Who Am I and If So How Many? (12 page)

The situation was dire. Three adults lunged at a small and vulnerable girl named Fawn, while her mother and sisters stood rooted to the spot with fear. The three assailants, who far surpassed Fawn in strength, bit Fawn on all sides in a brutal attack, regularly turning to glare at Fawn’s mother and sisters so as to keep them away. Fawn was beside herself. Eventually, another bystander interceded, and the assailants dispersed, leaving Fawn on the ground. She lay there for quite a while, screaming. In time, she assumed a seated position, but she remained hunched over, looking wretched and exhausted. Her older sister came over and put an arm around her. Fawn was too dazed to react, and her sister gently prodded her, as though attempting to wake her up, then embraced her again, and the two sisters cuddled together.

This dramatic scene is a true story that took place in the 1980s in Madison, Wisconsin, but the police did not intervene, and no newspaper carried the story. Frans de Waal, the interceding bystander, was the only witness able to provide an account of the events surrounding the attack. The reason is simple. De Waal is an ethologist, and the attack on Fawn took place in the Wisconsin National Primate Research Center. Fawn, her family, and her assailants were rhesus monkeys.

De Waal has been working with monkeys for the past thirty years. His early studies of chimpanzees in the Arnhem Zoo in Holland, when very little was known about their patterns of behavior, revealed the astonishing extent to which they are social animals who require life in a community. He learned that chimpanzees cheat, lie, and deceive one another, but that they are also tender and affectionate and establish complex social
relationships
. De Waal chose the revealing title
Chimpanzee
Politics
for his book about the chimpanzees of Arnhem.

Chimpanzees are not the only apes capable of feeling sympathy and affection. Fawn’s sister – a rhesus monkey – embraced her and cuddled with her when she evidently felt her sister’s pain and wanted to ease her plight. Although the genetic difference between rhesus monkeys and humans amounts to approximately 3 percent, rhesus monkeys display signs of empathy and ‘moral’ behavior. But where do these feelings come from, and why do they exist?

The question is more difficult than it first appears. Charles Darwin’s mid-nineteenth-century proof that people are close relatives of primates, and hence animals, provided a persuasive explanation for the origins of human ‘evilness’: man can be evil because he descended from animals. Darwin used the phrases ‘struggle for existence’ and ‘survival of the fittest’ to describe evolution. Although he had not invented these concepts himself, he was the first to apply them to the way all living creatures, from a blade of grass to an ant to a man, compete with one another and among themselves. In simple terms, survival of the fittest means that there are billions upon billions of organisms whizzing through the world with a single mission: to assert their genetic makeup against all others, to the detriment, suffering, or even death of others. And every human being is part of this evil and immoral game.

But Darwin was a very cautious individual. He acknowledged that the principle he had come upon was somewhat questionable, and he stopped short of drawing conclusions about human interaction from his insights into biology. Others, however, have
not been as cautious, claiming that only the best and strongest should survive and that the sickly and weak should simply be killed. Darwin’s evidence that man is essentially an animal was greeted with alarm by philosophers. It forces us to question what human nature really is. When Rousseau spoke about ‘nature,’ he had in mind nature as an ideal state of unalloyed happiness. But was nature actually good? Wasn’t it also barbaric, ruthless, and cruel?

In 1893, the auditorium in Oxford was packed when Thomas Henry Huxley, a close friend of Darwin, gave a lecture with the grand title ‘Evolution and Ethics.’ The crowd hung on the great biologist’s every word. Nature, Huxley proclaimed, is not good, but cruel, perfidious, and utterly indifferent to man. Man is undeniably an animal that owes its existence to chance and to a succession of apelike animal species, not to a ‘master plan’ guided by clever reason. If there was only chaos and no master plan, Huxley concluded, the will to be good or to act rationally cannot be a characteristic of nature.

In Huxley’s view, Rousseau’s ‘innate goodness’ was utter nonsense. Animals and humans were not good by nature, but amoral. But even so, Huxley could not deny that humans were capable of moral behavior. In England, where he lived, there were laws against murder and theft. Law and order enforced by the state meant that people could go out into the street without always having to fear for their lives.

