Kant there asks us to imagine our human "endowments" as three-fold: physical, "human" or "rational" in a strictly instrumental sense and moral. A rational animal without a conscience-without an awareness, however primitive, of the moral law-is a thinkable possibility; but it is not us. Even human infants, in their crying-counterpurposive, Kant thinks, if one regards the end of humanity to be mere physical survival-"immediately announce" their "claim to freedom an idea possessed by no other animal.
The newborn child certainly cannot have this outlook. But the tears that accompany his screaming a few months after birth reveal that his feeling of uneasiness comes, not from physical pain, but from an obscure idea or a representation analogous to it of freedom and its hindrance, injustice; they express a kind of exasperation when he tries to approach certain objects or merely to change his general position, and feels himself hindered in it.
The same thing happens when he falls, through his own fault. While the young of other animals play, children begin early to quarrel with one another; and it is as if a certain concept of justice which is based on outer freedom develops along with their animal nature, without having to be learned gradually.
I linger over the passage because it touches with unusual directness on the relation between nature and freedom in man, and hence on the "dualism" with which Kant is so often taxed. Unlike Lucretius, who interprets such crying as apprehension on the young infant's part of the "dolefulness" of the life in store for him, Kant sees in it the possible irruption into nature of the "idea of freedom" as a genuinely moral cause.
To be sure, the immediate consequences are morally doleful: the malevolent wish, expressed even by the young infant, to have one's way without granting similar sway to others. Still, as in Kant's other historical and religious writings, this fall into evil is the path human beings almost inevitably take in their progress toward earthly realization of the moral idea.
The point for our purposes is this: not the specifics of Kant's moral anthropology, but the larger claim about our need to make sense of our existence as embodied rational beings who are in nature but not fully of it. We are driven by our end-setting nature to make sense of the world both in relation to ourselves and as a whole.
Kant sometimes calls this our capacity for a priori principles of judgment. But all the stories that we tell are riven by partial failure, beginning with the infant who angrily discovers that his claim to freedom is not externally supported. Our very efforts to make sense of the natural world, in their initial failure, orient us toward the demands of moral transcendence. Whatever "embodied rationality" might mean for other beings elsewhere in the universe and Kant kept up a lively openness to the possibility of life on other planets , it is inscribed, for us, within an experiential framework that is dialectical in character.
The freedom that enables us to reason leads us to make demands upon the world that ultimately devolve upon ourselves if "only we are rationally consistent. The objective value that we claim is one that we ourselves cannot take to be rational, and hence cannot take seriously, unless we grant it to others who are similarly organized.
As this brief and inadequate sketch suggests, Kant's moral anthropology, broadly construed, is well positioned to support a regime of individual rights, or of "equal recognition," as Hegel will later call it. And this, indeed, is the use to which Kant is most often put, as we have seen, in today's bioethical debates. But "humanity," I am claiming, means more for Kant than the reciprocal freedom of consenting adults or those who might become or might once have been so ; it also imposes limits on the uses to which one may put one's own capacities.
What, then, are those limits? Here the story grows more complicated, as Kant himself admits. Still, certain fundamental principles are clear enough. In regarding ourselves as practical worldly agents-in "looking out" upon the world from a pragmatic standpoint-we cannot help thinking teleologically about our own capacities.
Contrary to some contemporary accounts of liberal "self-ownership," our bodies are not things we own, items that are indistinguishable, in principle, from other sorts of alienable property. As the site of our own worldly agency, our bodies are at once more emphatically and irreducibly our own than any merely worldly "thing" and less available to manipulation by our arbitrary will. Certain organic necessities cannot be overcome, nor could we wish to do so without seeking to undermine basic feelings like the difference between left and right, or between pain and pleasure by which we orient ourselves.
Such indispensable feelings, one could say, are the necessary polestars of living beings like ourselves who are also self-aware. The pleasant will always affect us differently than the painful, our left foot cannot become our right one.
Of course, one can strive to render oneself relatively indifferent to both pain and pleasure; or to compensate, by strengthening one foot, for weakness in the other. But such orienting feelings remain, at least so long as we are in that rough state of organic functionality and wellness that we associate with human sanity. Attention to our necessary ways of orienting ourselves in the world can help us to avoid certain absurdities to which certain "liberal" models of the self are otherwise all too prone.
