In his Scienza nuova (1725–1730), the Neapolitan Jean-Baptiste Vico affirms that humanity, in the west, is the only one compatible with its destiny. Lavoisier (1743–1794) declares: ‘Man is a new Prometheus, a second creator’.
Vertical Ape
In 1859, Charles Darwin published The Origin of Species. He demonstrated that ‘man is the co-descendant with other species of some ancient, lower, and extinct form’.
The animal origin of man was sensed at the end of the eighteenth century by Buffon and Linnaeus. In 1809, Lamarck had suggested that the characteristics of human organisation could have been produced by the ‘changes in habits of an ape’ (Philosophie biologique).
Darwin goes further. Using evidence of a taxonomic, morphological and embryological order, he establishes the fact of evolution, whose mechanism is explained by natural selection (which eliminates the weakest) and selective fertility (which favours the multiplication of the best). It shows that species derive from each other, and that man, if he is the last cry of evolution, is not necessarily the last word.
In certain traits of the anatomy of human beings he observes traces of an ancient kinship. The small point on the helix of the ear comes from the primates.442 The semilunar fold of the eye (the ‘third eyelid’) connects us to birds. Darwin cites again the coccyx, the appendix, the large root of the canine teeth, the atrophied muscles of the scalp: all of these are so many vestiges corresponding, in the cultural domain, to the decorative buttons that we wear on our sleeves which have not been used for buttoning for a long time, or the ribbons of hats which become simple ornaments over time.
As soon as Darwin’s works were published, we see what Jean Rostand has called ‘hominid pride’.443
‘Is it truly believable’, asks Wilberforce, bishop of Oxford, ‘that the favourite varieties of turnips could ever become men!’
At a meeting of the British Association, Wilberforce, opposed to Huxley, a disciple of Darwin’s, asked his interlocutor if it is by his grandfather or grandmother that he descends from the ape. Unperturbed, Huxley replied:
‘I would rather descend from an ape than from an imbecile who takes pleasure in confusing a question of which he does not understand the first word’.
A part of the public refuses to suffer the ‘zoological humiliation,’ just as it had refused, in the time of Galilee, the ‘cosmological humiliation’. This was the beginning of the ‘war of the ape’.
The transformist idea would nevertheless rapidly make its way. Broca in France, and Haeckel in Germany, are its first defenders. Today it is unanimous among scholars, even if they are still divided in their evaluation of its scope.
It is now known, as Jean Rostand has written, that ‘in a certain family of small placental mammals, transformations appeared which would lead to the vertical ape, whose forehead would rise towards the stars, and who would seek meaning in the universe’ (Charles Darwin, Gallimard, 1947).
Since the discovery of the remains of Neanderthal man in 1857, human palaeontology has itself made immense progress.
It is commonly believed that the primates appeared at the beginning of the tertiary era, around seventy million years ago, from a primitive strain of insectivores represented today by the genus Tupaia (treeshrews native to Southeast Asia).
The apes (the species apparently closest to ours) come from a strain that separated from the primates twenty or thirty million years ago.
By 1960, the earliest Hominin were still being traced back to the beginning of the Quaternary, that is, about a million years ago. More recent findings (and the implementation of dating methods such as potassium-argon) have led to new assessments. Hominin fossils found north of Kenya, near Lake Turkana, have been dated to five millions years. In 1974, in a field in Hadar in Central Afar (Ethiopia), the three-million-year-old skeleton of a ‘slender’ Australopithecus was unearthed, and named ‘Lucy’ — and in 1975, in the same location, the bones of hominin that lived 3.5 million years ago. Other fossils, such as the ‘Ramapithecus’ (uncovered at Fort Ternan, East Africa), which is fourteen or fifteen million years old, have also been added to our human ancestry.
According to Konrad Lorenz, one can speak of hominisation when three conditions are present: (1) The central representation of space, developed (especially in climbing) from the prehensile use of the hand, which constitutes the principle of all thought. (2) A permanent attitude of curiosity and active exploration, characteristic of a ‘non-specialised’ species. (3) A ‘cultural’ aptitude for self-domestication, creating new degrees of freedom in action.
