life without essence: man as a force-of-nature

Philosophical Perspectives, 25, Metaphysics, 2011

LIFE WITHOUT ESSENCE: MAN AS A FORCE-OF-NATURE1

Mandel CabreraUCLA

Auburn University

Sarah CoolidgeUCLA

Joseph AlmogUCLA

The essay’s task is to understand whether we — you, our trio and the restof us — are an integrated part of Nature, a force of Nature, in the way we takehurricanes, flowers and dogs to be each fully a Nature-product.

It is a commonplace in epistemology, metaphysics, action theory and ethicsto assert (but more often, presuppose) that we are not just another Nature-product. We are absolutely “special,” an exception, one of a kind. If this muchis not asserted directly, the matter is put forward in the form of a paralyzingdisjunction, a painful dilemma:

The Man-in-Nature Dilemma: Either one is a Nature-uniformist but then ahuman-reductionist or if one is to escape human reductionism, one must makeus a Nature-transcendent agency.

In what follows we would like to argue the dilemma is false. What is more, wewould like to diagnose what might be at its source. For this, we contrast belowtwo forms of understanding natural phenomena: understanding by essence versusunderstanding by Nature-placing, or in short, understanding by nature. The twomethodologies are absolutely general and apply across kinds of things be theymundane natural kinds — the kinds of “physics,” “chemistry,” or “biology” —artifactual kinds (“statues,” “computers”) or even that reputed one-of-a-kind,man-kind.

Our thesis is that the dilemma is sustained by holding on (be it inmetaphysics, action theory, or ethics) to understanding man by way of

PHILOSOPHICAL PERSPECTIVES

44 / Mandel Cabrera, Sarah Coolidge, and Joseph Almog

essence-theory. Essence-theory is a two-stage proposition. In the first, theessentialist takes human life out of Nature, and works conceptually on its“essence” or “definition” — what it is to be human — in (“philosophical”) vitro.Then, the essentialist moves in stage two, to the re-insertion of humans back intoNature but in a re-modeled version, that is, defined (and thus, conceptualized) as“rational animals,” “thinking beings,” “free-will based intentional agents” andso on. Now that we think of the humans — ourselves! — under the essentialist’senlightened lamppost, the malaise strikes and brings in its fore the dilemma. Themethodology engenders an illusion of a kind of specialness that (i) is not actuallysustained by our life in Nature, the lives of historically real humans and (ii)worse, the specialness is of a type that is not even logically possible for any kindof being, let alone for the million year old historical riff raff — species — that wemake.2

In contrast, understand man by placing it in and as part of Nature’s course,never take “them” — the humans — out of their historical home to the in vitroessence remodeling, and no illusory sense of special-ness gets engendered. Whatis more, the dilemma dissolves (without some dark human reductionism takingover) and a realistic, historically-grounded, sense of our specialness emerges. So,yes, of course we are each and as a plurality special but in (i) a logically coherentsense and (ii) an earned sense that is performance-based, due to what we actuallydo as yet another historical, if special, force of nature. Special forces are notsuper-men; they are men all right and part of the (e.g. country’s military) forcesand it is what they do as one-of-the-forces that stands out. That — the specialforces of Nature — is our life story, not some mythology of Nature-strandedangels or princes of another kingdom (of disembodied minds, of ends, etc.)temporarily exiled in mere “material bodies” produced by the local inhospitableNature.

An interesting expression of our troubling sense of specialness withoutsaddling it with too many theoretical presuppositions lies in the followingremarks of Tom Nagel3

. . . From an external perspective, then, the agent and everything about himseems to be swallowed up by the circumstances of action; nothing of him is leftto intervene in those circumstances. This happens whether or not the relationbetween action and its antecedent conditions is conceived as deterministic. Ineither case we cease to face the world and instead become parts of it; we and ourlives are seen as products and manifestations of the world as a whole. EverythingI do or that anyone else does is part of a larger course of events that no one“does,” but that happens with or without explanation. Everything I do is partof something I don’t do, because I am a part of the world. We may elaboratethis external picture by reference to biological, psychological, and social factorsin the formation of ourselves and other agents. But the picture doesn’t haveto be complete in order to be threatening. It is enough to form the idea of thepossibility of a picture of this kind. Even if we can’t attain it, an observer literallyoutside us might. Why is this threatening and what does it threaten? . . .

Life Without Essence: Man as a Force-of-Nature / 45

The reason we cannot accept it here, at least not as a general solution, is thataction is too ambitious. We aspire in some of our actions to a kind of autonomythat is not a mere subjective appearance — not merely ignorance of theirsources — and we have the same view of others like us. The sense that weare the authors of our own actions is not just a feeling but a belief, and we can’tcome to regard it as a pure appearance without giving it up altogether. But whatbelief is it?

we’d like to proceed in a slow-burning fashion and diagnose the source of Nagel’sand indeed Every-man’s anxiety about one’s cosmic place.

Part I. The man as force-of-nature problematic

We have barely stated our task — understanding our nature — and you mayalready feel the conjuring trick has been foisted on you. You may well ask —to whom precisely are you alluding with this folksy “we” or any-one who is“one of us”? About whom exactly is the question raised whether they are each amade-in-Nature product?

If you are guessing our intended answer is: by trying to understand “us”we are trying to understand “human beings,” and intend this to mean each andevery member of the zoological species homo sapiens, you are not wrong. But theanswer has not seemed obvious to philosophers. When many of the distinguishedphilosophers we mention below, like Aristotle or Descartes or Kant or Anscombe,pondered what was special about us — often using the key plural noun“humans” — they (i) did not include every member of the species (excludingearly members of the species — e.g. the mother of us all, Mitochondrial Eve andeven many of their own “remote enough’ contemporaries)4 (ii) on the other hand,they would have included many — provided they were appropriately cognitivelyendowed — non-humans, or for that matter non-mammalians — in the keycosmologically elite group that we make. For example, David Bowie, as the“man” who fell to earth with rather advanced mathematical patents we fancystealing, surely would count. It will emerge as we advance that by telling whoseplace in Nature we are looking for, we can tell whether it is in Nature that itsplace fully is.5

Intermezzo I: what feeds (and what doesn’t) into our dilemma

There are two very different problems besieging the understanding of (touse four variant vocabularies) what -we-are or human nature or the essence ofhumans or finally, the concept “being-human”. The first problem we call thewhich -concept problem; the second, the whether- by-a-concept problem.

The which-concept problem is this. It might seem that what is special aboutthe human-case (as opposed to the study of the nature of mundane naturalkinds like the tigers or water) is the type of concept used to define (characterize,


segregate) the pertinent kind — the humans. It is a concept that is very differentfrom the concepts used to define mundane natural kinds — e.g. “to be water isto be H20” or “to be a tiger is to have DNA D gotten by descending from urgroup T.” The latter essential definitions use vocabulary (or rest on concepts) wedeem “naturalistic”; some, in the vein of Carnap’s pseudo-scientific forays, wouldeven demand: the vocabulary of the language of Nature should be reducible to(some fantasized version) of the language of Physics. If only we could “define”(essentially characterize) the humans by a definition like “items of DNA Htransferred from ur-group M” (recall Mitochondrial Eve), we’d be locating man-kind–the humans — among the other kinds of Nature.

However, this zoological definition will not do, insist many which-conceptfocused essentialists. A definition that is a variant of the one given to slugsand tigers is not a correct characterization of mankind; it does not get at whatis fundamental and distinctive, arguably absolutely exceptional, about this oneof a kind. It is rather classical “philosophical” characterizations, reaching forthe distinctive, arguably exceptional, cognitive endowment of humans — e.g.the ancient “rational animal” — that are in the right direction. But, and thisis the nub of the which-concept problem — this type of cognitive concept isabsolutely exceptional among definitions of natural kinds in that it transcendsthe “scientific” language of Nature. Famed cognitive variations such as Descartes’“thinking being” or Kant’s “author of its actions” (or in his wordy way: rationalinitiator of an actus originarius) only magnify the problem.

This which-concept problem is a theoretical problem dominating manydiscussions in modern philosophy of mind and action. But it is not our problemhere; nor is it the problem of this essay’s interlocutors, classical pre-modernessentialists, such as Aristotle, Aquinas, Descartes, Leibniz, Kant and finally,Nagel, Anscombe and Davidson, to mention those we discuss below.

The theoretician’s dilemma — as we will call it — only gets going when wediscover, on a certain theory of the language of Nature (“science”), that relativeto that restrictive elective language, the human phenomenon cannot be defined.Many modern philosophers of mind indeed assume some such base languageof Nature. Some of them also accept that human essence involves cognitiveconcepts of the kind “rational” typifies. And some of those thinkers also assume(notice the accumulation of assumptions) that “rational” is not in itself somehowreducible (in one sense or another) to the concepts of the language of Nature.Such theorists trap themselves with a theoretical problem.6

To reiterate then, this theoretical language of Nature issue is not our problemnor is it, on our reading, the focus of the 2500 year old intellectual — surelymuch emphasized already in the early segments of the Old Testament and thus aneven older obsession — of specifying what is (absolutely) special about us. Ourproblem in the present essay and the classical essentialist’s feelings breedingit emanate from a pre-theoretic marketplace sense of our being absolutelyunique, categorically special, if not downright providential. Since we view asdeterminative this difference between our pre theoretic man-is-special problem


and the modern theoretician’s dilemma, we shall in the paragraphs that followlinger some more on the difference and try to bring it home from a few differentangles.7

Two ways of being special: Omega, God, Man

A familiar analog, coming up clearly in a more “exact” essential charac-terization project, may help us see the point. It involves characterizing countingnumbers — technically ordinal numbers — those numbers we use to count with (ina given plurality) e.g. the first duck, the second duck, etc. Now, one such ordinalnumber is omega, the first infinite ordinal. Suppose someone bound themselves,for whatever theoretical reason, to the idea that we can only use notations like 0,S0, SS0, . . . essentially made of finite iterations of an operation like successor toa given distinguished constant 0. A variation of such theoretical bondage comesup in famous work of Thoraf Skolem in the early 1920’s when he initiated theuse of a strict formal first order language to characterize such notions of “set”and “ordinal.”

The strictly self-bound thinker might soon worry that omega is indescribablein his elected “language of number.” But then the problem he raises is of his ownmaking for it has as its object this self-imposed “finitistic” language. The thinkerhas discovered a reason, if he insists on trafficking in ordinals like omega, toenrich his constricted language of number. So much is the theoretician’s dilemma;it is fanned by the theoretician’s restrictive means of expression.8

On the other hand, and now we edge back towards our kind of pre-theoreticproblem, having enriched our language of counting-numbers to be able to speakof infinite ordinals, everybody would still acknowledge that the entity omega isa categorically different entity than all previous finite ordinals. Here the focusis not on some theoretically driven restricted language and its limits. Rather, thefocus is on a categorically new kind of entity which, describe it as we will, isabsolutely special compared to the “previous” numbers.

