Politics - 5 - [Draft]**

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§ 8 The Anthropological Foundation of Politics  — Human Language and the Social Individual

The exertion of influence by human beings on one another is a fundamental condition of man's existence. In essence, politics occurs when one person or group wields influence on another person or group. In order to live, man therefore occupies himself interminably with activities that are political in nature, though they may not coincide with a narrower conception of politics—like the sort of stuff reported in the politics section of your daily paper.

The Needs-Inventing Animal, Human Language and the Infinity of Human Learning

Humans survive by a form of adaptation not found in any other animal: in order to survive: they change the environment in which they live—not by dictate of instinct alone, occasionally, marginally, or by happenstance, but incessantly, by design, to great effect and with unlimited consequences. They do this by imagining and inventing or discovering new desires, whose satisfaction they pursue with a rate of success unparalleled in the animal kingdom.

The cow is being forever tortured by flies; man finds ingenious ways of stopping the nuisance. 

Unlike human beings, whose ability to learn is virtually unlimited, all other animals are narrowly constrained by their instinctual apparatus in their propensity and their capabilities 

• to expand their understanding of the world around them continuously and systematically and 

• to apply the newly acquired knowledge to make their environment conform to their basic and unchanging needs as well as to those human desires that man conceives by creative ingenuity. 

Ultimately the narrow circumference of animal intelligence is due to the fact that non-humans, though equipped with linguistic abilities, lack the higher functions characteristic of human language which endow us with exceptional capabilities for apprehending, mentally remoulding and practically changing the world around us.

Language Makes Man

So, what is special about human language? Like other animals, man can express certain inner states such as anger or friendliness (expressive function of language), as when a dog snarls or wags his tail. Also, like other animals, man can signal intentions and desires (the signalling function of language), as when your dog nudges your arm with his nose to indicate that he is ready for a walk or some petting. 

Non-human animals, however, are not able to describe situations, courses of action, feelings or ideas—save in the most rudimentary form, as when a dog directs you to the fridge—is he really describing anything rather than having learned to trigger his human to get him food?—or a bee indicates other bees the direction in which to fly to a new dwelling place—which is a description, but most likely not reasoned out and consciously designed and stemming from a generally applicable capability to map complex scenarios into a descriptive narrative.

Sophisticated Descriptions and Criticism

Thus, the most basic function that differentiates human language from any other animal language is the descriptive function. Once a species is able to describe situations, courses of action, feelings or ideas, it is in a position to exchange and compare thoughts among bearers of different experiences. It can share in what his fellow has experienced and learned, and reciprocate by sharing its own experience and learning. In being able to compare descriptions, humans learn new things, genuinely widening their horizon by incorporating information that causes them to enhance, revise, and hone their own knowledge. From this aptitude emerge skills enabling man to authenticate ever more efficiently, ever more systematically the credibility and veracity of information. At this point, the human language has been augmented by the critical function of language, the ability to perceive and test the quality of descriptions and probe their truth and falsehood, the range of their implications and their usefulness. 

Objectivity

Thanks to the special nature of his language, man has acquired the ability to be objective—he is able to release into the open experience locked in the individual, turning subjective knowledge into the object of public scrutiny. Objective knowledge is highly scalable, it can be vetted and complemented by an unlimited number of corroborating perspectives that help to widen and enrich the human horizon. In the process ever more sophisticated techniques of argumentation emerge, which mix the expressive and signalling functions of language with the specifically human descriptive and critical functions, giving rise to a composite skill that is man's most powerful and versatile instrument for influencing his fellows. 

Language Makes Man Social — the Individual Is Always a Social Being

By turning subjective perspectives into objects of common experience, human beings are capable of building unlimited networks of shared experience allowing for cooperative learning that relies on comparative and competitive assessment of the common objects of experience from dispersed and unequal standpoints. Humans are able to develop mental techniques improving the logical consistency, the empirical veracity, and the practical usefulness of a world assembled in their communicating minds from experiences dispersed enough to cause varied perception yet also sufficiently similar to make for shared objects of reference.

In the process, human beings put together a world that is constantly expanding and diversifying in content and meaning.

Humans fabricate meaning from the supplies of a common world provided by language that absorbs individual views into a social experience available to all, giving rise to an interdependence of socially corroborated knowledge and individual variations of, challenges to and escapes from the common canon of meaning.

By contributing input from different angles of meaning and assessing the collective product of knowledge differently, humans learn to refine disagreement—an intrinsically social phenomenon— into a powerful and productive tool.

We relate to our environment, we understand and evaluate it by attaching meaning to it, an ability that we exercise as social beings, since both the building blocks of meaning and the ability to put them together individually are socially acquired and continually depend on interaction with other humans and the social world, including the products of the human mind—such as written language, music, mathematics etc.—in which we coexist, even if we are not living in the same place, at the same time or will never get to know one another in person.

Language creates an entirely novel dimension of being socially related to one another—we intrude and participate in our respective minds, whereas the minds of other animals are hermetically cut off from one another,

Language also lends a new character to the way in which (only human) animals differ and how they manage differences between them—we have more (cognitively registered) differences than other animals, because our language is a differences-producing machine, it allows us to participate in the experiences of our fellows and note and react on the differences that we perceive between our experiences and their experiences.

We compare the different meanings that the things of life, big and small, have to us. We are able to understand one another, and we are able to communicate and negotiated with the benefit of mutual experience and empathy.

Unlike other animals, we can step outside of the confines of our instincts and add to them a rich realm of complementary considerations.  We can vastly multiply the options we have to react to one another, including options that introduce useful new effects which represent genuine alternatives to instinctual responses—such as prudence, justice, deferred gratification, credible commitment and so on.

We are in a position to compare the effects of instinctual reaction to alternative strategies and from this develop entirely novel political options.

This includes path-breaking methods, such as mental anticipation, where we go through actions and their consequences only in our mind, and this technique can be applied as a form of communication with a partner, enabling us to engage in sophisticated strategic negotiations. It is in this sense that we must interpret Adam Smith's famous proposition:

Nobody ever saw a dog make a fair and deliberate exchange of one bone for another with another dog. Nobody ever saw one animal by its gestures and natural cries signify to another, this is mine, that yours; I am willing to give this for that....

Social life among other animals is largely a matter of coordinating the requirements of each animal's instincts. By contrast, we can refine the way in which we impact one another far beyond these narrow possibilities. Among humans, a physically weak, even a naturally non-dominant individual can use her intelligence to change the social order ending up in a superior position to the stronger and naturally more dominant. Only among human do we observe that  the weaker part of the population is more powerful than the stronger part (democracy); or that the stronger desire to be dominated by the weaker (progressive taxation).

In short, by their very nature humans are bound to make of politics a clever, powerful, and often very useful art.


Continued here.