Álvaro Rodríguez-González Barredo

“But now since there are pure as well as empirical intuitions (as the transcendental aesthetic proved), a distinction between pure and empirical thinking of objects could also well be found.In this case there would be a logic in which one did not abstract from all content of cognition; for that logic that contained merely the rules of the pure thinking of an object would exclude all those cognitions that were of empirical content. It would therefore concern the origin of our cognitions of objects insofar as that cannot be ascribed to the objects”

Critique of Pure Reason, A 55-6/B 79-80

1

Evolutionary explanations – a certain version of them, anyway – provide a very powerful reductive programme for basically every aspect of human life. It is as settled a fact as anything in science can be that we evolved from other, non-human lifeforms, and evolution (broadly) seems to care about one thing: that living forms can perpetuate themselves. There’s no need to enter into debates about whether genes, individuals or species are the right “unit of selection” here; life replicates itself and, that which manages to keep existing – normally by succeeding at replicating -, tautologically, does keep existing.

The various pressures that our biological history have impressed onto our species makes it so we can use something very similar to teleological judgments. We can think of “a reason” why we have most of the features we do in our bodies. Not through design, but through specific modes of adaptation we have developed in order to survive as a species in the environment we have had to deal with. Again, without getting into the weeds of the philosophy of biology, the legitimacy of functional talk regarding organisms, and so on; we can stick to the broadest and most basic understanding of the matter for our purposes. If we breathe air that is because we have been able to perpetuate ourselves whilst breathing air; and it is not much of a stretch to claim that our species, indeed, has perpetuated itself thanks, in part, to having developed such an ability.

All of this is to say that there are two easy inferences to make from this point in order to turn the scope of the evolutionary programme into something properly universal. One of them is quick, and it is dirty, and it doesn’t work. The other one is a bit more nuanced, and there’s something to be said about it. The first one would, naïvely, try to reduce every goal of human life to the goal of self-perpetuation. When we make friends, we’re really trying to make our genes survive through cooperation; when we fall in love, we’re really, most definitely trying to bear offspring and secure our genetic legacy, and so forth. This mode of “Darwinian suspicion”, quite transparently, can only take us so far. If we understand by “our real goal” some sort of psychological mechanism, some subconscious drive to perpetuation that tricks us into believing we have higher goals, the thesis is clearly false, examples of self-destructive goals that can’t possibly be reinterpreted in that way abound. On the other hand, if all that’s meant is that, from the point of view of self-perpetuating genes, things are about self-perpetuating genes, the explanatory prowess of this project flounders before having set sail.

2

Hence the sophisticated cousin of that naïve form of reductionism. Sure, one will say, human goals can drift from their “original” evolutionary purpose, there is no reason why we cannot use our gazelle-hunting brain for other, less procreationally viable, endeavours. But ultimately all claims around the sublimity and exaltedness of our human occupations have to face the test of its evolutionary ground. And it seems like they would, by and large, fail. If we belong to the same family tree as the humble sea sponge or the carrot, shouldn’t we tone down certain pretensions around the human race?

Kant seems to be a prime suspect of elevating humans far beyond what is reasonable given our not-so-illustrious pedigree. Heavens above us and moral law inside of us, we remember that; let’s start with the heavens. Is there a place for a transcendental I with apodeictic and necessary a priori principles of understanding in a natural history of humankind? Shouldn’t our claims to knowledge be all the more modest? Some pragmatic rule, perhaps, linking the normativity of our capacities to their success in securing certain essential goods for our continued existence (like Williams, 2002, sort of).

3

A community of people needs to quarry cubes that are as close as possible to a regular shape; in order to do that, they have to figure out a way of drawing out right angles on flat stone, so they know where to cut it and thus obtain their desired shape. They realize that they can use a rope with 12 knots at an equal distance from one another to make a right triangle. In due time, someone starts thinking about what other numbers of knots would work to get right angles. Eventually, the worldly needs of construction get you the Pythagorean Theorem.

4

Kant’s distinction between empirical and transcendental psychology is key to avoiding misunderstandings as to what he is actually claiming regarding the natural or non-natural character of our intellectual capacities. Qua sensible beings who can have an experience, and who can have knowledge of the world, there are certain conditions that, Kant claims, have to be given necessarily. Maybe not even space and time are necessary across the board (Kohl, 2015), and they’re only so amongst humans. But it seems like the forms of judgment, to Kant, are universal. This isn’t to say that they have fallen from the sky, but, rather, that they are the most fundamental rules that determine whether something counts as knowledge.

Imagine that humanity hadn’t, as it has, developed from one and the same evolutionary process. Rather, say only half of humans had evolved, and the other half had been directly created by a demiurge of some sorts. Both types of human, however, have the same type of knowledge, they can talk to each other, they agree on whether there is a tree in front on them, and on the laws of physics. Divine or material origin, Kant would claim, all of these people have the same conditions of experience. They hold with necessity, they are a priori, because no matter what, if sensible experience is to arise in the world, it will abide by the same principles. Similarly, it doesn’t matter if it’s an artificial intelligence or a human in the flesh producing a text in English; their grammar has to be the same.

Empirical psychology and natural history, of course, are emphatically important aspects of understanding humanity. It is, after all, through a natural process that these a priori principles came to actuality. Learning how such a natural process does that, and under what conditions it can occur, counts a great deal to understanding what the nature of our knowledge is.

5

But the possible products of such natural processes don’t have to stop there. What about the moral law inside of us? How is a free being created? Kant has an interesting view on the matter:

“For the offspring is a person, and it is impossible to form a concept of the production of a being endowed with freedom through a physical operation. So from a practical point of view it is a quite correct and even necessary idea to regard the act of procreation as one by which we have brought a person into the world without his consent and on our own initiative, for which deed the parents incur an obligation to make the child content with his condition so far as they can”

Metaphysics of Morals, 6: 280-1

We cannot conceive of a free being as somehow naturally created, not if we understand freedom in the ominous terms that Kant does. But, nonetheless, free beings are naturally created, in the very obvious and direct sense that they are born, that we have a good idea of the sort of physicality involved in making new humans. I think we can, however, understand it in the same sense as we do with other apparently timeless entities that come into actuality through temporal and natural processes. The Pythagorean Theorem will presumably still hold when there’s no human left, however prosaic and bound to our livelihoods its first utterance was. The principles of understanding are a priori and not bound to empirical conditions, even though the humans who use them very much are empirical, and even though they can only ever be used and exhibited in their empirical use. Evolution doesn’t compel us to deny that its mechanism may result in rational beings, who abide by special laws aside from those that nature imposes, and who are thus compelled by the unwavering call of morality (or, what is the same, the law of freedom). Perhaps, of course, we don’t want to assume any of that to begin with. Kant, however, shows that, should we want to, the natural history of our species would still be safe.

6

Naturally, this goes beyond Kant. The principle applies generally. If we have reason to hold a sphere of human activity as autonomous, as having its own principles that exist over and above the limits of what makes evolutionary sense, the empirical history of how it came to be, at least as far as I can see it, has no right within its boundaries.