This pre-theoretical problem is the analog of the classical human essential-ist’s problem about mankind’s absolute specialness compared to all previouslygenerated cosmic kinds. When man emerged, says the classical human essentialist,we “jumped” to, as it were, the omega of cosmic kinds, a new kind that is nothinglike the kinds of being the cosmos had before. The classical essentialist has noexpressive problem and she says it loud and clear—Mankind stands to tigers andprimates as omega stands to the finite ordinals.9

What then is the problem we see in the classical essentialist’s claim of ourbeing absolutely special, our being omega-like?

Using this just cited analogy of omega, we might say: both the essentialistand the nature placing metaphysician think that man is special, in the waytwo metaphysicians of number theory will surely agree that omega is special.The question is rather how they bring out the special-ness. One mathematical


metaphysician may do so in terms of a conceptual definition applying only toomega (and compare it to the definition applying to, say, the finite ordinalnumber 79) — only omega is such that that it is in one-one correspondence withvarious of its “parts”; 79 or 79,000,000 do not fall under such a (“Dedekind-infinity”) concept. In contrast, the place-it-in-the numbers metaphysician tells usthat omega is special because it is the limit of all finite ordinals (little that it isknown, this was Cantor’s original way of generating it in his second generationprinciple of his 1883 manifold theory). So, omega is special not because of aconcept it alone satisfies but because of its place among the numbers.

Another famous contrast perhaps more familiar to us all comes fromattempts to bring out what is special about God. We have here a contrast betweenthe methods of what Kant calls (i) the ontological (but should be called theconceptual-essentialist) argument and (ii) the cosmological argument. The formertells us only God falls under the concept of “supreme bearer of the perfections.”In contrast, the cosmological argument does not cite concepts (“perfections”); itplaces God as the first in a chain of cosmic causes. Each methodology deploysits “compass” — defining concepts vs. placing in an ordered manifold; using itsfavorite compass, the methodology points out, in the sense favored, that Omegaand God are “special”.

As we shall see in what follows, the essentialist and the nature-placing meta-physician approach this third special case, man-kind, again in a somewhat paralleland symmetric way. The essentialist will look for a special concept/essenceapplying to man and (allegedly) nowhere else; thus the focus on rationality (andits cognitive variants). The Nature-placer will tell us where in the tree of life —and more generally the cosmic tree of being — man shows up. In a nutshell, theessentialist methodology instructs us: tell me what x’s conceptual essence is, I’lltell you in what sense x is special. The Nature-placement metaphysician instructs:tell me where x is in the tree of being, I’ll tell you in what sense it is special.

The whether-by-a-concept problem

So, we can see that for our non-theoretical problem, we and the classicalessentialist are free to use any desired cognitive concept, e.g. the age old andalways influential concept “rational animal.” Our sense is that the problem isnot in the specific concept used to characterize men — it is not a which-conceptproblem — but rather in pursuing the project of understanding the humans-of-history, the historical-humans, by means of any concept-definition at all.We might put it this way: the problem in the classical essentialist gambit isthe abstractive flight from existence to essence, from being-s to concept-s, viz.we abstract from those historically real beings, the human-s, to the a-historicalconceptual definition (whatever definition the classical essentialist serves himselfto). E.g. as we shall see in a moment, for the essentialist there is no intrinsicdifference between “defining” the historical species of tigers and the “species”


of unicorns. In both cases, we produce, prior to any investigation of historicalanimals, an attributive definition, of the form “to be a tiger (unicorn) is to haveattribute A”. If, as essentialist champion Saul Kripke famously pointed out, wehave problems so defining the unicorns it is (i) not because there are no actualunicorns but (ii) because the unicorn-myth has not given us a robust enoughstructural attribute, but only attributes pertaining to superficial look that cannotdiscern between e.g. earthly exemplars and twin earthly doubles. If we upgradethe myth to “animals with DNA U” (DNA that will later turn out to be un-instantiated), we will have provided a defining attribute, as sanguine for theessentialist as the tiger-defining “to have DNA D”. The subsequent historicalfact — there are tigers, there are no unicorns — is logically subsequent for theessentialist.

All in all, this on our reading is the key essentialist step: we abstract awayfrom intra-historical jungle investigations of animals and dissect instead abstractattributes. We will call this key abstractive step away from describing historicalbeings in situ to analyzing in vitro an abstract conceptual attributive essence,essence-sublimation.

And so, in an important sense, the original sin of the classical essentialistis not with his approach to the limit-case of man-kind. The “conjuring trick”is essence-sublimation. It shows up in the “easy” cases, with mundane naturalkinds — e.g. tigers, water etc. — in trying to understand the in situ naturalhistorical phenomenon by re-modeling it in vitro by a defining concept, anessence. When the “hard” case of man-kind comes along, it is not as if theessentialist makes a new “law” just for this hard case. The essentialist, just likethe nature-placing metaphysician, knows that hard cases make a bad law. Hisuniversal law — define your kind by a conceptual essence — is fashioned in theeasy cases, then applied uniformly to the hard case of man-kind.

A Road map for comparing understanding man by essence vs.by nature-placing

Driven by the foregoing diagnosis, here is the road map we will follow inthis work. We start by reviewing the classical essentialist’s “standard model” viz.mundane natural kinds such as tigers and water. We isolate what we view asstructural flaws of the essentialism in this “easy case.” Then, we move on to aninfluential Neo-Aristotelian, cognitively focused conceptual definition of man-kind (and his alleged distinctive type of “intentional action”) due to ElizabethAnscombe, a concept-essence serving itself as the contemporary “standardmodel” of human action. Finally, we argue that, in full symmetry, the structuralflaws noticed in the characterizations of tigers and water, now repeat themselveswith man-kind, even though the concept used is not reductive-zoological butirreducibly cognitive.


As our alternative, we submit that just as we replace the essentialist’sunderstanding of tigers and water by embedding the tigers and water in naturalhistory, by describing the cosmic historical actions of the element and the species,we offer a symmetric resolution in the case of mankind — instead of a conceptualdefinition of man-kind, we urge a field investigation of man’s actions in situ,both as species and down to the level of individuals. Whatever kind we are tounderstand, we are to understand it by locating it on the cosmic tree of being;if it is in the sub region of the cosmic tree that is the tree of life, we understandit by locating it on the tree of life. Thus, we pursue tigers and men in the sameway. The difference is to emerge in where they show up in the tree of life, whatthey do in cosmic history, what kind of lives they respectively lead.

This study of our historical actions brings with it a realistic understanding ofwhat is (and what is not) special about man-kind, all the way to the most specialelixir of all, for which many men have given their lives away, man’s allegedfreedom. Just as the essentialist provides a sense of human freedom ingrained inman’s essence-concept, we symmetrically offer an alternative picture of humanfreedom — for, no doubt, man is free and “author of his actions” — a pictureowing to man’s real historical action inside natural history, as part of the treeof life. This is no apriori concept-based and pre-action (even if the conceptis camouflaged by the Neo Aristotelian as “form of life”) incantation that wemust be free; it is rather a life-earned aposteriori freedom resulting from ouractions-in-history.

It is thus time to turn to the first leg on this road map, the comparison ofthe essentialist and Nature placing methodology in the “easy” cases of mundaneNatural kinds. From this, we will be led to the hard case of man.

Part II. Mundane natural kinds: essence vs. nature-placing

Fundamentals of essence-theory

Traditionally, following the lead of Aristotle (to whom we return below),essence-theory studies kind-predicates — that apply singularly to individuals —such as “x is a tiger,” “x is water,” and “x is a prime number,” etc. Theessence-theorist proceeds by discovering conditions which govern the singularapplication of such a predicate: for any object x, hypothetical or real, itdetermines whether that object x is e.g. a tiger. In discovering the conditionswhich govern the application of “ . . . is a tiger,” we take ourselves to provide atwo-tiered fundamental account of the nature of the tigers.

The two tiers of this “fundamental account” are modeled after what wewould describe in a mathematical context — in “fundamentally accounting” forthe natural number or real number structure or for the structure of Euclideanspace — as providing an axiomatization of the target structure. The fundamentalaccount/axiomatization reveals (i) the fundamental nature of tiger-s, in general


(note the plural form). In addition, (ii) it grounds the necessary features of tigers— the “defining” features which provide conditions for being a tiger also providethe fundamental core from which to derive, understand, and/or explain, otherless fundamental — albeit necessary — features of the tigers (as it were, thetiger-nature of the single tiger — what makes one a tiger — exhausts the natureof that plurality produced by natural history, the tiger-s).

By focusing locally on conditions of being a single tiger, we are abstractingaway twice over from facts critical to the nature of the tigers: (A) various featurespertaining to the nature of that natural historical plurality, the tiger-s, are notreducible to essential features defining singularly what makes a given thing a tiger;(B) further away from the tiger-s altogether, many other background naturalhistorical active factors — e.g. the sun, the planet’s resources (water, oxygen,etc.), the behavior of earlier ur-feline species — are built into the very existenceof the tigers: are literally sine qua non (non-tigers!) factors.10

The nature-theorist’s alternative — indeed reversed — methodology worksglobal-to-local. That is, its key idea is that we understand the nature of a localphenomenon, e.g. the tigers, by Nature-placing it, by explaining how it fits intothe workings of that global phenomenon, Nature. We may well think of thisalternative approach as a Nature/nature theory — tell me what Nature did toproduce this phenomenon and sustain it in Nature and you’ve given me its nature,viz its place in Nature.

The nature-theorist sees Nature (the universe, the cosmos) as one, unifiedobject. It is unified in the sense that it is a single thing with a single beginningand a single history. It is also unified in the sense that it is uniform, the “laws”(or structural characteristics) of Nature are everywhere the same. When we lookfor the nature of a local phenomenon-thing, we are in effect asking for the placeof a local development of an underlying, originary global object, Nature.11

Aristotelian Essence — what explains

Essentialists often refer to Aristotle as the father of the doctrine. There are,of course, many readings of Aristotle’s basic metaphysical ideas (“substance,”“matter,” etc.); essence is one such key idea of his allowing many interpretations.On our reading of Aristotle, key to his approach to essence—as it were theessence of “essence” for him—lies in the idea of explanation. And so we will callhim and those offering an explanation-based account of essence following him,explantorists.12

Aristotle believes that the essential features of a kind, those that specify whatit is to be a member of that kind, are those features which are most explanatoryof the other features and behaviors of members of the kind. So, to discoverthe essence of a kind, we should ask why a given member has the various keyfeatures it has. Aristotle’s discussion seems to assume that the features to beexplained of the kind — at the plurality level — the key features of the tiger-s


(plural) — would be captured by explaining the important (necessary, key)features of an individual member of the kind e.g. Tony the tiger. This is a keyreductive conjecture of the plural to the singular — the essence of the plurality-kind itself — of the tiger-s — can be worked out by explaining at the level ofwhat we call singular condition of the form “x is tiger iff x is D.”13

For example, an essentialist might hold that x is a tiger iff x has DNA D. Anexplanatorist might, at this point, believe there is no further explanation we cangive for why tigers have this kind of DNA; its simply what it is to be a tiger. Let’scall this view the structural explanatorist view; once we get to some fundamentallevel of structure, be it atomic or molecular or genetic, we can no longer askwhy the relevant items are as they are. On the other hand, another explanatoristmight believe there is a sort of explanation for why tigers have the DNA theydo; an explanation in terms of how they emerged in evolutionary history fromother species, due to natural selection, etc. This second explanatorist (who wemight call the historical-evolutionary explanatorist) might then conclude that tobe a tiger is to have descended from animals who emerged by this particularevolutionary path. Whichever sort of explanatorism we choose, the project is todiscover those features which lie at the bottom of our best scientific explanationsinvolving the features of individuals of the kind in question. These will be thedefining features of the kind, those that a member of the kind could not bewithout.14

Kripke’s essentialism

In Aristotle’s explanation-driven model the premium is on those propertiesthat can serve as the minimal basis from which to mount the explanatorydeductions. We compare this to a modern variant of essentialism due to Kripke.In Kripke’s approach, we are not after an epistemically privileged basis.

