“In Defence of the Human Being”

An urgently needed book was published in 2020: In Defence of the Human Being. The author is Thomas Fuchs, philosopher, psychiatrist, and the Karl Jaspers Professor of Philosophy and Psychiatry at Ruprecht Karls University in Heidelberg. Fuchs’s book reminds us of the intellectual eradication we have witnessed in the human sciences since the 1960s and 1970s. Today, the human being seems to have disappeared from some areas of our human science disciplines.
  Only recently, for example, a group of young social workers at a large psychiatric institution in Germany, who deal with the most serious problems on a daily basis, expressed their honest astonishment that the term “relationship” had never been mentioned in their training. Of course, the term was self-evident in their view. But in the scientific principles that they learned in their training for dealing with their patients, the word “relationship” was mentioned neither in theory nor in practice. They were essentially only familiar with ecological, cybernetic, and radically constructivist systemic approaches, mostly of US origin. The huge field of human scientific research on humans as cultural and relational beings, especially in Europe, was no longer taught. What happened?

Misanthropic aberrations:
Deep ecology and transhumanism

There is, Thomas Fuchs begins his book, a long tradition

“of putting humanity itself in the dock, of accusing it of excess, greed, hubris, or perfidy, of blaming it for the horrors of war or the destruction of the planet. Recently, there has even been an increase in statements to the effect that it would be best for the earth if it could free itself from its ‘coating of mould’, as Schopenhauer once called humanity”.¹

Fuchs cites as examples the Voluntary Human Extinction Movement² founded by Les Knight in 1991 and based on deep ecology, which pursues the “extinction of humanity to save the earth”, as well as the transhumanist³ Robert Ettinger, who wrote in his 1989 book, Man into Superman, that humanity is “itself a disease”. We must “set about curing ourselves of it”. Our species Homo sapiens is “only a bungling beginning”. When man “clearly recognises himself as an error”, he will be “motivated to form himself”⁴.

The human being: A living,
bodily being in a relational space

Fuchs is concerned with the defence of the human being against challenges directed against the humanistic view of man and its core: the human person as a free, self-determining and social being connected to others. According to Fuchs, we humans are not “mere spirits” without corporeality, but “living beings” in “a shared relational space” and with a claim to respect our dignity, which humans “assert through their bodily existence and togetherness”.

From behaviourist conditioning …

Fuchs cites the book Beyond Freedom and Dignity by the US behavioural psychologist Burrhus Frederic Skinner, published in 1971, as a relatively early example of the questioning of the “humanistic personal concept of man”. It is a radical rejection of the personal conception of man.
  “The belief in something like free will and moral autonomy”, Skinner wrote, “is the relic of a mythical, pre-scientific view of man. The attribution of personal responsibility and dignity hinders scientific progress”.
  Skinner wanted to use social technologies to condition human behaviour in the same way that Pavlov conditioned his dog, whose saliva, after a while, would run only if the little bell sounded to announce the arrival of food. In this way, overpopulation and wars were to be discouraged and happiness instilled in humans.

… to the delusion of man as
a will-less fulfilment organ of
biochemistry and cybernetics

Recently, there has been less talk of Skinner’s frightening social utopia. But, according to Fuchs, Skinner’s basic idea is more relevant than ever: “to replace our self-image, which is biased by prejudice and myths, with rational knowledge of the human being and corresponding technologies”.⁵ For example, the Israeli historian Yuval Noah Harari claims in his 2017 book, Homo Deus that artificial intelligence is gradually rendering the humanistic view of man superfluous. Fuchs describes Harari’s theory, also known as “posthumanism”, which is based on biology and cybernetics, this way:

People will no longer see themselves as autonomous beings running their lives according to their wishes, but instead will become accustomed to seeing themselves as a collection of biochemical mechanisms that is constantly monitored and guided by a network of electronic algorithms.⁶

Untenable assumptions

Harari says that in recent decades life sciences have relegated the free will, the “idea of an autonomous self” and the human “ego” to the realm of those imaginary stories about Christianity, St Nicholas, and the Easter Bunny.⁷ Homo sapiens is “an obsolete algorithm”.⁸ However, says Fuchs, Harari’s cynical deconstructivist theory has very real political consequences: Digital surveillance systems are being created worldwide using artificial intelligence. Fuchs believes that “something very like Skinner’s social technology is being realised”. Authors such as Harari uncritically adopt set pieces of a “scientistic view of humanity”. This includes three assumptions:
  One, everything animate and inanimate can be fully explained scientifically. Two, subjectivity, mind, and consciousness are attributed to physical and physiological processes and are the products of nervous activity. Three, human subjectivity, spirit, and consciousness have no “independent effectiveness in the world”.
  Today the biosciences see all organisms as biological machines, controlled by genetic programmes. Mental experience, inwardness – all this is merely an “effect of biochemical or evolutionary mechanisms”. What is alive is thus eliminated.
  To this way of thinking, the human mind and consciousness are “neuronal information processing”, which in principle can run on any hardware and be simulated by computer systems.
  In this way, the human being becomes the “sum of his data”, says Fuchs, and self-awareness, self-determination, understanding, self-reflection, and self-knowledge become superfluous – the algorithms know us better. Here again Fuchs:

The modern chorus of materialistic neurophilosophy proclaims that our subjective experience is nothing more than the colorful “user interface of a neuro-computer and thus a user illusion” (Slaby 2011) – only the neuronal computational processes in the background are real.

Self-knowledge, understanding, self-reflection, self-awareness and self-determination – in short, mental and spiritual life – are no longer a reality in this materialistic world view; they are a naïve, nostalgic belief.
  To summarise, the following picture emerges: the modern “posthuman” materialist says that everything is matter that can be fully investigated by science. Consciousness, thinking, and feeling derive from physical-chemical nerve activity: “neuronal data processing”. Like a computer.

