Defining Humanity: Intelligence, Language, and Symbolic Thought

The Human Condition: Distinguishing Humanity

Humanity has always sought to differentiate itself from animals and the divine. Humans are unique, being neither purely animal nor divine. The shared similarities and relationship between animals and humans are evident, though it took centuries to clarify. In modern times, humanity has experienced three theoretical 'humiliations,' each rooted in scientific discovery and challenging religious dogmas.

Three Modern Humiliations of Humanity

• The Copernican Revolution

  The first: The Earth was shown not to be static, but revolving around the Sun.

• Darwin's Theory of Evolution

  The second: Darwin demonstrated that our species is merely one among all living beings, not divinely created, but evolved through mutations.

• Freud's Unconscious Mind

  The third: Sigmund Freud revealed our consciousness or 'soul' as a complex and often opaque entity.

Intelligence: Human vs. Animal

Traditionally, humans have been defined as 'rational animals.' Reason is the ability to find the most effective means of achieving one's proposed ends. Here lies the primary distinction between animal and human intelligence: animal intelligence primarily enables them to procure what they need, whereas human intelligence helps us discover new needs. An unhappy human is like an animal, unable to meet needs without perceiving another point on the horizon of their life.

Intelligence in animals appears to be exclusively in the service of their instincts. Humans, however, use intelligence both to satisfy instinctual needs and to interpret the forms of our instincts. Animals seem to be born already knowing much more than they will learn in life, whereas humans learn almost everything and know almost nothing at birth. The truth is that animals often succeed as if they were not burdened by excessive developments, while humans, though often groping and making mistakes, are better equipped to respond to radical changes in circumstances.

Unique Human Traits and Social Structures

Only humans make monogamy compatible with group life, probably due to sustained relationships with their offspring of both sexes even after they reach maturity. Humans seem to have the ability to distance themselves from things, to biologically detach and perceive them as objects with their own qualities, often unrelated to our needs or environmental fears. For humans, an animal is anything, even if it has nothing to do with us. Humans can study things in the world for their own sake, and our own condition as an objective ingredient of the real world, unlike animals in a zoo.

The Power of Human Language

So-called animal languages always refer to the biological purpose of the species. Human language, however, has no predefined content; it is used to discuss any subject, to invent things that have not yet occurred, or to refer to the possibility or impossibility of their occurrence. The meanings of human language are abstractions, not material objects. In reality, language allows us to create a world. Once acquired, it does not close us off from sensory input, much less from the desire to understand and exchange communications with our fellows. What makes a language truly human is that most of its content can be translated into any other: it signifies a desire to understand and be understood.

Symbolic Systems and Human Culture

Myths, religions, science, art, politics, history, and of course, philosophy, are all symbolic systems, fundamentally based on the symbolic system of language itself.