What Does It Mean to Be Human?

Standing on the grass between our houses, I got into a philosophical discussion with my friend.  I had to be eight or nine years old and we got into a deep question.  Are we animals?  We had to know.  It was important.  We couldn’t agree, but we had resources to find out.  All we had to do was run home and consult the authorities.  This was years before home computers, let alone the internet.

So… we asked our moms.  

My friend reported back and said yes, of course, we are animals.  But that didn’t sound right.  So I ran into my house and asked.  Mom didn’t even look up from what she was doing.  “No, son.  We’re not animals.”  That was clear, so that was that.  I knew what she meant.  Human beings are way more than just animals.  I ran back outside with the satisfaction of knowing I was right and my friend was wrong.  Mom proved it.  We dropped the debate and went back to riding our bikes in the streets.

But maybe the answer is more nuanced than that.  As humans, we share mammalian traits with other animals. Yet, we know we are unique too.  We are able to reason and speak at a qualitatively different level.  We socialize and understand each other, also at a qualitatively different level.  In fact, it’s only humans that blush.  You don’t have to be religious to know that our mental life is distinct from our physical existence—though they do go together.  For centuries, we’ve known that humans are rational animals, as Aristotle said.

Rational Animals.  We use our heads to think, but our animal appetites are tangled up and pulsing at the gut level.  In our bellies, so to speak.  We have an almost angelic mental capacity in the head, and a visceral and roaring animal nature in the gut.  We are rational animals.  Is that what makes us human?

Maybe.  But how do we handle this tension between Reason and Instinct?  This life on two levels?  How does the reason of the mind regulate the impulses of the gut—the animal instincts of the belly.  

In the book, The Abolition of Man, C.S. Lewis offers an answer.  This answer, he says, is what makes us human.  It’s what sets us apart from anything else in the Universe.  Lewis argues that Humans are a fusion—or the joining—of our Mental Life and our Animal Nature.  This joining takes place between the Head and the Belly—right in the Chest—at the Heart Level.

Michael Ward describes what Lewis means:  “In the head, we have thoughts and in the belly we have sensations, but only when we learn to integrate the rational and the sensual in stable sentiments located in the chest, do we really discover ourselves as human beings…. Connect the angel and the animal and you will have the anthropological.  The human being is a synthesis of the human brain and the human belly in the human breast.”  This is from Ward’s book After Humanity.  

The chest, or the heart, is where our conscience, our virtue, our living out the Good, the True, and the Beautiful is found.  The Chest, so to speak, is where our self-discipline and our rightly ordered loves reside.  Loves that are informed by objective values outside us and above us.  Not subjective impulses below.  The fusion of the head and the belly in the middle ground of the chest makes us human.

But Subjectivism kills all that.  That is why he titled his book, The Abolition of Man.  Subjectivism creates Men without Chests—humans without that special joining of Reason and Instinct that gives us an informed Conscience, informed Loves, Virtue in the heart.  Subjectivism craters that unique human quality right out of us.  It kill’s our ability to blush.  We’ll discuss how and why in the next podcast.