READ THE TREATISE BELOW AND DO THE FOLLOWING:
1. Write a 2-page summary of the treatise.
2. Write a 2- to 3-page reaction paper on the said treatise.
3. Submit on or before 9 October 2008.
[Specifications: a) Type on regular bond paper; b) Use Times New Roman font # 12; c) Single spaced]
Monday, September 29, 2008
Monday, September 22, 2008
THE EARTH IS ALIVE
RUEL F. PEPA
[An Excursus to "Gaia Hypothesis" and "Theagenesis"]
1.0 The Earth is alive . . . yet.
1.1 The Earth is alive and yet she is in a very serious condition.
1.2 The Earth is alive, yet she is likewise dying.
1.3 The Earth is dying and unless we do something imminent at this point in time, we shall surely perish with her.
2.0 This is the most pressing and present reality we face in the 21st century. Unless we reverse this tragic flow of events, we are heading toward disaster.
2.1 A foreboding atmosphere of impending devastation dominates the landscape for we have gradually systematically poisoned the Earth: prevalent pollutions of the air and waters; holes in the ozone layer; massive destruction of the flora and fauna. We—Earth and humans—are in the worst of times.
2.2 Through generations, we have failed to acknowledge the fact that the Earth is a living Super-Organism—a macro-mirror of our own delicate humanity that should have been taken extra care of with the best of our tenderness and protected with the resoluteness of a kindred spirit always ready to defend one of its flesh and blood.
2.3 The Earth has always faithfully sustained the most basic of our needs, wishes and desires. The Earth has constantly been a trustworthy patron of our sacred humanity making her the source of that very sacredness.
3.0 Yet, we have not positively responded to her loving kindness with sincere gratitude. Instead, we have become purveyors of abuses and exploitative acts. In the modern era, humanity has declared war against nature.
3.1 In the process, modern technology has been harnessed for exploitative purposes leading to heavy environmental devastations and ecological imbalance to the detriment of the human species.
3.2 In the final analysis, we humans are at the losing end.
4.0 Now is the most fitting moment to reconcile with nature.
4.1 Now is the most proper chance for us to bow down in humility and accept the magnitude of our misdoings with repentant hearts and total mindfulness of a new worldview that will at last redeem us from the mire of an impending destruction.
4.2 Now is the era of a new world order pushed and carried by a responsible humanity with all the willingness to renew what is yet renewable on Earth.
5.0 The challenge before us therefore is to work together and let a new Earth—now an eco-system where humanity becomes a part of nature—evolve and metamorphose to create a new humanity that does not only appreciate the spiritual but also the natural for they are not two but a unity.
Tuesday, September 16, 2008
MIDTERM (Part 2) FOR PHILOSOPHY 102 STUDENTS OF MR. PEPA
A. Do a comprehensive discussion of the following:
1. Peter Senge's LEARNING ORGANIZATION
2. Amitai Etzioni's COMMUNITARIANISM
B. Do an appreciative comparison between a communitarian society and the polis of ancient Greece.
C. Distinguish between liberal rationalism and communitarianism.
D. In what significant ways could certain communitarian principles enhance the operationalization of the disciplines of a learning organization? In a similar vein, how would the said disciplines enhance actual efforts to realize the principles of communitarianism?
[Submission date: On or before 22 September 2008.]
rfp/tua/cas/dphl/17-09-08
1. Peter Senge's LEARNING ORGANIZATION
2. Amitai Etzioni's COMMUNITARIANISM
B. Do an appreciative comparison between a communitarian society and the polis of ancient Greece.
C. Distinguish between liberal rationalism and communitarianism.
D. In what significant ways could certain communitarian principles enhance the operationalization of the disciplines of a learning organization? In a similar vein, how would the said disciplines enhance actual efforts to realize the principles of communitarianism?
[Submission date: On or before 22 September 2008.]
rfp/tua/cas/dphl/17-09-08
Tuesday, September 9, 2008
Group Discussion Assignment for Philo 102 Sections Under Mr Pepa to be accomplished on 11 and 12 September 2008
In communitarianism, we find a balance between the significance of the individual’s responsibility to society and the significance of society’s responsibility to the individual. Is there a glimmer of communitarianism manifest in the Philippine social life? If you think there is, give a concrete example or two. If you think there is none, what could be some of the probable instances that hinder its realization? Are you hopeful that, given the proper conditions, communitarianism could be tenable in the Philippine social context? Explain your answer.
Monday, September 8, 2008
A SUPPLEMENTARY READING TO PETER SENGE'S THEORY OF LEARNING ORGANIZATION
Karl Albrecht: Organisational Intelligence
Internationally recognised speaker, author and futurist, Dr Karl Albrecht was a guest of the Institute in June 2003 when he travelled from the US to speak on his theory of Organisational Intelligence.
AIM: You mention that, "Intelligent people, when assembled into an organisation, will tend towards collective stupidity". What do you mean by this?
Karl Albrecht: In over 25 years of experience as a management consultant, I've seen many more organisations defeat themselves than get beaten fair and square by worthy competitors. Executive incompetence, palace wars, political battles at all levels, lack of direction, malorganisation, nonsensical rules and procedures - all conspire to prevent a business from deploying all of the brainpower it's paying for. I call that collective stupidity - the people may be very intelligent, and highly capable of doing great things, but their collective brainpower gets squandered.
Think of it this way: when the employees arrive for work every morning, they bring with them a certain total number of IQ points - their practical intelligence and learned mental capacity. When we pay them, we're buying an option on those IQ points. At the end of each day, we've either exercised that option or we've let it expire. How many executives can say they're actually getting all the IQ points they're paying for?
If we borrow an idea from the physicists, we can talk about this lost or squandered brainpower as causing an increase in entropy. In thermodynamics, entropy is a measure of disorder in a system - the amount of energy which is unavailable for productive output. In contrast, we can talk about syntropy, which is the gain in available energy - or brainpower, in this case - due to operating more intelligently in many ways.
If you like math, the basic equation of OI is "net intelligence equals available brainpower, minus entropy, plus syntropy." Net intelligence is what we have left when entropy takes its toll and after we do various clever things to make good use of the brainpower we've hired.
AIM: What is Organisational Intelligence and what role can it play in today's busy workplace?
Karl Albrecht: My definition of OI is "the capacity of an enterprise to mobilise all of its brainpower, and to focus that brainpower on accomplishing its mission." By that definition, the role of OI is simple: to make the enterprise more successful in its environment.
My model of OI has seven key dimensions: Strategic Vision, Shared Fate, Appetite for Change, Heart (or spirit), Alignment & Congruence (the structure, systems, and rules), Knowledge Deployment, and Performance Pressure. The organisation that is moving in the direction of its highest potential must be continuously advancing in all seven of these key dimensions.
We don't really know the upper limit of any organisation's real capacity for intelligence, but there is little doubt that most organisations could improve substantially.
AIM: If an organisation could do just three things to channel individual and team potential into organisational intelligence what would you recommend?
Karl Albrecht: The best way is for the senior leaders of the organisation to start thinking and talking about their enterprise as a potentially intelligent operation, and to undertake a never-ending assessment of its possibilities for advancement. There should be an ongoing conversation around the simple question: "How can we operate more intelligently?"
The second step is to start giving people the authority to think. When even the lowliest worker believes that his or her ideas, experiences, insights, and suggestions will be listened to and appreciated, we begin to liberate more of the tremendous brainpower that we've already hired - and that we're already paying for every payday.
The third step is a systematic, relentless, and never-ending attack on the causes of collective stupidity: organizational structures that don't make sense; "silos" that have grown up between departments or factions; policies, rules, and procedures that thwart the value-creation process; incompetent, ineffective, or failing managers; turf wars between managers and departments; union-management conflict; caste systems that have grown up in the organisation; top-management behaviours that confuse, divide, or demotivate people; unfair or unjust treatment of employees that destroys morale and the sense of shared fate; and, sometimes, even the lack of a clearly defined vision and mission.
The most intelligent organisations operate on the principle that "good is never good enough."
AIM: What importance does human imagination play in the overall success of an organisation?
Karl Albrecht: In all of the developed economies, organisations are shifting from "thing-work" to "think-work." This applies to government and the non-profit sector as well as the corporate sector. In the knowledge economy, fewer and fewer people make their living by making things, and more of them make their living by working with data, information, and knowledge. This means that practical thinking skills - including imagination, but certainly not limited to that - will be ever more in demand.
HR experts predict an increasingly severe "smart gap," meaning that we'll have a tougher time finding employees who can think beyond their noses. Inasmuch as the public education systems are failing miserably to provide us with the smart people we need, we will find it necessary to grow our own smart people. I believe more and more organisations will take up the role of educator of last resort, and invest more heavily in the mental competence of their workers.
At a time when companies are spending tens of millions of dollars on information technology - the machine software - they've so far not seen fit to spend a few tens of thousands of dollars on improving the mental skills of their employees - the human software. As we begin to realize how much of the IT investment is being wasted or misdirected, I believe we'll be spending less on the machine software and more on the human software.
AIM: Can you supply an example of an organisation that successfully utilised OI and one that suffered from 'collective stupidity'?
Karl Albrecht: One of the most legendary episodes of collective stupidity was with Ford Motor Company in Detroit. In the early 1980s, they launched a new advertising program with the slogan "No unhappy owners." The TV ads promised that every Ford owner would have a car he or she was happy with, and if there was anything wrong, the company would make it right. The only problem was that they neglected to tell several thousand dealers about the ads. The dealers were swamped with unhappy owners, who became more unhappy when the dealers couldn't handle the volume of traffic.
This is the quintessential case of what I call "ballistic podiatry," otherwise known as shooting one's self in the foot.
On the opposite side, one of the legendary examples of collective intelligence, which has been going on for many years, is the remarkable orchestration of the daily experience of magic in the Disney theme parks. From the recruitment, indoctrination, training, placement, and supervision of the employees, all the way to the design and maintenance of the facilities, the delivery of customer value expresses the Disney business model, which is "fun and fantasy in a theatrical setting." Disney designers and managers are some of the world's best experts at eliminating the contradictions to the core proposition of value.
AIM: How do you think the OI of Australian companies compares to those in the United States?
Karl Albrecht: I don't have enough data to even speculate on this, although I have some unverified impressions. Not to seem unkind, but it does seem to me that Australian managers - and possibly executives - tend to have somewhat less formal education than their American counterparts, and are somewhat less likely to read up on and follow the development of the latest management ideas. This could indicate a somewhat more traditional, "safe-zone" style of leadership, although - again - this is mostly conjecture on my part.
Also, Australian industry has historically had considerably more labour strife than the Americans have, and this can contribute to a loss of a sense of shared fate and esprit de corps, although this condition seems to have diminished considerably in recent years.
We've recently collected several hundred samples of opinions of Australian managers about the OI status of their organisations, and we'll be compiling a summary of those findings. As we develop a larger data base for the survey, we'll be able to make some useful comparisons of their perceptions.
Sunday, August 3, 2008
MIDTERM EXAMINATION IN PHILOSOPHY 102 FOR SOPHIA MEMBERS
BASIS OF THE EXAMINATION:
Human Dignity and Political Entitlements (Nussbaum)
SPECIFICATIONS:
1. To be submitted on or before 15 August 2008.
2. Typewritten: a) Regular bond paper b) Times New Roman font #12.
EXAMINATION ITEMS:
1. What are the positive and negative aspects of the Stoic conception of human dignity? What is your own understanding of the concept?
2. Express fully in your own words the meaning of and the meaningfulness/significance to human flourishing of genuine respect for human dignity in the Aristotelian sense.
3. Make a thorough assessment of how the present Philippine government respects--or disrespects-- human dignity by way of putting in place "the necessary conditions for a minimally decent human life of the Filipino."
4. Personally evaluate Nussbaum's Ten (10) Central Human Capabilities in general terms (i.e., not individually). Classify them under certain categories that you may think of and relate them to how practicable/implementable they are in the context of contemporary Philippine social, economic, and political realities.
Human Dignity and Political Entitlements (Nussbaum)
SPECIFICATIONS:
1. To be submitted on or before 15 August 2008.
2. Typewritten: a) Regular bond paper b) Times New Roman font #12.
EXAMINATION ITEMS:
1. What are the positive and negative aspects of the Stoic conception of human dignity? What is your own understanding of the concept?
2. Express fully in your own words the meaning of and the meaningfulness/significance to human flourishing of genuine respect for human dignity in the Aristotelian sense.
3. Make a thorough assessment of how the present Philippine government respects--or disrespects-- human dignity by way of putting in place "the necessary conditions for a minimally decent human life of the Filipino."
4. Personally evaluate Nussbaum's Ten (10) Central Human Capabilities in general terms (i.e., not individually). Classify them under certain categories that you may think of and relate them to how practicable/implementable they are in the context of contemporary Philippine social, economic, and political realities.
Monday, July 28, 2008
AN INTRODUCTION TO EMMANUEL LEVINAS
Emmanuel Levinas (1906-1995)
"My effort consists in showing that knowledge is in reality an immanence, and that there is no rupture of the isolation of being in knowledge; and on the other hand, that in communication of knowledge one is found beside the Other, not confronted with him, not in the rectitude of the in-front-of-him. But being in direct relation with the Other is not to thematize the Other and consider him in the same manner as one considers a known object, nor to communicate a knowledge to him. In reality, the fact of being is what is most private; existence is the sole thing I cannot communicate; I can tell about it, but I cannot share my existence. Solitude thus appears as the isolation which marks the very event of being. The social is beyond ontology." "...I am responsible for the Other without waiting for reciprocity, were I to die for it. Reciprocity is his affair. It is precisely insofar as the relation between the Other and me is not reciporcal that I am subjection to the Other; and I am "subject" essentially in this sense. It is I who support all...The I always has one responsibility more than all the others."
Levinas, the French philosopher, was born in Kaunas, Lithuania to Jewish parents. He moved to France in 1923, and, between the years of 1928 and 1929, resided in Germany where he studied under Husserl and Heidegger. Levinas published his first book, Theorie de l'intuition dans la phenomenologie de Husserl, in 1930, and became influential in France for his translations of Husserl and Heidegger into French. In the late 1950's and early 1960's, Levinas began to formulate his own philosophy which became increasingly critical of Heidegger's philosophy, and, with his critique of prior phenomenological thinkers and Western philosophy in general, Levinas began to assert the primacy of the ethical relationship with the Other.