Kripke’s methodology takes empirical information — e.g. tigers actuallyhave DNA D — and asks whether having this feature is essential to being atiger. That the fact is actually true of tigers is discovered empirically; that itis (or isn’t) essential to being a tiger is discovered by thought experiments andpumping our intuitions about what it takes to be a tiger. Kripke is fond of citingKant’s dictum that “experience teaches us that something is so but not that itmust be so”. We might well say: Kripke amplifies Kant’s dictum by noting that,given actual experience(actual experiments), thought experiments teach us thatthe thing (kind) must be so.

Despite their differences, the essence-theories of Aristotle and Kripke havesomething in common. They each project epistemological facts onto theirmetaphysics. For Aristotle, the essential features of a thing are revealed to usby the structure of our explanations. For Kripke, the essential features of a thingare revealed to us by conceptual analysis (parametrized by an initial experience).For both, an essential feature of a thing, just is one which makes the thing


the kind of thing it is. The critical factor here is that for both Aristotle andKripke the reading of the key locution “makes the thing” is that of formal —and not efficient — causation; it is a logical-metaphysical “makes” of satisfactionof attributes (“concept”, “form”), not a causal “makes” of a process of energytransfer.15,16

Nature-placing the tigers17

Our example ponders the nature of the tiger-s. We think the nature of thetigers is their place in Nature. To understand how the tigers fit into Nature, onemust ask questions both about individual tigers and about the species as a whole.In investigating the nature of the species-plurality of tigers, we see the nature-theorist addressing two kinds of facts which transcend the essentialist’s singularconditions on being a tiger. The first kind — Nature-production facts — concernthe very coming into existence of the (species of) tigers; the second kind —Ensemble-action facts — focus on what joint-actions sustain the individuals andspecies while in existence.

Nature-production facts are facts about how the species of tigers came toexist in Nature, by what efficient causal processes. What did Nature have to doso that at a certain specific point in cosmic history, this new phenomenon — thetigers — came into existence (viz, became part of Nature)? The emergence of theindividual tiger, Tony, is understood as subordinated — a bud on the tiger-tree —and it is only within the context of understanding the nature of tiger-s that wecan articulate the process — tigers-involving process to be sure — of productionof this particular tiger, Tony.18 The species — the tigers — by way of two specifictigers as the most proximate causes makes this effect, the resultant new tiger,Tony. Throughout such Nature-production processes, the “making of Tony” isan efficient cause “making”, not a formal cause “making” where the bearing ofdefining attributes is the key. Nature makes — efficiently — the species and, intow, Tony, or nothing does.

The second kind of fact the singularist essence-theorist cannot account forwe call Ensemble-action facts. For instance, approximately 50% of tigers in thewild do not survive to be more than two years old. Or, consider the fact that, onaverage, a tiger’s hunt will end in a successful kill only one in twenty times. Theseare facts about the nature of the tigers that are difficult (if not impossible) tomake into a condition on being a tiger. Similarly, the way the tiger population isdistributed across Southeast Asia, along with their rapidly diminishing numbers,are part of how the tigers fit into Nature, though they are not facts recoverablefrom what it is to be a (single) tiger. These facts are of interest to the biologistand ecologist (and nature-theorist). They were introduced as Nature- placing butsoon we see that by so placing we gain insight into the nature in whatever pre-theoretic sense this word still carries. Nature-placing x unravels nature-pertainingfeatures of x.19


Russian Dolls I: Kripke’s dilemma

A motivating goal of the essentialist is to make the world “intelligible” tous. For Aristotle, for instance, our explanations of all the (universal or necessary)features of tigers or gold will bottom out in what it is to be a tiger or what itis to be gold, and this essence must be something we can grasp or understand.For Aristotle, the essence of a kind is statable in two words, one which givesthe genus and the other the differentia (what separates it from other things inthe genus). For example, an Aristotelian might say that to be a man is to be ananimal (genus) that is rational (differentia). This account of what it is to be aman is finite and graspable.

We have seen that in the case of biological kinds, like tigers, there issome pressure on the modern essence-theorist to upgrade his account into a“historical” account. That is, it may be that what it is to be a tiger involvesemerging in a certain way. Likewise, Kripke famously claims that what it is to beQueen Elizabeth II (a particular biological individual) involves emerging from acertain sperm and egg; anything we imagine that emerged in a different way isnot going to count as Elizabeth. But of course, the sperm and the egg each havetheir origin essentially as well. One might, inspired by Kripke, take essentialityof origin to be a general principle of essence: for any individual or any kind ofthing, its material origin is part of what it is to be that thing, or a member ofthat kind. Given that essentiality of origin is transitive, it seems now that beingthis particular table or woman requires emerging from a very particular causalchain running all the way back to the Big Bang!

But, as Kripke himself notes, requiring this sort of causal chain as part ofwhat it is to be the table makes the table’s essence “mind-boggling”.20 We mightcall this the Russian Dolls Predicament: once we allow a thing’s relationship to itsimmediate material origin to be part of that thing’s essence, we open a floodgateand are forced to allow in many more essential relations until our minds are(seemingly) boggled. The same would hold of the kind-plurality of tigers, if wethink that the tigers emerged at a certain place in the evolutionary chain; it is nolonger a simple, one-line account of the kind Aristotle would have given.

Intermezzo II: Russian dolls, worm-understanding and the essentialist’sdilemma

With his origin-principle, Kripke has taken classical essentialism to theedge. He alarms us with a hard choice: mind-friendly but nature-incompleteunderstanding or nature-complete (“Russian Dolls”) accounts that are mind-boggling. Thus the essentialist’s dilemma.

Spinoza, who followed in the footsteps of Aristotle, Aquinas, andDescartes — all essence-based analyzers of the nature of things — was well


aware of the dilemma. He thought that by using the merely classificatory“essences” such as “rational animal” or “thinking being” and their variants,they all under-described the full nature of what he called a singular thingand sometimes also “finite (viz. causally limited) mode” to indicate that eachsuch singularity is a modification-transformation of the one underlying primaland un-limited global object, Nature. For Spinoza, each such singular thingwas distinguished by a specific well-founded series of productive causes, itscosmic transitive closure. And so even more explicitly than Kripke, Spinozawas led to the limits of essentialism by his very attempt to understand theclassification-transcendent essential connections between things. He formulates avivid early version of the essentialist’s dilemma in his parable of “the worm in theblood.”21

Spinoza urges us to think of a tiny worm living in the blood. From itsvery local and restricted vantage point, it “sees” only the isolated “ingredients”of the liquid — the chyle cells, the lymph cells, etc. The worm has no outerperspective from which to view the blood as a whole and, in particular, seehow these local manifestations are inter-connected at the source, made by andreflective of the organic features of the underlying phenomenon, the blood. Andso he views, one level up, us — human “worms” — in relation to the universe.We live by locally-bound classificatory abstractions. We encounter this or thatlocal item and to “understand” it we suppose for it a local intrinsic essence; wenow “box” it and thus “understand” it. In fact, as with the cells in the blood, orthe organs of our bodies, the local ingredients all emanate as branches from anunderlying cosmic-tree, Nature. The worm’s predicament confronts us with hisvariant of the essentialist’s dilemma, either we live by worm-friendly but Nature-abstractive-and-incomplete local-insular essences or we opt for Nature-completebut worm-boggling chains of “Russian-Dolls” accounts of the nature of things.

Like Spinoza’s own positive thinking about the alleged mind boggling trap,our conclusion has not been so far that the Russian Dolls-dominated studyof Nature becomes mind-boggling and that understanding is beyond the pale.What is jeopardized is a certain (Aristotelian) model of understanding Nature —understanding by controlling capsule-essences and finite deductions therefrom.

Instead we witness the emergence of a different model of understandingNature. We track in our minds the in situ processes it took Nature to produce andsustain the phenomena — carbon, water, tigers. This understanding may not be“boxable” in one line essence-capsules and it inherently involves lifting Russiandolls. But the understanding does not battle anymore from inside a mentalbunker Nature’s own processes, by abstracting away from “mind boggling”natural history and analyzing “mind friendly” conceptual essences. The pathwe follow in understanding a phenomenon is to re-trace the path Nature took toproduce and sustain it.

This was the lesson arising from the study of tigers and water. The questionis: how does this transfer to understanding our own case?


Intermezzo III: Referential vs. Attributive metaphysics22

Hand in hand with the distinction of understanding the tigers by definitiveconceptual essence versus by Nature placing them, we have isolated two typesof metaphysical projects — understanding by referential metaphysics versusunderstanding by attributive metaphysics.

The distinction between the referential and attributive metaphysical projectsis clear enough with mundane natural kinds and much before we encounterit in the “hard case” of understanding the humans. E.g. we may referentiallyinvestigate the whales, those animals right there in the Baja waters, the animalswe have had many encounters with. Our naturalist’s descriptions may well include“Baja based large fish weighing each a few tons . . . ”. Inasmuch as it turns outthat these animals we were describing were not fish after all, we mis-describedthem. At no point were we defining, using the attribute “Baja based large fish . . . ”,the very animals to be described; we were already describing them. The animals,the historical beings, preceded their (true, false) descriptions.