Human consciousness: events bound to
physicality in the interpersonal space.

For Fuchs, consciousness, thinking, and feeling are not physical-chemical processes. Translated into everyday language, Fuchs says analogously:

Just as a melody, although it cannot be heard without a piano, is not contained in the material of the piano keys or can be explained by these keys, a person cannot express consciousness, thinking, and feeling without a brain and body. The melody is not the sequence of keys. It sounds in the spiritual space within and between us humans. So we always think and feel in the social space of social relationships. Thinking is therefore always interpersonal thinking, and feeling is always interpersonal feeling. A person without social relationships, which would of course be unthinkable, would not need to think, feel, or even speak.

We feel as whole beings –
not with the brain alone

According to Fuchs, materialism cannot be effectively countered by opposing it argumentatively to an abstract, disembodied, pure spirit. Rather, according to Fuchs, it requires casting the human person as a body-soul unity. According to Fuchs, the humanistic view of the human being shows “that human beings are present in their own body, that they feel, perceive, express themselves and act with their body”. When we humans meet, it is not brains that meet. It is the same with every life process. In reality, every human person does not act as a brain, but as a self-determined organism that is an inseparable unity of body and soul.
  According to Fuchs, interpersonal relationships are therefore not the contact of brains, but “intercorporeality”. This means: My hand is not a piece of flesh, but an animated part of a living organism. We do not understand other people “by means of a theory of the mind”, Fuchs remarks, but rather

“intuitively on the basis of their physical expression, their gestures and their behaviour. Just a few weeks after birth, babies recognise the emotional expressions of the mother or father, namely by understanding and feeling these expressions’ melody, rhythm, and dynamics in their own bodies.” (p. 13)

Hence, also, digital online communication always presupposes that we are dealing with “a living person made of flesh and blood”. The “feeling body” also feels sympathy in virtual spaces. We immediately understand what Fuchs means: In the cinema, it is not just the neurons in my brain that use a “theory of mind” to analyse what is going on outside the cave of my head on the screen. If the virtual mountaineer on the screen falls on the north face of the Eiger in a snowstorm, we react with our whole body.

Humanism of the
embodied living spirit

This view of the human being as a body-soul unit – which neither materialistically sees everything spiritual as a higher nervous activity nor assumes an abstract disembodied spirit – is what Fuchs calls “embodied anthropology”, a “humanism of the living embodied spirit”. This is actually a view that Aristotle had already recognised: the experiencing and self-conscious organism.
  Taking this view of the mind-body problem, Fuchs agrees with Adolf Portmann’s “basal anthropology” and with the concept of man we find in Adlerian individual psychology – which already emphasises the indivisible mind-body unity in its name – as well as with neo-psychoanalysis and with the psychosomatic research of Franz Alexander, Thure von Üexküll, and others, to name just a few important researchers.
  In his defence of the human being, Fuchs starts with this fixed point, with the “what” question, “What is the human being?”, to take a stance against the ongoing anti-humanist stream of false theories which radically question nothing less than the freedom and continued existence of the human species. This is not simply a theoretical question, says Fuchs, but an ethical and, above all, an eminently political one.

The concept of man:
An eminently political concern

“For as Karl Jaspers wrote, the concept of man that we hold to be true”, Fuchs writes, “ultimately determines our treatment of ourselves and others – today we would have to add: and nature”. He elaborates:

Humanism in its ethical sense therefore means resistance to the rule of technocratic systems and constraints as well as to the objectification and mechanisation of human beings. If we perceive ourselves as objects, be it as algorithms or as neuronally determined apparatuses, we surrender ourselves to the rule of those who seek to manipulate such apparatuses and dominate them socio-technologically. “For the power of Man to make himself what he pleases means […] the power of some men to make other men what they please”.⁹ The defence of man is therefore not only a theoretical task, but also an ethical duty”.¹⁰

This is completely in the spirit of Karl Jaspers as he wrote in “Der philosophische Glaube” (1974): It is “the concept of man which we hold to be true that ultimately decides how we treat ourselves and others” – today we would have to add: and nature.

 ¹ Schopenhauer, Arthur. The World as Will and Representation Vol. 2, 1859, quoted from Fuchs, p. 7
² https://www.vhemt.org/dindex.htm (retrieved on 3 October 2021)
³ Transhumanism wants to “improve” human nature through genetic engineering, nanotechnology, brain-computer wiring and the like. The biologist and eugenicist Julian Huxley defined transhumanism in his 1957 book “New Bottles for New Wine”: “The human species can, if it wishes, transcend itself – not just sporadically, an individual here in one way, an individual there in another way, but in its entirety, as humanity. We need a name for this new belief. Perhaps transhumanism will serve: man remaining man, but transcending himself, by realising new possibilities of and for his human nature”.
⁴ Ettinger, Robert C. Man into Superman. New York 1989, pp. 4, 8f., quoted from Fuchs, p. 8 [translation by Thomas Fuchs]
⁵ Fuchs, pp. 8ff.
⁶ Harari, J. N. Homo Deus.Eine Geschichte von morgen (Homo Deus. A brief history of tomorrow). Munich 2017, p. 445, quoted from Fuchs, p. 9
⁷ Harari, 2017, pp. 381 and 392, quoted from Fuchs, pp. 9f.
⁸ Harari, 2017, p. 516, quoted from Fuchs, p. 10
⁹ Lewis, C. S. Die Abschaffung des Menschen. (The Abolition of Man.) Freiburg/Br. 2007 [first edition 1943], p. 63, quoted from Fuchs, p. 17
¹⁰ Fuchs, p. 16f.