On Human Nature by Roger Scruton, Princeton, £18.95
Ignore the knighthood, the professorships, the medals, the 40 or so elegantly argued books like this one. Sir Roger Scruton is an animal. He is driven by biological needs, territorial impulses, a reproductive imperative. Him, you, me; hedgehogs, chimpanzees, rutting stags: we are all part of one long but uninterrupted chain of being. Natura non facit saltus.
Of course, we humans may feel (and act) as if we are special, but we aren’t. Not really. All the things that set us apart can be explained as enhanced versions of characteristics found in the lower animals also.
Darwin was right, we are told: our moral sense is continuous with, not distinct from, the social instincts of other species. All our pleasures, high and low, are the residues of adaptive processes whereby organisms became hardwired to behave in ways that further the reproduction of their genes. Evolutionary psychologists replace our own descriptions of ourselves with neutral scientific accounts of the kind “that could be applied to a dog or a horse”.
All our pleasures, high and low, are the residues of adaptive processes whereby organisms became hardwired to behave in ways that further the reproduction of their genes.
On Human Nature, based on a series of lectures given in Princeton in 2013, is a meditation that grows out of a riposte to this kind of reductionism. Scruton rejects assumptions that, if we have successfully ascribed a cause or function to something, then we have also somehow described its meaning or purpose. He goes on to develop an argument in which our first-person subjectivity, rather than being a sophisticated off-shoot of our animal nature or simply the key to our freedom to do whatever we please, is actually the source of our unique accountability to others.
In the final chapter, Scruton sets out to reconcile his attempt to found morality in inter-personal relations with the ancient proscriptions, the “sacred obligations” that descend on us from culture, custom and religion. Earlier, Scruton had noticed how religious people “have no difficulty in understanding that human beings are distinguished from other animals by their freedom, self-consciousness and responsibility. And they have a ready supply of stories and doctrines that make sense of those truths.”
Take away religion, however, “take away philosophy, take away the higher aims of art, and you deprive ordinary people of ways in which they can represent their apartness. Human nature, once something to live up to, becomes something to live down to instead.”
Scruton is as comfortable as always in the deepest thickets of academic philosophy, and able to grapple with the science too. (He went to Cambridge as an undergraduate to study natural sciences, but switched to philosophy.) Yet he always remains on the side of the daunted general reader trying to take something serviceable away from occasional forays into this territory. Few writers are more capable of rendering comprehensible some of the more abstruse, dry-as-dust debates conducted in specialist philosophy seminars and journals. (Though I confess my mind did wander occasionally, especially during those passages where the mission of philosophy appears to be to complicate the obvious.)
Equally, not many do polite but stinging intellectual put-downs better than Scruton. In “On Hunting”, he describes Heidegger’s “swaying, abstract sentences, burdened like unmilked cows and mooing piteously at the gate of sense”.
And here, when Richard Dawkins hoves into view with his theory of the self-replicating meme, Scruton’s dander is up once more. Dawkins’s pet concept is dismissed for having “the very fault for which it purports to be a remedy: it is a spell, with which the scientistic mind seeks to conjure away the things that pose a threat to it.”
Needless to say, this book is far more complicated than I can summarise here. However, forget my poor powers of philosophical synopsis. On Human Nature is short, readable in an evening or two, and appealing enough to be read again not long after. The final paragraph is, you might say, worth the entry fee alone, though its impact depends on having read everything that has gone before – something I heartily recommend.
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