The Torture Papers and the Metaphysics of Persons.

Jane Mayer, "The Torture Papers," The New Yorker, February 17, 2006, p. 32.
Kathryn Schulz, "Brave Neuro World: The New Ethics of Brain Science," The Nation, January 9/16, 2005, at p. 11.
John MacMurray, The Self as Agent (New York: Humanity Books, 1999), pp. 84-104.
Hassan M. Fattah, "Symbol of Abu Ghraib Seeks to Spare Others His Nightmare," in The New York Times, March 11, 2006, at p. A1. (There is now some question concerning the authenticity of the victim's identity in this photo, and also some question about these questions. It is undisputed that persons were, and probably still are, being tortured at Guantanamo and Abu Ghraib.)
Kirk Semple, "Captors Tortured American Then Killed Him," in The New York Times, March 12, 2006, at p. A10. (Experts predict more such incidents of "retribution" in the immediate future in response to the so-called "torture" policy, demonstrating the bankruptcy of all "get tough, tit-for-tat" responses to violence.)
Colin McGinn, Ethics, Evil and Fiction (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1997).



One of the subjects that I plan to address, repeatedly, in these essays is the torture debate. Along with a few other controversies -- such as abortion, right to die, death penalty and genetic engineering dilemmas -- the debate concerning the permissibility of torture transcends disciplinary and other boundaries, raising closely related legal, ethical and political issues. What is particularly fascinating about all of these controversies, especially the torture debate, is that they focus on the underlying question: "What is a person?"

For present purposes, I define torture as deliberate infliction of mental or physical suffering upon a person for purposes that do not belong to the victim and are not in the victim's self-determined interests, especially suffering that is intended to serve the interests of the torturer or of his/her employers or superiors. This usually means secret information-gathering for the State or on behalf of un-named "others." The secrecy alone makes questioning by a "therapist" unethical, probably criminal, as a form of torture, so is the infliction of frustrations and obstructions to creative expression, usually intended to cause psychological distress and depression or for any reason.

Once you have decided on the criteria for the moral category of "persons," there will be consequences in terms of what you may do to someone who qualifies as a person. The moral and political status of persons are quite distinct, since both concepts are different from what we mean by a human being in biology, or by a person in the legal system. Corporations are legal persons, for example, but not necessarily moral persons.

I believe that a "person" is a being occupying a unique moral category, first of all, so as to be accorded legal protections and rights, along with responsibilities. A person is an agent, a being "acting" intentionally in the world, with or upon others. This definition requires analysis not only in terms of causes leading to effects, but also in terms of that mysterious concept of "intention," the measuring of actions in terms of motives and purposes.

A person has motives for his or her actions that are not reducible to causal determinations. Thus, the causal explanation, in terms of brain science, for moving my hand to cut a piece of bread with my knife is the same as the identical gesture or movement when I deliberately cut not bread, but someone's hand off. Yet the meaning of the action is entirely different in each instance. Meaning and intention are words used, properly, only with regard to persons or groups of persons.

Richard Burton described a meeting with Humphrey Bogart at which they engaged in a mock quarrel about the respective merits of British versus American acting methods. "You just behave before the camera," Burton said, "you do not act." Bogart was struck speechless, rose from his chair, went to his closet and returned with his Oscar award, placing it before Richard Burton, Bogey said: "Here, kid. You argue with my Oscar."

A useful distinction is drawn in this anecdote between "behaving" and "acting." A person is self-legislating, choosing his or her actions in the world, accepting their consequences, and being responsible for those self-chosen actions. A person is a social actor. Yes, there are persons who may be impaired in their capacity to act on their intentions, limited in responsibility and judged accordingly as merely "behaving," but what is crucial is the capacity or potential to formulate intentions, to be motivated to act, to be more than an empirical object moved about by external forces. A person decides on the meaning of his or her actions, choosing to reject the interpretations of others so as to construct, freely, his or her own interpretations of those life-actions. Behavior is observable; experience is not.

Suppose that I am an actor on stage, I turn my back to the audience and comb my hair as I make a great speech ("to be or not to be") in Hamlet. After the performance, I comb my hair before the same mirror once again, performing identical physical behaviors or movements -- but not the same actions -- for very different reasons from those "choices" made on stage.

That difference in the meaning of the physically identical gestures is not observable in any brain scan and never will be. Brain scans will only detect the same neurons firing and blood vessel activity. "Not so," you say, "all of the new technology will show ever-finer gradations and subtleties." This is irrelevant to the question of meaning which is essentially cultural, linguistic and (therefore) social, having as much to do with factors outside (an audience, the director, other actors, interpretations of the text) as with those inside the brain of the actor, though both are important.

Like minds, meaning and culture are not items that have a single, narrowly-specified physical location. Hence, the protean selves or minds that emerge in cyberspeace, free of gender, ethnicity, nationality may be persons and yet not be limited to a single physical location or bodily identity. John MacMurray explains:

A behaviorism which ... denies consciousness is self-refuting. It proposes to describe behavior by excluding all elements which cannot be observed or inferred from observation. But "observing" and "inferring" cannot be observed; and no theory, not even even a behaviorist theory is then possible.

