Reaction: Babette Babich's " 'What Makes Human Beings Into Moral Beings?' The Significance of Ethics in the Process of Evolution"
Babich, Babette. 2012. ‘ “What Makes Human Beings Into Moral Beings?” The Significance of Ethics in the Process of Evolution’, Revista Voluntas: Estudos Sobre Schopenhauer 2(2): 03–30. [via academia.edu]
[It is a quite long and rambling reaction]
This came my way and I was pleased. I have read, decades ago, Babich’s 1994 Nietzsche’s Philosophy of Science: Reflecting Science on the Ground of Art and Life, and where I collected the phrase that we humans ‘lack an organ for truth’.
Babette’s article is publish in a journal called Revista Voluntas: Estudos Sobre Schopenhauer.
I have not read, nor read abour, Schopenhauer much, if at all, mainly in more comparative works, or contextualising works on Nietzsche, who I do not really care for.
When I was about 30 I studied Polish near Gdańsk, before Babette’s book was published. I stayed in a well-to-do house belonging to a family who lived a few houses down from Lech Walesa in Sopot. They had a chair that was roped off in the dining room because the pope had sat on it. We communicated in German.
They fed me as well as housed me, but I needed more fruit, ape that I am; vitamin C is important. So I would go to a nearby laneway of stalls to buy fruit. There I would buy ‘kiwi fruit’ which came in from Italy. I would ask in bad Polish for the ‘kiwi’ as a New Zealander would say kiwi fruit (but which I learned as a child to call a Chinese Gooseberry) and they would nudge each other and say I was French, they tended to visibly relax at this point so I did not correct them. As they did not correct me to say kivi. The local pronounciation of the wrong name for the fruit I desired.
The laneway was named after Schopenhauer, who was born in Danzig.
The original form of the town’s name was perhaps more like *gdansick, but it was named after the river, perhaps by the low German traders setting up shop, but the river has changed its name from Gdania to Motława since then. Is Gdynia named after it too? Whatevs.
Names and nouns indicate ontologies. Ontologies indicate frames or methods on how to cut up the world, especially between the world and our selves, and even more between our group of good selves and group of are-they-good-at-all? Different ontologies can indicate a clash, if not of style then of starting points.
ABSTRACT: Just as animals in general are described as “feeling” nothing like “pain” but “stimuli responses” or “behaviours,” scientific theorists once proposed to reduce the differences between socio-cultural expressions of pain to differences in general between the races: Black, White, Asian, and especially so-called aboriginal peoples and Nazi experiments on human pain extended the same test of pain thresholds from experiments performed on animals for centuries (the same experiments on animals unchecked to this day) to human beings designated as subhuman. Ethological studies by Frans de Waal suggest that animals share this capacity for sympathizing with the other. Schopenhauer’s notion of compassion thus serves as the basis for a new understanding of becoming moral. This essay situates Schopenhauer with respect to Kant as well as Nietszche and develops
connections with Levinas and Adorno as well as Isaac Bashevis Singer.
I like this abstract because it indicates the way without exactly telling me the name of the destination
It also raises the bogus ontologies of race, modelled on the division between human and animals and their qualities as befits their station in the great chain of being. I do think this should be talked about more as one of the great stupidities.
It bring de Waals into the picture, who also lifted my from my apathetic slumbers in the mid-2010s, on the distinction we cut between the other obligate fruit-eating apes and ourselves.
Apes all 'lack an organ for truth', and also require vitamin c, having lost the ability to produce it when we lived in the Eurasian-wide rainforest of the Eocene, and had fruit about us at all times. We scavenge vitamin C ahead of absorbing any sugars in our digestive systems, it is that important.
Now to read the paper and in particular Schopenhauer’s notion of compassion, I’ll be holding in mind the pathology of the narcissist as a nomothetic ideal, and those lectures on Schopenahuer I watched when I first discovered youtube, following on from online courses on human revolution, about a decade ago.
