Pulling The Human From The Animal

In delineating the contours and parameters of what is human (and here I refer to more than simply the organisms known as Homo sapiens, and include the idea of human) it seems that many, if not most, conceptions of humanity focus on explorations of human as a sort of symbiosis or amalgamation: it is a union of instinct and intellect, of beast and divine, within the shell of Homo sapien that produces human. Certainly Wilson partakes of this, with his notion of pre-adaptations (the animal) and the “something more” (the essence of human consciousness), which is a product of these pre-adaptations after a precise series of evolutionary conditions and events. And perhaps even Teilhard indulges this notion to a lesser extent with his theory of tangential and radial energy. It seems that the definition of human is perhaps (and this is being overly simplistic, but I feel that in some form this is fundamental to many notions of humanity) human equals non-human plus “something” that is not non-human, and thus inexistent until “human” comes into being. This does not satisfy me. It is true that to some degree human must necessarily be comprised at some point of animal and some other “thing”, with these two parts working in harmony and being necessary components. After all, it is impossible to construct something that contains certain properties if the parts of which it is comprised do not themselves exhibit some form of those same properties. However, it seems to me more enticing to ponder that which, within the shell of Homo sapien, does not combine animal and man, but rather differentiates it. In other words, where inside humans does this separation from non-human occur? How can we begin to grapple with things like conceptions of justice or even foundations of justice, issues central to the human condition, without exploring the separation of non-human and human that must necessarily exist within the concurrence of non-human and human? It is not in our atoms or their characteristics, for those we share with everything in the universe. It is not in the biological structures within our bodies or the exact makeup of our bodies, because the second after death, even if the body is completely intact and even still warm, a dead body is not human. It lacks something essential. Is it perhaps, then, the way in which we use those atoms and biological structures that makes us human? Here we run into the problem of what “to use” implies. One would not posit that a table uses the characteristics of the atoms which comprise it to stand. Is a table really “using” its legs to stand? However, a monkey certainly uses its arms to swing from trees. The notion of teleology, implying some driving force or mechanism, cannot be charged with separating the non-human from human.

Perhaps, then, what tears us from the non-human is the necessity of the human consciousness to create. And here I do not refer to the need to procreate, but rather the need to create art, names, music, cuisine, luxury, concepts, and ideas. This necessity, a seemingly useless biological expenditure of energy, is a need to consume time and energy in a way that is extraneous to survival. This need ignores many of our basic instincts. An animal can survive just as well without art, without music, or a conception of time, or a notion of morality, or a semblance of justice. It is not simply the ability to override instinct; it is the fact that creation is itself an instinct for humans that wrenches the human from the non-human. Perhaps this instinct, different in kind from other instincts, is the separation within us that pulls the human out of the animal.