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BECOMING WHAT ONE ACTUALLY IS

(Jan Müller)

1. HOOK AND BAIT: A COMIC BOOK & AN “EVOLUTIONIST CHALLENGE”

Joann Sfar’s seminal comic book The Rabbi’s Cat1 begins with a philosophical challenge. One

day, the story's hero, the cat of an algerian rabbi, a clever animal of autonomous and daring

disposition, surprisingly, after having eaten its master’s annoying parrot, can (literally, as

opposed to the merely mimicking bird) speak2. Is it alright to still count the cat as a cat after

its feast? This is a conceptual or epistemological problem only insofar as it causes serious

practical problems for all concerned: For the rabbi, who, as the cat’s master, is now in a new

and unfamiliar way responsible for his companion's well-being; for the rabbi’s daughter, who

used to confide in the cat and is now reluctant to continue doing so: for if the cat can talk, it

may understand, and hence: reply and judge3; finally for the rabbi’s rabbi, who is confronted

with the theological implications: If “god” is “the word”, then the talking cat is made “in the

image of god”, or falls under this divine form just as other humans, and is hence entitled to a

bar-mitzvah and to study the torah.

The story of the Rabbi’s cat presents us with two ways to interpret talk of development or

evolution from “animal self” to “human self”: as pertaining to an individual, or to a kind or

species. Both interpretations are familiar, and do not seem to pose any particular problem. In

every ontogenesis, there is something like the dawn of reason in an infant, the advent of a

human self. Remember when the child starts to follow persons with its gaze; or when

suddenly the whole field of specifically human emotion emerges from the almost amorphic

guiding distinction of pleasure and unpleasure that dominated the child’s early weeks.

Experiences like that easily accrue to descriptions that cover steps or phases of a continuous

1 Cf. Joann Sfar: Le chat du Rabbin. Tome 1: La Bar-Mitzvar. Paris: Dargaud 2001. 2 More precise: speak up and out; for of course the cat – being the story’s narrator! – could (in some sense) talk

even before. I’ll return to that point. 3 In a different context, considering these questions would have to include Jacques Derrida’s reflections upon

human living amongst, with and as animals (cf. Jacques Derrida: Das Tier, das ich also bin. Wien: Passagen 2010, esp. Part III, 175sqq.). Sfar’s narrative might serve as a reminder that it is by no means a mere fancy to ask oneself, as Derrida does, whether there is some significance to the fact that one can feel viewed by an animal – for it is, as I hope to bring out a bit more clearly, not just a reflection which somehow inadequately „humanizes“ a singular animal, but which points to a basic uncertainty towards these creatures, the ground for which lie in the practical form of our constantly having to negotiate and re-establish the fickle border between „animals“ and „humans“.

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development.4 And the same intuition, surely, holds for accounts of phylogenesis: If man is

the animal which possesses the faculty of logos (language and reason, or: outspoken reason),

it must have evolved from an animal which did not (yet) possess that faculty; and it surely

makes perfect sense to try to find the point in time at which man acquired this faculty.5

In narrating an “evolution” brought about by something an individual living being does (eating

a parrot), and by this: does to itself (not merely suffering), the comic example intertwines both

levels6 and presents an understanding of the relation of and the passage between animal self

and human self while playfully begging questions7: Is the cat still a cat after coming to

(accidentally) resemble “god’s image”, or did the change affect its erstwhile being? I’ll dub

this – rather loud-mouthed – an “evolutionist challenge”. It arises not from such developments

themselves, but from our conceptual and reflective handling of them, in Wittgensteinian

parlance: from the form and grammar of the narrative devices we employ to capture

development. The problem is8 whether it is adequate to explain the form of human conduct as

being merely a part of nature from whence it (somehow) stems, or whether human conduct’s

normative form and its essential rationality are sui generis, fundamentally different vis-à-vis

their “natural” background.

So, I’ll first try to pinpoint the tension in accounting for both the form of human thought and

action and their “natural” character. I will then discuss two strategies of confronting this

problem. Both miss their explanatory goal because they miss the methodological implications

the “evolutionist challenge” entails: “Nature” plain and simple is only conceivable from the

vantage point and in the light of self-conscious human practice. Understanding the general

4 Consider, for a moment and regardless of its truth, Jean Piaget’s studies into the development of human

intelligence, from sensomotoric (and by all means still animalistic) intelligence to pre-operational, concrete-operational up to formal-operational intelligence (or intelligence proper), which suggest that there is a continuous development from one phase or stage to the next.

5 This formulation (and, indeed, my further argument) owes everything to Josef König (1958): Probleme des Begriffs der Entwicklung. In: Ders.: Kleine Schriften. Hrsg. von Günter Dahms. Freiburg u. München: Alber 1994, 222-244.

6 The cat’s doing is not strictly active; in doing, the individual cat suffers evolution, it immediately exemplifies the more general passage to another species.

7 Which may be put as a variation on Theseus’s ship in which the ship is the acting subject of the account… 8 So, such devices aren’t originally at home in the realm of literary fiction – although I’d argue that literary

fiction is an especially apt medium to reflect upon the peculiar character of such narratives, for in fiction their strangeness can be inevitably visible.

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form of human self-relation, hence, includes (in some sense) human production of nature – a

claim that I’ll sketch in closing.

