CONFRONTING TRANSIENCE

In the preceding chapters, I have attempted to justify the belief that, while human beings are not supernatural entities, neither are they simply parts of nature. Unfortunately, that is only half the story. Our privileged mode of being is hedged about with terms and conditions: personhood is contingent on the continuing vitality of our bodies. Those bodies share the unwilled transience of all things in a restless universe. “I am” depends on “It is”: sooner or later the relevant “it” disintegrates and the “I” is swallowed up in the wider “it” of the material world; the little “who” is lost in the boundless “what”. Worse, since we are highly complex entities, and hence thermodynamic freaks, we are more transient than most of the material world that surrounds us. Pebbles, rivers, trees outlast us. Irrespective of whether or not mankind can bear too much reality, reality of a sort will sooner or later kick down the door, set fire to all our possessions, raze our property, and leave us naked to and beyond the bone, inert in the indifferent open. While we may in some sense be the makers of the world in which we live our lives, the natural realm outside of the thatosphere has us in its ultimate grip.

Thus, death the leveller, eloquently expressed by Bohuslav Brouk the Czech poet, biologist and philosopher: “The body is the last argument of those who have been unjustly neglected and ignored: it demonstrates beyond debate the groundlessness of all social distinctions in comparison to the might of nature”. And the Bible observes that notwithstanding man’s special relationship with God: “For that which befalleth the sons of men, befalleth beasts; even one thing befalleth them; as the one dieth, so dieth the other; yes, they have all one breath; so that a man hath no pre-eminence above a beast; for all is vanity”. The “justice” of transience goes beyond human affairs.

Flourishing without God

ON BEING USEFUL: THE DIGNITY OF LABOUR

Measured by the hour, work is the most important part of many, perhaps most, lives. Labour has occupied the greater part of the waking hours of the human race since time immemorial and one’s job – or lack of it – is the most generally accepted marker of one’s place in the social order.

Genesis 3:19 commanded that, as a result of that first disobedience, humans should live by the sweat of their brows. Work as a punishment captures some of the unappealing features by which it is defined. They are most evident in the kind of work where there is division of labour and of classes, numerically weighted towards the bottom. It is associated with: loss of freedom, and being bossed around, even bullied; the fear of failure, of making a mistake however trivial (missing a spoon in a table setting), of falling behind others, of looking a fool, of being mocked and pranked; unpleasant, gruelling and not infrequently damaging physical toil, mental strain, stress; inhospitable physical and social conditions; eternal repetition of the same actions, even in some cases of the same physical movements; uncontrolled interruption (politely called multi-tasking); being in attendance or on call; waiting (all work is riddled with waiting) and clock-watching; and sometimes acute danger with a risk to limb or even life. “Work” encompasses a wide range of human activities from the relatively elevated calling of the priest, doctor, or nurse to a frenzied repetition of simple actions, while one is harassed by progress chasers who in some cases do not even permit the toilet breaks necessary to prevent incontinence.

The fragmentation of labour in industrialized society into small elements may remove any claim to dignity. As a thoughtless schoolboy, I relished a comedy sketch in which an individual spoke enthusiastically of a job that consisted in putting the holes at the end of toothbrush handles, so that they could be hung up.

There is a deep mystery around the relationship between the first-person who am and the third-person or no-person of the body that is. While ambodiment is the ultimate embrace, and RT is the body that is pointed out when he is pointed out, and they are inseparable – as inseparable, as I have suggested, as the recto and verso of a sheet of paper – there nevertheless remains a distance between RT and his body. It is time to return to where we began: the fundamental tension at the heart of embodiment and what we may call the difficulty of getting an “I am” out of an “it is”.

Some readers may detect the echo of a philosophical problem, first put into circulation by David Hume in his Treatise of Human Nature, of deriving an “ought” from an “is”: “The distinction of vice and virtue is not founded merely on the relations between objects; nor is perceived by reason”. There is nothing in the material world, in nature, that seems capable of generating norms. Matter ain’t a normative stuff: pebbles, for example, do not deplore or applaud. I would like to suggest that the difficulty of getting “ought” out of “is” is an aspect of a wider challenge of finding a basis for mattering in matter. And this is in turn a surface manifestation of the difficulty of finding an “am” in an “is”; or getting an “I” out of an “it”; or “I am” out of “it is”.

The difficulty is highlighted by the various complex quasi-external relationships between the “I” and the body that we discussed in this chapter: ownership, caring, using, suffering, and above all knowing. Of course, RT is represented to some extent in both places of the two-place relationship: the body I possess, care for, use (as the immediate agent of my agency), suffer, and so on is my body. Nevertheless, the distance underlines the non- or incomplete identity between me and my body.