But where did this order come from? Huxley concluded that civilization and culture were meant to harness man’s primal, animalistic drives, which was the exact opposite of Rousseau’s view that man was innately good and civilization bad. For Huxley, man was bad, but civilization kept man in check. Morality, Huxley stated, is not a natural characteristic of man: ‘The ethical progress of society depends not on imitating the cosmic process, still less in running away from it, but in combating it.’ Frans de Waal has added lyrical punch to Huxley’s argument by calling society a ‘sword forged by
Homo sapiens
to slay the dragon of its animal past.’

Anyone who, like Rousseau, was convinced that man was good by nature found it necessary to explain the rise of evil. Huxley faced the opposite question. If man was bad by nature, where does ‘the ethical progress of society’ come from? Since Huxley was not religious, he did not find its origins in God. If there is nothing good in man by nature, how was it possible for the interaction of all those bestial people to have led to a reasonably well regulated society? Where does morality come from – if not from human nature? And if man is not moral by nature, why does he have the capacity to act morally?

The question is thus whether there is something within man that impels him to behave well toward others. If Darwin and Huxley had known as much about apes and primates as Frans de Waal, they would have had an easier time coming up with an explanation, and terrible misunderstandings might have been avoided. Primatology has shown that there is no contradiction between morality and evolution. Morality, which strikes some people as a stupid error on the part of nature, which otherwise recognizes only the right of the stronger, is actually a biologically ingenious adaptation. Thirty years of observing apes have convinced de Waal that being good-natured and helping others are behaviors that can bring great rewards to both the individual and the group as a whole. The more that apes help and care for one another, the better the whole community fares. The manner of social support varies
tremendously
. Even the four major great apes (orangutans, chimpanzees, bonobos, and gorillas) are quite different in this respect. While sex in chimpanzees nearly always entails power, dominance, and subjugation, bonobos use their very frequent sexual intercourse to dispel tension quickly. Bonobos indulge in sex virtually all day long, especially in the so-called missionary position, with the partners face to face. (Strictly speaking, it ought to be called the ‘bonobo position,’ because bonobos used it long before missionaries.)

The ‘struggle for existence’ does not occur among isolated animals – Darwin and Huxley were wrong on that score. With rare
exceptions, humans are not merciless lone warriors; most of us are also members of a family and of larger social groups, in which we seek not merely to supplant others but also to care for those within the group. The ability to think and act on behalf of another person is known as altruism. Great apes also exhibit many facets of altruistic behavior. De Waal distinguishes an altruism
aimed at
inclusive fitness
, such as the instinctive love a mother has for her offspring, from
reciprocal
altruism, which may have been the origin of human morality: one ape helps another in order to be helped when in need, refraining from certain bad behaviors so that the others are not bad in return. Evidently the rule ‘Do unto others as you would have others do unto you’ applies to great apes as well.

Human weaknesses, aggressions, deceit, and selfishness are not the only holdovers of our distant past as apelike creatures; our ‘noble’ characteristics are part of our initial biological nature as well. Rousseau surmised that the capacity to be good was a primeval instinct and that our natural self-love forces us to be good in accord with this instinct. For Rousseau, good behavior was the only conduct that came naturally to man. De Waal considers affection, consideration, and kindness typical primate instincts, but he finds that they are in steady competition with aggression, mistrust, and egoism. People and apes are therefore neither ‘good’ nor ‘bad.’ They are capable of both behaviors, and the one comes as naturally as the other. But if the ability to be good is just one instinct among others, who or what ensures that people use that ability? What makes it a binding principle in human society?

The year was 1730. A mother and her six-year-old son were taking an evening stroll near the gates of Königsberg (now Kaliningrad in Russia), a cosmopolitan town on the Baltic Sea. Lovingly and in great detail, the mother explained to her son what she knew about nature, about plants and herbs, animals and stones. The streets were dimly lit, and it grew dark out. The woman showed her attentive son the starry sky above them. They looked up, spellbound, into the infinite distance. The boy was fascinated. ‘Two things,’ he later wrote, ‘fill the mind with ever new and increasing wonder and awe, the oftener and more steadily we reflect on them: the starry heavens above me and the moral law within me … I see them before me, and I associate them directly with the consciousness of my own existence.’ As it turned out, astronomy and moral philosophy were two areas in which he would make great strides.