2. EVOLUTIONAL GRAMMAR; HOMONYMIES AND PARONYMIES

Aristotle repeatedly reminds us that the most common form of misunderstanding is

homonymy – “[t]hings […being] equivocally named, when they have the name only in

common”, but differ in their articulated essence (ousia)9. Is “self” in the expressions “animal

self” and “human self” used homonymously? Consider the rabbi’s cat again. Does a

development transform (note how this shifts the problem!) the substance that suffers change,

or does the substance itself remain unchanged? Is the Rabbi’s cat “a cat” only homonymously,

for sense and meaning of the word “cat” differ fundamentally before and after the parrot-

snack? If so, then pre- and post-parrot cat share only their conventional symbol. The changed

substance does not exhibit the same form after “its” change; its being-a-substance differs.

Consider a butterfly, which, too, undergoes profound substantial changes during its life-cycle.

Yet its shapes – egg, larva, chrysalis, imago – still all conform to the same conceptual unity,

“(developmental stages of) a butterfly”; they do not differ as substances. The Rabbi’s cats, on

the other hand, notably do differ as substances before and after the parroticide which effects a

fundamental change in the way the cat relates to itself: After the deed it is self-conscious; it is

by its mere form answerable and accessible to normative address. It has, extrinsical

designations aside, not much in common anymore with the token of felis silvestris that

instinctively picked the bird from its cage. And although these substances still fall under

common concepts in certain regards10, these concepts do not reveal their essence. They do not

express in which way the thing is (or what it is); they address the substances “merely

abstract”11, informing us about what necessarily and typically holds the things we are

concerned with (the two cats), but not what characterizes them essentially. Esentially the

“first” cat (so to speak) is an animal self, whereas the talking cat presents a human self.

9 Cf. Aristotle: Cat. I1, 1-3. 10 Both are, e.g., tokens of the type “living thing”; both realize the predicate “occupying a place in space and

time”. 11 Cf. Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel: Wer denkt abstrakt? In: Theorie-Werkausgabe. Hrsg. von Eva

Moldenhauer u. Karl Markus Michel. Bd. 2. Frankfurt/Main: Suhrkamp 1972, 575-581.

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Recalling Peter Geach’s distinction12, the expressions “animal” and “human” in these phrases

aren’t predicative adjectives pertaining to tokens of one and the same type of things, namely:

“selves”. Rather, they do a an attributive job: whatever properties the two substances might

accidentally have in common, their essential mode of being is articulated by the attributes

“animal” and “human”.

But if these substances were both called “selves” merely by accident, then “evolution” would

be incomprehensible13. Luckily, homonymies aren’t always accidental. The grammarian is not

knowledge of grammar; the virtuous is something other than virtue; but they are nonetheless

named thus because of an essential relation. The content of such paronymous (or derivative)

expressions,14 their sense and meaning, are related to and dependent on each other. To say

that the attributive adjectives in “human self” and “animal self” articulate an essential

difference doesn’t preclude asking how the substances expressed are related, and which

direction of fit defines their relation.

3. THE REDUCTIONIST APPROACH: “MAN’S PLACE IN NATURE”

But first, consider the double game our feline story plays, for it is typical of such narratives:

We are lead to believe that the evolution in question was a natural process, brought about by

brute instinct and resulting in the advent of a quasi-human, thus suggesting that “human self”

derived its meaning from our knowledge of its animalistic precursor. Yet the treacherous fable

only works in virtue of there always already being a humanized cat narrating in human

language15 – or else, as with all talking cats, big or small, “we wouldn’t be able to understand

it” (PI, § 327). This shows the methodological stance we are forced to take in considering the

development from animal to human selves: employing a reconstructive narrative, conveying

events from a doubtful beginning up to a finale we are acquainted with.

12 Cf. Peter Geach: Good and Evil. In: Analysis 17.2 (1956), 33-42.

13 There would be a revolutionary gap not bridged but merely concealed by wording. 14 Aristotle: Cat. I1, 13-15, and Met. IV, 1003a 33ff. 15 Which, quite deceitful, doesn’t even use the preterite tense to indicate a retrospect view, but narrates in

progressive present tense.

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A hearty naturalistic philosophical standpoint in comparison provides a clear methodological

path: First, animal attentiveness and interaction is observed; then the shape and form of

animal self-relation is obtained by way of extrapolation and idealization; last, the scope of

inquiry is widened to include the form of self-relation that tokens of homo sapiens sapiens

exhibit, that is: receptivity to reasons and the capacity for normative judgment, practical

reasoning, and self-consciousness not as a property or capacity, but as an actual relation of

practical recognition in between persons. But this standpoint16 ignores its own methodological

vantage point17. It purports to understand the phenomena of human practice in its specificity

by translating and rephrasing it in the language-games of the empirical sciences. But because

this translation seems to be just a reduction to the phenomena’s essence, not a constructive

effort, it also seems unnecessary to question the translation’s very adequacy. This “breach of

grammar”18 unwittingly modifies the original question; the naturalist description does not

answer to the question it originally wanted to address.

Consider the phenomenon of being bound and, inversely, being entitled by a promise – where

speech acts of “promising” exemplify the normative form of human conduct (praxis) in

general. G. E. M. Anscombe19 famously agreed with Hume that the establishment of mutual

obligation is not “naturally intelligible”, yet refused to conclude that thus the idea of

obligation was just an abbreviation for some natural adaption to external forces, as, for

example, Peter Stemmer would have it20. Anscombe’s argument rebuts such translations.

Were we to try and understand the force of a right a promisee has towards a duty-bound

promisor merely a as product of (actual or announced) coercion, then the explanation would

16 Even if it does not embrace reductionism as readily as e.g. Quine, debasing study of human psychology to “a

bump on the bump” that is biology – physics of course being the core science that “investigates the essential nature of the world” (Quine 1964, 93).

