1. The "human"

In asking what it is to be human we cannot see what we are because, as the ones who see, we are at the wrong end of the line-of-sight running from seer to seen. Nor can the problem be solved by mirroring, for when I look at myself in a mirror I see what I look like rather than what I am seeing like. The mirror experience is fascinating, certainly, because it takes me right up to the edge of seeing myself seeing, fudges an approximation of this, a kind of Doppelgänger experience, but it never quite delivers myself.

We cannot say or pass judgment on what we are, because we are ourselves the grounds of judgment. By analogy, the drafters of a national constitution cannot decide whether or not a suggested provision is constitutional, since constitutionality does not exist before they make their determination. And their constitution can always be overthrown or amended for extraconstitutional reasons. Now we may discover a superior constitution to judge ourselves by, some divine or cosmic standard, but we cannot stand apart from our own act of constituting that standard as superior.

Most perplexing of all, we cannot even be what we are, because if we raise real questions about ourselves we open ourselves up to novel determinations. In reinterpretation we must change, since interpretation is not just about us but is us; but this means that we can never catch up with ourselves. Questioners cannot have a fixed nature. But in spite of that condition, or because of it, we cannot keep from relating ourselves to the horizon of thinkability, the "Absolute," which in surpassing us tells us what our limits are. Since we take part in the surpassing by thinking that very thought, we must read ourselves as "image of God" or "shepherd of Being," distending our identity toward a transcendent First or Highest.

Such limitations belong to the structure of our inquiry. If we were to escape them, we would no longer be anything like human beings, and there would be no more discourse on the human.

That we can have no fully adequate awareness or definitive construal of ourselves does not mean, however, that there is nothing to be learned by asking about "human nature" or that we can keep from asking. There are observable human phenomena and practical problems that give shape to our openness, and there are conclusions about human existence that must be thought out just to navigate from today to tomorrow. Our need for conscious orientation is such that we become paralyzed if we do not have some view of what we take to be our true capabilities and constraints. We must interpret ourselves to live, and we can no more interpret our experience without a working anthropology than a surgeon can operate without a working knowledge of anatomy.

If we are not put off by the inconclusiveness of self-interpretation, there are still other serious difficulties of principle to reckon with. The ideal "we" of "our" thinking is subject to challenge whenever some subjects believe themselves to be left out of its assumptions or presumptions; correspondingly, claims to discern the human "in general" are constantly shadowed by doubt whether one person's or community's experience is like another's or commensurate with it. It is important to recognize that any would-be reasonable discourse is an experiment that supposes the possibility of acceptable publicity, on the one hand, and accurate and useful generality, on the other. It may never pretend to succeed, only trust that it can make meaningful progress--precisely in rectifying human relationships--by trying to correct its flaws. Granted this license, we are allowed, if not to say just anything, at least to begin.

The classic form taken by a conclusion about the sort of being we are in general is an attribution to "human nature." To say that X belongs to human nature is to say that X is "how we are" in general, or that X is among the criteria by which a life or life-part is given its fullest identification as a member of the class "human." (How we play the classing game can be an important problem, but for our purposes the reference group for setting class criteria can be all members of the biological species homo sapiens who are not thought by the majority of their conspecifics to be extraordinarily impaired or deprived.) We discuss human nature in order to strengthen our seeing-together of human beings: to appreciate individuals, it is necessary to grasp the resemblances off which their individuality plays.

