I found a curious section, almost a side-note, in Rothbard’s The Ethics of Liberty today:
“And so man, not having innate, instinctive, automatically acquired knowledge of his proper ends, or of the means by which they can be achieved, must learn them, and to learn them he must exercise his powers of observation, abstraction, thought: in short, his reason. Reason is man’s instrument of knowledge and of his very survival; the use and of his mind, the acquisition of knowledge about what is best for him and how he can achieve it, is the uniquely human method of existence and of achievement. And this is uniquely man’s nature; man, as Aristotle pointed out, is the rational animal, or to be more precise, the rational being. Through his reason, the individual man observes both the facts and ways of the external world, and the facts of his own consciousness, including his emotions: in short, he employs both extraspection and introspection.”
I wonder what Rothbard is getting at when he says that “rational being” is a more precise way to encapsulate human nature than “rational animal.” Aristotle’s definition involves, as always, what he perceives to be the proper genus and species of the thing: Man is an animal with a rational soul. Inherent in this are all of the workings of the body and mind. Strip man of ‘animal’ and we lose eating and sleeping, sense perception, pooping, communication with others, and everything else that seems to (a) keep us alive, (b) allow us to perceive and utilize the world around us, and (c) provide the foundation for abstraction and reason.
If we allow Rothbard the qualifier and consider humans as rational beings — that is, rational being qua rational being — we lose the very foundation that Rothbard upholds in the beginning of the paragraph: “And so man, not having innate, instinctive, automatically acquired knowledge of his proper ends, or of the means by which they can be achieved, must learn them, and to learn them he must exercise his powers of observation, abstraction, thought: in short, his reason.”
Perhaps it is the case that a human functioning in a rational manner is “in short” utilizing reason, but even Rothbard would agree that you can’t get to reason, abstraction, thought, etc. without first acquiring raw sense data — without first observing things in some sense.
Perhaps Rothbard meant “the rational being” to be read as “the rational being,” or in other words, “the [only] rational being,” so as to distinguish us from all of the other animals, plants, etc. But this would work only insofar as there are no other beings that have, or could potentially have, reasoning faculties. (Christians, of course, will submit at least a few more candidates for us to consider as ‘rational beings’). Aristotle restricts humanity’s genus to animals — i.e. enlivened organic bodies — because it is metaphysically possible for non-animal entities to exist exercising reason, such as the late Socrates’ rational soul. (Aquinas takes this concept and runs with it).
Or perhaps Rothbard had none of this in mind, and I’m reading into it. Still, it piqued my interest, as any author can do simply by quoting Aristotle and following it with “or, to be more precise. . .” (Aquinas, who is receiving only parenthetical treatment in this post, effectively does this in his commentaries on Aristotle, but usually does so under the guise of ‘what the Philosopher is really saying here is. . .’ rather than ‘this is almost true, but better still is. . .’)