17 Besides the vain injury that naturalism’s claim to answer time-honored metaphysical problems inflicts upon other philosophers. – I shall refrain to present another detailed critique of such an approach. For a recent version of such a critique in firmly McDowellian spirit cf. Thomas Hoffmann: Das Gute. Berlin: de Gruyter 2014, ch. 4; the pitfalls of naturalistic reductionism are detailled e.g. in Hartmann, Dirk / Janich, Peter: Methodischer Kulturalismus. In: Dies. (Hrsg.): Methodischer Kulturalismus. Zwischen Naturalismus und Postmoderne. Frankfurt/Main: Suhrkamp 1996, 9-69.

18 Cf. Friedrich Kambartel: Normative Bemerkungen zum Problem einer naturwissenschaftlichen Definition des Lebens. In: Barkhaus, Anette, Mayer, Matthias, Roughley, Neil u. Thürnau, Donatus (Hrsg.): Identität, Leiblichkeit, Normativität. Neue Horizonte anthropologischen Denkens. Frankfurt/Main: Suhrkamp 1996, 109-114.

19 G. E. M. Anscombe: Rules, Rights, and Promises, *** 20 Cf. Peter Stemmer: Normativität. Eine ontologische Untersuchung. Berlin: de Gruyter 2008.

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miss our question: How mentioning the fact that I have promised to do X may serve as a

reason for me to do X, binding my further action with the force of actual necessity21.

Attempts to rephrase this in deductive-nomological vocabulary would have to understand the

form of right, the validity of claims, rights and duties as based directly on factual individual

desires, or – with a bit more nietzschean zeal – an expression of thinly veiled and fenced

animalistic violence. Sure enough, it is prudent to remember the affective and potentially

violent aspects which belong to the very form of interpersonal conduct, so as not to reduce

politics to morals22. But on the level of conceptual groundwork such ideas produce serious

inconsistencies, for they amount to the thesis that reasons are merely a kind of efficient cause

of behavior. That is how Peter Stemmer answers the question of what reasons are; even the

law of non-contradiction, he argues, is valid only because it is instrumental in producing the

perlocutionary effect of making someone believe a proposition23; like any norm, it owes its

force to an individual’s desire. And one is bound by the force of rational norms only insofar as

one wants to be rational to satisfy some natural such natural desires24.

4. HUMAN NATURE, FIRST AND SECOND

Stemmer’s account demonstrates what is wrong with reductive naturalism: It rephrases the

question – how to understand that in rational action and ethical life we are subject to

normative claims? – by assuming that there is no “rational” action which is not rooted in the

animal fitting of desires, and hence no practical reason deserving the name, that is:

explaining action as the mode in which thought itself is actual and effective25. Hence, the

21 Anscombe’s discussion of the grammar of “stopping modal” shows just this: “you cannot leave now, you

promised to X” – this use of “stopping modals” does articulate a literal necessity (for it is in some sense impossible for someone to refrain from doing what she promised; cf. Anscombe RRP, 100).

22 This may be the proverbial “grain of truth” that merits “realistic” and reactionary thinkers’ resistance against reducing politics to morals.

23 Concerning Stemmer’s account, this is a bit of a tautology, for all rules and norms – he believes – stem from conventionalized contingent regularities of individual behaviour. – The argument I sketched: „Die Antwort auf die Frage, warum man, wenn man behauptet, dass p, nicht gleichzeitig auch behaupten kann, dass non-p, lautet also: weil man so nicht erreichen kann, was man mit den Behauptungen erreichen will. Man kann auf diese Weise z. B. niemanden dazu bringen, das eine oder andere Behauptete für wahr zu halten.“ (Stemmer 2008, 341)

24 Cf. Stemmer 2008, 65. 25 Cf. Sebastian Rödl: Handeln und Denken. Eine Entgegnung auf Friedrich Kambartel. In: Mittelstraß, Jürgen

(Ed.): Der Konstruktivismus in der Philosophie im Ausgang von Wilhelm Kamlah und Paul Lorenzen. Paderborn: Mentis 2008, 105-110, 109.

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reductionist’s picture of a human self evolving from its animal precursor cannot account for

the essential difference of the evolved, viewing it as a mere variant of the original26.

Ironically, this ultimately renders incomprehensible what is supposed to provide the grounds

for these assumptions: Evolutionary narratives, the weighing of reasons for explanatory

accounts, in short: the very practice of science. For while scientific descriptions necessarily

abstract from their practical conditions, these conditions nonetheless characterize the very

form, validity and scope of scientific knowledge. It is defined as scientific knowledge by the

clause that it is tied to its methodological vantage point in human practices27, just like the

Rabbi’s cat is fettered to human language and hence cannot but narrate the advent of its

human self as having become what it already was28.

Now, this methodological clause allows for a modest and a resolute interpretation. John

McDowell argues modestly29: If human perception is conceptual “all the way down”, then the

way human beings relate to the objects of their intuition must not be conceived of as merely a

variant, or a derivation of animal object-relation. Inhabiting the “space of reason” is an activity

sui generis that cannot be phrased in the language of natural sciences. In “mere animals,

sentience is in the service of a mode of life that is structured exclusively by immediate

biological imperatives”30; a “mere animal does not weigh reasons and decide what to do”

(McDowell 1994, 115). So Man is not a mere, but a very special animal: “thinking and

knowing are part of our way of being animals”31, making up the “second nature” which is

enabled by, but not reducible to the “first nature” of homo sapiens sapiens. Rational practice,

human thought and action proper, make up a realm of its own right, which phylogenetically

26 Hence unmasking the paronymous explanation of “human” in the light of “animal” as a mere homonymy,

which is facilitated by misguided philosophical traditions finally debunked 27 The perspective of such reflection is retrospective, or reconstructive; its methodological starting point is the

telos and terminus of the narration it produces. 28 And in an ironic twist, but in the same key, one has to recall Ansombe’s dictum that „God can make no

promises to man except in a human language“ (RRP, 99). 29 Which, on the other hand, is an extremely resolute argument regarding the way he understands the substantial

or ontological place man occupies in nature; cf. Matthias Haase: Life and Mind. In: Khurana, Thomas (Hrsg.): The Freedom of Life. Hegelian Perspectives. Berlin: August 2013, 69-110, 98.

