“Man is the only animal that blushes…or needs to.” I’d like to tell you that I came across this Mark Twain quotation from reading him, but I actually got it from one of my favorite movies: Finding Forrester. This sentiment will help me establish some foundation to defend the argument from my previous post:
Premise 1: Everyone has an ultimate concern—an orienting center of value (that is, everyone is religious in some sense).
Premise 2: Every ultimate concern is expressed and sustained through a mythic framework—a creation myth and its ensuing mythos.
Therefore: Everyone lives by a creation myth and its accompanying mythos, whether acknowledged or not.
Today I will focus on Premise 1, which can be broken down a bit further:
Premise 1a: Everyone has an ultimate concern—an orienting center of value that orders their judgments, sacrifices, and hopes.
Premise 1b: Such an ultimate concern is properly described as religious in nature.
Premise 1a is much easier to defend than 1b. And while most of the connection will arise with Premise 1b, I still need to establish Premise 1a. I will begin by arguing for Premise 1a through establishing that humans are set apart from animals.
When I refer to man as animal, I am in no way detracting from the truth that he is made in the image of God, or that he is set apart from the animal kingdom. All men are animals, but all animals are not men. The same works with the Hebrew word Elohim, which is the generic term for an immaterial creature. Angels are elohim and God is Elohim, so God is (an) Elohim—but no other elohim is God. God is of a similar nature as the other elohim but is set apart in terms of moral goodness, reason, and ability. The same is true for humans when compared to other animals.
Humans are animals in the sense that nearly everything that can be applied to animals can be applied to humans: we live according to our physical nature and therefore we respond similarly to external stimuli with corresponding internal brain states. While the physical nature is similar, there is another aspect that differs: a normative or teleological nature. By that I mean this: humans don’t merely act; we can be judged in relation to what we are meant to be. Humans have an “ought” stitched into their experience. This is where the Twain line bites. Blushing isn’t merely a biological reaction; it is a moral signal. It is the body testifying that something has gone wrong—not merely socially awkward, but wrong.
What is the good? This is also called “Aristotelian goodness.” Philosophers often talk about this, and goodness is one of those words that we use constantly but still have difficulty defining. The most irreducible and proper definition is: the proper use of intended function—or, more plainly, performing the task for which a thing is designed.
What is the good of a chair? It holds the weight of people, it is stable, and it is comfortable. What is the good of a broom? It sweeps the floor well. What is the good of a beaver? It “beaves”—that is, it lives according to its kind: it creates dens from trees it fells, creates dams, and procreates. In this sense, animals often “excel” at their goodness: they tend to live according to what they are. They do not morally rebel against their nature. They simply enact it.
So what is the good of humans? That is: what is the unique function of humans? What do humans do uniquely well? Or rather, in the case of humans, what are they meant to do uniquely well?
Let us consider a couple of key concepts. First, I wish to differentiate between human attributes and human attributions (to animals). Human attributes are components that are unique to humans, while human attributions are anthropomorphic projections of uniquely human attributes onto animals.
Let us consider shame again. For the most part, shame is unique to humans. However, my dog Vash has a tendency to chew up things she is not meant to chew. She does this when she feels like she’s not getting enough attention. When she is confronted with evidence of her wrong-doing, she puts her tail between her legs, puts her ears down, and makes a sad face. She seems to display things like regret and shame.
The only reason I am able to give those attributions is because they are part of my attributes—or, in the language I’ve been using, part of my normative nature—and therefore they give clues to my (and all humans’) Aristotelian goodness. I can delineate things like shame, wrong-doing, and regret because those things are uniquely human. Of course, I am not maintaining that these components are entirely absent from the animal kingdom, only that only someone human could make the observation, “Look at that dog displaying shame.” It would seem unlikely if a dog thinks, “Wow, Vash is really displaying human levels of shame.” A human can make this observation, but only because humans uniquely understand shame.
And here is the key: we do not merely feel shame; we treat shame as something that can be right or wrong. We argue about warranted shame versus toxic shame. We say, “You shouldn’t feel guilty about that,” and we also say, “You ought to feel guilty for that.” We don’t merely experience moral emotions—we evaluate moral emotions. That already places us in a different category than mere stimulus-response creatures. It implies an inner court, an implicit standard, a sense of measure.
It seems that what sets humans apart from the animal kingdom is not merely intelligence, but a desire (and obligation) for some degree of moral goodness. Shame, regret, and wrong-doing are moral language. Humans act on moral awareness and live as if they can discern some type of universal moral law, which is often referred to as natural law. Therein presents another unique human feature: a unique type of reasoning that allows for universality—second-order mental states, or the ability to have thoughts about thoughts.
One can point to animals that display behaviors we might call “proto-moral” or “proto-rational.” Even if bonobos show social restraint and corvids show astonishing problem-solving, neither is defined by moral accountability the way humans are. They may show attributions, but they do not bear the full weight of attributes. No one would compel the beast, “you ought not to kill competing males.” It is understood the bonobo cannot—and should not—be held to the same standards as humans.