Levinas' scholarship directly influenced the movement of existential-phenomenology in France. His translations and secondary texts influenced thinkers such as Sartre and Merleau-Ponty. In the last several decades, Levinas has become increasingly influential in continental philosophy, and his influence is evident in Jacques Derrida's more recent writings, where he has increasingly emphasized a Levinasian ethics as being at the heart of deconstruction. Derrida, a close colleague of Levinas, influenced Levinas' attempt in his book, Otherwise than Being (1998), to go beyond the still too ontological language of his Totality and Infinity (1969).
Levinas' philosophy is directly related to his experiences during World War II. His family died in the Holocaust, and, as a French citizen and soldier, Levinas himself became a prisoner of war in Germany. While Levinas was forced to perform labor as a prisoner of war, his wife and daughter were kept hidden in a French monastary until his return. This experience, coupled with Heidegger's affiliation to National Socialism during the war, clearly and understandably led to a profound crisis in Levinas' enthusiasm for Heidegger. "One can forgive many Germans," Levinas once wrote, "but there are some Germans it is difficult to forgive. It is difficult to forgive Heidegger." At the same time, Levinas felt that Heidegger could not simply be forgotten, but most be gotten beyond. If Heidegger is concerned with Being, Levinas is concerned with ethics, and ethics, for Levinas, is beyond being--Otherwise than Being.
Levinas' work, particularly beginning with his Totality and Infinity (1969), is a critique of Heidegger and Husserl, not to mention all of Western philsophy, in the service of ethics. Levinas is concerned that Western philosophy has been preoccupied with Being, the totality, at the expense of what is otherwise than Being, what lies outside the totality of Being as transcendent, exterior, infinite, alterior, the Other. Levinas wants to distinguish ethics from ontology. Levinas' ethics is situated in an "encounter" with the Other which cannot be reduced to a symmetrical "relationship." That is, it cannot be localized historically or temporally. "Ethics," in Levinas' sense, does not mean what is typically referred to as "morality," or a code of conduct about how one should act. For Levinas (1969), "ethics" is a calling into question of the "Same":
"A calling into question of the Same--which cannot occur within the egoistic spontaneity of the Same--is brought about by the Other. We name this calling into question of my spontaneity by the presence of the Other ethics. The strangeness of the Other, his irreducibility to the I, to my thoughts and my possessions, is precisely accomplishmed as a calling into question of my spontaneity as ethics. Metaphysics, transcendence, the welcoming of the Other by the Same, of the Other by Me, is concretely produced as the calling into question of the Same by the Other, that is, as the ethics that accomplishes the critical essence of knowledge." (Totality and Infinity, p. 33)
Levinas adopts a style of writing that is fluid and includes self-effacing double-movements. Ethics cannot be reduced to a set of propositions--cannot be reduced to the Same (or, thinking in terms of Lacan, to the One of the Symbolic)--and so Levinas must repeatedly unfold and then withdraw his propositions. Even as he uses the language of ontology, his style of writing endeavor's to resist ontology's totalizing grasp. "Western philosophy," writes Levinas (1969), "has most often been an ontology: a reduction of the Other to the Same by interposition of a middle and neutral terms that ensures the comprehension of being" (pp. 33-34). As ontology, philosophy is narcissistic, seeking pleasure by incorporating the other into the Same. Philosophy, in this sense, is an "egology" whenever it asserts the primacy of the self, the Same, the subject or Being. Ontology as totality admits to no outside. Thus, if Levinas is to preserve the Other, the Other cannot become an object of knowledge or experience within the totality of an egology. In the enjoyment (jouissance) of egology, the I is the "living from" which uses up the other in order to fulfill its own needs and desires. The "transmutation of the other into the same," writes Levinas (1969), is "the essence of enjoyment" (p. 113). The other, in this sense, however, is not the Other. Only the other, not the Other, can become a source of enjoyment. The transcendence of the other is not a threat to the self, but rather a source of satisfaction and happiness:
"The I is, to be sure, happiness, presence at home with itself. But, as sufficiency in its non-sufficiency, it remains in the non-I; it is enjoyment of ‘something else,' never of itself. Autochthonous, that is, rooted in what it is not, it is nevertheless, wtihin this enrootedness independent and separated." (Levinas, Totality and Infinity, 1969, p. 152)
The relation with the Other, however, is a "relation without relation" (p. 79). The Other is never reduced to the Same, thus remaining unknowable, outside of the totality of the Same. The encounter with the Other calls egology into question. The "I" can no longer live in the fantasy of a unique possession of the world. The power and freedom of the Same are called into question. The Other cannot be possessed, resists enjoyment, and, as the I encounters this Otherr, it is called back to the meaning of its freedom--a freedom which is founded by the Other and which, in this encounter, is called to responsibility and obligation towards the Other as genuine freedom.
As responsible for the infinite Other, I am called to guard her against the systematic determination of any moral law. "For Levinas, the God that provides sanctity for the Other can never be reduced to a set of commandments because the Other calls me only as herself" (Cornell, 1998, p. 140). To reduce the Other who calls me as a unique self in the face-to-face to a set of a priori moral principles is a violence to her alterity. And since my responsibility to the Other is to the Other in her uniqueness and alterity, my responsibility is infinite. "It is precisely because the Good is the good of the Other that it cannot be fully actualized" (Cornell, 1998, p. 141).
The French-Jewish philosopher Emmanuel Levinas (1906-1995) made ethics the central point of his philosophical inquiries. He considered ethics to be the prima philosophia, the first and foremost central issue of all philosophical investigation, in spite of the Greek tradition that from the time of Aristotle onwards had always allotted this first place to metaphysics. Levinas believed that metaphysics and ethics were in fact one and the same. In this equation of metaphysics and ethics he wanted to underscore the Hebraic element in Western thought, though he knew well that the Greek Socrates also had made endeavors to show the metaphysics of ethics. But the difference with Socrates is the fact that Levinian ethics are more rooted in a religious view on life, while Socrates wanted to show the rationality of right ethical conduct.
Criticism
"My effort consists in showing that knowledge is in reality an immanence, and that there is no rupture of the isolation of being in knowledge; and on the other hand, that in communication of knowledge one is found beside the Other, not confronted with him, not in the rectitude of the in-front-of-him. But being in direct relation with the Other is not to thematize the Other and consider him in the same manner as one considers a known object, nor to communicate a knowledge to him. In reality, the fact of being is what is most private; existence is the sole thing I cannot communicate; I can tell about it, but I cannot share my existence. Solitude thus appears as the isolation which marks the very event of being. The social is beyond ontology." "...I am responsible for the Other without waiting for reciprocity, were I to die for it. Reciprocity is his affair. It is precisely insofar as the relation between the Other and me is not reciporcal that I am subjection to the Other; and I am "subject" essentially in this sense. It is I who support all...The I always has one responsibility more than all the others."
Levinas, the French philosopher, was born in Kaunas, Lithuania to Jewish parents. He moved to France in 1923, and, between the years of 1928 and 1929, resided in Germany where he studied under Husserl and Heidegger. Levinas published his first book, Theorie de l'intuition dans la phenomenologie de Husserl, in 1930, and became influential in France for his translations of Husserl and Heidegger into French. In the late 1950's and early 1960's, Levinas began to formulate his own philosophy which became increasingly critical of Heidegger's philosophy, and, with his critique of prior phenomenological thinkers and Western philosophy in general, Levinas began to assert the primacy of the ethical relationship with the Other.
Levinas' scholarship directly influenced the movement of existential-phenomenology in France. His translations and secondary texts influenced thinkers such as Sartre and Merleau-Ponty. In the last several decades, Levinas has become increasingly influential in continental philosophy, and his influence is evident in Jacques Derrida's more recent writings, where he has increasingly emphasized a Levinasian ethics as being at the heart of deconstruction. Derrida, a close colleague of Levinas, influenced Levinas' attempt in his book, Otherwise than Being (1998), to go beyond the still too ontological language of his Totality and Infinity (1969).
Levinas' philosophy is directly related to his experiences during World War II. His family died in the Holocaust, and, as a French citizen and soldier, Levinas himself became a prisoner of war in Germany. While Levinas was forced to perform labor as a prisoner of war, his wife and daughter were kept hidden in a French monastary until his return. This experience, coupled with Heidegger's affiliation to National Socialism during the war, clearly and understandably led to a profound crisis in Levinas' enthusiasm for Heidegger. "One can forgive many Germans," Levinas once wrote, "but there are some Germans it is difficult to forgive. It is difficult to forgive Heidegger." At the same time, Levinas felt that Heidegger could not simply be forgotten, but most be gotten beyond. If Heidegger is concerned with Being, Levinas is concerned with ethics, and ethics, for Levinas, is beyond being--Otherwise than Being.
Levinas' work, particularly beginning with his Totality and Infinity (1969), is a critique of Heidegger and Husserl, not to mention all of Western philsophy, in the service of ethics. Levinas is concerned that Western philosophy has been preoccupied with Being, the totality, at the expense of what is otherwise than Being, what lies outside the totality of Being as transcendent, exterior, infinite, alterior, the Other. Levinas wants to distinguish ethics from ontology. Levinas' ethics is situated in an "encounter" with the Other which cannot be reduced to a symmetrical "relationship." That is, it cannot be localized historically or temporally. "Ethics," in Levinas' sense, does not mean what is typically referred to as "morality," or a code of conduct about how one should act. For Levinas (1969), "ethics" is a calling into question of the "Same":
"A calling into question of the Same--which cannot occur within the egoistic spontaneity of the Same--is brought about by the Other. We name this calling into question of my spontaneity by the presence of the Other ethics. The strangeness of the Other, his irreducibility to the I, to my thoughts and my possessions, is precisely accomplishmed as a calling into question of my spontaneity as ethics. Metaphysics, transcendence, the welcoming of the Other by the Same, of the Other by Me, is concretely produced as the calling into question of the Same by the Other, that is, as the ethics that accomplishes the critical essence of knowledge." (Totality and Infinity, p. 33)
Levinas adopts a style of writing that is fluid and includes self-effacing double-movements. Ethics cannot be reduced to a set of propositions--cannot be reduced to the Same (or, thinking in terms of Lacan, to the One of the Symbolic)--and so Levinas must repeatedly unfold and then withdraw his propositions. Even as he uses the language of ontology, his style of writing endeavor's to resist ontology's totalizing grasp. "Western philosophy," writes Levinas (1969), "has most often been an ontology: a reduction of the Other to the Same by interposition of a middle and neutral terms that ensures the comprehension of being" (pp. 33-34). As ontology, philosophy is narcissistic, seeking pleasure by incorporating the other into the Same. Philosophy, in this sense, is an "egology" whenever it asserts the primacy of the self, the Same, the subject or Being. Ontology as totality admits to no outside. Thus, if Levinas is to preserve the Other, the Other cannot become an object of knowledge or experience within the totality of an egology. In the enjoyment (jouissance) of egology, the I is the "living from" which uses up the other in order to fulfill its own needs and desires. The "transmutation of the other into the same," writes Levinas (1969), is "the essence of enjoyment" (p. 113). The other, in this sense, however, is not the Other. Only the other, not the Other, can become a source of enjoyment. The transcendence of the other is not a threat to the self, but rather a source of satisfaction and happiness:
"The I is, to be sure, happiness, presence at home with itself. But, as sufficiency in its non-sufficiency, it remains in the non-I; it is enjoyment of ‘something else,' never of itself. Autochthonous, that is, rooted in what it is not, it is nevertheless, wtihin this enrootedness independent and separated." (Levinas, Totality and Infinity, 1969, p. 152)
The relation with the Other, however, is a "relation without relation" (p. 79). The Other is never reduced to the Same, thus remaining unknowable, outside of the totality of the Same. The encounter with the Other calls egology into question. The "I" can no longer live in the fantasy of a unique possession of the world. The power and freedom of the Same are called into question. The Other cannot be possessed, resists enjoyment, and, as the I encounters this Otherr, it is called back to the meaning of its freedom--a freedom which is founded by the Other and which, in this encounter, is called to responsibility and obligation towards the Other as genuine freedom.
As responsible for the infinite Other, I am called to guard her against the systematic determination of any moral law. "For Levinas, the God that provides sanctity for the Other can never be reduced to a set of commandments because the Other calls me only as herself" (Cornell, 1998, p. 140). To reduce the Other who calls me as a unique self in the face-to-face to a set of a priori moral principles is a violence to her alterity. And since my responsibility to the Other is to the Other in her uniqueness and alterity, my responsibility is infinite. "It is precisely because the Good is the good of the Other that it cannot be fully actualized" (Cornell, 1998, p. 141).
The French-Jewish philosopher Emmanuel Levinas (1906-1995) made ethics the central point of his philosophical inquiries. He considered ethics to be the prima philosophia, the first and foremost central issue of all philosophical investigation, in spite of the Greek tradition that from the time of Aristotle onwards had always allotted this first place to metaphysics. Levinas believed that metaphysics and ethics were in fact one and the same. In this equation of metaphysics and ethics he wanted to underscore the Hebraic element in Western thought, though he knew well that the Greek Socrates also had made endeavors to show the metaphysics of ethics. But the difference with Socrates is the fact that Levinian ethics are more rooted in a religious view on life, while Socrates wanted to show the rationality of right ethical conduct.
This has brought a number of students of philosophy to believe that there is a mystical element in the thought of Levinas, precisely because he wants to transcend rationality as the source of his ethics. This makes it worthwhile to consider the similarities and the dissimilarities between the thought of Levinas and mysticism. That way we may perhaps in the end be able to answer the question whether Levinas was a mystic or not; whether his thought is mystical or otherwise indebted to mysticism.
Ethics
To understand Levinas´ thought we must begin with his teacher, the German Edmund Husserl. Husserl had discovered that all consciousness is characterized by intentionality. With intentionality he meant that consciousness has an innate tendency to objectify all external objects and all internal and external psychisms. This objectifying isn´t done in any random manner. It has a certain purpose built into it: it aims at making all exteriors fall into the very matrix of consciousness itself. According to Husserl every act of objectification is in fact an act of subjectification. Consciousness wants the object to become an object to me as a subject. So this will of consciousness is to equate, to make what is strange familiar, to make the other the same. All perception, all experiencing, all understanding -all modi operandi of consciousness- have precisely this intentionality: they aim at possessing the outside world in logical terms, to make psychologically and intellectually mine what seems remote and strange.