On the other hand, having seen some whales in the distance in the Bajawaters, we may lift the attribute “Baja based large fish . . . ” and now turn thisattribute into our logical subject. We are thus concerned with whatever satisfiesthe condition of being a Baja based large fish weighing a few tons. A key reversalhas taken place: the attribute (it is no description-of-anything-real yet!) precedesthe, indeed any, historical beings. It may well turn out there are no actualhistorical beings that are Baja based large fish weighing each a few tons (forall we know, that is the case). Also, the “conceptual” truth that (whatever is) aBaja based large fish weighing a few (at least three!) tons is heavier than a 2-toncar concerns the attribute as the subject of the truth. The animals in the Bajawaters — grey whales as it happens, even if they weigh each more than the 2-toncar — don’t make such a claim (this time about them, the marine mammals) trueby “conceptual analysis” but by the amount of krill or plankton they eat daily.It is their cosmic acts, not conceptual analysis, that makes them heavier than a2-ton car.

A case very close to home — where “home” is where the philosopher’s heartis, i.e. the wish to stipulate-define the “conceptual” object he investigates —involves triangles. It may well be the case — let us so assume for our currentexample — that the German geometer, in his further capacity as the king’s landsurveyor, studies large earthly structures, those parcels of land, identified for himby the zoning board as triangles (this is exactly what Gauss studied in the 1820’sin the flat land of Northern Germany). Of course, it is assumed by the board thatthese earthly triangular bodies have an angle sum of 180 degrees. If it turns outlater that they don’t — as indeed it did! — Gauss was nonetheless referentiallyfocused on these triangular bodies, even if as luck would have it — or rather thenecessity of earthly spherical geometry — that these triangles do not have thepresumed feature of 180-degree angle sum.


On the other hand, the abstract geometer, though he may be initiated in hischildhood by his school teacher with such concrete examples as a heuristic, mayalso focus himself on the attribute “being a Euclidean triangle” which requires, bydefinition, its satisfiers to have a 180-degree angle sum. In fact, even if it turnedout that no (large enough) triangles on this earthly sphere etc. are Euclidean, ourabstract geometer wouldn’t eat his hat. The geometer had delineated his subjectof investigation as the attribute “Euclidean triangle” and it is about whatever issuch a triangle that he wishes to prove various theorems.23

We believe the aforementioned classical essentialist adopts — rather like theabstract geometer — an attributive stance when it comes to us. We see Aristotleas studying whatever is a rational animal, Descartes, whatever is a thinkingbeing (essentially connected to a (human) body?), Kant studying whatever has arational will indulging in a series of actus originarios and Anscombe, (discussed indetail in a moment below), focusing attributively on whatever acts intentionally,viz. acting from her own reasons.

And so we turn to our hard case of understanding human nature informedby two morals from the “easy” case of mundane natural kinds: (i) the distinctionof referential vs. attributive metaphysical projects and (ii) the threat of anepistemology/metaphysics dis-harmony, the essentialist dilemma — either wefocus on essences that are mind friendly but Nature-incomplete or we deployNature-complete but mind boggling (“Russian dolls”) natures.

Part III. Human being and action — Essence vs. Nature placing

We are going to present a modern influential humanistic essentialist accountderiving from Aristotle’s idea that we are “rational animals.” The theory servesitself to the richest cognitive concepts in its essential definition of man-kindand the (“intentional”) actions allegedly distinctive of men. So, in the discussionthat ensues, we are not in the throes of the theoretician’s dilemma. The disputebetween us and the human essentialist is not about which language to use. Thequestion is how to understand human beings: by essence or by placing them onthe cosmic tree of being and, in turn, its sub–tree of life? Should we investigatethem by the methods of attributive metaphysics — stipulate come what may, likeGauss on Euclidean triangles, that we study rational animals — or rather shouldwe engage (with no guaranteed key attribute) in a referential inquiry of thesehistorically real beings over here?

The essence theory we review is a theory of the essence of human action dueto Elizabeth Anscombe. Anscombe welds together ingredients due to Aristotle’sconception of what is distinctive of rational animal action and Neo Kantianelements pertaining to our (so-called “first person”) perspective on our actionsand the role of “our” (again, “first person”) reasons in the generation (andexplanation) of our actions. And of course being the post-modern neo-Kantian


philosopher that she was, Anscombe further added insights of Wittgensteinregarding how we talk about high level human — let us assume, rational —action. In all, her account represents a powerful theory of rational (animal)action.

We will present the theory very much in her own language, trying to captureher own perspective and underlying motives. Having done so, we will follow ouraforementioned road map and revert back to our essence vs. nature vocabularyto ponder (i) in what way; her rational action theory is an essence-based theoryof human action and being; (ii) how this makes for an image of ourselves as freeagents (“freedom by essence”); (iii) in what way this account is Nature-incomplete— viz. in its description of the historical lives of actual humans; (iv) whetherAnscombe applied — as we saw Aristotle and Kripke did — a form of theessentialist’s dilemma to scare us away from the plague of Russian dolls whenit comes to descriptions of human action; and finally, (v) how an alternativenature-placing account of human action and being would welcome the Russiandolls, remove, in tow, the descriptive-incompleteness and give us quite a differentsense of our being (v-i) rational animals and (v-ii) free agents.

Anscombe’s rational-action man: intentions

In her Intention, Anscombe considers the phenomenon of intentional action.Her approach to understanding the nature of this phenomenon is doublyconceptualist: one conceptualist endeavor is embedded in another.

First, to understand the nature of intentional action, she considers whatwe might call the form of intention-thought — formal (logical or grammatical)features of our thoughts about intentional actions and their properties. Herstarting point is to consider what she takes to be a tight conceptual connectionbetween intentional action and a certain form of explanation. That is, she beginswith a definition of intentional action according to which intentional actions arethose events in someone’s life “to which a certain sense of the question ‘Why?’is given application” — namely, the sense “in which the answer, if positive, givesa reason for acting.”24 In other words, to be something done intentionally isto have a place in a certain form of explanation: reasons explanation. WhatAnscombe has in mind here isn’t just anything that might be called a reasonsomeone does something, but rather her reasons for doing it: e.g., what I givewhen I say that I’m tapping at the keyboard in order to write this paragraph.When giving someone’s reasons for acting, what we do is to shed light on theworkings of her mind: how her situation as she thought of it led her to opt fordoing so-and-so.

Second, Anscombe thinks that a further conceptual investigation will allowus to expand this definition into a full-blown metaphysical account of intentionalaction. That is, such an expansion requires a certain kind of inquiry into reasonsexplanations. Any true explanation reveals explanatory relations between things.


But what kinds of explanatory relations do reasons explanations reveal? Howare these relations structured? How do they work? In Donald Davidson’s famousformulation: “What is the relation between a reason and an action when thereason explains the action by giving the agent’s reasons for doing what he did?”25

What this question is after is an account of what we might call rational etiology —the nature of the ‘reason-for’ relations that reasons explanations reveal.

Anscombe’s method for understanding rational etiology is precisely aconceptualist one: to understand what ‘reason-for’ relations are, she looks toformal features of intention-thought. By considering three features in particular,we can begin to understand why she thinks such formal features might provideinsight into rational etiology.

First, an event is only an intentional action modulo certain descriptions Iuse to represent it. In other words, an action is only intentional under certaindescriptions — what we might call intentional descriptions. A single event inmy life might be described as my tapping at the keyboard and my moving airmolecules thusly, even though I do the former, but not the latter, intentionally.There are many ways of correctly describing an action, but not all of them willbe intentional descriptions.

This is due to the second key feature. Intentional descriptions don’t functionto describe just any features of my action: for a description to be an intentionalone, it must reveal something about my own point of view on my action — i.e.,a mode of presentation under which I think of what I do. For example, I can’tbe tapping at the keyboard intentionally unless I think of myself as doing so.

Third, the paradigm examples of reasons explanations are, by Anscombe’slights, ones that relate one intentional description of an action to another.26 Forinstance, in the above reasons explanation, “tapping at the keyboard right now”and “finishing this paragraph” are both intentional descriptions. In other words,what a reasons explanation does is relate one aspect of an agent’s point of viewto another, one mode of presentation under which she thinks about what she isdoing to another.

The fact that intentional descriptions have these formal features suggests,Anscombe thinks, a deep conceptual connection between intention-thought andthe logical architecture of reasons explanation. What further reflection on theform of intention-thought yields, she ultimately thinks, is an understanding of thisarchitecture.27 This in turn yields an account of rational etiology, and thence ofintentional action itself. In this way, her definition of intentional action providesa skeleton key that opens up a kind of conceptualist’s playground: a treasuretrove of resources allowing us to expand the definition, through conceptualistmethodology, into a full-blown metaphysical account. What we have here is adistinctive form of explanatorism.

She follows Aristotle and subordinates the essential to what explains. So itmay well be true on her overall picture that, in the generative existential cosmicorder, the raising of the arm originated in my reason for the action. But this isnot why Anscombe would class the reason as essential to the action. It is because


the reason explains my act that it is anointed as its essence. What explains is ofthe essence.28

What explains and what is of the essence

There are two claims we must separate here; Anscombe is wedded to both.29

She is absolutely certain (and practically all contemporary action theorists repeatthis as if it were a platitude) that (i) we, marketplace explainers, indeed soexplain — we cite the reason, often from a first person perspective and weare done. So the first Anscombe-driven claim is quasi-empirical and concernsour explanatory practices. Secondly, Anscombe makes the theoretical claim that(ii) if my reason explains my act, it is thus made into the essence of my act.

Both claims seem to us mistaken. The as-if empirical claim about ourexplanatory practices strikes us as psychologically shortsighted. Yes, we do oftencite a one-line first blush why-I-did-it. But often we ourselves want to go deeper.Sometimes we do it 30 seconds later, on a bit of reflection, sometimes a lifetimelater with hindsight re-thinking on our deathbeds why we did what we did. Weare surely aware even in the heat of the moment, that the “story” behind the (my)act of raising my arm at the question time of the colloquium might be muchmore complex and in at least three ways.

First, there is always a complex historical external background, in theexternal environment, e.g. my past interaction with the speaker before today’smoment of arm raising, my past life, in which I attended talks and got familiarwith communication conventions, what other members of the audience have justbeen doing etc. Secondly, there’s more background information, this time insidemy “physical body” — the state of my arm muscles, whether I nauseated whethermy eyes are getting light rays reflected from the speaker’s body surface etc. Andthird and final, there are purely mental (so to speak) clusters of beliefs, intentions,reasons and ulterior motives, all percolating “in my mind” before this iceberg-tipsurfaces on my lips and I respond to your “Why?” with “I raised my arm becauseI wanted to pose a question about the talk”.

Thus, some of the rich background of the act beyond the one-line reason isclear to me as I explain my act. Often, yet deeper facts are clear to me — factsabout my motives, complex self deceptive patterns I am subject to, etc. Deeperyet, there is a whole ecology of “imitation of the affects” (to use Spinoza’sphrase to which we return below): much of my socially situated human action— as in a colloquium discussion — is a response to cues and affects of others,where — without my noticing consciously — I take on manners of performanceby imitating “standardized” local behavior. Finally, if the question of my armraising is of some “historic” or even just local significance (say to the police), weare likely to scratch even more — both from a psychological and bio-mechanicalvantage points — reconstructing the flow diagram leading to my act from an“omniscient observer of history” space-station vantage point.


