Human, All Too Human: An Essay

A Paper presented at the Conference, Becoming Human, The Evolutionary Origins of Spiritual, Religious, and Moral Awareness, May 17-18, 2002, at Stanford University, sponsored by the University and the John Templeton Foundation.

My genre is the essay, not the scientific, nor the scholarly paper, because I am a preacher and my métier is the essay for a general public. As for the content, we participants are all at an equal disadvantage, because we have agreed to step down from our pedestals and out of our professional niches onto the no-man’s-land of interdisciplinary communication, where we are all in danger of disappearing down the cracks of our incomprehension or ignorance. On our pedestals we can be as authoritative as marble monuments, out here we are exposed, but we accept the embarrassment of exposure for the hope that we will gain human wisdom to add to the expertise we deploy on home ground.

Immodestly, I borrowed the title of this essay from Friedrich Nietzsche. I trust you remember who he was? His dates are 1844-1900 and he was a German philosopher of sorts. Today, I think, he is mostly read in literature departments. His was a peculiar genius that finally staggered through megalomania into incoherence, where he stayed for the ten last years of his life. Despite the ignominy of his end FN has been immensely influential in Western culture, chiefly because he thought through the absence of metaphysics to its logical outcome in nihilism.

“Human All too Human “ appeared in 1878, when FN was 34 years old. It was his fifth book and is remarkable for two reasons: it is the first to be written as a series of aphorisms rather than a continuous prose exposition, and it marks FN’s radical break with metaphysics. Here he wants to think in what he understood to be a strictly scientific mode, without any reference to what he called the “world behind” what is simply there. Earlier he had declared that he wished to counter the true but deadly doctrine of Darwin that humans and animals are in some important way continuous, by developing a new picture of human being, built entirely on an empirical basis without recourse to dogma or intuition. He failed, and at the point of this failure he switched from continuous prose to aphoristic utterance and concentrated on human psychology, or what he called the “human, all to human (Kaufman 51).” 

I wish to approach the theme of this conference by way of a meditation on this “human all to human”, in the light of evolutionary theory and in conversation with FN, claiming some of the same privilege he claims when he communicates in aphorisms.  Aphorisms are authoritative, aphorisms are oracular, aphorists do not have second thoughts. When I stumble into incoherence please think “aphorism,” and remember we aphorists follow in a grand tradition that stretches from the pre-Socratic philosophers to the New Yorker cartoons. I stumbled onto this line of approach because the organizers of this conference pressed me for a title before I was even sure I could undertake the task, given my limitations up here among the professors of biology and anthropology.  Since the conference title has “human” in it I hurriedly gave the most “human” title I could think of without any idea of what I might say to it, and that was, in my language, providential. Soon I came upon Claudia Roth Pierpont’s fine review (The New Yorker, April 8, 2002, p. 82-89) of Rudinger Safranski’s new philosophical biography of FN (Nietzsche: A Philosophical Biography [New York: W.W. Norton, 2002), written to mark the centennial of FN’s death in August 1900, and thus was my approach via FN’s aphorisms mapped out for me. And so I begin my meditative saunter, map in hand, with the question, “What is it to be human and where shall we look for guidance?”

Here is a first aphorism from FN:  Pierpont quotes him, without reference, as follows: “Individuals and generations can now fix their eyes on tasks of a vastness that would to earlier ages have seemed madness and a trifling with Heaven and Hell. We may experiment with ourselves (1880) (NY p. 86).” That last sentence caught my eye, because in a sense more radical than even FN imagined we are experimenting with ourselves.  He believed that since there is no metaphysical necessity, no natural moral law, we are free to make ourselves as we are able, to serve the will to power. He had in mind breaking the moulds of morality, we are breaking the bonds of biology; he moved in the world of words and ideas, we move in the world of deeds and flesh; he wished to change minds, we intend to change bodies. For this reason I believe that our subject today is the most demanding of all the intellectual challenges we must currently meet, and our conference, part of the Templeton Foundation’s broader initiative in taking up the challenge, is right on target. Our culture must grapple with the issues, and, one hopes, prevent them from slipping by stealthily and resolving themselves by default. Now that we have achieved the power to experiment with ourselves we will intervene radically in our own development, simply because we can, and because our dominant public ethic is utilitarian not deontological and our dominant cultural force is economics.  We must be very fastidious about such intervention, because an old and well-tested human self-understanding is at stake, and our current understanding of the relationship between matter and morals might be wrong. We might indeed not be free to experiment on ourselves; the judgment that there is no metaphysics and so morals can only be utilitarian, might be wrong. Already that prophet of the end of history and the last man, Francis Fukuyama, is writing of, Our Posthuman Future (Farrar, Strauss and Giroux, 2002). We might be on the verge of a great self-wounding because of a great misunderstanding.

