People and other Animals

Abstract

Late in the twentieth century, we still need to think through anew the basic principles of our view of nature and of man and especially of the relation between nature and man. The trouble we are still, and more urgently than ever, faced with in this endeavor, began, if one may say so yet again, in the seventeenth century when Descartes split apart the inner life of consciousness from the external, material world. For despite the ingenuity of some of his remarks about the interaction of mind and body, the radical disconnection of these two kinds of finite substances made a coherent understanding of the world in terms of them impossible. And as men’s knowledge of physical nature increased by leaps and bounds, the mind understood as disembodied spirit shrivelled to a mere ‘ghost in the machine’, gibbering but impotent – or else vanished altogether into the software of the brain. Man was displaced from the center of nature and become no longer his Maker’s image, but only a handful of dust. Paradigmatic of this displacement, and even debasement, of man, was Laplace’s famous boast of 1814: that if an omniscient observer knew the position of all the particles in the universe at time t ₀, he would be able to predict their position at time t ₁, and so would know everything there was to know. Now without returning, or even longing to return, to the tidy theocentric cosmos of earlier centuries, we do need, it’s clear, to repopulate the Laplacean desert, to find a way of understanding the world more coherent and more adequate to our own experience than the Laplacean conception: our own experience whether as ordinary mortals, as scholars or as scientists. This is the task that Wilfrid Sellars calls reconciling the manifest and the scientific image of man.