On Friendship, Utilitarianism, Sexuality, and Evolution. (F.U.S.E.)

On Friendship, Utilitarianism, Sexuality, and Evolution. (F.U.S.E.)

 

In retrospect, I can find some argument in Evolutionary Biology for Michael’s assertion that any relationship between a man and a woman, at least outside of the immediate family, is sexually motivated at its radical core. This assertion usually clashes with my conscious ideals, but in the absence of any clear “evidence” from the Unconscious (chiefly because it IS Unconscious), I will entertain the evolutionary argument.

The argument is thus: You can study the behavior of apes and see some distinctly human-like behaviours. The adult males typically hunt together as a pack, and this would thus engender friendships amidst them. This makes sense because of the utilitarian advantage of forming such bonds. When the apes are not hunting, but they are out in the clearings, they have been known to play primitive “war games”. If we are to presume that our ancestors did something like this, we can guess that similar games were the origin of our modern games, sports, and even warfare.

Meanwhile, the adult women spent their days at home, caring for the young. They were of a markedly introverted nature, and this would explain the tendency for modern women (according to the theory) to tend more towards introversion, whereas men tend more towards extraversion. The relationship between Mother and Child thus developed, yet there is no reason to presume, by common sense, that anything like that would have been the relationship between Father and Child, because quite obviously at one point it was the Father’s biological duty (for the survival of the species) to tear the male child away from the comfort of home and to introduce him to the hardships of hunting. We do not know, to my knowledge, if the father had anything to do with his daughters.

So it would seem quite probable that friendship has traditionally existed as a utilitarian relationship between adult males, and we might presume based upon this that any relationship between an adult male and adult woman was sexual in nature. After all, what purpose would a Platonic relationship serve?

 

I have several problems with this:

1.       IT IGNORES THE SUBJECTIVE FACTOR. We know from our experience that there is something distinct about how we see ourselves when we describe ourselves as subjects as opposed to objects. When one writes a poem or even just a description of what a day in one’s life is like, it does seem to paint a picture of what it means to be human, yet this is quite distinct from the picture painted when one is asked to describe one’s own characteristics, such as one’s skin colour, one’s ethnic background, one’s social status, et cetera. This distinction Sartre pointed out when he spoke of “non-reflexive awareness”: The tendency to see things without making reference to one’s self in the process.
We do not know about the subjectivity of apes. We can only regard them as Objects, and in describing them, we may draw parallels to our own “objective” views of what it means to be human, but we totally efface the subjective factor.

2.       IT COMMITS THE PATHETIC FALLACY. When we presume the experience of apes to be in some sense either identical to ours or motivated by a common motive, we anthropomorphosise them. Because of the first point, there is no evidence that this is not a huge leap of faith.

3.       OUR ANCESTORS WERE NOT IDENTICAL TO PRESENT-DAY APES. In truth, I am not certain of this fact, yet it seems as if not more probable than the alternative. Were our ancestors apes in the modern sense, then why did these apes that we have available to study not evolve as well? One may presume that only certain apes broke off and developed into human beings, whereas the remaining apes remained unchanged throughout those thousands of years of human evolution. What right do we have to make this guess? Is it not totally improbable, given how much our species alone changed during this short time?

4.       EVOLUTION IS A THEORY. It may be, to my mind, the most coherent theory that we have yet. (I know little of Creationism, and usually my schooling and upbringing have dissuaded me from doing studies into Creationism; I simply don’t find immediate interest in studying the issue at present.) Yet there are no facts in Science, only theories, and these theories glaze over several problems which are only called into question in the other schools of thought, such as philosophy. It is time that we reconcile these schools of thought.

5.       IT NEGATES FREE WILL. Any statement of the “nature” of something has been regarded as silly by the existentialists when applied to a human being, because, according to one’s individual experience, one seems to have Free Will, which means that even if one has a set of predispositions, be they genetic or cultural (and the line betwixt these two influences is not clear as we might hope) one can always choose one’s behavior and therefore determine one’s Nature. Modern science seems to corroborate this.

6.       IT UNIVERSALISES INDIVIDUAL EXPERIENCE. Mike may very well have found, giving his memory a cursory glance, that most of his relationships with women were sexual in nature. Yet I can personally say that I have maintained very close friendships with girls who I was either not attracted to or, if ever I was attracted to them, eventually sexuality became an absurdly marginalized factor that never entered into our conversations again except in pure theory (such as the consideration of this very philosophical question).

Personally, I never tended to find the same enjoyment in conventional Games, Sports, and any semblance of Warfare as did most of the other boys on the playground; I preferred to write, draw, and invent games imaginatively. Does this mean that I am superior to those boys who, growing up, showed a marked close-mindedness and anti-intellectualism, except where they saw the advantage of studying someone else’s work in order to attain social status? Not necessarily. Yet it certainly always set me apart.

7.       FRIENDSHIP IS NOT UTILITARIAN. Here again I must appeal to the subjective factor. From my experience, the distinctly delightful thing about Friendship is that, while it may fulfill needs, a good friend will not keep track of such things. When I use the expression “friend”, I refer to a kind of unconditional love.

8.       ONE CAN IMAGINE OTHERWISE. So what if we can find no empirical evidence for early man having Platonic friendships with early women with whom he was not sleeping? One can barely find objective “evidence” for this in modern life, yet subjective accounts seem to suggest that it is possible and maybe even common. Simply because we cannot conceive of a Rational REASON for such a thing occurring in early, prehistoric society does not mean that it did not. The very fact that we can imagine it seems to suggest that, whatever the case may be, modern man is different because he or she can at least picture such a situation and desire it despite all Utilitarian pragmatism. The argument against this imaginative faculty (which seems to define, as far as I am aware, the Human Experience) serves only to underscore our Rationalist and Empiricist prejudices from the Nineteenth century, which only incidentally was Darwin’s time.   

9.       WE ARE NOT APES. We may have, theoretically, DESCENDED from Apes, but we are not apes. The modern adult male may very well be a home-maker, whereas the modern adult woman may be a businessperson, lawyer, or politician. It is not uncommon, and psychology seems to tell us that each of us has both feminine and masculine traits, whereas gender roles are conditioned. They may have been necessary at one point in history for survival. Yet we have come a long way; no other animal we can think of has produced civilization on such a large scale. Is it not possible that we evolved Free Will, or that if our ancestors had Free Will, they simply did not find it profitable to employ it yet, for survival depended so much on their being practical? This is not difficult to imagine when one examines the modern individual who stifles his or her creativity for practical purposes.

Joseph Campbell distinguishes the birth of the “Human Human” as the earliest instance wherein man appreciated Art. There was a stone found by archaeologists that had supposedly been hoarded by an early ancestor. The stone had no conceivable practical purpose (or if it did, the process of hoarding it did not). What set it apart was that it had a zigzag pattern running along it. Anthropologists have speculated that this was one of the earliest instances of an ape appreciating Beauty. Does this not suggest, therefore, that the essence of what it means to be Human is not only to be Free but to Use that freedom in service NOT of self-preservation but of something more vague and mysterious, be it aesthetic, idealistic, religious, mystical, or otherwise?

I am reminded of a quote from the film Waking Life: “The gap between a Nietzsche or a Plato and the average human is GREATER than the gap between a super-chimpanzee and the average human.”

One needs not any empirical evidence, so much as simple day-to-day experience, to corroborate this. I always seem to hope that it is not true, yet my experience definitely lends meaning to this statement. And Michael himself admitted that I might be an exception to his generalization.

 

Dm.A.A.