Rediscovering the Higher and Lower

We support our Publishers and Content Creators. You can view this story on their website by CLICKING HERE.

Our cultural confusions, especially among the educated, reveal a language desperately in need of repair, a reality in need of rediscovery. Differences in rank, in particular, were obvious until the dawn of modern scientism, the political ideology of technocratic materialism.

An extremely liberal, atheist British comedian came out in support of Britain’s new free speech movement, and as a result, he’s found himself under woke attack in public speeches and internet fora, and now allied with—for him—very unusual allies: religious conservatives. In the process, apparently, his new friends have tried politely to anchor his commitment to free speech in something more solid than his secular pragmatism, some deeper notion of human dignity. Yet the avant-garde comedian admits he simply cannot understand what they’re saying.

“They say, human beings are higher than animals, but I just don’t get it,” he marvels innocently. “Their words make no sense to me. Whatever could it mean to say that anything is higher or lower than anything else? What could that mean?”

Our cultural confusions, especially among the educated, reveal a language desperately in need of repair, a reality in need of rediscovery. If our British friend rushed into a burning house and faced the choice of rescuing either a single, obnoxious human or a half-dozen extremely cute kittens, he would rescue the nasty person. He simply can’t explain why. Admittedly, common synonyms like “noble and ignoble” or “fine and base” might express mere sentiments, approval and disapproval. So: are higher and lower real, objective distinctions in ranks of being?

Ironically, Plato predicted that we’d have this problem in his Republic, 2,400 years ago. In democracies, his Socrates tells his young interlocutors, “beasts are freer than in any other city…. Horses and asses get into the habit of making their way, quite freely and solemnly, bumping into whomever they meet on the road.” But today, this democratic tendency toward indiscriminate egalitarianism has been pushed into cultural psychosis by ideological scientism.

Differences in rank were obvious until the dawn of modern scientism, the political ideology of technocratic materialism. Propagandists from Bacon and Locke to Darwin and Freud purposely suppressed the reality of rank, since they believed everything could be reduced to matter-in-motion. In particular, they had faith that the higher functions of the mind could be explained entirely by lower mechanisms of biochemistry, appetites, and aversions. So we need to recover the real language of nature, to push back this materialist idiocy.

The Definition

To begin, the simple formula for the reality of rank: A is higher than B, if A is or does everything B is or does, but B is not or has not everything A is or has. (Philosopher Heidegger, e.g., says this somewhere.) An A lacks none of the substance and functions of a B, and has more. A is everything B is, and then some. So, a student once asked, what’s the yardstick to measure differences in rank? There can be no common yardstick between ranks. It would be absurd, for example, to try to measure the intelligence of a rock. Some simple science will make this clear.

What we typically call matter—a grain of sand or rock—has mass and extension. Two tricks: drop it, and it falls; push against it, and it pushes back. For the most part, it’s just stuff, different sorts of stuff, but nothing in particular. We speak about more or less sand, versus many or fewer trees, the volume versus the count. Until people got romantic about gemstones and mountains, they were on the margins of anything recognized as having identity or thing-hood.

So: at the bottom rank, there’s different sorts of matter, stuff, but just stuff. Plants however are different. They are made out of matter, so they have everything matter has—mass and extension—but more. They grow—the nutritive function—and they generate their kind, the reproductive function. Plants take in different sorts of matter—carbon dioxide, water, minerals—and with the heat and light of sun, they incorporate it into themselves. Non-plant becomes plant, amazingly, and as they mature, they realize their kind or idea, reproducing other plants.

Why is this more and not simply different? Lifeless matter is subject to entropy: cooling and disorder. It decays. Life fights decay. Scientifically, life is now called negative entropy, the orderly concentration of energy. And it’s ironic that materialist science describes life as negative decay. The living thing doing this is truly particular, an active embodiment of information, a form, species or idea. For a rock, just existing is a minimal activity, but a plant is purposive, orderly activity. When it stops “doing plant,” it decays back into its constituent stuff.

So: at the second rank, higher than matter, we have the lowest rank of life. The vegetable has mass and extension (like a rock), but also nutrition and reproduction. Yet animals are more. They have all the active functions of plants, but even more: sensation and locomotion. They gather information at a distance, and they move in response to that information. Cat sees squirrel; cat chases squirrel. It is providential that sensation and locomotion are united in animals, because an immobile cat would be highly frustrated, and a sightless cat would simply walk off cliffs.