[Spoiler, we arrive nowhere and the narcissist at my elbow made a very thin appearance as an ego]
Rather than reducing ethics or morality to biology, i.e., claiming that the moral is the biological, I am prepared to argue that ethical behaviour and/or action as well as moral feeling or sentiment is not limited to humanity alone but can be found throughout the world of sentient beings. [pages 9-10]
I do not disagree with the widening the circle so much, as in “throughout the world
of sentient beings.” Neither however do I disagree that the moral is the biological (how could it be not).
However, we are confusing the self with the world we world ourselves, the base with the more derived characteristics and so cannot see what it is that is seleccted for by evolution.
I take the lessons de Waals & others give in investigating empathy in primates, but do see a way to reduce them to biology parsimoniously.
“But the problem is not Christianity or religion per se. Much rather the problem is nothing less than modern science. Thus in On the Genealogy of Morals, Nietzsche” [page 11]
But have we not just learned from the science of de Waals et al? We get a riff on asceticism and theology.
I must say that this paper seems very dated (from 2011) overtaken as it is by the now of 2025 where it is right wing dogma that free markets get us a bad deal compared to tarriffs on all imports (ignoring the last 50 years of right-wing free market liberalisation of world trade see GATT signed 1947), and where techbros think that stockmarkets of capital are a communist plot. In addition, now cultural warriors are anti-vaccination fools, but when I was young leftie hippies were anti-vaxers (the airhead new-agers wellness freaks cross it over I guess).
The general tenor or stance no longer works as it did… —what 15 years ago. When I was 45 years old and finally got a full-time job.
Here I’ll make the point that when I read Mary Douglas fifteen years before that job, I came to the realisation that any value can use any cultural item or artefact to promote it’s bad worlding (as I would word it now). Asceticism may be used to promote a simple life, or give the rulers a method of cheap ostentation, or at least the appearance of it. Linkage to any badness, or goodness, can be undone with fashions' cycles. I did not think I would live to see it, but here we are.
The values remain, but their investment, their choice of uniform or not, can change with the wind. The values are limited in number, their variety is denominated by perceptions of risk.
To repeat, the article then moves on to Nietsche's views on asceticism, apparently science is a type of asceticism, but I do not know if this works as a description of the techbros.
Anyway, from this posturing we get to:
Thus Schopenhauer invokes the scholastic expression operari sequitur esse [what we do follows from what we are]—a perspective on being that Sartre would invert or better said: convert into existentialism but which is indeed already at work in Schopenhauer and in Nietzsche, and it is this that makes us “interesting,” to use Nietzsche’s ambivalent term in the Genealogy. Expressed in Pindar’s encomium to achieved or perfected excellence, this same ideal urges us to realize or accomplish or perfect ourselves: to become the one you are, a naturing of one’s first nature as a nature apt or able to acquire such perfections involves Aristotle’s ethical evolution or fashioning of character as a second nature. To explain this scholastic maxim, Schopenhauer writes, “everything in the world operates in accordance with what it is, with its character and quality, in which all its manifestations are therefore already contained potentially.” 13 [page 11]
I really like: “Expressed in Pindar’s encomium to achieved or perfected excellence, this same ideal urges us to realize or accomplish or perfect ourselves: to become the one you are, a naturing of one’s first nature as a nature apt or able to acquire such perfections involves Aristotle’s ethical evolution or fashioning of character as a second nature.”
That “fashioning of character as a second nature” is what outcomes of the worlding urge are, regardless if these are more (religion/morality) or less (need for social order/routines of the seasons) consciously articulated and argued into agreement.
Recently I saw a trite commonplace, along the lines of, ‘lefties want to change the world, and righties want to change themselves’. I left a comment poitnting out that is exactly what is not happened at the moment. Righties are changing the world to suit themselves, and lefties will have to lump it. Righties espouse character building activities righteously, in a holier-than-thou moment, while they indulge their fears in self-fulfilling paranoia upon the world because they cannot police themselves. Un-self-regulate they boast of their character development when they have none.