Levinas and Jacques Derrida both agree: this intentionality of consciousness is a kind of violence. Consciousness wants to conquer the world by objectifying it. It does not need be. It takes in, with the intent of adapting it to its own. The Other must become the Same. So in the postmodern thought of Derrida this intentionality becomes problematic. Rationality and (relative) consciousness are dismantled as having, so to speak, criminal traits. They want to rob existence of the thing-in-itself. This according to Derrida is the metaphysics of violence.
This criticism of Husserl is also the starting point of Levinas. He wants to show that there is a metaphysical element in existence that always remains totally strange to me. This element defies all objectification of consciousness. It can never be expressed in the classical Greek language of logical thinking. Because of its total strangeness it escapes me. It can never be pinned down. But nevertheless it makes an appeal. It wants itself to be heard, though it can never be understood. According to Levinas this strange other is the voice of ethics itself. It is the goodness of existence that confronts me, shakes me, disturbs me and drags me away from my self preoccupation and self complacency. It can never be subdued because it will always remain the remote and infinite other.
This voice of the eternal other comes to me, as a religious imperative, by way of the countenance of my fellow human being. As an individual I am an autonomous being striving to prolong my own enjoyment by way of consumption, housing, work and the accumulation of property. In these aspects I can shape my own life and I´m free to do as I want. My aim is to bring everything in life to fit the rules that I have set up. But there is something mysterious in the countenance of the other that upsets me and turns my autonomy into an heteronomy. When confronted with the other I loose my freedom. I become responsible for his well being. I cannot escape the claim of ethics in taking care of my fellow human being. The other confronts me with the fact that I will never be able to secure my life on my own. Somehow life needs otherness also.
At the metaphysical-ethical level of existence I can never escape the otherness of the countenance and its appeal. The mysteriousness of that individual other keeps upsetting me. I can not reduce that countenance in front of me to a class or a category. But at an ontological level -ie. within an ontology of immanence- the other becomes reduced to an impersonal class and is fitted into the totalitarian scheme of categorization. He is reduced from a being to being. He becomes part of a greater field and so loses his compelling uniqueness. Instead of that countenance in front of me he becomes simply a nigger, a gypsy, a Jew. At this ontological level violence again is possible. Because the other is robbed of his unique otherness.
The ethical relationship is asymmetrical. The ethical obligation I feel for the other is far greater than the claims I may have on him. Levinas speaks in this respect in almost religious language: the other comes to me ´from above´, he ´descends on me´, like God spoke from the heights of mount Sinai to his people. The countenance of the other is far greater than me, because my own self is always the exception. I may try to picture the other as a self too, but I never succeed in doing so. The self of the other always remains enigmatic, escaping all objectification of consciousness. I am never able to see the other as she or he really is. This makes my small, relatively familiar `I` the exception in a world of silent, hidden and mysterious selves.
So the essence of ethics is metaphysical. Ethics descends on me from a hidden, supranatural world of otherness. But a posteriori, after the instigations of an ethical appeal have descended on me, an element of comparison, an element of rationalization presents itself. Then I start to think about the right way to act. Then justice wants some questions to be answered. I will have to make some -often difficult- choices. This is the problem of justice, because there is always a third who makes the ethical relationship with my fellow human being more complicated. Who should I help first? Who should I help more? Why? This problem would not be there if there wasn´t a third. The third impels us to think.
Criticism
This is a nutshell the philosophy of Levinas. The aim of this article is to compare this philosophy with the insights of mysticism. So it is best to start this criticism now. Later on some other points in the ethics of Levinas will be addressed, but they will be presented in the course of argumentation.
The most fundamental difference between mysticism and Levinas is the axiom of mysticism that the otherness of the other is just an illusion. At a fundamental level I and the other are the same. We have the same divine substantia. We all share the same Self with a capital. When I look the other in the eye and when the other looks at me, we recognize ourselves in our eyes. We love and respect each other, because we are basically the same. This is not a metaphor meaning ´we are all in it together´ or ´we are put up with each other´, no, this is very literally so: my deepest `I´ is no different from your deepest `I´.
Schopenhauer also has pointed to the fact that all ethics are based on this mutual recognition of sameness. When I see someone on the verge of drowning, I will not hesitate a second. Even before I have given it any thought, I will have undone my trousers to get into the water. The help I will give my fellow human being in such distress is not provoked by mental considerations. The instigation to act immediately is premental. It comes from the metaphysical level of Self, from our shared godliness. Before I have thought about, it flashes through my heart -not through my mind-: 'there is ´me´ lying in the water! I have to save ´me´'.
In these premental, ethical and instinctive feelings I equate the life of that illusionary ´other´ with my own life. My respect for the life of others -and in fact for all life- comes from the fact that my deepest and true Self and the Self of that submergent other over there in the water are nothing more and nothing less than Life itself. Life recognizes Life. Forces are joined and ranks are closed. In these decisive moments of great danger and distress all otherness -which was an illusion anyhow- falls away. Man can only be so good and so brave because he is in fact saving ´himself´, when he is saving others. But remember, the ethics of help and braveness are premental: ´why did you do it, risking your own life?´ ´I don´t know. I simply acted.`
If the other would be a total -even a metaphysically total, as Levinas would have it- stranger to me, it would leave me stone cold. I would shrug, walk away and think the old testamentian ´am I my brother´s keeper?` The strangeness of the other would prevent me from having any inner connection. But as it is, in respect, love and all ethics I leave aside the otherness of the other and focus on what we have in common, which is not simply an attribute (which would be an indifferens, in Stoic terms), but which is our deepest substantia.
It is precisely as Levinas describes: the other is holy to me, he has a greater claim on me than I have on him, he comes to me ´from above´ etc. But it is so for reasons that are precisely contrary to the arguments Levinas presents. The otherness of the other is not an epiphany of the sacred. It is an epiphenomenon of the sacred; merely an illusion that is set aside on decisive and deeply felt moments of being touched by the other. The other moves my heart, because she is the God that I actually am. This feeling strikes me, moves me, upsets me and makes me wonder about Who I actually am. This is the source of all ethics: the thunderbolt strikes me that I am actually the other and the other is actually me.
Levinas is right that there is otherness in the other. But his otherness is the same as my own otherness is to me. He is as other to me as I am other to myself. For the otherness of the other is only at the level of personality and ego. At this level I am also other to mySelf. If I identify myself with this level -the wrong assumption that I am so and so and this and that- I also become estranged to myself. I will then be other than myself, an idea not very accurately analyzed within the phenomenology of Husserl nor within the ethics of Levinas, but which is one of the basic insights of mysticism. When I am other than myself, I will also become other to the other. He will not recognize me anymore. If I build up a too strong personalty he will in fact mock me for it, disrespect me for it, aye, even hate me for it. Then the Levinian metaphysicality of all ethics is lost between the other and me.
The mystics also speak of the countenance of the other, but for them it is the mask, the persona, that hides the true essence of the other. That´s why the mystics close their eyes and look for the Original Face -both of the self and the other-, ie. the countenance we have before we were born, which is our true identity if only we would somehow manage to strip ourself of the so and so, the this and that and the then and then. So it is not the countenance of the other that stirs me. It is the eyes of the other that make the appeal, because the eyes reflect our deepest soul. That´s why we never look another in the eyes when we humiliate or violate each other. If I would look the other in the eyes I would only see myself. This would refrain me from any violation.
But the countenance is the mask, the persona, the hypocrite, the stage player. I use my countenance to play my role and hide the real me that I am. One can easily check this with a little experiment. All it takes is to take a mirror and hold it before our face. Within a few seconds we will be ´making faces´ and mimicking to the mirror. Instantaneously the role playing begins. I will play the sad person, or the smiling person, or the person in need etc. We do this all the time, when we meet people. Thus the face is very cleverly trained in serving our needs of the moment. What the personality wants, the face reflects. But the eyes never lie. For Levinas the countenance reflects the countenance of God, after who´s image we are made. But only the eyes do so in fact, the countenance never. For the eyes reflect the divine Self which is the true center of every being. And right away, prementally, it shivers and moves in my soul: `it is Me that I see there in the eyes before me!´ But only because I am able, by looking deep into the eyes, to lift up the mask and see behind any countenance the other is showing.
Synchronicity and diachronicity
The assumption of the fundamental otherness of the other reveals a deep inner contradiction within the philosophy of Levinas. To make this clear we shall have to describe two philosophical terms Levinas uses in explaining the workings of consciousness and time:
synchronicity
My consciousness collects all sorts of sense impressions, together with the thoughts, feelings, and memories that I have, to bring them together at a single point in time: at this present moment at which I am conscious. Relative consciousness ´sucks in´ the past, the present and the future, so to speak. It does so to give an overall view of my life and its surroundings. Its purpose is to give meaning to every object that is (re)presented. This is the synchronicity of consciousness. Its working is a presence in the here and now. It condenses all time to this nunctuous point of synchronicity. Its function is to shed light on everything that has happened, happens and will happen, but it can only do so at some present moment. I may move the beam of light backwards to the past or forwards to the future, but the projecting of the light and the projector of the light are only at the synchronic level of a nunctuous moment.
diachronicity
So consciousness works at a synchronic level. But my life and my relative existence are located in time. Living as an organism I am in the claws of time. The fleeting of time tends to escape the control of my consciousness. Time has a life of its own. It devours me. In the end it will even annihilate me and my consciousness. Then I will again have fallen into the dark abyss of time. This is diachronic time, the time outside of my consciousness. My consciousness aims at shedding light on this diachronic time to give some meaning to it all, but it only succeeds incompletely and piecemeal.So in the existential philosophy of Levinas the world of light is only the world of our consciousness. The world of light is only at the synchronic level. But outside of this world of light there is the world of diachronic time. This world escapes me. So it is a world of darkness, a world of meaninglessness. I am its victim.
The existence of this world confronts me when the synthesizing capacity of my consciousness has failed me, like in the hours of sleeplessness, in suffering or in the ultimate unsatisfactoriness of erotic pleasure. Levinas calls this world the `il y a`, the ´there is...` of diachronic time.Now the great problem within the philosophy of Levinas is: the other must belong to the dark world of ´il y a´, precisely because he is essentially other than my consciousness. He escapes the light of my consciousness. He always remains the Other. He can never totally be reduced to the synchronic world of the Same. Would this be so, he would not, in Levinian terms, escape the ´violence´ of my consciousness. He would be reduced to the me. This reduction would show my lack of respect and my hunger for control. The other remains outside of my devouring consciousness in the diachronic world of time.
According to Levinas, it is precisely because of this otherness, because of his being outside my synchronicity, that he can make his ethical appeal.But the problem is: the world of ´il y a´ is a world of meaninglessness, of darkness, not the world of light. If the other belongs to this world of ´il y a´ he would be also meaningless to me. I would not have any connection with him whatsoever, but he would haunt my sleepless nights as a source of ignorance, fear and resentment. My consciousness would not be able to locate him in synchronic time. He would literally be a total stranger to my world. In short: his ethical appeal would be meaningless and therefor refused.
Levinas proposed a solution to this problem that has some resemblances with mysticism. He said that not all of the other belonged to the dark world of immanent being, the diachronic world of ´il y a´. The ethical element in my meeting with the other belonged to a world beyond immanent being. He called this the transcendent world of ´other-than-being´, autrement qu`être. All goodness, all ethics come from this other world that is beyond the being of this world.The mystics would nod and assent to this solution, but not wholeheartedly. There would still remain qualms and doubts about this solution. For they would say that precisely this belonging to the world of ´autrement qu´être´ makes us ethically the same. It takes away all otherness of the other. It is not the Other that is the source of all goodness in the world, it is the Same. So the difference between mysticism and Levinas comes down to the problem of the One and the Many. So let´s see what the mystics have to say about sameness and otherness. The metaphysics of mysticism.
The existentialism of Levinas accords consciousness only a place within me. So consciousness in the books of Levinas is always a relative consciousness. But in mysticism my consciousness is part of (or more correctly: overlaps with) a larger kosmic consciousness, called Pure or Absolute Consciousness. So in mysticism the beam of light is not only within me, but it is everywhere in the kosmos. This is the misconception that I have to liberate myself from, that I would be the sole keeper of the beam of light. Like Plato said, at a transcendent level we are all inhabitants of a world of light. The only thing I have to do is to transcend this world of immanence. In this transcendence I will find the meaning I am looking for.In religious language: I will have to find God to find meaning. Levinas would assent to this transcendence, but the unsurmountable difference with mysticism is his description of the complete Otherness of God. In mysticism we believe that God and the deepest Me are one and the same.
But suppose Levinas would retort: ´with the complete Otherness of the ´autrement qu´être´, of the other and of God I mean that they always remain different from and strange to my personal me. Is this not an insight of mysticism also, that the form and the personal are merely an illusion? What else does the word ´illusion´ mean than that it is other than Reality? Does this not mean that the substratum and the epiphenomenon of form are incompatible? I do not see any fundamental difference between my philosophy and the philosophy of mysticism.`But I think this is a wrong explanation of the metaphysics of mysticism. For in mysticism the One and the Many are ontologically different -and here Levinas is right- but they also share the same metaphysics, which means that both the One and the Many share the same godliness. The One is in the Many and the Many are in the One. This is the great mystical paradox: ´This world is illusionary. Only Brahman is real. The world is Brahman´. So God is never a stranger to me. Not even to my personal me. He is not the completely Other.
He is the fundamentally Same. In mysticism we transcend all duality, also the duality man versus God. But in the Hebraic thought of Levinas God remains so holy and inapproachable that He always remains the completely Other. The duality is not transcended, but strengthened instead. I think this misconception stems from a wrong understanding of the nature of divinity. For it is true that the deepest godliness of myself, of the other, of all existence always remains to a certain degree unknown and unknowable to me. But we must not confuse this unknowability of God with a complete otherness of God. That something is unknown or not known yet does not mean that it is other. This is jumping to conclusions.If God or my fellow human being were completely other than me, I would not have any rapport with them nor with that other world that is beyond immanent being and its beings, but that is my true home. In mysticism this rapport is felt so strongly because all differences between this so called me and this so called other are in fact illusionary. But let´s not stress the argument too much, because the point is made.Similarities between Levinian thought and mysticism.