Secondly, there is no way, in theory, from an organic consciousness to a personal consciousness involving knowledge and action.

In a recent article containing numerous logical errors and category mistakes undetected by the author, resulting from a failure to recognize these philosophical distinctions and also many others crucial to the metaphysics of mind/body debates, Kathryn Schulz writes:

In transforming Gage from the amiable and responsible person he had been before the accident [a brain injury] to the temperamental and bawdy one he became after, the iron bar also drilled a hole in Cartesian dualism, the intuitive distinction we all make between our minds and our brains.

I don't know about Ms. Schulz, but a brain injury has a way of ruining my mood too. Getting my cable bill has the same effect. This has no bearing on the validity of dualism.

Descartes was well aware of the connection between mind and brain. His error was in supposing that this connection could be "located" in the pineal gland. He understood perfectly well that brain and mind are mutually dependent, for us, but also believed that minds and/or souls were conceptually or philosophically distinct entities, which (he thought) might exist independently of physical organisms. Descartes used the analogy of a ship's pilot (mind) and the ship (body) sailing on the high seas. This is something which computer scientists today -- who are seeking to transfer human brain states to "chips" to be inserted in computers -- also believe, that minds may be separated, some day, from organic bodies.

Like MacMurray, I am NOT a dualist, but a personalist and a compatibilist. On the mind/body issue, I am what philosophers describe as a "dual aspect theorist." I like that better than Davidson's term "anomalous monism." I am anomalous enough, thank you. I believe that minds and brains do not act in the world, only persons do that. Persons tend to have both minds and brains or bodies, which are mutually dependent, to be sure, but neither one of these concepts or entities (mind or brain) can be reduced to the other, no matter how much they need each other to exist. (See "The Galatea Scenario and the Mind/Body Problem.")

When Ms. Schulz says that neuroscience "brooks no distinction between me and the physical processes of my brain," I wonder what she means by "me." Does she think of her American nationality, sexual preference and drive, vocabulary, religious tradition and family as "located" inside her brain? All of those factors make up what -- logically speaking -- she must mean by "me," yet they are not reducible to the contents of any single person's brain as opposed to mental experience. Did you invent the English language? Where did it come from? Doesn't it take two to tango, or to communicate, or to do lots of fun things that are defining of identity? We are not obligated to accept her grim conclusion: "I have no 'will' above and beyond the neurochemical reactions that make me tick."

Relax, kid, and keep "ticking." You can choose to reject the confused neurochemical determinism contained in your article (were you "determined" to adopt that view?), while remaining scientific and fully up to date, so that your friends at the lab or at your university will approve.

I also believe that there is no distinction between "me" thinking, apart from "me" walking and talking, or having a cheeseburger. There is a conceptual distinction between the different aspects of me that think (mind), or eat (brain, stomach, digestion), or desire (mind, brain, and other parts of me), love (mind, brain, filtered through culture). Some of these aspects of me are meaningful socially, others are more individual; some are best studied in a laboratory, others are best examined psychologically or socially, through art or religion, or simple dialogue. All of these aspects of me are certainly "real." Persons are (get ready for a shock) "complicated."

The most illuminating insights into the nature of mind will not come from reductivists, denying the mind's reality by focusing only on the brain, but from "complexity theory" and the mathematics of "emergent phenomena." It is quite possible that science will never solve the puzzle of consciousness, since science is concerned with empirical reality and consciousness -- though natural -- is not "locatable" empirically.

You are in contact with my mind as you read these words, but where is my mind? It is not "on" your computer screen. It is with my brain or me, wherever I am, when you read this. The location of my mind, like that of a minute particle in the quatum realm, is a matter of uncertainty. If you are an actor or film director, then you may create a set of illusions which are captured on film forever; then, like Elvis, you leave the building. Persons who are in touch with those illusions, as they see your film, are experiencing the "products" of your mind, but where is that mind or your self? On screen? Or with your physical body at the Beverly Hills Hotel, where you like to stay to promote the movie? ("What the hell, the studio is paying for it.") Or "at home" with the family? Or working on the next project?

A person is a "freedom in the world" (Sartre), a self-choosing agent, responsible for his or her actions, if unimpaired. A person always has a moral command on my concern, a right to be treated with respect, as a subject and not an object. You do not censor the speech of others. You do not limit the legitimate freedom of others to suit your purposes. A person who has committed no crime is not something to be acted upon by another, without his or her informed and unimpaired consent, regardless of who that other may be or what ostensibly altruistic reasons are offered for that "acting upon" another. Any violation of another's autonomy is worse if it is done secretly, then covered up. As Goethe said that when he heard the word "culture" he reached for his revolver, so whenever I hear the words "this is for your own good," I reach for my baseball bat.