Why is this animal with mass, extension, nutritive, vegetative, reproductive, plus sensitive and locomotive functions essentially higher than a vegetable? It flourishes only as a unified organism, so it has what we now call a central nervous system. A plant has tropisms, active genetic responses built into its individual cells, so each cell reacts to whatever touches it. Yet an animal has instincts, activating its whole being with more developed, single purposes. You can chop a twig from a tree, stick it in soil, and its cells all respond independently. The cells in the wet dirt multiply root cells, while the cells sticking up in the air, bathed sunshine, respond by multiplying leaf cells. Don’t try this with a cat. You cannot chop off its leg, stick it in a saucer of cream, and expect it to grow another cat. It lives or dies as a dramatically more unified whole. Legless or sightless, the cat likely dies, because it lives a life more fully alive than a carrot.

So: at the third rank, higher than plants, we have animals, with mass, extension, nutrition, reproduction, sensation and locomotion. Yet human beings are even more. Human beings have minds and free wills, functions enabled by reasoned speech. How can this be? We must take a step back, and consider something too easily ignored by reductionist materialism: Nature’s laws themselves are mysterious, and the fact that we can understand the tiniest bit of them, even more mysterious.  As Einstein said, “…the eternal mystery of the world is its comprehensibility.”

When Isaac Newton discovered the mathematical laws of material motion, he himself thought he was revealing the rational mind of the Creator. Yet, scientific materialists like Bacon and Spinoza assumed, since natural motion is predictable, it must be stupid and purposeless. So, they thought, all of nature can be “no more than matter in motion,” atoms like sticky grains of sand, flowing through the void, randomly smacking each other and glomming together into lumps like stars, planets, oceans, jellyfish, cats, and eventually humans. There was nothing original in this simplistic cosmology. The Roman poet Lucretius said it all, 1,500 earlier (Rerum Natura). Yet, with all the new mathematical evidence, the modern materialists failed to ask: where did the math come from? Then, two hundred years later, finding variations within species, Darwin asserted that living species embodied no fixed ideas, so that any given jelly “protoplasm” might glom into any sort of different organisms, with no inherent, underlying rationality.

Not to stray from the higher and lower issue: the new materialists erred in assuming that whatever is smaller is simpler. They were wrong. Since then, particle physicists have discovered that the smallest atomic particles are an infinitesimally precise, spectacularly improbable balancing of four forces (gravity, EMF, strong nuclear, weak nuclear). Cellular biologists now know that plant and animal cells are amazingly complex molecule factories, manufacturing protein building blocks for each of our 30 trillion, utterly specialized cells. And geneticists have found that each of us sprouts from a fertilized seed, containing a single, unique word (genome) composed of 23 syllables (chromosomes), each syllable on average 100 million letters long (nucleotide pairs). Our names in English may have only a dozen letters, but our unique names in carbon chemistry have to be much longer, since they must communicate all the structural information and active blueprint needed to grow each of us and any life.

Hindu mythology marveled poetically that the Earth sits on the back of a turtle, on the back of a turtle, on the back of a turtle…implying, “It’s turtles, all the way down.” Equally mythically, reductionist materialists imagined, “It’s tiny sand grains, all the way down.” Now, real science is discovering—however far down “it” goes—“It’s Intelligence, all the way down.”

Human Souls

So, back to the fourth rank, much higher than animals: humans with reasoned speech. Like any animal, humans are composed of matter (some more than others), living our nutritive and reproductive functions (sometimes healthily), and ranging our world with sense and motion. We are subject to—or more properly, enabled by—laws of geometry and gravity, nourishment and fertility, and act intelligently to satisfy the necessities of life. But speechless animals embody no more than their own idea, the purpose or active intelligence of their own particular type, and live only instinctually in their range. With reasoned speech, growing our minds, humans are more, so much more that Aristotle says each human is the equivalent of an entire animal species.

Just as mommy cats replicate kittens, other cats, with information-seeds within their wombs, so we replicate the idea of cat with sensory seeds in our minds. Speaking essentially, the idea of the cat in the cat and the idea of the cat in my mind are the same idea: not in the same language, replicating its material genetics, but replicating its type or idea. Its genetic word is how it is; our spoken word is what it is. We can know perfectly well what it is, without knowing how. We knew cats for millennia, before we knew cat genetics, and we could never have discovered how cats exist, unless we first knew they were cats. Science’s how presupposes common-sense’s natural what. And more, with our minds, we replicate all sorts of ideas, populating the Cosmos.