‘As man possesses the same senses as the lower animals, his fundamental intuitions must be the same’, wrote Darwin, thus paving the way for modern ethology, i.e. the biology of behaviour.
Today, the ensuing theoretical and ideological significance of these discoveries appears considerable.
Against the Philosophies of the Impossible
In L’Humanité, (21 June 1974) Luce Langevin wrote: ‘What distinguishes and privileges the action of man is work’.
Yet we know now that private property is not the result of the division of labour or of a ‘contradiction’ in the relation of the forces of production — as Karl Marx purported. It is, like all phenomena of possession, a natural institution whose origin is lost in the labyrinth of a pre-human heritage.
‘The philosophies of Rousseau, Marx, or Freud’, observes Dr. Pierre Debray-Ritzen, ‘have not yet grasped the explosive importance of what contemporary anthropology and ethology brings: how could Marx have known that property has been marked for hundreds of millions of years in evolution? How could Freud imagine that hierarchy is an institution common to all animal societies and that the tendency to dominate his peers, to become an ‘alpha’, is an ancient instinct which is also hundreds of millions of years old? Would Rousseau have imagined that the Australopithecus africanus, from which we are undoubtedly derived, was a carnivore, and therefore a killer?
Recently, a ‘second school’ of ethologists (almost all American) have attempted to substitute the thesis of the inherentness of the aggressive impulse with another conception, inspired by psychoanalysis, in which aggressiveness is simply a reaction to the ‘frustrations’ of the surrounding environment.
This thesis, which seemed to prevail in the seventh meeting held at Rueil-Malmaison in May 1974, merely resumes the arguments of the old ‘reflexologists’. It is very unconvincing: we know now that the repeated frustration undergone by individuals or groups can lead to total passivity as well as endemic violence.
Other criticisms of Lorenz and Ardrey came from proponents of the ‘philosophies of the impossible’ (existentialism, neo-Marxism, structuralism, the Frankfurt School, anti-psychiatry), by those who moralise the world and only accept existence under the condition that it be justified — forgetting that it is only in death that the selfsame is perfect.
For L. Berkowitz (Aggression, McGraw Hill, 1962), the conclusions of classical ethology revert to saying that ‘civilisation and the moral order must ultimately be founded on strength and not on love and charity’. According to B. F. Skinner, who is the principal theorist of behaviourism, these conclusions ‘encourage an attitude of resigned passivity’.
Robert Ardrey responds with a smile:
‘It must be admitted that no one obeys the territorial imperative as much as a professor of sociology contesting the intrusive hypothesis of biology, according to which man is a territorial animal!’
In The Human Imperative,444 Alexander Alland, Professor at Columbia University, seemed to fuel the debate by claiming to defend man against ‘absolute biological determinism’.
‘Numerous recent, successful works’, he wrote, ‘wanted to convince us that aggression, territoriality, and other sad human behaviours, already exist in lower animal species. Certain biological continuities between man and animal were then overestimated and used as an explanation for the worst aspects of humanity. On the basis of such statements, wars and conflicts eventually ap
pear inevitable’.
In fact, on reading his book, one realises that Alland’s preoccupations are mainly of a social and political nature: his main criticism of Ardrey is that he has shown his hostility ‘to progressives, Marxists, and Freudians’. He explicitly claims ‘the message of Marx’ and asserts that the Soviet system has proven to be ‘stunningly effective’.
Moreover, his tract is largely deficient in its purpose, for neither Robert Ardrey, nor even Lorenz, have ever declared that the study of animal behaviour allowed us to explain everything about man.
Alland himself admits that Lorenz ‘tries to establish a synthesis between the biological heritage and its cultural expression’. As for Ardrey, he writes: ‘The human mind is free, for it neither strictly nor directly obeys instinct. Among all the instinctual problems that rage in man, there is always one which wants to dominate others and win acceptance’.