The scene is now set for a discussion of what may be variously called the subject, the “I”, the ego, the person, or the self. As if that were not sufficient as a source of confusion, there is a range of terms available for describing what is at issue – first-person being, personal identity, the self, and so on. Given that the scope of these words is individually contested, with edges that are at best fuzzy, it is hardly surprising that the relationship between them is somewhat confusing. I shall again refrain from attempting to straighten out “the crooked timber of human discourse”. The self will be my main focus, or at least my term of choice, and while the concept seems nebulous this does not mean that its object is mist. I shall also look sideways at the rest of the cast of characters, notably “personal identity” which, due to the massive presence of the recently deceased Oxford philosopher Derek Parfit, has occupied centre stage.

Selfhood is central to our distinctive human nature, to our sense of the kinds of beings we are, and it is inseparable from the agency on which our claim to dignity rests. Trying to get a clear idea of the self is therefore essential to any endeavour to develop a truly humanist philosophical anthropology. This is particularly urgent in view of the fact that many philosophers and others deny or diminish the reality of the self.

In the last two chapters, we have reminded ourselves of certain fundamental, pervasive characteristics of the embodied human subject. The ways we are related to our own bodies, and our mode of being in time and relating to the thatosphere, are extraordinarily complex. They most certainly go deeper than any particular ideology, bourgeois or otherwise. It is these characteristics that will provide the starting place for our understanding of what it is to be a self. But we first have to address the views of those who deny that there is such a thing.

We killjoys sometimes make life easier for ourselves by considering animal consciousness from a distance sufficient to enable us to overlook the often-remarkable capacities of individual species. We talk about “reactions”, “associative learning”, “mechanisms”, “programmes” and “instinct” – terms that apply equally to the behaviour of ants and apes. The purpose of what follows is to look closely at some individual species and their remarkable capabilities, to put the notion of humans versus (all) animals, man versus beast, to the test.

A good place to begin is with bees. They have only a million neurons, compared with the 9 billion neurons in the reader’s brain – though they are widely branched and richly connected. Lars Chittka’s “Bee Cognition” should be mandatory reading for anyone persuaded by the views advanced in this chapter and, indeed, this book. It is a reminder that the central thesis of human exceptionalism has to be specified carefully. Chittka reminds us of the rich behavioural repertoire of social insects: “that orchestrate life in the colony, facilitate the construction of a communal home, secure a steady stream of appropriate food for their young, defending the colony and regulating its climate”.

This is usually dismissed as “just instinct”. Instinct it is, but the “just” is not justified. In the case of bees, the provisioning of their young in a specially constructed nest, required a precise spatial memory in addition to extraordinary home construction skills because “evolution does not take kindly to a mother who forgets the location of her offspring”. There is also the vital capacity to learn to identify and remember – and to communicate through their dances – the spatial location of those flowers that are the richest source of energy. Bees can remember multiple foraging locations and even the time of day when each one is profitable. And they have to learn this quickly, given that life expectancy is only a few weeks, and they often employ the short cut of copying the flower choices of more experienced individuals.

We are now equipped to examine something that many philosophers – not to speak of myself as an anguished teenager – believe that reason obliges us to deny: human agency. I will argue that we have an important measure of freedom. At the heart of our freedom is the special relationship that we, as persons rather than organisms, have to time, a relationship manifested in our selfhood and our enduring identity. Selfhood and agency develop in parallel. We realize ourselves through our struggles as agents with the world and our selfhood underpins our agency.

A valid defence of the reality of our freedom must be a cornerstone of humanist philosophy. “Freedom” the English historian Edward Gibbon said “is the first wish of our heart, the first blessing of our nature” – notwithstanding that there are times when the way we exercise it suggests that it may also be our primordial curse. Any version of Della Mirandola’s “dignity of man” must presuppose that we are not the playthings of nature. If we have no agency, our lives are no more imbued with purpose than those of other primates; or, if that seems a little harsh on our nearest animal kin, than the lives of insects whose sole end (unknown to themselves) is to create more insects.

DETERMINISM

Opening shots

The case against our being free agents is sufficiently well-rehearsed as to require little telling. Briefly, it takes its rise from the undeniable fact that we are embodied in material organisms which, it is to be assumed, are subject to the laws of nature. Such laws are, by definition, unbreakable, admitting no exceptions. We are, it seems, frog-marched from birth to death along tramlines laid down by those laws which have their local and universal expression in the way effects inescapably follow causes. Every material event in my body has a material cause within or beyond my body operating in accordance with physical laws. Although those laws are expressed differently at different levels – at the level of atoms or whole, macroscopic organisms – they are equally unnegotiable.

Turtle Island

My exposure to the politics of international trade began in the mid-1980s, when Canadians were thrust into an existential debate among themselves over the future of their economic relationship with the United States. The catalyst was a proposed comprehensive free trade agreement between the two countries. Americans hardly batted an eyelash at the negotiations, but they transformed Canada’s 1988 federal election campaign into a single-issue referendum on the future of the country. Just a few years later Americans and Mexicans confronted similar angst as all three North American states debated whether to support the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA).

