Is the instinct of self-preservation material?
Self-preservation is one of the most taken-for-granted and elemental truths about the human condition. Scratch that. All organic life seems to possess this instinct. A jellyfish stings so fish don’t eat it; a porcupine pricks, a harmless fly comes to resemble a stinging wasp, a hippopotamus bites, a plant’s leaves bend towards the sun. But perhaps possession is too crude a word to use, as possessions are acquired through labour, even if that labor is as minimal as picking up a quarter one finds on the ground. Energy is expended. The level of generality of the instinct of self-preservation is so vast and all-encompassing that it misses only the mineral and the elemental. It would in many ways be more accurate to say that the instinct of self-preservation possesses us. When someone runs at us with a knife, we manage to wrench the knife away and stab our attacker just as the wildebeest kicks the predatory lion off its body. Paradoxically, this most extreme assertion of subjectivity participates in the most global instinct in the living world.
From Descartes to Heidegger, subjectivity has occupied a central place in philosophy. It seems obvious that subjectivity must be among the logical predicates of self-preservation. The peculiarities of human consciousness have lent the question of subjectivity some weight. In his vivisections, Descartes tried to show that animals did not have a soul, the essential element of which is arguably Reason. It is possible, however, to demonstrate the use of rationality by animals. For example, when I was younger, I remember watching my cat make her way through the 2 feet of snow lying on the front lawn. She gingerly stepped in her own footprints. I thought to myself, to do that she must:
1. Be able to imagine a rudimentary alternative future, one that includes losing body temperature should she decide to make new tracks from increased body surface area contact with the snow.
2. Recognize that stepping in her own footprints will reduce the body surface area contact with the snow.
Given that a stable internal temperature is essential to the metabolic processes of mammals, it would be easy to chalk 1. up to the instinct of self-preservation. However, 2. Requires some level of complex information processing to make the appropriate decision to fulfill this instinct. It is far more deliberative than a wildebeest kicking off a lion.
But what is the nature of this instinct? How does it manifest itself in human society? What are its limits, its boundary cases? Does it pose a significant problem for materialist philosophy?
An instinct is an ambiguous concept. It is most often used to discuss the response of an organism to a situation in contradistinction to a response that uses reason. The human genome was completely mapped by April, 2003. Despite the heavy use of the concept of instinct in biology and psychology, the human genome project did not identify a gene that codes for this most pervasive of instincts. In biological discourse, the instinct of self-preservation in an individual is often metonymically linked to the survival of the species in the theoretical framework of evolution. For example, expectant mothers increase food intake during pregnancy both to keep herself alive and to ensure her genes are passed on successfully. Despite the materialist tendency of science (that consciousness can be reduced to a knowable articulation of the movement of compounds between cells in the brain), there is no material predicate of the concept of an instinct.
The feeling of fear is among strategies of self-preservation. A common fear, such as the fear of snakes, not only stems from a lack of knowledge about which snakes are venomous and thus pose a threat to our safety, but also perhaps from an archaic collective memory of millions of people dying from snakebite. Even for people who know plenty about snakes, a sudden strike by a completely harmless snake may make them recoil reflexively. This instinctive evasion can be overcome, but that it has to be overcome testifies to the long history of the danger of existence and the inheritance of reflexive self-preservation outside of the domain of reason. There was a story in the news last year about a man successfully fending off an attack by a mountain lion by shoving his fist down the big cat’s throat. This is a great example of reason operating counter-intuitively, and perhaps even counter-instinctively, but so quickly that it seems to be instinct or reflex. This story became news because of its strangeness – we tend to distinguish sharply between thinking processes we describe under the rubric of reason and those that produce automatic reactions. The relationship between reason and reflex is crucial to the antinomies and paradoxes of self-preservation. Surely there is overwhelming evidence supporting the existence of an instinct of self-preservation. A strict empiricist cannot be satisfied with the evidence, however.
All the evidence for such an instinct is indirect. It depends upon inference, deduction, and induction. For instance, when a man falls, he puts his hands out in front of him to break his fall. Let us examine this action in detail. The hands shoot out reflexively to prevent damage to more important parts of the body, such as the head, which houses the brain. Reason is the best tool humans have developed and honed to survive and thrive. However, we can ask, why the hands? Why hasn’t it been instinctive for us to flip around so we land on our rear ends? After all, didn’t cats evolve to land on their feet? The hands have also played a huge role in human evolution, with the opposable thumb enabling us to dextrously manipulate things and materials. Why would we develop an instinct that regularly endangers such a vital element in our successful evolution?
Of course, amputees have taught us that hands are not necessary. Not to detract from these individuals’ resilience or ingenuity, but this lesson has been learned largely because the human is a social creature, and social aid is one of the best resources for survival. Furthermore, does the fact that a man breaks his fall with his hands, or that many people break their falls with their hands over and over from the beginning of memory necessarily mean that those falling are trying the preserve themselves by so putting their hands out in front of them?