Torture reduces a person to the ontological and moral status of an object. Torture is always immoral and it happens to be illegal under American and international law. To the extent that the current Administration or any other, anywhere, authorized torture, that Administration and those persons -- even if they wear black robes -- have acted illegally and should be held accountable. I am not persuaded (yet!) that this flawed decision to torture Iraqui detainees was made at the highest levels of the government, at the level of policy. Although it is clear that some amazingly awful legal reasoning seems to have been adopted by the Bush Administration, making the hateful abuse of detainees possible.

Jane Mayer's article about the brave actions of former General Counsel for the U.S. Navy, Alberto Mora, suggests that this heroic attorney understood the heinousness in any policy of torture long before anyone else did, boiling it down to essentials. His public statement of these views seems to have resulted in his sudden "departure" from his employment. He will probably face professional ethics charges eventually. He is just not enough of a "team player" to remain an attorney for long. This is to his credit. Nevertheless, he is quite correct. Persons may not be tortured, just as they may not be enslaved, raped, or killed, and for the same reason: because they are persons, entitled to dignity and respect. I insist on my dignity.

Most of the lawyers who researched the issue for the administration had no problem with rationalizing and seeking to justify torture. (It was "nothing personal.") Psychologists and other "therapists" knowingly implemented the techniques designed to inflict torments on men not charged with crimes, much less convicted of any. None of those professionals will face ethics charges. They are the sort of "politically connected" people appointed to elite committees and panels to judge the ethics of others, eventually some of them will serve as judges. Despite my poverty and struggling writer's life, despite my many failures and flaws, I do not envy them their "success" or their precious and oh-so false ethics. Would you care to see one of their portraits? http://www.judiciary.state.nj.us/supreme/images/justices.jpg

Philosophers concerned with the concept of disgust may wish to focus on torturers who are uniquely capable of producing disgust in normal persons, especially when those torturers are lawyers, psychologists or psychiatrists. Mr. Mora states:

"If cruelty is no longer declared unlawful, but instead is applied as a matter of policy, it alters the fundamental relationship of man to government. It destroys the whole notion of individual rights. The Constitution recognizes that [a person] has an inherent right, not bestowed by the State or laws, to personal dignity, including the right to be free of cruelty. It applies to all human beings, not just in America -- even those designated as 'unlawful enemy combatants.' If you make this exception, the whole Constitution crumbles. It's a transformative issue."

There are jurisdictions within the United States where cruelty is allowed, so long as it is done secretly and "persons" do not discover that they have been tortured, so that courts and agencies can pretend that nothing happened. (See "Psychological Torture in the American Legal System.") Sometimes these jurisdictions are controlled by one of the national political parties -- often not the one that you might expect -- but the issue is ignored by the powerful. The torturers get away with it, possibly after making a political contribution.

State judges are often more concerned about lobbying for pay increases -- which they probably deserve, especially when they actually do their jobs -- than about coping with this reality of torture in the legal system. Organized crime has become influential in local governments in too many jurisdictions -- New Jersey being the prime example -- influencing the appointment of judges and other officials. It is often difficult to distinguish the criminals from the judges. (See "Same Old, Same Old" and "A Letter From a Condemned Man" at Philosopher's Quest, also: David Kocieniewski, "Ex-Prosecutors in Trenton Respond to U.S. Scolding," in The New York Times, January 27, 2006, at p. B2.)

I am suggesting, along with Mr. Mora, that a choice to ignore "crimes against humanity" or violations of the integrity of persons, when they are committed by the politically or otherwise "connected," is a tragic mistake. It results in the loss of the very freedoms for which American men and women are said to be dying now, as I write, in Iraq. It also undermines of the credibility of the American legal system by leading observers to conclude that Constitutional principles are given lip service publicly, but ignored in practice. I continue to hope that this is not true.

It should be noted that sadists and torturers (Alex, Terry and Diana), victimizers of all sorts, grow addicted to their activities, deriving pleasure -- maybe even sexual pleasure -- from inflicting pain on others, preferably others who are rendered helpless in some manner. Professor Colin McGinn explains:

"[The sadist's] governing impulse is about as repulsive as any could be -- to make another person not want to live. This is a good deal more heinous than merely wanting to make one's mark on the world or reduce the other to fleshly existence. What the sadist is primarily aiming at is the desire system of the victim -- he wants to alter it from being pro-life to being anti-life. He does not primarily seek the death of the victim, only the victim's desire for his own death. The victim's suicide is the logical extension of the sadist's aim ["jump off the Empire State building!" -- has been whispered by torturers to victims, as I can attest,] but this has the disadvantage that the victim will no longer exist in a state of complete value-turnaround. The death of the victim is always a matter for complete ambivalence on the part of the sadist: it is both consummation and failure. ... The evil character is moved by something more than the mere absence of virtue. If we wish to understand and eradicate evil, we need to start by acknowledging how good it feels [to the evil-doers]."

Ethics, Evil and Fiction (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1997), p. 81, p. 91.

Professor McGinn is suggesting that doing evil "feels good" to torturers and evil-doers. Just the opposite is the case for the rest of us, who will never do evil because we find the very idea of such actions -- and the persons capable of them -- repulsive.

