Man is the Rational, Transrational, and Irrational Animal

If human beings are the rational animal, then it follows that "we need to understand what it is to be rational and what it is to be an animal" (Feser). After all, it's only rational. 

First and foremost, an animal is alive, but what is that? Yesterday's post delved into the question, which can be approached from different angles and levels, from the sub-biological to the metaphysical. 

I say "sub-biological" because there are those whose reductionism is so thorough that they maintain that what we call life is but a statistically unlikely arrangement of atoms and molecules. In my line of work we call such folks "autistic," and who knew you could get a Ph.D. in autism? In this view,

all observable objects are really just aggregates of particles whose properties and powers can be reduced to the sum of those particles, in something like the way that a machine is an aggregate of parts whose properties and powers can be reduced to the sum of the properties and powers of the parts (ibid.).

Which literally doesn't hold water. As Feser points out, water, as we all know, is composed of H₂O. However, one can know everything about hydrogen and oxygen while knowing nothing about water. The two elements, when combined, reveal entirely new properties that are by no means present in the component parts. Oxygen, for example, feeds fire, while water extinguishes it.

Analogously, a face is not the sum of nose, mouth, and eyes, rather, these are only (in Polany's terms) the tacit components of our focal awareness. To reverse this movement is to descend from a world of intrinsic meaning to one of utter nihilism. 

In Aristotle's view, life is "self-moving," meaning that it features immanent causation:

A causal process is immanent when it originates within the agent and terminates within it in a way that tends toward the agent's own self-perpetuation or completion (ibid.).

Which is why kicking a stone and kicking your neighbor have such different results. The stone has only what is called "transient causation," as the source of its motion is external to itself. Absent a heroic dose of LSD, material things don't just sprout legs and move around on their own.

The point is, like the example of water given above, life has novel features that are not present in the component parts. Now, what is the principle of these new features? Feser doesn't say so, but I suspect that it is situated "above" rather then "below." But this is a book of philosophy, not theology, so we'll leave the living God out of it.

Biology describes features and properties of life, but doesn't bother with the essence of life. This is in keeping with the whole scientific revolution, which jettisoned such venerable concepts such as essence, teleology, substance, and form. Pushed to its reductio ad absurdum, "there are no living things, but only things that seem to be alive" (ibid.).

But this is again like saying that water only seems to be wet, or your wife's face only seems to be smiling. Which reminds me of P.G. Wodehouse's Professor Scully, who "doggedly dissected 'the drawing back and slight lifting of the corners of the mouth, which partially uncover the teeth, the curving of the naso-labial furrows.'"

In the long-forgotten post linked immediately above, I called this malady "reductionosis," in which case the smile is reduced to 

"the contraction of muscles in the region of the mouth and cheeks, and this latter through electrical impulses transmitted through the nerves from the centre called the 'brain.'" But this is like trying to understand a telephone conversation by analyzing the electrical impulses that pass within the wires. The most complete analysis will necessarily be completely inadequate.

Moreover, the rigidly consistent autist eliminativist "will have to deny that he is himself alive." 

But that is manifestly false, for thinking -- including thinking about the nature of life, eliminativism, and so on -- is itself an immanent causal activity.... the eliminativist has to carry out immanent causal activity in the very act of denying that there is such a thing as immanent causal activity (ibid.).

Another one of those irrational performative contradictions. I wonder if LSD would help?

Feser quotes a theoretical biologist named John Dupré that is right out of Robert Rosen's (discussed yesterday) playbook: "Reductionism can only apply to closed systems, at least in biology." But Rosen turns the conventional view on its head, arguing that open systems are the rule, closed systems the rare exception to the rule.

This is because -- in the panoramic Raccoon perspective -- the cosmos itself is an open system. If it were truly closed, we could never understand -- which is to say, transcend -- it. 

Yada yada, Feser spends much of the chapter explaining how and why human intelligence is fundamentally different from animal intelligence, but we've been down that road many times. Bottom line:

The truth, as I will argue, is that the human being is a single substance with both corporeal and incorporeal properties and powers. We are neither angels nor apes, but something in between.

Which is the subject of the next chapter -- and post -- What is a Human Being? 

A picture is worth 869 words, but I'll be damned if I can figure out how. I wonder if LSD would help?