Humanity as a Man-Made Phenomenon

James Paul Gee, What Is a Human?: Language, Mind, and Culture

Like “freedom” or “democracy,” most people think we have a working definition of “humanity” in our heads, and it works adequately most of the time. But this loosey-goosey approach to human essentialism has caused negative outcomes throughout history. War and slavery have let powerful people strip the social designations of humanity from strangers, while belief in human exceptionalism currently threatens humanity’s very existence through anthropogenic climate change.

In his youth, James Paul Gee initially trained for the priesthood, but after losing his faith, he earned a Ph.D. in linguistics. This duality probably influenced the interdisciplinary nature of his subsequent activities, such as the tacitly public nature of literacy, or the social interpretation of video games. This book, written as Gee retired from active academia shortly before the pandemic, is the culmination of his life’s work.

Gee identifies human nature through a balance of extremes. Each human is utterly unique, he writes, but unique human attributes manifest themselves mainly through social context. Therefore we are separate, circumscribed by the limits of our senses in the world, but we’re never truly separate, as we rely utterly on relationships with other humans and the natural world. We lack “free will,” a sludgy and imprecise term, but that lack doesn’t justify determinism.

Past attempts to define humanity have fallen down on the lack of nuance inherent in brevity. Recall Plato defining a human as a “featherless biped,” and Diogenes responding by brandishing a plucked chicken. Gee makes no such mistake here. His definition of humanity sprawls over 200 pages, sometimes narrowly focused on precise scientific outcomes, other times expanding to encompass philosophic maunderings and autobiographical anecdotes. Brevity isn’t Gee’s weakness.

Humans, to Gee, exist in community; he uses termite mounds as his metaphor (sometimes stretched to breaking). Obviously we rely upon others to divide labor, collaborate on labor, and amplify our thought processes. But we don’t just exist in community; we are ourselves communities, what Gee calls “transacting swarms,” made up of our microbiomes and our relationship with the earth. We live in termite mounds, and we are termite mounds.

James Paul Gee

But Gee distrusts the mechanistic materialism of Richard Dawkins and Daniel Dennett. Just as humans have organic biomes, we have “spiritomes,” the complex nest of spiritual realities in which humans dwell, individually and collectively. Though Gee, a lapsed Catholic, flinches from capital-T Truth claims, he believes human spiritual subjectivity is real enough to matter in making life-altering decisions. We all have relationships with evidently noncorporeal realities.

To this point, Gee’s thesis draws heavily on research from other thinkers academically grounded in the physical sciences. Not surprisingly, as a linguist, Gee’s anthropology becomes most dense and detailed when discussing how language shapes the human mental structure. Gee admits coming from a Chomskian generative linguistic background—fascinating but often abstruse. But exactly how his linguistic background shapes humans may surprise you.

Gee admits never reading poetry until after achieving his doctorate. How he studied linguistics without at least a historical survey of poetic metaphor eludes me, but whatever. Gee waxes rhapsodic about what a revelation it was discovering poetry in adulthood, unclouded by state-school “skillz drillz.” The unsullied joy he describes bespeaks a wonder that we who still read poetry often struggle to recapture. I’m downright jealous.

Despite his sometimes scientistic mindset, the humanities offer Gee’s greatest insight into the relationship between our outside, communal world, and the strictly internal neural landscape of senses and higher reasoning. We perceive the world according to our senses, and also according to our ability to describe it to others. His lavish fondness for poetry, especially Emily Dickinson, bespeaks a worldview in which subjectivity isn’t a weakness, but a defining trait.

To his credit, Gee doesn’t pretend his definition is more binding or global than it actually is. He acknowledges that any definition of humanity is provisional and circumscribed by the author’s background and prior knowledge. His language is colored by nuance and the frequent need to walk a tightrope between seemingly contradictory positions. He invites informed readers to challenge and refine his definition of humanity; he doesn’t just stand pat.

Now past seventy, Gee clearly writes with one eye angled toward how posterity will remember him. He clearly intends this volume as a capstone of his academic career. He finished writing in the months leading up to the pandemic, and one wonders how this book might’ve looked just six months later. Yet as a prolegomenon to future humanistic studies, Gee offers an exciting, readable, and purely joyful philosophic consideration.