Let me here give preliminary explanations of two salient terms and what they mean in this discussion, nihilism and metaphysics. Metaphysics holds that there is something to give and to ground meaning, namely an eternal world of rational order, a spiritual world, related to this world of change. For this reason there can be a reliable definition of and an abiding significance to human life. Much of our current confusion about definitions of the human arises because the possibility and act of defining exists only if some such metaphysic is in place. Without the stability this view grants to ideas, definitions are written on water. Nihilism on the other hand, is a life without metaphysics, well-described by Shakespeare’s Macbeth as a “tale told by and idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing (Latin: nihil).” Less poetically, nihilism it is the view that history is without direction or goal, and therefore, that human life staggers from one thing to another, hungrily devouring morsels of fortuitous meaning (Junk food for the soul; MacDonald’s as the shrine to our significance!) that do not satisfy, but rather remind us of what might be if only we could achieve our fifteen minutes of fame. Since there is no such thing as a spiritual square meal we are hungry all the time, and as Freud frequently said, the best we can hope for is to endure. There is no overarching meaning, because there is nothing to give and to ground such meaning. Everything signifies nothing; that is nihilism.

It is helpful I believe to understand how this nihilism, this death of the metaphysics of spirit came about in the mind of FN one of its most influential representatives.  He called it the death of God, and he referred to it as “the world behind” the evident material world.  FN was a Classicist and used figures from Greek religion and philosophy as a kind of shorthand. Three pre-Socratic philosophers are important to him for an understanding of the “world behind.” The first is Parmenides, whose most famous disciple was Plato, and who taught that the really real is non-material, rational, and unchanging, that there is a correspondence between word, thought and reality, and that since the real is rational only the rational can be real. With Plato this took the form of a world of eternally subsisting ideas that serve as the archetypes or models of things in this ultimately unreal material world. On this view there is an ontological antipathy between the spiritual world of models, and the material world of copies. The “world behind” that FN seeks to expunge is this Platonic world of traditional metaphysics, where the models of all significant things subsist in eternal, unmoving sameness.

The second philosopher is Heraclitus, who held that the really real is constantly moving fire. He was the one who said that we cannot step into the same river twice, for the obvious reason that everything flows and flows like a river. There is a mysterious rationality to this flux, which he called Logos, and which structures things in forms of constant conflict. Heraclitus therefore said that war is the father of all things. His Logos is the logic of antithesis and violence, and his most influential interpreter was Zeno the founder of the Stoic school. For Zeno, like Plato, there is a rational order to “the world behind,” but for him that world is a material not a spiritual world, made of a refined form of fire. So the Stoic “world behind” is a material world of violence and flux, in which war is the father of all and whose Logos decrees antitheses.

The third pre-Socratic is Democritos, for whom the really real is atoms falling randomly in a void. This “world behind” is without reason, a world of chance. FN describes it as an icy world and enters it for “a personal detoxification” of all assumptions about meaning in history or personal significance, and to strip himself of attitudes lazily assumed from a Platonic past, especially the attitude of compassion, which he considered a besetting personal weakness. Democritos’s best know exponent was Epicurus, whose ethic advised humble contentment, preferably in an enclosed garden, no participation in the  world of politics, and no fear of the gods. Epicurus makes a lot of sense in a world of corruption and violence, and I daresay he has many silent followers among us who tend our gardens modestly and hope for little more than a painless death.