I am asking judges everywhere to honor the robes that they wear by doing what is required by law and morality. Punish the torturers. Stop the evil. Recognize that victims are persons, entitled to respect and acknowledgment in their pain and suffering. End the stone-walling and cover ups. Tell people who have been tortured the truth about what has been done to them and who has done it. South Africa's peace, after years of torture and oppression, was only made possible by a process of "Truth and Reconciliation." Mr. Mora will provide the last word:

"The debate here isn't only how to protect the country. It's how to protect our values."

Elaine Pagels and the Secret Texts of Christianity.

The image accompanying this essay may be blocked or obstructed by N.J. hackers. The pattern of protected censorship and cybercrime -- apparently by N.J. Democrat attack machine flunkeys and mafia whores -- continues in 2009.



Elaine Pagels, Beyond Belief: The Secret Gospel of Thomas (New York: Vintage, 2003), $13.00. (You may be able to get it at Strand Books for $10.00.)



In an interview discussing her most recent book entitled Beyond Belief: The Secret Gospel of Thomas (New York: Vintage, 2003), Professor Elaine Pagels of Princeton University was photographed in the company of her parrot named "Augustine." Professor Pagels indicated that she had a life-long interest in archeology as well as history.

I hoped to question Professor Pagels concerning her scholarly work and her views of early Christianity together with the growing global interest in kabbala and "gnosticism." Due to her busy schedule, however, Professor Pagels was unavailable for an interview, but she did arrange for a meeting between a representative of "Critical Vision" and Augustine, who is a scholar, a distinguished lecturer on the theology of evil and the history of parrots in the United States.

We arrive for the interview on a cool evening in early Autumn, at the Pagels's family residence in Princeton, New Jersey to find Augustine at the door in a silk bathrobe and an ascot, holding a tiny glass of brandy. He smiles and says: "I hope you don't mind, but I've started without you."

Augustine stands three-and-one-half inches in height, impressive for a parrot, and is a kindly and charming host. We sit in a large room, which is warm and welcoming, with fresh-cut flowers, a roaring fireplace, some antiques and impressionist watercolors on the walls. Augustine smokes a tiny pipe and there are vestiges of an Oxbridge accent in his speech, despite his many years in America. He is wearing slippers with a monogram and miniscule golden spectacles dangle at the end of his beak.

What is "Gnosis"?

The word Gnosis is usually italicized," Augustine explains, "but not other uses of 'gnostic' or 'Gnosticism,' " The word may be defined as: "A doctrine of various sects combining Christian and pagan elements, that came into prominence around the 2nd century. Central importance attaches to ‘gnosis’ [the word literally means 'knowing' and it has become 'controversial' recently, like most interesting things, or] revealed but secret knowledge of God and of His nature, enabling those who possess it to achieve salvation. ... The material world is associated ... with evil, but in some men [and women] there is a spiritual element that through knowledge and associated ritual may be rescued from it and attain a higher spiritual state."

Dictionary of Philosophy (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1994), p. 158.

"For my generation," Augustine is roughly my contemporary, "gnosticism has often come to symbolize or designate the religious impulse generally, that is, the energies of transcendence in the human psyche, together with the on-going quest for ultimate meaning in a place and time that seems to deflate and ridicule this aspiration in crippling ways."

Taking a puff from his pipe, Augustine sighed: "Among the principal sources for gnosticism are Elaine Pagels, The Gnostic Gospels (New York: Vintage, 1989) and Hans Jonas, The Gnostic Religion (Boston: Beacon Press, 1963)."

Professor Pagels’s latest book is more personal, powerful and accessible to non-historians, like me, than anything that she has written previously. At any rate, it is more powerful than any of her other writings of which I am aware. Those of us wary of organized religion, skeptical of church authority, jaded about the “fairy tale” qualities of our childhood religions (and disappointed by the failings of some of those who taught them to us, persons who are as imperfect as we are), find that Professor Pagels is an interesting guide to what religion may yet be for us.

I can never believe in a personal God, dispensing rewards and penalties at whim. Does she? Maybe not. I do believe in (and have experienced) love. Nonetheless, I recognize the importance of unfulfilled spiritual needs, or even hungers, in my own life. I suspect that Professor Pagels’s work is motivated, in part, by a recognition of similar yearnings and of some of the obstructions to those yearnings resulting not only from contemporary secularism, but also from the contradictions in what has come to be known as “official” Christianity. This recent transformation may be described as Dr. Pagels’s “Kierkegaardian turn.” Consider this passage from Kierkegaard’s journals:

"... And when God wishes to bind a human being to Him in earnest, He summons one of his most faithful servants, His trustiest messenger, Grief, and tells him: Hurry after him, do not budge from his side (... and no woman can cling more tenderly to what she loves than grief)."

The Diary of Soren Kierkegaard (P. Rhode, trans. & ed.: New York: Carol Publishing Group, 1993), p. 20.