30 Or, as would be more appropriate, drives; for an imperative may or may not be adhered to – animal drives, on the other hand, force their satisfaction and may only be hindered externally.

31 John McDowell: Naturalism and the Philosophy of Mind. In: de Caro, Mario/ Macarthur, David (Hrsg.): Naturalism in Question. Cambridge, Ma.: Harvard UP 2004 91-105, 95.

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evolved from precursory animal forms and reproduces itself through every individual’s

ontogenesis.

But note how McDowell’s modesty is a two-faced affair: On the one hand, he insists that the

form of human conduct is essentially related to the actualization of rational capacities.

Remember Anscombe’s account of promising: We understand its peculiar normativity by

understanding the logoi or forms of thought which express the necessity at work in rights and

dutys, which in turn are intelligible only as being actualized by participating in “the practices

of reason” (Anscombe, RRP 103). The reality of normative forces is the actuality of rational

practice. No reference to “nature” seems necessary32 to say this; and, indeed, in this strand of

his argument McDowell merely uses the expression as a critical provision against reductionist

tendencies, stressing that there “is nothing obligatory about equating nature with the domain

of natural-scientific intelligibility.”33 – But on the other hand the insistence on rational

practice’s sui generis-character threatens the idea that even this practice still is, somehow, part

of nature. That is why McDowell opts for a model of man’s practical-rational second nature as

not-quite-but-yet-still-natural: “if second nature is nature too, parts of our lives can be outside

the scope of scientific understanding, even though, as parts of our lives, they belong to nature”

(McDowell 2007, 396).

The tension between these two strands in McDowell’s dualism of “first” and “second nature”

merely reproduces the problem it purported to solve. Saying that “[h]uman beings […] are

born mere animals, [... which] are transformed into thinkers and intentional agents in the

course of coming to maturity” in a process of “Bildung” – essentially: “being initiated into a

language” (McDowell 1994, 125) – doesn’t solve, but merely rephrases the “evolutionist

challenge”: Either McDowell’s mention of “transformation” is to be taken literally – then

saying human beings are born “mere animals” only paraphrases the formal idea that human

activity presupposes its pre-existing potential34, leaving the idea of “first nature” empty that.

Or reference to “mere animality” is to be taken literally – then individually acquiring “second 32 Other than to remind us that obviously human agents aren’t immaterial creatures. 33 „That is exactly why we can ignore those naturalizing programmes, rather than holding our breath in

anticipation, or fear, of their success“. John McDowell: On Pippin's Postscript. In: European Journal of Philosophy 15.3 (2007), 295-410, 397.

34 That in order to realize human energeia, an individual has to be dynamei human.

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nature” belongs to the specie’s phylogenesis, rendering the merely metaphorical

“transformation” a biological process.35

McDowell tries to conform to both interpretations at once, with a twofold consequence: First,

he (despite his intentions) ultimately falls short of realizing what Matthew Boyle36 called a

transformative picture of human rationality. This picture understands the advent of “second

nature” as essentially determining all possible understanding of the precedent stages37– they

will always have been nothing but stages up to that which explains their essence. But

McDowell shies away from severing all conceptual ties to a given first nature, hence rolling

back into a picture which understand the specificity of man’s second nature as a mere addition

to biology’s universe of discourse. On the one hand, he unnecessarily concedes that the

empiricist idea of natural sciences tapping directly into the ontological order of the world was

basically correct as long as it doesn’t infringe on second nature; by coming that close to the

empiricist agenda, however, he is on the other hand forced to deny that empirical study of so-

called “first nature” might contribute essentially to our understanding of so-called “second

nature”.38

5. BETWEEN NATURAL DETERMINATION AND INVENTED HISTORIES

Put differently: McDowell’s critique of the empiricist dualism employs a language-game

which inadvertently reproduces its trade mark grammar: explaining “human self”

paronymously from “animal self”39. This renders mysterious the idea the advent of reason

35 See Mathias Gutmann: Erfahren von Erfahrung, Erfahren von Erfahrungen. Dialektische Studien zur

Grundlegung einer philosophischen Anthropologie. 2 Bde. Bielefeld: transcript 2004, 415sqq. 36 See Matthew Boyle: Additive Theories of Rationality. A Critique, forthcoming, http://nrs.harvard.edu/urn-

3:HUL.InstRepos:8641840.

37 For they are significant only in the light and by means of their successor. 38 In this picture, the second nature of man is rendered intelligible in light of his first nature, hence abandoning

the critique of traditional naturalism for the unity of the natural realm. McDowell avoids this relaps into reductionism; but he pays by conceding that This concession would be unnecessary, if McDowell held fast to the transformative picture. As it is, he comes too close to reductionisms’ central thesis to effectively denounce it: that there is nothing wrong with the empiricist picture.