As animals have sensation and locomotion, united in their neural instincts, rational human beings have the analogous faculties, elevated to an immeasurably higher rank: intellect and will, united in our minds. Just as animal life is enabled by molecular forces and laws of motion, the solid geometry of genetics and laws of organic nutrition, and the laws of population mechanics and ecological niches—similarly, but infinitely more nobly, our minds are enabled by the imperative transcendentals: Being, Goodness, Truth, and Beauty (a whole new discussion, but not here). We embody the laws of logic, mathematics, linguistics, taxonomy, natural ethics (we hope), music, poetry, carpentry…all our mental tools and incredible and development of the arts, enabled by human diversity, communities of speech and cooperative divisions of labor.

As animals occupy their ranges, analogously, but infinitely more nobly, we occupy families, societies and civilizations, within, yet open to the Cosmos—becoming personal, social and civilizational microcosms of the Cosmos, reproducing at least enough of the universal order, in our own little splinters, to survive our own ignorance and stupidity. Being such a microcosm of the Cosmos may be most immediately experienced in contemplating a sunset. Even a skeptical British comedian can acknowledge we somehow experience Oneness with the Whole, when we pause to contemplate a sunset: the uniqueness, harmony and splendor of an unrepeatable moment in time and space, the transcendental imperative of Beauty at work. Do cats contemplate sunsets?

All the laws of visual geometry, natural taxonomy, language and ethics are implicit in the mind, its “working parts,” so to speak; but wholes are bigger than their parts. Again, saying something is a higher rank than something else means there’s no common yardstick to measure their distinct nobility. You can measure a carrot’s weight and dimensions, compared to a rock, but it’s ridiculous to compare the carrot’s growth rate or seed production to a rock’s—the rock doesn’t go there. Compared to a carrot, you can measure a cat’s growth and fertility, but the carrot cannot compete with the cat’s agility and visual acuity; it wouldn’t even try. And we humans can be compared to the cat in terms of our weight, dimensions, growth, fertility, agility and vision (where we’re hopeless), but it’s simply unfair to compare the cat to us in terms of sociability, artistic innovation or scientific exploration—the cat is supremely indifferent.

Democratic extremists might object that assigning any importance to these differences in rank means disrespecting rocks, carrots and cats, but in reality, it means respecting the nobility of everything in its proper rank. To ignore differences in rank is to reduce everything to the status of just stuff, as our current culture demonstrates. This bears repeating: to ignore differences in rank is to reduce everything to the rank of mere matter, human material for the use of our rulers.

The Materialist Perversion

For their part, materialists acknowledged the utility of human speech, but considered it no more than “markers” or signs for things desired. Reasoning became no more than “spies for the passions” (Hobbes). They tried to reduce humanity to clever animals, twitching to instincts, even while enjoying the advantages of logic, grammar and taxonomy. So they embarked on the Great Denial of Truth, Goodness and Beauty. With the zeal of dissecting a cat, they were fixed on how things work, while indifferent to what they are, their natures: the truth, goodness and beauty of the cat itself. Their only knowledge was use. Yet the love of wisdom begins in wonder, says Aristotle. A toddler properly marvels at the rock, even if the rock can’t marvel at the toddler.

The most damaging notion of the reductionist lie was the denial of the fact that humans with reasoned speech are essentially social beings—persons. We enter the world incomplete, only partly developed, so that we can learn the local lingo. We grow to neurological maturity outside the womb (like Kanga and Roo) in a maternal embrace—a womb with a view. In Mommy’s cradling arms, soothed by her smell and long-familiar voice, we are neurologically hard-wired to fix our gaze on her smiling face, with eyes focusing no more than the distance from her breast to her face. Mommy continuously flatters us, of course, so over the next several weeks, we learn to distinguish speech-sounds from noise-sounds: what comes from Smiling Face is speech, and ambient sounds are just noise. Babies deprived of this face-to-face stimulus (like hundreds of Romanian orphans in the 1990s) end up neurologically crippled. Babies enjoying this nurturing can later understand quiet conversations amid heavy traffic.

Baby and Mommy wonder with each other. That elemental, maternal friendship draws each of us into the Cosmos, as persons in relation to other persons, and that sets us up for the rest of our lives—if it does—in confident expectation of a welcoming Cosmos. We live and flourish as whole persons only in our supportive family, community and society. Or we are stunted in our growth by their (and eventually our own) failures of friendship. Friendship is the fabric of our lives, where we find our happiness—“life fully alive”—freedom and meaning. So Aristotle says that true legislators worry more to establish friendship in a polity, than justice. If citizens are friends, justice can be recognized; where citizens are enemies, justice becomes a battlefield.

