn shaped us. We have recently, through the Enlightenment and the Industrial Revolution, reached a level of cognition and progress and advancement and scholarship and production never before even imagined. And as our environment has changed, so have we. Less effort need be spent on maintaining our physical constitution; the preeminence of the mind is one of the distinguishing characteristic of our age. We now love, because we have that luxury to create such connections with other people. We are a gentler race now, civilized by civilization itself. This phenomenon must be incorporated into a theory of being human.
Finally, I really want to draw in the idea of education. What is education’s purpose, if not to prepare us for our (human) lives? So, I think that the idea of education is very much wrapped up in the question of what do we want to be? What do we want the world to look like, and what role do we want to play in that world, and what must be done to bring this envisioned world into reality? Whatever we teach our kids reflects the vision of the future that we have for them. But, this necessarily puts us into conflict with the vision of the future that they have for themselves. And, furthermore, I think that education is a uniquely human phenomenon and that we can incorporate so much of human nature and human experience into a truly human education. “The method of schooling is its only real content.” What lessons from the market and society and world we’ve built will be incorporate into our education of the next generation of our species, who we’ve essentially built this world for? This is still fuzzy for me, and maybe instead of trying to fit education into my theory of being human piece I should just try to fit some of my theory of being human into my education piece. But, as mentioned above, I’m playing with the idea of how the theory of the intellectual division of labor could apply to education, and I’m thinking about the type of relationships through which education can occur successfully. In other words, I think I see a lot of connections between my theory of being human and my theory of education. Like, the schooling system represents the height of mankind’s conceit in designing the future. But education represents man’s acknowledgements of his shortcomings and his hope for a future that is not only unseen, but which he will never personally see. In that sense, then, I think it might just represent the very essence of humanity.
So, my final product will pretty much follow the path set forth above, but with more explanation and clarity and development. Hopefully it's clear how each step considered necessarily leads to the next one. The final product will make that integration more obvious. Then, if I am so inclined, I will attempt to briefly show how all the other EMC2 projects are related to this theory of mine. My hope is that I can give my students something to help them understand the world better, and their role in it.
As is the hallmark of the modern epoch, your understanding of causality is myopically tied to the efficient cause, the concept of which you reproduce without the nuance with which it was first formulated by Plato and, more notably, Aristotle. Efficient causality has a hold only over that which cannot be otherwise, which is why its proper home is in the realm of physics. Your cast of reason as the ability to “follow a causal chain out of sight” misses the more originary meaning of reason as that by virtue of which the human being has access to the being of beings, which Aristotle already gives a glimpse of in De Anima.
ReplyDeleteThe social science of economics is by its very nature characterized by an indifference to the nature of its object, i.e. a fundamental failure to think the phenomenon of human being itself. A proper thinking-through of the human being would reveal that the concept of human being cannot come into its element as a "what" (quidditas, Washeit) but only as a "who" (quissitas, Werheit), a free origin of its own actions. Social interplay among more than one of these free origins cannot be subject to the calculative, predictive rationality of modern science with its deranged fixation on the efficient cause. Economics cannot be a science in the proper, Aristotelian sense as knowledge of that which cannot be otherwise proceeding from first-principles. It can be nothing more than what Plato called an emperia, i.e. empirical data which works, at best, for the most part but operates without knowledge of grounds. Here it is conceptualized in Cartesian fashion as a quantitative science which has utterly no concern with or insight into the qualitative aspects of its subject matter--the phenomena of exchange, money, capital, etc., which it merely takes for granted--or into its own historical particularity.
This consistent failure in the modern age to think through the phenomenon of human being results in the danger of a complete eradication of human freedom, whose basis is the Werheit, quissitas, “who-ness” of the human being, in danger of being forgotten by the modern fixation on Washeit, quidditas, “what-ness.” Hence your comment on the division of labor which remarks that the individual “becomes more and more a part of the whole,” missing the danger that the individual becomes molded into a mere agent of her function in the social totality. That the objective increase of wealth in modern society provides the individual with more personal wealth to pursue her subjective ends does not compensate for the fundamental subordination of the particular to the abstract universal revealed by a phenomenological thinking-through of the concepts of exchange, money, and capital, never attempted by the quantitative bent of modern economics. Such a systematic analysis would reveal that the private sphere is subordinated to and subsumed under the abstract-universality of the state, and thus the bourgeois private individual cannot overcome its subjection to the state by its private life regardless of the “increased amount of wealth available to each individual.”
Any attempt to salvage individual freedom from its complete subordination to both economic and technological rationality of the modern age must go beyond this myopic modern thinking to a true thinking-through of the phenomenon of human being in which its concept can come into its element in its Werheit, which is the basis of all human freedom.