39 McDowell’s rephrasing of the problem in terms of “first” and “second nature” shows that this grammar is intelligible only if one also keeps an explanation in opposite direction in mind: that in advancing such an interpretation one implicitly already understands talk of an “animal self” as referring to a precursor of second-natural, human self-consciousness. Unfortunately, McDowell doesn’t develop this idea, but rather – in his

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came about by “initiating” still merely animal individuals into a tradition of reason40. In trying

to provide for a perspective beyond the human form, McDowell creates a categorial gap

which he then has to bridge by providing equivalents for eating parrots41. Aristotle, in

contrast, isn’t particularly puzzled by how a not yet virtuous individual might acquire virtue

by acting virtuous. He accounts for the practical form of our thought and action without

raising the question of a “first nature”. First and foremost, we understand how we live, that is:

what it essentially means to be a rational being, and only by means of this, we may come to

understand the form of living things in general42. This is not the explanatory “direction of fit”

that McDowell advocates. But if first-natural science per definition cannot contribute

essentially to our understanding of our sui generis “second nature”43, then “first” and “second”

nature are linked only by name; there is no unity of nature.

But why should there be? As Wittgenstein puts it, we understand the form of our rational

practice by “supplying [...] remarks on the natural history of human beings”44, but “we can

modesty (or his indecisiveness regarding the two pictures of the specifically human realm of reason) – accepts a constitutive gap to form.

40 This doesn’t occur to Aristotle (who was first to deal with this satisfactorily) who clearly understands that being initiated in a techné, and even more a (essentially virtuous) praxis presupposes that the pupil is already acknowledged as suitable, that is: as being able in principle to acquire the faculties and hexis in question, which in turn means: acknowledged as a human being who exhibits – albeit only dynamei – “second nature”. Cf. Aristotle: EN 1105a, 22sqq..

41 Much more would have to be said, e.g.: are we to conceive of this initiation as perfective and resultative as the phrasing suggests (like: being initiated in an art or a club)? Or are we to understand it as an ongoing process, towards a formal end of eudaimonia (which is what McDowell suggests)? If so – from whence stem the criteria of success and failure, if they are not to be conceived of as merely contingent (tradition in the reactionary traditionalist’s sense, cf. Robert B. Pippin: Leaving Nature Behind, or Two Cheers for Subjectivism: On John McDowell . In: The Persistence of Subjectivity. On the Kantian Aftermath. Cambridge: Cambridge UP 2005, 186-222, and Georg W. Bertram: Zweite Natur. In: Barth, Christian/ Lauer, David (Hrsg.): Die Philosophie John McDowells. Ein Handbuch. Münster: mentis 2014, 121-136). In addition, McDowell’s picture of this “transition” is remarkably peaceful and omits every trace of the violence of passion which, after all, is an essential part of the traditional understanding of “first nature” from which he draws. For an utterly convincing critique and alternative models see Julia König/ Philip Hogh: Bestimmte Unbestimmbarkeit. Über die zweite Natur in der ersten und die erste Natur in der zweiten. In: Deutsche Zeitschrift für Philosophie 59.3 (2011), 419-438, 431sq.

42 Unfortunately, his narrative may be read to suggest otherwise. But the stages or phases of the relation between living things and their soul cannot make up a simple ascension, or else it would be incomprehensible that „the soul“ (in principle, not this or that „singular soul“, whatever that may be) is the principle of every animate thing. Hence: if there is ascension, it must be understood in retrospect.

43 This is because it remains outside the scope of what it is interesting here. First nature is of interest only formally, as a reservoir for second-natural possibilities; and all this is due to McDowell’s unnecessarily equating empirical inquiry with being the forbearer and herald of scientistic reductionism.

44 The quote continues: “facts that no one has doubted, which have escaped notice only because they are always before our eyes“ (PI, § 415).

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also invent fictitious natural history for our purposes” (PI II, § 365). An invented natural-

historical explanation exemplifies a general form just as well as a materially saturated natural-

historical judgment. Both exhibit the same form, and hence suffice to understand the grammar

of our practical self-relation and its “natural aspects”. We may fist-personally know the form

of human action – action conforming to an idea of good providing practical thought with

reasons for choosing means – without referring either to past experiences, nor to a general

good ranking higher than that which is phronetically manifest45. Understanding this form is

neutral towards certain empirical content and its (evidently historically fluctuating) validity –

it only presupposes that there is some content46.

But isn’t it odd to think that although we constantly refer to systems of natural-historical

judgments in forming singular judgments which normatively link individual’s performances to

their life-form (Thompson 2004, 2008), the development and revisions of these systems

should remain so strangely marginal?47 Like the cat’s crime, the three proverbial injuries dealt

by the ideas of Copernicus, Darwin and Freud48, are not academic, but transform the way in

which a concept of “practical human self-relation” is even conceivable. It seems absurd that

knowledge of human evolution and the kinship with sub-rational animals should only

accidentally enter the form of human self-relation.

6. HOW TO RECLAIM NATURE

The “methodological challenge”, then, is to bring nature back into the picture. Philippa Foot’s

account of “natural goodness” attempts this by erasing the critical border McDowell draws

45 See Michael Thompson: Forms of nature: ‘First‘, ‚second’, ‚living’, ‚rational’ and ‚phronetic’. In: Hindrichs,

Gunnar/ Honneth, Axel (Hrsg.): Freiheit. Stuttgarter Hegel-Kongress 2011. Frankfurt/Main: Klostermann 2013, 701-735.

46 Understanding the form of practical reasoning rests upon shared experience, that is: partaking in a communal practice; but it is not tied to these experiences in the way that reflection had to subscribe to (the validity of) its content. We may learn the form of human reasoning, for sure, in understanding how people oriented themselves in pre-copernican times; their “second nature”, albeit saturated in experience, is – or so Wittgenstein and McDowell would argue – not formally determined by this experience’s content.

