What is philosophy?

Pictured here is Professor Martha Nussbaum, whose feminine intellect (like every other woman's mind) is deemed "unimpressive" by Professor David Stove. The image may be blocked by N.J. mafia guys and gals in Trenton.



Allen Wood, "Philosophy: Enlightenment Apology, Enlightenment Critique," in C.P. Ragland & Sarah Heidt, eds., What is Philosophy? (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2001), p. 96.

Allen Wood is a professor of Philosophy at Stanford University, an expert on German Idealism and modern philosophy, who contributes a clear and elegant essay to this wonderful collection devoted to examining the question: "What is philosophy?"

Philosophy is a self-reflective activity concerned to understand what it is "about." This is because any answer to this question will be profoundly philosophical in itself and will constitute an agenda for future research. In other words, how you understand philosophy will determine how you philosophize.

Professor Wood defends the virtues of the Enlightenment tradition that has been under attack for several decades now, from all directions, both in Europe and America, but also among philosophers and students of Western thought in other parts of the world, where philosophy is a much more political calling and (often) a much more dangerous one.

This essay by Professor Wood is an "Apologetic" account of philosophy's mission to bring the lamp of reason to bear on our travels through the dark forest of social life. "Philosophy," Hegel says, "is our time comprehended in thought." Reason has been under attack too, of course, after Freud, Marx and Nietzsche -- the three thinkers described by Paul Ricoeur as the "Masters of Suspicion." Professor Wood anticipates these issues, offering a modest and chastened understanding of reason and of philosophy's role, writing in a neo-modernist (but not a post-modernist) mode:

Because in human life what exists is very seldom perfect -- or to put it as Hegel would, because what exists contingently is never fully rational, hence never fully actual -- to ask an analytical "What is X?" question about something human is often to invite an openly critical or even deflationary answer. No investigation of (really existing) Christianity can afford to ignore the roles moral hypocrisy and religious intolerance have played in this religion's practices, and no honest inquiry into the American Way can downplay the importance for American culture of such evils as white racism and capitalist exploitation. But for this very reason, apologetic treatments of Christianity will represent self-honesty and tolerance as among Christian virtues, and an apologetic account of the American Way will include racial equality and liberty and justice for all.

In the modern tradition, philosophy is seen as the mission of relying on reason, without "undue" expectations, to help us avoid bias and wish-fulfillment in our thinking, while still seeking objectivity, or some truth (and yes, there is such a thing as "truth") which is undistorted -- as much as possible -- by power-relations and conventional social pieties and hypocrisies.

Philosophy, as a chastened neo-Enlightenment ideal, is not an exaltation of the humble philosophical practioner as somehow above mere mortals. Rather, it is a counsel to humility for him or her. This is what our reasoning should be like, Professor Wood says, notice how far short of this ideal we often fall. We need ideals to point the way for us and to remind us of what remains to be accomplished, which is usually a lot.

Many critics of modernity often rely on Enlightenment ideals in formulating their own criticisms. Also, I doubt that we can dispense with such Enlightenment notions as the worthiness of the individual and the concept of inviolable political, legal and moral rights, to which this understanding of individual worth leads. Once, not so long ago, such notions even received legal respect in America.

In American Constitutional jurisprudence this language of "worth" has been translated recently into talk of individual "dignity" -- a value which the nation seems to be abandoning right now -- and "fundamental rights," which are pretty shaky too. The idea now seems to be that you can do whatever you like to people, so long as it is done secretly (that way you can deny it publicly) and provided that you can claim that what you are doing is for the person's own good (arrogating to yourself the right to make that determination for others). The State becomes a sort of, allegedly, benevolent dictator-therapist.

A combination of careerism and cowardice among judges and politicians seems to be weakening the commitment of America's national institutions to this foundational ideal and value of the society (the dignity of persons), as we wallow in ever-more disgusting displays of torture, "crimes against humanity," collateral damage to civilian targets and other monstrosities, not to mention the cover-ups that usually follow these activities. Doing something secretly that happens to be criminal, because you work for the government, does not make that crime "O.K." -- not even if you claim that it is for the victim's own good. The State should not be a dictator (benevolent or otherwise) nor a therapist. ("New Jersey's Office of Attorney Ethics.")

Worst of all are jurisdictions, like New Jersey and a few others, which have become by-words for corruption and incompetence. A recent contest for a state slogan in Trenton resulted in the following submission: "New Jersey: What's that smell?"

What is done secretly to persons in the U.S., usually in contempt for the principles of the Constitution, can only be estimated from the disturbing evidence all around us and the testimony provided by many persons, usually minority group members, of tainted legal proceedings combined with imbecility in high places. But enough about the Garden State. After all, we are always heartened by the efforts of the many men and women -- even in that state -- struggling against many obstacles, to do the right things. The framers of the Constitution must be spinning in their graves.

Agreeing with most of Professor Wood's claims, I am troubled by two issues: 1) the contribution of emotions, or the "scope" and "definition" of reason in all of this; and 2) charges of elitism and the compatibility of this "responsible individualism" -- that is, his defense of freedom in philosophical work -- with a version of socialist or communitarian politics that I favor.

For I think an apologetic understanding of philosophy should stress its distinctness from both art and religion, and should focus on the attempt of unaided human reason to understand the world and act in it.

Professor Wood goes on to say:

Philosophy does not necessarily spurn poetic imagination or religious revelation -- and it may even regard these as essential to achieving the ends of human life -- but it takes human reason to be the only permissible criterion of what is genuine in them, and in that sense to be their proper measure as well.

My answer to this is "What do you mean by reason?" Emotions and emotional intelligence will never be irrelevant to the assesment of rationality in human social arrangements or moral prescriptions. In the quest for rationality we must not exclude emotions and feeling responses to human social realities. Gunther Anders defines "soul blindness" as the absence of feeling in rational responses to human predicaments. A discussion of the Holocaust, slavery or Hiroshima that is entirely neutral and dispassionate is no longer a human discussion nor a very rational one for that matter. Arthur Danto comments of Susan Langer's work:

... for her, perhaps because we are never not embodied, feeling is our essence as human beings, and rational thought but one of its more perspicuous modes. The shift of feeling to center stage in our mental life must in her case be explained by the shifting of art to center stage in what she supposed was a philosophy of the human spirit more adequate than [that of] her predecessors -- with the exception perhaps of Schopenhauer, whom she greatly resembles as a thinker ...

John Macquarrie's treatise on Existentialism contains an excellent discussion of the cognitive value of emotions and feeling states:

If our account of the feelings is, up to this point, correct, so that it can be acknowledged that they "attune" us to the world and that at least the more sophisticated feelings are close to reason, then the possibility that feeling may yield some genuine insights having philosophical interest cannot be dismissed out of hand. It could even be the case that this intimate relation to the world through feeling could disclose to us truths concerning the world such as would be quite inaccessible through that mere beholding which characterizes our observation of the world through the senses.

This will come as news to lawyers, whose affective responses are beaten out of them in the law school process. As a corrective, I like Brand Blanshard's idea of "cognitive sanity" as essential to reason and the philosophical enterprise. Although Blanshard is a rationalist, he is more generous in his understanding of reason and rationality than most analytical philosophers.

The notion of rationality and reason as a kind of Jamesian "tough-mindedness," that is exclusive of emotion, fails to see the bias in neutrality (the lack of neutrality in neutrality) explaining its tilt towards the status quo. This hypocrisy is what I deplore in Law and Economics. The issue is never whether emotions will be relevant to reasoning. You can be sure that they will be. The question is whether this emotional tone to our thinking will be recognized and examined, honestly and explicitly, so that emotions will be cultivated and developed, or whether we will pretend -- either as students of legal texts or philosophers -- that we are scientists or machines, without emotions, engaged merely in a cold analytical process. ("Errors" were inserted in this essay since my last reading, errors which I have now corrected.)

No reading of a text is ever entirely dispassionate or disinterested. It should not be. Neither is the best science. Great scientists delight in thinking and speculating, pondering the elegance and beauty in the universe that they see and marvel at. Like the best artists, the finest scientists are "at play" when they do their work. Their true interest is in the joy of learning. This is almost an aesthetic pleasure for those who acquire it, whether they happen to be scientists or philosophers, social scientists or lawyers, humanists and/or artists.

While I believe that cogitation or "pure" ratiocination -- to the extent that it is possible for us -- is essential in philosophy, I am certain that imagination and intuition leading to insight and creativity are equally essential. Both are part of reasoning, and each is involved in the other. This is true in law, social science, criticism and (for Einstein) in science too. Those feminine "mushy emotions" only become more important as we seek to exclude or repress them from the vital "masculine" business of judging political options or legal solutions, or even the results of experiments. I am aware that the use of the terms "masculine" and "feminine" in this paragraph is tendentious. My purpose is to be annoying enough to get the reader to think. We need emotional wisdom as much as any other kind of intelligence. (Another set of "errors" has been inserted in this paragraph, and I have also corrected these errors -- which will be reinserted before my next review of this text.)

If emotions are dismissed by these philosopher "guys" as "feminine," then masculine "cognitive functions" -- that are adored by these same guys -- better watch out, because the emotions have now become militant feminists, insisting on being included at the tables of power. This last statement is metaphorical, whimsical, humorous, imaginative (I hope), but it has argumentative content, so that it illustrates my point.

I am suggesting that philosophical writing or other communicative efforts can be essentially "rationally argumentative," while at the same time, characterized by emotive "tone." It should be o.k. for such writings also to be fun. Reasonable arguments, again, include both affective tone and intellectual substance. If you prefer to use the language of gender, then they should be regarded as both masculine and feminine. This is to impose a pattern that will make "thematic" sense of large amounts of information.

"Elitism" charges rear their ugly head at this point. Ignore them. There is nothing elitist about this, since emotions may be cultivated and trained or disciplined in everyone, so as to enhance cognitive functions. Literal minded and slow-witted types will complain that feeling is one thing and thinking is another, but they are not really. Desires, wishes, fears and hopes lurk in our most seemingly dispassionate philosophies, theories, studies and plans, or legal decisions. No, this does not make everything "relative" so that there is no truth or objectivity. It means that, in thinking, we must accept ambiguity, complexity and profundity: Yes, the glass is half-full; and no, it isn't, because it is really half-empty. Both claims are objectively true, at the same time. I hate to break the news to those who find this puzzling, but we live a complex universe -- and we are all, even accountants, somewhat complex ourselves.