When FN rails against metaphysics and the “world behind” it is the non-material world of Plato and Parmenides he has in mind. Heraclitus-Zeno and Democritus-Epicurus both have a place in his thinking as the exponents of hinter-worlds, but since their “worlds behind” are material they are in principle acceptable. In his later period and amongst his later disciples Heraclitus and Democritus came together in something called “Lebensphilosophie” which might be described as a reveling in things vital, strenuous and vulgar, based on a belief that the really real is material, random, and warlike. This philosophy provided strong support for militarism, the conviction that the strong deserve to rule and to possess, and that war brings out the best in people. My nearest contact with this philosophy was with the followers of Ayn Rand when I was Dean of Chapel here. FN prophesied the arrival of an Uebermensch from this material hinterworld, who would have the right to exterminate the flunkies of Parmenides’ foggy notions and the slaves of his timid ethics. Here is FN on the subject, “The human being who has become free, and all the more the spirit who has become free, tramples on the despicable type of well-being dreamed of by shopkeepers, Christians, cows, females, Englishmen, and other democrats. The free man is a warrior (Safranski, 329, from Twilight Of the Idols 6, 139, f). I need not tell you that Hitler identified himself as the Uebermensch.

Now why have we made this apparent detour through pre-Socratic philosophy? Because it seems to me that evolutionary theory is just such a claim about the really real and a description of a “world behind.” As such it is a world in flux and full of violence like Heraclitus’ world, and it is a world of cold chance like Democritus’, material, violent and aleatory.  “Hard-nosed” evolutionary theory, according to my understanding, is nihilism. It has a place for Heraclitus and Democritus but not for Parmenides. So it has made the same metaphysical choices FN made, and what, one might ask, is there now to prevent it from making the same moral choices? I know that one does not make a case merely by criticizing an opposing argument, but if the consequences of a hypothesis seem absurd it does strengthen the case for the alternative. Let us therefore consider some of the intellectual and moral consequences of rejecting Parmenides in favor of Heraclitus and Democritus, let us be nihilists for a while.

Here is one among several consequences: according to FN and his intellectual descendents, the I of “I think, therefore I am,” is a metaphysical phantasm. Descartes should have said, “Thinking happens; ‘I ‘ is a froth on the surface of thought that laughably believes itself to be the cause.”  FN dramatized the death of Parmenides as the death of God. In our Western tradition both Jewish and Christian we are persons because we are the image of a personal God and we are called and spoken to by a rational God (Genesis 1:26). When God dies the human person dies, and we descend into rational incoherence. We can no longer say, “I think.” Thus the death of God entails the death of man/woman. It is no wonder then that FN’s presentation of the death of God features a madman going about the market place with a lighted lantern at noon, looking for God. The repeated references to madness in his writings, (cf. the tasks of “madness and trifling with Heaven and Hell” quoted above) suggest to me that he knew that the way of metaphysical nihilism leads to insanity, that only a madman, or one prepared, or destined to become such would announce the death of God. I suggest that no one without the benefit of a very expensive education would believe that s/he is not the subject of his/her own thinking, and that his/her speaking is not a coherent communication embedded in a womb of meaning that nurtures all life.

According to FN most of us who continue to believe in a world like that and to live rational lives of silent desperation maintain a modicum of sanity because we are so good at self-deception. Disenchantment has been a theme of much Western discourse for the last two centuries and now, in our present context, evolutionary psychology, the latest in a long line of tiresome poets, journalists, and scribblers, comes to disenchant us again, and persuade us that all we really care about is our own genetic survival by getting into the pants of the most viable other, an adolescent’s dream come true. (FN is interesting on the theme of procreation; his Zarathustra says: “ Don’t just re-produce (in the sense of re-peat) but advance” (Nicht nur fort sollst du dich pflanzen, sondern hinauf!     ( Also Sprach Zarathustra: Ein Buch fur alle und keinen [Stuttgart: Reclam, 1972, p62])). Along with the “I” disappear freedom, compassion, purpose, and truth, but we continue to live as if these were real, indeed, as if they were the definitive properties of the human self by a massive self-delusion. In my opinion this account is more science fiction than science, and crumbles under the weight of its own absurdity. If we were successfully to detoxify ourselves of these enchantments we would go mad, and the fact that we never succeed, not even FN, is a strong argument against nihilism. Therefore, metaphysical nihilism might be a mistaken interpretation of the evidence presented by evolutionary biology.