In the first case, one may be driven to regard such arrangements as the sale of body parts or maternal surrogacy as no more problematic than any other exchange of goods or services. But even the fiercest champions of untrammeled market freedom in such areas are sometimes brought up short by due recognition of the human consequences-consequences that would ultimately make markets as such impossible.
Eighteenth-century physiognomists may have exaggerated the extent to which our inner character can be read in our faces; but that there is some reciprocal relation and effect seems undeniable. The face is a mask that both reveals us and permits us to hide, just as actors' masks allow them to assume, in highly stylized ways, identities other than their own.
Still, a world in which faces, and the peculiar expressions that accompany them, were as exchangeable as hats does not seem to be one in which human life as we know it could easily exist. In the second, admittedly rarer case, the body and the self become confused in such a way as equally to challenge the possibility of human life. In Dworkin's words:. There is a never real privacy of the body that can co-exist with intercourse: with being entered..
The thrusting is persis tent invasion. She is opened up, split down the center. She is occupied-physically, internally, in her privacy. For Dworkin, for whom all intercourse is rape, the skin, as Jean Grimshaw notes, "is the boundary of the self. The body, so construed, is a pure idea, without engagement with the world-life, as it were, without metabolism.
Whatever personal pathology Dworkin's argument may or may not reflect, its conceptual coherence remains, given the impoverished set of categories with which Dworkin, like many of her libertarian counterparts, sets out.
Thus there is a singular advantage, if we are to arrive at a satisfactory and comprehensive liberal understanding of the world, in starting like Kant , not with the abstract distinction between things and persons-a distinction in which human bodies as such disappear-but from our experience as embodied rational beings who make claims on one another and hence also on ourselves.
It is that "pragmatic" starting point as in the infant's own tearful cry-its initial act of worldly self-assertion that in Kant's view gives rise, when we try to think it through consistently, to the conceptual distinction between things, persons, and a certain thing-like use of persons that falls somehow in between.
Kant's pragmatic starting point, which begins with man and his deeds, bears the following fruit. Human consciousness is punctuated from the start by freedom and a related sense of justice and injustice, right and wrong.
Our valuations are not only homogeneous but also hierarchical. Pleasure and esteem are related e. That observation permits us to make a three-fold distinction among human aptitudes: animal, rational in an instrumental or calculative sense and moral. The usefulness for present purposes of this rank-ordering lies in its relative formality. On the basis of rather minimal assumptions about the character of human life-assumptions roughly congruent with the premises of liberalism itself-one can draw, as I will argue, some significant bioethical conclusions.
That one can do so without appealing to the dogmatic claims of a specific religious tradition- claims that cannot fail to be politically problematic in a liberal society like ours-makes Kant's framework all the more promising.
His explicitly "pragmatic" starting point draws on our ordinary notions about health and sickness that are inseparably bound up with our most basic dealings in the world.
That such notions have proved relatively immune to the ideological onslaughts of "value relativism" is not accidental. We may be willing to sacrifice our health for what we regard as a greater good; but we cannot regard it with indifference or as wholly arbitrary in its meaning.
Kant analogically extends the sort of reasoning we do with regard to health and sickness upward. Pleasure and pain serve as rough yet indispensable guides to health and illness. Pain and pleasure regulate the lives of animals instinctively. Human beings, in our capacity as calculative reasoners, can override the immediate demands of pain and pleasure with a view to maximizing our physical well-being deliberatively.
By analogy, human beings can and should orient themselves with a view to moral health, or the subordination of physical well-being to a higher rational purpose. But it is not an arbitrary ideal nor one, in Kant's view, toward which we can remain indifferent.
And it is an ideal whose formality can encompass, though not from their own point of view replace, moral and religious aspirations of a more traditional sort. How might such pragmatically informed reflections bear on contemporary questions of bioethics? Without entering fully into the many complexities involved, a few guiding principles can be educed. First, there is a certain teleological structure to human life that is anchored, at the lower end, by our primary experience of ourselves as worldly agents.