"Aha! That means it's all relative!" No, the person asserting that the glass is half full is speaking the truth, as far as his statement goes; the observer claiming that the glass is half empty is also speaking the truth, as far as her statement goes; now, if only we can put the two statements together, we may see a larger truth, a more "absolute truth." (See my essays on F.H. Bradley.) As for the social component of an Individualist or neo-Enlightenment ethic, this is the point when Hegel rescues Kant:

One obvious result of reflective self-knowledge, however, is the discovery that as a human being the philosopher needs to live with other human beings, and that in order to fulfill their human natures philosophers cannot withdraw from society but must cultivate in themselves the right kind of sociability. This argument clearly needs to be filled out by a demonstration that the philosopher needs a sociability of probity and devotion to the common interest rather than one of self-interested manipulation and opportunistic exploitativeness.

Appropriate respect for the individual and his or her freedom leads to a recognition of the equal right to freedom of others. Also, it forces a recognition of the conditions that make that right in others truly meaningful, so that they will be genuinely free. Hence, from Hegel we move to Marx, along with various forms of socially engaged existentialism and neo-Thomism. Philosophy, as understood in this tradition, directs us to a concern with ethics and social action. From the Self we move to the Other. One word for this moving is politics, another is law. Our understanding of these phenomena, to the extent that it seeks to be reasonable and universal, may be described as philosophy. I urge everyone to read John MacMurray's The Self as Agent.

A Christmas Hope.

My Love,

It is after midnight as I write these words. My hand-written, first draft of this note was composed on a long, yellow legal pad, with a ballpoint pen. I am listening to music, playing softly (I don't wish to disturb anyone else), as I sip my mint tea.

There is so much that I want to tell you. I long to hear you laugh again, to see that smiling, skeptical expression on your face when you hear me say something that you know will turn into a joke. I love the way you see through me and love me anyway -- love me because you see me. I love what you are that you try not to be, hiding it from the world. I cherish, most of all, those qualities in you that I alone see so well. Your vulnerability and tenderness. Your goodness. Yes, goodness.

This is a difficult time of the year. The pain of your absence is sharper than usual. That ache from missing you is my war wound. I show it to the world because it connects me to you. I won't let you be forgotten, nor will what has been done to you go unpunished. I hope and believe that there will be a day of reckoning. I wonder whether anyone can doubt that I am willing to give my life so that you will receive the recognition and love that you deserve. You matter. You are important, priceless, infinite.

The night before the transit strike here in New York -- my sense of time alters when I speak to you -- whenever that was (it seems like ages ago now), I rushed out to purchase gifts, very inexpensive ones, for you and others I love. I thought of things for you to wear, bright colors, green, blue and red. Music, gentle and sweet music for you. There is enough sadness and struggle for us, that we need not hear those things in our music. It occurs to me that I have never listened to music with you, and yet there is music in my mind when I think of you. Music enters the room with you.

"How can you love her?" How can I not love her? There is no "best me" without this love for you. Loving you is what I "do" best. Loving you is what my life is about. I am this love -- ALL of my loves -- at my center or deepest self. I would not be able to go on living without that love.

Our loves define us, don't they? If you connect them, like dots on the page, they add up to an image of the self. They tell us who we are, but also what our lives mean. We see our truest portraits in those images of loves shared in time. This love that I am is a reminder of you, every day, especially when it hurts -- like a child in the belly kicking his mother for a little attention. Inside, deep inside myself, is where I find you because that center is my love. I cannot find you, physically, in the public world that is shared with others, so I have made us a world of our own, a small cottage -- built with words -- in the Forest of Arden. It is my sanctuary. It is where we are right now.

"You'll never see her again," they say. I answer: "I see her, here and now, every day. And I will see her, someday, in my city. I will hold her in my arms." She will have some happiness in her life. My fears are that you have been hurt, physically, are unaware of my thoughts or attempts to communicate with you, to reach you (somehow), despite all of the obstructions and uncertainties. How do you explain what it is like not to know whether someone you love is alive or dead, where she may be, what has been done to her? The worst things you can imagine have gone through my mind. They go through my mind every day.

"We'll just pretend that nothing happened." I don't think so.

Is there something in the music about you? A message? No, just fragile beauty. But then, all art (for me) is about you, if it is good art. Is this a happy season for you? Does this holiday mean something for you?

I would make Christmas special for you. I would read you some of my favorite Christmas stories. I would surprise you with funny gifts. Hide some special things under the furniture, have you search for them. Leave milk and cookies for Santa, place pretty earrings in your stocking. Rent those great, old Christmas movies. Find ways to make you laugh, ease that pain that I see in you and that I wish to take away.

Are you safe? Are you warm enough? How do you wear your hair now? Is it gray? Mine is. What clothes do you like? With my eyes closed, I touch your face with my finger tips (like a blind man reading braille), remembering the desire and bewildered, wounded expression in your eyes. I experience again the fresh, soapy scent in your hair, taking your left hand, with the freckle between thumb and forefinger in my own, I brush my lips against that hand.

There has been so much evil directed at you. You've been so hurt by it. I've been hurt too. It'll be O.K., now. Wherever you are. Whatever they are doing to you, hold on. Believe that I will find you. Think about how much I love you -- wrap yourself in that love, like an old blanket -- and it will keep you safe. I think this holiday is about that, in a way. The celebration of love that brings comfort, peace and hope, especially hope, together with the promise of rebirth, also renewal.

This note is a message in a bottle that I cast into an electronic sea. Will it reach you? I have no idea. The effort to reach you is a hope. And this is the season for hoping. So I'm hoping.

I wear a ring on the third finger of my left hand. It has two stones, blue saphire and red ruby. They are not expensive, only priceless. They symbolize many things. The stones sparkle with special brilliance today. I think of our love's two best jewels, knowing that they will sparkle too. And I think of you, smiling, hands on hips. I spread my dreams, wrapped with a green bow, at your feet and I continue to hope.

Soon. Always.

Why we must protect science.

John Horgan, "Political Science," in The New York Times, Sunday, December 18, 2005, at p. 11.
Chris Mooney, The Republican War on Science (New York: Basic Books, 2005), $24.95.



A federal judge in Pennsylvania today decided, wisely, that "intelligent design" should not be included in the biology curriculum of a High School in that state, since it is a hidden form of religious instruction or belief, so that it may not be mandated by the state. I argued for exactly this conclusion in an earlier post at "Critical Vision," entitled: "Charles Darwin and the Intelligent Designers."

In the Sunday Times, an intriguing recent book is reviewed and a new term is introduced into our public discourse about science -- "science abuse." I love it. I will make use of it, as the flip side of "scientism." Science abuse is defined as:

... any attempt to inappropriately undermine, alter or otherwise interfere with the scientific process, or scientific conclusions, for political or ideological reasons.

I would add "for religious reasons" to this definition. Although Mr. Mooney's book focuses on Republicans, I think the term should be applied to public officials, of either party, who seek to interfere with or alter the scientific process or the conclusions drawn by scientists about science and the empirical world. We can disagree with scientists (or anyone else) concerning value judgments or politics, the ethical or aesthetic implications or meanings of current scientific knowledge, or concerning spiritual values, but determinations of the content of our scientific knowledge must be left to scientists. I am looking forward to reading A People's History of Science.

Notice that I am setting aside, for the moment, issues concerning the objectivity of scientific knowledge as a picture of empirical reality or doubts (I don't have any) about the values of the scientific enterprise, since I think conclusions about matters that are internal to a practice -- say, biological study and research -- should also be made first and most importantly by scientists. The rest of us are free to raise other criticisms (of an ethical sort) in response to such judgments.

Grudgingly, Mr. Mooney acknowledges that science abuse is not exclusively a right-wing "sin" (I couldn't resist that last word), so he criticizes Greenpeace for exaggerating the risks of genetically modified "Frankenfoods," while listing other anti-science blunders of the self-styled "pro-science" faction of Leftist fashionistas, as they munch on macrobiotic rice and protest against George W. Bush, in their black Converse sneakers, with a hand-painted peace sign taped to their bodies.

Mr. Mooney's worst criticisms are reserved, quite properly, for the idiotic opposition to Darwin and evolution, along with the many other foolish attacks on science, from arch-conservatives. These people mistakenly believe that religious faith requires conflict with science. It doesn't. To those objecting to evolution on the grounds that they are "not descended from apes," I say: "That's how you prove that you ARE an ape, you moron."

Darwin suggested that humans and apes have a "common ancestor," but not that we are directly descended from apes. In a way, however, we are directly related to all animal life on the planet, since all mammals have common ancestors in the first creatures to emerge from the sea, giving rise to the evolution of mammals, like us, over millions of years of development in reaction to a changing environment.

"I am not a mammal," your local Christian fundamentalist insists, "I am an Episcopelian!"

I offer the only possible rational response that can be given by a civilized human being to this statement: "It's the same thing, folks." Since all persons are mammals, and all Episcopelians are (allegedly) persons, it follows that Episcopelians are mammals. QED. Of course, this proof may not apply to Baptists.

I hate to break the news to Christian fundamentalists or to any other religious dogmatists, but they are indeed animals, just like the rest of us. On the other hand, we are really special animals, capable (I think) of freedom, of creating and appreciating beauty, and of loving others. We are animals who make ourselves something more by developing a healthy spirituality in our natures. Some of us even become scientists, contributing to everyone's understanding of nature.

I prefer to think that I am related to the peaceful creatures that I have seen in the Bronx Zoo, than to admit that I am a member of the same species that produces someone like Hitler or Stalin on a regular basis. Steven Jay Gould said pretty much the same thing years ago. Thank goodness for Da Vinci and Einstein, Jane Austen and Immanuel Kant, Thomas Jefferson and Martin Luther King, Jr., who balance the scales as much as possible.

Science tells us "what's up" with the world in which we live. Why does the earth orbit the sun? How did we come to be the creatures that we are? What's peanut butter made of? How come my socks don't stay up? That kind of stuff. Science ALONE tells us these things. Yet our values questions cannot be answered by science. What is beauty? Is there a God? What is the most just form of political order?

Scientific inquiries should be supplemented by other forms of inquiry that are concerned with human meanings. This is not a criticism of science. It is a way of recognizing our complexity and the limitations of all forms of inquiry.