47 I leave aside for the moment Mica Lott‘s recent treatment of a similar question; cf. Have Elephant Seals Refuted Aristotle? Nature, Function, and Moral Goodness. In: Journal of Moral Philosophy 9.3 (2012), 353-375.

48 Shouldn’t we argue that it isn’t only the content of our natural-historical knowledge that changed, whereas the conceptual form of our relating ourselves to what we are (the practical form every human individual exemplifies) remained unchanged from Aristotle onward, via Aquinas and Kant up to the present?

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between “first” and “second nature”, arguing that knowing the formal end of a living thing in

general provides us with the grammatical tools to understand what “good self-preservation

and reproduction”, flourishing, naturally means for human animals.49 But this cannot solve the

problem at hand, for it merely substitutes McDowell’s reductionist notion of first nature with

a (nominally Aristotelian) metaphysics of nature while preserving the overall function this

idea fulfills. But this undermines the transformative picture Foot aims at. If the activity of

practical reason changes the very way in which the expression “being bound by one’s nature”

is intelligible for a rational being, then actualizing this very nature by relating oneself freely to

it does not provide one with the sort of imperative guidance animal life-forms enjoy; this is

why for rational wolves as well as for their Algerian feline counterpart the question how to

conform to their more-than-lupine nature50 is essentially open51. But then Foot’s substantive

claims regarding the canon of virtues are arbitrary52. That her understanding of an agent’s

subjectivity owes its form to the modern bourgeois form of right and to capitalist reproduction

is made invisible by grounding these assumptions in an idea of “human nature” which is

independent of our historical and natural-historical knowledge about the human species.53,54

But the gist of the transformative picture, as I have crudely appropriated it here, was that in

exercising rational faculties human beings themselves define their mode of being, and hence

49 Cf. Philippa Foot: Natural Goodness. Oxford: Clarendon 2001, esp. ch. 5 ; see also the very compassionate

reconstruction of her argument by Thomas Hoffmann: Das Gute. Berlin: de Gruyter 2014, esp. chapters 6-7, 124sqq.

50 John McDowell: Two sorts of naturalism. In: Mind, Value, and Reality. Cambridge, Ma.: Harvard UP 1998, 167-197.

51 For it is not clear whether these creatures still count as “a wolf” or “a cat”. 52 This seems to be the upshot of Michael Thompson’s sympathetic critique: Three forms of Natural Goodness, §

3. 53 Or else requiring some very demanding metaphysics of history. Thomas Hoffmann: Das Gute, 150, falls into

this pit when he argues that if human „Wollen“ is „im Allgemeinen eine Ausübung praktischer Rationalität“, and then continues: „Auch derlei zu behaupten heißt nicht, eine mehr oder minder gewagte empirische These über Menschen aufzustellen, sondern es heißt: unser naturhistorisches Wissen über jene Lebensform artikulieren, deren Exemplare wir sind. Es heißt: Natur und Begriff von Menschen zu explizieren“. Note the tension between the empirical stance and the claims that go along with natural-historical knowledge. If there is no empirical irritability build into that form of „knowledge“, then it is of the same sort of „knowledge“ of which Wittgenstein said that it may as well be made up. But then „explicating nature and concept of human beings“ might just as well refrain from referring to „nature“ in any modern sense at all.

54 The dilemma originates from a first-and-second-natural dualism, be it one that assumes a “first nature” naturally answering to the natural sciences (in McDowell), or one that takes “life” as represented in a system of natural-historical judgments as analogous model for human, that is: rational activity (in Foot; Foot simply swaps a reductionist’s picture of nature for Aristotelian biology.)

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human practice produces “the animal kingdom”55; it served precisely to forego the dualism of

“first” and “second nature”. In this the attributive adjectives “human” and “animal” denote

certain perspectives upon objects (the relation of concepts and objects in general); they are, as

Matt Boyle pointed out, “concepts of reflection”56. And so, understanding the distinction

between first and second nature as established within second nature57, the dilemma vanishes.

This suggests a resolute constructivist approach: Science’s objects are not given; rather, the

methods and conceptual instruments of scientific research define what counts as an object of

inquiry, and these methods and conceptual instruments – the standardized language-games of

the sciences – are rooted in quotidian practices. Consider how biological notions of

“development” stem from pre-scientific know-how of animal breeding and plant cultivation;

or how the organismic model for a functional unity is based on acquaintance with techné and

the teleology of intentional action58. In par with a certain othodoxy: Addressing something as

an organism is not just addressing an object falling under a certain concept (organism), but

addressing it in the light of a certain relation between “object” and “concept”59. It is in

subjecting it under a certain (teleological) description-form (logos, as Anscombe says, or

articulated thought-form) and in employing our practical acquaintance with technical artifacts

that the activity and structure of living things gains its form and reality60. In the same way,

animal attentiveness, knowledge and self-relation are modeled after our own, defined as

55 See Matthew Boyle: Essentially rational animals. In: Abel, Günter/ Conant, James (Hrsg.): Rethinking

Epistemology. Vol. 2. Berlin/New York: de Gruyter 2012, 395-427, 424. 56 Recently, Matthew Boyle hinted at the importance of the Kantian „Reflexionsbegriffe“ (“concepts of

reflection”) in founding a metaethical naturalism in his Essential Rational Animals, 425, hence directing the question of naturalism – I think – in much the same direction I suggest here. Cf. Immanuel Kant: KrV B 316; there, of course, Kant is concerned with the relation between „Begriff“ and „Vorstellung“; for a complete account see Michael Nerurkar: Amphibolie der Reflexionsbegriffe und transzendentale Reflexion. Das Amphibolie-Kapitel in Kants Kritik der reinen Vernunft. Würzburg: Königshausen u. Neumann 2012.

