In An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding David Hume writes this advice: “Be a philosopher; but, amidst all your philosophy, be still a man.” Now, for the occasional “woke” person who might stumble across this statement, I need to point out that the tradition in English writing has until recently been to use “mankind” and “man” to represent all humans. Growing up and going through school, I heard no objection to this general use. But in the last five decades, the words man and mankind have become anathema, not so much, I believe, because of a new inclusiveness, but rather because a shift in liberal educators who found some offense in using a single word because of its association with male.
As a result, the old adage that excess verbiage makes for poor writing went into the Lethe, that mythical Hadean River of Forgetfulness, to be replaced by a dictum that sentences with “he or she” or “she or he” are “proper.” And now, those “in charge of language” throw out hundreds of years of linguistic tradition by transforming the number relationship between pronoun and antecedent. What used to be “the boy went to his gym class” or “the girl went to her gym class” is now “the person went to their gym class.” Number agreement between substantive word, phrase, or clause and pronoun has morphed.
Don’t get me wrong here. I don’t mind that language changes. If it did not change, then thee would read as thou might have read in “days of olde.” Language that does not change is a dead language like Latin, Sanskrit, and Anglo-Saxon. But changes in language have long been “organic,” occurring, for example, when teenagers adopt a new “in word.” The word spreads among them, and they carry it into their adulthood and influence older adults to adopt the word. Nineteen fifties “Cool,” isn’t it? Language also changes because of discoveries or events. In an era of hundreds of thousands of new chemicals and tens of thousands of new machines and technologies, a living language changes. In an era of globalization, speakers from one region adopt words from many cultures. As Anglo-Saxon, a language derived from Germanic languages, evolved into Middle and then Modern English, it adopted words from Latin, Greek, the Scandinavian languages, and French. To that rich vocabulary the spread of the global English Empire added terms. So, you rise each morning to practice Tai chi to keep your yin and yang in balance, eat tofu with your Kung pao and Won ton, and practice Kung fu. Maybe you play a didgeridoo in a local band. And as the expression goes with regard to Karma, what goes around comes around like a Boomerang. The addition of words from many cultures has enhanced English. Chemistry and the other sciences have also enriched the language: Irradiated, dissolved, reactive.
The problem I have with objection to “man” and “mankind” stems from the distraction it imposes on understanding language in its historical context and meaning. If Hume were writing today, he might adopt “human being” or “person” for man in his sentence. The modern reader steeped in the distraction might easily miss the message that is applicable to more than “just males.” The modern obsession with seeing all through the lens of the present voids historical views and manners of thinking.
Hume begins his work with a discussion on “manners” by which one can approach the topic of human understanding. The paragraphs that precede his statement briefly explain two such manners: On the one hand there is an approach that sees and interprets humans through their actions and emotions; on the other hand, an approach that interprets humans through reason, this latter manner being somewhat abstract.
Hume cautions those “pure philosophers” who would apply reason alone to explain human nature to remember that there is that other side of humanity, the one that feels and acts on feeling. Both are important. Hume writes, “Man is sociable, no less than a reasonable being.” In short, understanding human nature requires a holistic approach. Hume acknowledges that “artists,” for example, make us “feel the difference between vice and virtue.” Philosophers make us think rather than feel.
I find it interesting that so many academicians, journalists, and editors pain themselves over words rather than over meanings. But I guess in an Orwellian age, I should find the practice uninteresting and rather ordinary. I suppose, also, that I see in this trend a revitalization of Marshall McLuhan’s “the media is the message” message. Today’s media personalities have elevated themselves to be “THE MESSAGE.” I simply call the reader’s attention to pundit shows in which pundits talk no so much about the actions and feelings of “mankind,” but rather about how other pundits have said what they said. It has become an era when a tweet can instigate a cascade of responses because the tweeter used an unacceptable word. Context be damned. The words are more important than the message they carry. Distraction, not clarity of thought, is the focus.
Let me pose an objection you might be thinking right now. “Messages are carried by words, so meanings can’t be separated form the words that convey them.” Good point. But focusing on a word because of matters, such as “inappropriate gender reference” or “inferred racism of the speaker or writer” means that the forest truly can’t be seen because of the trees.