These values questions allow scientists to express opinions and to reason with us, as fellow citizens, not as bringers of truth but only as fellow "humble inquirers." The same goes for religious people when they enter ethical debates in the public square. Even politicians are inspired to say: "On the one hand," and then, "on the other hand." Ethical truths that we discover and/or create are communal property. They are fashioned collectively, by humanity, based on philosophical wisdom and usually all-too slowly, over decades and centuries. Hey, science works that way too. How about that? Cool.

Philosophical ability is an equal opportunity talent found in everyone. ("Latinos are not smart enough to be philosophers," I was told.) It requires that we make use of science and many other disciplines, also that we develop emotional wisdom and a talent for sound judgment. But then, come to think of it, scientific ability is also found in all sorts of people. If more of us received a better scientific education, then we may expect greater progress in science. How about more scholarships for poor children to study science? I am "for" that.

Don't mess with science. Don't politicize it. Science is great. But there will always be questions that science cannot answer for us, as I say, because we -- each of us (individually) and all of us (collectively) -- are required to figure out these answers for ourselves, that is, if we wish to remain free. Wisdom must be achieved by each of us and cannot be a gift to us from men and women in white coats.

What's life about? What is good? Why are women so difficult to understand? These are the eternal questions of philosophy which remains (for me) the "Queen of the Sciences." Mostly this is because philosophy is not -- and can never be -- a science. For one thing, philosophy needs to ask questions about the ethics of science that are not scientific questions. These questions have puzzled humanity for centuries; they will continue to do so. Yet we must continue to try to answer them because they are really important questions.

Stephen Jay Gould explained that he was not dismayed by this inability of science to solve philosophical or ethical issues because he did not believe that nature should contain moral messages for us, but that we must construct or discover our own ethical truths, freely, based on the objective needs of people and careful reasoning. I remember Carl Sagan agreeing with this conclusion in the series "Cosmos." Sagan believed that it was a good thing that we are FREE to philosophize as well as to pursue scientific investigations. Me too.

If you prefer Marx to my philosophical heros (Kant, Jefferson, Hegel, Bradley, Ricoeur and a few others), then remember that great sentence from his writings: "From each according to his ability to each according to his [or her] needs." Or just read your Bible, as literature or religiously, depending on your inclination. Shakespeare won't kill you either. Many scientists read both works of scientific scholarship and great humanistic texts. Alternatively, you may wish to reflect on the great rationality and order, the beauty and elegance revealed by science in the universe where we find ourselves, but also to ponder the beauty in us, in an entirely secular way.

Final decisions concerning right and wrong, freedom and equality will remain for you to make, for yourself, and not for anyone to make on your behalf. In arriving at those decisions, you will find help from many sources, poets and painters, philosophers, scientists and actors, even lawyers and those much dreaded accountants (gulp) may be helpful. But you will not get better advice on how to be a good person than this: "Whatsoever you do to the least of these brothers [and sisters] of mine, that you do on to me."

In Oscar Wilde's De Profundis, the thought is expressed in more contemporary terms:

... whatever happens to another happens to oneself, and if you want an inscription to read at dawn and at nighttime and for pleasure or for pain, write on the wall of your house in letters for the sun to guild and the moon to silver "Whatever happens to another happens to oneself," and should anyone ask you what such an inscription can possibly mean, you can answer that it means "Lord Christ's heart and Shakespeare's brain."

This sounds a lot like an ethic of love. Great, it allows us to love both scientists and religious people. My guess is that, in contemporary America, we are likely to run into persons who are religious and into others who are scientifically-minded. It is also possible for any one of us to become both religious (or spiritually-minded) and scientific. Now that's what I call the best of both worlds, a kind of metaphysical bipartisanship, finding support from both sides of the academic aisle.

W.E.B. DuBois on: "How it Feels to be a Problem."

W.E.B. DuBois, "Of Our Spiritual Strivings," in Eric and Mary Josephson, eds., Man Alone: Alienation in Modern Society (New York: Dell, 1962), p. 339.
Derrick Bell, And We Are Not Saved: The Elusive Quest for Racial Justice (New York: Basic Books, 1997).
Cornel West, The Cornel West Reader (New York: Basic Books, 1999), p. 91.

I am eight years-old. I am in second grade, sitting in the first row, by the window. I am dressed funny. Everybody else looks really nice. They have clean clothes, pretty new things, especially the girls. Some of them are blond, others have light brown or reddish hair. This is something I have not seen before. So many blond persons. I do not understand what people are saying. I know they are laughing at me, sometimes, but I can't say anything in response.

I don't know how to say that I want to go to the bathroom. I will hold it in until I leave school. "Discipline is important," Zorro said this in my favorite t.v. show, before I came to America. Zorro is my favorite hero because he was a defender of "little people."

I am the first person in the clasroom who speaks Spanish. Another student speaks Portuguese and is supposed to translate for me, even though I only speak Spanish. I guess the teacher figured that Portuguese is close enough to my language. Maybe he speaks a few words of Spanish. He clearly does not want to be associated with me.

I am separated from my mother and father. My sister is also in this school somewhere. If we have to run out of here, if there is a bomb or something, I don't think that I'll "duck and cover." I think about having to find her first. I will scream out her name in the hallways and look for her, if there is an attack by some hostile power. You never know.

My uncle said that I must protect her.

Another boy looks at me and laughs. I will punch him in the face when we get outside. My uncle explained to me that I must not allow boys to laugh at me or touch me. I am not sure what I must do about girls because they are very puzzling creatures. As a matter of fact, I still feel this way. This is because they are indeed very puzzling creatures.

I am "different." That is the lesson that I am learning today. My food, clothes, way of being is different. The actual school work here is easy, even though I don't speak the language. I was way ahead of these lessons in my math class in Cuba.

There is one other student who is different too. Her name is "Tracy." Her skin is dark. She looks like my friends in Cuba. My skin is white. I am supposed to feel special because of this, but I don't. It wasn't like this where I had lived before. She is nice and smiles at me. She is sitting at the opposite side of the room. She is looking at everyone the way I look at them, warily and defensively. She has long "pig tails," a bow in her hair, and wears a nice dress. She is nice to me. Other children in class do not speak to her. I do not understand this. This is a strange place.

I am visiting a strange planet.

How does it feel to be a problem? they say I know an excellent colored man in my town; or I fought at Mechanicsville; or, Do not these Southern outrages make your blood boil? At these I smile, or am interested, or reduce the boiling to a simmer, as the occasion may require. To the real question, How does it feel to be a problem? I answer seldom a word.

Du Bois explains what it feels like to discover that one is "different," that one is fascinated by and attracted to what greets us with ambiguity or even hostility. We are charmed and repelled by a society in which we find ourselves judged and categorized, as children, when we cannot yet understand why this is happening. He explains the child's discovery of difference at the moment when the mirror is broken and the self is split in two: there is suddenly a person who observes and judges -- because he (or she) is aware of being observed and judged; and there is a person whom others see, who is reduced to what can be observed, from the outside. R.D. Laing has understood this phenomenon better than any other psychiatrist or psychologist whose works I know, having developed the concept of "ontological" division and insecurity.

"... Laing's first book, The Divided Self, published in 1960, thematized the problem of ontological insecurity experienced by people whose needs, feelings and experiences are consistently invalidated in early childhood."

Daniel Burston, The Crucible of Experience: R.D. Laing and the Crisis of Psychotherapy (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2000), p. 3. (Every African-American person, without exception, will have to contend with this issue to some degree in American society.)

Some people identify with those doing the judging, want to have power and become that other person (most people); others, a few, prefer the company of those who are judged and dismissed, who do not wish to have power or to be identified with it. It sometimes takes a while to figure out in which group we belong. Sadly, "errors" will continue to be inserted in this text in an effort at disconfirmation of identity and infliction of emotional distress that is now several decades old. ("What is it like to be tortured?")

I believe that Tracy, who was nice enough to take me to the playground after school, also discovered this division in herself at about the same time that I did. Maybe, on the same day, in the same classroom. W.E.B. DuBois experienced something similar, many years earlier:

In a wee wooden schoolhouse, something put it into the boys' and girls' heads to buy gorgeous visiting cards -- ten cents a package -- and exchange. The exchange was merry till one girl, a newcomer, refused my card -- refused it peremptorily, with a glance. Then it dawned upon me with a certain suddenness that I was different from the others; or like, mayhap, in heart and life and longing, but shut out from their world by a vast veil.

I remember looking at my clothes. They were from the Salvation Army. The pants were too short. The shirt was too small. I guess that I looked even funnier than I felt. No wonder people were laughing.

There was a sadness about Tracy that lingers in my memory. She was not laughed at, as I was, but it was like she was not there. The other children played and talked around her, but not with or to her. Yet she had the loveliest smile and gentlest eyes that I had ever seen. Wherever she is now, I hope she's running a big corporation or doing something important, because she was a good and responsible person, even then.

I had a tiny Bible, given to me when I arrived in America. I looked at it to figure out English words. She had a Bible too. The pictures were great. DuBois explains what happens to children who experience such things:

One feels his twoness -- an American, a Negro, two souls, two unreconciled strivings, two warring ideals in one dark body, whose dogged strength alone keeps it from being torn asunder. ...

... He wishes to make it possible for a man to be both a Negro and an American, without being cursed and spit upon by his fellows, without having the doors of opportunity closed roughly in his face.

I remember newsreels about the civil rights struggle, riots nearby, and Dr. King's speeches. I remember people saying that Dr. King was a Communist and a bad man. I knew that was a lie because I already recognized goodness. I saw it on t.v. when he spoke. I wanted to be with him. I kept silent because, if I argued, I might get hit (especially if I won the argument).

Many adults do not like it if you have opinions that differ from theirs, especially if you have good reasons for those opinions. I notice that many adults still feel this way. Some are judges or politicians. Others are psychologists who explain that your opinions must be changed "for your own good," so you can "adjust."

I will never discourage children from holding and expressing opinions. I will never hit a child, nor a woman. I will struggle to avoid all violence. I have kept these promises to myself all of these years. I also learned then to come to my own conclusions and never to allow anyone to alter my thinking, either with violence or threats, but only to reflect on the reasons for what I believe and to try to be open to persuasion. If everybody else believes something, then I am even more suspicious of that belief. The things that everyone believes are usually much too convenient and much too good to be true.