Nevertheless, the question remains: Is man only an animal — and nothing else?
The Specifically Human Level
The reality of our pre-human heritage is undeniable. It is expressed in the most deeply buried layers of our brain (the palaeocortex). Beyond the species that preceded it, man is the heir to three billion years of life. This immense past corresponds to his biological dimension.
This, however, is not sufficient to characterise the human being. To say that man is an animal is a fact. But how does he differ from other animals?
After centuries of anthropomorphism (even theomorphism), it is important not to fall into pure zoomorphism or biologism.
Regarding the ‘reality’ of man, one can say that it can be apprehended and decomposed into four levels: the microphysical level (energy); the macrophysical level (matter); the biological level (life), and finally a specifically human level, characterised by culture and historical consciousness.
Man shares his belonging to the first three levels of the universe with increasingly restricted ‘parts’. Only the last one properly belongs to him.
Certain fashionable ideologies attempt to reduce these different levels to one another by erasing the emergent qualities that characterise and differentiate each level. These are the ideological reductionists.
All the Instincts
Materialism reduces man to his material dimension. Its logic is that of physical systems, governed by the second law of thermodynamics: it is a logic of homogeneity, and therefore, in the final analysis, a logic of the growing entropy and of death.
Pure biologism (or biological materialism) has the merit of placing the accent on aspects of the human being that are far too underestimated today: heredity, ethnicity, and animal inheritance. It also remains, however, beyond what can and must be a complete description of the human phenomenon. It does not, on its own, allow interpretation.
In their work, ethologists note a number of striking analogies between the animal and human kingdoms. However, sometimes they compare man to the chimpanzee, sometimes to the Ugandan kob, sometimes to the giraffe and the gudgeon, if not to the squirrel or the seagull. These comparisons show that man is less the descendant of one branch of evolution than the heir of the totality of the animal kingdom. Man is not ‘devoid of instincts’, as the American Ashley asserts. On the contrary, he has all the instincts. This forces him to make choices — to actualise this or that instinct to the detriment of others.
After having shown that man, in his biological dimension (and in no other) is subject, like the other animals, to the ‘natural law’ of living systems, Konrad Lorenz (whatever his opponents have said) has always taken care to show that this is what makes the specificity of the human phenomenon.
He also refers to one of the masters of ‘philosophical anthropology’ (philosophische Anthropologie), the sociologist and philosopher Arnold Gehlen, who died in 1976, and was author of seminal works which unfortunately have not been translated into French: Der Mensch. Seine Natur und seine Stellung in der Welt (1940 and 1966), Urmensch und Spätkultur (1956), Die Seele im technischen Zeitalter (1957), Anthropologische Forschung (1961), Moral und Hypermoral (1969), Einblicke (1975), etc.445
Arnold Gehlen
According to Gehlen, whose thought lies at the antipodes of Rousseau’s, one of the characteristic traits of man is that he is not adapted to a particular environment, but to all environments. This enables him to be ‘open to the entire world’ and to build his environment himself. To use one of Ernst Jünger’s expressions, it can be said that this ‘openness’ is oriented towards the ‘total mobilisation of the world’. Man, therefore, has the possibility of choice, and by consequence a freedom which belongs only to him. In this he is distinguished from other species, which, being subject to their own environment, are narrowly specialised. Man, however, is the ‘specialist of non-specialisation’.
‘Imagine’, writes Konrad Lorenz, ‘a triathlon whose requirements were a thirty-kilometer run, a four-meter climb, a dive twenty-meters deep with the task of bringing an sunken object back to the surface: there is no mammal that performs these deeds, which are within the capacity of any average citizen.
Even the term instinct is inappropriate when it concerns man.
What characterises instinct in the animal is that its object, as well as the way it is expressed (that is, the sequence of events arising from the execution impulses), are ‘programmed’ in advance: the wolf, the tiger, and the baboon know instinctively how and upon what their aggression should be exercised, the food they need to eat, how and on whom they must exercise their sexual power, etc. For man, this is not the case. The plurality of instincts within him correspond to a certain number of impulses without a predetermined object. It is still necessary for him choose which of these he can possibly dominate; and he can give an almost infinite number of concrete expressions to them.
