Great Ideas; 21; The Case Against Darwin

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I find that there are certain things under these three headings that men do and men alone do. Things that no animal does at all in any degree whatsoever. And these special things that men do indicate a special mental power which men have. That is the power of reason. And if this is established, it establishes the definition of man as a rational animal. Which means that man and man alone is rational, not that man has more reason or more reasoning power or more rationality or more intelligence than some other animal. It means that man and man alone is rational.

Now, what how will the evidence of human behavior show the presence of something you can't observe, namely reason, a power of reason? How will we interpret the evidence, what right of you interpret the evidence, as showing the existence and man of this special power? I say to you that there are two marks in the evidence itself which tend to show the presence of reason. One, if the human behavior is highly variable, and two, if it seems to show some understanding, the presence of some understanding that no animal has, an understanding that is found or expressed itself in a grasp of the universality of things. Now, last week, last week, I outlined the general shape this evidence would take to Mr. Luckman. And I asked Mr. Luckman during the week to present it to people and even professors and get from them their comments and objections. He has done that. And as I go on now to present the evidence, he is going to present the objections he picked up during the week and I'm going to try to answer them.

Are you ready, Lord? Let me go to the first heading then. The first heading is only men make artistically. Now, I have an objection here. So soon? Right, right away. In discussing this particular point, the immediate reaction, but even I have to this challenge of yours, is that we know how beautifully a spider spins his web. We have seen the perfection of the bees hive. We've seen the beavers engineering excellence in the dam. So how can you say that only men can make things and make them artistically? Well, my answer to that objection, whether it comes from you or anybody else, is, first of all, that I'm not concerned now with the excellence, which is why you're using the word artistically, the excellence of the animal's production because it's quite true, that the spider's web is often more perfect, more subtly perfect than any human lace could be. It is not the excellence of the animal's production, but rather the way in which animals make and men make.

I say that animals are makers by instinct and men are makers by art. And in that difference, makers by instinct and makers by art lies the whole difference between men and animals because animals show that animals instinctively and the human art represents the influence of human reason. What is the sign that men animals make by instinct only and men by art? It is that in a given species of animal, whether it be a beaver or a bee or a bird, the production is exactly the same, generation after generation, because the instincts are the same. Whereas in human productions, works of human art, from one tribe to another, from one century to another, you have a great variability and more than that, an improvement, a perfection of the art. We received a letter last week, which perfectly makes this point. It comes from a young man from Thomas McGurney, who was a high school student in San Mateo. It's an extraordinarily good letter. Young Mr. McGurney, McGurney rather, quotes the eminent French naturalist, Henri Fobre, a great student of insect life, and goes on to say, there is never any improvement in the spider's spinning of its web during the spider's lifespan.

Furthermore, a spider living today spins his web in the same manner his ancestors did a hundred or a thousand years ago. There is no improvement in the course of generations. Contrast this, Mr. Young, Mr. McGurney points out, contrast this with the way in which the individual man increases his skill during his own lifetime in any art, or the way in which the human race increases all its skills and hearts in the course of human history. This shows a gap, which as young Mr. McGurney says, and I agree with him, is an unbridgeable difference between man and animal. But there are two more ways of seeing this. First, it is true, Darwin and Freud, when he says that animals use rudimentary tools, he would describe monkeys as using rocks as weapons, or stones to crack nuts, and I showed you, to wild back how a chimpanzee made a tool out of these two bamboo sticks and used it. Yes, it is true that animals may use tools of this kind, but never one shouldn't say a man that he is the only tool using animal. But think of this, man is the only animal who makes by machine tools.

What is a machine tool? Think of the production of Grand Rapids furniture, think of the assembly line on which automobiles it turned out. The man makes a machine and puts into that machine specifications, what it represents on his blueprints, so that the machine then turns out an indefinitely large number of pieces of the same kind, pieces of furniture, automobiles. This shows that man can separate the idea, the idea of a thing to be produced from the individual production. He doesn't make the things individually. He puts the making into the machine and the machine turns out an indefinitely. This is the sign of art in human making, and it is here seen man's grasp of the universal, the plan, the idea, apart from the individual. One other point about human making. I would say that only man produces works of fine art. All the other things Mr. Luckman referred to, the beavers, dam, the birds, nests, the bees hive, these are useful things.