Human nature is interpreted by a variety of categories. One group of categories has to do with observable shape. To know that human life is mammalian is to know a great deal about our organismic design and also about patterns in our relationships and emotions. Likewise we have vertebrate, animal, living, and entitative shape. It seems that this mammal-to-entity progression of categories has less and less to do with our identity, that it concerns how we are, or the means of our existence, all that in which we "find ourselves," rather than who we are, or our end. The humanity of who we are is centrally interpreted by categories that organize us inwardly rather than outwardly. A human being is one kind of person, that is, a consciously relationship-oriented, linguistic being, and a person is one kind of intentional subject, that is, a sentient being aiming at other beings.[1]

We humans require a double definition, then, along the lines of the traditional formula "rational animal," because we come into two distinct yet (through us) mutually qualifying series of categories. The chief Western creation story introduces us in double aspect: we are made in the divine image, and we are made male and female (Genesis 1.27).[2] Whatever is true of person-as-such is true for us only in the way that it can be true of sexually reproducing animals; "animal," more specifically "mammal," names a particular field of intentional relations in which human subjects find themselves. That is the other side of the familiar point that we are a distinctively personal sort of animal.

To say we are "persons" is ambiguous, for we may mean by this nothing other than human persons, but then again we may be thinking of features that are relatively abstract and not specifically human, like rationality (unless we mean to think of specifically human rationality). On the other hand, when we say "human being" we may actually mean the more abstract "person." Statements purporting to be anthropological often tacitly mislead in this way. To take an example at random, Hegel once declared that the "fundamental characteristic of human nature is that man can think of himself as an ego."[3] Thus humans are distinguished from the "lower animals," as Hegel intended, but we learn nothing about what makes for a specifically human realization of self-consciousness. The anthropology is abstract. It is like saying that the fundamental characteristic of primates is that they nurse their young: that is indeed a point of fundamental importance for primates, and might well be their most striking characteristic in the absence of comparison with other mammals, but it leaves out much of the heart of the primate story.

Another source of confusion is to mean by "human" only that which is the same for all humans without regard for differences among them. The legitimate purpose in this is to contemplate our commonality. In abstracting from our differences, however, we forget that being subject to differentiation is part of everyone's humanity. The literature of philosophical anthropology is pervasively marked by this forgetfulness.[4] Perhaps it is caused by the wish to create an ideal model of humanity as a sort of public utility--an inclusive apotheosis.

Let us give the designation of anthropomorphism (in an honorific sense) to the pursuit of full concreteness, the enforcing of all pertinent categories, in representing humanity. That our thinking about ourselves so often slides off into zoomorphism or theomorphism, observational biology or idealized psychology, shows that maintaining an anthropomorphic balance is not easy.

*

Since it is sometimes argued that "nature" is the wrong scheme in which to display the meaning of "human"--that we ought rather to speak of a human condition or a human project--we should try to get a view of the relations among these conceptions.

"How we are," or "human nature," and "how it is with us," or "the human condition," are distinct yet mutually entangled notions. Knowing something of how we are is assumed by an insight into how matters stand with us, since we must be aware of what it is that faces a situation or what possibilities might or might not be realized in a theater of action. On the other hand, the enduring features of our situation stamp us so strongly that we cannot readily conceive ourselves apart from them. Does death pertain to human nature, or to the human condition? In which of these two categories are we speaking when we say we are mortal? (In which category were we speaking when we said "We cannot know ourselves"?) It is impossible to choose one against the other. If we regard ourselves as capable of living in a fundamentally different situation, we become then other-than-human--for instance, we imagine ourselves in heaven as angels. To put the point in the most general terms: insofar as we abstract from homo sapiens' emplacement in the world, separating our nature from our condition, we shift toward a wider genus than the human, such as "person," and humanity is thought of as what happens when persons inhabit human circumstances.[5] This is not an unmeaningful idea. It conveys insight, as much as in saying "A bat is what happens when a mammal has to fly." But there is still batness; it is like something to be a bat, and also to be a human; and that returns us to our more specific nature.

Among the ingredients of human nature are desires (say, appetite and our "spirited part") and capacities of awareness (the senses and the mind). Correlative with these are the ingredients of the human condition: we are given a certain array of happy and unhappy transactions to engage in, a certain array of aspects the world can wear. Taking all of this together as a living whole, we conceive a human project or perhaps a bundle of characteristic projects. What we are up to is surely the crucial revelation of what we are as well as where we are.

