The kiss, mark of tenderness or of simple social sympathy, derives from pecking. Laughter probably developed through the ritualisation of a threatening motion, reoriented. (To find the same things funny promotes collusion and strengthens mutual ties against outsiders).
‘In analysing accelerated takes of people eating’, Eibl-Eibesfeldt reports, ‘we were struck by the fact that the individual, after one or two mouthfuls, raised their face and looked around, as if to explore the horizon. Baboons and chimpanzees have the same behaviour. It is probably a warning behaviour against enemies, which man still possesses in his phylogenetic heritage, which takes place automatically, even though there is not much danger today for man when he is eating’.
Konrad Lorenz has remarked that the characteristic features of infant morphology (prominent bulging forehead, head clearly too big compared to the body, eyes in the lower part of the head, rounded cheeks, short and chubby extremities) are found in the puppy as well as in the rabbit or chick, and that seeing them produces an innate protective behaviour in the adult, alongside a positive judgment that is always identical (the baby is declared ‘cute’).
This is what ethologists call the ‘reaction to the baby’. It proves the biological origin of certain aesthetic or moral behaviours and judgments.
‘All human beings’, says Paul Ekman, director of the Human Interaction Laboratory in San Francisco, ‘have a nervous and muscular program that binds a given emotion to certain movements of the facial muscles’ (Psychologie, January 1976). This program is the same in all cultures. It therefore does not result from a process of learning. On the contrary, these human facial expressions lie in the direct prolongation of animal mimicry. (This is demonstrated again by Eibl-Eibesfeldt in L’homme programmé. L’inné, facteur déterminant du comportement humain. Flammarion, 1975).405
On Aggression
Like all higher primates, man is a social animal: he lives in a group. Better: his integration with a group conditions the discovery of his own identity, that is to say, the specific place he occupies within the group. As such, man is the seat of instinctive impulses that serve the formation and survival of the group: associative tendency, tendency to maintain individual and social distance, territoriality, sense of hierarchy.
‘Since man is a social animal’, Darwin observed, ‘it is very likely that he inherited tendencies towards loyalty to his companions and obedience to the leader of his tribe’ (The Descent of Man).
In On Aggression,406 Lorenz points out that: ‘In a community of higher animals, organised life cannot develop without a principle of order, a social hierarchy’.
In the primitive conditions of natural selection, ‘rejection of the stranger’ is another condition of the survival of the group: all animals, and chimpanzees in particular, attack those among them that they perceive as ‘different’ — even a monkey struck with polio whose behaviour seems strange to them.
In On Aggression, one of his first books published in France (the one that attracted the greatest attention), Lorenz demonstrates that aggression in all living species is a fundamental, innate impulse in the same vein as sexuality, hunger, fear, and so on. And it is the very expression of life: every organism, as it gradually develops itself, imposes itself to the detriment of the environment that it ‘attacks’.
The philosopher Immanuel Kant wrote, as early as 1784, in his Idea for a Universal History: ‘Thanks be to Nature, then, for the incompatibility, for heartless competitive vanity, for the insatiable desire to possess and to rule! Without them, all the excellent natural capacities of humanity would forever sleep, undeveloped’.407
However, we must not confuse aggression (which is practiced within a species) with predation (which occurs between several species). The first, not the second, implies competition. The lion is no more in competition with the antelope that it devours than the cow is with the grass upon which it feeds. Conversely, it would be wrong to believe that aggression begins with the higher primates. ‘Herbivores’, says Eibl-Eibesfeldt, are by no means more peaceful towards their fellows. Bulls fight no less intensely than rabbits, sparrows, hamsters, or cats’.
Freud, who explained physiology through pathology, evoked the ‘death instinct’ (destrudo) to speak of aggressiveness.
Lorenz, who explains the pathology by physiology, rejects the Freudian interpretation: ‘Attentive observation of the behaviour of children aged three to ten years’, he writes, ‘shows that they commit an average of a hundred aggressive acts per day, regardless of the culture to which they belong. The boys observed are much more aggressive than the girls, and this aggressiveness is greatest in toddlers (two to four years). It then decreases. Such a constant confirms its instinctive, innate character’.