The boy’s name was Immanuel Kant, and his happy childhood under the care of his devout and well-educated mother came to an end when she died just after he had turned thirteen. The slender boy with clear blue eyes would grieve deeply for a long time to come. His father, a leather cutter, did everything in his power to give his sensitive son a good start in life. He sent him to the
Friedrichskollegium, the best high school in their town. There, and later at the University of Königsberg, the young man proved to be a talented student. He could not tear himself away from the observatory on the roof of the school building, where he often spent long evenings gazing at the stars. At the age of sixteen, he passed the entrance examination for the University of Königsberg. Although he was supposed to be studying theology, he spent most of his time on mathematics, philosophy, and physics. In his spare time, he excelled as a cook and a gambler. He was an outstanding billiards player, and although he spoke softly and tended to mumble, he was a welcome guest at parties in Königsberg. His great passion, however, remained the cosmos. Kant’s professor of logic and metaphysics, Martin Knutzen, supported him to the best of his ability. His reflecting telescope – the same kind the great physicist Isaac Newton had used – entranced Kant, who read Newton’s seminal work about the structure of the universe; immersed himself in numbers, charts, and calculations; and derived his own model of the physical world. The slim volume he wrote on this subject had a colossal objective and a commanding title to match:
Universal Natural History and Theory of the Heavens
. Dispensing with mathematical calculations, he attempted to fathom the make-up of the world purely by means of his own deductions. The project was as strange as it was ambitious. Although scientists barely acknowledged his book, Kant judged his method a success, and he retained it for other areas of inquiry, certain that many of his insights were correct. Long after his death, his theories were indeed substantiated. He envisioned the solar system we have today as having originated solely by means of a process of attraction and repulsion of the elements – the first attempt to explain the genesis of the planetary system without the hand of God.

Although his published views were forceful and progressive, Kant was flummoxed when it came to planning his career. His postgraduate path was anything but straight and narrow. He frittered away nine years of his life as a private tutor and waited
until what was then considered the ripe old age of thirty-one to complete his dissertation, which was on the subject of fire. He lectured at the university for minimal pay, and his professional development went nowhere until he reached the age of forty. Kant was highly gifted, fiercely intelligent, and interested in nearly everything: theology and pedagogy, natural law and geography, anthropology and logic, metaphysics and mathematics, mechanics and physics. Eventually the university offered him a professorship, but – to his horror – in the field of poetry, which would require him to hold ceremonial addresses interspersed with his own poems. Kant turned it down. It took him a full fifteen years of teaching to attain a coveted professorship in logic and metaphysics.

Realizing that his shaky health would not leave him much more time to make his mark on philosophy, Kant introduced rigid routines into his day. His life became the epitome of boredom. The writer Heinrich Heine later quipped that the life story of Kant is hard to describe, for he had neither a life nor a story. His servant was instructed to wake him up at five in the morning. He took a walk at the same time every day, and he went to bed at ten in the evening. He wound up living a long life, and was nearly eighty when he died. His daily routine seemed like one long protest song against life. But the books he wrote over the course of his thirty-four years as a philosopher were anything but boring. Many consider them the most significant oeuvre in German-language philosophy.

Kant did not regard the human mind the way a naturalist or a theologian would, as many philosophers had before him, but rather like a legal scholar in search of ‘laws.’ As a young man, he had attempted to decipher the ‘systematic constitution’ of the cosmos. As a philosopher, he endeavored to find rules and patterns from which to derive binding laws of the human mind. To do so, he first had to address what may be the most important question in philosophy: what can I know, and how can I be sure of what I know? Like Descartes 150 years earlier, Kant decided to seek the certainty of knowledge not in things but in human thought. Kant
called this philosophical approach, which explores the
preconditions
of our knowledge, transcendental idealism. But he stopped far short of Descartes in concluding where this knowledge could lead. Descartes had believed that human thought could discern the ‘true’ nature of things, whereas Kant felt that this ‘true’ nature was wholly inaccessible to man. And why should it be accessible? The ‘order of nature,’ he posited, is ‘ordered’ by the human brain. Just as colors are produced not by nature, but by our eyes and our optic nerves, so the human mind creates an order and imposes it on nature. Man thus has a perceptive and cognitive capability to structure the world. ‘The understanding,’ he wrote in his
Prolegomena to Any Future Metaphysics
, ‘does not draw its (a priori) laws from nature, but prescribes them to it.’ Kant then applied this productive and modern idea to the question of morality.

He proceeded very cautiously at first. He did not think much of instincts, which Rousseau had believed in, and steered clear of simplistic classifications and the question of whether man was good or bad ‘by nature.’ Man, he argued, was equipped with a set of templates to grasp the world, and these evidently included a template for moral conduct.