The repeated Wittgenstein-Anscombe claim that “explanation comes to anend” with my one-line cited reason is simply not empirically correct of our prac-tices. Our practices are more “rational,” in the true sense of the word, indicatingopenness to more evidence. And again our practices are more rational in beingless “authoritarian” than the official “rationalism” of Anscombe, who canonizesthe first person, first-come to mind, cited reason (just as Wittgenstein socanonizes my first-person “I am in pain”). There may be of course ulterior philo-sophical motives — be they from epistemology, or morality-theory or both —to stipulate “this reason-citing is how we explain.” But if Anscombe is notjust preparing us for a theory of autonomous moral agents or standards of legalresponsibility and is genuinely “empirically” describing our explanation of actionpractices, we dare say her shining the light on first person cited reasons is vastlyincomplete as a theory of (i) the nature of the human action and (ii) in light of(i), what would count as a true explanation of the action.

The essentialist’s dilemma and intentional action

We come now to Anscombe’s second claim, about the theoretical groundsof essence. We see Anscombe’s account of raising my arm confronting the verydilemma Kripke encountered in accounting for tigers and water. We can have(i) either a mind-friendly and explanatory but Nature-incomplete essence of theact or (ii) a Nature complete but mind boggling and allegedly un-explanatoryaccount of my arm raising. Like Aristotle, Anscombe chooses to subordinate theessential to the epistemically friendly explanations.30

If we hark back into the true background of my arm raising — even withoutgoing all the way to the Big Bang but just to my part in the background cone,leading to my raising my arm at the end of the speaker’s talk — we are boundto find en route a succession of Russian dolls about my (deep) psychology, mybody’s motions through space, etc. Explanation won’t come to an end, at anyrate not a quick end — at the end of a one line sentence offering my reason asin “because I wanted to ask a question.”

In contrast, if, like Anscombe (and her essentialist inspirations, Aristotleand Kant), we prime explanation-friendly accounts of our actions, we had betterlook at proximate mental sources, transparently available to the explainer andavoiding Russian dolls like the plague. The “why?” test Anscombe canonizes isby design meant to isolate such a mind-friendly essence: I did it because I wantedto ask the speaker a question. One line, my one line, and we are done.

Working from within an idealist “inner model”

Running through this epistemically driven reading of essence, from Aristotleto Wittgenstein-Anscombe is a sense that “how we talk” is the maker of what


kinds of things there really are.31 There is of course a mention of the world itselfbut it is mentioned as a dark beyonder “thing in itself,” one not accessible toour cognitive powers and derivatively not one we understand directly. The worldis a sort of enemy we battle as if caught up with it in a dark alley on a foggynight. We are not seeing ourselves as an integral part of “the world” we observe,for if we did, this allegedly “alien” world would have been seen to be the mostfriendly environment we could hope for, an environment by which (i) we are madeand (ii) stronger yet, made-to-understand. There is nothing to fear about our notunderstanding our alien maker. It is not alien. We are bound by a umbilical cord,one that never gets — and could not be — cut off. We are Nature, here.

This operation, driven by a sense of gaping alienation from the world, is theway we read the essentialist-idealist stance in general — in analyzing all kindsof natural kinds — and this is also how we read Anscombe when it comes toour case, mankind or, for that matter, the stipulated kind of “intentional actors.”We retreat into the alleged safety of our-selves and we continuously “fix” whatwe are out to understand; in a word, we are not out anymore to understandbut rather “inward” looking. We replace the “out and out” Nature — a sortof alien un-intelligible thing in itself by what the logician would call an “innermodel”.32

It is thus that we load the dice and employ our clever intellectual centrifugesto isolate and lift a sub kind we dub intentional actions. And once we fixed theclass of actions that really matter to us, we make sure to explain them with stufffrom inside our mental bunker, viz. our own reasons and with no Russian dollsimpinging on why I did what I did. Anscombe and Wittgenstein tell us thatthe limits of my language (and concepts, as it were) are the limits of my world;the Nature-placing metaphysician reads their retreat into a mind-made “innermodel” more darkly — the limits of my intellectual fears are the limits of “theworld” I acknowledge.

Out of the idealist bunker — Nature-placing

The first corrective step of the Nature-placing metaphysician is to temperthe alienation from Mother Nature. The relationship between man and Natureis not fraught with the overtones the idealist — from Aristotle to Wittgenstein-Anscombe — is obsessed with. Nature is not hostile or friendly. Nature is.And Nature produces. This is its way of generating local existences and their ownactions. We are just another such production; no doubt an advanced model but aNature-production anyway. As we try to backtrack through Nature’s productionprocesses, we are not threatening our understanding by lifting Russian dolls; tothe contrary, this is the only path to understanding.

And so, it is to this kind of understanding of our actions, Nature placing byRussian dolls lifting, that we now turn.


Placing our actions in natural history

Nature-theory reverses the essentialist’s approach. The essentialist is alocalist about objects, even when she is a globalist about concepts. The conceptsshe uses to define a kind, like man, may be taken from the universal languageof metaphysics. However, when she defines a kind, she does so by thinking of itin abstraction from its complex, interwoven place in Nature. She focuses solelyon those few elixer properties which separate that kind of thing from others.Instead of a localism for objects and a globalism (Kant and Frege: “utmostgenerality”) for concepts, in nature-theory we start with a globalism for historicalobjects and actions. The “concepts” — previously all potent, apriori given, inthe universal language of metaphysics — are now “projected down” into cosmichistory (as everything else is; to be is to be in Nature). And so, the essentialist’skey, the concepts (“being a tiger,” “being water,” “being human”) are just moregenerated natural-historical objects, viz. the concept “being K” is generated bythe historical kind K (e.g. the species of tigers), itself a natural historical bud onthe cosmic tree of being.

Nature-theory’s globalism about objects reverses the essentialist reduction of(human) actions to elixir essences (actions carried by beings with the key essence).For the nature-theorist, action precedes being. The nature of a thing is not priorin any sense to the thing itself, to its actual entry into cosmic history, doingthe things it does. Rather, a thing makes, through its historical doings, its ownnature. As above, the making we have in mind here is not logical making, formalcausation. Rather, it is productive making, efficient causation. Thus, to say thata thing makes its own nature is simply to say that its entry into cosmic historyand the unfolding of its existence in Nature over time is what determines —what is — its place in Nature.

How, though, could the thesis that something’s action precedes it’s beingpossibly express globalism about its nature? The crucial element to note here isthat we don’t have in mind the action of a segregated local individual — like aminiature God perpetually creating itself ex nihilo. Rather, the actions by whicha thing makes its nature are inseparable from its production by and inherence inNature’s actions.

To act, a thing — a water molecule, a tiger, a human being — must enterinto cosmic history: some historical processes must, that is, bring it into being.More than this, the kinds of actions a thing undertakes depend on the kinds ofprocesses which engender it — the time, place and way it came into existence.Humans, born of humans, do not form hydrogen bonds with each other ortrickle down the mountainside; neither do water molecules, born of hydrogenand oxygen atoms, mate or road-trip across America together. In other words,a thing’s making is itself something which is made — not by itself, but by theprecise processes that bring it into being.

Now once you and I come into being, we share some initial nature: our livesare episodes in the history of one and the same human species. Nevertheless,


once I am brought into being, I perpetually lie at the intersection of any numberof ensembles. When I raise my arm, this is my action to be sure. However, insofaras it is the movement of the water molecules in my body, we have in one and thesame event an episode in the existence of an ensemble with which I intersect —an action of the kind water, understood as the ensemble of water molecules.Here, it is not only I who am acting, who is doing something — water is heredoing something too. Insofar as I am a part of the ensemble ‘human being,’ myaction is also an action of this much bigger ensemble. And so on, all the way upto the largest ensemble with which every natural being intersects, by being madeby it and contained within it — Nature. In Quine-speak, we might say: to beis to be of and in Nature and such a being’s (e.g. my own) action — which wehave claimed makes its nature — is at one and the same time the action of water,of carbon, of life, terrestrial life, animal life, mammalian life, hominid life, andNature itself.

From the point of view of essence-theory, this might seem like an alarmingthought: my action of raising my arm isn’t simply mine, but a clamor of actionsby a dizzying number of overlapping ensembles. This is alarming to her becauseshe’s attached to the idea that I must be active in some categorically or logicallydifferent way from other kinds of things, other ensembles: my action must begrounded in an essence which distinguishes me from the rest of Nature. From thispoint of view, nature-theory seems to fragment me, decompose me, steal awaythe real unity I have and lends such unity only to Nature itself. The essence-theorist tries to gain this unity through her primary object-localism, deferringmy-unity-with-Nature to a secondary derivative level of conceptual globalism.

But the nature-theorist rejects the hand-wringing. Everything in Nature is anagent: not a segregated, local agent but rather Nature itself acting at a particulartime and place and in a particular way. But saying that all things in Nature arejust as ‘active’ as I am — albeit in very different ways — doesn’t steal away myagency. My arm-raising is still my action, but nature-theory lets loose the desireto see this as action in some categorically or logically different sense from theaction of water molecules, of tigers, and all the rest.

In sum: If the ensemble of humans did not act, this specific human, myself,would not be; and if I did not act, I wouldn’t be of the nature that my actionsmake me have — i.e. I wouldn’t have the place in Nature I do. I don’t have aprefabricated nature — a place in Nature determined by my essence before I enterinto history. Rather, I make that nature by carrying out actions of the humansaround here and you make your nature by making actions of the humans overthere. Different lives, different natures develop (a reflection one level down ofwhat happened to us versus to the chimps). Yet, my action is merely a branchof the acting undertaken by human-s in general — the acting by humans onlywithin the historical context that led to their kind of acting. It is what the animalsdid — actually did — that made them humans (and left chimps, chimps). Andit’s what I do within that context of the human-s acting (my acting is of coursea sub-agency thereof) that makes my (vs. your variant) human nature.


Part IV. Human freedom — by Essence vs. by Nature

The foregoing contrast between two pictures of human beings impacts the alltoo dear to us idea that we are free. Of course, now that we pointed out that “whatone is” may be understood differently — by essence vs. by place in Nature —the very idea of “being free” by what-one-is may diverge. By running throughthese dualities, we will come full circle back to our opening dilemma about man’splace in Nature.33

At home in the universe?