Whatever is generally determining for the interpretation of human life belongs to anthropology, so we must attend to human nature (as a dimension of individual beings and as a specification of personhood and mammalianness), human condition, and human project alike. But it is right to give preeminence to human nature, for in that category we inspect ourselves most directly and intimately, in our portentous obscurity. Our very intentions are drawn into what is in question about ourselves, and possibilities of imagining different kinds of human life stand only as open as they appropriately can.

The notion of "nature" is so rich and slippery, however, that we should pause to try to foresee where it can lead us if we adopt it for our self-interpretation.

2. "Nature": four primary senses

"My nature" is "what I am"; my human nature, what I and other humans commonly are. Whatness is a form of being. Our human whatness is the ideally knowable form you can match against other forms in determining whether something is or isn't one of us, or how fully or with what slant an individual represents us. Anything identifiable has a "nature" in this sense. When the words "I" and "you" are spoken to rip Self and Other loose from the already-woven fabric of experience, precisely to introduce new grounds of identification, then at that moment and in that aspect we have no natures; we are transcendences, holes in being. But we also always have a comprehensible aspect.

A thing's whole nature governs everything about it for the trivial reason that it includes everything about it; but since we never know everything about anything that is empirically actual (like ourselves), and in our own case have the extraordinary difficulties of knowledge already mentioned, we will not foolishly try to treat our "nature," with its decently limited predictiveness, as an absolutely predictive "essence."[6] If there are necessary implications of our conception of a thing's nature, the necessity will belong to our thinking, not to the thing we are thinking about.

Nature-as-such is all that really is, the totality of whatnesses, which we must conceive to possess some sort of internal structure or "system" of real and logical compossibility.

We did not, of course, demolish the prospect of human form in our opening arguments. Much can be seen in ourselves, without everything being seen; much can be said about us, despite the absence of a clinching judgment; and our living cannot but realize our form, even if we are continually changing it. (Still, the significance of our form's hidden aspects is never measurable.) But granting the possibility of doing anthropology, what does it matter, anyway, what we say about the form of humanity? What is at stake? Let us review the ways in which we line ourselves up in relation to what, if anything, we believe to be the form of humanity--what molecular structures are formed when the atoms of what we mean join with the atom of what we think we are.

(a) Endowment

We encounter our "nature" as an already-given involuntary factor in our lives, an origin not subject to shaping by us. Even if we think of human "nature" as pure creativity or an open site of radical transformations, we take that embroilment in novelty to be the involuntary horizon of our lives. The involuntary is also the inalienable. When we can say "We enter the world as the kind of being that is A, B, and C," our identity is secure in those respects.

We feel, in always finding ourselves with our "nature," that we have received it, and we readily speak of what we have received as an endowment--but this is not so small a step, because with endowments there is the issue of conservation and prudent use vs. wasting, and even a question of appropriate gratitude and respect for the endowing source. An endowment becomes the matter, the about-which, of piety. So far as the pre-givenness of our "nature" goes, what counts is that the fundamental order of our lives is really settled in some way, and settled, one might say, all the way down, not open to significant questioning; we know that not this but other matters are to be determined by our thought and action, and so we can more easily decide how to point our attention. We also have a genealogical sense of who we are.

For some purposes, we trace our endowment on the slope of what comes "naturally," that is, easily, to us--the fact that it is much easier to walk on our feet than our hands reads as a sign of what is natural to humans in the matter of locomotion--while for other purposes we look to what is difficult (wisdom, courage, or even walking on our hands, or even celibacy) as most fully revealing of our given potential. Clearly, what we recognize as our endowed potential depends on what we want to do and how we are able to harmonize our efforts.

(b) Consistency

For more direct and active self-orienting, our "nature" amounts to whatever we can make evident about ourselves and reliably refer to when we have to include ourselves in our calculations. The surgeon knows the anatomical part of our nature; the industrial psychologist knows how we are likely to behave under a given set of working conditions; the theater director can predict how we will react to stimuli from the stage; more deeply and indefinitely, everyone knows (up to a point) what everyone is like, for everyday purposes. Human "nature" is what we can hold on to like a guide-rope or an anchor-chain. It is the consistency of our life, what we can generally expect to be possible or impossible, connected or unconnected, easy as "with the grain" or hard as against it. (From the stress on the fixed comes the equation of "nature" with "law," and from the stress on the tangible comes the use of "nature" to mean physical nature.)