The mystical element in the thought of Levinas is his analysis of the ´autrement qu´être´ as mainly ethical. His ´autrement´ is the source of all quality and goodness in the world. Mysticism agrees on this. Whether we believe in an unsurmountable duality between God and the world -as Levinas does- or whether we believe that godliness is the essential element of all life -as mysticism does-, we both believe that quality, happiness and goodness depend on some sort of transcendence. The being moved, the being touched, the friendly smile, the arm around the shoulder, in short, compassion, friendliness and altruistic behavior all have their roots in a mysterious component of life, that is the source as well as the telos of all existence. Levinas and mysticism also agree on the fact that there is infinity and that this fact leads to a fundamental unknowability of the world. When our thought tries to capture this infinity within the finity of its own paradigmata, it behaves in a violent and totalitarian way. It wants to shrink the infinity and the forever newness of the world to fit its own views and claims. This is for Levinas and also for mysticism the ultimate hybris. This brought him to believe that the intentionality of our relative consciousness and its seeking for truth within a mental paradigma have to be transcended. Here Levinas and Zen have much in common. Like Zen, Levinas also wants to break out to a level of no-mind. But for Levinas this outbreak is mainly an ethical one. I can only break out in the ethical relationship I have with the other. In the confrontation with the other I am forced by God to break out. So for Levinas the other is the ultimate meditation in life.
Amsterdam December 8 2005
Sunday, July 13, 2008
The Myth of Sisyphus
The gods had condemned Sisyphus to ceaselessly rolling a rock to the top of a mountain, whence the stone would fall back of its own weight. They had thought with some reason that there is no more dreadful punishment than futile and hopeless labor.
If one believes Homer, Sisyphus was the wisest and most prudent of mortals. According to another tradition, however, he was disposed to practice the profession of highwayman. I see no contradiction in this. Opinions differ as to the reasons why he became the futile laborer of the underworld. To begin with, he is accused of a certain levity in regard to the gods. He stole their secrets. Egina, the daughter of Esopus, was carried off by Jupiter. The father was shocked by that disappearance and complained to Sisyphus. He, who knew of the abduction, offered to tell about it on condition that Esopus would give water to the citadel of Corinth. To the celestial thunderbolts he preferred the benediction of water. He was punished for this in the underworld. Homer tells us also that Sisyphus had put Death in chains. Pluto could not endure the sight of his deserted, silent empire. He dispatched the god of war, who liberated Death from the hands of her conqueror.
It is said that Sisyphus, being near to death, rashly wanted to test his wife's love. He ordered her to cast his unburied body into the middle of the public square. Sisyphus woke up in the underworld. And there, annoyed by an obedience so contrary to human love, he obtained from Pluto permission to return to earth in order to chastise his wife. But when he had seen again the face of this world, enjoyed water and sun, warm stones and the sea, he no longer wanted to go back to the infernal darkness. Recalls, signs of anger, warnings were of no avail. Many years more he lived facing the curve of the gulf, the sparkling sea, and the smiles of earth. A decree of the gods was necessary. Mercury came and seized the impudent man by the collar and, snatching him from his joys, lead him forcibly back to the underworld, where his rock was ready for him.
You have already grasped that Sisyphus is the absurd hero. He is, as much through his passions as through his torture. His scorn of the gods, his hatred of death, and his passion for life won him that unspeakable penalty in which the whole being is exerted toward accomplishing nothing. This is the price that must be paid for the passions of this earth. Nothing is told us about Sisyphus in the underworld. Myths are made for the imagination to breathe life into them. As for this myth, one sees merely the whole effort of a body straining to raise the huge stone, to roll it, and push it up a slope a hundred times over; one sees the face screwed up, the cheek tight against the stone, the shoulder bracing the clay-covered mass, the foot wedging it, the fresh start with arms outstretched, the wholly human security of two earth-clotted hands. At the very end of his long effort measured by skyless space and time without depth, the purpose is achieved. Then Sisyphus watches the stone rush down in a few moments toward that lower world whence he will have to push it up again toward the summit. He goes back down to the plain.
It is during that return, that pause, that Sisyphus interests me. A face that toils so close to stones is already stone itself! I see that man going back down with a heavy yet measured step toward the torment of which he will never know the end. That hour like a breathing-space which returns as surely as his suffering, that is the hour of consciousness. At each of those moments when he leaves the heights and gradually sinks toward the lairs of the gods, he is superior to his fate. He is stronger than his rock.
If this myth is tragic, that is because its hero is conscious. Where would his torture be, indeed, if at every step the hope of succeeding upheld him? The workman of today works everyday in his life at the same tasks, and his fate is no less absurd. But it is tragic only at the rare moments when it becomes conscious. Sisyphus, proletarian of the gods, powerless and rebellious, knows the whole extent of his wretched condition: it is what he thinks of during his descent. The lucidity that was to constitute his torture at the same time crowns his victory. There is no fate that can not be surmounted by scorn.
If the descent is thus sometimes performed in sorrow, it can also take place in joy. This word is not too much. Again I fancy Sisyphus returning toward his rock, and the sorrow was in the beginning. When the images of earth cling too tightly to memory, when the call of happiness becomes too insistent, it happens that melancholy arises in man's heart: this is the rock's victory, this is the rock itself. The boundless grief is too heavy to bear. These are our nights of Gethsemane. But crushing truths perish from being acknowledged. Thus, Edipus at the outset obeys fate without knowing it. But from the moment he knows, his tragedy begins. Yet at the same moment, blind and desperate, he realizes that the only bond linking him to the world is the cool hand of a girl. Then a tremendous remark rings out: "Despite so many ordeals, my advanced age and the nobility of my soul make me conclude that all is well." Sophocles' Edipus, like Dostoevsky's Kirilov, thus gives the recipe for the absurd victory. Ancient wisdom confirms modern heroism.
One does not discover the absurd without being tempted to write a manual of happiness. "What!---by such narrow ways--?" There is but one world, however. Happiness and the absurd are two sons of the same earth. They are inseparable. It would be a mistake to say that happiness necessarily springs from the absurd. discovery. It happens as well that the felling of the absurd springs from happiness. "I conclude that all is well," says Edipus, and that remark is sacred. It echoes in the wild and limited universe of man. It teaches that all is not, has not been, exhausted. It drives out of this world a god who had come into it with dissatisfaction and a preference for futile suffering. It makes of fate a human matter, which must be settled among men.
All Sisyphus' silent joy is contained therein. His fate belongs to him. His rock is a thing Likewise, the absurd man, when he contemplates his torment, silences all the idols. In the universe suddenly restored to its silence, the myriad wondering little voices of the earth rise up. Unconscious, secret calls, invitations from all the faces, they are the necessary reverse and price of victory. There is no sun without shadow, and it is essential to know the night. The absurd man says yes and his efforts will henceforth be unceasing. If there is a personal fate, there is no higher destiny, or at least there is, but one which he concludes is inevitable and despicable. For the rest, he knows himself to be the master of his days. At that subtle moment when man glances backward over his life, Sisyphus returning toward his rock, in that slight pivoting he contemplates that series of unrelated actions which become his fate, created by him, combined under his memory's eye and soon sealed by his death. Thus, convinced of the wholly human origin of all that is human, a blind man eager to see who knows that the night has no end, he is still on the go. The rock is still rolling.
I leave Sisyphus at the foot of the mountain! One always finds one's burden again. But Sisyphus teaches the higher fidelity that negates the gods and raises rocks. He too concludes that all is well. This universe henceforth without a master seems to him neither sterile nor futile. Each atom of that stone, each mineral flake of that night filled mountain, in itself forms a world. The struggle itself toward the heights is enough to fill a man's heart. One must imagine Sisyphus happy.
If one believes Homer, Sisyphus was the wisest and most prudent of mortals. According to another tradition, however, he was disposed to practice the profession of highwayman. I see no contradiction in this. Opinions differ as to the reasons why he became the futile laborer of the underworld. To begin with, he is accused of a certain levity in regard to the gods. He stole their secrets. Egina, the daughter of Esopus, was carried off by Jupiter. The father was shocked by that disappearance and complained to Sisyphus. He, who knew of the abduction, offered to tell about it on condition that Esopus would give water to the citadel of Corinth. To the celestial thunderbolts he preferred the benediction of water. He was punished for this in the underworld. Homer tells us also that Sisyphus had put Death in chains. Pluto could not endure the sight of his deserted, silent empire. He dispatched the god of war, who liberated Death from the hands of her conqueror.
It is said that Sisyphus, being near to death, rashly wanted to test his wife's love. He ordered her to cast his unburied body into the middle of the public square. Sisyphus woke up in the underworld. And there, annoyed by an obedience so contrary to human love, he obtained from Pluto permission to return to earth in order to chastise his wife. But when he had seen again the face of this world, enjoyed water and sun, warm stones and the sea, he no longer wanted to go back to the infernal darkness. Recalls, signs of anger, warnings were of no avail. Many years more he lived facing the curve of the gulf, the sparkling sea, and the smiles of earth. A decree of the gods was necessary. Mercury came and seized the impudent man by the collar and, snatching him from his joys, lead him forcibly back to the underworld, where his rock was ready for him.
You have already grasped that Sisyphus is the absurd hero. He is, as much through his passions as through his torture. His scorn of the gods, his hatred of death, and his passion for life won him that unspeakable penalty in which the whole being is exerted toward accomplishing nothing. This is the price that must be paid for the passions of this earth. Nothing is told us about Sisyphus in the underworld. Myths are made for the imagination to breathe life into them. As for this myth, one sees merely the whole effort of a body straining to raise the huge stone, to roll it, and push it up a slope a hundred times over; one sees the face screwed up, the cheek tight against the stone, the shoulder bracing the clay-covered mass, the foot wedging it, the fresh start with arms outstretched, the wholly human security of two earth-clotted hands. At the very end of his long effort measured by skyless space and time without depth, the purpose is achieved. Then Sisyphus watches the stone rush down in a few moments toward that lower world whence he will have to push it up again toward the summit. He goes back down to the plain.
It is during that return, that pause, that Sisyphus interests me. A face that toils so close to stones is already stone itself! I see that man going back down with a heavy yet measured step toward the torment of which he will never know the end. That hour like a breathing-space which returns as surely as his suffering, that is the hour of consciousness. At each of those moments when he leaves the heights and gradually sinks toward the lairs of the gods, he is superior to his fate. He is stronger than his rock.
If this myth is tragic, that is because its hero is conscious. Where would his torture be, indeed, if at every step the hope of succeeding upheld him? The workman of today works everyday in his life at the same tasks, and his fate is no less absurd. But it is tragic only at the rare moments when it becomes conscious. Sisyphus, proletarian of the gods, powerless and rebellious, knows the whole extent of his wretched condition: it is what he thinks of during his descent. The lucidity that was to constitute his torture at the same time crowns his victory. There is no fate that can not be surmounted by scorn.
If the descent is thus sometimes performed in sorrow, it can also take place in joy. This word is not too much. Again I fancy Sisyphus returning toward his rock, and the sorrow was in the beginning. When the images of earth cling too tightly to memory, when the call of happiness becomes too insistent, it happens that melancholy arises in man's heart: this is the rock's victory, this is the rock itself. The boundless grief is too heavy to bear. These are our nights of Gethsemane. But crushing truths perish from being acknowledged. Thus, Edipus at the outset obeys fate without knowing it. But from the moment he knows, his tragedy begins. Yet at the same moment, blind and desperate, he realizes that the only bond linking him to the world is the cool hand of a girl. Then a tremendous remark rings out: "Despite so many ordeals, my advanced age and the nobility of my soul make me conclude that all is well." Sophocles' Edipus, like Dostoevsky's Kirilov, thus gives the recipe for the absurd victory. Ancient wisdom confirms modern heroism.
One does not discover the absurd without being tempted to write a manual of happiness. "What!---by such narrow ways--?" There is but one world, however. Happiness and the absurd are two sons of the same earth. They are inseparable. It would be a mistake to say that happiness necessarily springs from the absurd. discovery. It happens as well that the felling of the absurd springs from happiness. "I conclude that all is well," says Edipus, and that remark is sacred. It echoes in the wild and limited universe of man. It teaches that all is not, has not been, exhausted. It drives out of this world a god who had come into it with dissatisfaction and a preference for futile suffering. It makes of fate a human matter, which must be settled among men.
All Sisyphus' silent joy is contained therein. His fate belongs to him. His rock is a thing Likewise, the absurd man, when he contemplates his torment, silences all the idols. In the universe suddenly restored to its silence, the myriad wondering little voices of the earth rise up. Unconscious, secret calls, invitations from all the faces, they are the necessary reverse and price of victory. There is no sun without shadow, and it is essential to know the night. The absurd man says yes and his efforts will henceforth be unceasing. If there is a personal fate, there is no higher destiny, or at least there is, but one which he concludes is inevitable and despicable. For the rest, he knows himself to be the master of his days. At that subtle moment when man glances backward over his life, Sisyphus returning toward his rock, in that slight pivoting he contemplates that series of unrelated actions which become his fate, created by him, combined under his memory's eye and soon sealed by his death. Thus, convinced of the wholly human origin of all that is human, a blind man eager to see who knows that the night has no end, he is still on the go. The rock is still rolling.
I leave Sisyphus at the foot of the mountain! One always finds one's burden again. But Sisyphus teaches the higher fidelity that negates the gods and raises rocks. He too concludes that all is well. This universe henceforth without a master seems to him neither sterile nor futile. Each atom of that stone, each mineral flake of that night filled mountain, in itself forms a world. The struggle itself toward the heights is enough to fill a man's heart. One must imagine Sisyphus happy.
A Free Man's Worship
Bertrand Russell
A brief introduction: "A Free Man's Worship" (first published as "The Free Man's Worship" in Dec. 1903) is perhaps Bertrand Russell's best known and most reprinted essay. Its mood and language have often been explained, even by Russell himself, as reflecting a particular time in his life; "it depend(s)," he wrote in 1929, "upon a metaphysic which is more platonic than that which I now believe in." Yet the essay sounds many characteristic Russellian themes and preoccupations and deserves consideration--and further serious study--as an historical landmark of early-twentieth-century European thought. For a scholarly edition with some documentation, see Volume 12 of The Collected Papers of Bertrand Russell, entitled Contemplation and Action, 1902-14 (London, 1985; now published by Routledge).
