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If We Are Not Just Animals, What Are We?

Philosophers and theologians (神学家) in the Christian tradition have long regarded human beings as separate from the other animals by the presence of the divine spark (神圣的火花) that is believed to exist within them. This inner source of illumination, the soul, is something that can never be grasped from without, and, as such, must be something that is detached in some fundamental manner from the natural order of things such that the soul continues to exist even after the death of the body, perhaps taking wing for some supernatural place following its demise (死亡).

Recent advances in genetics, neuroscience and evolutionary psychology have all but killed off this idea.1．For quite clearly, although we are animals, bound in the web of causality (因果关系) that joins us to the zoosphere, we are not just animals.

This fundamental question is as relevant to the philosophical inquiry of today as it had been for the ancient Greeks. In a thousand different ways, we have drawn and continue to draw distinctions between ourselves and the rest of nature.2．We believe that people have rights, that they have sovereignty (完全独立的) over their own lives, and that those who live by enslaving (使成为奴隶) or abusing others are denying their own humanity.

Evolutionary psychologists tell another story. Morality, they argue, is an adaptation. If organisms (生物体) compete for resources, a strategy of cooperation will be more successful in the long run than a strategy of pure selfishness. Cooperative features of an organism will therefore be selected over time. And all that is special in the human condition can be understood in this way — as the outcome of a long process of adaptation that has given us the unbeatable advantage of morality, whereby we can resolve our conflicts without fighting and adjust to the demands that upset us from every side.

The astonishing moral equipment of the human being — including rights and duties, personal obligations, justice, resentment (憎恨), judgment, forgiveness — is the deposit (沉积物) left by millenniums of conflict.3．It is an evolved mechanism whereby the human organism proceeds through life sustained on every side by bonds of mutual interest.

I am fairly confident that the picture painted by the evolutionary psychologists is true, but I am also convinced that this is not the whole truth.4．We human beings do not see one another as animals see one another, as fellow members of a species. We relate to one another not as objects but as subjects, as creatures who address one another “I” to “you.”

By speaking in the first person, we can make statements about ourselves, answer questions, and engage in reasoning and advice in ways that avoid all the normal methods of discovery. As a result, we can participate in dialogues founded on the assurance that, when you and I both speak sincerely, what we say is trustworthy: We are “speaking our minds.” This is the heart of the I-You encounter. Hence as persons we live in a life-world that is not reducible (可简化的) to the world of nature, any more than the life in a painting is reducible to the lines and colors from which it is composed.