Instead, we are required to show them respect. For Kant, dignity was what made something a person. Beliefs about where dignity comes from vary between different philosophical and religious systems. This is called imago dei. Others believe dignity is a way of recognising our common humanity. Whatever its origin, the concept has become influential in political and ethical discourse today.
Dignity is often seen as a central notion for human rights. By recognising dignity, the Declaration acknowledges ethical limits to the ways we can treat other people.
Kant captured these ethical limits in his idea of respect for persons. In every interaction with another person we are required to treat them as ends in themselves rather than tools to achieve our own goals. As a society, we have had many occasions to revisit fundamental questions about our humanistic identity. I think we are at another historical moment when it would serve us well to stop, reflect and trace back the foundational roots of humanistic psychology and its most fundamental mission in the field of psychology and in the world at large.
Historically and philosophically, phenomenology is the epistemological foundation for humanistic psychology. Phenomenology is always engaged in a process of interrogating the meaning of constructs, tracing them back to their origins in life-world experience and making sense of them within their social, historical and linguistic context. The phenomenologist never tires of the slow, deliberate process of exploring what things mean and examining our role in the constitution of these meanings.
Whether we are explicitly aware of them or not, these meanings are always already present in the way we comport ourselves to our work and the way we interact and communicate with our colleagues. Interrogating our humanistic identity, then, is a matter of constantly, and with great vigilance, rooting out what we already implicitly understand about what we are and what we are called to be in the world.
We can then bring these meanings to explicit, critical reflection and into more vibrant action in the world. To interrogate the meaning of humanistic psychology, we can take humanistic psychology's phenomenological approach and turn it back upon itself. To engage in phenomenology is to describe the phenomenon and then to identify its invariant themes. Next, through imaginative variation, the investigator distills the phenomenon down to its essential or eidetic structure.
Using this approach, we can ask, what are the invariant themes of humanistic psychology? What is the situated essence of humanistic psychology? In the next newsletter, I will expand on my findings but I want to focus this newsletter on what I have found to be a core, invariant theme of humanistic psychology that is often overlooked: a fundamental recognition of human dignity. At a time when B. Skinner's Beyond Freedom and Dignity was casually rejecting the concepts of human freedom and dignity, humanistic psychology affirmed these concepts.
The humanistic stance that affirms the ontological difference between human beings and objects was part of a worldview that was pulled along by an ethical concern — to protect dignity, which had become the basis for the protection of basic human rights, including the United Nations' Declaration of Universal Human Rights. They are endowed with reason and conscience and should act towards one another in a spirit of brotherhood. These rights include the right to life, liberty, and security of person; the right to be freed from slavery; equal protection before the law; freedom from arbitrary arrest, detention or exile; and so on.
Philosopher and ethicist Immanuel Kant was influential in his distinction between price and dignity. To have a price, according to Kant, was to be measured against other values. A box of cereal and a Mazda MX-6 are objects, and objects have a price — their worth can be estimated in terms of other values, such as their economic worth. However, a being with dignity must be measured according to her intrinsic worth. To say that human beings have dignity is to say that any given person is beyond price, of non-quantifiable value that is non-fungible and therefore of infinite worth.
This is why, against utilitarian ethics, we can say that it is impossible to estimate a person's worth over and against the anonymous crowd. Human worth is not summative in the way something with a price has summative value. Therefore a single person — think for example of Rosa Parks — can be seen, ethically, to have as much value as a whole collective of people who stand against her.
Humanistic psychology, after Kant, is an approach to psychology that recognizes the ontological dignity common to all human beings by reason of their nature or being. This is why humanistic psychology is suspicious of all kinds of reductionism which attempt to reduce human beings to the properties of things. This is why we refuse to permit the narrowing of the meaning of a person to a label such as a mental health diagnosis.
This is why humanistic psychology is drawn to wholistic approaches which understand the person to be more than the sum of his or her cognitive, behavioral, and anatomical parts. This is why we understand that the person, while situated always within an interpersonal context, is not reducible to mere social meanings — no person is just-nothing-but a social construction. The person transcends reductionistic labels and simple categories by virtue of her dignity.
Having contemplated via phenomenology the eidetic structure of the humanistic tradition, I am using these insights to guide my decisions during my year as President.
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