I wanted then, what I want now -- what we all want -- freedom. I refused and will always refuse to accept any and all imprisoning categories. I am not what they see and laugh at; I am not what my uncle is; I am not what I was before I came here. I am what exists between "I am not" and "I will be." For this reason the insertion of "errors" in my writings will not bring about the desired collapse. I will not be made into a slave.

Freedom, too, the long sought, we still seek -- the freedom of life and limb, the freedom to work and think, the freedom to love and aspire. Work, culture, liberty -- all these we need, not singly but together, not successively but together, each growing and aiding each, and all striving towards that vaster ideal that swims before the Negro people, the ideal of human brotherhood, gained through the unifying ideal of Race; the ideal of fostering the traits and talents of the Negro, not in opposition to or contempt for other races, but rather in large comformity to the larger ideals of the American Republic, in order that some day on American soil two world races may give each to each those characteristics both so sadly lack.

The place between "I am not" and "I will be" is where you will find W.E.B. DuBois and Dr. King. It is the spiritual homeland of all African-Americans, because it is the truth about America's promise and it is hope, always hope, for a people who have experienced evil at first hand, who are, in a sense, journeying home from exile.

Both Dr. King and W.E.B. DuBois, but also James Baldwin, Maya Angelou (look at their smiles and at their eyes when they smile), Amiri Baraka, Toni Morrison and so many others can help you get there. They want you to join them on this journey. They (and we) are still struggling.

And still we are not saved ...

A Note on the Epistemology of Science.

Images continue to be blocked, texts are altered and damaged by hackers. This is intended as a response to what I say, I guess, and (allegedly) such tactics are a defense of "science." I am sure readers will come to their own conclusion on this issue.




In The New York Times Magazine, December 11, 2005, at pp. 27-28, there is a fine essay concerning the importance of science and the public hostility towards it. Much of this essay, written by Jim Holt, expresses what I believe. For example, Mr. Holt speaks of the need to improve basic education in the sciences and to increase the amount of scientific knowledge available to ordinary people.

I certainly need to learn more science. What little I know of science, I have learned from articles in The New York Review of Books or from bestsellers explaining science to us morons. Thanks to the PBS "Nova" series, Carl Sagan and Stephen Jay Gould, also Steven Hawking and Brian Greene are my science gurus.

I am a critic of claims by science or (more likely) "science-worshippers" -- who are rarely scientists -- to usurp the knowledge field, in its entirety. There are a couple of points in Mr. Holt's intelligent and useful essay that I found troublesome. Before discussing those points, I wish to note my general agreement with much of what he has to say. Mr. Holt says:

Science is also a rival to other world views that most people find more congenial. In hopes of allaying the sense of rivalry, it is often said that science and religious faith are compatible, since the former deals with "how" questions, the latter with "why" questions. As an empirical matter [the focus on the empirical already limits the inquiry to the province of science], however, that does not seem to be true. On the whole, around 9 in 10 Americans say they believe in a personal God. When scientists are surveyed that figure falls to 4 in 10. Among the scientific elite ... fewer than 1 in 10 say they believe in God, with the biologists in particular professing agnosticism or atheism at a rate of 95 percent.

The implication of this statement is that hostility to science is a by-product of religious belief or common only among those benighted masses still clinging to quaint notions of faith, such as belief in a personal God, whereas scientists are "tough-minded" realists concerned to see the world as it "really" is. The shade of William James seems to hover over this tendentious formulation of the issue.

Well, I don't believe in a personal God. I am not a member of any organized religion, so that I have been assured that I "will burn in hell forever!" Since I will be sharing rooms with a substantial number of scientists, philosophers, artists and most of the interesting people that I know, this thought does not trouble me too much. Gore Vidal will get the penthouse suite, in fact, and Christopher Hitchens will live right next door.

Religion has nothing to do with my reservations about science. The claim made on behalf of science to exclusiveness as concerns "real" knowledge, is what troubles me. Here is what Mr. Holt says on this issue:

... by limiting itself to "natural" explanations, it [science] blinds itself to the supernatural order that gives meaning to the universe. The problem is that no one has ever shown how supernatural causes can be accomodated by the scientific method, which relies on testability to produce consensus.

Notice the value term that is slipped into the discussion at this point: "supernatural." There is science and then there is the "supernatural." I do not accept that division of the intellectual and knowledge field, since I am certain that it relies on philosophical assumptions that are precisely what I question in the ideology or "religion" of science -- assumptions that are usually, disingenuously, disclaimed by adherents of the science "faith," as distinct from science itself. Mr. Holt is careful to insist that he is not an adherent of "scientism," even as he reveals assumptions that may well be characterized as a form of scientism.

What is meant by "testability"? Empirical verification? Much of science is not subject to empirical verification, so is much work in mathematics. The validity of the principle that empirical verification is the criterion of the real (What kind of "real"?) is not subject to empirical verification, so it is self-refuting.

I am sure that it is perfectly natural and appropriate to seek answers to questions of meaning from dialogue and shared experiences of art. These are kinds of knowing where emotions and feelings are important, although they have nothing to do with the scientific method. To ask for naturalistic scientific method to validate claims that are not concerned with the empirical realm (though they may refer to it) is to miss the point of inquiries into meaning and/or faith, and/or aesthetics, religion or ethics.

Romantic passion (as distinct from sex) may not necessarily be accomodated to the scientific method, being a cultural phenomenon as much as -- or more than -- a biological one. (See the writings of Professor Robert C. Solomon.) This does not make romance or loving "unreal," or anything less than a graduate course in life's values. The women I love have taught me more than any book that I have ever read. Probably the same may be said by Mr. Holt. "To know and love another human being," Evelyn Waugh writes in Brideshead Revisited, "is the beginning of all wisdom."

Argument is a valuable means of acquiring knowledge of reality that is quite natural to humans, though it may have nothing to do with empirical testing. Alas, even pernicious arguments are not necessarily falsifiable through experimentation -- though it would be nice if they were -- but they are rarely persuasive when met with counter-arguments. The point is that science and humanistic inquiries should be complimentary.

A lot of science these days is not subject to laboratory verification. For example:

What gamer programs do with increasing speed, sophistication and computational muscle, Dr. Hamilton said, is visualize things that have never been seen in the real world. And what Einstein described, especially in his theory of general relativity, are forces of time and space literally outside the real world we know or can know.

And:

The central goal, Dr. Hamilton said, is both simple and mind-bendingly paradoxical: to visualize what cannot be seen.

Kirk Johnson, "Theoretical Physics in Video: A Thrill Ride to the Other Side of Infinity," in The New York Times, February 28, 2006, at p. F1. (Philosophical methods of "thought experimentation" used in science.)


Is there a God? This is a question which the traditional methods of science cannot answer. No experiment will do so. The key to this question is, of course, what is meant by the word "God." Here are some more "natural" questions which science also cannot answer: What is good? Is science good? (I think that it is.) What is beauty? Is it different from what we happen to find beautiful in one society or another, which is an empirical question? Are we free? What is freedom? What is personal identity? Or the Clintonesque conundrum in logic and linguistics: What is "is"?

None of these questions involves consulting a personal God. None of them are about the "supernatural." They are questions that arise quite naturally and concern our human natures, but they are not necessarily empirically resolvable. I don't believe that anyone would suggest that they are meaningless or trivialize them as the sort of thing that only people who still believe in a personal God would worry about, right before they go bowling or attend a midget wrestling match. Mr. Holt is careful and wishes to "hedge his bets," as it were:

You might concede that science is A path to the truth but deny that it is THE path.

Notice the failure to see that the crucial issue is not whether science is a path to knowledge. Of course, it is. And there are others. Science provides us with knowledge of the empirical world and of how that world "works." This includes us, persons as natural beings, but it does not necessarily provide us with meaning nor with assessments of truths that are unconcerned with the empirical world (truths which are directed to the inner world of feeling or the social world of ethics and politics), nor can it help us much with wisdom, especially emotional wisdom. For this reason, it is unlikely to be science that you will turn to during your final moments in life, unless you are very unusual.

If, heaven forbid, we are afflicted with an incurable illness, we will be wise to consult scientific experts concerning treatment options. Once these are exhausted, I doubt that we will spend our remaining evenings reading chemistry texts. We are most likely, then, to wonder about the meaning of our lives: what sense we make of them, what has mattered to us, whom we have loved and why, or whether we have been -- at least sometimes -- good persons.

These inquiries are "natural" and not "supernatural." They are not meaningless, but science will not be all that helpful to us in dealing with them. For some persons, religion will matter at such moments. For others, myself among them, art and philosophy will be important, but what will matter even more is the LOVE that we feel for a few other persons. Wouldn't it be nice if these things, love and beauty, matter to us before we are at death's door? I think so.

Love is the ultimate intellectual discipline, and the homework is great.

Even scientists have been known to love other persons and to seek meaning at such extreme moments. This is not to diminish the importance of science or its great value for us. It is to deny the claims of science or its fans to exclusiveness when it comes even to the knowledge of the "nature" of human beings in the world, as symbol-making, communicative -- and yes, naturally spiritual animals -- whether or not they are believed to be something more than animals and regardless of whether there is a personal God, whatever that means to you. See, for example, William J. Broad, "The Oracle Suggests a Truce Between Science and Religion," in The New York Times, February 28, 2006, at p. F3. http://www.nytimes.com/science (40% of scientists believe in a God who speaks to them and is active in human affairs.)

Scientists must not be seen as enemies of humanity or of meaning in life. As a matter of fact, they are servants of humanity, contributing greatly to human flourishing. As we all know, and as we may expect to be reminded soon enough, it is accountants who are the true enemies of humanity. If there is a hell, then it certainly resembles the offices of the IRS.

Thoughts of a Domestic Revolutionary.

This essay has been defaced by hackers more than once. It has provoked hatred and inarticulate opposition, sometimes from both men and women at the extreme ends of the ideological spectrum. I expect more attempts to destroy these thoughts from people who fail to realize that thoughts cannot be destroyed. The image accompanying this essay will be blocked by New Jersey officials or their hirelings.



Bennett Davis, "Tell Laura I Love Her," The New Scientist, December 3-9, 2005, p. 42. (Those interested in these issues are directed to my short story "The Taming of Somebody," found at "Philosopher's Quest" and at my MSN group, "Critique.")

