What Philosophy Can Learn from Anthropology
By Justin E. H. Smith
I have gradually become convinced that historians of philosophy --my colleagues, and by training myself-- are going about a cluster of very interesting questions in entirely the wrong way. These questions, I think, may be much more adequately answered from an anthropological point of view.
According
to one widespread account, modernity came into being as a consequence
of the sacrifice of nature. The Scientific Revolution literally killed
nature by transforming it from a living and holistic system of
interconnected entities, human and non-human alike, acting
intentionally in accordance with their natures, into a dead system of
atomic particles being moved about, without intrinsic purposes, but
only as a result of extrinsic physical forces. This new scientific
cosmology would also bring with it, the story goes, a new philosophical
anthropology, as humans came to see themselves as radically separate
from, and opposed to, a natural world in which they as thinking
intelligent agents could have no part. The world, which now operated
according to entirely different laws than those that governed our own
thinking, was 'disenchanted', as Max Weber would later put it,
literally gutted of any cosmological significance --where cosmology is
understood as some model of the interrelatedness of the heavens, the
earth, animals, humans, super-human spiritual entities, and perhaps
also God-- and reduced simply to extended particles endowed with mass,
figure, and motion.