To Dr. Faustus in his study Mephistopheles told the history of the Creation, saying:
"The endless praises of the choirs of angels had begun to grow wearisome; for, after all, did he not deserve their praise? Had he not given them endless joy? Would it not be more amusing to obtain undeserved praise, to be worshipped by beings whom he tortured? He smiled inwardly, and resolved that the great drama should be performed.
"For countless ages the hot nebula whirled aimlessly through space. At length it began to take shape, the central mass threw off planets, the planets cooled, boiling seas and burning mountains heaved and tossed, from black masses of cloud hot sheets of rain deluged the barely solid crust. And now the first germ of life grew in the depths of the ocean, and developed rapidly in the fructifying warmth into vast forest trees, huge ferns springing from the damp mould, sea monsters breeding, fighting, devouring, and passing away. And from the monsters, as the play unfolded itself, Man was born, with the power of thought, the knowledge of good and evil, and the cruel thirst for worship. And Man saw that all is passing in this mad, monstrous world, that all is struggling to snatch, at any cost, a few brief moments of life before Death's inexorable decree. And Man said: `There is a hidden purpose, could we but fathom it, and the purpose is good; for we must reverence something, and in the visible world there is nothing worthy of reverence.' And Man stood aside from the struggle, resolving that God intended harmony to come out of chaos by human efforts. And when he followed the instincts which God had transmitted to him from his ancestry of beasts of prey, he called it Sin, and asked God to forgive him. But he doubted whether he could be justly forgiven, until he invented a divine Plan by which God's wrath was to have been appeased. And seeing the present was bad, he made it yet worse, that thereby the future might be better. And he gave God thanks for the strength that enabled him to forgo even the joys that were possible. And God smiled; and when he saw that Man had become perfect in renunciation and worship, he sent another sun through the sky, which crashed into Man's sun; and all returned again to nebula.
"`Yes,' he murmured, `it was a good play; I will have it performed again.'"
Such, in outline, but even more purposeless, more void of meaning, is the world which Science presents for our belief. Amid such a world, if anywhere, our ideals henceforward must find a home. That Man is the product of causes which had no prevision of the end they were achieving; that his origin, his growth, his hopes and fears, his loves and his beliefs, are but the outcome of accidental collocations of atoms; that no fire, no heroism, no intensity of thought and feeling, can preserve an individual life beyond the grave; that all the labours of the ages, all the devotion, all the inspiration, all the noonday brightness of human genius, are destined to extinction in the vast death of the solar system, and that the whole temple of Man's achievement must inevitably be buried beneath the debris of a universe in ruins--all these things, if not quite beyond dispute, are yet so nearly certain, that no philosophy which rejects them can hope to stand. Only within the scaffolding of these truths, only on the firm foundation of unyielding despair, can the soul's habitation henceforth be safely built.
How, in such an alien and inhuman world, can so powerless a creature as Man preserve his aspirations untarnished? A strange mystery it is that Nature, omnipotent but blind, in the revolutions of her secular hurryings through the abysses of space, has brought forth at last a child, subject still to her power, but gifted with sight, with knowledge of good and evil, with the capacity of judging all the works of his unthinking Mother. In spite of Death, the mark and seal of the parental control, Man is yet free, during his brief years, to examine, to criticise, to know, and in imagination to create. To him alone, in the world with which he is acquainted, this freedom belongs; and in this lies his superiority to the resistless forces that control his outward life.
The savage, like ourselves, feels the oppression of his impotence before the powers of Nature; but having in himself nothing that he respects more than Power, he is willing to prostrate himself before his gods, without inquiring whether they are worthy of his worship. Pathetic and very terrible is the long history of cruelty and torture, of degradation and human sacrifice, endured in the hope of placating the jealous gods: surely, the trembling believer thinks, when what is most precious has been freely given, their lust for blood must be appeased, and more will not be required. The religion of Moloch--as such creeds may be generically called--is in essence the cringing submission of the slave, who dare not, even in his heart, allow the thought that his master deserves no adulation. Since the independence of ideals is not yet acknowledged, Power may be freely worshipped, and receive an unlimited respect, despite its wanton infliction of pain.
But gradually, as morality grows bolder, the claim of the ideal world begins to be felt; and worship, if it is not to cease, must be given to gods of another kind than those created by the savage. Some, though they feel the demands of the ideal, will still consciously reject them, still urging that naked Power is worthy of worship. Such is the attitude inculcated in God's answer to Job out of the whirlwind: the divine power and knowledge are paraded, but of the divine goodness there is no hint. Such also is the attitude of those who, in our own day, base their morality upon the struggle for survival, maintaining that the survivors are necessarily the fittest. But others, not content with an answer so repugnant to the moral sense, will adopt the position which we have become accustomed to regard as specially religious, maintaining that, in some hidden manner, the world of fact is really harmonious with the world of ideals. Thus Man creates God, all-powerful and all-good, the mystic unity of what is and what should be.
But the world of fact, after all, is not good; and, in submitting our judgment to it, there is an element of slavishness from which our thoughts must be purged. For in all things it is well to exalt the dignity of Man, by freeing him as far as possible from the tyranny of non-human Power. When we have realised that Power is largely bad, that man, with his knowledge of good and evil, is but a helpless atom in a world which has no such knowledge, the choice is again presented to us: Shall we worship Force, or shall we worship Goodness? Shall our God exist and be evil, or shall he be recognised as the creation of our own conscience?
The answer to this question is very momentous, and affects profoundly our whole morality. The worship of Force, to which Carlyle and Nietzsche and the creed of Militarism have accustomed us, is the result of failure to maintain our own ideals against a hostile universe: it is itself a prostrate submission to evil, a sacrifice of our best to Moloch. If strength indeed is to be respected, let us respect rather the strength of those who refuse that false "recognition of facts" which fails to recognise that facts are often bad. Let us admit that, in the world we know, there are many things that would be better otherwise, and that the ideals to which we do and must adhere are not realised in the realm of matter. Let us preserve our respect for truth, for beauty, for the ideal of perfection which life does not permit us to attain, though none of these things meet with the approval of the unconscious universe. If Power is bad, as it seems to be, let us reject it from our hearts. In this lies Man's true freedom: in determination to worship only the God created by our own love of the good, to respect only the heaven which inspires the insight of our best moments. In action, in desire, we must submit perpetually to the tyranny of outside forces; but in thought, in aspiration, we are free, free from our fellow-men, free from the petty planet on which our bodies impotently crawl, free even, while we live, from the tyranny of death. Let us learn, then, that energy of faith which enables us to live constantly in the vision of the good; and let us descend, in action, into the world of fact, with that vision always before us.
When first the opposition of fact and ideal grows fully visible, a spirit of fiery revolt, of fierce hatred of the gods, seems necessary to the assertion of freedom. To defy with Promethean constancy a hostile universe, to keep its evil always in view, always actively hated, to refuse no pain that the malice of Power can invent, appears to be the duty of all who will not bow before the inevitable. But indignation is still a bondage, for it compels our thoughts to be occupied with an evil world; and in the fierceness of desire from which rebellion springs there is a kind of self-assertion which it is necessary for the wise to overcome. Indignation is a submission of our thoughts, but not of our desires; the Stoic freedom in which wisdom consists is found in the submission of our desires, but not of our thoughts. From the submission of our desires springs the virtue of resignation; from the freedom of our thoughts springs the whole world of art and philosophy, and the vision of beauty by which, at last, we half reconquer the reluctant world. But the vision of beauty is possible only to unfettered contemplation, to thoughts not weighted by the load of eager wishes; and thus Freedom comes only to those who no longer ask of life that it shall yield them any of those personal goods that are subject to the mutations of Time.
Although the necessity of renunciation is evidence of the existence of evil, yet Christianity, in preaching it, has shown a wisdom exceeding that of the Promethean philosophy of rebellion. It must be admitted that, of the things we desire, some, though they prove impossible, are yet real goods; others, however, as ardently longed for, do not form part of a fully purified ideal. The belief that what must be renounced is bad, though sometimes false, is far less often false than untamed passion supposes; and the creed of religion, by providing a reason for proving that it is never false, has been the means of purifying our hopes by the discovery of many austere truths.
But there is in resignation a further good element: even real goods, when they are unattainable, ought not to be fretfully desired. To every man comes, sooner or later, the great renunciation. For the young, there is nothing unattainable; a good thing desired with the whole force of a passionate will, and yet impossible, is to them not credible. Yet, by death, by illness, by poverty, or by the voice of duty, we must learn, each one of us, that the world was not made for us, and that, however beautiful may be the things we crave, Fate may nevertheless forbid them. It is the part of courage, when misfortune comes, to bear without repining the ruin of our hopes, to turn away our thoughts from vain regrets. This degree of submission to Power is not only just and right: it is the very gate of wisdom.
But passive renunciation is not the whole of wisdom; for not by renunciation alone can we build a temple for the worship of our own ideals. Haunting foreshadowings of the temple appear in the realm of imagination, in music, in architecture, in the untroubled kingdom of reason, and in the golden sunset magic of lyrics, where beauty shines and glows, remote from the touch of sorrow, remote from the fear of change, remote from the failures and disenchantments of the world of fact. In the contemplation of these things the vision of heaven will shape itself in our hearts, giving at once a touchstone to judge the world about us, and an inspiration by which to fashion to our needs whatever is not incapable of serving as a stone in the sacred temple.
Except for those rare spirits that are born without sin, there is a cavern of darkness to be traversed before that temple can be entered. The gate of the cavern is despair, and its floor is paved with the gravestones of abandoned hopes. There Self must die; there the eagerness, the greed of untamed desire must be slain, for only so can the soul be freed from the empire of Fate. But out of the cavern the Gate of Renunciation leads again to the daylight of wisdom, by whose radiance a new insight, a new joy, a new tenderness, shine forth to gladden the pilgrim's heart.
When, without the bitterness of impotent rebellion, we have learnt both to resign ourselves to the outward rules of Fate and to recognise that the non-human world is unworthy of our worship, it becomes possible at last so to transform and refashion the unconscious universe, so to transmute it in the crucible of imagination, that a new image of shining gold replaces the old idol of clay. In all the multiform facts of the world--in the visual shapes of trees and mountains and clouds, in the events of the life of man, even in the very omnipotence of Death--the insight of creative idealism can find the reflection of a beauty which its own thoughts first made. In this way mind asserts its subtle mastery over the thoughtless forces of Nature. The more evil the material with which it deals, the more thwarting to untrained desire, the greater is its achievement in inducing the reluctant rock to yield up its hidden treasures, the prouder its victory in compelling the opposing forces to swell the pageant of its triumph. Of all the arts, Tragedy is the proudest, the most triumphant; for it builds its shining citadel in the very centre of the enemy's country, on the very summit of his highest mountain; from its impregnable watchtowers, his camps and arsenals, his columns and forts, are all revealed; within its walls the free life continues, while the legions of Death and Pain and Despair, and all the servile captains of tyrant Fate, afford the burghers of that dauntless city new spectacles of beauty. Happy those sacred ramparts, thrice happy the dwellers on that all-seeing eminence. Honour to those brave warriors who, through countless ages of warfare, have preserved for us the priceless heritage of liberty, and have kept undefiled by sacrilegious invaders the home of the unsubdued.
But the beauty of Tragedy does but make visible a quality which, in more or less obvious shapes, is present always and everywhere in life. In the spectacle of Death, in the endurance of intolerable pain, and in the irrevocableness of a vanished past, there is a sacredness, an overpowering awe, a feeling of the vastness, the depth, the inexhaustible mystery of existence, in which, as by some strange marriage of pain, the sufferer is bound to the world by bonds of sorrow. In these moments of insight, we lose all eagerness of temporary desire, all struggling and striving for petty ends, all care for the little trivial things that, to a superficial view, make up the common life of day by day; we see, surrounding the narrow raft illumined by the flickering light of human comradeship, the dark ocean on whose rolling waves we toss for a brief hour; from the great night without, a chill blast breaks in upon our refuge; all the loneliness of humanity amid hostile forces is concentrated upon the individual soul, which must struggle alone, with what of courage it can command, against the whole weight of a universe that cares nothing for its hopes and fears. Victory, in this struggle with the powers of darkness, is the true baptism into the glorious company of heroes, the true initiation into the overmastering beauty of human existence. From that awful encounter of the soul with the outer world, enunciation, wisdom, and charity are born; and with their birth a new life begins. To take into the inmost shrine of the soul the irresistible forces whose puppets we seem to be--Death and change, the irrevocableness of the past, and the powerlessness of Man before the blind hurry of the universe from vanity to vanity--to feel these things and know them is to conquer them.
This is the reason why the Past has such magical power. The beauty of its motionless and silent pictures is like the enchanted purity of late autumn, when the leaves, though one breath would make them fall, still glow against the sky in golden glory. The Past does not change or strive; like Duncan, after life's fitful fever it sleeps well; what was eager and grasping, what was petty and transitory, has faded away, the things that were beautiful and eternal shine out of it like stars in the night. Its beauty, to a soul not worthy of it, is unendurable; but to a soul which has conquered Fate it is the key of religion.
The life of Man, viewed outwardly, is but a small thing in comparison with the forces of Nature. The slave is doomed to worship Time and Fate and Death, because they are greater than anything he finds in himself, and because all his thoughts are of things which they devour. But, great as they are, to think of them greatly, to feel their passionless splendour, is greater still. And such thought makes us free men; we no longer bow before the inevitable in Oriental subjection, but we absorb it, and make it a part of ourselves. To abandon the struggle for private happiness, to expel all eagerness of temporary desire, to burn with passion for eternal things--this is emancipation, and this is the free man's worship. And this liberation is effected by a contemplation of Fate; for Fate itself is subdued by the mind which leaves nothing to be purged by the purifying fire of Time.
United with his fellow-men by the strongest of all ties, the tie of a common doom, the free man finds that a new vision is with him always, shedding over every daily task the light of love. The life of Man is a long march through the night, surrounded by invisible foes, tortured by weariness and pain, towards a goal that few can hope to reach, and where none may tarry long. One by one, as they march, our comrades vanish from our sight, seized by the silent orders of omnipotent Death. Very brief is the time in which we can help them, in which their happiness or misery is decided. Be it ours to shed sunshine on their path, to lighten their sorrows by the balm of sympathy, to give them the pure joy of a never-tiring affection, to strengthen failing courage, to instil faith in hours of despair. Let us not weigh in grudging scales their merits and demerits, but let us think only of their need--of the sorrows, the difficulties, perhaps the blindnesses, that make the misery of their lives; let us remember that they are fellow-sufferers in the same darkness, actors in the same tragedy as ourselves. And so, when their day is over, when their good and their evil have become eternal by the immortality of the past, be it ours to feel that, where they suffered, where they failed, no deed of ours was the cause; but wherever a spark of the divine fire kindled in their hearts, we were ready with encouragement, with sympathy, with brave words in which high courage glowed.