A key to the contrast about human freedom we are about to review is thequestion of being “at home in the universe” (this is Harry Frankfurt’s apt phrasewhich we borrow).34 This question sends us back to our original dilemma. TheNature-placing metaphysician looks upon men, as indeed on all other beings,simply as Nature’s produced beings, from bacterias to galaxies. All of themwithout exception are “ashes to ashes and dust to dust”, in the deepest senseof being made by nature, living by (sustained by) Nature and ceasing to existas Nature consumes one’s singular being and other Nature products take one’splace. Man is no exception and, logically speaking now, there can be no exception.To be is to have one’s place in Nature; when that place, now filled for a millionyears or so, will be overtaken, man will be gone. For man, as for any other being,there is no-where else to go. 35

As we have seen, many philosophers worry that making us so at home,absolutely integrated, in the universe may well lose the baby with the bathwater.Nothing would be left of the uniqueness of man, now made into a mere budon the cosmic tree of being, for that matter, a bud on the sub-region of thecosmic tree, what we call the tree of life, but not substantially any different fromtulips and wolves. Nature runs all those buds and it so runs us, buds who spranga million or so years ago and are still running strong. One is only to recallTom Nagel’s opening quote to re-live the anxiety.

Human freedom by essence

Nobody feels the anxiety in a more acute way than Kant, in natural historypieces mentioned above (in note 3). The insightful essays are Kant’s version ofdrawing Terry Malick’s tree of life, but unlike Malick (though like Nagel), with theadded anxiety about where exactly on the tree, if at all, he is to locate us, mankind.Kant says very deftly, man is halfway between the Nature-bound animals and theNature-transcendent reflective angels. Each of us, in his instinctive early years,and the species in its early ascent from the primates are like the animals. Then,in his later years, upon his reason-driven rebellion against Mother Nature, man


(each adult reflective man and the species in its advanced state) jumps over tobelong with the Nature transcending angels.36

Kant (our representative human essentialist at this point) sets up a pri-mordial antagonism — a form of dualistic humanism — between man andNature: man struggles to free himself from the hold of Nature, a sort of originalprefabricated cage shared initially with rocks and flowers and our closest rivals,the animals. Rivals indeed; segregating ourselves from those who are seeminglyso similar to us and are obviously mere Nature-subordinates is an obsessionamong human essentialists. One is tempted to apply psycho-analytic diagnosesfamiliar from other obsessive segregationist efforts — what is so threateningabout the similar-other that so much ingenuity is spent on drawing the line?There is hardly any piece of writing of (Descartes, Leibniz and) Kant, whereone is not hammered flat with the search of some elixir property (down to “hastool-making hands”!) securing the break and setting us apart (and soon enough,in tandem with the reflective angels). In such writings, Nature is often describedas man’s miserable cradle, the favella that is his birth place, and that he strivesto leave by rebelling against it.

It is often emphasized that, in contrast to Descartes’ substance-dualism ofmind vs. body (reserved to man-kind in contrast to all animals), the Aristotle-Kant-Anscombe (AKA) variant of the humanistic tradition does not draw theline so starkly. But a variant dualism — still bent on segregating us fromthe rest of Nature — soon emerges. The focus is rather on our activities andthe enabling faculties, not on an ontologically “atomic” immaterial substance.As we saw it emerge in Anscombe’s account, we must focus on our essence-revelatory “higher” forms of “intentional” acting. Such higher forms involveessentially our, the self styled Nature-liberated, sense of control of what we defineas our own actions, those we originate by authoring the reasons of our actions.37

Human Freedom by Nature-placing

The Nature-placing account of human action reverses the humanist (man-centered) answers just given.38 We do not start with man and an anti-Naturerebellious Cogito (Descartes) or I originally-will (the AKA tradition). We startat the beginning of it all, all being and action, and thus we start with Nature.Correlative to this starting point, we do not ground our acting in our distinct kindof cognition — thinking (“reasoning”). We rather view our thinking-reasoningas the by-product of acting. What is more, acting is universal right at the outset:it’s the very nature of Nature to en-act its power. In this respect, acting is not ararity due to a very special, Nature-alien, item, Cogito-Man and a few items —e.g. angels? — displaying a similar kind of epistemological profile regarding theirknowledge of their own states. Action now pervades Nature. It is Nature’s verynature to exude its acting power. Every local Nature-product just is Nature-in-action here or there; so every such local being acts. If this has the ring of a logical


truth of the logic of Being, so be it. To be, for our Nature placing metaphysician,is to act. This global-to-local inversion — from Nature’s acts to its local actionstations — is at the source of a variety of contrasts we are tracking.

On the Nature placing account, no-thing, not even Nature itself, can enjoythe prefabricated freedom by essence accorded to us by Aristotle, Kant andAnscombe.39

Being is action-made; specific local forms of being are forged by specificforms of Nature-acting. Right from the beginning, that is my own beginning,it is the active-life, not essence, of Nature-agencies, viz. the human species andits local sub-agencies, my biological parents, that made up this novel (little “n”)nature, me. So right from the start, it was natural historical life that made aroundhere, more natural life, my little “n” nature (note well, a local nature was made,not an essence). And so it goes. It is my actual life in Nature, the unfoldingof Nature around here, that continually makes my nature. On this conception,though you and I share much of our natures at the outset (both are products ofthat living agency, the human species), what we go on doing in our respective livesforges for us different natures. Focusing now on just one such life, say my own,the on going in situ making of my nature is a work in progress, with its familiarups and downs. One’s nature is produced through and through– at the outsetby the productive inter-action of various Nature’s sub-agencies, and later on, byone’s productive life, further inter-actions with such neighboring sub agencies.

Many would view such a precarious essence-less and “accidental” life-madenature as making for a lesser human being. And less a few times over — a mereNature sub-ordinate, a mere local-agent of the global power, dependent on priorsin the tree of life for coming into being and further dependent on others and itsown embodiment as it goes through life. With so many “external” dependencies,freedom, connoting to so many philosophers in-dependence, is gone by the board.

Unless . . . unless the key to freedom is not in in-dependence from othersurrounding factors but rather in how one inter-acts with these proximate others,what forms of inter-dependence one enters in one’s life. If, as a true Dionysian, Idrink unrestrained-ly at the restaurant and drive later, or linger on and on in theon line poker game or frantically indulge night after night in the libertine’s muchcoveted orgiastic sexual life, my excessive dependency on the joys of alcohol andgames and sex nibbles at my life-force. On the other hand, if I monasticallyavoid wine bars, games and sex and merely take my austere daily walk throughthe same precise path through the city’s seven bridges and at that, precisely at4pm, I am reined by other excesses. The Dionysian and the Monastic are twosides of the same coin, liberated as the one seems and retentive as the othermay strike us. Both are controlled by forces beyond them. The key is not in-dependence — of course, not feasible in this “material” life-environment, filledwith others, so sublimated in-stead to another dual realm where one’s mind is anindependent island all to itself. The key rather is in co-ordinated-integrated actionwith Nature, one’s own Nature-formed nature acting in unison with neighboringNature-forces.


Conclusion: Force-of-Nature freedom embedded in the tree of life

Sometimes, Kant seemed to urge himself and us to take this natural historicalpath, as in his two aforementioned papers in the 1780’s (see n. 4 above). Unlikethe foundational and hyper-analytic famous Critiques and their metaphysicalcompanion essays, the natural historical sorties did not make the philosophicalheadlines. And of course he himself got in those very pieces impatient and insteadof looking at us in situ, he soon turned to conjectural history and, again morelike him, not conjectures but assertions about a prolegomenon to any future ofmankind, where we-mankind are — indeed must be — going.

So even in the pieces with the promissory word “history” in the title, Kantslips back to understanding humans by essence and indeed understanding theirambient environment, Nature itself, by its presumed essence, what he views asits end (he was sure of course, it had an end and he bound that end with ours).As the French are fond of saying (a bit in the vein of our current piece), chassezle naturel, il revient au gallop (“chase away the natural, it returns galloping”) —Kant couldn’t go against his own (philosophical) nature and had to work underthe enlightenment’s conceptualist lamppost.

We urged instead a real plunge in natural history, a kind of philosophicalanalog to the aforementioned Terry Malick’s filmed essay, The tree of life. Leavingthe defining concepts behind, we urged looking — but taking time to look slow-burningly — at the cosmic tree of being, its sub tree of life, the sub tree of thatsub-tree of human life, my own branch on the sub-sub tree, viz. my own humanlife. This means carrying on the philosophical investigations of man’s nature —and for each man, his own specific nature — on the dark side of the street.

Notes

1. The project arose out of our interaction for many years at UCLA. The three ofus have written elsewhere both on the general metaphysical essence vs. naturecontrast, as well as its application to the human case: Cabrera, in “Natural Unityand Human Exceptionalism” (forthcoming in Midwest Studies in Philosophy,2011) and in his forthcoming dissertation, Natural Unity and Human Nature;Coolidge, in her dissertation, From Concept to Cosmos; for Almog, this isthe third part of a triptych, whose two earlier sections are “Nature withoutessence I” J. Philosophy 2010 and “Nature without Essence II: Mathematics”(to appear in a volume dedicated to The Philosophy of Kit Fine, 2012).

At UCLA, we are grateful to two on going venues, the metaphysics and historyworkshops and specifically to Paul Nichols, Kristina Gehrman, Brian Hutler,Sabine Tsurada, Antonio Capuano, Ari Lev, Peter Murray, Jorah Dannenberg,David Kaplan, Shel Smith, Andrew Hsu, Howie Wettstein, Tony Martin, GavinLawrence, Calvin Normore, Seana Shiffrin, a colloquium by Sam Schefflerdedicated to Children of Men, and finally, the sorely missed friend of the


department, the late Paul Hoffman. Special thanks are due to a series ofpresentations by Brian Copenhaver on the development of the idea of globalNature in the two thousand years in between Aristotle and Spinoza. We learnedmuch from the writings of and interactions with Barbara Herman and JohnCarriero (see references below). We also thank the luminous contributions ofHarry Frankfurt, Etienne Balibar and Olli Koistinen, who regularly visited theworkshops. As will be obvious to the reader, the three of us owe intellectual debtsto the writings of Thomas Nagel and to Terry Malick’s evocative visual “essay”,the film The Tree of Life.

2. By “logic” we here mean literally logic and how it applies to the very idea of (i)being and (ii) acting. See below the development of the motif that “to be is tobe in Nature” and “to act is to act in Nature”.

3. The View from Nowhere, p. 114.4. Those who know Aristotle and Kant’s views about females would know Elizabeth

Anscombe — cigar and all — might have had a hard time being counted as afully rational animal, by the two distinguished humanists. Kant offers beguilingmusings even about males — ready for sexual reproduction at 17, he says —but not quite ready for the rational musings he prized. We urge the reader, ashe/she reads the present essay but also for their own sake, to read two “popular”essays written by Kant in the 1780’s on the problem of understanding humanbeings as part of Nature. The essays are written in the midst of what intellectualhistory classifies as “the enlightenment” and indeed Kant had just finished athird related piece called “What is Enlightenment?” (the articles plunge into adebate raging then among German thinkers about “Spinozism” and its way ofaccommodating (or is it dissipating?) man as part of Nature; one could think ofthem as unsettled by our dilemma).The two articles we have in mind are “An ideaof universal history” (1784) and “A conjectural beginning of human history”(1786): cf. Kant, Immanuel. On History. ed. Lewis White Beck (New York:Prentice Hall, 1963). The essays are not in the soi-disant rigorous mode of hisfamous essays and the three Critiques but they benefit from (i) being readable bythe common man and (ii) they develop a species of informal rigor in presentinghis “rationalistic” image of man, man grown in and by Nature but transcending itanyway. We return to these essays throughout the paper. See our reference belowto Barbara Herman’s interesting annotated reading to Kant on these matters.