Consistency is more objective than endowment, often observable and measurable. But it is also changeable, if we can figure out how to change it, whereas endowment is in principle what cannot be changed.

One could point out that useful knowledge of human consistency always pertains to certain people rather than to humanity as such; and indeed many recipes do not travel between communities. But there are two reasons to go ahead and qualify what is known of certain people as human nature. One is that any particular person could, for all we ever know, be any other person at all, if the other were placed in the very same circumstances. The theatergoers of Beijing might not react to plays as New Yorkers do, but they very probably would if they had been raised in New York by New Yorkers. A second reason is this. When we cross community lines and have to guess how to deal with strangers, we operate by two rules--to expect them to be different from the sort of people we know, and to expect them to be basically our own sort of being. The second rule reflects a presumption that community with the strangers can, should, and will be realized, and the first is subordinate to it inasmuch as we are sensitive to difference for the sake of making any adaptations that are necessary for community. We normally want to maximize mutual understanding and cooperation with strangers, and so while we are ready in general to be surprised by them, we are committed to finding everything we know to be true of our own people to be true in some way of them as well, and everything we learn of them to be true in some way of ourselves. The rule is not always vindicated, but no other fundamental heuristic points to the pay-off we are aiming for. (Seekers of the "exotic" are not really an exception to this rule; they are adventurous explorers of their own humanity.)

(c) Métier

We take up a relation with our past when we regard human "nature" as the already-given; we assume a relation especially with the present when we regard it as a consistent reference-point for our calculations; and we invoke the "natural" again when we take an attitude toward the future. Since we are free agents we have to ask the moral question, To what account shall we turn our endowment, or to what end shall we use our hold on human consistency? The "natural" appears in this light as the fulfillment of the best promise of our given selves. We have distinctive and valuable potentialities--whether as human, as kinds of human, or as individuals--that it would be a "natural shame" not to actualize. The goal of self-cultivation, beauty or power or serviceableness, may be called "virtue," and the meaning of selfhood may be identified very closely with it. The path of optimal self-cultivation is one's métier.

Métier can be a mischievous idea. Is a young man, strong, well-coordinated, and seven feet tall, who chooses not to play basketball, guilty of a crime against "nature," a "vice"? One doesn't rush to that judgment. All the same, one is irrepressibly curious to know what else he is doing with himself. One hopes he is doing something else he is good at, and so one continues to impose the category of the métier, though without holding him to a particular one. Suppose that even though he lacks a good color or design sense, he persists in cultivating himself as a painter. That is a mistake. The more strongly we believe that he is in a position to be aware of his mistakenness, the likelier we are to judge him deviant not only in action but in interpretation, hence "perverse."

Seven feet of height are not self-evidently and intrinsically for playing basketball. We can let this example reveal the absurdity of all claims that natural attributes are ordered to chosen goals by anything other than choice. But we cannot bring our awareness of the seven feet of height into relation with our planning and evaluation of life without caring whether it is put to some intelligent use. Other things being equal, and admitting that many other features of the person are worth caring about more, we will be gratified if the seven feet play a part in what he achieves (maybe as a lifeguard).

The métier-norm is two-sided and ambiguous. Partly we use it to appreciate an individual's life for its own sake and on its own terms, but partly we use it to call for responsible role-playing. We will ask the seven-footer to be a basketball player if we believe that the community will profit more from what he does in this area than from what others would do. But the question of community benefit is not really separable from the question of individual fulfillment. Flourishing individual and flourishing society require each other; ideally speaking, imperfection in either dimension impairs the other. (And of course there is the further difficulty that all conceptions of flourishing are debatable and subject to change.)

