This article is a preview from the Spring 2020 edition of New Humanist
Being Human (SPCK Publishing) by Rowan Williams
The third instalment in an “unintended trilogy” that includes Being Christian and Being Disciples, Rowan Williams’ new book sets itself the not unambitious task of exploring “the questions in our culture that make us wonder what ‘real’ humanity is like and whether our most central ideas about what it is to be human are under threat in this environment”. The former archbishop spells out what he takes to be some of these central ideas, and suggests ways of resisting the threats. He does a better job of the former than the latter.
Chief among the threats is what Williams calls “reductionism”, a view that he regards as not only “intellectually incoherent”, but also “morally deeply dangerous”. Reductionism, according to Williams, is the tendency to view consciousness in particular, and reality in general, as simply “a world in which small solid objects bump into each other, as if the world is a very large snooker table”.
What is dangerous about this apparently innocuous view is that it leaves out higher explanations of reality in favour of a stripped-back, mathematised conception, forsaking the immense richness of human life in favour of a colourless picture that explains something as remarkable as consciousness in terms of objects bumping into each other.
Williams is right to note that reductionist explanations can be crude and uninteresting, and that they sometimes end up providing an impoverished picture of the phenomena they seek to explain. But surely this is not morally dangerous in and of itself. It may or may not be helpful to use neuroscience to understand love, but there is nothing wrong with cardiologists conceiving of the human heart in reductive terms, if that is what it takes to successfully complete an angioplasty.
This crusade against reductionism impels Williams to take up the age-old philosophical quest of identifying something in the human being that is “outside” the deterministic snooker table of a world, that defies reductive explanation. His suggestions to this end are the most intriguing sections of the book. The central point in his argument is that, as a conscious being, “I live in a world where I don’t simply bump into things, but a world where I bump into signs.” That is, that my world is first and foremost significant – it is a world of lived, meaningful experience.
How does one bump into signs? The basic picture is this: the world of lived experience is located (we “see” this world from a particular perspective), narrational (it is built up from stories we tell ourselves about the past and the future), relational (we always already have relations of various kinds with people around us) and linguistic (the world is experienced through the lens of shared symbols and metaphors).
In this picture, the world is intrinsically meaningful – meaning is not something humans project onto the world, but something we find in it. When we are born we already stand in myriad relations to people, places and institutions, relations that determine and structure our existence and our range of possibilities. We acquire language and further enter a world of shared meanings and symbols, out of which we begin to construct a sense of self and of what is important.
Williams evidently thinks that when we are looking for “real” humanity, we will find it here, in the world of signs, symbols and moral obligations, rather than on the “very large snooker table”. And there is surely a sense in which this world is more real – it is the world that matters to us. But there seems an equally good sense in which the reductionist world of “medium-sized dry objects”, as the philosopher J. L. Austin once put it, is more real, if only in the sense that it is this world that is there anyway, independently of our meanings and symbols, narratives and metaphors, indeed regardless of our existence at all.
In later chapters, Williams explores the frontier of philosophy and theology: hope, faith and mortality, time, eternity and silence. Whilst inevitably less interesting to the non-religious reader, these final chapters offer a deeply humane version of modern philosophical theology. They constitute, together with the rest of this earnest little book, a calm, courteous and circumspect appreciation of the depth and difficulty of philosophical problems, and the importance of these problems for human life.
