THE HUMAN CONDITION
November 17, 2008
Human beings occupy a strange niche in the realm of nature. We are constantly poised between two worlds (we might even say precariously poised), for we are creatures both of nature and of our own contrived society.
Animals also thrive within the context of social groups, but with animals there is no conflict between their individual nature and their society. In our case, it seems at times to be the very opposite. We are forever engaged in a balancing act between the primal urges that compel us and the social forces that constrain us.
What is the source of this problem? How did we manage to place (or find) ourselves in such difficult circumstances? We look at man and see a creature that is undeniably natural (and we are personally reminded of it every time we sense the pangs of hunger or the urge to eliminate), and yet, we see something that is just as undeniably so much more. We may observe bees building hives but not superhighways, computers and space shuttles. No, there is something different, something very different between us and the animals. It is so different that I am tempted to think of it in terms of two distinct worlds, the world of nature and the world of man.
Whenever I ponder this, I find myself arriving always at the same place: language. It is the behavior of language that truly separates human beings from animals. And there is one particular aspect of language that seems to stand out as especially significant in this regard - the language of abstraction.
It could be argued that animals also have languages. Birds trill, whales sing, monkeys (and wolves) howl and dogs bark. I don’t think that anyone would argue that these various forms of air (or in the case of whales, water) disturbance are not indeed forms of language. The sounds these animals make communicate information, and the information always corresponds to something that is undeniably real, both for the animals and for the world around them. The bird signals that something, perhaps some predator, has just entered the environment; the monkeys howl their concerns over territorial infringements, the wolves their hunger and so on.
But there is one thing that animals do not communicate to each other. They know nothing of the invisible or imaginary. The howl of the wolf is not a sermon delivered to the moon, or some far-off prey, about the injustices built into the universe. It proclaims nothing of gods, devils, love or hate.
Only human beings dabble in the abstract. Animals, by contrast, are forever immersed in the real, and only the real. Man’s plight is that he is immersed in both the real and the abstract. Therein lies his challenge, his struggle.
The wolf’s hunger is real, as well as its need to procreate. Can we say that man has a need to toy with abstractions? I think not. Man may be inclined to indulge in abstract matters, but he certainly has no such need. (Indeed, it could be argued that he just might live a lot better without his abstractions.)
But the ability to engage in abstractions demarcates another distinction between man and beast. Man is not restricted to the parameters of his needs. It is true that he is just as driven by them as are the animals, but once he satisfies his needs there is yet something remaining – time.
Animals typically sleep once their needs are met, some upwards of 16 hours a day. The human animal is normally content with eight or less. Can it be then that Man has developed the ability to engage in abstractions simply as the result of having time on his hands? Do humans dabble in the abstract just because they have nothing else to do? Is idleness truly the Devil’s workshop?
It has become natural for humans to engage in abstract forays. We do, after all, possess such an ability. It is perhaps the defining characteristic of humans, what truly sets us apart from the animals. But the mere possession of such a talent is not what gets us into trouble. It is one thing to entertain abstractions, to discuss them, talk them over, share them with friends, propose them as viable options or solution to this or that problem, but it is quite another to act on them. Our problems then, result from the way we act upon our abstractions.
Language is the thing. Once we developed it (its abstract component), we found ourselves in brave new worlds, those of the imagination. We found that we could string words together in any way we liked. It didn't matter that the word strings didn't make sense. It was simply fun to string them together. We did it because we could! It was a form of experimenting or exploring (another activity that is natural for both man and beast). It doesn't matter that we have the power to take words like "four-sided" and "triangle" and place them next to each other and create a non-existent idea: "four-sided triangle." It doesn't matter that we created a word like "who" and duped ourselves into believing that there really was such a thing (as a who). None of this really matters, because it is just what we do. We play with words.
Quite often (perhaps too often) we get caught up in our word play and lose sight of the real world, the one of plants and animals, stars and planets, wind and rain, mountains, rivers and oceans. We do this because we are social animals, and human society depends - utterly depends - on communication.
The fact that we are both social and natural creatures creates some strictly human problems for us, problems that animals never have to deal with. We are all motivated by primal urges, but have to temper those urges with something we call social decorum. We have to eliminate waste from our bodies, as all animals do, but the demands of human culture impose severe restrictions on us in this regard. We are strongly discouraged from eliminating in public, in front of others. We are taught from a young age that this is behavior that must be performed in private. Animals know nothing of such private behaviors.
But without question, the most compelling thing we have invented with our word play is the idea of invisible beings. Most everyone in the whole world believes that there are actually such entities as gods and devils. From my perspective, here in the early part of the 21st century, this is beyond amazing. You’d have thought that we would have educated ourselves to be immune to this sort of thing by now. The only thing that makes any sense is that we simply enjoy the word play too much to stop doing it.
It reminds me of music, also a form of word play. If you don’t consider music as a way of playing with words, just stop to consider for a moment what a word is. If someone were to ask you to define “word,” what is likely to be your first response, the one that comes from the gut, the one you don’t think too much about? The answer is at once simple, yet compelling. A word is a sound, a piece of disturbed air. Is this not the same – the very same – thing as a musical “note”? And what do we do with musical notes? We string them together to make tunes, which is the very same thing we do with words. We just call them by different names. We call the word-strings “sentences,” and the note-strings “tunes” or “melodies.”
The essential difference between tunes and sentences is meaning. We expect there to be meaning in sentences, but not in tunes. While listening to a song, we have all asked, upon noticing certain of its words, what they meant. But (I daresay) we have never asked the same about the arrangement of the notes in the song. This is perhaps why music is so popular (not to mention why it is so often referred to as the universal language). It doesn’t require the burden of meaning that ordinary speech does. Music is pure word play; talking is polluted – by meaning, grammar and syntax.
The human problem, then, is that we too easily forget that we are playing with words (in much the same way that we are playing with music) and delude ourselves into thinking that we are being (or that we should be) completely serious with them.
I am speaking of course of words in their abstract sense. It is one thing to be serious with word usage if we are talking about real things, and quite another if we are talking about abstractions. If someone is about to run in front of a car (a real object), I am going to be perfectly serious about warning them (and I hope they would do the same for me). But if someone is talking to me about invisible beings (like gods and devils), they most certainly should not be serious. This kind of talk should be engaged in playfully (or at very least, academically).
There are, to be sure, certain exceptions to this. Take the lines of latitude and longitude, for example. They are purely abstract notions. They don’t really exist. But they are nevertheless extremely useful. If someone were giving me map coordinates, I would certainly hope that they were being serious about it. I wouldn’t appreciate trying to find a place in New York only to find myself in Nevada.
But even these sorts of abstractions deal with real things, like actual places on the map. By contrast, the abstractions we know of as “gods and devils” do not deal with anything that we know to be real or sensory. They only suggest something that is purely imaginary, something for which there is no sensory connection whatsoever.