Aggressive tendencies are neither good nor bad. Or rather, they are good and bad according to the circumstances.
‘Aggression is not the diabolical and destructive principle that psychoanalysis discerns in it, but an essential part of the organisation of instincts for the protection of life’.
Not only is aggression the condition for the survival of societies (being understood that the imperatives for survival themselves impose limits to aggression), but it constitutes a selection that seems to be the origin of social sympathy. No personal connection appears in species without aggression: herring and finches, who live in very harmonious groups, are unaware of any familial relationship or even dependency. Nietzsche said: ‘Great despisers are also great venerators’. This goes even in the animal kingdom. We know love in proportion to which we know hate.
The Sense of Territory
‘In man’, specifies Eibl-Eibesfeldt, the suppression of aggression, ‘an important driving force for cultural development’, would very probably lead to the disappearance of the spirit of initiative. The spirit of competition, the taste for risk, the sense of honour, the will to undertake, and even industrial dynamism are all, like war, ‘by-products’ of an aggressive drive inscribed in the most delicate structures of the organism. To attack this pulse would be tantamount to depriving the species of its taste for struggle, its will to live. To condemn it to death.
By examining depth psychology, Sigmund Freud had the merit of seeking to identify some of our archaic impulses. But before long, it was the sexual impulse that his efforts centred upon. Recent studies, however, have shown that sexuality is not the principal preoccupation of species such as the gorilla, the baboon, or the chimpanzee. It forms the axis of their societies even less. For most species, the conquest of hierarchical symbols or plots of land is more frequently the object of competition than sexual partners. In the history of humanity, a small number of men have died for love. A great number have given their lives to defend their homeland.
The sense of territory (the territorial imperative) is of particular importance.
‘Even within a family’, writes Robert Ardrey, ‘each person has his own individual domain. The boundaries of ownership for each family are even more clearly marked, and this “natural right” is recognised by legislators. No one may enter a stranger’s apartment without specific authorisation, and if he does, he commits home invasion. Every crossing of the territorial boundaries requires special ceremonies in order to remain unpunished. Even when we visit friends, we follow a certain ritual ultimately destined to appease aggression, for example by bringing gifts, and we find the equivalent of this in the ceremonies of appeasement in animal greetings.’
‘A car in urban life’, he adds, ‘is a very obvious form of mobile territory, as is confirmed by the resolve to defend it, manifested both by the driver and his dog. The territorial borders formed by fenders and bumpers isolate the car owners to the point that even in a common traffic jam, one sees a mosaic of territories whose owners, even if they do not get angry, ostensibly ignore each other’ (La loi naturelle, Stock, 1971).408
After On Aggression, Konrad Lorenz published Man Meets Dog,409 Evolution and Modification of Behavior,410 Essays on Animal and Human Behavior,411 and more. Authors
such as Robert Ardrey (African Genesis),412 Irenäeus Eibl-Eibesfeldt (Programmed Man),413 Anthony Storr (Human Aggression),414 Desmond Morris (The Naked Ape),415 and others, cite him constantly.
The Essays on Animal and Human Behaviour are probably his most important work. This title brings together five studies published between 1935 and 1954. Lorenz talks about the formation of instinct, the habits of crows, and the manner in which graylag geese roll their eggs. Wrens, red-gorges, wolves, and muskrats: Konrad Lorenz lives in a world of paw sounds and birdsongs, like city children dream about. He knows all the animals. When they are with him, the jackdaws, the rabbits, and the bullfinches seem to speak. They tell their everyday lives. And the scholar draws the lesson from it.
