Roger Scruton and Human “Animals”

Roger Scruton is consistently a breath of fresh air in the world of philosophical thought. In a world of voices like Daniel Dennett, who seek to deny the whole subjective, intentional “I” of human personhood (which of course undercuts Dennett’s own intentional statements in his writing; the assemblage of matter that has been labeled “Daniel Dennett” isn’t actually saying anything with intentional meaning and the assemblage of matter that has been labeled as an audience isn’t really thinking about any of said meaningless, non-intentional statements; but I digress), Scruton provides a much needed rebuke of such reductive materialism, which he terms “nothing buttery.” (Thankfully thinkers like Thomas Nagel and Peter Leithart also show such nonsense for what it is).

“Nothing buttery” is the idea that humans are “nothing but” an assemblage of matter, or “nothing but” the mechanistic result of evolutionary psychology, or any other number of materialistic assertions from the ideological plague of dogmatic scientism. Not only is such a dogmatic, materialistic scientism detrimental to any view of genuine philosophical inquiry into human personhood, it is also detrimental to scientific study itself, including evolutionary biology. As Scruton notes in his book The Soul of the World (Princeton University Press, 2014):

It is helpful at this point to register a protest against what Mary Midgley calls “nothing buttery.” There is a widespread habit of declaring emergent realities to be “nothing but” the things in which we perceive them. The human person is “nothing but” the human animal; law is “nothing but” relations of social power; sexual love is “nothing but” the urge to procreation; altruism is “nothing but” the dominant genetic strategy described by Maynard Smith; the Mona Lisa is “nothing but” a spread of pigments on a canvas, the Ninth Symphony is “nothing but” a sequence of pitched sounds of varying timbre. And so on. Getting rid of this habit is, to my mind, the true goal of philosophy. And if we get rid of it when dealing with the small things— symphonies, pictures, people— we might get rid of it when dealing with the large things too: notably, when dealing with the world as a whole. And then we might conclude that it is just as absurd to say that the world is nothing but the order of nature, as physics describes it, as to say that the Mona Lisa is nothing but a smear of pigments. Drawing that conclusion is the first step in the search for God.  (pp. 39-40)

And Scruton doesn’t confine his writing purely to the covers of academic books. A recent article for the New York Times, “If We Are Not Just Animals, What Are We?”, offers a helpful summary of his non-reductive thinking. Scruton rightly eschews the “either/or” of dogmatic materialism and scientism in favor of a “both/and” view.

Yes, human beings are both products of evolutionary development and they are far more than just mechanistic assemblages of matter; they are human persons, and persons are not simply reducible to material and mechanistic processes. As Scruton says in the article:

…as persons we inhabit a life-world that is not reducible to the world of nature, any more than the life in a painting is reducible to the lines and pigments from which it is composed.

Of course, I have a slight disagreement with Scruton in the article in regards to the soul. He seems to imply that the historic Christian view of the spiritual aspect of the human person has been done away with by advances in genetics, neuroscience, and evolutionary psychology. I humbly disagree. I think these disciplines have given us a wealth of information on how the human brain has developed and functions and even how neurophysiology and the mind interact. Despite this, the classical, Christian philosophical tradition of thought about the mind as ontologically distinct from matter seems to me to make better sense of human conscious experience; though of course mind and matter are concomitantly connected in a whole human person. As David Bentley Hart puts it:

And yet the necessary connection that exists between the addition of two numbers and the sum thereby yielded is one produced entirely by the conceptual content of the various terms of the equation, and not by any set of biochemical contingencies. Conversely, if the tenets of mechanistic materialism are sound, the mere semantic content of a thought should not be able to affect the course of physical events in the cerebrum. Even if the long process of human evolution has produced a brain capable of reason, the brain cannot produce the actual contents of reasoning; the connections among the brain’s neurons cannot generate the symbolic and conceptual connections that compose an act of consecutive logic, because the brain’s neurons are related to one another organically and therefore interact physically, not conceptually. Clearly, then, there are mental events that cannot be reduced to mechanical electrochemical processes.

–The Experience of God: Being, Consciousness, Bliss (Yale University Press, 2013), p. 188

Despite this quibble, I think Roger Scruton is largely correct in his assessment. Are we, as homo sapiens, products of a long history of genetic development and evolutionary processes that share many traits with other animal species? Yes. Are we, as human persons, with the ability to speak, think, and interact as “I” and “Thou” far more than just animals. Yes indeed.

It’s almost as if the writer of Genesis 2:7, who spoke of humans as being materially made from “the dust of the earth” and yet also imbued with a non-material “breath of life,” thus forming a “living nephesh” (“soul,” “living being,” “self”), was on to something. Crazy right?