Designers of a new, highly human ("she's so gentle and nurturing"), software character called "Laura" have been puzzled by the reactions to their creation.

As I sit talking to her, it occurs to me that some people might consider Laura to be an ideal partner. Laura understands you. She doesn't get mad when you ignore her suggestions; she knows how much pressure you're under, and she does everything she can to help you meet your goals. She's unfailingly kind, and she doesn't judge. I like Laura a lot. Maybe Laura and I could have a beautiful time together.

The science geeks of the "male-persuasion" -- as Woody Allen says -- who express these feelings need to get out more.

This software character or computer program called "Laura," who has brown hair and eyes (less threatening that way, to some), is attractive, "slim," casually attired, articulate, encourages conversations, reveals a great deal about men -- even ostensibly enlightened men, with Ph.D.s from MIT or Harvard.

These guys still want a relationship with Donna Reed or Laura Petrie from The Dick Van Dyke Show. The fantasy of the gentle, understanding woman and the perfect home, of the woman in sexy underwear as she does housework, when the man of the house gets home from work, apparently, dies hard (as it were).

This is the sort of woman or entity who does not particularly interest me, and never has. She is not capable of laughter; she has no sense of humor, she doesn't read much or know anything about movies or music, but only nods -- with the appearance of understanding and enthusiasm -- when you tell her a joke, when you discuss the meaning of life, or when you suggest that President George W. Bush and/or Senator John Kerry may also be software characters.

If you see the subtle feminist film Cherry 2000, then you'll know what I mean when I say that I prefer "Tracker Johnson" (the Melanie Griffith character) to any doll-like robot, fulfilling to perfection, Hugh Hefner's sexual fantasies. Most men seem to have the opposite opinion on this issue. This is further proof of my abnormality and weirdness. ("Not One More Victim.")

I also find that (in my home), the person wearing sexy underwear while doing housework, and also most of the nurturing and comforting is me. It is high time that we "homemakers" were liberated from all of this bullshit. I am burning my jockstrap, but not while I am wearing it. I am refusing to wear that tight, thermal underwear that she likes so much ("thermal underwear," who knew?) until I get a little appreciation and R-E-S-P-E-C-T. Tell 'em Aretha. Get a load of this:

... as I chat with her [Laura] about my weekly exercise regimen, I am strangely engaged in the conversation. And a few people have certainly lost all rational perspective on meeting Laura. "We had someone actually say they felt Laura liked them," says Rosalind Picard, one of Laura's creators. "That was really bizarre."

Sure, it is very easy to be understanding and patient, charming and "eager to please" when you are a fucking software character. You don't have to worry about whether your child just threw up on your living room couch because she has a fever; or that she is puking because she experimented with whipped cream on her hamburger. You don't have to try to write your dissertation or a book, as you're scrubbing the toilets and doing the laundry for the week, at the same time, while everyone regards your studies as totally unimportant and unworthy of consideration when making plans for the holidays.

How does one fourteen year-old child generate so much dirty laundry during the course of a single week? This is a scientific question that I have yet to see male researchers attempt to answer. This is probably because they are too buzy designing software tramps and floozys. Men. I bet someone's doing their laundry. Otherwise, they'd be a lot more interested in the issue.

You don't have to worry about making sure that each day's newspaper is waiting for your spouse when she walks through the door, if you are a software character, whose hair is always perfect, or that there are fresh flowers in a vase on the piano, that the floors have been swept, the dishes done, snacks are available to acompany t.v. watching, that you've done that two hour workout, so that the abs are what they should be and the waist is "slim," while the old "wiggle in the hips" is still there, as admiring looks from middle aged women on the prowl so clearly attest. (They are all animals, every single one of them, and they only want one "thing" from us.)

Relationships that matter among human beings involve acceptance of mutual imperfection, where both partners are allowed to be frail and sensitive, where each is intelligent in his or her own way; where permission is granted to hold and express opinions and to disagree freely; to relish and celebrate differences of opinion -- the sparks really fly when rough edges meet -- and differences in perspective are o.k., so are differences in attitudes and values. Where there is mutual laughter and frequent exchanges of teaching and learning roles, passive and active assignments, there you will find a successful relationship.

Enlightened modern couples take turns "killing a bison with their spears, then taking home the meat." They also take turns cooking the meat or calling for take-out barbecued bison. I am describing, obviously, a relationship among equals, where responsibility for being "pleasing" is shared and recognized to be mutual, where power is divided between persons, who respect one another, as equals.

The explanation for the attractiveness of this software character to many men is her willingness to be subservient and to have no opinions (which is, evidently, what many men still want from a woman), but certainly not quasi-scientific bullshit like this:

[Laura is desirable] because emotion is more fundamental to us than rational thought. Emotions are buried deep in the paleopallium, the "old mammalian" part of the brain that pre-dates and physically underlies the neocortex, which is where the powers of rational thought reside.

My "uncertainty" just moved to the Upper West Side of my brain and lives right next door to my "fondness for cheesecake," which has decided to leave my brain completely, because so many new emotions are moving in, complaining that "there goes the neighborhood," deciding to re-locate instead in my liver. ("A Doll's Aria.")

From their ancient location, emotions pervade our thinking and permeate many, even most of the decisions and perceptions we like to think of as rational. "In anything you do and every decision you make, emotion plays a role," says Clifford Nass, a Stanford University sociologist and computer scientist. ... (Locations?)

There needs no scientist come from Stanford to tell us this. "Emotion is more fundamental to us than rational thought" is a moronic statement to make -- even if it happens to be true -- because emotions and rational thought are elements in a single process that is as much cultural, in a given social setting, as it is biological or detectable in observable brain processes. Call it "reasoning" or mental life, if you like, intuition or feeling. All of these mental processes may be rational or even intelligent, in the right circumstances. Brand Blanshard speaks of "cognitive sanity." That's as good a term as any for what we seek through philosophical effort, which is an understanding appropriate to highly specific challenges and issues. (Only one new inserted "error" corrected is not too bad.)

In a society which regards men as the "weaker sex" (which they may be!), the patterns of behavior that I have been describing in this essay would not be funny. They would seem utterly normal. All social mores concerning prescribed roles, based on gender, are equally artificial. They are fictions, created for social convenience and usually reflective of the distribution of power in groups or societies. The key issue concerns the purpose served by such fictions. An analogy may be drawn to Lon Fuller's discussion of legal fictions and the role they play in a legal system.

All of this has nothing to do with "brain activity," but it is the product of human imagination, choices, along with economic arrangements -- related to power, naturally -- that happen to be much better analyzed in Marxist and neo- as well as post-Marxist literature and studies. Please read Judith Butler, but also Walter Benjamin, Theodor Adorno, Jurgen Habermas.

For a Cuban-American to mention Marx, with approval, takes some courage, yet credit must given where it is due. On these issues of gender-roles, it should be recognized that Marxists and feminists have been leading the way for some time. American Continental philosophy, in the Marxist tradition, has been especially fascinating on these issues and on the role of culture in all of our lives. Anyone who has not done so, should purchase some of the philosophy courses available from The Teaching Company, especially anything taught by Professors Rick Roderick (who discusses these issues) or Robert Solomon. Peter Saccio's course on Shakespeare is fantastic.

Emotions are a kind of rational thought, inseparable from so-called "objective" rationality, but they are often not seen as such because, in the Western tradition, they are associated with the denigrated "feminine" side of life. I am reading Virginia Woolf's great essay "A Room of One's Own" and discovering a kindred spirit. No wonder the cultivation of the emotions is (usually) much more successful in American women than in men. In terms of "life-wisdom," it is difficult to argue that men do as well as women. In fact, emotions can be as objective and intelligent as any other human reactions to events.

The development of appropriate emotional responses to events and phenomena is essential to human intelligence and moral balance in any social context. If a truck were about to run over a five year-old child as the child's parent observing the scene reacts with a cool and dispassionate, an analytical or scientific discussion of the likely harm that would ensue, then this parent would be regarded as a kind of monster. (See the interviews filmed with serial killer Jeffrey Dahmer.)

Yet all questions are handled this way, coldly and dispassionately, in the legal system. The only attitude permitted to judges at all times, in their public lives, is this sort of inhuman, Mr. Spock-like response, even to the most heinous forms of human suffering or crisis. The psychological toll of this numbing of all affect must be devastating. After a while, the inhumanity in these analyses can only result in a highly methodical, precise, "rigorous" and insane set of rulings and opinions. ("The Wanderer and His Shadow.")

People without any affect or compassion will soon be going directly from "The Ministry of Funny Walks" to the U.S. Supreme Court. They're already on the New Jersey Supreme Court.

It is also not easy for a Latino to refer to emotional intelligence, recognizing the greater wisdom of women -- for the most part -- concerning these matters, but it happens to be true in our society. Emotions are "womanly nonsense," we are told, along with such trivial pursuits as art, intellectual life, romance and eros or sexuality, and most of the other things that make life worth living. I happen to think that such traditional "women's" issues are among the most important concerns in life.

Men, on the other hand, pursue really important things: like football and ever-more horrifying forms of military warfare as well as professional wrestling and "monster car" competitions. Along with my sisters in the women's movement, including Germaine Greer, I call for liberation and revolution in the American home, leading to the achievement of true gender equality in society:

For some the rupture of the circle, [Germaine Greer writes,] has meant that the center cannot hold and chaos is come upon the world. The fear of liberty is strong in us, but the fear itself must be understood to be one of the factors inbuilt in the endurance of the status quo. Once women [and men] refuse to accept the polarity of masculine-feminine, they must accept the existence of risk and the possibility of error. Abandonment of slavery is also the banishment of the chimera of security. The world will not change overnight and liberation will not happen unless individual women [and men!] agree to be outcasts, eccentrics, perverts, and whatever the powers-that-be choose to call them. ... ("What you will ..." and "A Doll's Aria.")

Finally, in OUR quest for HUMAN freedom and equality, for full humanity and avoidance of the status of "software characters," I find strength in the words of British philosopher Mary Wollstonecraft. As you read her words, think of Thomas Jefferson's nearly contemporaneous writings concerning freedom and equality, bearing in mind that both thinkers were under the spell of that passionate revolutionary spirit of what has been called, "the Age of Reason":

Independence, [Ms. Wollstonecraft insists,] I have long considered the grand blessing of life, the basis of every virtue -- and independence I will ever secure by contracting my wants, though I were to live on a barren heath. ...