Brief and powerless is Man's life; on him and all his race the slow, sure doom falls pitiless and dark. Blind to good and evil, reckless of destruction, omnipotent matter rolls on its relentless way; for Man, condemned to-day to lose his dearest, to-morrow himself to pass through the gate of darkness, it remains only to cherish, ere yet the blow falls, the lofty thoughts that ennoble his little day; disdaining the coward terrors of the slave of Fate, to worship at the shrine that his own hands have built; undismayed by the empire of chance, to preserve a mind free from the wanton tyranny that rules his outward life; proudly defiant of the irresistible forces that tolerate, for a moment, his knowledge and his condemnation, to sustain alone, a weary but unyielding Atlas, the world that his own ideals have fashioned despite the trampling march of unconscious power.
Electronic colophon: This electronic text was typed for the BRS Home Page in July, 1996 by John R. Lenz from the 1929 U.S. edition (pp. 46-57) of Mysticism and Logic (orig. London, 1918). I used a copy of this book signed by BR himself. Russell's signature in the title of this electronic version is that very signature, which I reproduced using a scanner and irony: another essay in the same collection is "The Place of Science in a Liberal Education."
Sunday, July 6, 2008
The President's Council on Bioethics, Washington, D.C., March 2008
Human Dignity and Bioethics: Essays Commissioned by the President's Council on Bioethics
http://www.bioethics.gov/reports/human_dignity/index.html
TABLE OF CONTENTS
Letter of Transmittal
Members of the President's Council on Bioethics
Council Staff and Consultants
Acknowledgments
Introduction
Chapter 1: Bioethics and the Question of Human Dignity (Schulman)
Chapter 2: Human Dignity and Respect for Persons: A Historical Perspective on Public Bioethics (Davis)
Part 1: Dignity and Modern Science
Chapter 3: How to Protect Human Dignity from Science (Dennett)
Chapter 4: Human Dignity and the Mystery of the Human Soul (Kraynak)
Commentary on Kraynak (Dennett)
Commentary on Dennett (Kraynak)
Commentary on Dennett (Gómez-Lobo)
Chapter 5: Human Dignity from a Neurophilosophical Perspective (Churchland)
Commentary on Churchland (Meilaender)
Part 2: Human Nature and the Future of Man
Chapter 6: Human Uniqueness and Human Dignity: Persons in Nature and the Nature of Persons (Rolston)
Chapter 7: Human Dignity and the Future of Man (Rubin)
Chapter 8: Dignity and Enhancement (Bostrom)
Part 3: Dignity and Modern Culture
Chapter 9: human Dignity and Public Discourse (Neuhaus)
Chapter 10: Modern and American Dignity (Lawler)
Chapter 11: Human dignity: Exploring and Explicating the Council's Vision (Meilaender)
Commentary on Meilaender and Dennett (Lawler)
Commentary on Meilaender and Dennett (Schaub)
Part 4: The Source and Meaning of Dignity
Chapter 12: Defending Human Dignity (Kass)
Chapter 13: Kant's Concept of Human Dignity as a Resource for Bioethics (Shell)
Chapter 14: Human Dignity and Political Entitlements (Nussbaum)
Commentary on Nussbaum, Shell, and Kass (Schaub)
Chapter 15: The Irreducibly Religious Character of Human Dignity (Gelernter)
Part 5: Theories of Human Dignity
Chapter 16: The Nature and Basis of Human Dignity (Lee, George)
Chapter 17: Two Arguments From human Dignity (Weithman)
Chapter 18: Dignity and Bioethics: History, Theory, and Selected Applications (Sulmasy)
Part 6: Human Dignity and the Practice of Medicine
Chapter 19: Human Dignity and the Seriously Ill Patient (Dresser)
Chapter 20: The Lived Experience of Human Dignity (Pellegrino)
Sunday, June 29, 2008
PRELIMINARY EXAMINATION FOR SOPHIA MEMBERS
Make a Comparative Analysis of Max More's BEYOND THE MACHINE: Technology and Post-Human Freedom and David Hulme's Material Facts from a Non-Materialist Perspective.
*Presentation Format:
I. A Summary of Each of the Two Selections
II. A Comparative Analysis of the Two Selections
III. A Personal Evaluation of the Selections In Terms of Philosophical Tenability/Reasonability
*Required Number of Pages: At least three (3) pages; Times New Roman font # 12.
*Submission Date: On or before 16 July 2008.
*Presentation Format:
I. A Summary of Each of the Two Selections
II. A Comparative Analysis of the Two Selections
III. A Personal Evaluation of the Selections In Terms of Philosophical Tenability/Reasonability
*Required Number of Pages: At least three (3) pages; Times New Roman font # 12.
*Submission Date: On or before 16 July 2008.
Friday, June 27, 2008
HOW TO PROTECT HUMAN DIGNITY FROM SCIENCE
Daniel C. Dennett
Many people fear that science and technology are encroaching on domains of life in a way that undermines human dignity, and they see this as a threat that needs to be resisted vigorously. They are right. There is a real crisis, and it needs our attention now, before irreparable damage is done to the fragile environment of mutually shared beliefs and attitudes on which a precious conception of human dignity does indeed depend for its existence. I will try to show both that the problem is real and that the most widely favored responses to the problem are deeply misguided and bound to fail. There is a solution that has a good chance of success, however, and it employs principles that we already understand and accept in less momentous roles. The solution is natural, reasonable, and robust instead of fragile, and it does not require us to try to put the genie of science back in the bottle-a good thing, since that is almost certainly impossible. Science and technology can flourish open-endedly while abiding by restrictive principles that are powerful enough to reassure the anxious and mild enough to secure the unqualified endorsement of all but the most reckless investigators. We can have dignity and science too, but only if we face the conflict with open minds and a sense of common cause.
The Problem
Human life, tradition says, is infinitely valuable, and even sacred: not to be tampered with, not to be subjected to "unnatural" procedures, and of course not to be terminated deliberately, except (perhaps) in special cases such as capital punishment or in the waging of a just war: "Thou shalt not kill." Human life, science says, is a complex phenomenon admitting of countless degrees and variations, not markedly different from animal life or plant life or bacterial life in most regards, and amenable to countless varieties of extensions, redirections, divisions, and terminations. The questions of when (human) life begins and ends, and of which possible variants "count" as (sacred) human lives in the first place are, according to science, more like the question of the area of a mountain than of its altitude above sea level: it all depends on what can only be conventional definitions of the boundary conditions. Science promises-or threatens-to replace the traditional absolutes about the conditions of human life with a host of relativistic complications and the denial of any sharp boundaries on which to hang tradition.
Plato spoke of seeking the universals that "carve Nature at its joints,"i and science has given us wonderful taxonomies that do just that. It has identified electrons and protons (which have the mass of 1,836 electrons and a positive charge), distinguished the chemical elements from each other, and articulated and largely confirmed a Tree of Life that shows why "creature with a backbone" carves Nature better than "creature with wings." But the crisp, logical boundaries that science gives us don't include any joints where tradition demands them. In particular, there is no moment of ensoulment to be discovered in the breathtakingly complicated processes that ensue after sperm meets egg and they begin producing an embryo (or maybe twins or triplets-when do they get their individual souls?), and there is no moment at which the soul leaves the body and human life ends. Moreover, the more we understand, scientifically, about these complexities, the more practical it becomes, technologically, to exploit them in entirely novel ways for which tradition is utterly unprepared: in vitro fertilization and cloning, organ harvest and transplant, and, at the end of life, the artificial prolongation of life-of one sort or another-after most if not all the sacred aspects of life have ceased. When we start treating living bodies as motherboards on which to assemble cyborgs, or as spare parts collections to be sold to the highest bidder, where will it all end? It is not as if we could halt the slide by just prohibiting (some of) the technology. Technology may provide the faits accomplis that demonstrate beyond all controversy that the science is on the right track, but long before the technology is available, science provides the huge changes in conceptualization, the new vistas on possibility, that will flavor our imaginations henceforth whether or not the possibilities become practical. We are entering a new conceptual world, thanks to science, and it does not harmonize comfortably with our traditional conceptions of our lives and what they mean.ii
In particular, those who fear this swiftly growing scientific vista think that it will destroy something precious and irreplaceable in our traditional scheme, subverting the last presumptions of human specialness which ground-they believe-our world of morality. Oddly enough, not much attention has been paid to the question of exactly how the rise of the scientific vista would subvert these cherished principles-in this regard, it is a close kin to the widespread belief that homosexual marriage would somehow subvert traditional "family values"-but in fact there is a good explanation for this gap in the analysis. The psychologist Philip Tetlock identifies values as sacred when they are so important to those who hold them that the very act of considering them is offensive.1 The comedian Jack Benny was famously stingy-or so he presented himself on radio and television- and one of his best bits was the skit in which a mugger puts a gun in his back and barks "Your money or your life!" Benny just stands there silently. "Your money or your life!" repeats the mugger, with mounting impatience. "I'm thinking, I'm thinking," Benny replies. This is funny because most of us think that nobody should even think about such a trade-off. Nobody should have to think about such a trade-off. It should be unthinkable, a "no-brainer." Life is sacred, and no amount of money would be a fair exchange for a life, and if you don't already know that, what's wrong with you? "To transgress this boundary, to attach a monetary value, to one's friendships, children, or loyalty to one's country, is to disqualify oneself from the accompanying social roles."2 That is what makes life a sacred value.
Tetlock and his colleagues have conducted ingenious (and sometimes troubling) experiments in which subjects are obliged to consider "taboo trade-offs," such as whether or not to purchase live human body parts for some worthy end, or whether or not to pay somebody to have a baby that you then raise, or pay somebody to perform your military service. As their model predicts, many subjects exhibit a strong "mere contemplation effect": they feel guilty and sometimes get angry about being lured into even thinking about such dire choices, even when they make all the right choices. When given the opportunity by the experimenters to engage in "moral cleansing" (by volunteering for some relevant community service, for instance) subjects who have had to think about taboo trade-offs are significantly more likely than control subjects to volunteer-for real-for such good deeds. (Control subjects had been asked to think about purely non-sacred trade-offs, such as whether to hire a house-cleaner or buy food instead of something else.)3
So it is not surprising that relatively little attention has been paid to charting the paths by which science and technology might subvert the value of life. If you feel the force of the admonition, "Don't even think about it!", you will shun the topic by distracting your own attention from it, if at all possible. I know from experience that some readers of this essay will already be feeling some discomfort and even guilt for allowing themselves to broach these topics at all, so strong is the taboo against thinking the unthinkable, but I urge them to bear with me, since the policy that I will propose may have more going for it than their own.
The fact that the threat has not been well articulated does not mean it is not real and important. Let me try to make it plain by drawing some parallels. Like climate change, the threat is environmental and global (which means you can't just move to a different place where the environment hasn't yet been damaged), and time is running out. While global warming threatens to affect many aspects of the physical environment-the atmosphere, the flora and fauna, the ice caps and ocean levels-and hence alter our geography in catastrophic ways from which recovery may be difficult or impossible, the threat to human dignity affects many aspects of what we may call the belief environment , the manifold of ambient attitudes, presumptions, common expectations-the things that are "taken for granted" by just about everybody, and that just about everybody expects just about everybody to take for granted.
The belief environment plays just as potent a role in human welfare as the physical environment, and in some regards it is both more important and more fragile. Much of this has been well-known for centuries, particularly to economists, who have long appreciated the way a currency can become worthless almost overnight, for example, and the way public trust in financial institutions needs to be preserved as a condition for economic activity in general. Today we confront the appalling societal black holes known as failed states, where the breakdown of law and order makes the restoration of decent life all but impossible. (If you have to pay off the warlords and bribe the judges and tolerate the drug traffic.just to keep enough power and water and sanitation going to make life bearable, let alone permit agriculture and commerce to thrive, your chances of long-term success are minimal.) What matters in these terrible conditions is what people in general assume whether they are right or wrong . It might in fact be safe for them to venture out and go shopping, or to invest in a clothing factory, or plant their crops, but if they don't, in general, believe that, they cannot resume anything like normal life and rekindle a working society. This creates a belief environment in which there is a powerful incentive for the most virtuous and civic-minded to lie, vigorously, just to preserve what remains of the belief environment. Faced with a deteriorating situation, admitting the truth may only accelerate the decline, while a little creative myth-making might- might -save the day. Not a happy situation.
And this is what people fear might happen if we pursue our current scientific and technological exploration of the boundaries of human life: we will soon find ourselves in a deteriorating situation where people-rightly or wrongly-start jumping to conclusions about the non -sanctity of life, the commodification of all aspects of life, and it will be too late to salvage the prevailing attitudes that protect us all from something rather like a failed state, a society in which the sheer security needed for normal interpersonal relations has dissolved, making trust, and respect, and even love, all but impossible. Faced with that dire prospect, it becomes tempting indeed to think of promulgating a holy lie, a myth that might carry us along for long enough to shore up our flagging confidence until we can restore "law and order."
That is where the doctrine of the soul comes in. People have immortal souls, according to tradition, and that is what makes them so special. Let me put the problem unequivocally: the traditional concept of the soul as an immaterial thinking thing, Descartes's res cogitans , the internal locus in each human body of all suffering, and meaning, and decisions, both moral and immoral, has been utterly discredited. Science has banished the soul as firmly as it has banished mermaids, unicorns, and perpetual motion machines. There are no such things. There is no more scientific justification for believing in an immaterial immortal soul than there is for believing that each of your kidneys has a tap-dancing poltergeist living in it. The latter idea is clearly preposterous. Why are we so reluctant to dismiss the former idea? It is obvious that there must be some non -scientific motivation for believing in it. It is seen as being needed to play a crucial role in preserving our self-image, our dignity. If we don't have souls, we are just animals! (And how could you love, or respect, or grant responsibility to something that was just an animal?)
