Kant & The Human Subject
Brian Morris compares the ways Kant’s question “What is the human being?” has been answered by philosophers and anthropologists.
The mystery of mind. The far more highly evolved self-conscious minds of the human species. In fact, who really knows what the minds of “lesser creatures” perceive and/or conceive about the world around them. We know that we share more “primitive” brains functions with many other animal species. And we often make that distinction between creatures able to grasp on at least some level the existence of “I” – orangutans, chimpanzees, gorillas, bottlenose dolphins, elephants, orcas, bonobos, rhesus macaques, European magpies – and those creatures that seem to be propelled/compelled entirely by biological imperatives embedded in instincts and drives.
We have instincts and drives as well. But, unlike most other animals, we are, given some measure of human autonomy, actually able to react to and to judge the behaviors of those who, in embodying their own more primitive brain functions, don’t choose the same values and behaviors as we do.
I merely focus the beam here on the extent to which these interactions are rooted more in dasein – “I” – than in what philosophers can tell us about, among other things, the moral obligations of so-called “rational” minds.
Still, once again, take this particular “intellectual contraption” down off the skyhooks, and integrate the words out in particular worlds understood in conflicting ways by the only species, capable of communicating memes as well. Historical, cultural and interpersonal in any number of particular human communities.
Instead, the discussion continues on – in articles such as this – only up in the clouds of scholastic abstraction:
Whereas the “duality” that I am most intrigued by revolves around the distinction between [b]I[/b] in the either/or world and “I” in the is/ought world.
These biological elements/imperatives are important to grapple with and to grasp but once one is convinced they have the clearest possible understanding of them, how is this knowledge applicable to identity as an existential contraption confronting conflicting goods out in a particular political economy?
Always assuming of course that the is/ought world reflects the actual existence of free will in our own species. In other words being able to explain scientifically how the evolution of biological life on Earth actually resulted in the autonomous mind.