The Inescapable Question of Human Nature

I think of us as essentially normative beings, that what sets us apart from the other animals is our capacity to commit ourselves, our worrying about whether we are entitled to those commitments, whether it’s a cognitive commitment as to how things are or a practical commitment as to how things shall be. I think of us as discursive beings… We’re beings who engage in practices of giving and asking for reasons. And I think these two dimensions—the normative dimension and the rational dimension—are what set us apart from beings that can feel but can’t think. And I think of logic and philosophy as having the task of making explicit what is implicit in those normative and rational practices.

– Robert Brandom, Interview at The University of Leipzig (June, 2008)

This quote from the American philosopher Robert Brandom shows how inescapable the question of human nature is. Much Twentieth-Century philosophy was influenced by two related and significant movements: logical positivism and the linguistic turn. To over-simplify, these movements were characterized by attempting to set up strict boundaries about what it was sensible for philosophers to try to explain, and the method by which they would go about coming up with philosophical explanations was primarily through analyzing language – that is, sentences, words, arguments etc. This was, in some part, a reaction to a previous style of philosophizing that was metaphysically extravagant, postulating all sorts of entities, and taking diverse and slippery phenomena to be the subject matter of philosophy.

Any-hoo, a comprehensive theory of human nature that explained what a person is at essence, is exactly the kind of metaphysical and speculative theory philosophy tended to shy away from after positivism and the linguistic turn. What I like about the above quote from Brandom, a linguistic philosopher among linguistic philosophers, is that he tries to justify this focus by an appeal to human nature. To paraphrase, he says, ‘Look, focusing on language is the best way to philosophize, because at root, what separates humans from animals is the ability to communicate; to articulate, criticize and accept reasons.’

It is interesting to see that even within a philosophical movement that eschewed coming up with theories of human nature, and indeed often criticized Christianity on exactly this point, there were latent substantive metaphysical assumptions about what a human being really is.