A way to think of Kant’s two interesting papers as background readingsfor our paper is to view them as his analog to Terry Malick’s recent bold visualessay, the film titled The tree of life, which we also urge as background “reading”.Kant’s essays are his own vision of “The tree of life” and our emergence as abud therein. We return to Malick’s theme and Kant’s essays below.

5. We sure use the hero — played by David Bowie — as means and not as anend and Kant would correctly reprimand us. The reader is invited to watch theeerie and visually stark The man who fell to earth, directed by Nicholas Roeg.Speaking of whom, the civilization-shy aboriginal boy of the (again, visuallystark) film Walkabout, though certainly a member of homo sapiens and certainlyone we relate to as means and not as an end, would not be counted by Kant asone of us, rational animals. A reading of Kant’s anthropological lectures aboutpre-civilization races would bring out the point.


6. In some of his more theoretical moments, from his early writings on “Physical-ism” (Philosophical Review 74 [July, 1965]: pp. 339–56) to his discussions in the1970’s of anomalous monism and accommodating “what its like” experiences inthe language of science and all the way to “The psycho-physical nexus” (In PaulA. Boghossian & Christopher Peacocke (eds.), New Essays on the a Priori. OxfordUniversity Press, 2000), Nagel seems to be engaging this theoretical dilemma.But the letter of his early quote remains pre-theoretical and intimates concernwith a language-of-science free casting of a more primal problem about ourspecialness, in line with the Aristotle-led classical philosophers mentioned. Likeremarks apply to Davidson and Anscombe, who as modern writers, encounteredthe theoretical demands of reductionism etc. But all three also wrote—and thisis what we harp on—in a pre-modern vein, emphasizing a theory-free intuitiveproblem occurring to every marketplace-man before breakfast.

7. We thus say to the quick-witted reader, do bear with us, for we shall hammer thematter a few times over. Our sense is that coming to grips with which problemone is anxious about here is a long way towards its (dis) solution.

8. As indeed Skolem urges us, e.g. by adopting an infinitary language (which headopted) or a generalized first order language with new primitive numericaldeterminers (“for (in) finitely many”) or a way to fix non formally the idea of abi-jection or by adopting an arithmetically primitive “recursive mode of thought”(which he also did) and thus not taking formal first order set theory as the fulllanguage of number. The ever so naturally sharp Poincare had been warningHilbert seventeen years earlier (in his 1905 review of Hilbert’s new formalistfoundations of logic arithmetic) that this problem of the expressibilty of “(in)finite” is coming upon him. Driven by a theoretical agenda demanding such aconstricted language, Hilbert did not heed the message.

9. This is of course not a verbatim report but rather an indirect discourse report ofthe belief-content held by the classical essentialists. The reader is only to revisitKant’s aforementioned papers in n. 4 to revive the sense of what a categoricalleap the essentialists think took place with the emergence of mankind, or at anyrate, the appearance of late rational stages of man-kind.

10. As we shall see in a moment, the sabotaging of the Nature-placing blocks thelocal essentialist from accounting for a variety of nature-pertaining facts, thislast taken in an intuitive sense, as facts pertaining to one’s nature, such as thoselabeled below “production” and “ensemble action” facts.

11. The classical conceptualist tradition views concepts (essences) as laying outsidenatural history and as given logically prior to the active unfolding of the cosmos(“from concept to object”, as in the ontological argument, where God’s essence(defining concept) logically precedes his derived actual existence). Inasmuch aswe discover that we need to “individuate” concepts (e.g. the concept of “water”)by some environmental local information (is it on earth or twin earth?) we keepthe general “essence (concept) precedes existence” picture and merely parametrizethe identity of the concept to an environmental factor. On the nature theorydeveloped below, concepts, just like species or substances, are by-products ofnatural history. They cannot be encapsulated-defined by one line essences and inlaying out the nature of the concept of water much of the nature of the substancewater is infused in. In this respect “the concept of water” reads like “the concept


of Barack Obama” and it is of that historical phenomenon — Obama, water —inheriting what is true of the nature of the historical phenomenon. We understandconcept-of . . . in the way the modern vision theorist understands image-of (e.g.Barack Obama), viz as a product of a natural process originating in the man,Obama. In this sense, there can be no concept-of-unicorns because there is nonature of unicorns, viz because nowhere in Nature was a little “n” unicorns-nature produced. There is, no doubt, the concept “animal looking like a horsewith one horn in its forehead”. It too came into existence only when certaincosmic-history conditions obtained e.g. natural history engendered the specieshorse and, in turn, the concept “horse” (of course, further conditions had to beproduced by Nature for the assembled concept to be assembled).

12. See Aristotle’s Posterior Analytics, Book II.13. This conjectures that we will not need to explain as part of understanding the

nature of tigers why the tigers are, say, an ancient species or widespread onlyin Asia or calling for a certain female/male distribution to be evolutionarilyviable. On such non singularly reducible nature-pertaining features, see belowour discussion.

14. A modern explanatorist “essential definition” (but non-modal) that is Aristotle-inspired account is provided by Fine in op.cit.. One of us discusses op. Cit. Fine’sdefinitionalism — especially in the context of the nature of mathematical kindsof things.

15. For Kripke “the kind of thing that it is” includes both (i) the sortal category(the thing is one of the tigers) and (ii) the specific identity of the thing within thecategory. It is a notoriously controversial question whether Aristotle commitshimself to (ii). For Kripke’s important commitment to (ii), see more below.

16. It may seem as though Kripke’s commitment to the essentiality of an individualorigin puts him in line with the nature-theorist in emphasizing the energy-transferring processes of efficient causation by which specific things come tobe. So, was Kripke the first to undo from inside essence theory its own maximsand turn towards a nature-theory? One of us, in her dissertation, develops thisinterpretation in her thesis: see Coolidge, From Concept to Cosmos. On thereading we emphasize initially in the present paper, we see Kripke’s remarks onessentialism as a conservative revision of Aristotle — Kripke incorporates intothe formal cause of things information about their microscopic structure. Butthen, in the space of two pages and two adjoined footnotes (fn. 56–57 of hisNaming and Necessity [Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1981], henceforthNN), Kripke introduces the essentiality of origin and ponders the transitiveclosure of one’s origin all the way back to the origin of the universe (see thekey fn. 57). This engenders a new set of problems for the essentialist leadingeventually to what is a deep “ambivalence” reflected in a dilemma confrontingKripke and us with a hard choice. See immediately below.

17. In using the plural expression “the tigers” we speak of the plurality-species, witha dash, as if the plurality of tigers and the species were the same. They are notbut we do not want to enter here complex ontological issues about the speciesas a unity as opposed to the plurality (and of sentences such as “the tigersform (are) a distinct species”). What matters to us is that in speaking of thetiger-s, we are not speaking of an individual member, e.g. this tiger, Tony. The


kind of priority of the tigers as plurality-or-species to the individual Tony willpreoccupy us immediately below and can be stated in either vocabularies (it isinvariant under the choice of an entity (entities) “the tigers” stands for).

18. This is true even for those hard cases involved in the very early segment,when the species is just emerging. Even then the individual animals — whether“full” tigers or not — are understood as cases of productions by envelopingspecies(pluralities). No individual e.g. Tony, full tiger or not, comes into theworld as sheer-bare Tony without being produced from a living group.

19. Consider an example from another domain: the fact that carbon emerged inthe universe in a triple alpha process — involving three helium nuclei inside astar and the subsequent changing distribution of carbon atoms throughout theuniverse, are facts of interest to astro-physicists and are part of the nature ofcarbon, part of how it is placed in Nature, in cosmic natural history (and key toits presence in various carbon-based phenomena, not least of them our subjecthere . . . life). However, the emergence and distribution of carbon in general isnot a fact we can apply naturally to a candidate atom of which we are asking, isit or is it not carbon?

20. Kripke states, “Obviously this question is related to the necessity of the origin ofthe table from a given block of wood and whether that block, too, is essentiallywood (even wood of a particular kind). Thus, it is ordinarily impossible toimagine the table made from any substance other than the one of which it isactually made without going back through the entire history of the universe, amind-boggling feat,” NN, footnote 57, p. 115.

21. Spinoza’s letter 32, written in 1665 to Oldenburg. See Spinoza, Baruch. CompleteWorks. Michael Morgan (ed). Samuel Shirley (trans.) (Indianapolis: HackettPublishing Co., Inc, 2002), pp. 848–51.

22. The distinction between referential and attributive is of course due originally toKeith Donnellan, an inspiring figure to us three at UCLA. Donnellan used itto draw a distinction between types of uses-in-language of definite descriptions.But in the back of his linguistic distinction lies a distinction about kinds of actsof thinking (or types of having in mind). See Donnellan’s forthcoming collectedwritings in Essays on Reference, OUP 2011, with an introduction essay by oneof us focused on his referential/attributive distinction.

23. Thus Descartes’ famous discussion of essence in meditation V, the paradigmcase of . . . (the 180 degree angle sum of) triangles, on which he models thediscussion of God’s essence is, from our perspective, a paradigm of attributivemetaphysics. Ironically, there is a line running from Descartes the mathematician(not the definitional philosopher!) to Gauss (and Bonnett, of the Gauss-Bonnetttheorem), whereby we study not the attribute “being a Euclidean triangle” butrather we look referentially at triangles in their spatial-environment (and thecurvature of the plane they “live in”). Such cases of understanding mathematicalkinds by embeddings the entities in ambient manifolds are discussed in the paper(mentioned in n. 1) dedicated to understanding mathematical kinds by essencevs. by nature-placing.

24. Intention, p. 9.25. From the opening of “Actions, Reasons and Causes,” in Davidson op. cit.,

p. 3.


26. More precisely: reasons explanations in which an event under one description isrelated to itself under a different description.

27. We have left out an explication of these further reflections. Anscombe goes onto reflect on what she calls the other two major applications of the concept ofintention — ‘expression of intention’ and ‘intention for the future.’ Throughdemonstrating the conceptual unity of these three applications, she claims touncover the fundamentals of rational etiology. We have left out these details inpart for simplicity of presentation. But we also wish to highlight the featuresof Anscombe’s account that have been taken up most frequently in post-Anscombian metaphysics of action. For example, although there in are notoriouspartisan battles between followers of Anscombe and followers of Davidson in themetaphysics of action, what we have said so far represents Davidson’s project justas well as it does Anscombe’s. Our aim is to show that, despite their differences,both Anscombe and Davidson — as well as many others who have ventured intotheir disputes — share an over-arching approach to the nature of human actionthat we wish to criticize.

