Essence and affordances
freedom in perception
Here is your anthropos!
According to the testimony of another Diogenes,1 the notorious Cynic, Diogenes of Sinope, cried out the words above as he cast a plucked chicken onto the floor of the Academy. Following Diogenes’ exclamation, a farcical account of this event presents Plato begrudgingly appending the differentia “…with flat nails” to his provisional definition of the human being as “the featherless biped.”
More recently, definitions of the human being have tended to approach the issue genomically. Interestingly, the resulting definition is proportionately equivalent to Plato’s given that Homo sapiens apparently shares upwards of 60% of its genome with Gallus gallus, plucked or otherwise. But neither the satirical definition provided, according to Diogenes Laërtius, by the Platonic Academy nor the genomic definition provided by the modern one manages to identify an essential differentia of the human being that could adequately distinguish it from other creatures. The former identifies trivial qualities to serve as differentia and the latter does not really identify any differentia at all other than a sheer quantitative percentage of difference. Obviously, “the featherless biped” in not a definition that was seriously held among the Classical Philosophers. Instead, Man was defined as “the rational animal.” Indeed, the etymology of the word “man” literally implies just this. The Germanic word “man” may be compared to Latin and Sanskrit cognates of mens and manas, respectively, both of which mean “mind.” What does it mean to be rational, or to be a bearer of mind?
Traditionally, reason was understood as the ability to contemplate the essence of things, which is precisely what a definition seeks to indicate. Hence, only the human being among creatures is inclined to define things. The scene depicted in Genesis 2:20 in which God brings the animals before Adam to be named illustrates the function of reason very precisely given that the perception of the existence of a thing occurs in simultaneity with a conception of its essence. A-rational animals have no concept of essence or existence. Essence is “being” (from Latin esse, “to be”) and existence is an instance of being. We behold being through theoria and not by theorizing or by merely looking.
Evident to cursory observation, or mere looking, is that both humans and chickens embody themselves in characteristic physical forms. By theorizing, scientific knowledge infers that these physical forms were wrought according to a blueprint of sorts that is encoded in corresponding base pairs of DNA. Through theoria, we can go further and begin to gain insight into the truth of things. That’s because the fact of theoria on our part is itself an expression of human nature in contrast to animal nature. In other words, we apprehend a difference between human and animal nature through doing as well as through knowing; through the exercise of a capacity as well as through the results of that capacity’s exercise. It is only in virtue of our humanhood that we can contemplate another being according to who it is in itself. Animals that are not human (i.e. beings that have life and also that breathe, sense, and locomote2) cannot relate to other beings according to who those beings are in themselves, but only what those beings are for them. Other animals can only relate to their fellow beings as affordances. The Psychologist James Gibson coined the term “affordance” in and explained it thus:
The affordances of the environment are what it offers the animal, what it provides or furnishes, either for good or ill. The verb to afford is found in the dictionary, the noun affordance is not. I have made it up. I mean by it something that refers to both the environment and the animal in a way that no existing term does. It implies the complementarity of the animal and the environment. (The Ecological Approach to Visual Perception, 1979)
Basically, affordances present behavior-potentials for an organism. An affordance can be thought of a will-impulse embodied in perception that is ready to spring into action according to an instinctual pay-off calculation. It is our animal nature, and not our human one, that relates to our fellow beings exclusively as behavior-potentials. For instance, if I perceive the chicken as an affordance for dinner, I am perceiving it through my animal nature. If the chicken runs away from me, it is also perceiving me as an affordance, though in the negative, which is to say, it is perceiving me as a threat. The chicken is constitutionally incapable of perceiving me as who I am, but rather only as what I entail for it. Another instance of this kind of perception is a man who sees women not as men (i.e. it’s a slight play on words in allusion to the etymology outlined above; the meaning is clearer if the term “individual spirits” is substituted for “men”) but as affordances. Unlike the chicken, a human being is not constitutionally incapable of perceiving his fellows as more than what they are for him. Most political interactions are similarly based on ignoring who people are and weighing them rather as affordances. Economic interactions are almost exclusively based on this form of relation. In fact, any time we relate to another human being as a member of a class, category, gender, etc…instead of as an individual, we are almost certainly relating to her through our animal nature. If something we can say about someone takes precedence over whom we are saying it about—any time the subject is superseded by its predicate(s)—the corresponding relation is a less-than-human one. In any instance that “what” overshadows “who,” this being has become an affordance for us and, concomitantly, we have lowered our own consciousness below the human level as a result of the manner in which we have related to others.
The above consideration is not meant to suggest that animal-level consciousness has no place in human interactions. Instead, just as I am free to use a Stradivarius violin for firewood, for example, so I am free to capitulate my freedom to the authority of my own animal nature. Animals do not enslave themselves by living according to their nature because this would imply a capitulation of something that was not present in the first place. As an human being, however, I am failing to live according to my potential if I only relate to other beings according to what they are for me and not according to what or who they are in themselves. The question of freedom is an uniquely human question, and to relate to another being on its terms rather then mine is an exercise of this freedom. With this conclusion, we have penetrated to the essence of humanhood and provided an alternative to the unsatisfactory definitions of the human being with which this consideration began: the human being is the free animal.
Diogenes Laërtius, Lives of the Philosophers.
*Plants have life, animal have life and also breath/sensation/locomotion. This issue is explored in greater detail in Five Themes (2019).