The Inevitability of Philosophical Anthropology
I wrote this little essay in tribute to several conversations I was involved in last semester, especially a live event I took part in with my friend Michael Sacasas, author of The Convivial Society Substack and Executive Director of the Christian Studies Center of Gainesville, Florida. The live event took part at the Bradley Study Center here in Blacksburg, Virginia, and the conversation has been released as an episode of Peoples & Things. Thanks to Director Mike Weaver and other staff members of the Bradley Center for holding such a great event.
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Here is something I’ve come to believe over the years: We can’t help but have images of what human being or human nature or whatever you want to call it is like, so we’d better work to ensure our images are as accurate as they can be, lest bogus and misleading ideas slip in without our awareness, bogus and misleading ideas that can cause us to act unwisely, including by making lousy recommendations.
I often refer to our ideas of human nature and the work we do to make those ideas as strong and precise as possible as philosophical anthropology. This term emerged from Germany in the early 20th century, in figures like Max Scheler, Helmuth Plessner, and Arnold Gehlen, who worked in traditions of existential and phenomenological philosophy. That origin story makes sense because at their best existentialism and phenomenology are dedicated to exploring and describing human being. But I choose to use the term philosophical anthropology in a broader way to describe all the traditions and methods we use to think about the nature of humanity. Such traditions and methods certainly include the formal social sciences, and I will talk about some of their findings below, but we get a lot, probably most, of our senses of what human beings are like from our own experiences and from what other people tell us, including through things like art, religion, literature, proverbs, and sayings. “There’s a sucker born every minute.” You bet there is! And if we are honest, you and I will admit that we are often one of them. What makes philosophical anthropology philosophical, though, is that, to the best of our abilities, we think through our images of humanity in a rigorous and informed fashion, not just baste in our own prejudicial juices.
One thing that motivates me to write this essay is that, for many years, I have been involved in several different conversations about this broad topic with friends and colleagues. I would like to take a moment to call these folks out because this essay arises from my love for them. First, as I write these words, I have just returned from a workshop of brilliant and wonderful folks at Johns Hopkins that my old friend, historian Yulia Frumer, held on how to integrate psychological and other thinking about emotions into the study of history. Second, for years now, I have been talking with technology studies scholar Raquel Velho and other friends and colleagues about the promises of the philosophical school of American pragmatism – which I believe is fundamentally a form of philosophical anthropology – has for thinking today. Third, the chances of fate have brought me into conversation with Protestants, like Michael Sacasas, and Catholics, like Federico Ponzoni, Grant Martsolf, and Brandon Daily, who are interested in Christian traditions of philosophical anthropology, including Personalism and New Natural Law theory as well as related strands of thinking like the Capabilities Approach. I am also interested in what other Western and Eastern religious traditions (including classical tantra, the primary spiritual tradition I work in these days) as well as what various contemporary academic schools, like Black, Indigenous, queer, disability, postcolonial, and other hubs of study and theory, have to say about these topics.
Now, I don’t have the space here to critique various 20th and 21st century philosophical schools that have, like Michel Foucault, called for “the disappearance of the human” or what some call “post-humanity.” I am just going to say that I think they were wrong. But I still think we need to take some of their criticisms seriously because philosophical anthropology most definitely comes with real risks. For the sake of brevity, I will highlight two of them: First, there are SO MANY examples where people put forward ideas of human being, from sexist concepts of “hysteria” to racist ideas of “IQ,” that have masqueraded as objective descriptions but, in reality, have mostly existed to justify existing social hierarchies. Philosophical anthropology, like almost anything made by humans, can be a tool of oppression.
Second, there is a deep set of questions that will likely never go away about how much what we study and seek to describe in any set of humans is simply a result of where they sit in time and place, how much of it is a product of enculturation, rather than a durable characteristic of human being.