28. True to Wittgensteinian instincts, Anscombe may not use “essence” (thoughsee her use in “The question of linguistic idealism” following the master’s own“grammar creating essence”). We here translate her stylishly coded remarksabout the “definition” of the intentional-act in terms “essence.” Cf. Anscombe,G.E.M., “The Question of Linguistic Idealism,” Acta Philosophica Fennica 28,pp. 209–25.

29. In speaking of two central claims of Anscombe, we’d like to qualify the personalattribution, at least with regard to the first claim. We are aware that Anscombe(like Wittgenstein before her) makes sure — having just launched the modelof a first person “given” originary reason — to indicate that there may wellbe other manners of explaining our actions, depending on “our interests”.One of us has written in detail about Anscombe, in a scholarly vein. In thiswork, her alluding to a cluster of other considerations active in explaining ouractions is analyzed. See Cabrera op. cit. So much for Anscombe scholarship.

Nonetheless, two points need to be made in the present, intentionallynon-scholarly context. First, it is a common methodological move by bothWittgenstein and Anscombe to qualify an assertion about what they offer initiallyas the cause or the source or the correct understanding of a phenomenon. Soonenough, we are told there are “other contexts” and “other interests” wherethe cited analysis does not apply. The reader can make what she/he wishesof this “relativistic” strategy. It is often lauded for its “openness” but it maywell strike one as an attempt to forestall criticism and block focusing on what’sphilosophically essential, so as to have a legal escape hatch. A powerful examplegenerated by this strategy came up when three decades ago Kripke focusedon what he took to be the key idea of Wittgenstein on rule following — andKripke has his piercing eye for what’s essential — and hordes of loyalist apostleswere quick to cite this or that qualification as showing this is a straw manand Wittgenstein’s true view is so much more complex and subtle. In the sameway, it is very likely that Anscombe’s view is also more complex and subtle.

But then this leads to our second point. Let Anscombe’s view be as relativisticand subtle as one wishes. Her work — if not her own intentions — lead


the reader naturally to a “simple minded” model of human action, wherebythe full originary essence of the action is my first person operative reason (inthe sense that the parents’ gametes are meant to be the full originating essenceof this man). Whether Anscombe held it or not, this simplified view taps into adeep marketplace, pre-philosophical, idea, the one Nagel targets in his insightfulopening quoted passage, with allusion to each of us taking him/herself to be“the author of his/her actions”. And so, in the discussion below, we make anintentional choice — to focus on this primal idea, whether or not Anscombe’sview is as simple minded as that. (One of us is ready to bet his right arm that, ofher essence, her view could not be that simple marketplace view). So, in readingbelow our attribution to Anscombe of a model of human action explanation (andgiven the second claim linking explanation and essence, the action’s essence) thereader is to recall we use Anscombe’s work as a prompter to lift this “my ownreason is the essential origin of my action” marketplace view. This view, not thebiography of a subtle scholar, is our focus.

30. On Aristotle’s epistemically grounded essence of kinds (and Locke’s critique ofit) see Coolidge From concept to cosmos; on Anscombe’s epistemically inclinednotion of “definition” see Cabrera’s Natural unity and human nature.

31. See Anscombe’s stark “The question of linguistic idealism”, op. cit.32. The “inner model” title is deserved twice over. It is an “inner model” in the

logical sense of a smaller realm (than the universe modeled) preserving enoughimportant structure. And it is “inner” in the epistemological sense that it is insideour heads and known transparently in the “first person” way.

33. We are aware of the loaded character of the historical references below to themajor figures, all the more so when it comes to a make-or-break issue likehuman freedom. What is more, the contemporary literature on human freedom,especially in the context of Anscombe’s derivatives, viz. in the context of givingconditions for when intentional actions are free or whether all such actionsare at least willed freely, is replete with technical issues about being able to dootherwise, the idea of (higher order) formation and review of one’s will and ahost of presuppositions about “reason”, “autonomy”, “first person access” etc.We do not mean to address these intra-theoretical issues but to the contrary, weconsciously retreat to as it were a pre-professional, innocent (and to the learnedreader, perhaps ignorant) level of reflection on human freedom. Our guide here isThomas Nagel, and his setting up of the problematic in The View From Nowhere,in a passage that we quoted early in the paper. Our discussion should be seen astracking the two responses — by the free by essence vs. free by nature accounts —to his problematic (dilemma).

34. The three of us are each singularly and together as a trio very indebted toFrankfurt’s illuminating insights in the last two years throughout many Spinozaworkshops and seminars at UCLA.

35. Says Spinoza, in what we take as a constitutive passage for the Nature-placinggrounding of human acting and by means of it, the fundamentals of humanbeing:

. . . And so by natural right I understand the very laws or rules of nature, inaccordance with which everything takes place, in other words,the power of


nature itself. And so the natural right of universal nature, and consequentlyof every individual thing, extends as far as its power: and accordingly,whatever any man does after the laws of his nature, he does by the highestnatural right, and he has as much right over nature as he has power . . . .But as we are treating here of the universal power or right of nature, wecannot here recognize any distinction between desires, which are engenderedin us by reason, and those which are engendered by other causes; sincethe latter, as much as the former, are effects of nature, and display thenatural impulse, by which man strives to continue in existence. For man,be he learned or ignorant, is part of nature, and everything, by which anyman is determined to action, ought to be referred to the power of nature,that is, to that power, as it is limited by the nature of this or that man.For man, whether guided by reason or mere desire, does nothing save inaccordance with the laws and rules of nature, that is, by natural right.

. . . But most people believe, that the ignorant rather disturb than followthe course of nature, and conceive of mankind, in nature as of one dominionwithin another. For they maintain, that the human mind is produced byno natural causes, but created directly by God, and is so independent ofother things, that it has an absolute power to determine itself, and makea right use of reason. Experience, however, teaches us but too well, thatit is no more in our power to have a sound mind, than a sound body.Next, inasmuch as everything whatever, as far as in it lies, strives topreserve its own existence, we cannot at all doubt, that, were it as muchin our power to live after the dictate of reason,as to be led by blinddesire, all would be led by reason, and order their lives wisely; which isvery far from being the case. For “Each is attracted by his own delight.”

Nor do divines remove this difficulty, at least not by deciding, that thecause of this want of power is a vice or sin in human nature, deriving itsorigin from our first parents’ fall. For if it was even in the first man’s poweras much to stand as to fall, and he was in possession of his senses, and hadhis nature unimpaired, how could it be, that he fell in spite of his knowledgeand foresight? But they say, that he was deceived by the devil. Who then wasit, that deceived the devil himself ? Who, I say, so maddened the very beingthat excelled all other created intelligences, that he wished to be greater thanGod? For was not his effort too, supposing him of sound mind, to preservehimself and his existence, as far as in him lay?

(from his Political Treatise, in op. cit., p. 684).36. See both “An idea of universal history” (in op. cit.) of 1784 where Kant labors

our ascent from and away from Nature’s “mechanical motions” towards anend-driven (cosmo-) political coexistence. An interesting protective reading ofKant’s dualistic humanism but aiming for some form of Nature-integration isoffered by Barbara Herman in her “A habitat for humanity”, in Kant’s Idea for AUniversal History, eds. A. O Rorty and J. Schmidt, Cambridge University Press,2009.

The second piece “A conjectural beginning of human history” (1786) (in op.cit.) reflects on the biblical genesis story, the original sin, the fall and man’s


ascent to freedom by way of a rebellion against Nature. In this latter piece, Kanthas most revealing things to say about the point in a man’s life where he transitsfrom animal-like instinctual existence to sharing-a-profile with the reasoningangels. Says Kant (fn. 2, p. 62):

. . . When he is about sixteen or seventeen years old, nature makes man comeof age; that is, she gives him both the desire and the power to reproducehis kind. In the uncivilized state of nature, a youth literally becomes a manat that age. He is then able to look after himself, to reproduce his kind,and to take care of both a wife and children. This is easy because his needsare simple. But in order to discharge the responsibilities of manhood inthe civilized state, one needs means and skills, as well as fortunate externalcircumstances. Hence a youth acquires the civil aspect of manhood on theaverage only about ten years later. But as society increases in complexitynature does not alter the age of sexual maturity. She stubbornly perseveres inher law, which aims at the perpetuation of man as an animal species. Hencemanners and morals, and the aim of nature, inevitably come to interferewith each other. For as a natural being a person is already a man at anage when as civil being (who yet does not cease to be a natural being aswell) he is still a youth or even a child. For thus one may well call a personunable, in the civil state, to provide for himself, let alone for others of hiskind. Yet he has the urge and capacity to reproduce his kind. What is more,he also has the nature-given vocation to do so. For surely nature has notendowed living things with instincts and capacities in order that they shouldfight and suppress them. The disposition in question, then, did not intendthe civilized state, but merely the preservation of man as an animal species.And the civilized state comes into inevitable conflict with that disposition.This conflict only a perfect civil constitution could end, and indeed such aconstitution is the ultimate end at which all culture aims. But the space oftime during which there is still conflict is as a rule filled with vices andtheirconsequences–the various kinds of human misery.

37. We owe here special thanks to discussions with Olli Koistinen and John Carriero.See Olli Koistinen’s excellent laying out of the “ordinary conception of humanaction” in The Cambridge companion to Spinoza, Cambridge U. P. We refer to itby the “humanist AKA model” (it is not quite clear to us that the ordinary —as contrasted with the standard philosophical — conception embraces theAristotle-Kant-Anscombe idea of a metaphysical actus originarius, viz. that weare the absolute originators of our ordinary actions). We owe much to JohnCarriero’s orally presented ideas as well as his crystalline paper “Spinoza onfinal Causality”, op. cit.

38. Spinoza’s account of human action — in Ethics IV and in the human actionfoundations laid out less geometrically and more intuitively in his Political Trea-tise — provides a paradigm of the Nature-placing account. A most revelatoryyet accessible account of Spinoza is provided by Etienne Balibar’s ch. 4–5 of hisSpinoza and politics (New York: Verso Press, 2008). We thank Balibar for mostinteresting seminars and personal conversations in the last 3 years.


39. This important idea that not even Nature — for him, God — can be “free” inthe “standard” sense of operating outside Nature’s laws, is due to Spinoza inEthics I (and reflected in the quote from the Political Treatise of fn. 31 above).To the contrary, says Spinoza. To be free is to operate from one’s nature: Naturefrom her (laws of) Nature and us-locals from our Nature-made local natures. Seemore immediately below on the compulsion-driven actions of the monastic andthe Dionisyan agents. The idea introduced immediately below to concentratenot on ontological in-dependence but the type of inter-dependent action withproximate others also derives from Ethics II, 7–13.

life without essence: man as a force-of-nature

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