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The climate crisis has forced us to recognize that we are not separate from nature but are part of the natural world on which we depend: human beings are animals and we must understand much better our place in nature and our impact on our environment if we are to avoid our own annihilation as a species. And yet we feel nevertheless that we do not entirely fit into nature, that we stand apart from other animals in some way – in what way, exactly?
Markus Gabriel argues that what distinguishes humans from other animals is that humans are minded living beings who seek to understand the world and themselves and who possess ethical insight into moral contexts. Mind is the capacity to lead one’s life in the light of a conception of who or what one is. The undeniable difference between us and other animals defines the human condition and places a special responsibility on us to consider our actions in the context of other living beings and our shared habitat. It also calls on us to cultivate an ethics of not-knowing: to recognize that, however much we may seek to understand the world, we will never completely master it. Our grasp of reality, mediated by our animal minds, will always be limited: much is and will remain alien to us, lending itself only to speculation – and to remember this is to stand us in better stead for carving out an existence among the environmental crisis that looms before us all.
Introduction
First Part: We and the Other Animals
The Logical Animal – How Humans Became Animals The Specific Something Nature is not a Safari The Anthropocene as Hybris The Network: Plants, Bats, Fungi Continuity, Discontinuity, or Somehow Both? Shadowboxing What Does it Actually Mean to Understand Oneself as an Animal? Why We are Not Amphibians The Animal Word: Why the Zoo does not Exist Animalism, The Prestige, and The Anomaly The Human Animal as Machine? Animals Like Us? Korsgaard’s Values Alice Crary – Inside Ethics Subjectivity and Objectivity – Why We Aren’t Strangers in Nature The New Enlightenment in the Age of Living Beings Kant’s Four Questions – Being Human is an Answer to a Question The Human Being as the Animal Who Doesn’t Want to Be One
Second Part
Social Freedom and the Meaning of Life
The Basic Idea of Liberal Pluralism The History of Life The Idea of Life To Live and to Survive – The Basic Form of Human Society Do We Want to Live Forever? The Meaning in Life The Meaning of Life [pg. ] is Not Nonsense Nonsense is Sense-deprivation Limits of Liberal Pluralism? Who We Are and Who We Want to Be – Radical Autonomy and the New Enlightenment Social Freedom and the Meaning of Life Why Science Has Not Discovered that Life Has No Meaning From Mind Back to Nature
Third Part
Towards an Ethics of Not-Knowing
Nature, Environment, Universe In-itself and For-itself… Is Science Fiction? Limits of Scientific Knowledge Otherness – Towards an Ecological Ethics Under-complex, Complex, Hyper-complex Homo sapiens, Or, The Wise Words of Socrates Opinions, Knowledge, and the Idea of the Good Moral Reality and Ethical Facts Not-knowing Towards An Ethics of Not-knowing
Acknowledgments
Glossary
Notes
Index
Description
The climate crisis has forced us to recognize that we are not separate from nature but are part of the natural world on which we depend: human beings are animals and we must understand much better our place in nature and our impact on our environment if we are to avoid our own annihilation as a species. And yet we feel nevertheless that we do not entirely fit into nature, that we stand apart from other animals in some way – in what way, exactly?
Markus Gabriel argues that what distinguishes humans from other animals is that humans are minded living beings who seek to understand the world and themselves and who possess ethical insight into moral contexts. Mind is the capacity to lead one’s life in the light of a conception of who or what one is. The undeniable difference between us and other animals defines the human condition and places a special responsibility on us to consider our actions in the context of other living beings and our shared habitat. It also calls on us to cultivate an ethics of not-knowing: to recognize that, however much we may seek to understand the world, we will never completely master it. Our grasp of reality, mediated by our animal minds, will always be limited: much is and will remain alien to us, lending itself only to speculation – and to remember this is to stand us in better stead for carving out an existence among the environmental crisis that looms before us all.