Although "nature" as métier already relates the individual to a larger system, there is another aspect of the notion of "nature" that touches this issue more directly.

(d) Harmony

Endowment was especially a religious issue; consistency, a scientific and technical issue; métier, a moral issue. Nature as harmony combines all these dimensions.

Nature-as-such is the sum of things that exist. But things can only coexist if they are compossible in principle and mutually adjusted in fact. Thus to speak of "Nature" is implicitly to speak of a "natural harmony," an order of things, and we call "natural" for us, with reference to nature-as-such, whatever accounts for the possibility of our coexistence with everything else in the universe, along with whatever actually adjusts us. The contemporary destruction of the world's forests is an "unnatural" human act in that it changes an order of things on which our own existence depends. (Once again, no conception of natural order is immutable or indisputable. We even hear arguments that human engineering is the ultimate principle of order in this universe; if we learn to manage our atmosphere and ecosphere differently than by relying on forests, that will only prove that all merely found orders are properly subordinate to our ordering.)

Natural harmony is always a fact given to observe, but it can be apprehended in intenser fashion as the holding- and belonging-together of the elements in the harmony, a unifying presence, what Emerson called "the integrity of impression made by manifold things."[7] The "natural" in us would then be especially the feelings, judgments, or actions that participate in this larger integrity. One important implication of adopting this posture is that harm of other beings becomes a sin against ourselves: all are jointly defined by this present "nature."

The harmony on which our own existence rests is our origin, seen in its full extent. To be unsociable toward the universe is felt as ingratitude and impiety. Further, our vision of natural harmony sets the main lines of the consistencies we observe and the vocations and virtues we practice.

In sum, we find four important senses of human "nature": as an already-given constitution serving as a platform for our present and future acts; as a checkable reference point for calculations involving ourselves; as a goal for self-cultivation; and as a larger harmony which we can support or interfere with. We have here four kinds of light in which to appraise any human qualification.

3. Following nature

Though we never said outright, "Follow nature!", the uses of "nature" that we discussed were generally prescriptive. The apparent purpose of "nature"-talk is to call for conformity to a pattern. The reader will be aware, however, that the propriety of making any such move has been contested.

Partisans of reason have sometimes affirmed "nature" as the concrete expression of rationality, mixing in selected features of real living conditions to lend stability and weight to their visions. We see this in seventeenth- and eighteenth-century "laws of nature," although they still trade rhetorically on the older view, classically expressed by Aquinas, that human reason is but the dependent reflection of a divine reason expressed in the universe's "nature." But Hobbes' "laws of nature" are set over a violent "state of nature": we are to look to convention, rather than our given condition as such, for our norms. Thus the ultimate liberal revulsion from the "natural" is foreshadowed.

The revolution that puts human reason on the throne is consummated by Kant. Kant can grant no moral force to empirical anthropology, for "natural" facts about ourselves can always be otherwise and thus cannot absolutely bind judgment, as the concept of morality requires; but he wants to include among his formulations of the moral law, "Act as if the maxim of your action were to become through your will a universal law of nature."[8] By this he means to impose the moral test question, "What if things always had to happen this way?" He does not seem to be interested in determining whether a law of occurrences dictated by willing is compatible with regularities that we already observe in the world. If it is not--if, for instance, people always do a certain amount of lying according to a social-psychological law--then so much the worse for the immoral world. It is enough that we can conceive without contradiction a world where only truth is told. Only rational consistency matters.