Hume has an analogy that you might find appropriate here. “Astronomers had long contented themselves with proving, from the phaenomena, the true motions, order, and magnitude of the heavenly bodies: Till a philosopher, at last, arose, who seems, from the happiest reasoning, to have also determined the laws and forces, by which the revolutions of the planets are governed and directed.” He writes this as a model in his hope that that “philosophy [read ‘understanding human nature’], if cultivated with care, and encouraged by the attention of the public, may carry its researches still farther, and discover, at least in some degree, the secret springs and principles, by which the human mind is actuated in its operations [‘read behaviors and feelings’].” As I wrote above: Only a holistic approach can lead to understanding human nature.
As a rational species, we apply “science” to achieve understanding. But as we have discovered, humans are often unpredictable, whimsical, focused on desire, desirous of entertainment, and willing to accept feelings as guides to virtue and vice, purpose and chaos, and truth and untruth. We go by our guts as much—or maybe even more so—as we go by our brains, more often by feeling than by reasoning.
When I began to write all of the above, I decided to let it take me where it would. I had no plan to address the fuss over gender words, for example. But the nature of this little essay seems to make my point about understanding human nature. Like language, it is fluid. Sometimes reason is the guide and actually serves to establish the “laws” by which humans operate just as people like Kepler and Newton discovered the laws by which the Solar System operates. And sometimes emotions are the guide leading to unexpected results. We can profess to be more rational than emotional or more scientific than artistic, but to understand ourselves we need both “manners” of approach.
Yet, when I reread Hume’s work, I find his ending in favor of a purely rational approach. He wants, I believe, a discoverer of Laws, some Kepler or Newton. He writes, “If we take in our hand any volume; of divinity or school metaphysics, for instance; let us ask, Does it contain any abstract reasoning concerning quantity or number? No. Does it contain any experimental reasoning concerning matter of fact and existence? No. Commit it then to the flames: for it can contain nothing but sophistry and illusion.” Hume, it appears, would have us abandon any reasoning that is not backed up by experiment and close observation. He would prefer a statistical analysis of “mankind.”
Unfortunately, all experimental attempts to understand mankind run contrast to the “insights” of writers, painters, and poets. We could, for example, say that when the Germans bombed a Basque town that a specific number of people were casualties. We could count injuries of various types and number of people killed. Or, we could try to understand “mankind” in a painting, such as Picasso’s Guernica. The former “manner” relies on Hume’s “experimental reasoning” about a “matter of fact and existence.” The latter “manner” conveys the horror of the tragedy. Picasso’s manner of “understanding mankind” makes us “feel the difference between vice and virtue.”
Now, you’re thinking that I’ve just negated my argument about distraction, that I missed the point that the word mankind just doesn’t give a holistic picture because it excludes females. Yet, in the meaning of “humanity” it is encompassing and has been so since Biblical times. The new distractive way of seeing how something is worded that applies “social appropriateness” will probably enrich the language by adding terms since every human being will be able to choose a new pronoun, a new word, and a new syntax and grammar. That’s all right. As of this writing, the Oxford English Dictionary lists more than 170,000 words to which it adds more every edition. Some estimates suggest that English has, in fact, more than a million words though many in that count are alternate forms, gerunds, for example. The problem for any generation of speakers and writers will lie in how much time they spend in learning which terms are acceptable when their ultimate goal is to communicate effectively some understanding of human nature.
But I could be wrong. A living language changes, and with it or because of it, our understanding of human nature changes. Understanding our human nature has varied as much as psychoanalysis has varied from behavioral psychology and Platonism has varied from existentialism.
I’m going to ask you to recall Hume’s statement on being a philosopher, but still being a man. Caught up in the rules of appropriateness, we have accepted the jargon of the times. Hume writes, “Accurate and just reasoning is the only catholic remedy, fitted for all persons and all dispositions; and is alone able to subvert that abstruse philosophy and metaphysical jargon, which, being mixed up with popular superstition, renders it in a manner impenetrable to careless reasoners, and gives it the air of science and wisdom.” For those whose concern is word over thought, I will point out that catholic means “universal,” not “papist.” But my thinking that I have to point that out for the occasional reader emphasizes what I wrote about focusing on word over thought, on term over holistic meaning. Ironically, we live in the thick of a scientific, experimental era, but we have become “careless reasoners,” giving in our daily communication the mere “air of science and wisdom."
