What are we made for? Natural virtue and the highest life

A few weeks ago I was writing about the foundations of morality, and I argued that they can be found in Nature. Specifically I argued that (at least in the classical understanding) it is possible to derive human morality from a teleology of Man; and I argued moreover that Man's nature as a biological organism guarantees us a teleology. The conclusion is that there is a human morality derived from our Nature that is not merely a matter of convention or an assertion of arbitrary will.

The next question, clearly, is: What does this natural morality tell us to do? What ends are we made for? How shall we live? And what kind of man is the highest, noblest, or best kind of man?

Aristotle answered this question by saying that the highest virtue is the virtue of our highest and most distinctive human part, viz., our reason. Since the best activity is that which is for its own sake and not for the sake of something else, the best reasoning is the pure contemplation of the philosopher. And the philosopher himself is the best and highest man.

I approach the question a little differently, although I certainly don't quarrel with all of Aristotle's results. I am just fine with recognizing courage, temperance, prudence, and justice as virtues. But I am not persuaded that human reason is so uniquely and distinctively human, that it is qualitatively (not just quantitatively) different from the kinds of cognition available to the other higher animals, such as dolphins or the other primates. It is true that human technology has allowed us to penetrate far out of the ecosystem where we arose and into most parts of the world, but after all ants seem to have achieved the same victory.

Remember, though, what I said in identifying the natural foundation of human teleology: with respect to our internal biological functioning, the " system of regular processes which interact to perpetuate themselves constitutes a teleology at a cellular level, or at the level of the single organism"; and at the level of the organism's life inside an ecosystem, the "system of acquired traits which function in a self-maintaining way can be described as a system of interlocking purposes that are an innate feature of this organism's life in this environment."

In other words, if we have evolved in such a way that we interact with our environment in a stable, sustainable way, where our way of life is both caused by and maintains both the environment and our evolutionarily-acquired features -- in that case, that way of life is what we are made for.

By that criterion, the life we were made for was the life of the Old Stone Age, which represents 99% of human history, and which therefore has a better claim to adjectives like stable and sustainable than any way of life we have seen ever since. What can we say about this way of life? Things that we know for sure include:

• We lived in communities, not large ones by modern standards but larger than a single family.
• We spoke language.
• We cooked our food.
• We made art.
• We cooperated on common goals, like hunting.  

It has also been recently argued that human bands in the Old Stone Age had neither property nor marriage, keeping all their tools and raising all their children in common. This thesis is certainly not universally accepted (or at least not yet), but the similarities to Plato's ideal republic are unmistakable. 

What are the ends of Man? I think it is the whole package, to be implemented so far as practically possible. We are made to live with others, to work together, to play together, to make music and art, and to raise children. To be clear, almost nobody in the modern day has any idea how to survive like we lived in the Old Stone Age, without medicine or metal or even bread or rice. And surely it is obvious that there is no way to support eight billion people on this planet using only Stone Age technology and no agriculture. So the qualifier "so far as practically possible" is an important one. But we can still live together and work together and all the rest of it. And those are good things for us to do.

What is the highest end of Man? I don't really want to limit the list to only one. Or to put it another way, I think it is a failure of our language that we don't have a single noun which means life-as-a-human-being. If there were such a noun, that would be my choice -- because that is what we have evolved to do, and therefore according to the principles I explained above that is what we are made for. Aristotle said our highest end was reason, and I agree that life-as-a-human-being includes reason as one component; but for the most part I think it is the practical reason of the man-at-work organizing a task with his fellows, and not the theoretical reason of the metaphysician (which by comparison looks a little hypertrophic or even pathological). Freud said that someone in good mental health should be able to "lieben und arbeiten" -- love and work -- and these too are part of the package but not the whole thing by themselves. Still, like reason, they are inestimably precious.

If I had to pick one single phenomenon or behavior as the highest end for Man, I think I would look at our eusociality, which comes as close as anything to a truly defining characteristic for us as a species, and I would nominate friendship. Friendship meets Aristotle's criterion insofar as (in at least the best and noblest cases) we it enjoy for its own sake and not purely in an instrumental way as a tool for getting something else. And from it we can derive all the other behaviors that I identified above as distinctively human. Community, language, and cooperation are surely related to friendship; for the rest, an artist might live alone and even cook for himself, but it is hard to imagine how he could have learned his art (or learned how to cook) without the initial help and support of friends.

Who, then, is the highest man? Aristotle proposed the philosopher; and if he meant a philosopher like Sokrates, who was always talking with his friends in the gymnasium or the marketplace, the suggestion at any rate doesn't look crazy. But the history of philosophy has also known great minds with awkward social skills, thinkers who had trouble connecting with anyone around them. And as I suggested above, it is hard not to see such cases as at least a little pathological. If I can say that the highest end of Man is life-as-a-human-being, then the highest man is someone who can do all those things surpassingly well, someone like Odysseus. H. D. F. Kitto writes in The Greeks (p. 172):

The hero of the Odyssey is a great fighter, a wily schemer, a ready speaker, a man of stout heart and broad wisdom who knows that he must endure without too much complaining what the gods send; and he can both build and sail a boat, drive a furrow as straight as anyone, beat a young braggart at throwing the discus, challenge the Phaeacian youth at boxing, wrestling or running; flay, skin, cut up and cook an ox, and be moved to tears by a song. He is in fact an excellent all-rounder; he has surpassing arete.

In fact the only question-mark that I have to set against Odysseus is that he seems to be a dangerous man to know ... look at the fate of all his shipmates on the voyage home, or of even innocent bystanders during his slaughter of the suitors. So I am actually not completely certain how well he stands with respect to the virtue of friendship. But perhaps the example is valuable anyway. 

Nor is this ideal the special preserve of Antiquity. The very same perspective was captured in the late twentieth century by Robert Heinlein, in Time Enough for Love:

A human being should be able to fix a flat, con a ship, program a computer, cook a tasty meal, deliver a baby, heal the sick, comfort the dying, lie convincingly, take orders, give orders, write a sonnet, fight nobly, and die gallantly. Specialization is for insects.