Man’s ability to be good made such a deep impression on Kant that he conferred a very special mark of distinction on man: ‘human dignity.’ He believed that man’s freedom to act morally placed him above all other creatures. No other animal, Kant argued, is capable of deciding and acting freely. And because man is the greatest of all beings, there is nothing that counts more than a human life. The phrase ‘human dignity’ was not Kant’s invention; it had first been used three hundred years earlier by the Italian philosopher Giovanni Pico della Mirandola, one of the great Renaissance thinkers. Man, Pico della Mirandola asserted, is an autonomous being with the dignity to think and act freely, so his decisions and ambitions are of his own devising.

Kant was not concerned with whether man was good by nature, but rather with how the fact of being human
obliged
man to be good. Kant explored the faculty of human reason to discover a
natural principle that makes morality possible. He reasoned that neither talent nor character nor life circumstances assured
goodness
– the will did. The only good thing about man was his good will. If people wish to get along, they need to abide by good will, not just as a motivation, but as an unshakable law. Kant called this adherence to good conduct the ‘categorical imperative.’ In its best known formulation in the
Critique of Practical Reason
, this imperative reads: ‘Act only according to that maxim whereby you can at the same time will that it should become a universal law.’

In other words, Kant believed that since man is capable of
wanting
to be good, man
should
be good. For Kant, this conclusion did not reflect a morality that he himself had drawn up, but was simply a logical function of human reason. Moral law inhered within man, and Kant was merely analyzing it, the way he had analyzed the cosmos earlier in his life. For him, the obligation to be good was a natural phenomenon, like the sky and the stars, so the categorical imperative was universally valid, and it could and should be applied by all. People who heed the moral law within them are good people who do good deeds, even if their good intentions lead to bad outcomes. If the will is good, Kant believed, the action is morally justified.

Kant was quite satisfied with his system of thought, although he later worried whether the system he had worked out so carefully would stand up to biological scrutiny. He finally convinced himself that the ‘schematism of our understanding’ is likely to be ‘an art concealed in the depths of the human soul, whose real modes of activity nature is hardly likely ever to allow us to discover, and to have open to our gaze.’ His regimented life offered him refuge from his relatively mild anxieties. At the age of sixty, he could afford his own house, a servant, and a cook, but in the years to follow, his formerly sharp brain was weakened by Alzheimer’s, and he moved from increasing forgetfulness to a complete loss of orientation. On February 12, 1804, at 11 a.m., he died in an advanced state of dementia.

At the time of Kant’s death, his renown was already
considerable
, and his fame would continue to grow. Many philosophers compare his achievements in philosophy to those of Copernicus, who showed that the earth revolves around the sun. Kant likewise overthrew previous conceptions of how we understand the world, demonstrating that our understanding scans the world according to its own set structures and claiming that each individual carries within him a logical scheme that obliges him to be good.

But is there actually a logical scheme of this kind, a ‘moral law’ within us? If there is, how did it get there, and where is it? To find out why man should be good, we first need to know why man strives to be good in the first place. Kant was never able to address this point. Throughout his life, he was quite taken with science, and he would have loved to gain scientific insight into how the ‘schematism of our understanding’ functions and have it ‘unveiled before our eyes.’ But in Kant’s day, no one was studying primates, and neuroscience was in its infancy. The German physician Franz Joseph Gall had just begun to measure the brain, but his maps of brain functions were as bizarre as the nautical charts of the Atlantic before Columbus, and he could make only vague speculations about what occurred in the brain.

As a young man, Kant had been interested in the cosmos, and he tried to analyze the sky mathematically. Later he attempted to fathom the human mind and its laws. But his efforts were like those of a physicist trying to calculate the movements of planets and the laws of the universe without the benefit of even the tiniest telescope. Kant could speculate about the human brain, but he could not peer inside. Today, scientists do have the requisite telescope. They measure with electrodes, and they scan the human brain with magnetic resonance imaging. So we can again pose the questions that Kant was unable to answer: is there a center for morality in the brain? If so, how is it constructed, and how does it function? And how does it control our ability to act morally?

But before we turn to these fascinating questions, we have to shed light on a fundamental issue. Kant had declared reason the
lord and master of the brain, and he was certain that reason dictated our actions. But as we saw in the first part of this book, the unconscious shapes us to a far greater extent than does the conscious, so we need to figure out to what extent the moral law within us is affected by drives other than reason – by our feeling, thinking, and volition.