As a result, the old adage that excess verbiage makes for poor writing went into the Lethe, that mythical Hadean River of Forgetfulness, to be replaced by a dictum that sentences with “he or she” or “she or he” are “proper.” And now, those “in charge of language” throw out hundreds of years of linguistic tradition by transforming the number relationship between pronoun and antecedent. What used to be “the boy went to his gym class” or “the girl went to her gym class” is now “the person went to their gym class.” Number agreement between substantive word, phrase, or clause and pronoun has morphed.
Don’t get me wrong here. I don’t mind that language changes. If it did not change, then thee would read as thou might have read in “days of olde.” Language that does not change is a dead language like Latin, Sanskrit, and Anglo-Saxon. But changes in language have long been “organic,” occurring, for example, when teenagers adopt a new “in word.” The word spreads among them, and they carry it into their adulthood and influence older adults to adopt the word. Nineteen fifties “Cool,” isn’t it? Language also changes because of discoveries or events. In an era of hundreds of thousands of new chemicals and tens of thousands of new machines and technologies, a living language changes. In an era of globalization, speakers from one region adopt words from many cultures. As Anglo-Saxon, a language derived from Germanic languages, evolved into Middle and then Modern English, it adopted words from Latin, Greek, the Scandinavian languages, and French. To that rich vocabulary the spread of the global English Empire added terms. So, you rise each morning to practice Tai chi to keep your yin and yang in balance, eat tofu with your Kung pao and Won ton, and practice Kung fu. Maybe you play a didgeridoo in a local band. And as the expression goes with regard to Karma, what goes around comes around like a Boomerang. The addition of words from many cultures has enhanced English. Chemistry and the other sciences have also enriched the language: Irradiated, dissolved, reactive.
The problem I have with objection to “man” and “mankind” stems from the distraction it imposes on understanding language in its historical context and meaning. If Hume were writing today, he might adopt “human being” or “person” for man in his sentence. The modern reader steeped in the distraction might easily miss the message that is applicable to more than “just males.” The modern obsession with seeing all through the lens of the present voids historical views and manners of thinking.
Hume begins his work with a discussion on “manners” by which one can approach the topic of human understanding. The paragraphs that precede his statement briefly explain two such manners: On the one hand there is an approach that sees and interprets humans through their actions and emotions; on the other hand, an approach that interprets humans through reason, this latter manner being somewhat abstract.
Hume cautions those “pure philosophers” who would apply reason alone to explain human nature to remember that there is that other side of humanity, the one that feels and acts on feeling. Both are important. Hume writes, “Man is sociable, no less than a reasonable being.” In short, understanding human nature requires a holistic approach. Hume acknowledges that “artists,” for example, make us “feel the difference between vice and virtue.” Philosophers make us think rather than feel.
I find it interesting that so many academicians, journalists, and editors pain themselves over words rather than over meanings. But I guess in an Orwellian age, I should find the practice uninteresting and rather ordinary. I suppose, also, that I see in this trend a revitalization of Marshall McLuhan’s “the media is the message” message. Today’s media personalities have elevated themselves to be “THE MESSAGE.” I simply call the reader’s attention to pundit shows in which pundits talk no so much about the actions and feelings of “mankind,” but rather about how other pundits have said what they said. It has become an era when a tweet can instigate a cascade of responses because the tweeter used an unacceptable word. Context be damned. The words are more important than the message they carry. Distraction, not clarity of thought, is the focus.
Let me pose an objection you might be thinking right now. “Messages are carried by words, so meanings can’t be separated form the words that convey them.” Good point. But focusing on a word because of matters, such as “inappropriate gender reference” or “inferred racism of the speaker or writer” means that the forest truly can’t be seen because of the trees.