Professor Pagels examines the question of what is meant by faith or religion in the light of her own experience of tragedy, together with her analysis of the early Christian texts, touching precisely on this issue of whether the quest that I speak of and that is often, as I suggest, ridiculed in our institutions of higher learning today as an unfortunate relic of a more superstitious age, is truly fundamental or merely something to be overcome:

"What is Christianity, and what is religion, I wondered, and why do so many of us still find it compelling, whether or not we belong to a church, and despite difficulties we may have with particular beliefs or practices? What is it about Christian tradition that we love -- and what is it that we cannot love?"

Beyond Belief, at p. 6.

For Tolstoy, this question demanded an answer:

"The essence of any religion lies solely in the answer to the question: Why do I exist and what is my relationship to the infinite universe that surrounds me?"

A Confession and Other Writings (London: Penguin, 1987), p. 134.

Tolstoy goes on to say:

"Religion is the relationship a person recognizes himself to have with the external world, or with its origin and first cause, and a rational person cannot fail to have some kind of relationship to it."
A Confession, p. 137.

In light of these comments by Tolstoy, consider Professor Pagels’s observation:

"[There is] much that I love about religious tradition, and Christianity in particular -- including how powerfully these may affect us, and perhaps even transform us. At the same time, [my study of the gnostic gospels] helped clarify what I cannot love: the tendency to identify Christianity with a single, authorized set of beliefs -- however these actually vary from church to church -- coupled with the conviction that Christian belief alone offers access to God."

Beyond Belief, p. 29.

This goes a long way toward explaining why gnostic Christianity is attractive to Americans -- because the focus is on experience rather than dogma, intuition and revelation along with the immediate and direct encounter with the divine within all of us is essential to this tradition. But it is not only the gnostic tradition which sought this "mystical union," but also the Alchemists, kabbalists and some Protestant sects have cultivated inner disciplines aimed at achieving a unity with God. And here is Kierkegaard again:

"... but how on earth does it occur to a person to subject himself to all this; why must he be a Christian when it is so hard? The answer to this might be, in the first place: Shut up! Christianity is the Absolute, a Must. But there could also be another answer: because the consciousness of sin within him will not leave him in peace, the pain of it fortifies him to bear everything else, if only he can find redemption."

And yet again:

"This means that the pain of sin [and of loss?] must be very deep in a human being; therefore it must be presented as it is, so difficult that it becomes truly obvious that Christianity is only related to the consciousness of sin [or of pain in general?]. Any attempt to become a Christian for any other reason is quite literally lunacy; and that is how it should be."

The Diary of Soren Kierkegaard, pp. 149-150.

The relationship with the external world that we recognize may be one of overwhelming identification or “unity.” Some of us -- persons from all religious traditions or from no religious tradition, skeptics and religious believers alike -- have sensed or experienced very directly that we are connected to one another and to all that is. This “mystical” insight may be expressed entirely in the language of science and have no patina of the mythic or religious about it. As one who continues to think of himself as an agnostic and skeptic, for instance, I am reminded of the writings of the physicist David Bohm:

"This is the implicate or enfolded order. In the enfolded order, space and time are no longer the dominant factors determining the relationships of dependence or independence of different elements. Rather, an entirely different sort of basic connection of elements is possible, from which our ordinary notions of space and time, along with those of separately existent material particles, are abstracted as forms derived from the deeper order. These ordinary notions in fact appear in what is called the explicate or unfolded order, which is a special and distinguished form contained within the general totality of all the implicate orders."

Wholeness and the Implicate Order (London: Routledge, 1980), p. xv.

The work of Professor Bohm anticipated and is seemingly confirmed by some of the latest findings of physicists exploring developments in the field of "emergent phenomena":

"Inevitably reductionism [and atomistic methods] have been overused. Not everything can be reduced to cosmic nuts and bolts. In the emerging sciences of the twenty-first century, many researchers are dusting off an old saying: 'The whole is more than the sum of its parts.' "

Keay Davidson, "You Are More Important Than a Quark: A Nobel Prize Winning Physicist Takes On the Reductionist Tendencies of Modern Science," The New York Times, Book Review, Sunday, June 19, 2005, at p. 19. [Review of Robert B. Laughin, A Different Universe: Reinventing Physics From the Top Down (New York: Basic Books, 2005).]

In accordance with this new scientific view of the universe, persons and all that "is" (thank you, Mr. Clinton) may be part of a vast and multidimensional whole, which is directed at purposes, ends, or realizations which we only dimly apprehend or fail to understand entirely, serving as an explanation of what each minute particular does and is, as well as a reason for what it does and is. It follows that one must trust in the coherence of the whole and in the appropriateness of the pattern, which can never be seen in its entirety by any single individual, from only one perspective. Counselor West in the Matrix: Reloaded says: "Comprehension is not a requisite of cooperation."

There is much talk about "interpretation" these days. Well, this view of the universe and of our roles in it must be the ultimate faith in coherent interpretation. Just as persons worked for decades on the building of cathedrals that neither they nor their children would see completed, in the confidence that those cathedrals would rise and that they would be beautiful, in the fullness of time, so we must labor and suffer for reasons that we only dimly apprehend or fail to grasp entirely, yet trust to be meaningful somehow, from some ultimate perspective. I will continue to struggle against the evil of New Jersey's mafia corruption and disgusting criminality for as long as I live.

