Humans are more than homo sapiens. In The Face of God, philosopher Roger Scruton deconstructs the essence of what it means to be human via a focus on the face. His arguments for the need of the face in modern society elucidate the ways by which humanity must regain its face. This brief essay will be a reaction primarily to his argument of the face as a heuristic for the rational human nature and how this rational nature provides meaning to the human life.

Firstly, a question to ponder: Is morality nothing more than a genetically beneficial construct? In The Origins of Virtue, Matt Ridley suggests that moral virtue is solely a biological adaptation. But can moral virtue truly boil down to nothing more than a Darwinian method of survival? Scruton takes great issue with this proposition and writes in The Face of God, “You can situate human beings entirely in the world of objects. In doing so you will in all probability reduce them to animals whose behavior is to be explained by some combination of evolutionary psychology and neuroscience. But then you will find yourself describing a world from which human action, intention, responsibility, freedom, and emotion have been wiped away: it will be a world without a face.” Morality as just a facet of evolution removes what we (as humans and not just as homo sapiens) understand as the human rational nature. This view that morality or rationality is a biological construct removes the humanity from the human. The argument is convenient in the way that it wields a certain explanatory comfort, but it is intuitively false. The soldier that dives on a grenade to protect his soldiers is not the same as the cricket that drowns itself to give birth in water. One was biologically programmed and made no choice; the other acted on a conscious decision. Once this is agreed upon, we can decide which was which, and this is intuitively obvious.

Scruton provides another excellent conception of this distinction between our biological being and our rational human essence via the Mona Lisa. The face of the Mona Lisa is not solely the blobs of paint that Da Vinci spread across the poplar panel. In a sense, these blobs of paint smeared on wood are all that the Mona Lisa is, but we intuitively know that there is something greater in front of us than just paint. There is an essence of the painting that supersedes its parts because of the nature of its creator that instilled this essence within it, so that the image could become more than solely paint and wood.

Roger Scruton titles this book The Face of God in part to show how the divine essence of God can be intuited in the world through the face of the earth in a metaphorical sense and the face of humans through a more literal sense: we see our love for one another, seeing through the face. When we remove the face of society and strip humanity down to a plastic human body model, we stare at a plastic homo sapien and not a human. We wipe away that which makes humanity more than just the metaphorical blobs of paint; we wipe away that which makes humanity great. We are more than solely biological beings; we have a face.

-Charlie, April 2024