Hume has an analogy that you might find appropriate here. “Astronomers had long contented themselves with proving, from the phaenomena, the true motions, order, and magnitude of the heavenly bodies: Till a philosopher, at last, arose, who seems, from the happiest reasoning, to have also determined the laws and forces, by which the revolutions of the planets are governed and directed.” He writes this as a model in his hope that that “philosophy [read ‘understanding human nature’], if cultivated with care, and encouraged by the attention of the public, may carry its researches still farther, and discover, at least in some degree, the secret springs and principles, by which the human mind is actuated in its operations [‘read behaviors and feelings’].” As I wrote above: Only a holistic approach can lead to understanding human nature.
As a rational species, we apply “science” to achieve understanding. But as we have discovered, humans are often unpredictable, whimsical, focused on desire, desirous of entertainment, and willing to accept feelings as guides to virtue and vice, purpose and chaos, and truth and untruth. We go by our guts as much—or maybe even more so—as we go by our brains, more often by feeling than by reasoning.
When I began to write all of the above, I decided to let it take me where it would. I had no plan to address the fuss over gender words, for example. But the nature of this little essay seems to make my point about understanding human nature. Like language, it is fluid. Sometimes reason is the guide and actually serves to establish the “laws” by which humans operate just as people like Kepler and Newton discovered the laws by which the Solar System operates. And sometimes emotions are the guide leading to unexpected results. We can profess to be more rational than emotional or more scientific than artistic, but to understand ourselves we need both “manners” of approach.
Yet, when I reread Hume’s work, I find his ending in favor of a purely rational approach. He wants, I believe, a discoverer of Laws, some Kepler or Newton. He writes, “If we take in our hand any volume; of divinity or school metaphysics, for instance; let us ask, Does it contain any abstract reasoning concerning quantity or number? No. Does it contain any experimental reasoning concerning matter of fact and existence? No. Commit it then to the flames: for it can contain nothing but sophistry and illusion.” Hume, it appears, would have us abandon any reasoning that is not backed up by experiment and close observation. He would prefer a statistical analysis of “mankind.”
Unfortunately, all experimental attempts to understand mankind run contrast to the “insights” of writers, painters, and poets. We could, for example, say that when the Germans bombed a Basque town that a specific number of people were casualties. We could count injuries of various types and number of people killed. Or, we could try to understand “mankind” in a painting, such as Picasso’s Guernica. The former “manner” relies on Hume’s “experimental reasoning” about a “matter of fact and existence.” The latter “manner” conveys the horror of the tragedy. Picasso’s manner of “understanding mankind” makes us “feel the difference between vice and virtue.”
Now, you’re thinking that I’ve just negated my argument about distraction, that I missed the point that the word mankind just doesn’t give a holistic picture because it excludes females. Yet, in the meaning of “humanity” it is encompassing and has been so since Biblical times. The new distractive way of seeing how something is worded that applies “social appropriateness” will probably enrich the language by adding terms since every human being will be able to choose a new pronoun, a new word, and a new syntax and grammar. That’s all right. As of this writing, the Oxford English Dictionary lists more than 170,000 words to which it adds more every edition. Some estimates suggest that English has, in fact, more than a million words though many in that count are alternate forms, gerunds, for example. The problem for any generation of speakers and writers will lie in how much time they spend in learning which terms are acceptable when their ultimate goal is to communicate effectively some understanding of human nature.
But I could be wrong. A living language changes, and with it or because of it, our understanding of human nature changes. Understanding our human nature has varied as much as psychoanalysis has varied from behavioral psychology and Platonism has varied from existentialism.
I’m going to ask you to recall Hume’s statement on being a philosopher, but still being a man. Caught up in the rules of appropriateness, we have accepted the jargon of the times. Hume writes, “Accurate and just reasoning is the only catholic remedy, fitted for all persons and all dispositions; and is alone able to subvert that abstruse philosophy and metaphysical jargon, which, being mixed up with popular superstition, renders it in a manner impenetrable to careless reasoners, and gives it the air of science and wisdom.” For those whose concern is word over thought, I will point out that catholic means “universal,” not “papist.” But my thinking that I have to point that out for the occasional reader emphasizes what I wrote about focusing on word over thought, on term over holistic meaning. Ironically, we live in the thick of a scientific, experimental era, but we have become “careless reasoners,” giving in our daily communication the mere “air of science and wisdom."
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