The ways people choose to communicate this basic intuition that we see “through a glass darkly,” but that there certainly is an infinity to be seen, is immaterial anyway. The languages deployed to convey or articulate the insight are secondary to the powerful and immediate knowledge itself of this “instantiation” of the universe in us and of ourselves in all that is. (See the film "In America" and the Henry James story "The Figure in the Carpet," or the Tom Stoppard play "Arcadia.")

Those who prefer a more traditional philosophical statement of these metaphysical issues are directed to F.H. Bradley's discussion of evil in his classic, Appearance and Reality (Oxford: 1897). In his examination of the writings of Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Walter Pater writes that Coleridge:

" ... regards nature itself as the living energy of an intelligence of the same kind as, though vaster in scope, than the human."

Pater goes on to say:

"But the suspicion of a mind latent in nature, struggling for release, and intercourse with the intellect of man through true ideas, has never ceased to haunt a certain class of minds. ... wherever the speculative instinct has been united with a certain poetic inwardness of temperament, as in Bruno, Schelling, there that old Greek conception, like some seed floating in the air, has taken root and sprung up anew."

Harold Bloom, ed., Selected Writings of Walter Pater (New York: Signet, 1974), p. 149 (emphasis added).

Scientists tell us that all the matter that now exists in the universe was formed out of a substance compressed into a bulk roughly the size of your fist at the instant before the “Big Bang.” We are made of that highly compact “star-stuff.” As Webster saw “the skull beneath the flesh,” so we can sometimes see ourselves not only in the eyes of others but also in the farthest stars and galaxies, or in the tiniest components of the universe. We recognize a reflection of our likeness, in other words, in the powerful forces that make up the universe because we discover them first in ourselves. In looking through a telescope we see vast and unimaginably strange things, we also see sameness, likeness, self-portraits.

If it is true that in knowing the universe, we know ourselves; then it is equally true that in the mystical traditions -- both in Judaism and Christianity, but also in Islamic sufism -- knowledge of ourselves is also, eventually, knowledge of God.

The intuitions of poets, artists and philosophers come together with the discoveries of some of our greatest scientists in response to the encounter with the numinous, with the unimaginable vastness and smallness of the cosmos and the microcosmos. The final insight is inescapable: My concern for a neighbor or for the planet is also a concern for myself. See Ken Wilber, No Boundary: Eastern and Western Approaches to Personal Growth (Boston: Shambala, 2001), p. 3.

For those of us struggling to find some community and meaning in an increasingly secular and materialistic culture that is contemptuous of our natural spirituality and dismissive of all religion, we are led to ask: Can we get the "bonus" (community, meaning) without the "onus" of religious faith (dogmatism and intolerance)? I hope so.

Our visit with Augustine is drawing to a close and as he walks us to the door, he pauses to discuss some of the items in the home that he shares with Professor Pagels and her family. We discuss my difficulties with belief, and he reminds me of the words with which Professor Pagels takes her leave of readers:

"Most of us, sooner or later," she writes, "find that, at critical points in our lives, we must strike out on our own to make a path where none exists. What I have come to love in the wealth and diversity of our religious traditions -- and the communities that sustain them -- is that they offer the testimony of innumerable people to spiritual discovery. Thus, they encourage those who endeavor in Jesus' words, 'to seek and you shall find.' "

A Comment on Personal Identity and the Soul.

"In every [person] there is a spark of the Divine Soul. The power of evil in man darkens this flame and almost puts it out. Brotherly love among them rekindles the soul and brings it closer to its source."

Arthur Hertzbeg, ed., Judaism (New York: George Braziller, 1962), p. 111. Compare: George Bratl, ed., Catholicism (New York: George Baziller, 1962), pp. 11-12; and John Alden Williams, ed., Islam (New York: George Baziller, 1962), p. 159 ("transcendence in Sufism").

Earl Conee & Theodore Sider, Riddles of Existence: A Guided Tour of Metaphysics (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2005), $18.95.



This entertaining book is a great introduction to the basic issues in metaphysics. It is accessible, but still pretty thorough in examining the complexities of the issues. I recommend it to anyone interested in learning more about metaphysical philosophy.

I wish to focus on the discussion of "personal identity" in this work, since personal identity is a much debated concept in contemporary philosophy. Personal identity is discussed in different ways and for different purposes by philosophers and psychologists, biologists, neurologists and physicists. It is also discussed by a group of intellectuals who are usually ignored in attempts to decipher this mystery. We forget that theologians of all the great religions in the world have also been concerned to examine the related question: "What is a person?"

Discussions of personal identity among philosophers focus on what makes a person one and the same person over a lifetime, if anything does. If you look at one of your baby pictures, you may ask yourself: "Was that really me?" If you answer "yes, that was me," then on what basis are you coming to that conclusion?