This is an example that the need for social order can be agreed upon as a basic human need, but not what order it should be, nor in what even more derivative value should it be ordered by (truth, love, Order, God, Oneness, balance).
In good worlding we will work on our character as a second nature, yes, but without throwing any part of these second natures (those outcomes and derivatives, and which if doubled-down are dogma and wheels in the mind) into the gaps we dance. Our second natures cause us the most problems in our worlding, where we self our worlds among others doing the same (changing the self and changing the world | maintaining the world and maintaining the self). These values can appear basal to everything and not derivative, especially if held close (beloved/believed), but ‘everything’ is often a procession, and the holding patterns do not last. They may be basal to a sense of self, but to the world they come last.
One may prefer social order over disorder. We may say "Human beings need a social order" and this is true in a weak sense, but it is not primal, prior to this many assumptions have to be in place.
The urge to world, to make space for the "self" embodied, with others doing the same, will often come to terms with habit and routine and expectations and assumptions of how it is. This preference for a need for social order, and thus the order itself, is an outcome of the repeated remains of the day. So, this is not in itself a need for social order in a strong sense. But a weak sense, yes. The stronger more parsimonious impetus is the worlding urge, giving arise to the need for social order, secondarily, among other outcomes in socially worlded animals as they consider their good selves in a group, or two, or many.
In viewing the remains of yesterday we lose sight of the more parsimonious framing. It creates the world before it is there, but we can only see the reuslts. We live the results, not the cause, even as we feel the urge to should on others, is is the world than remains in our intention, in our focus. It always there, and you don't always know what you got 'til its gone.
On page 12 Babich moves on to the tautologies of logic as a dis towards science again, and I wonder is not a mirror also a tautology, that which allows the buds of empathy? And the moral world itself arises from that?
Is not the hindsight of logic also the hindsight of love?
“Schopenhauer similarly concludes that “even Kant’s basis for ethics” turns out to be “merely theological morals in disguise.”16 And the problem with theological morals is only that these are not very moral” [page 12]
Which is why I ask “what is the ethical response to morality?”. Good to see some prior art.
We move onto Schopenhauer and animals, and theology as the cursed project of creating self-serving ontologies, human - not-human. The English word 'it' examples that the gendered = human, not gendered = animals (see any object can example any value given a context – culture warriors are fools).
Apparently science as an asceticism has inherited this from theology as a worldview or two. I’d argue after Mary Douglas, that this linklage, however real, may not survive fashion, the linkage provides no gnostic certainty, no mystic foundations in being there. Fashion changes and explains nothing, not even change. Values however…
We now move onto empathy (de Waal) and, in a Kantian interlude, compassion (Schopehauer)
“only insofar as an action has sprung from compassion does it have moral value.” [page 14
Here we have a derivative piled upon a derivative. The options astound us. But the leveraging is a dismal science.
We then sink into the spontaneous, as some indication that this compassion/empathy nexus is basal, which it is to the self’s sense of self in the world, but not to the moral world, that is something we learn, or teach outselves as characters in the world, thus we worry about guilt, shame, honour, reputation, clout, rank, self-worth, salvation.
I say we learn, but I really mean, the mother goddess teaches, your mother teaches you to self by degree by making special. (See also). She is always letting go of you. Evolution is always letting go of you. Off you go. And here we are.
Schopenhauer argues that it is only “possible for a suffering which is not mine and does not touch me to become just as directly a motive as only my own normally does, and to move me to action” to the extent that one feels the pain of the other “in, with and through him,” and he emphasizes in so many words: we are in immediate communion, with-feeling, feeling-into the other in compassion: mitleid in this sence is mitsein. “although it is given to me merely as something external, merely by means of external intuitive perception or knowledge, I nevertheless feel it with him, feel it as my own, and yet not within me, but in another person.”27 [page 15]
LOOK MUM NO HANDS!!