Having a satisfying biological needs, only man makes things which satisfy no biological need at all, makes them for pleasure for his enjoyment. That's why I would say that the cromanian man who lived about 25,000 years ago, who lived on the caves of southern France and drew charcoal drawings of reindeer on his cave walls, was a man. Because he was there making something strictly for the pleasure of imitation and not for any biological utility in the struggle for existence. Human making is different from animal making. Now let me go to my second piece of evidence. It is under the heading, only man think discursively. Now right at this point Dr. Adler you have already given us some very compelling evidence. And as I talk to the professors and you referred to about this particular point, they were most emphatic. That animals do solve problems, and problem solving is another way of expressing intelligence.

When you talk about intelligence, you say what is the ability of this student or this animal to solve a problem. So with the emphasis on problem solving being same as intelligence, intelligence, meaning thinking, I would say that animals think these people too, in their behalf, that animals think discursively. Let me answer that objection, Lloyd. Notice what Mr. Leckman said. Animals promise all problems. Certainly they do. In fact, all animal thinking takes place in the course of problem solving. Now what's the next point? All the problems that animals solve are problems that arise from basic biological needs. Problems they must solve in order to survive in the struggle for existence. Men solve, and they solve them by trial and error, or by perceptual insight to wake her or as apes did. Now men solve problems like that in that way too. Put a man in a room, lock the doors, lock the clothes, the transoms, seal the windows, pour smoke under the door, yell fire, and that man, as soon as panic sees him, will start to fight his way out of that room by trial and error, claw his way out, just as an animal does.

But the point is that men think in another way. In the first place they think about problems that there is absolutely no need for them to solve so far as their biological needs are concerned with the struggle for existence or survival. The problems of mathematics, the problems of philosophy, the problems of any of the theoretical speculative science. And in the second place, the man in which they think about those problems is quite different. An animal when thinking about a solving a problem is active, bodily it uses his hands. His limbs run around, but a man thinks in a different manner. You all, I'm sure, have the image of the human thinker. It is given us by that statue of Rodan, which is here in San Francisco, La Pazura. Notice that statue. I want you to look at something. There is the posture of human thought. And what you see about that posture is intense, intense, bodily inactivity.

Only men sit down to think about what is important and not urgent. Now, I said at the beginning, but only men think discursively. Why did I say discursively? The word discourse connects with the word discussion. I meant only men think in words, in words that are abstract. Now you may say that I've already told you, but Yerkes has discovered a fairly elaborate language in the possession of chimpanzees. Sure, monkeys chatter to one another and chimpanzees of a higher sort of monkeys may chatter to one another. But what is this monkey chatter like? What are the 125 so-called words that Fessierke's found in the language of chimpanzees? They are all emotional outcries, expressions of need, of pain, of pleasure, of rage, of hate, of hunger, of sex. Men have such cries too. We say, oh, ah, ouch! That's like the monkeys cry. But we also have a syntactical language. We, in thinking, make sentences.

And in those sentences are words that are abstract that refer to things that cannot be perceived but only understood. Human language is the only language that is syntactical, has parts of speech and sentences. And believe me, the day, the first monkey or chimpanzee orders a single sentence, one single sentence. I'll be quite willing to believe that there is only a difference in degree between men and age. Now, let me go to my third. May you head up. Only men associate politically. No, Dr. Adler, as I discuss this point, I got an immediate reaction, almost a violent reaction, in terms of the resistance to the implication that animals don't associate. They point it out, not only the herd in stink, but they also indicated, for example, among insects, whether you're thinking of wasps or you're thinking of termites or you're thinking of ants, tremendous hierarchy, a authority structure, and this again gives evidence.

You see, of their parallel, direct parallel with mankind's actions, and so my challenge is how in the face of that kind of evidence, from the behalf of these who argue against you, that you could say that only men associate socially in this fashion. And your friends, I didn't say that only men are social. I didn't say that only men are gregarious. Obviously, quite true what Mr. Luckman says, that there are many other animals that are social are gregarious. I said only men associate politically. Man is the only political animal. Let me explain that. All the other animals, that are social are gregarious, are so instinctively. The organization of the beehive, of the ant colony, of the termite colony, these are all instinctive organizations. They do not change from century to century, from generation to generation.