As I sit in my Star Trek pajamas, having enjoyed a nutritious breakfast of Captain Crunch cereal with peanut butter and bananas, I see myself as highly mature. Not everyone is as mature and responsible as I am, of course, but most of us see ourselves as making some progress in journeys toward self-awareness or enlightenment, and yet still as one "being" throughout our lifetimes.

Most people say, well, it is my same physical body -- although greatly changed -- so that's why it is me, both in the baby picture from long ago and today in my full adult splendor. In fact, most of the cells in the human body, or one's material substance, will be recycled every seven years or so, through normal processes of ingestion and excretion. So it is not really your same body over any ten year period. In my case, this is fortunate.

Also, your material body may be altered through the transplantation of an organ or by the loss of a limb. Yet we do not say that I have lost some of my identity when I had my appendix removed. If a person receives my kidney, then does it automatically follow that the recipient will suddenly develop an interest in philosophy and Opera, like me? See Steven King's The Dark Half or Robert Louis Stevenson's Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde.

Advances in technology will soon make it possible for bodily organs to be replaced by synthetic products. Once your heart, liver, kidneys and other organs (an alarming thought just crossed my mind concerning one of my organs in particular!) are plastic or manufactured in Asia, as computer chips enhance your cerebral functions, will you still be the "same person"? If so, why?

Not according to a bodily criterion of identity. Change your body and you have changed your identity. The official term for this physicalist or materialist theory of personal identity is the "bodily continuity" theory. It appeals to those who like to think of themselves as scientifically-minded, except that they hardly think of themselves as only material objects in the world, bodies, without minds or souls, even though they claim that neither minds nor souls exist in this advanced scientific age. On the other hand, this seems to adherents of scientism like a good way to think about other people. Other people are mere material bodies. "We" are something more, psychobabblers say.

Oscar Wilde reminds us that "other people are quite dreadful." Whereas, "to love oneself is the beginning of a life-long romance." He neglected to discuss the possibility that one's self-love may not be reciprocated. I am always infuriated by the way I play "hard to get" when I try to love myself. More than once I have had to send myself candy and flowers, so as not to be denied sex, by myself.

Against this view is the "memory or psychological criterion" of identity which regards persons as "identical" with their memories or personalities. This view is typically associated with John Locke's philosophy (see Bishop Butler's criticisms of it, by the way, or the writings of Thomas Reid). This "memory criterion" leads to insurmountable problems.

If a person suffers from amnesia, then is he or she the same person today as the one yesterday, whose actions are not recalled today? Not according to the memory criterion. In the story Shattered, a man is involved in a terrible accident that causes "brain damage" resulting in impairments of "mental" functioning and memory. He is slowly given the memories of another person, raising the question: Does the victim with the altered memories become this other person? If so, at what point is the transformation complete? Hint: You will need Spinoza and Hegel, Kafka, Erikson, Jung, maybe also Maugham's Of Human Bondage, even to begin to figure this one out.

You can see that after Cartesian dualism, the subject or self is split into physical and mental entities, so that two concepts of identity linked to each of these aspects of the self emerged. My guess is that neither of these incomplete notions of the self, body or mind, will ever be adequate -- on its own -- as an account of what persons are.

The idea of "splitting" in schizoid patterns (see Laing's Divided Self, and forget Juliet Mitchell's criticisms) or in terms of poetic discourses, which sever writer from reader -- or writers from their roles as readers -- is fascinating in connection with debates over personal identity, but worthy of separate treatment.

There are a number of assumptions made by these authors leading to difficulties or mistakes, I think, that might be avoided. Traditionally, issues of personal identity were resolved by means of the concept of the "soul." Today, of course, philosophers mostly wish to avoid talk of the soul or spirit as a relic of a prescientific age, while neurologists and psychologists dispense with the notion of the soul entirely since, despite their best efforts, they fail to detect its presence in laboratory animals:

Souls might seem to provide quick answers to many philosophical perplexities about identity over time, but there is no good reason to believe that they exist. [Read that last sentence again and notice that the first part of it refutes the second.] Philosophers used to argue that souls must be posited in order to explain the existence of thoughts and feelings, since thoughts and feelings don't seem to be part of the physical body. But this argument is undermined by contemporary science. [Is it?]

Furthermore,

... it is sensible to conclude that mentality itself RESIDES in the brain, [but in what neighborhood?] and that the soul does not exist. It's not that brain science DISPROVES the soul; souls could exist [What a relief!] even though brains and psychological states are perfectly correlated. [Are they?] But if the physical brain explains mentality on its own, there is no need to postulate souls in addition.

All efforts to have the physical brain explain "mentality" have failed, spectacularly and repeatedly. No brain image detects mind or soul. Therefore, some scientists say, these things do not exist. However, brain images also do not detect thoughts, wishes or fears, hopes or spiritual experiences (though brain science detects the effects of such inner experiences and knows them to be real). I think that we can say the same about minds. We may assume or infer their existence based on their effects, including the recently documented capacity of thoughts to control appliances at a distance, thanks to a brain implant, not to mention the ways in which meditation alters brain chemistry.