This is where the difference between even the most moral animal and the least moral human begins to separate: expectation. What is interesting about human nature is that humans are uniquely moral, but unlike any other animal in the animal kingdom, it is not surprising when humans fail to meet their unique function, normative nature, or Aristotelian goodness.
It would be anomalous if the beaver did anything but “beave”—that is, to live outside of its nature: to walk to a sand dune and eat sand. If someone saw a beaver acting that way, one would think, “That is bizarre behavior.” Whereas the opposite seems to be true when it comes to humans. Humans are expected to act according to some moral natural law, but it is considered anomalous when it is actually achieved. That is: human goodness has something to do with intellect and moral goodness, but it is not surprising when that intellect and moral awareness are used for vice rather than virtue.
The animal kingdom is brutal; it is cold and ultimately compassionless, but it is not randomly cruel. Again, one may argue that a lion entering a new pride and slaughtering all competing males is brutal and cruel. One might argue that male sharks having claspers that allow for a type of forced mating is a form of cruelty. But those same people would further condemn a man to a greater degree for doing the same things to humans. There is an expectation of moral goodness for humans to act according to moral goodness, but there is no surprise when this moral goodness is not achieved.
At this point, a skeptic might say: “But maybe this moral awareness is just social conditioning or evolutionary advantage.” And of course there is a social component to conscience. But that explanation does not remove the normative pressure; it merely describes how the pressure might be formed. Because even when we appeal to “society,” we don’t merely mean “what is common.” We mean “what is justified.” We don’t only fear consequences; we argue about whether the blame is deserved. We don’t merely say, “My tribe dislikes this.” We say, “That is wrong,” even when our tribe approves of it. Humans do not only report values—we contest them. That’s not just sociology; that’s normativity.
This is also where “function” language matters. I am not trying to make a cheap argument from biology: “humans are built this way, therefore you ought.” Rather, the point is that humans are the kind of creature who can be answerable to reasons. We are not merely pushed around by impulses. We deliberate, we justify, we repent, we excuse, we condemn, we praise. A being who can ask, “What should I do?” is already living in a world of standards, whether he admits it or not.
I want to conclude this post by parsing out some C. S. Lewis and how he explains this unique notion of humanity and begin with a quotation from The Four Loves:
When we blame a man for being ‘a mere animal’, we mean not that he displays
animal characteristics (we all do) but that he displays these, and only these, on occasions where the specifically human was demanded. (When we call him ‘brutal’ we usually mean that he commits cruelties impossible to most real brutes; they’re not clever enough).
He further explains this in The Abolition of Man: “Without the aid of trained emotions the intellect is powerless against the animal organism.” That is, even those who acknowledge human intellect still recognize that intellect alone does not reliably govern the animal impulses beneath it.
When I wrote earlier that humans have a normative or teleological nature, I meant that in a figurative, teleological sense: humans have a unique function, and can be judged in relation to it. But humans also have a literal spiritual nature as well—and it is the existence of this spiritual nature that sets humans apart. C. S. Lewis, through the medium of his fictional work The Screwtape Letters, explains the unique nature of humans:
Humans are amphibians...half spirit and half animal...as spirits they belong to the eternal world, but as animals they inhabit time. This means that while their spirit can be directed to an eternal object, their bodies, passions, and imaginations are in continual change, for to be in time, means to change. Their nearest approach to constancy, therefore, is undulation--the repeated return to a level from which they repeatedly fall back, a series of troughs and peaks.
What all of this establishes is not yet a full theology of religion, but a foundation for it. Humans are not merely animals that react; we are animals that evaluate. We do not merely desire; we judge our desires. We do not merely act; we blame ourselves for acting. Twain’s line about blushing lands so hard because blushing reveals an inescapable moral awareness—an inner court, a sense that we have failed to be what we ought to be.
And this is precisely why Premise 1a is difficult to avoid. A beaver does not oscillate between virtue and vice; it simply beaves. But man undulates. Lewis’s description of peaks and troughs is not the absence of a standard, but repeated falling away from one. You cannot fall short of a good that does not exist. So if humans can experience shame, regret, and moral expectation, then humans must be the kind of creature for whom there is such a thing as proper function—a human good against which we can be measured.
Once that is granted, ultimate concern follows almost automatically. A creature who can discern the good and fall short of it must orient life around some highest good—some governing value that orders judgments, sacrifices, and hopes. Even when someone insists they have no “highest good,” they still arrange life around something functionally ultimate—comfort, autonomy, justice, nation, success, pleasure, authenticity, survival, or even nihilism-as-defiance. The structure remains: a top value that authorizes lower values, a center that orders the orbit.
In the next post, I want to make that connection explicit: to marry the unique function of humans—our Aristotelian goodness—with the inevitability of ultimate concern, and then to show why this concern does not remain a private preference but takes on the weight and authority we typically reserve for religion.