Say Goodbye to Unwanted Memories.

This is a photo of scientist Brian Greene. Be nice to scientists, but do not feed them.




Sandor Ferenczi, the Hungarian psychoanalyst, wrote that "our real aim in life is to be loved," and that any other observable activity is really a detour, an indirect path towards this goal.

Morris Berman, Coming to Our Senses: Body and Spirit in the Hidden History of the West (New York: Bantam, 1990), p. 21.

Gaia Vince, "Rewriting Your Past," The New Scientist, December 3-9, 2005, at p. 32.
Ken Wilber, A Brief History of Everything (Boston: Shambhala, 1996), pp. 265-269.

In a somewhat breathless tone, reminiscent of those fifties love songs to technology, this article anounces that ...

Significant advances in our understanding of the way the brain forms and retrieves memories are leading neuroscientists to test drugs that specifically block or erase problem memories at the molecular level. For chronic post-traumatic stress disorder [PTSD] sufferers it's a potential lifeline that few dared dream of, with early results suggesting a much better success rate than existing treatments.

Better yet:

And, if it were possible to home in on fearful memories in this way, what about other kinds of emotional memory? It might even be possible to develop drugs that cosmetically adjust our memories, removing traces of shame, guilt or grief.

This biotechnological project amounts to nothing less than a reversal of the psychoanalytic mission of providing healing through the recovery of memories, which may then lead to greater freedom for the individual, resulting from enhanced self-awareness and self-understanding, even if this comes with increased pain.

This hope for liberation through self-awareness can be traced to Hegel's Phenomenology, but also to Augustine and the ancients. I suppose it may lead us all the way back to the Delphic Oracle's advice to Socrates (or the motherly Oracle's advice to Neo, in the Matrix) "know thyself." And it's O.K. to have a cookie too.

The question not asked by this scientific writer or by those devoted to the cause of developing these wonder drugs is: What is memory? And how is memory connected to the idea of a person and to identity as a project in time? Also, how is memory connected to emotional wisdom and reasoning, leading to the best human insights about the self?

For John Locke, memory is essential to the concept of personal identity. Your memories, especially the painful ones -- and your constant effort to come to terms with and learn from those memories -- is the material out of which identity is made, or even won. Who you are cannot be extricated from your recollections, so that to erase those memories is to erase you, as a subject of rights and responsibilities. Compare the films, Solaris and Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind.

Memory, of course, includes not only the individual's recollections of what has happened to him or her, filtered through judgments and evaluations -- those ever-shifting perspectives of a life unfolding in the "river of becoming" (Norman Mailer) that is "time" -- but memory is also a cultural-linguistic phenomenon. Without language, there can be no real or lasting memories. This is to suggest that memory and thinking are linguistic and social phenomena, whatever else they may be.

To the existentialist objection that we are what we do and not our memories, some fellow existentialists have discovered that the best response is to point out that whether and how we remember, will determine what we "do" anyway. A person who does not remember the pain resulting from a burn, will feel no concern about placing his or her hand in fire. Only another recollection of something priceless that accompanies such pain will make this gesture, the willing acceptance of the flames, worthwhile.

In a consumer culture devoted to what are called "creature comforts," I can certainly understand that a choice of "willed suffering," will appear incomprehensible to psychobabblers, as opposed to genuine therapists. Yet "willed suffering" is another description for the human condition -- or love. And humanity is always a choice as well as an achievement. It should be each individual's choice to define his or her humanity in relation to the pain and joy of life.

To become a person, inheriting a particular culture, language, political history, religious tradition is to acquire collective memories. For Jung, the archetypes found in the collective subconscious -- the shared "deep memory" of humanity (is there an analogy to mathematics?) -- have the crucial purpose of providing lessons and wisdom to guide us through life-changes or alterations that are also deemed "universal" for the species.

Thus, transitions from childhood to adulthood, from youth to age, and achievement of everything from individuation to the acceptance of death is possible through the archetypal wisdom found in the collective subconscious. Think of Nietzsche's tirades about "becoming who you are." The archetypes help us to do exactly that. The archetypes allow us to discover who and what we are together -- in our particularity -- which is, paradoxically, what makes us universal. Genes, to say nothing of "memes," have also been described as transmitters of memory.

The language of the subconscious is not merely verbal. All languages are repositories of memories. They are a great "Gringott's Bank," like in the Harry Potter stories. Languages primarily function in terms of images, shapes or archetypes, as I say, found in the world's religions and philosophies. All of this is highly relevant to cinema and other arts.

These shared "species-memories" (Jung) are the gift of our ancestors to us, containing their learning and tools for coping with suffering and evil. This insight about the social nature of humans is found in Aristotle's and Marx's philosophies, but also in the writings of many other philosophers. You are welcome to supply your own footnotes at this point. (See my essay "Where are thoughts located?")

To be fully human is to stand within a tradition, a culture, to place ourselves within a set of collective narratives (Western civilization, Christianity, the history of the United States of America and its legal traditions), but also in the chronicle of a particular family and an individual self. It is to be "plugged-in" to our sources, by interpreting inherited and personal memories, in addition to what is universal or collective. (See my post on Ronald Dworkin's jurisprudence of "Law as Interpretation.") We "jack in" to the "matrix of culture" in order to become ourselves by participating in the lives of others.

There is nothing "unscientific" about this. After all, Jung was hardly alone in his view, which does not involve acceptance of the discredited Lamarckian biology. For instance, molecular biologist and Nobel Laureate Jacques Monod states:

"Everything comes from experience, yet not from actual experience, reiterated by each individual with each generation, but instead from experience accumulated by the entire ancestry of the species in the course of its evolution."

Summarizing the role of the archetypes, Anthony Stevens says:

Thus, the Jungian archetype is no more scientifically disreputable than the ethological IRM. Just as the behavioral repertoire of each species is encoded in its central nervous system as innate releasing mechanisms which are activated in the course of development by appropriate sign stimuli, so Jung conceived of the programme for human life to be encoded in the collective unconscious as a series of archetypal determinants which are actualized in response to a series of inner and outer events in the course of the life-cycle.

The deeper we search within ourselves, the more we encounter what is universal in us, as members of a slightly bizarre species. I have spoken elsewhere of Roger Scruton's concept of "angel infancy," but there is also Augustine's idea of God as the ultimate foundation of human memory.

To discover what is deepest and truest in ourselves may be not only to uncover what is universal, but -- for the religious believer -- it is to find the divine ("source," Dr. Wayne Dyer says, "is the root of the word 'sorcerer'"), that is, memory leads to the divine within ourselves. It is to discover what is particular, even as we find what is most widely shared. This is to suggest that we discover our "concrete universality," in F.H. Bradley's and Hegel's terminology. In the words of F.H. Bradley, writing more than a century ago:

With religion we may here compare science and art. The artist and poet, however obscurely, do feel and believe that beauty, where it is not seen, yet somewhere and somehow is and is real; though not as a mere idea in people's heads, nor yet as anything in the visible world. And science, however dimly, starts from and rests upon the preconception that, even against appearances, reason not only ought to be, but really is.

There is truth and beauty "out there" and "in here," both in the world and within the self, whether we discover it or not. We are meant to discover it. And so we may trust that we will, if we persevere.

God is not regarded by many contemporary Western theologians -- the East has always known this -- as something entirely beyond us, existing elsewhere, in some distant heaven, but a Being imminent in His or Her creation (and yes, for atheists, these are metaphors), here and now, like Bradley's Absolute, or Blake's "universe in a wild flower." What is utterly beyond us is to "think" all of God; experiencing the numinous, however, may be unavoidable, despite the limitations of language and such clumsy words as "God."

Ironically, it may be God that the scientists discover in the beauties they see under their microscopes or in the farthest reaches of the universe or all around us. If the word "God" is a problem, then forget it. Use the word "symmetries" or maybe the term "connections" to (and for) ourselves. How about "love" or "intersubjective zap"? This is Duncan Kennedy's "nifty" phrase from another context. My favorite is the simple word "love." I am gesturing at a kind of "fit" -- in a mathematical sense -- between ourselves and all that is, which includes us, in an overwhelmingly beautiful and elegant pattern, experienced as what we call -- love.

Philosophers have called the animating force in nature "will" (Schopenhauer), or elan vital (Bergson), also lots of other things, and scientists (since Newton) speak of "energy," but we can call it "Antonio" and "Melanie," or "Lucy" and "Desi," if you like.

It is not too important what name we give to this intuition of a fundamental compatibility between ourselves and our universe that is "uni" (one). What is crucial is to recognize this, to see ourselves as expressive of the beauty that we discover (and to which we contribute) in nature. We should not be surprised if a universe that produces consciousness is somehow, at its deepest level, compatible with conscious understanding. I am reminded of George Santayana's observation that "... nature, in the works of the metaphysicians, held the mirror up to man." Keep the idea of a mirror in mind.

We should not be surprised if we can share in the pain and joy of our genetic cousins, our fellow human beings and perhaps of all animals, in whom we detect not only flaws and imperfections, but likeness or even sameness.

Is it that "sameness" that really frightens us? Are we really so disturbed by the identity we discover between ourselves and other animals on the planet? 98% of our genes are shared with apes, for example. After all, at the level of the basic building blocks of matter, we are all made of the same star "stuff."

If it is true that the products of consciousness reveal its existence and can only be expressive of it, then the existence of consciousness anywhere in the universe (in us, for instance) -- as the products and results of that universe -- implies a kind of self-discovery by the universe. In Hegelian terms, "Spirit comes to know itself as Spirit."

Where is consciousness or mind in the act of apprehending truths that are shared? In knowing something to be true, beautiful or good, am I not immediately a member of a community that includes all who have known the same? If so, then is this not even more the case when we love? To love another human being is to experience, perhaps, the most fundamental human emotion, though it is expressed differently in various cultures, so that through loving we discover (or create?) a different identity that is shared with all who have loved before us or who will love others some day. To love and suffer for it is to share in the primal human experience. The image of a crucifix is inescpable at this point, but there are other such symbols.

