Last week I argued the public desperately needs a scientifically based humanities program dedicated to studying the nature of man.

Also last week, the University of Wisconsin’s Center for the Humanities sponsored a workshop where a panel of scholars argued that man has no distinguishing nature. According to their “post humanist” philosophy, we must abandon old conceptions of what it means to be human, especially the idea that humans are superior to other animals. “Human exceptionalism is what post humanism problematizes,” said UW English faculty member Alastair Hunt. The panel said abandoning Western boundaries between humans and animals would allow the extension of rights to nonhumans and maybe inanimate objects.

Ponder this for a moment. Here we have a group of scholars from within the humanities arguing the distinction between human and animal should be abandoned.

Imagine biologists abandoning the distinction between living and inanimate matter or claiming that being alive is no more exceptional than being a rock. This would mean the end of biology. The absolute unique and exceptional status of living organisms is what gives rise to the field of biology. In this respect, the humanities are no different.

It is no coincidence that elephants lack humanities departments and that monkeys don’t study medicine. Only humans have a faculty of reason; only humans can acquire abstract conceptual knowledge. It is this supremely unique and exceptional nature of man that makes the humanities both possible and necessary.

Yet it appears the humanities can’t decide if humans, or anything else, have a distinguishing nature, as “post humanism” is now a subject of study and debate. The issue, however, is not “post humanism” per se, but what it represents. Its very existence represents the logical culmination of years of chipping away at the foundations of Western thought.

Here, for example, is a bit of recommended reading from a workshop on post humanism:

“To recapitulate, certain dualisms have been persistent in Western traditions, they have all been systemic to the logics and practices of domination of woman, people of color, nature, workers, animals. … Chief among these troubling dualisms are self/other, mind/body, culture/nature, male/female, civilized/primitive, reality/appearance, whole/part, agent/resource, maker/made, active/passive, right/wrong, truth/illusion, total/partial, God/man.”

Did you get that? Western (i.e. Aristotelian) logic, which conceptualizes and distinguishes between such things as right, wrong, true and illusion are troubling tools of domination. Imagine biologists arguing against the dualisms of living and dead, cell and organism or truth and illusion.

Two thousand years ago such dualisms may have seemed troubling, but at the dawn of the 21st century the fact that anyone in the humanities would consider this worth reading and debating is incomprehensible.

Over two millennia ago Aristotle identified man as the rational animal and articulated the laws of logic. Nineteen hundred years later these achievements made possible the birth of science and the founding of America. From Galileo to Newton to Locke, the key to their success was a proper view of man as a conceptual being and their dedication to reason.

Scientifically, we have built upon their achievements using the same Aristotelian methods of logic and careful observation.

When you ride on an airplane or use a computer it is Aristotelian logic you are counting on to make crucial distinctions between lift, drag, current and voltage. When you sign a contract or criticize your government it is Western enlightenment reasoning you are counting on to make crucial distinctions between ownership, theft, individual rights and statism.

Yet it is this Aristotelian, enlightenment foundation with its “constraining” discourse, conceptualizations, hierarchical orderings and identifications that the humanities wish to be liberated from. The workshop reading continues:

“The organic, hierarchical dualisms ordering discourse in ‘the West’ since Aristotle ruled … have been cannibalized. … The dichotomies between mind and body, animal and human, organism and machine, public and private, nature and culture, men and woman, primitive and civilized are all in question ideologically.”

Giants like Aristotle, Locke and others discovered basic principles of human nature, rationality, rights, freedom and government. Rather than standing on their shoulders, refining, clarifying and expanding on their discoveries like the sciences did, the humanities are discussing their cannibalization.

Humans are conceptual beings requiring properly defined concepts, principles and abstractions. If an engineer can cause a plane to crash by failing to distinguish lift from thrust, think of the destructive effects on a culture unable to distinguish man from animal, rights from entitlements, private from public or freedom from slavery.

While the humanities debate the merits of moving past such old-fashioned categories as human and animal and can’t decide whether rocks and bugs have rights, people in the real world need to understand and conceptualize the world as only humans can do.

Will the humanities rediscover the age of reason and its Aristotelian base, or will it continue to seek “liberation” from its necessity? This is the question.

Jim Allard ([email protected]) is a graduate student majoring in the biological sciences.