A ‘Specific Environment’
‘I want to show’, he writes, ‘the heritage of the animal in contemporary man’. For if the animals are a little human, it is because humans are also animals. Lorenz warns us against ‘anthropomorphism’, which consists in judging our ‘inferior brothers’ according to criteria that is too-human. Biologically speaking, the ant is no more ‘selfless’ than the bulldog — and the cuckoo is as ‘tender’ as the squirrel. Their behaviour escapes moral categories. It is driven by instinct.
To explain the presence of identical, rudimentary moral behaviours in all human societies, three types of explanation have been advanced: the metaphysical explanation by ‘natural right’; the historical explanation, which presupposes very ancient (and very unlikely) contacts between societies; and the psychoanalytic explanation, recently supported by Albert Ehrenzweig, which traces the ‘sense of rightness’ back to typical early childhood experiences.
Underlining the inadequacies of all these hypotheses, Konrad Lorenz argues that the ‘mysterious feeling that distinguishes good from evil comes primarily from characteristic innate behaviours’.
‘We can’, he writes, ‘consider as scientifically verified the fact that the Homo sapiens species possesses a system of highly differentiated behaviours which serve to eliminate parasites dangerous to society, and analogous to the defense system of cells through antibodies (…) In most cases, the original active impulsion is produced by the application of innate patterns and hereditary impulses’.
‘What psychopathology calls “poverty of affect” (Gemütsarmut)’, he adds, ‘or blindness to respect for values (P. Schröder), most certainly rests on genetic foundations, and probably on the failure of relational, ethical, and aesthetic patterns’.
The influence of the biologist Jakob von Uexküll (1864–1944) is felt here on Lorenz’s approach. Author of numerous works published since 1920 (Umwelt und Innenwelt der Tiere, 1921, Theoretische Biologie, 1928, Streifzüge durch die Umwelten von Tieren und Menschen, 1934 and 1940, etc.) and a famous essay on the ‘Biology of the state’ (Staatsbiologie, Anatomy, Physiologie, Pathologie des Staates, 1920 and 1933), von Uexküll is one of the principal theorists of ‘organic epistemology’. We owe to him a very fruitful definition of the ‘specific environment’ (Umwelt)416 of living systems.
In von Uexküll, the word Umwelt refers to the individual environment, the ‘phenomenal’ surroundings such as they are perceived, and therefore subjectively constituted, for every organism according to the sensory-motor abilities of its species. In effect, each species only perceives a particular and limited form of the world with its sensory organs. And it is these perceptions of their environment that serve to ‘characterise’ it for the individuals (to give it a meaning) and, as a consequence, to adopt such and such a behaviour. Man, of course, is no exception: he perceives the world in a way which is not that of the dog, which is not that of the bee, and so forth. (What we perceive as colours will be perceived in other species as frequencies, rhythms, etc.). Thanks to our instruments of measurement, we can refine our perceptions, but these do not become objective (or universal) for all. ‘All the characteristics of objects’, wrote von Uexküll, ‘even if we decompose them into their ultimate elements, atoms and electrons, will always remain perceptual characteristics of our senses and representations’.
From this perspective, the universe, which is the totality of specific environments, appears as an interlacing of lived worlds and perceived worlds, where ‘active space’, ‘tactile space,’ and ‘visual space’, while complementing each other, can also contradict. There are as many worldviews as there are forms of life.
Consequently, ‘life’ should no longer be understood as the whole that is formed by living beings, but rather as the whole that these living beings form with their Umwelten, their ‘specific environments’. As for the environments, they are no longer studied according to the aspect that they have for us, but, for the first time, according to the aspect that they have for the studied species: comparing the organism to a ‘house’ and the specific environment to the ‘garden’ that surrounds it, von Uexküll strives to understand the garden only under the aspect that it assumes for the inhabitant of the house.
The Whole and the Part
Konrad Lorenz, in the same spirit, published a text in 1950 on The Whole and the Part in Animal and Human Society,417 where he takes a firm stand against the mechanists and the behaviouralists, partisans of a purely analytical (‘atomistic’) and reductionist approach to biological reality.