57 Hence, the anti-reductionist stance boils down to avoiding the amphiboly of understanding – falling for the reification of some “animalistic” substance or properties –, but to understand the distinction between “animalistic” and “human” aspects when addressing the nature of self-relation.

58 Cf. Mathias Gutmann: Life and Human Life. Some Methodological Considerations on the Relation of the Hermeneutic and the Scientific Concept of Life. In: Korsch, Dietrich/ Griffoen, Amber L. (Hrsg.): Interpreting Religion. The Significance of Friedrich Schleiermacher's ‘Reden über die Religion’ for Religious Studies and Theology. Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck 2011, 163-185.

59 Cf. the analogy Michael Thompson brings on various occasions: Frege’s “Begriff-Gegenstand” formally equals “bipolar order-person” formally equals “Life form-organism” formally equals (but this is extrapolation on my part) “Practice-action”. Cf. Thompson 2004, 2008; I owe this interpretation to Jens Kertscher’s astuteness.

60 (just like the actuality of “pacta sunt servanda”!)

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precursory shapes which are “conscious” only per analogiam61.

If human practice constitutes and brings about the form of “nature”, then empirical scientific

enquiry essentially contributes to the form of human life: Not (only) by providing content

(which is by definition fallible), but because the manner of producing, articulating and

judging such content (that is: scientific practice and thought) essentially belongs to the form

of human self-relation.62 It includes continually navigating and renegotiating the reflectively

drawn borders between “animalistic”, and not-yet-human, and human aspects of our practical

life – which are only then, derivatively, extended outwards to encompass the other creatures

and things63.

7. BECOMING WHAT ONE IS: “PRODUCING ESSENCE” AFTER ANSCOMBE AND MARX

This provokes two objections, to which my replies must be crudely sketchy.

The first objection takes issue with the modeling of organisms: Isn’t the living animated body

a primitive category, which cannot be reduced to artificial “as-if-descriptions” – for it is cause

and principle of its own activity and self-preservation64? But consider how even this specific

trait of living things is articulated in light of human action65 – both negatively (it differs from

artificial functional units in having its telos not externally but internally66) and in the positive:

The idea of continuous activity which reproduces itself is not learned from living things, but

on the contrary from first-personally knowing what it is to progressively be in action, and

taking part in a wider collective generic activity67. “Living organism” can be introduced as a

primitive concept into a biological language-game; but its grammar is still rooted in the

61 If they weren’t, they would not be objects of inquiry but members of society – men, not animals. 62 Only empiricist ideology has for some time distorted the way it serves as the general model of articulated

reason. Cf. Aristotle: EN, VI. 63 Which is why they are, “fortunately for the scientist, […] well furnished with all their relevant features and

traits“ (Mathias Gutmann 2011, 181). 64 Aristotle: De an., III ***, 65 That is, in the language-game of self-conscious participation in practical reason. 66 Cf. Sebastian Rödl: Leben Herstellen. In: Deutsche Zeitschrift für Philosophie 62.1 (2014), 74-89, 87. 67 Consider Plato’s Republic: it is the city which serves as a model for the soul, which only then, in turn, serves

to justify a social order. “Practice” paronymously illuminates the grammar of “life” – which is why it is not a mere metaphor nor plain naturalism to insist on the necessity of conceiving of human practice as “living”.

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grammar of human activity68.

The second objection sees voluntarist fancy in the idea that in “doing science” – in authoring a

description of ourselves that renegotiated the reflective border between “animal” and “human”

form – we somehow produce natural history69. But we mustn’t push an innocent idea to the

absurd70. Consider Wittgenstein’s saying that the “essence is expressed through grammar”,

aiming at the irreducibility of linguistic practice: That the idea of essences independent from

linguistic practice is incomprehensible doesn’t entail that essences somehow come about by

means of factual intentional linguistic acts71. The talk of “production” is, as Wittgenstein puts

it, a “simile”: like in the “production” of a geometric figure from other shapes in “shewing […]

a new picture” „it is as if God had constructed them like that“ (RFM § 72), so reference to “us”

in saying that nature is essentially a product of our human conduct is such a simile72.

Grammar is the medium in which essence, the categorial manner of being, expresses itself

insofar as we express it73, “we” refering generically to the actual process of our living – our

life-form. It is this life-form which, per simile, produces “essence” – beyond whose activity

the idea of “essence” would be unintelligible. So it is only owing up to the transformative

picture to say that human activity in general comprises producing – natural history. The 68 Mathias Gutmann: Lebewesen verstehen. In: Deutsche Zeitschrift für Philosophie 62.1 (2014), 90-107, 95f. 69 An animated living thing, for example, evidently is not living because a scientist describes it as such. 70 This is where accounts of “self-constitution” like Christine Korsgaard’s go awry. She states that “the form of

the human is precisely the form of the animal that must create its own form“ (Christine M. Korsgaard: Self-Constitution. Agency, Identity, and Integrity. Oxford: Oxford UP 2009, 131), and since the human self’s nature is to self-conscious and free, “[w]e choose the laws or principles of our own causality. And this means [...] that there is a sense in which we choose our own forms.“ (Korsgaard 2009, 127). Each individual by the grace of its own actions makes itself to be an exemplar its kind – and thereby literally produces the “natural form” it conforms to.