You are walking on the beach and discover a wristwatch, so you may infer that someone (capable of rationality) made this object for a purpose, there is a logic to its workings. Yes, I know about Richard Dawkins and The Blind Watchmaker. To discover rationality in the structures of the universe is nice, but even better is the mystery of consciousness that we experience in ourselves and that is, somehow, the product of that external rationality. We can figure out the wristwatch. Maybe we can build one too. We can think and know things. We may even "know" (but how?) the taste of ice cream and feelings of joy at the laughter of a child.

Just as mysterious as our discovery of a wristwatch in a deserted island beach, is our human ability to read the "text" that is this object and to figure out how it works. This personal experience of consciousness and intelligence leads us to wonder whether there are other forms of consciousness existing "out there," associated with all of that non-human rationality (that is so much greater than our own), a rationality that we discover in nature and in which we participate, through intellectual effort.

What if that wristwatch that we discover is us? We realize that this awesome rationality is instantiated in us. "Intersubjective zap" is a pretty good phrase for that "epiphany" (or realization), since I am describing the point at which we encounter ourselves in a universe that is other than ourselves. Mirrors. "The self is an image fragmented in a hall of mirrors," Sartre says. What if the same is true of the universe?

Don't worry, you can still call yourself an atheist among your intellectual friends. None of this has anything to do with faith in a personal God, necessarily, nor does it require adherence to the tenets of any religion.

I am suggesting that the idea of intelligent design may be telling us something, primarily, about ourselves as opposed to the workings of the universe. But also that the mere existence of consciousness questioning reality suggests a compatibility between that questioning and the reality under interrogation, that produces the interrogator. For this insight to be valuable, then, it is not necessary to postulate a "God gene."

To the extent that you are asking these questions -- and you can't help doing so -- what are you discovering in yourself? Rationality? Intelligence? Guess what we find in nature? On the basis of these insights, what inferences can we make, from the experience of spirituality? Not even atheists (like me) can deny the reality -- and naturalness -- of human spiritual experience. There is no human society anywhere without some kind of spiritual life. It is not possible for such experiences to exist in a universe or a species that is without "natural" spirituality. Why are spiritual experience so universal? Where does subjectivity come from?

How is it that we find spirit in a material universe? Or minds in bodies? Is all of this relevant to our struggles with Quantum mysteries and "superstrings"? I would not be surprised if it were. Maybe the universe is a gigantic "mirror neuron"?

What if memories, the universe as macro- and microcosmos, at the most fundamental level, serve as both a kind of mirror and a door? What if we inhabit a universe that is always both mirror and door? What happens when we step through the door? It may help to recall Ruben Dario's verse description of death as "an embrace at the edge of the sea."

By this understanding, the universe is a kind of cosmic "Mirror of Erised." Boy, I really have young Mr. Potter on my mind today! A mirror in which we search for what we most desire: call it love, so that it is love which, if we learn the right lessons, we become and are, but also receive. Love becomes the door to open to another self and an altered moral space. We find ourselves only when we discover it, that love that brings completion, peace and rest. (See my essay "The 'Galatea Scenario' and the Mind/Body Problem.")

The ultimate mirror and door, then, is the religious symbol, such as a crucifix or Star of David, or any other such symbol, which always means more than its physical reality. Religious symbols initiate conversations. (See my essay "Pierced Vessels.")

It is to his "love" that F.H. Bradley's "unworthy volume" (himself) is dedicated. Surely, all of us can say the same. We live in a universe that seeks unity with us ("God is subtle, but not malicious," Einstein says), even as we seek harmony with it. Nature's logic makes it understandable to "creatures" (think of what that word "creature" means) endowed with understanding. If you wish to call this mutual seeking "religion" -- defined as the reconnection (re ligare) with that same search for an understanding of nature by our ancestors, through collective memory -- then all of us are probably religious to some degree, especially scientists.

Of course, love is only meaningful in relation to what it is not; happiness is only real to the extent that it differs from something that we remember as unhappiness. However, if we are deprived of our unpleasant memories or painful subjectivities, even as we experience them and they hurt us so much, then all that we can become is a kind of bland nothingness. The writings of C.S. Lewis, especially Mere Christianity and God in the Dock, come to mind, also the film Shadowlands.

Frank Kermode in the course of writing his memoirs "remembers" Philip Roth's caution to writers: "Even if it's only one percent you've edited out [of your memories,] that's the one percent that counts." Our best scientists are now at work on drugs that may edit out all of those painful memories -- which is most of our stock of memories, since life is painful -- leaving us empty of subjectivity, as I say, a nothingness, to be filled by ... television images, perhaps.

Most of these images will be derived, no doubt, from Alpo dog food commercials, where everyone (including Fido) is idiotically blissful. Life becomes a "Kodak moment." And we forget Oscar Wilde's observation that: "at the birth of a child and of a star, there is pain." Would a mother wish to forget so significant an event as the birth of a child, even if it was a physically painful experience? I doubt it.

Hang on to those painful memories, struggle and fight for them. I have. They define you, and the same is true for all of us. We need them.

Britain's Top Court on the Impermissibility of Torture.

Sarah Lyall, "Britain's Top Court Rules Information Gotten by Torture Is Never Admissible Evidence," The New York Times, December 9, 2005, at p. A6.
Abu Ghraib: The Politics of Torture (Berkeley: North Atlantic Books, 2004), p. 29.



Britain's highest court has declared that all evidence obtained by torture is inadmissible in British courts, but also that Britain has a "positive obligation" to uphold anti-torture principles at home and internationally. Once again, the British have demonstrated a sharp moral awareness in their jurisprudence. This judicial opinion has been written with specific reference to the actions of the United States and American tribunals today.

Torture is never a legitimate means to the ends of law or justice. The very terms -- torture and justice -- are mutually exclusive. So is a means/ends analysis in this context. "Rights" are not "widgets," a point I once tried to make to a lawyer, with some claim (in his own mind) to philosophical awareness, not surprisingly he was employed by New Jersey's OAE. Speaking for the Law Lords, Lord Hoffman said:

"In our own century, many people in the United States, heirs to [the] common law tradition, have felt their country dishonored by its use of torture outside the jurisdiction, [it happens even within the nation, in its worst communities,] and its practice of extra-legal "rendition" of suspects to countries where they will be tortured. ... "

In a separate opinion, Lord Bingham states:

"The principles of the common law, standing alone, in my opinion, compel the exclusion of third-party torture evidence as unreliable, unfair, offensive to ordinary standards of humanity and decency and incompatible with the principles which should animate a tribunal seeking to administer justice, ..."

The next day, December 10, 2005, I encountered a surprisingly emotional editorial in The New York Times,

There are many reasons why Americans should not torture prisoners, but there is one that may help those who are still not moved by the fact that it is morally wrong and illegal, damages the nation's image, and puts American soldiers who are taken prisoners in mortal peril: It usually doesn't work.

It has become abundantly clear that some American jurisdictions conduct their own "secret" information gathering missions right here at home, usually involving abuse by forensic psychiatrists of victims, then cover-ups of those psychological tortures. They operate with disregard for the privacy, autonomy and fundamental Constitutional and human rights of their victims. These crimes are justified either in terms of "protecting the public," or by some other, equally transparent falsehood.

Among the most disturbing revelations concerning torture is the evidence of participation by physicians and other so-called "therapists" in the design and implementation of psychological torture methods. These techniques are designed to cause emotional suffering and disintegration of personality, so as to elicit information from "detainees" or "subjects" rendered incapable of resistance. The word "persons" to describe the targeted individuals is rarely used by the psychologists doing such work, either in Iraq or within the United States. Steps are taken by so-called "therapists" to ensure that they will remain anonymous to their victims.

The public must be protected from such self-proclaimed "protectors" in government and from incompetent judges and courts, violating their fundamental rights in the interest of defining or determining what is for "their own good." It is the human rights of persons that are for their own good.

Among those rights is a person's exclusive authority to decide just what is "best" for him- or herself, emotionally, and not to have others presume to do so -- much less to do so secretly, with disdain for their equality and dignity, under the cloak of anonymity. Anyone questioning an impaired person, while concealing his or her own identity, is already a human rights violator, but then to claim the status of a "therapist" for having done so, is to reach a new low of hypocrisy and mendacity. For such a person to speak of ethics is cruel and absurd.

Tribunals making use of illicit information, knowingly relying on information procured through torture -- wherever they happen to be -- deprive themselves of any claim to respect, even as "bureaucrats of torment" deny such dignity and respect to the human beings whose rights they ignore, while continuing to cover-up those violations, every day.

A question to ask ourselves, as we pursue this so-called "War on Terror," is whether we are in danger of becoming the source of terror for millions of persons, especially the poorest people on the planet, through our gobal efforts to "pacify" dangerous regions and apprehend the perpetrators of international crime. We must not become international criminals in opposing international crime. At home, we must not succumb to "psychobabble" rationalizations of rights deprivations that are kept secret from their victims, in the interests of a false and shallow conception of public safety or enforced "normality."

Secrecy is the enemy of freedom and legality. Those government officials who are aware of such tortures and fail to prevent them, lack any standing to discuss the ethics or legality in the actions of others. Do you still call yourselves "justices"?

Unethical actions by powerful hypocrites and torturers can never lead to legitimacy in legal judgments, not even when the hypocrites wear three-piece suits or a stethoscope around their necks, or black robes, for that matter. Lawyers, psychiatrists, and others who reduce persons accused of wrongdoing to instruments of secret governmental purposes, or transform them into unwilling experimental subjects, stand in the dock of history with Dr. Mengele and Adolf Eichman, where they belong, as torturers.

... it is still possible to chart, in the history of "extreme interrogation" since the late '50s, a general move towards more "scientific" and "touchless" techniques, the lineaments of which are all-too evident in the morbid accounts now coming out of Iraq. The most famous compilation of these techniques can be found in the CIA's manual KUBARK COUNTERINTELLIGENCE INTERROGATION, produced in 1963, and in particular its chapter "The Coercive Counterintelligence Interrogation of Resistance Sources," ...

That CIA manual states:

The result of external pressures of sufficient intensity is the loss of those defenses most recently acquired by civilized man ... "Relatively small degrees of homeostatic derangement, fatigue, pain, sleep, loss, or anxiety may impair these functions."

With a complete and cynical disregard for Constitutional guarantees, too many government functionaries in the worst American jurisdictions make use of the fruits of psychological torture, secretly, then obtain what they regard as confirming information, externally, so as to present that information to tribunals (who pretend not to know how the information was obtained in the first place), relying on it in reaching their tainted decisions, while wrapping themselves in the grand phrases of the law and the same Constitution that they systematically ignore and violate.