Doesn't the very meaning of our lives depend on the reality of our immaterial souls? No. We don't need to be made of two fundamentally different kinds of substance, matter and mind-stuff, to have morally meaningful lives. On the face of it, the idea that all our striving and loving, our yearning and regretting, our hopes and fears, depend on some secret ingredient, some science-proof nugget of specialness that defies the laws of nature, is an almost childish ploy: "Let's gather up all the wonderfulness of human life and sweep it into the special hidey-hole where science can never get at it!" Although this fortress mentality has a certain medieval charm, looked at in the cold light of day, this idea is transparently desperate, implausible, and risky: putting all your eggs in one basket, and a remarkably vulnerable basket at that. It is vulnerable because it must declare science to be unable to shed any light on the various aspects of human consciousness and human morality at a time when exciting progress is being made on these very issues. One of Aristotle's few major mistakes was declaring "the heavens" to be made of a different kind of stuff, entirely unlike the matter here on Earth-a tactical error whose brittleness became obvious once Galileo and company began their still-expanding campaign to understand the physics of the cosmos. Clinging similarly to an immaterial concept of a soul at a time when every day brings more understanding of how the material basis of the mind has evolved (and goes on evolving within each brain) is a likely path to obsolescence and extinction.
The alternative is to look to the life sciences for an understanding of what does in fact make us different from other animals, in morally relevant ways. We are the only species with language, and art, and music, and religion, and humor, and the ability to imagine the time before our birth and after our death, and the ability to plan projects that take centuries to unfold, and the ability to create, defend, revise, and live by codes of conduct, and-sad to say-to wage war on a global scale. The ability of our brains to help us see into the future, thanks to the culture we impart to our young, so far surpasses that of any other species, that it gives us the powers that in turn give us the responsibilities of moral agents. Noblesse oblige . We are the only species that can know enough about the world to be reasonably held responsible for protecting its precious treasures. And who on earth could hold us responsible? Only ourselves. Some other species-the dolphins and the other great apes-exhibit fascinating signs of protomorality, a capacity to cooperate and to care about others, but we persons are the only animals that can conceive of the project of leading a good life . This is not a mysterious talent; it can be explained.iii
Here I will not attempt to survey the many threads of that still unfolding explanation, but rather to construct and defend a perspective and a set of policies that could protect what needs to be protected as we scramble, with many false steps, towards an appreciation of the foundations of human dignity. Scientists make their mistakes in public, but mostly only other scientists notice them. This topic has such momentous consequences, however, that we can anticipate that public attention-and reaction-will be intense, and could engender runaway misconstruals that could do serious harm to the delicate belief environment in which we (almost) all would like to live.
I have mentioned the analogy with the ominous slide into a failed state; here is a less dire example of the importance of the belief environment, and the way small changes in society can engender unwanted changes in it. In many parts of rural America people feel comfortable leaving their cars and homes unlocked, day and night, but any country mouse who tries to live this way in the big city soon learns how foolish that amiably trusting policy is. City life is not intolerable, but it is certainly different. Wouldn't it be fine if we could somehow re-engineer the belief environment of cities so that people seldom felt the need to lock up! An all but impossible dream. At the same time, rural America is far from utopia and is sliding toward urbanity. The felicitous folkways of the countryside can absorb a modest amount of theft and trespass without collapse, but it wouldn't take much to extinguish them forever. Those of us who get to live in this blissfully secure world cherish it, for good reason, and would hate to abandon it, but we also must recognize that any day could be the last day of unlocked doors in our neighborhood, and once the change happened, it would be very hard to change back. That too is like global climate change; these changes are apt to be irreversible. And unlike global climate change, drawing attention to the prospect may actually hasten it, by kindling and spreading what Douglas Hofstadter once called "reverberant doubt."4 The day that our local newspaper begins running a series about what percentage of local people lock their doors under what circumstances is the day that door-locking is apt to become the norm. So those who are in favor of diverting attention from too exhaustive an examination of these delicate topics might have the right idea. This is the chief reason, I think, for the taboo against thinking about sacred values: it can sometimes jeopardize their protected status. But in this case, I think it is already too late to follow the tip-toe approach. There is already a tidal wave of interest in the ways in which the life sciences are illuminating the nature of "the soul," so we had better shift from distraction to concentration and see what we can make of the belief environment for human dignity and its vulnerabilities.
The Solution
How are we to protect the ideal of human dignity from the various incursions of science and technology? The first step in the solution is to notice that the grounds for our practices regarding this are not going to be local features of particular human lives, but rather more distributed in space and time. There is already a clear precedent in our attitude toward human corpses. Even people who believe in immortal immaterial souls don't believe that human "remains" harbor a soul. They think that the soul has departed, and what is left behind is just a body, just unfeeling matter. A corpse can't feel pain, can't suffer, can't be aware of any indignities-and yet still we feel a powerful obligation to handle a corpse with respect, and even with ceremony, and even when nobody else is watching. Why? Because we appreciate, whether acutely or dimly, that how we handle this corpse now has repercussions for how other people, still alive, will be able to imagine their own demise and its aftermath. Our capacity to imagine the future is both the source of our moral power and a condition of our vulnerability. We cannot help but see all the events in our lives against the backdrop of what Hofstadter calls the implicosphere of readily imaginable alternatives-and the great amplifier of human suffering (and human joy) is our irresistible tendency to anticipate, with dread or delight, what is in store for us.5
We live not just in the moment, but in the past and the future as well. Consider the well-known advice given to golfers: keep your head down through the whole swing. "Wait a minute," comes the objection: "that's got to be voodoo superstition! Once the ball leaves the club head, the position of my head couldn't possibly affect the trajectory of the ball. This has to be scientifically unsound advice!" Not at all. Since we plan and execute all our actions in an anticipatory belief environment, and have only limited and indirect control over our time-pressured skeletal actions, it can well be the case that the only way to get the part of the golf swing that does affect the trajectory of the ball to have the desirable properties is to concentrate on making the later part of it, which indeed could not affect the trajectory, take on a certain shape. Far from being superstitious, the advice can be seen to follow quite logically from facts we can discover from a careful analysis of the way our nervous systems guide our muscles.
Our respect for corpses provides us with a clear case of a wise practice that does not at all depend on finding, locally, a special (even supernatural) ingredient that justifies or demands this treatment. There are other examples that have the same feature. Nobody has to endorse magical thinking about the gold in Fort Knox to recognize the effect of its (believed-in) presence there on the stability of currencies. Symbols play an important role in helping to maintain social equilibria, and we tamper with them at our peril. If we began to adopt the "efficient" policy of disposing of human corpses by putting them in large biodegradable plastic bags to be taken to the landfill along with the rest of the "garbage," this would flavor our imaginations in ways that would be hard to ignore, and hard to tolerate. No doubt we could get used to it, the same way city folk get used to locking their doors, but we have good reasons for avoiding that path. (Medical schools have learned to be diligent in their maintenance of respect and decorum in the handling of bodies in their teaching and research, for while those who decide to donate their bodies to medicine presumably have come to terms with the imagined prospect of students dissecting and discussing their innards, they have limits on what they find tolerable.)
The same policy and rationale apply to end-of-life decisions. We handle a corpse with decorum even though we know it cannot suffer, so we can appreciate the wisdom of extending the same practice to cases where we don't know. For instance, a person in a persistent vegetative state might be suffering, or might not, but in either case, we have plenty of grounds for adopting a policy that creates a comforting buffer zone that errs on the side of concern. And, once again, the long-range effect on community beliefs is just as important as, or even more important than, any locally measurable symptoms of suffering. (In a similar spirit, it is important that wolves and grizzly bears still survive in the wilder regions of our world even if we almost never see them. Just knowing that they are there is a source of wonder and delight and makes the world a better place. Given our invincible curiosity and penchant for skepticism, we have to keep checking up on their continued existence, of course, and could not countenance an official myth of their continued presence if they had in fact gone extinct. This too has its implications for our topic.)
What happens when we apply the same principle to the other boundary of human life, its inception? The scientific fact is that there is no good candidate, and there will almost certainly never be a good candidate, for a moment of ensoulment , when a mere bundle of living human tissue becomes a person with all the rights and privileges pertaining thereunto. This should not be seen as a sign of the weakness of scientific insight, but rather as a familiar implication of what science has already discovered. One of the fascinating facts about living things is the way they thrive on gradualism. Consider speciation: there are uncounted millions of different species, and each of them had its inception "at some point" in the nearly four billion year history of life on this planet, but there is literally no telling exactly when any species came into existence because what counts as speciation is something that only gradually and cumulatively emerges over very many generations. Speciation can emerge only in the aftermath . Consider dogs, the millions of members of hundreds of varieties of Canis familiaris that populate the world today. As different as these varieties are-think of St. Bernards and Pekinese-they all count as a single species, cross-fertile (with a little mechanical help from their human caretakers) and all readily identifiable as belonging to the same species, descended from wolves, by their highly similar DNA. Might one or more of these varieties or subspecies become a species of its own some day? Absolutely. In fact, every puppy born is a potential founder of a new species, but nothing about that puppy on the day of its birth (or for that matter on any day of its life) could be singled out as the special feature that marked it as the Adam or Eve of a new species. If it dies without issue, it definitely won't found a new species, but as long as it has offspring that have offspring.it might turn out, in the fullness of time, to be a good candidate for the first member of a new species.
Or consider our own species, Homo sapiens . Might it divide in two some day? Yes it might, and in fact, it might, in a certain sense, already have happened. Consider two human groups alive today that probably haven't had any common ancestors in the last thirty thousand years: the Inuit of Cornwallis Island in the Arctic, and the Andaman Islanders living in remarkable isolation in the Indian Ocean. Suppose some global plague sweeps the planet sometime in the next hundred years (far from an impossibility, sad to say), leaving behind only these two small populations. Suppose that over the next five hundred or a thousand years, say, they flourish and come to reinhabit the parts of the world vacated by us-and discover that they are not cross-fertile with the other group! Two species, remarkably similar in appearance, physiology and ancestry, but nevertheless as reproductively isolated as lions are from tigers. When, then, did the speciation occur? Before the dawn of agriculture about ten thousand years ago, or after the birth of the Internet? There would be no principled way of saying. We can presume that today, Inuits and Andaman Islanders are cross-fertile, but who knows? The difference between "in principle" reproductive isolation (because of the accumulation of genetic and behavioral differences that make offspring "impossible") and de facto reproductive isolation, which has already been the case for many thousands of years, is not itself a principled distinction.
A less striking instance of the same phenomenon of gradualism is coming of age , in the sense of being mature enough and well enough informed to be suitable for marriage, or-to take a particularly clear case-to drive a car. It will come as no surprise, I take it, that there is no special moment of driver-edment, when a teenager crisply crossed the boundary between being too immature to have the right to apply for a driver's license, and being adult enough to be allowed the freedom of the highway behind the wheel. Some youngsters are manifestly mature enough at fourteen to be reasonable candidates for a driver's license, and others are still so heedless and impulsive at eighteen that one trembles at the prospect of letting them on the road. We have settled (in most jurisdictions) on the policy that age sixteen is a suitable threshold, and what this means is that we simply refuse to consider special pleading on behalf of unusually mature younger people, and also refrain from imposing extra hurdles on those sixteen-year-olds who manage to pass their driving test fair and square in spite of our misgivings about the safety of letting them on the road. In short, we settle on a conventional threshold which we know does not mark any special internal mark (brain myelination, IQ, factual knowledge, onset of puberty) but strikes us as a good-enough compromise between freedom and public safety. And once we settle on it, we stop treating the location of the threshold as a suitable subject for debate. There are many important controversies to consider and explore, and this isn't one of them. Not as a general rule. Surprising new discoveries may in principle trigger a reconsideration at any time, but we foster a sort of inertia that puts boundary disputes out of bounds for the time being.
Why isn't there constant pressure from fifteen-year-olds to lower the legal driving age? It is not just that they tend not to be a particularly well-organized or articulate constituency. Even they can recognize that soon enough they will be sixteen, and there are better ways to spend their energy than trying to adjust a policy that is, all things considered, quite reasonable. Moreover, there are useful features of the social dynamics that make it systematically difficult for them to mount a campaign for changing the age. We adults have created a tacit scaffolding of presumption, holding teenagers responsible before many of them have actually achieved the requisite competence, thereby encouraging them to try to grow into the status we purport to grant them and discouraging any behavior-any action that could be interpreted as throwing a tantrum, for instance-that would undercut their claim to maturity. They are caught in a bind: the more vehemently they protest, the more they cast doubt on the wisdom of their cause. In the vast array of projects that confront them, this is not an appealing choice.
The minimum driving age is not quite a sacred value, then, but it shares with sacred values the interesting feature of being considered best left unexamined, by common consensus among a sizable portion of the community. And there is a readily accessible reason for this inertia. We human beings lead lives that cast long beams of anticipation into the foggy future, and we appreciate-implicitly or explicitly-almost any fixed points that can reduce our uncertainty. Sometimes this is so obvious as to be trivial. Why save money for your children's education if money may not be worth anything in the future? How could you justify going to all the trouble of building a house if you couldn't count on the presumption that you will be able to occupy it without challenge? Law and order are preconditions for the sorts of ambitious life-planning we want to engage in. But we want more than just a strong state apparatus that can be counted on not to be vacillating in its legislation, or whimsical in enforcement. We, as a society, do need to draw some lines-"bright" lines in legalistic jargon-and stick with them. That means not just promulgating them and voting on them, but putting an unequal burden on any second-guessing, so that people can organize their life projects with the reasonable expectation that these are fixed points that aren't going to shift constantly under the pressure of one faction or another. We want there to be an ambient attitude of mutual recognition of the stability of the moral-not legal-presumptions that can be taken for granted, something approximating a meta-consensus among those who achieve the initial consensus about the threshold: let's leave well enough alone now that we've fixed it. In a world where every candidate for a bright line of morality is constantly under siege from partisans who would like to change it, one's confidence is shaken that one's everyday conduct is going to be above reproach. Consider that nowadays, in many parts of the world, women simply cannot wear fur coats in public with the attitudes their mothers could adopt. Today, wearing a fur coat is making a political statement, and one cannot escape that by simply disavowing the intent. Driving a gas-guzzling SUV carries a similar burden. People may resent the activities of the partisans who have achieved these shifts in opinion even though they may share many of their attitudes about animal rights or energy policy; they have made investments-in all innocence, let us suppose-that now are being disvalued. Had they been able to anticipate this shift in public opinion, they could have spent their money better.
