Lecture Preparation 2

What is Humanity, Part 2

Now that we know that there are no sciences focused on humanity, no science, that is, to which we can turn to improve our knowledge and advance our understanding of human affairs of whatever kind, we should turn away from the so-called “social science” disciplines. They only use the name of science, only pretend to be sciences. They are a fraud. Those who do not know the history of these “social sciences” formation, are unaware of their, from the start fraudulent character. They may not understand what damage they do to societies in which they exist. But you now know this, and it is particularly important for the present audience to reject these fraudulent academic professions and to create a true science of human affairs in their stead.

For this, it is first of all essential to define humanity – that is, to define the subject-matter of this science, its focus. The first thing in this definition is to recognize that humanity is neither a physical nor a biological reality. If it were physical or biological, there would be no need for a separate science of humanity: physics or biology would be sufficient. This means that humanity is irreducible to material or organic phenomena, that it is of a different nature (and causality) than either matter or life. For instance, that it is not a biological species “homo sapiens,” though it certainly exists in the boundary conditions of this species and is, therefore, logically consistent with them. In other words, this means that humanity is a reality sui generis, of its own kind.

Now we must establish what quality distinguishes humanity from life in the conditions of which it exists. What we need for this – as we needed in the case of life vis-à-vis matter – is the positive evidence of something clearly affecting all human life, to which biology had no access. Comparative zoology provides the empirical basis for us to identify the quality that distinguishes humanity from the subject matter of biology, defining humanity as an ontological category in its own right. Comparing human beings with other animals immediately highlights the astonishing variability and diversity of human societies and human ways of life (what humans actually do in their roles as parents, workers, citizens, and so on) and the relative uniformity of animal societies, even among the most social and intelligent animals, such as wolves, lions, dolphins, and primates. Keeping in mind the minuscule quantitative difference between the genome of Homo sapiens and that of chimpanzees (barely more than 1 percent), it is clear that the enormous difference in variability of ways of life cannot be accounted for genetically—that is, in terms of biological evolution. Instead, it is explained by the fact that, while all other animals transmit their ways of life, or social orders, primarily genetically, humans transmit their ways of life primarily symbolically, through traditions of various kinds and, above all, through language. It is the symbolic transmission of human ways of life (both the symbolic transmission itself and the human ways of life that are necessarily so transmitted) to which the term “culture” implicitly refers. Culture in this sense qualitatively—and radically—separates human beings from the rest of the biological animal kingdom.

This empirical evidence of human distinctiveness shows that humanity is more than just a form of life—i.e., a biological species. It represents a reality of its own, nonorganic kind, justifying the existence of an autonomous science. The justification is provided not by the existence as such of society among humans but by the symbolic manner in which human societies are transmitted and regulated. Stating the point explicitly in this way shifts the focus of inquiry from social structures—the general focus of social sciences—to symbolic processes and opens up a completely new research program, in its significance analogous to the one that Darwin established for biology. Humanity is essentially a symbolic—i.e., cultural, rather than social—phenomenon.

II

When the science of humanity at last comes into being, it will make use of the information collected in the social sciences but will not be a social science itself. Its subject matter, whichever aspects of human life it explores, will be the symbolic process on its multiple levels—the individual level of the mind and the collective levels of institutions, nations, and civilizations—and the multitude of specific processes of which it consists. The science of humanity will be the science of culture, and its subdisciplines will be cultural sciences.

In contrast to the current social sciences, but like biology and physics, the science of humanity will have an inherent general standard for assessing particular claims and theories. As an autonomous reality, humanity is necessarily irreducible to the laws operating within the organic reality of life and to the laws operating within the physical reality of matter. It nevertheless exists within the boundary conditions of those laws—i.e., within the (organic and physical) reality created by the operation of those laws. Consequently, it is impossible without those boundary conditions. All the regularities of autonomous phenomena existing within the boundary conditions of other phenomena of a different nature (i.e., organic regularities existing within the boundary conditions of matter and cultural regularities existing within the boundary conditions of life) must be logically consistent with the laws operating within those boundary conditions. Therefore, every regularity postulated about humanity—every generalization, every theory—beginning with the definition of its distinctiveness, must entail mechanisms that relate that regularity to the human animal organism—mechanisms of translation or mapping onto the organic world. Indeed, the recognition that humanity is a symbolic reality implies such mechanisms, which connect every regularity in that reality to human biological organisms through the mind—the symbolic process supported by the individual brain.

The postulation of the mind and other distinguishing characteristics of humanity follows directly from the recognition of humanity as a symbolic reality, because such characteristics are logically implied in the nature of symbols. Symbols are arbitrary signs: the meanings they convey are defined by the contexts in which they are used. Every context changes with the addition of every new symbol to it—which is to say, every context changes constantly. Every present meaning depends on the context immediately preceding it and conditions the contexts and meanings following it, the changes thus occurring in time. That fact means that symbolic reality is a temporal phenomenon—a process. (It must always be remembered that the concept of structure in discourse about culture can only be a metaphor; nothing stands still in culture—it is essentially historical, in other words.) The symbolic process—that is, the constant assignment and reassignment of meanings to symbols (their interpretation)—happens in the mind, which is implicitly recognized as distinct from the brain (or from whatever other physical organ it may be associated with) in languages in which “mind” is a concept. The mind, supported by and in contrast to the brain, is itself a process—analogous, for instance, to the physical processes of digestion, happening to food in the stomach, or breathing, happening to air in the lungs. More specifically, it is the processing of symbolic stimuli—culture—in the brain. That fact makes culture both a historical and a mental phenomenon. In the science of humanity, moreover, it necessitates a perennial focus on the individual (methodological individualism, indeed already recommended by Weber), the individual being defined as a culturally constituted being and the mind being seen as individualized culture (“culture in the brain”). It also precludes the reification of social structures of whatever kind, be they classes, races, states, or markets. Although the mind is the creative element in culture (the symbolic process in general and the specific processes of which it consists on the collective level), its creativity is necessarily oriented by cultural stimuli operating on it from the outside. The symbolic process, just like the organic process of life, takes place on the individual and the collective levels at once, involving both continuity and contingency. Like genetic mutations in the process of life, change is always a possibility, but its nature (and thus the direction of evolution in the case of life and the direction of history in the case of humanity) can never be predicted.