Nevertheless, Kant's "law of nature" formulation does prompt us to investigate the larger framework of "nature." It turns out that moral reasoning is very often decisively affected by this sort of consideration. For instance, if, for the sake of the rational goal of peace, I propose to give up all forms of recourse to harming others, it is not reasonable to imagine my pacifist "natural law" operating in a vacuum. To complete the moral gesture, I must conjoin my idea with known probabilities of aggression, conflict, and the consequences thereof. I realize then that even if I can conceive of a peaceful world, I can't plan on one, and that my peace policy had better be appropriately qualified if I am not to admit unacceptable results. Moral consistency is both rational and real.[9] Even if its premises were different, Aquinas' "natural law" thinking nevertheless brought us to the same balancing point between reason and "nature," for it presumed that our way of realizing fullness of being in our given form must involve the use of our intelligence.[10]

More carefully relating and to some extent reconciling moral thinking with observation of the whole system of nature in his "Critique of Teleological Judgment," Kant still declares that for the final purpose commanding our obedience "we must not seek within nature at all."[11] (Published in the same year was Burke's Reflections on the Revolution in France with its many expressions of horror at the Revolution's "war with nature.")[12] Mill, more radical, does not try to conserve any of the meaning of the Enlightenment's "best of all possible worlds"; for him, "nature" is not only not a moral norm, it no longer provides any reliable clues to right action. Mill can paint nature the way Burke painted the Revolution, red in tooth and claw. "The physical government of the world being full of the things which when done by men are deemed the greatest enormities, it cannot be religious or moral in us to guide our actions by the analogy of the course of nature."[13] Nature is for amending rather than imitating. Emerson, still trying to hold nature and reason together, restates the Pauline claim that "the world lacks unity, and lies broken and in heaps . . . because man is disunited with himself";[14] but Mill has let go of this vision and blames no one (except, tacitly, those who have rationalized injustices by dressing them in the gown of "nature"). His is the progressive spirit overleaping all the barricades of piety.

On either Kant's or Mill's view, and on liberal views continuous with theirs (including contemporary liberal attitudes toward sex, race, and age), "follow nature" becomes at best a hollow, at worst an offensive piece of advice. But notice what such views forget or forswear that belongs to the thought of "nature." According to them:

1. We have no "origin" beyond our own present discernment of the good. We have no past; we always constitute our identity right now, in our reasonings or negotiations. Thus we don't really have a history, we only have this one constant scenario.

2. Our anchor-chain consisting of reason only, we have no solidarity with our flesh and gain no support from our tangible surroundings. The natural world can set problems and we can use it to illustrate solutions, but it has no intrinsically meaningful moral form of its own, and in that sense is enigmatic. We hear it on the moral wavelength only as static.

3. Clues to the fulfillment of personal character are entirely inward and thus individual. A person's métier is discoverable only by experiment, and identifiable with some confidence only when extraordinary talents come into play (since unique capabilities remain hidden in lives of an average type).

4. The fact of adjustment between natural beings is not worth consideration in its own right; it is overshadowed by questions like "How can we make life better?" and "How can we implement our ideals?" As progressives, our worry is that we might not make the best use of our opportunities, as against the conservative worry that we will fail to preserve the built-up order that secures a good life.

The upshot of the liberal turn is that anthropology, as a mode of normative thinking, dissolves without remainder into ethics and politics. To think anthropologically about human qualities requires some sort of recovery of the aspects of human "nature" that are excluded by liberalism.

NOTES

1. I give an account of these categories in The Concept of the Spiritual (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1988), esp. Chapters 2 and 3.

2. The "male and female" of Genesis 1.27 is not merely a reminder of the category of animal existence that has already been established before the creation of humans, for although God earlier told the animals to be fruitful, sexual differentiation had never been mentioned; thus the introduction of the terms "male and female," coming just after the unprecedented realization of the divine image, makes human sexedness seem distinctive. "Divine image" and "male and female" are not separate "levels" of human existence, for this story. The proximity between "divine image" and "male and female" even admits the interpretation that "male and female" specifies the divine reality itself: "they were made in the divine image, therefore they are male and female." But I take the prime thought here to be of a mutual qualification of personhood and sex in the meeting-ground of "human nature." This places our life in a different light than when we concentrate exclusively on a "divine image" of reason, freedom, and creativity; it crucially limits Pico della Mirandola's grand idea that God told Adam, "Thou shalt ordain for thyself the limits of thy nature" (trans. C. G. Wallis, quoted by Stephan Strasser in Understanding and Explanation [Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press, 1985], p. 82).