‘Their approach’, he explains, ‘consists in isolating the various elements of a system without seeing that the particularities of the whole are not able to be reduced to the sum of the peculiarities of the parts, but that they also include those which result from the arrangement of the parts. By demonstrating their ‘incapacity to grasp the nature of the organic totality as a system of practically universal reciprocal causal links’, the adherents of reductionism are hard pressed to adequately explain ‘emergent properties’, and from this fact, implicitly consolidate the most irrational theses of ‘animism’ and metaphysics.
But Lorenz also criticises the equally excessive views of the proponents of ‘Gestalt psychology’, which have only tended to see the totality while neglecting the parts.
‘Citing H. Werner, according to whom ‘man, insofar as he belongs to a supra-individual unit, possesses qualities which are due only to his belonging to this totality and which are only comprehensible from the essence of this totality’, he recalls that individuals are not interchangeable, and that it is still necessary to distinguish among ‘collective traits’ those that belong to the sociocultural environment and those which are innate.
It notably fails to fall into the Marxist type of conception, in which man would be the ‘agent’ of the masses — and the individual of the structures.
*
L’agression. Une histoire naturelle du mal, a study by Konrad Lorenz. Flammarion, 314 pages.418
Essais sur le comportement animal et humain, a study by Konrad Lorenz. Seuil, 483 pages.419
Ethologie. Biologie du comportement, a study by Irenäus Eibl-Eibesfeldt. NEB-Ed. Scientists (B. P. 3,78350 Jouy-en-Josas), 576 pages.420
*
Ethology has undergone considerable development in recent years. After Lorenz, a ‘second generation’ of ethologists have emerged, mainly in the German and Anglo-Saxon speaking countries. One of its principal representatives is Professor Irenäus Eibl-Eibesfeldt. After Ethology: The Biology of Behaviour and Against Aggression,421 he published The Preprogrammed Man422 and The Biology of Peace and War.423
In The Preprogrammed Man, Eibl-Eibesfeldt writes: ‘It is often said that man is an “instinctive being”, which is true if we refer to the relation between the cultural tradition and the innate, but it is probably false in the absolute. In human behaviour, the role of phylogenetic adaptations is no less than in other higher mammals. In fact, the case of man even calls for a greater number of phylogenetic adaptations: one only has to think only of the disposition of man to learn languages. To attribute a negligible importance to the innate in human behaviour — as some still do today — would be to disavow scientific observations’.
He adds: ‘Today in communit
ies we are trying to raise children in groups without any connection to the parents, by departing from the mistaken idea that individualised relationships are at the origin of any egocentric attitude. One thus hopes to raise men without discrimination who are made for the collectivity, while completely forgetting that the child has a need to connect to his mother or a substitute, because he is phylogenetically programmed thus, and because a repression of the need to establish an individualised relationship has the effect of deprivation’.
In the same work, Professor Eibl-Eibesfeldt shows that the existence of hierarchies in human societies plays a powerful role in the inhibition of aggressive impulses. ‘Hierarchisation’, he says, ‘seems to be a mechanism designed to neutralise aggression within a group; in this respect, it can be seen as an adaptation’. We can conclude that egalitarianism implies a greater intraspecific violence, and that its application would give social competition the form of merciless struggle.
On the origins and development of behavioural biology, see the special issue of Nouvel école (Nr. 25–26, winter 1974–75) dedicated to ‘Ethology’. (This issue contains an important interview with Konrad Lorenz). On the œuvre of Lorenz, cf. the study by Heinrich Meier, Konrad Lorenz (in Criticòn, München, Nr. 37, September–October 1976); and the book by Alec Nisbett, Konrad Lorenz: A Biography (New York: Harcourt Bruce Jovannvich, 1977).
Ritual Behaviours
On one hand, a lizard that inflates itself like an ox, the triumphal dance of a greylag goose, the prenuptial offering of a spider to its spouse. On the other, social conventions, children’s games, voodoo, the symbolism of colours, and the United Nations. This is not a random inventory in the style of Prévert, but rather different aspects of a same reality: ritualisation.
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