71 Cf. G. E. M. Anscombe: The question of linguistic idealism, ***. 72 Hence the distinction and negotiation of our humane relation to the other creatures is essentially a matter of a

virtuous, prudent human practice. 73 Now, Anscombe may be so humble as to forego the problem of the production of essence – and remember:

this includes the constitution of scientific objects which contribute essentially to our human self-understanding – because the productive aspect has already been delegated. Since it is clear, Anscombe says, that “essences” are not literally produced by individual, intentional acts, but only impersonally “expressed” through human language’s grammar, they must have been produced by “whoever or whatever produced mankind“. – G. E. M. Anscombe: Human Essence. „It would appear that the notion of the essential constituents of anything except substantial objects (of the various kinds we thought of) is necessarily a simile [...]. We may say they [e.g. the mathematicians] have produced grammars in which essences are expressed. But it is more important to understand the grammars and their application than to think about essences. The ‚essences‘ produced by mathematicians otherwise look like a sort of illusion. [...] The claim that one is using a simile means that the thing the simile is a likeness of is not a simile. This is the coming into existence of various substantial objects, which are made, are generated from others and turn into others when they cease to exist“.

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ambiguity in this must no longer trouble us; just like the Rabbi’s cat told us about its passage

to its actual self, so human practice in no small part consists in reproducing itself as rational

practice through narrating, refining, revising its own natural history. Producing and

cultivating a system of natural-historical judgments is (at least part of) producing human

essence. Now, science provides for the natural part of “natural-historical judgments”; the

historical form is bought about in an account which has human practice as its formal end.

How does that work? – Marx, in his early Feuerbachian phase, tried to model this in terms of

human “Gattungswesen” or species-being, an actual generic subject which, by virtue of its

token’s activity, reproduced and preserved “itself”. But Marx already then leaned towards the

transformative picture, and so his uneasiness with this tricky vocabulary and its tendency

towards ideas of a preconceived essential “first nature” is especially instructive. Consider the

tension he stages in asserting that “nature is man’s inorganic body [...]. That man’s physical

and spiritual life is linked to nature means simply that nature is linked to itself, for man is a

part of nature“: The first part bases „nature“ on human practice, while the second part, from a

higher-level perspective, addresses „nature“ as acting subject. Of course, Marx knows that

reference to “the being of man” potentially renders “actual people’s actual conduct”, the

progressive being-in-the-act of actual people, philosophically invisible. That’s how “German

Ideology” works: It only allows to address people as tokens of their “Gattungswesen”, or

scientifically modeled as tokens of a biological species, but not as subjects of their own

history. Again, let’s avoid a voluntarist interpretation. “Men make their own history, but they

do not make it […] under self-selected circumstances, but under circumstances [...] given and

transmitted from the past“. So, human history is “made” by forming and continually

transforming human practice and its natural world74, in short: producing human essence by

narrating the story how these unavailable circumstances were dealt with. Marx‘s later

phrasing aims at “the categories being true in/by practice“ (“praktisch wahr als Kategorie“,

Einleitung in die Grundrisse [MEW 43, 39]) – the thought that the basic form of human

thought is itself subject to an evolution through and by its very own activity. Hence, the

„forming“ of human essence „is a labor of the entire history of the world down to the present”

74 Cf. Marx: “Earth is the general means of work [das allgemeine Arbeitsmittel], for it furnishes a locus standi to

the active subject and a field of employment for his process“ (Cap. 1 [MEW 23, 195]).

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– it is this history and the continuous reflection upon its narration’s adequacy and validity.

Understanding “nature” as essentially human – as our “inorganic body” – includes the

contribution of empirical science to understanding the phylo- and ontogenesis of homo

sapiens sapiens, but insists that human form is irreducibly the vantage point and the formal

end of all such considerations. The conceptual tension between both perspectives should not

be concealed, for it defines human form: It marks the form in which we, a self-conscious

persons, relate to ourselves in practice, constantly shifting gears from representing ourselves

as practical subjects, as persons, as tokens of biological species-descriptions etc. So we

employ scientific models of paleo-anthropogenesis, or consider psychological generalizations

when in question how to prudently understand our children’s development, or engage

ourselves in working through our affective dispositions in psychoanalysis. But always we

depart from the immediacy of already having been human75; always practical self-knowledge

of human agents provides the blueprint for conceiving of the problematic animal self76. Recall

the Rabbi’s cat: The problem wasn’t a cat-turning-sapient, but our being confronted with an

apparent cat that can lie; an animal which shares human form in judging its action not as cat-

appropriate but reprehensible (else it need not try to mislead its interlocutor)77, and forces us

to, again, trans-form our nature.78

75 We may focus scientifically on certain kinds of animals, but not the advent of the human self, for the

expression “advent of the human self” is immediately rendered incomprehensible. We can ask when, historically speaking, human selfhood may actually have first occurred on the planet– but we cannot pinpoint the transition itself, neither onto- nor phylogenetically, for our own conceptual apparatus renders the transition, so to speak, invisible: We are always already human.

76 Cf. Karl Marx, Einleitung in die Grundrisse [MEW 43, 39]. 77 Animality and evil: Cf. Hegel, „Das Recht, nichts anzuerkennen, was Ich nicht als vernünftig einsehe, ist das

höchste Recht des Subjekts“ (GPhR §132 [HW 7, 245]).

78 Perhaps this is the gist of it: Suddenly, the anthropocentric perspective of our rational agency, the immediacy of practical certainty, is unsettled, and in attempting to reestablish coherence by integrating yet further parts of our “inorganic body” our natural self-relation is not only sustained but constantly formed and trans-formed.