To students of North American integration, the bruising political debates that preceded the NAFTA’s eventual implementation in 1994 can myopically appear to have been one of the most important events in the history of North America: time before NAFTA and then NAFTA. The NAFTA era was unquestionably a significant development in the political economy of postwar North America.

Yet it was hardly the first time anyone has thought about what North America is and what it ought to be.

When Christopher Columbus “discovered” the Americas in 1492, he quickly learned a lot of people had already discovered it. Indeed, by some estimates, there were as many as 100 million people spread throughout the Western Hemisphere at the time, many of them descendants of Asian migrants from a much earlier period (see C. Mann 2005; Jennings 1975).

The 1975 Pulitzer Prize for Poetry was awarded to University of California–Davis professor and poet Gary Snyder for his collection of poems entitled Turtle Island. It was a name given to what we now refer to as North America by aboriginal communities and derived from the creation myths common to many of them.

Snyder writes:

We are neither apes nor angels; neither mere organisms nor disembodied spirits passing through nature from a pre-natal to a post-mortem eternity. Nor are we flesh and spirit combined in percentages to be determined by our propensity to romanticism or realism about humanity. No; we are embodied subjects. It is this that I want to explore in the present chapter. Like the last chapter, it is haunted by the mystery of intentionality.

Intentionality accounts for the distance between the organism H. sapiens and the human person. More specifically, full-blown, shared intentionality, creating a community of minds, a public space, an explicitly shared world, is the key to our distance from nature and our status as individuals facing a common world populated by objects and subjects that are intuited as being other than ourselves and as having hidden as well as manifest properties. Our exploration of embodiment will eventually lead to a suggestion as to how we arrive at the notion of “physical” objects that have an existence, a reality, properties, that lie beyond our experiences – at the idea of an object as a thing-in-itself. I hope this part of the inquiry will address lingering doubts about the reality of the profound gulf between ourselves and beasts; between humans who have world pictures and beasts that are wired into, or attuned to, an umwelt, an environment.

The distinctive intentionality of human consciousness involves two fully developed partners. The first is a subject or self which has – even “owns” – its experiences; and the second is the object of those experiences, encountered as something in-itself, distinct from the experience and, indeed, from the subject of the experience. This form of intentionality is able to develop from a first-order level of the experience enjoyed by most higher animals to secondary and higher-level intentionality unique to humans.

Higher-level intentionality has many manifestations. The most obvious are signs that have been deliberately generated in order to be “about” something that a subject wants to share with other subjects: individual gestures and a thousand verbal and non-verbal sign systems.

Seeing Ourselves has been motivated by the hope that philosophy might do justice to our human nature and by the possibility that it might one day open up a way of thought that matches the profundity of religion. A particularly inspiring example in western philosophy is Baruch Spinoza, a philosopher who seems to have been poised on the cusp between religious and secular thought. He did not separate God from Nature, and denied that the deity was a transcendent, providential agent who intervened in history. Consequently, he has been accused of being both an atheist and a pantheist, as both godless and (to use the German Romantic poet Novalis’ phrase) “God-intoxicated”. He was expelled from his Jewish community for “abominable heresies”.

There is a deeply moving passage at the beginning of his unfinished Treatise on the Correction of the Understanding:

US Trade in Goods and Services With Nafta Partners, 1989–2017

Lack thereof?

One of the most important, and persistent, critiques of the NAFTA, which has already been touched on several times, is that it lacks a robust institutional structure. However, the NAFTA is not without governance institutions. Indeed, the NAFTA as a whole can be considered a set of institutions, since the rules it establishes, the trade it frees through tariff liberalization and the affirmation of concepts such as national treatment around a host of issue areas are by definition forms of governance.

In fact, until it was recently rediscovered and popularized as behavioural economics, the niche discipline of institutional economics focused on the impact of the “scaffolding” of both formal and informal rules in structuring the behaviour of economic decision-makers. This analytical approach to the study of institutions has included everything from the theory of the firm (its organizational structure) to how legal institutions structure the long-term macroeconomic performance of countries and regions (Coase 1937; Williamson 1998; de Soto 2001). As Douglass North writes,

Under these terms, the NAFTA certainly qualifies as a set of institutions. However, when critics of the NAFTA argue that the agreement lacks enough of an institutional structure, they are, first, talking about the design of “formal” institutions and, second, whether they pool enough sovereignty within them to act as the arbiters of disputes around a broader set of rules. The domestic rule of law is, of course, enforceable via the state’s monopoly over the exercise of coercive power. This volume has already noted in several places the ways in which enforcement power between states is less readily found, among them the discussion of foreign direct investment and the historical absence of the rule of law governing flows.