Neo-Existentialism by Markus Gabriel

Author:Markus Gabriel
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: John Wiley & Sons, Inc.
Published: 2018-06-02T00:00:00+00:00

4

Human Life and its Concept

Andrea Kern

1

The concept of a human being, according to Gabriel, is not the concept of a natural kind. The reason for this, Gabriel thinks, is that “human beings essentially depend on their self-conceptions, for they act in light of who they take themselves to be” (p. 42). Nevertheless, Gabriel thinks, “humans are animals” (p. 19).

In what follows I will argue that Gabriel’s position has difficulty making sense of the latter thought. His account of the human does not allow him to make intelligible the thought, entertained by a human being, that a human being is an animal. However, if a human being cannot understand herself as an animal that possesses the very capacities in terms of which she is supposed to understand herself as, and hence be, a human being, then there is no such thing as a human being, on Gabriel’s account, and hence no such thing as the various phenomena subsumed under the term “Geist.”

I will suggest that there is a way to keep much of the spirit of Gabriel’s account of “Geist” without running into difficulties comprehending the thought that a human being is an animal. However, this requires that one does not think of a human being’s animality as a “condition” of “Geist.” Rather, the animality of human beings has to be conceived as a distinctive manifestation of “Geist,” or so I will argue.

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