3. G. W. F. Hegel, Lectures on the Philosophy of World History. Introduction: Reason in History, trans. H. B. Nisbet (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1975), p. 50. In this connection it is interesting to watch Jean-Paul Sartre move in Being and Nothingness between equating "human-reality" with abstract freedom, the for-itself as such, and qualifying the freedom that is "human-reality" with the limits of human facticity--see esp. IV.I.II.

4. Is it not astonishing that a well-oriented specialist in philosophical anthropology like Michael Landsmann can make a list of twenty-three basic structures of human nature, ranging from "unspecialization" to symbolic capacity, and never mention male and female?--Fundamental-Anthropologie (Bonn: Bouvier, 1984), Chapter 9. --Robert Paul Wolff shows the link between our self-investment in the abstract category "person" and the liberal program of maintaining a "public" realm where specifically human characteristics like age and sex count for nothing, in "There's Nobody Here But Us Persons," Philosophical Forum 5 (Fall 1973-Winter 1974), pp. 128-144. Sartre examined this thinking in "the democrat" and "the inauthentic Jew" in Anti-Semite and Jew.

5. Hannah Arendt's assessment is different. In her view, no "human condition" or corresponding "human activities and capabilities" are "essential characteristics of human existence in the sense that without them this existence would no longer be human. The most radical change in the human condition we can imagine would be an emigration of men from the earth to some other planet. Such an event, no longer totally impossible, would imply that man would have to live under man-made conditions, radically different from those the earth offers him . . . Yet even these hypothetical wanderers from the earth would still be human; but the only statement we could make regarding their 'nature' is that they still are conditioned beings"--The Human Condition (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1958), p. 10. But if we insist that the emigrants are human, we think of an array of continuing "conditions" more specific than the fact of being conditioned, like having to breathe, eat, speak, and mate; to the extent that these conditions are altered, the emigrants really do metamorphose into another sort of being.

6. I do not mean that S's whole nature governs everything about it in the sense that S's whole story is exhausted by "S is P" predications, as Leibniz posited for his monads. I mean that there is no better reference for knowing S than the sum of knowable manifestations of S, including that portion of the determination of events that is attributable just to S.

7. Ralph Waldo Emerson, "Nature," in The Complete Essays and Other Writings (New York: Modern Library, 1950), p. 5.

8. Immanuel Kant, Groundwork of the Metaphysic of Morals, trans. H. J. Paton (New York: Harper & Row, 1964), p. 89 (Ak. 421). In the Critique of Practical Reason he calls the natural law principle a "type" of the moral law needed for common-sense moral reasoning (Ak. 69-70).

9. Kant sometimes ignores this principle. In his famous refusal to lie to a murderer ("On a Supposed Right to Lie from Altruistic Motives"), he seems to get carried away with the thrill of obeying ideal laws regardless of consequences. But he yields to the principle in another way when he says in the "Dialectic of Pure Practical Reason" that we have to postulate an ultimate apportioning of happiness to virtue if we are to stay morally sane--Critique of Practical Reason, Book II.

10. Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologica I, II, Q. 91, Art. 2.

11. Kant, Critique of Judgment, trans. W. Pluhar (Indianapolis: Hackett, 1987), p. 318 (Ak. 431).

12. Edmund Burke, Reflections on the Revolution in France, with Thomas Paine's The Rights of Man (New York: Anchor, 1962), p. 62.

13. John Stuart Mill, "Nature," in Collected Works, vol. 10 (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1969), p. 386. Compare Wollstonescraft: "Firmly persuaded that no evil exists in the world that God did not design to take place, I build my belief on the perfection of God. Rousseau exerts himself to prove that all was right originally: a crowd of authors that all is now right: and I, that all will be right"--A Vindication of the Rights of Woman, 2nd ed. (New York: Norton, 1988), p. 15.

14. Emerson, op. cit., p. 41.