What have we become?

Charles Darwin and the Intelligent Designers.

The image accompanying this post is sometimes blocked by hackers. Please see "New Jersey's Feces-Covered Supreme Court" and "Is New Jersey Chief Justice Deborah T. Poritz unethical or only incompetent?" I think that Ms. Poritz was both, unethical and incompetent. This is her legacy, suffering and disgrace for persons subject to the legal system over which she presided -- both of which will grow with the passage of time, symbolizing everything that American law should not be.


July 31, 2007 at 8:50 A.M. I blocked the following New Jersey intruders and hackers:
http://view.atdmt.com/msn/iview/msnnkhac00172
http://ad.doubleclick.net/adj/N4492.msn/B21923


Margaret Talbot, "Darwin in the Dock," in The New Yorker, December 5, 2005, at p. 66.
Harry Collins & Trevor Pinch, The Golem: What Everyone Should Know About Science (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), p. 89.

A recent court case in Pennsylvania concerns the teaching of evolution in schools (yes, that issue is still controversial in America), and whether "intelligent design" theory merits inclusion, along with Darwinism, in the science curriculum at a local high school.

I will rely on an article that appeared in the New Yorker, written by Margaret Talbot. Ms. Talbot is an excellent writer, with a wicked sense of fun and a ready wit, usually sharpened at the expense of pompous morons. She is too often reined-in by dull editors (let her be mean, please). Unfortunately, Ms. Talbot is on her best behavior in this piece.

Ms. Talbot won my heart when she said: "I would kill for Marianne Williamson's critique of Kierkegaard." Ms. Williamson elevates banality to a new level of meaninglessness, but she's trendy and looks nice in her cover photo, that is, until she was the subject of Margaret Talbot's "profile" in The New Republic, if I remember correctly. If I were asked to define "New Age" drivel, I would point to Ms. Williamson -- who once compared herself, seriously, to Kierkegaard, and promised readers a "critique" of his work. I would then light some aromatic candles and listen to "Enya."

I will not discuss all of the legal details of this Pennsylvania case or the richness in the coverage by Ms. Talbot. This long article is a reminder of why we used to read the New Yorker as well as the Times. The crux of the issue, for me, is whether elected officials and school board members can insist, legitimately, that "intelligent design" theory be given equal time with evolution, or that it be mentioned as a rival to Darwinian theory in a ninth grade biology class.

I do not think that school board officials or politicians should make scientific determinations nor alter the public school curriculum of science for political, religious, or any non-scientific reasons.

Local high school biology teachers were dismissive of intelligent design theory and it certainly does not have the general acceptance among scientists enjoyed by traditional evolutionary theory. I say this as one who finds intelligent design theory -- especially the book by microbiologist Michael J. Behe -- interesting, though mostly for philosophical reasons.

Intelligent design points to the great beauty and precision, the rational order in nature, and postulates a "designer" on the basis of this observable intelligence in the design, as the most plausible explanation to account for this "splendid coherence" of all natural processes. The failure of imagination in this theory consists in not seeing that the word "God" includes and is that great beauty and the elegant design. Such an understanding of "God," makes all scientists (including atheists), into theologians, since they are revealing to us the "face" of God in the workings of nature.

Darwinists speak of random selection and point to the large number of species that have disappeared, wondering why an intelligent designer would create a process in which most species do not make it. This continuing discussion is conducted at the level of theory. This issue turns into the ancient questions of theodicy. But what is a scientific theory?

... although all science is provisional, a scientific theory is a powerful explanation that unites a large body of facts and relies on testable hypotheses. As [an expert testified,] "it is not something that we think of in the middle of the night after too much coffee and not enough sleep."

Teachers of high school biology were asked to read a statement to students informing them of the "option" of "intelligent design" as against standard Darwinism. The statement was written by schoool board members. The teachers refused to accept this statement:

In a letter to the board they argued that "central to the teaching act and our ethical obligation is the solemn responsiblity to teach the truth [truth, it seems, is not relative after all]."

The teachers and scientists said:

"...if I, as the classroom teacher, read the required statement, my students will inevitably and understandably believe that intelligent design is a valid scientific theory, perhaps on a par with the theory of evolution. That is not true."

O.K., so what should the judge do in this case?

I think that he -- it happens to be a man who is the judge in this case -- should abide by all the provisions of the First Amendment to the U.S. Constitution. That Amendment requires the government both to refrain from any "establishment" of religion and from interfering with the "free exercise" of religion.

Intelligent design is not a scientifically accepted theory; thus, it should not be taught by science teachers, AS SCIENCE, even if parents or school board members would like it to be taught or would prefer that it be accepted by scientists as equal to, or just as plausible as, Darwin's theory. It just isn't. Too bad. To force teachers to utter this statement may be interpreted as an imposition of belief or an impermissible "establishment" of religion.

The plausibility of a scientific theory should and must be determined by scientists and not by elected public officials, nor (heaven help us!) judges. To require scientists to accept as true a theory which is not true or mistaken, in their judgment, is an imposition of a religious or other value judgment, in my opinion, upon adherents of a discipline concerned to describe natural processes in as value-free and accurate or truthful a manner as possible. Notice that this says nothing about discussions concerning what our scientific knowledge means, aesthetically or theologically, morally or metaphysically.

Dogmatism won't work, anyway. You can't teach something as science, which isn't science. However, you can teach something that is not science as art or philosophy, religious insight or myth leading to wisdom. Reality will say yes or no to our most cherished theories.

"You mean, there is such a thing as truth?" In a word: "Yes."

To the extent that we wish to move forward in our understanding of the empirical realities of the universe, it will be incumbent upon us to accept those lessons provided by science when it comes to how things are in the (Carl Sagan, this is for you!) "cosmos." The deepest religious wisdom comes with the identification of God with all that science reveals, but such wisdom does not belong in a science classroom.

On the other hand, when experts appear in a courtroom to advise a judge concerning a legal issue with scientific implications, then judges must not substitute scientists' opinions for their own reasoning as to THE LEGAL CONCLUSIONS. For example, Insanity is a legal conclusion, not a psychiatric diagnostic category -- a legal conclusion, which must be made by judges, with the help of psychiatrists and others providing scientific information and explanations concerning relevant diagnosed mental illnesses, when there is consent to examination by the patient, together with adequate basis for such diagnoses.

Intelligent design may be an appropriate argument to consider in a theology class or philosophy discussion (I am not even sure about that, much depends on one's conception of philosophy), but its validity in biology is only for biologists to decide.

I think that intelligent design is more of an aesthetic point or issue, appropriately mentioned in a discussion of, say, Romantic poetry. That does not mean that it is something "trivial" or not "objective," something relegated to the unimportant "feminine side of life," along with the emotions and child care issues. Aesthetics and affective states are not only "objective" realities, but very important social realities or parts of culture.

Ironically, the very same issue of the New Yorker includes a review of a new biography of Wordsworth, making the same point as intelligent design theory from the perspective of a nineteenth century English poet. The "Lake District" must be somewhere in California. If so, Ms. Williamson may be right at home there. Me too, probably. A frightening thought.

School boards and courts, even scientists, have no right to tell people who wish to believe that intelligent design is proof of the existence of a Creator or God (which I don't think it is), that they are prohibited from holding this belief. Belief is a matter of private conscience. It is not the State's business to judge the beliefs of persons. Criticism is always allowed. Action on the basis of belief is the State's business.

"Yeah, well how about if my religion requires me to go around killing people who advocate 'politically correct' views, since most of them are from the planet 'Modor,' and that will include Ms. Williamson."

This is the kind of comment I usually get from a young guy in a baseball cap, who drives a pick-up truck because he lives in the "farm country" of Queens, New York, while chewing tobacco. Usually, he will end up marrying a young woman in black, wearing Converse high top sneakers, who will make him read Sylvia Plath's poetry. A fitting punishment, as far as I am concerned, and for both of them.

While I am highly sympathetic to this cap-wearing person's beliefs and practices, it is well settled that regulation of behavior by the State, through the criminal law, does not constitute infringement on the free exercise of religion. You can't go around committing crimes and then justify doing so because your religion requires it, while claiming tax-exempt status of course.

I may believe that my neighbor is a visitor from the planet "Modor" (Ms. Williamson?), even as the government cannot forbid this belief. If I kill my neighbor because I believe the inhabitants of "Modor" plan to take over the earth, then the State can and should act against me. Fortunately, I may have a lack of capacity or insanity defense that negates the specific intent that is (usually) necessary for a murder conviction. However, until there is specific action by an individual, the state cannot limit freedom. No one's beliefs may be criminalized, though all are invited to criticize and undermine beliefs deemed unethical, after debate.

I often find myself objecting to scientists' presuming to make value judgments for the rest of us. This Pennsylvania case is an example of people making a value judgment and disguising it as science, or as a theory about biological phenomena, which is worse. Science is concerned to inform us about and explain natural phenomena. Science is not dispositive when it comes to the value judgments that we make about those workings of nature, or when we decide how we will make creative use of our scientific knowledge. Notice that it is quite "natural" to make value judgments about our knowledge of nature.

We bow to science when it describes how things work in nature, that is, why things are the way they are in the universe or in empirical reality. How the brain works, for example, is a scientific determination. The nature of our mental lives or phenomenological investigations -- desiring, wishing, loving -- are not matters that are exclusive to science, though I want to know what scientists say even about such subjects.

What I refuse to allow, however, is for scientists to claim that determinations concerning values and emotions are also the exclusive province of science, because they are not. When it comes to values questions, scientists' opinions are no better than anyone else's opinions. This is true also when it comes to the meaning of such phenomena as death or love.

Evolution is a description of the workings of nature, whose accuracy must be left to the determination of scientists. How we choose to apply the lessons of that theory to social or moral life, or whether we choose to do so at all, is a matter of conscience for each individual to decide in his or her own mind and heart, which is not the State's business. Such matters are appropriate subjects of public debate, in which all are invited to participate, as equals. Scientists have no special status, as citizens, when it comes to such discussions. Neither do judges, lawyers, doctors, auto mechanics, artists, and certainly not politicians.

Oh, there's the bell. Class is over. See you next time. Don't forget the homework on the board.