I have already acknowledged that you don’t build yourself up by running the other guy down, that showing nihilism leads to madness does not automatically mean that metaphysical plenitude is sanity. They may both be mistaken; but, in any case, I would like to make the case that some form of Parmenidean plenitude is more likely to save the appearances than nihilism, and that that form of plenitude is best presented in the Bible. How are we to make this case? I suggest we re-introduce the living God to the story and pay attention to the biblical accounts of creation. Emphatically I do not mean that we approach the theological mistake called “creationism,” but rather that we give an account based on the Bible that saves the appearances satisfactorily, grounds robust moral conviction, and opens the community of rational people to the enterprise of science, not grudgingly but enthusiastically.

I can of course only sketch the story here, and I begin with the biblical image of man as a piece of mud infused with the divine breath. In Gen 2:6-7 we read,  “A flood used to rise out of the earth and water all the surface of the ground. Then the Lord God molded a man, dust from the ground (afar min ha-adamah) and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life (nishmath hayyim) and man became a living being! (wyahi h’adam  lenephesh hayah).” FN’s Zarathustra urges us to maintain contact with the earth and there could be no more earthy image of humanity than this biblical one. Every Ash Wednesday, the day that marks the beginning of our Christian 40 day Lenten fast, as I mark the foreheads of believers with the ash of last years Palm Sunday branches I say, “Remember, O man/woman, that thou art dust and to dust shalt thou return. Repent and believe the Gospel.” So the story of the human begins in the earth, “dust from the ground (afar min ha’adamah).  The name Adam is in Hebrew derived from the word for earth – Adam-adamah=earth. The divine breath suffuses this lump of earth, and man becomes a living being, (nephesh hayah). The human comes to life as a union of the dust and the divine.

Let me meditate aloud on this text. The Stoics believed that the four fundamental elements are earth, water, air and fire. In our story, the earth is there, and it is parched; then appears water, in the desert, spontaneously springing up, and its advent marks the time when the process that will lead to man begins. Earth and water mingle and suffuse and something moulds the amalgam into a human figure. Then that something opens the muddy lungs with air, the breath of life, and the water, the earth and the air stand up together as a living, human, being. Where is the fire? Fire was for the Stoics the rarest of the elements, the source of life. Here the Lord God is the fire. (Tomorrow is Pentecost Sunday, which commemorates the gift of the Holy Spirit to the disciples of the crucified and risen Jesus. The Spirit is portrayed as fire descending on them, bringing the energy of divine life that will empower them to re-present the person of Jesus to all the world through all the ages. St Paul calls this event the “new creation (2 Corinthians: 4:6, 5:17).” The liturgical color for the day is red and the dominant symbolism is tongues of fire). The human being who walks away from the moment of creation, is dust of the earth and fire from heaven, in the image and likeness of the eternal God.

 I must curb myself and conclude so let me cut to the chase. The point is that one can read this story of the creation of man as an allegory of evolution, with the Parmenidean sources of spirit, religion and morals not off in a separate spiritual world behind the phenomena, a world that can be utterly dismissed, but in with and under the process itself, from the first springing of the water to the last hymn of praise to the Living God, and God is present in the process from beginning to end.

This vision of evolution and the human is technically called a panpsychic view. It is no accident that it has affinities with the Stoics because they were the best-known pantheists of the ancient world. Pantheism is the identification of material reality as divine, everything is God, panpsychism or panentheism is the view that not everything is God but that God is present in everything. So in Greek terms we want the marriage of Parmenides and Heraclitus, and in more up to date terms, we want to locate metaphysical and moral significance within the system.

Where within the system? In the human mind, which is the most marvelous part of the system, and a window into all that has come before it. Robert Wright said that the first person to know his creator, Darwin, hated him. Darwin’s mind could be a symbol for us in this explanation. In him the system came to self-consciousness for the first time, and in him it passed a negative moral judgment on itself. In Darwin evolution says of itself, “I am too cruel, wasteful and vulgar! I must do what I can to improve myself”. In this light all those who do the humble work of science and medicine, trying to intervene in our human being to make human experience less, cruel vulgar and wasteful are playing a critical role in guiding the process, but they must resist the temptation to become cruel, vulgar and wasteful themselves.