But humans, formed by reason, the conventions, the constitutions, the laws, the rules, under which they live. And that's why, in human families, all human states, political societies, there is such a great variability, can try to try to culture the culture, epoch the epoch the century to century. Man is the only animal. Man is the only animal, who devises the constitutions and laws under which he lives. This is the evidence of his reason and freedom. In fact, instead of saying, man is the only political animal, what I perhaps should say even more sharply is, man is the only constitutional animal. Now, how should I summarize all this? I think the best way I can summarize this is to have you look at a cartoon, I saw last week. It is a cartoon was published in the Gatfly magazine issued by the Great Books Foundation. What does the cartoon say?

As I am saying, man is a rational animal, man is a rational animal, man is a rational animal, man is a rational animal, till you're tired of hearing me say it. Only I would say more than that of you from the cartoon, that only man is a rational animal, man alone is rational. And I think the evidence I present under these three headings is after the day, justifies the conclusion that only man is rational. Now, there are more objections. Yes, I have. One or two more objections, and these would come under the heading of concern for the development, for example, of human beings. Take the infant, for instance. There's a period in the infant's life when it isn't rational, and in that period, then, is it also human? Another closely-aligned question would be based on the unfortunate human being, who is either in basilic or moronic, and therefore isn't a state really a vegetation that people say they're vegetables. How can you call them human beings or human and rational beings?

Well, I think an answer to Mr. Luckman's question, which I have as an objection, I'm sure, that many people would make. I would say that the baby and the idiot or imbecile are clearly humans, and we treat them as such, in terms of our laws of murder and general general laws concerning the treatment of the person. Both the baby and the idiot have the potentiality of reason, even though reason, as a power, has not yet matured in the human infant to the point of view. And even though in the idiot or imbecile, there is a pathological impediment to the use of reason. But let me show you this. Let's look at a baby and a pig. Look at the baby and the pig. Nice, clean pig. And as you look at them, you don't see any more reason in the baby than you do in the pig. They act very much the same way, but there's this difference. The baby usually grows up to be a man. The pig never does. Never does. Or take the idiot and the dumbest of animals. The idiot, modern medical research, is able to cure. We are able to cure pretty idiocy, for example, that someday we'll be able to cure Mongolian idiocy.

But the stupid animal is not subject to cure. This shows the presence in the baby and the idiot of the potentiality of reason absent from the animal who has no reason at all. Now I'd like to add to this one very important point. To say that man is a rational animal is not to say that he is always reasonable or that he's always acting rationally. On the contrary, that is too seldom the case. The interesting point is that only man is ever unreasonable. Only man is irrational. Only man goes insane or becomes the right. In this matter of neurosis and man becoming neurotic, we have evidence going back to your experimental psychology with animals that the psychologists have been able to make rats in their mazes, frustrated and neurotic. So why only man degenerating in that fashion?

The experimental evidence Mr. Luckman mentioned is very interesting evidence. It is true that in recent years, psychologists with laboratory animals usually rats sometimes cats have tomitted them into neurosis. What the psychologists call neuroses actually by creating through conditioning in the animal a kind of tight conflict of impulses. The animal breaks down into the tension of that conflict into a severe frustration that I admit might look like a neurosis. But think of this difference. Think of this difference. It takes a psychologist. It takes a psychologist to give a rat something like a neurosis. Rats, cats, other animals, left to themselves don't get that way. But human beings are quite able to become neurotic without the help of psychiatrists for the most part that is the case. And that I think is quite remarkable evidence of the difference between the rational animal who can become irrational, unreasonable, insane neurotic and the poor rat or cat that it takes a psychologist to upset.

And I'm going to go on next week to sum up the issue. I'm going to weigh as carefully as I can the evidence on both sides. Perhaps I shall add a little more evidence and perhaps Mr. Luckman will bring in some more objections to complete the picture. But when we have weighed the evidence on both sides, I then want to go on to see if I can show you the deep importance that this issue has or should have for all of us. Both theoretically and practically affecting our lives morally, politically and spiritually. I hope you will send in questions on the material we cover today or questions about the issue and its importance to you as we go on to conclude the discussion of man in our session next week. Thank you very much.

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