These observations are not contentious, I think. How, though, can we apply this familiar understanding to the vexing issues surrounding the inception-and manipulation and termination-of human life, and the special status it is supposed to enjoy? By recognizing, first, that we are going to have to walk away from the traditional means of securing these boundaries, which are not going to keep on working. They are just too brittle for the 21st century.
These observations are not contentious, I think. How, though, can we apply this familiar understanding to the vexing issues surrounding the inception-and manipulation and termination-of human life, and the special status it is supposed to enjoy? By recognizing, first, that we are going to have to walk away from the traditional means of securing these boundaries, which are not going to keep on working. They are just too brittle for the 21st century.
We know too much. Unlike traditional sacred values that depend on widespread acceptance of myths (which, even if true, are manifestly unjustifiable-that's why we call them myths rather than common knowledge), we need to foster values that can withstand scrutiny about their own creation. That is to say, we have to become self-conscious about our reliance on such policies, without in the process destroying our faith in them.
Belief in Belief
We need to appreciate the importance in general of the phenomenon of belief in belief .6 Consider a few cases that are potent today. Because many of us believe in democracy and recognize that the security of democracy in the future depends critically on maintaining the belief in democracy, we are eager to quote (and quote and quote) Winston Churchill's famous line: "Democracy is the worst form of government except for all the others that have been tried." As stewards of democracy, we are often conflicted, eager to point to flaws that ought to be repaired, while just as eager to reassure people that the flaws are not that bad, that democracy can police itself, so their faith in it is not misplaced.
The same point can be made about science. Since the belief in the integrity of scientific procedures is almost as important as the actual integrity, there is always a tension between a whistle-blower and the authorities, even when they know that they have mistakenly conferred scientific respectability on a fraudulently obtained result. Should they quietly reject the offending work and discreetly dismiss the perpetrator, or make a big stink?iv
And certainly some of the intense public fascination with celebrity trials is to be explained by the fact that belief in the rule of law is considered to be a vital ingredient in our society, so if famous people are seen to be above the law, this jeopardizes the general trust in the rule of law. Hence we are not just interested in the trial, but in the public reactions to the trial, and the reactions to those reactions, creating a spiraling inflation of media coverage. We who live in democracies have become somewhat obsessed with gauging public opinion on all manner of topics, and for good reason: in a democracy it really matters what the people believe. If the public cannot be mobilized into extended periods of outrage by reports of corruption, or of the torturing of prisoners by our agents, for instance, our democratic checks and balances are in jeopardy. In his hopeful book, Development as Freedom and elsewhere,7 the Nobel laureate economist Amartya Sen makes the important point that you don't have to win an election to achieve your political aims. Even in shaky democracies, what the leaders believe about the beliefs that prevail in their countries influences what they take their realistic options to be, so belief-maintenance is an important political goal in its own right.
Even more important than political beliefs, in the eyes of many, are what we might call metaphysical beliefs. Nihilism-the belief in nothing - has been seen by many to be a deeply dangerous virus, for obvious reasons. When Friedrich Nietzsche hit upon his idea of the Eternal Recurrence-he thought he had proved that we relive our lives infinitely many times-his first inclination (according to some stories) was that he should kill himself without revealing the proof, in order to spare others from this life-destroying belief.8 Belief in the belief that something matters is understandably strong and widespread. Belief in free will is another vigorously protected vision, for the same reasons, and those whose investigations seem to others to jeopardize it are sometimes deliberately misrepresented in order to discredit what is seen as a dangerous trend.9 The physicist Paul Davies has recently defended the view that belief in free will is so important that it may be "a fiction worth maintaining."10 It is interesting that he doesn't seem to think that his own discovery of the awful truth (what he takes to be the awful truth) incapacitates him morally, but that others, more fragile than he, will need to be protected from it.
This illustrates the ever-present risk of paternalism when belief in belief encounters a threat: we must keep these facts from "the children," who cannot be expected to deal with them safely. And so people often become systematically disingenuous when defending a value. Being the unwitting or uncaring bearer of good news or bad news is one thing; being the self-appointed champion of an idea is something quite different. Once people start committing themselves (in public, or just in their "hearts") to particular ideas, a strange dynamic process is brought into being, in which the original commitment gets buried in pearly layers of defensive reaction and meta-reaction. "Personal rules are a recursive mechanism; they continually take their own pulse, and if they feel it falter, that very fact will cause further faltering," the psychiatrist George Ainslie observes in his remarkable book, Breakdown of Will .11 He describes the dynamic of these processes in terms of competing strategic commitments that can contest for control in an organization-or an individual. Once you start living by a set of explicit rules, the stakes are raised: when you lapse, what should you do? Punish yourself? Forgive yourself? Pretend you didn't notice?
After a lapse, the long-range interest is in the awkward position of a country that has threatened to go to war in a particular circumstance that has then occurred. The country wants to avoid war without destroying the credibility of its threat and may therefore look for ways to be seen as not having detected the circumstance. Your long-range interest will suffer if you catch yourself ignoring a lapse, but perhaps not if you can arrange to ignore it without catching yourself. This arrangement, too, must go undetected, which means that a successful process of ignoring must be among the many mental expedients that arise by trial and error-the ones you keep simply because they make you feel better without your realizing why.12
This idea that there are myths we live by, myths that must not be disturbed at any cost, is always in conflict with our ideal of truth-seeking and truth-telling, sometimes with lamentable results. For example, racism is at long last widely recognized as a great social evil, so many reflective people have come to endorse the second-order belief that belief in the equality of all people regardless of their race is to be vigorously fostered. How vigorously? Here people of good will differ sharply. Some believe that belief in racial differences is so pernicious that even when it is true it is to be squelched. This has led to some truly unfortunate excesses. For instance, there are clear clinical data about how people of different ethnicity are differently susceptible to disease, or respond differently to various drugs, but such data are considered off-limits by some researchers, and by some funders of research. This has the perverse effect that strongly indicated avenues of research are deliberately avoided, much to the detriment of the health of the ethnic groups involved.v
Ainslie uncovers strategic belief-maintenance in a wide variety of cherished human practices:
Activities that are spoiled by counting them, or counting on them, have to be undertaken through indirection if they are to stay valuable. For instance, romance undertaken for sex or even "to be loved" is thought of as crass, as are some of the most lucrative professions if undertaken for money, or performance art if done for effect. Too great an awareness of the motivational contingencies for sex, affection, money, or applause spoils the effort, and not only because it undeceives the other people involved. Beliefs about the intrinsic worth of these activities are valued beyond whatever accuracy these beliefs might have, because they promote the needed indirection.13
So what sort of equilibrium can we reach? If we want to maintain the momentousness of all decisions about life and death, and take the steps that elevate the decision beyond the practicalities of the moment, we need to secure the appreciation of this very fact and enliven the imaginations of people so that they can recognize, and avoid wherever possible, and condemn, activities that would tend to erode the public trust in the presuppositions about what is-and should be-unthinkable. A striking instance of failure to appreciate this is the proposal by President Bush to reconsider and unilaterally refine the Geneva Convention's deliberately vague characterization of torture as "outrages on personal dignity." By declaring that the United States is eager to be a pioneer in the adjustment of what has heretofore been mutually agreed to be unthinkable, this policy is deeply subversive of international trust, and of national integrity. We as a nation can no longer be plausibly viewed as above thinking of arguable exceptions to the sacred value of not torturing people, and this diminishes us in ways that will be difficult if not impossible to repair.
What forces can we hope to direct in our desire to preserve respect for human dignity? Laws prohibit ; traditions encourage and discourage , and in the long run, laws are powerless to hold the line unless they are supported by a tradition, by the mutual recognition of most of the people that they preserve conditions that deserve preservation. Global opinion, as we have just seen, cannot be counted on to discourage all acts of degradation of the belief environment, but it can be enhanced by more local traditions. Doctors, for instance, have their proprietary code of ethics, and most of them rightly covet the continuing respect of their colleagues, a motivation intensified by the system of legal liability and by the insurance that has become a prerequisite for practice. Then there are strict liability laws, which target particularly sensitive occupations such as pharmacist and doctor, preemptively removing the excuse of ignorance and thereby putting all who occupy these positions on notice that they will be held accountable whether or not they have what otherwise would be a reasonable claim of innocent ignorance. So forewarned, they adjust their standards and projects accordingly, erring on the side of extreme caution and keeping a healthy distance between themselves and legal consequences. Anyone who attempts to erect such a network of flexible and mutually supporting discouragements of further tampering with traditional ideas about human dignity will fail unless they attend to the carrot as well as the stick. How can we kindle and preserve a sincere allegiance to the ideals of human dignity? The same way we foster the love of a democratic and free society: by ensuring that the lives one can live in such a regime are so manifestly better than the available alternatives.
And what of those who are frankly impatient with tradition, and even with the values that tradition endorses? We must recognize that there are a vocal minority of people who profess unworried acceptance of an entirely practical and matter-of-fact approach to life, who scoff at romantic concerns with Frankensteinian visions. Given the presence and articulateness of these proponents, we do well to have a home base that can withstand scrutiny and that is prepared to defend, in terms other than nostalgia, the particular values that we are trying to protect. That is the germ of truth in multiculturalism. We need to articulate these values in open forum. When we attempt this, we need to resist the strong temptation to resort to the old myths, since they are increasingly incredible, and will only foster incredulity and cynicism in those we need to persuade. Tantrums in support of traditional myths will backfire, in other words. Our only chance of preserving a respectable remnant of the tradition is to ensure that the values we defend deserve the respect of all.vi
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FOONOTES
i. Phaedrus 265d-266a.
ii. The philosopher Wilfrid Sellars, in his essay "Philosophy and the Scientific Image of Man" (in Science, Perception, and Reality [London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1963]), distinguished between the manifest image of everyday life, with its tables and chairs, trees and rainbows, people and dreams, and the scientific image of atoms and particles and waves of electromagnetic radiation, and noted that the task of putting these two images into registration is far from straightforward. The dimension of meaning, which resides solely-it seems-in the manifest image, is resistant both to reduction (the way chemistry, supposedly, reduces to physics) and to any less demanding sort of unification or coordination with the scientific image. The tension we are exploring here is a particularly vivid and troubling case of the tension between these two images.
iii. My 2003 book, Freedom Evolves , is devoted to an explanation of how our capacity for moral agency evolved and continues to evolve. It begins with a quotation from a 1997 interview with Giulio Giorelli: " Sì, abbiamo un'anima. Ma è fatta di tanti piccoli robot.- Yes, we have a soul, but it's made of lots of tiny robots!" These "robots" are the mindless swarms of neurons and other cells that cooperate to produce a thinking thing-just not an immaterial thinking thing, as Descartes imagined and tradition has tended to suppose.
iv. As Richard Lewontin recently observed, "To survive, science must expose dishonesty, but every such public exposure produces cynicism about the purity and disinterestedness of the institution and provides fuel for ideological anti-rationalism. The revelation that the paradoxical Piltdown Man fossil skull was, in fact, a hoax was a great relief to perplexed paleontologists but a cause for great exultation in Texas tabernacles." See his "Dishonesty in Science," New York Review of Books , November 18, 2004, pp. 38-40.
v.There are significant differences in breast cancer, hypertension and diabetes, alcohol tolerance, and many other well-studied conditions. See Christopher Li, et al., "Differences in Breast Cancer Stage, Treatment, and Survival by Race and Ethnicity," Archives of Internal Medicine 163 (2003): 49-56; for an overview, see Health Sciences Policy Board (HSP) 2003, Unequal Treatment: Confronting Racial and Ethnic Disparities in Health Care.
vi. Thanks to Gary Wolf, Tori McGeer and Philip Pettit for asking questions that crystallized my thinking on these topics.
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EndNOTES
1. See Philip Tetlock, "Coping with Trade-offs: Psychological Constraints and Political Implications," in Political Reasoning and Choice , ed. Arthur Lupia, Matthew D. McCubbins and Samuel L. Popkin (Berkeley, California: University of California Press, 1999); "Thinking the unthinkable: sacred values and taboo cognitions," Trends in Cognitive Science 7 (2003): 320-324; and Philip Tetlock, A. Peter McGraw, and Orie V. Kristel, "Proscribed Forms of Social Cognition: Taboo Trade-Offs, Forbidden Base Rates, and Heretical Counterfactuals," in Relational Models Theory: A Contemporary Overview , ed. Nick Haslam (Mahway, New Jersey: Erlbaum, 2004), pp. 247-262, the latter also available online as Philip E. Tetlock, Orie V. Kristel, S. Beth Elson, Melanie C. Green, and Jennifer Lerner, "The Psychology of the Unthinkable: Taboo Trade-Offs, Forbidden Base Rates, and Heretical Counterfactuals," at http://faculty.haas.berkeley.edu/tetlock/docs/thepsy~1.doc. 2. Tetlock, et al., op. cit., p. 6 of online version. 3. Material in the previous two paragraphs is drawn from my Breaking the Spell: Religion as a Natural Phenomenon (New York: Viking Penguin, 2006), pp. 22-23. 4. Douglas Hofstadter, "Dilemmas for Superrational Thinkers, Leading up to a Luring Lottery," Scientific American , June, 1983, reprinted with a discussion of reverberant doubt in Metamagical Themas (New York: Basic Books, 1985), pp. 752-755. 5. Douglas Hofstadter, "Metafont, Metamathematics and Metaphysics," in Visible Language , August, 1982, reprinted with comments in Hofstadter, Metamagical Themas , pp. 290, 595.6. What follows is drawn, with revisions, from my Breaking the Spell , chapter 8. 7. Amartya Sen, Development as Freedom (New York: Knopf, 1999); see also his"Democracy and Its Global Roots," New Republic , October 6, 2003, pp. 28-35. 8. For a discussion of Nietzsche and his philosophical response to Darwin's theory of evolution by natural selection, see my Darwin's Dangerous Idea: Evolution and the Meanings of Life (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1995). 9. Daniel C. Dennett, Freedom Evolves (New York: Viking Penguin, 2003). 10. Paul Davies, "Undermining Free Will," Foreign Policy , September/October, 2004. 11. George Ainslie, Breakdown of Will (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), p. 88. 12. Ibid., p. 150. 13. George Ainslie, précis of Breakdown of Will, in Behavioral and Brain Sciences 28 (2005): 635-650, p. 649.
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