‘The response to an impulse’, writes Alexander Alland, ‘is not as rigidly modelled as the response to an instinct. The fact that a man has an impulse dictated by hunger, for example, tells us nothing about how he will get food, or what he will eat’.
While the animal is completely subject to its belonging to a given species, man, on the contrary, is ‘partially free from the constraints of the species’ (Spengler). His neocortex can superimpose his will upon the impulses, emotions, and the moods produced by the palaeocortex. The domestic, reasoned consciousness in him feels it. His freedom of choice is preserved at all times.
Nietzsche’s remark is thus authenticated: ‘Man’s sickness is man, he suffers from himself: the consequence of a violent divorce from his animal past’.446
On the other hand (and Lorenz quotes Gehlen again), man is an ‘incomplete being’: his non-specialisation is explained by the fact that his capacity for adaptation endures throughout his whole life, whereas in other species it is restricted to the short period of infancy.
The small animal, left to itself, can very quickly manage on its own. He knows instinctively what he needs and what he must avoid. At thirteen weeks a chimpanzee begins to masticate pieces of solid food. At seventeen or eighteen months he is familiar with all the ‘techniques’ of adults. The small human is very different. It has to learn everything. When we raise a three-month-old baby with a small monkey of the same age: in every area, the monkey outperforms the child.
The higher one climbs the scale of organised beings, the longer the maturation, the more time it takes to make a complete individual.
Great apes reach the age of puberty between seven and twelve years (for a lifespan of forty to fifty years). It occurs in men between eleven and fifteen years — up to seventeen years in the Nordic countries. (It should be noted that in men, maturation lasts longer than in women).
The precocity of the animal world goes hand in hand with a development that ‘locks in’ more rapidly. ‘The proverb’, writes Lorenz, ‘that an old dog does not learn new tricks also applies without restriction to all inquisitive, non-specialised animals. An old black crow, or an old rat, has absolutely nothing of the openness to the world which, in
young animals, resonates so closely with the “human”’.
Man is therefore a persistently juvenile being. For him, the ‘learning’ period is prolonged almost indefinitely. His mind remains an ‘open system’ until his final moments. We become men only because we have benefited from a very long childhood.
To describe this ‘persistent juvenility’, which is peculiar to humans, zoologists speak of foetalisation or neoteny.
‘The distinctive character of man’, writes Lorenz, ‘the preservation of an active and creative capacity for adaptation to the environment, is a phenomenon of neoteny’.
This superiority is responsible for both the greatness and also the extreme fragility of the human race. When the crayfish is moulting, it must abandon its shell: at that moment it is more vulnerable than ever. Man is continually ‘moulting’ his whole life. He can always imagine differently and want better. He creates, accomplishes, and surpasses himself, but perpetually puts himself in danger. ‘Man’, says Gehlen, is a ‘risky being’: he has ‘by his very constitution, a chance of losing himself’.
There is also a close connection between the neoteny and the enduring nature of curiosity and imagination.
Human thought is essentially imaginative. It develops without the aid of concrete objects, and ‘builds’ by simple curiosity. Man can learn new motor coordinations, for example, without having practiced the exercise himself. He can express feelings that he has not felt himself. His knowledge is nourished not only by experiences, but also by intuitions, analyses, deductions. We play with the concepts that our mind contains. (‘Man is perfectly man only when he plays’, says Schiller).
Ultimately, man is the only being who is conscious of being conscious. Animals know that they exist, but they do not know that they will die. They are conscious of death only when it seizes them. Men, and by extension cultures, know that they are mortal. Their ‘double consciousness’ is a historical consciousness: it puts time into perspective.
Man Draws Everything from Himself
Darwin said ‘free will is to mind what chance is to matter. This is our arrogance, our deep admiration for ourselves’.
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