Fighting for Life: Contest, Sexuality, and Consciousness

Preface

Preface From antiquity the human being has been considered the "microcosm . " the " little world" in which all of the forces and all of the reality of the entire great world, the universe or macrocosm, are represented. Sometimes the human being was thought of as a kind of mirror of all else in the universe. Today we arc even more taken by the connections between the human being and the rest of the cosmos than the ancients were, but we cannot be conlcnt with such a simplified representation of the connections. Earlier views of the individual as a microcosm tended to be atemporal and generalized. OUf present understanding of our complex relationship to the rest of the universe is largely temporal , based on a knowledge of the evolutionary and historical past in relation to the present, and it tends to be quite circumstantial and concerned with details of human behavior. Humankind has a long past. and it is all present, for, like all beings in history, we are where we are, inevitably, because of where we came from. Even though free choice is panly responsible for our present situation, free choice itself cannot be exercised groundlessly. Any choice is made at a given time in a given situation and thus depends on the options that the time and situation provide, that is, the options that the past has brought into being. We have become increasingly aware of the biological base of some of these options. Sociobiology , understood in Edward O. 9 Pre/act' Wilson's sense (1975:595) as " the systematic slUdy of the biolog· ical basis of all social behavior," and variously identified as a new synthesis and as a fad, is in either case very much in the news today. Some people think of it as reductionisl. as it can well be, eliminating anything distinctively human by making it out to be purcly biological. But sociobiology need not be reductionist. Thought and human free choice can be dependent on biological activity, particularly on neurophysiological activity (serious brain damage makes thought and decision impossible), without being the same thing as biological activity. This book has grown out of the study of intellectual, literary. and cultural history-in short, of the history of consciousness. At certai n points such study is inevitably driven back into biology. The biological side of our nature is nothing to be ashamed of. Human consciousness has always a biological grounding or com· plement. And biological activity makes little if any sense apart from its evolutionary history. The complexities of biological evolution that we now know thus make an investigation of con· sciousncss a task more complex than ever before. But in the end we come to an impasse. For what is most distinctive of human beings. male and female, is human self· consciousness. Human self·consciousness is biologically unpro· cessable because it is genetically free· noaling. The ."" that I ullcr is distinct from and totally cut off from all clse, directly accessible only to itself and from its own inside: no one else can know the taste of self (to use Gerard Manley Hopkins's expression ) which I experience when I say " (" or when' am simply aware of my own presence to myself. My body resembles the bodies of my parents and earlier ancestors. But my own self. what I refer to when I say "I." is no more related to my parents than to anyone else. II has no genetic constitution. And even though it is embedded in a particular culture, which provides it with its characteristic ways of relating to others, to the world, and even to itself, it still noats free of its culture. The ,,' " that 1say is as completely different from any other self in my own culture as it Preface is from any other self in any other culture, real or imaginable. am simply not you, no matter who or how close you are. But the human biological organism , in which selfconsciousness is nested, does not float free as self-consciousness does. It has a past of millions of years of biological evolution, not to mention a much longer inorganic past. Biological evolution underlies social structures in the infrahuman world and in the human world as well: patterns of aggression and appeasement, of hierarchy, dominance, and submission, of group formation, of sexual drives, and much else. Knowledge of the genetic heritage, far from destroying human freedom , enables us better...