For example, it could be the case that a lot of Americans act like selfish assholes. But I think we’d better not assume that humans just are selfish assholes, the way, at least as a caricature, some economists seem to in their models. We have loads of examples of other cultures in history and today in which people are more other-oriented and -concerned, less “individualistic.” Among other things, reminding ourselves that a lot of ways of human being are enculturated gives us hope that the world can become a better place. If we take something historically true of human beings and reify it, or turn it into an essence, it can break our hearts. Both of these risks are among many reasons why philosophical anthropology must remain an always-open dialogue that includes all who want to be involved. (It’s also worth emphasizing that some of the hottest, most contentious debates in our society, like how to think about gender, are deeply interwoven with, or even just are, philosophical anthropology. Obviously, these are precisely the places hardest to have open dialogues, Lord help us.)
So, there are risks to doing philosophical anthropology, but I’m afraid we have to do the work anyway. We can’t let ourselves off the hook. One reason why this is true is because, if we get philosophical anthropology wrong, it can cause us, consciously or unconsciously, to mislead others.
The example of things going off the rails that I would like to focus on is John Perry Barlow’s famed 1996 text, “A Declaration of Independence of Cyberspace.” Barlow was a lyricist for the Grateful Dead, a rancher, and a Republican politician who worked as a campaign coordinator for Dick Cheney. At times, Barlow referred to himself as a libertarian, and he is certainly associated with a strand of thinking known as cyberlibertarianism, which, as one definition puts it, “refers to a discourse that claims that Internet and related digital media can and should constitute spaces of individual liberty.” In other words, it’s the view that the Internet should not be regulated. I am interested in the role of philosophical anthropology in Barlow’s version of this view.
The “Declaration” begins with these words:
Governments of the Industrial World, you weary giants of flesh and steel, I come from Cyberspace, the new home of Mind. On behalf of the future, I ask you of the past to leave us alone. You are not welcome among us. You have no sovereignty where we gather.
The text then goes on to argue that government should not, in any way, regulate “cyberspace.” I think it is fair to say that the “Declaration” is now hilarious in several ways. For example, the Internet itself was the product of a government program. Whoops!! Also, as oodles of scholars have pointed out in the last few decades, the Internet is not some disembodied spirit world but something that exists in real space on servers, cables, smartphones, and so on.
But what interests me more are two things that Barlow got wrong, two things he could not see: one is rooted in technological and business change, the other in philosophical anthropology. The technical thing that Barlow, like a lot of other cyberlibertarians during the period, could not foresee was that “Cyberspace” as he liked to call the Internet would not develop as a free, open “frontier” but as a series of walled gardens – pools of interaction and information (including formal scholarly knowledge) that were fundamentally cut off from one another.
It has been interesting to watch the Electronic Frontier Foundation, an organization that Barlow co-founded, tack from being a libertarian anti-regulation interest group to one focused on regulating and breaking up “Big Tech,” for example, calling for a ban on what it calls “online behavioral advertising.” (You can hear science fiction author and technology critic Cory Doctorow, who has been involved in the EFF for decades, reflect on his own path from libertarian anti-regulation ideas to focusing on the monopoly power of digital technology firms in my podcast interview with him.)
Now, on one level, you can’t really fault Barlow for failing to see the technological changes coming just over the horizon. As I have argued elsewhere, we humans are just really, really, really bad at predicting how technologies will develop, even in the near term, and no kind of expertise makes us better at prediction. Indeed, being an expert can you make you worse at it. Our fundamental badness at technological prophecy means that we should avoid soothsayers and we should avoid making . . . . well, the kinds of dramatic claims that Barlow did, many of which are now LOL funny.
But I believe the more fundamental problem with Barlow’s “Declaration” is one of philosophical anthropology, and this, I think, we should not let him off the hook for. Now, here too I think we should acknowledge that we have the benefit of hindsight that Barlow lacked in the 1990s. Some of the problems we have seen develop in the past few decades are the kinds of things that will emerge only after you let evolved apes with language goof around with global information machines for a while. But there is a deeper problem in Barlow’s thinking that goes well beyond a lack of empirical data to the question of how should think – or theorize – in a strong and rigorous manner.