The materialist reduction of humans to consumer-animals, tamed solely by fair exchange (Locke) reduced the family to a contract among detached individuals. Later, reacting against this “bourgeois individualism,” rationalistic communitarians like Hegel and Marx argued that humans exist only as animal cells in political beasts. In proclaiming us mere organs of our ethnic nation or economic class, they denied that we are free persons, each of us freely open to the revelation of nature. Both individualists and socialists deny the full reality of the human person. Yet, for all that we are animals, even when we betray our inherent dignity, we are immeasurable higher than the predatory or herd instincts of our animal roots.

In reality, nurtured within a natural network of families and communities, human persons are truly free, but not independent; responsible, but not servile. A mature person, living for a family, within a wide array of productive friendships and societies, is more perfectly individual than the most solitary badger, and more perfectly social than the most docile sheep.

A Brief Lexicon

The nurture of the Free Will and Friendship are whole new discussions (like the real experience of the True, Good and Beautiful).  Yet, because we’re recovering the reality of Higher and Lower, must take a quick look at the use of their synonyms, first the urgent and important, then the noble and ignoble, or fine and base. They describe first the differences between our intentions, and then between persons within the rank of the human, where there is a common yardstick. But here there’s space only for some quick outlines.

Our lower functions are most urgent. It is most necessary that I do not step off a high building, or I will imitate a falling rock. It is next most necessary that I stay well-watered, or I will imitate a wilting carrot. It is both necessary and important that I have healthy family and productive friendships: necessary, because otherwise I will end up imitating an injured cat, hiding under a porch. And friends are important, because otherwise I inevitably lose our shared awareness of Truth, Goodness and Beauty: our local microcosm or civilizations of music, art, literature, architecture, craft and cuisine.

We’re always tugged between urgent necessities and important joys. Living fully alive begins in transforming the necessary into the important. So we elevate merely eating for nutrition or stress-relief, into dining, celebrating our friendships. We thus transform isolated tasks into the contemplation of an excellent, meaningful life—happiness.

Humans have all the functions of mass, so we’re subject to gravity… all the functions of vegetables and so require nutrition… all the qualities of animals and thus inhabit a range. And we are minds, so we live in a Cosmos of Truth, Goodness and Beauty. These are lower and higher functions. In healthy animals, these functions work in harmony. For free humans, not so much. This should surprise no-one. A cat can be good or bad, growing into the idea of a cat well or badly, subject to the circumstances. But we humans can be good or evil. We are evil when we freely choose to betray our local microcosms of Truth, Goodness and Beauty for the sake of selfish dominion. Then we see any personality vanishing into the vortex of irrational willfulness, the collapse of any personal vision of the good life, into the hollowed mannequin of a Hitler, Stalin or Mao—“no one home there”—a malignant will to dominate, stripped of any meaning.

In a slightly less dramatic spectrum of virtue, a Socrates, living intentionally at the highest, contemplative level of his being, is fine and noble. Living as if one were a belly on legs, a Henry VIII, is base and ignoble. Somewhere in the middle is living a simple, productive life, with family and friends, for which most of us can be perennially grateful. However, short of a lobotomy, we cannot sink below the human and live as some sort of innocent animal, like Rousseau’s cartoon “Noble Savage.” If we try, we end up like Rousseau, abandoning our bastard children in an orphanage—base and ignoble.

The ancient Stoics, the best of antiquity, thought of human beings as ethereal and purely contemplative souls, trapped in a bestial bodies and longing for escape. Christians, given the datum of the incarnation or embodiment of the Word, see humanity as suspended between angels and beasts, and responsible for sanctifying the material world. Yet, for both pagan and Christian, our natural capacity to replicate the order of the Cosmos and reproduce it in our own beautiful creations—our cultivated contemplative faculty informing our productive activity—has almost universally been recognized as the Imago Dei, the Image of God in each soul. So, we may pray for an opportunity to console our British comedian friend that he’s really much more noble than he thinks, and he is likely happier than he can explain. He simply needs a reformed vocabulary.

The Imaginative Conservative applies the principle of appreciation to the discussion of culture and politics—we approach dialogue with magnanimity rather than with mere civility. Will you help us remain a refreshing oasis in the increasingly contentious arena of modern discourse? Please consider donating now. 

The featured image is “Peasant Girl with Sheep” (c. 1895) by Julien Dupré, and is in the public domain, courtesy of Wikimedia Commons.