The most remarkable among many remarkable things about this moment when evolution becomes self-conscious is that it so distances itself from itself as to be able to condemn itself as morally exigent. In distancing itself from itself evolution sets up a quasi hinter world in the human mind. It seems as if something like freedom has emerged, and categories of right and wrong, and the awareness of the divine, and the impulse to prayer and praise, to altruism and unconditional love.

If all this has emerged in these latter days of the advent of mind, must we not also say that it was always there, since the first bubbling up of water and the first lump of clay, symbolized in the divine breath, the holy fire? If God can incarnate himself in a human baby, He could also have infused himself into the whole system, and I believe he did, both things, and that the full, orthodox Christian faith is also the best account of the nature of things, especially the relationship between what we, with our post-Christian, impoverished vocabulary call spirit and matter. So let me close with this.

There is an old line of argumentation for God that locates Him in the gaps of our scientific knowledge. This argumentation was faulty when it started long ago and it is faulty now, but it is not for that reason abandoned. We still have attempts to discover marvels, mysteries and anomalies in nature to serve as pegs on which to hang the flaccid remains of a dead God. In principle all natural marvels will someday be exposed, all mysteries explained and all anomalies dissolved. I look forward to that distant day because I believe it will tell us more about the God who created the whole system, and who does not hide in fright holes but is evident on the face of all reality if we have eyes to see. The way God did it – in seven days of fiat or millennia of maturation – while necessarily of interest to scientists is not necessarily of interest to theologians. God creates, and scientists map the details of the creation, and whatever those details turn out to be makes no determinative difference in the matter of the existence of God and the question of the source of spirituality, religion and morality. For me a story  of earth, water, breath and God covers the bases .

I shall end here. Human all to human! The word human is derived from the Latin for earth, humus, and it is related to the adjective humble. The humble man knows his earthy origins, he knows that he is dust and shall return to dust, and that he is in God’s image and likeness, and never separated from the divine love. John Templeton calls his way the “humble way.” Clearly it is the way of truth in senses we are only beginning to appreciate, and his initiative is immensely significant. I believe, however, that the most effective way to influence our culture in this crucial dimension is to institutionalize the interdisciplinary enterprise that is required to meet the challenge, by founding and funding interdisciplinary institutes at great universities, to give gifted young minds the prospect of a secure career path, and old minds a place to record their twilight wisdom. Culture is in many respects the outcome of self-fulfilling prophecies, and the break-up of knowledge into departments and sub-departments that followed the research successes of the model Humboldt University of Berlin in the 19th century, was a prophecy that fulfilled itself in the post-modern fragmentation of intellectual work and human selfhood following the death of God. It is now time to establish new, integrative models for human enquiry. The founding of interdisciplinary institutes would be self-fulfilling prophecies of the future integration of knowledge, because they would give gifted minds a secure future and generate the prestige that is essential to cultural acceptance. And someday the prophecies of the second coming will be fulfilled and in place of the madness that attends the dead God we shall enter upon the wholeness that comes from the living God.

Let me end with an utterly unoriginal aphorism of my own. Given that our knowledge of nature is always advancing and in that process both confirming and refuting what we think we know, it is probable that we are presently in the dark or simply mistaken about essential things. Human nature is the most essential of essential things and we cannot afford to be mistaken about it. The process of evolution by which it came into being might be far more mysterious than we think, and in any case should not now be taken to warrant a nihilistic self-understanding and a utilitarian ethic. As John Templeton knows, the market is not the dominant definer of human worth and economics, the generator of utilitarian ethics, remains a dismal science. So here is my aphorism: “Someday we shall all understand that there are indeed two natures, spirit and matter, but that they are one, like the two natures in the one person of Jesus Christ, as orthodox Christian doctrine teaches.” There is no need to separate the two worlds and choose between them. Therefore, the most difficult doctrines of orthodox Christianity, the Incarnation of God and the bodily Resurrection of Christ, are prophecies of the true spiritual nature of matter, and someday our scientific knowledge will catch up with our revealed truth. As Einstein once said of the indeterminacy principle, which he detested, “The Lord God is subtle, but he is not malicious (Raffiniert ist der Herrgott, aber boshaft ist er nicht), and, we might add, he is not a nihilist.