I always got the vibe from Barlow’s use of a capital-M in the word Mind in the extract above – “Cyberspace, the new home of Mind”- that he believed the Internet would aggregate human thought and wisdom and lead us to a much better place. Recently, I realized that Barlow didn’t believe this in a vague or general way but in a specific (and crappy) one. Barlow was influenced by the French Jesuit priest, paleontologist, and philosopher Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, whose speculative theories included the idea that humanity and all of history was spiraling towards the “Omega Point,” the final grand moment of evolution where evolution is viewed in a teleological, progressive, non-Darwinian fashion. An essential aspect of this march towards the Omega Point was something de Chardin, drawing on Vladimir Vernadsky, called the “noosphere,” a hypothesized layer of the biosphere made up of interacting human minds. Fitting his teleological, progressivist view, de Chardin asserted that the noosphere would become more unified, coherent, and integrated over time.
When Barlow encountered the Internet, he came to feel that it was the embodiment of de Chardin’s theories. As he told the USENIX Conference in January 1994, “I really feel that what we are essentially doing here is roughly like what the French theologian philosopher Teilhard de Chardin was talking about when he started to write in the thirties about the Omega point ... that point at which human beings became so good at communicating with one another that they would create what would amount to a great Collective Organism of Mind.”
Barlow went on,
I think we are going to become such a creature. Perhaps we already are. It is a very different kind of creature than has ever been seen in the universe before. It will be enormously powerful and intelligent. And you folks are helping it be born. Thank you very much.
Now, I don’t know about you, but I think Barlow’s prediction here turned out to be pretty fucking shitty. When you look at human behavior on the Internet over the past few decades, what we see – from Gamergate to partisan political behavior and how people peacock their political identities on social media – is pretty far from “human beings [becoming] so good at communicating with one another that they would create what would amount to a great Collective Organism of Mind.” But the real issue here is not that Barlow lacked the experience with the Internet we all have had by this point; it is that John Perry Barlow, who sometimes egotistically referred to himself as an “amateur anthropologist,” did not know how to think. I mean this in two ways: First, Barlow did not know how to theorize in a reasonable fashion. Second, he lacked the discipline to study and read up on the topics that interested him, including literatures going back to at least the 1930s that attempted to wrestle with the question, “How do people interpret and use the information they glean from media?”
If Barlow had bothered to do his homework – in the essay where he calls himself an amateur anthropologist he brags about not doing homework – he would have found social scientists saying things just about the opposite of what de Chardin put forward in purely speculative, non-empirical musings. Such social scientific thinking includes the “two-step flow of communication model,” which goes back to the 1940s and holds that most people form their opinions on the basis of influential figures in their communities. But more important are traditions of thinking known variously as confirmation bias and motivated reasoning – the idea that humans engage with information by cherry-picking data that fits their existing worldview and radically discounting data that might upset those views.
Important for my view of the world: The insight of motivated reasoning isn’t new but goes way back in history, including many of the world’s wisdom traditions. Francis Bacon warned of it in his Novum Organum (1620), writing that if people who lack virtue and self-discipline get into philosophy and thinking, “they distort and corrupt [thought] to suit their prior fancies.” Wikipedia informs me that similar ideas are – unsurprisingly, seems to me – found in Thucydides (460-395 BCE), Dante (1265-1321 CE), and Ibn Khaldun (1332-1406 CE), and we can certainly add various ancient and Medieval strands of Eastern thought, including Buddhism and Tantric Shaivism, to this list. So many traditions converge on this idea because wise reflection points towards truth.
Whether the answer to Internet-use rooted in motivated reasoning is formal regulations, I do not know. But if John Perry Barlow had been more connected to reality, he would have been more cautious in his recommendations and warned people to closely attend to what the evolved apes with language might get up to with their devices. I will confess that my own speculations informed by the literatures cited above point pretty far in the opposite direction of Barlow’s. My hunch, for instance, is that a lot of bad online behavior, including stuff that gets described as “radicalization,” “misinformation,” “filter bubbles,” and so on and so forth, arises not so much from supposedly “powerful algorithms” or platform design but from humans being humans, in our fractious, biased, motivated ways. We may never know if I am right about this, but I am certain that the only way we can learn more is by rigorously thinking and studying philosophical anthropology. May we all be so called.