Babich gets a bit lost skirting the sociobiological neuroscience just-so stories. I guess it is pro forma philosophical minecrafting though.
“The counter claim here is that evolution can’t explain morality if only because evolution is so very useful for explaining egoism. “ [ page 18]
Considering I learned “we lack an organ for truth” the same could apply to more derivative outcomes to the worlding urge “we lack an organ to explain morality”.
Actually evolution can explain morality, if we accept it is an outcome of an urge, and that evolution can select for that urge. If egotism is an urge for the body’s POV, the sense of self, then the world is an outcome of the urge to deal with the rest of reality outside of that bodyself. (Hunger does not tell us how to bake a cake).
It’s a figure ground thing.
Morality is but one of these outcomes that we should as social animals where the rest of reality includes other doing the same. Easier with close kin like mother and child, (the world here precede the self of the child) less easy with second cousins thrice removed, and quite hard with kith.
We manage it all the same.
We just find it very hard to notice we have an urge to world and so do not look for it, investigate it. Worry at it.
The urge to ego is harder to ignore.
Finally on page 19:
“When we talk of morality, we are talking about what we should or ought to do.”
More prior art for "what is the ethical response to morality?”:
“Nietzsche’s question here, he tells us this himself, has to do with the worth of the judgment made regarding moral worth for Schopenhauer as for Kant and it would seem that here he poses his question almost in an evolutionary voice: “under what conditions did man devise these value judgments good and evil? And what value do they themselves possess?” (GM §v). In this spirit, Nietzsche calls for “a critique of moral values, the values of these values themselves must first be called in question ...” (GM §vi). If Schopenhauer argued that Kant’s “basis of ethics” turned out to be “merely theological morals in disguise”32 Nietzsche challenged the enlightened scientific “psychology” of his day, challenging the scientific and reasonable utility of utilitarian but also conventionally approbative theories but that also means evolutionary accounts of morality: “The utility of this unegoistic action is supposed to be the source of the approval accorded it, and this source is supposed to have been forgotten—but how is such forgetting possible? (GM I:3)” [page 20]
I think I have begun to answer this in why we should. The key thing to realise is that hunger does not tell you how to bake a cake. Morality/religin/polity is a recipe, or a even more derivatively, a menu of recipes for a feast within a play. All the world’s a stage.
The article then takes a punitive turn.
And then to an evolutionary frame.
“The current scientific establishment tells us, as it has for the last century, that moral behaviour is an evolutionary adaptation.” [page 27]
It's been looking for the gene for a recipe, or a menu, not realising that hunger exists.
Babich does not quite get to this type of place with her philsophizing, it’s stuck crafting up the upgrade ladder in minecraft, apparently it happens to continental as well as analytic philosophy. All too human I guess.
I think I learnt more about Nietzsche than Schopenhauer. And despite buying those kivi fruit in a lane of stalls named after Schopenhauer in Sopot, near Gdańsk, I’ve not read a lot by him, nor in more secondary literature. But then one day I will, and probably before I get to Husserl.
References
Babette Babich. 2012. ‘ “What Makes Human Beings Into Moral Beings?” The Significance of Ethics in the Process of Evolution’, Revista Voluntas: Estudos Sobre Schopenhauer 2(2): 03–30. [via academia.edu]
Ellen Dissanayake, ‘Chapter 4 The Core of Art: Making Special’, in Homo Aestheticus: Where Art Came from and Why (Free Press, 1992) <https://neilgreenberg.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/06/Dissanayake-on-Art-16856-16986-1-PB.pdf> [accessed 27 February 2025]
Gwenn Seemel, ‘Making Special’, October 18, 2022, Gwenn Seemel <https://www.gwennseemel.com/blog/2022/1018-lbv-andrew> [accessed 27 February 2025]