Brain science cannot picture or identify the link between observable brain processes, such as neurons firing and abstract concepts such as consciousness or mind. It is simply assumed or taken for granted that such a link exists. There is no brain image of consciousness. This is because consciousness or mind is a concept made possible by language.

Your brain can be removed from your skull and placed in a jar; but your mind cannot be placed in a jar for the excellent reason that it is a philosophical concept, existing "in relation" with or connected to your brain, but also socially, linguistically, culturally in a network of relations with others, and for religious persons, also in relation with God. Mind has no weight or physical location, but it does have a history in philosophy.

Part of the problem in this discussion is that the concept of the "soul" is not defined by these philosophers or most scientists, even as they use or reject it. Like many others, they merely assume that the soul is an archaic concept associated with mystical or magical religious notions, so that it may be dispensed with and discarded. The word "person" is also not defined, although it is used in this discussion. Other concepts that should be used in this discussion -- and when they are used, tend not to be defined -- include: "psyche," "spirit," "being," or "mind" and "culture."

It is no coincidence that "psyche," as well as "soul" and "spirit" have a common etymological root in the ancient Egyptian word, ka or "breath." This word "soul" is what scientists describe as a "mystery." Interestingly, that's also what theologians say. Ain't that a kick in the pants? I'd say so. O.K., boys and girls, lets go back to the beginning of this discussion.

What are you? Are you an object, like a shoe? Are you a complex machine, like your t.v. set, or a car? My guess is that whatever scientists say, that is just not how any of us see ourselves. It is not how they see themselves. "This failure to accept your animal nature is only an illusion or just wishful thinking," says the busy MIT graduate.

Professor Sider assumes that science and the concept of the soul, which he does not define, are incompatible. Why? Who says so? How can he know if he does not define what he means by the soul? Suppose that the problem is not accepting our animal natures, but coming to terms with the part of us that is more than animal or material, that aspect of our selves that exists "in" language, socially, spiritually (if you like), with others, as an inherently social entity? The mystery is revealed by our capacity for love. When you love another person, "where" are you?

I think that the concept of a soul and contemporary scientific accounts of human nature are highly compatible, each enriches and contributes to the other. Philosopher David Braine writes in The Human Person, that traditional accounts of the soul or "personal being" turn "not on consciousness but on intellect, which is something whose most evident human expressions are not in perception, emotion and the experience of pain, but in speech and writing -- in brief in the works of language." Similarly, the concept of God is fully compatible with scientific learning and reality, as indicated by scientist Carl Sagan, who says in Broca's Brain:

An atheist is someone who has compelling evidence against the existence of God. I know of no such compelling evidence. Because God can be relegated to remote times and places and to ultimate causes, we would have to know a great deal more about the universe than we do now to be sure that no such God exists.

I usually define myself as an atheist or agnostic in rejecting anthropomorphic concepts of God. Carl Sagan would say that I am not an atheist and neither is he. You decide.

No one can tell you that belief in God is prohibited by scientific learning. But if there is a God, then all of what science reveals would be contained in or as God. This belief in a deity is a matter of choice, like your identity. I am not alone in this conclusion that the concept of a soul, defined as the unity of material and social -- or other aspects of humans -- is a useful one. In other words, the soul is the unity of that protean and variable essence that you are, which is always plural or multiple, made up of many elements. Your mind and your self are "leaping things." Anthony O'Hear writes:

... my identity is a particular and specific amalgam of my biological nature and my social circumstances. And it is on the basis of what I INHERIT [see my earlier discussion of Jung and collective memory, including religious traditions,] in these ways that I work out my conception of the good life, and what should count as reasons in evaluating which rights to recognize, which pleasures to seek, which pains to discount.

I am not a pure self. I am not self-sufficient, physically, psychologically, intellectually, emotionally or in any other way. ... I am a rational animal. [No one is denying this, who is a serious participant in this discussion.] I am also, in Alasdair MacIntyre's helpful phrase, a dependent rational animal.

Underline this next phrase and compare it to Charles Taylor's critique of atomism:

Multiple dependencies permeate my existence. ... As a moral being, deciding what to do and what to value, I am in fact as situated in my world [materially, biologically] as I am in my existence as a knowing agent [mind, soul].

This is not Cartesian dualism, but the denial of dualism. Important philosophers supporting this view are Spinoza, Hegel and Josiah Royce.

I suggest that a person is one entity. I am a unity of material or animal being, existing empirically in the natural world for a specific temporal period or duration, with a history, but also existing as a human being only by becoming a moral subject within communities and in a life-world of meaningful relationships, using a language, feeling for other people, as a member of multiple communities (a dynamic multiplicity). I am a being whose essence requires that he be larger than himself. My purpose is self-transcendence. My purpose, then, is "to be." And the only way to be, is to love. Love is "doing," it is true action in the world (John MacMurray), though it does not require accumulation of wealth or military conflict.

All of us are spiritual beings living in a material world, an infinite essence within a material base. A human life takes place within (or as) paradox. In my case, I exist as an American, New Yorker, of Cuban ancestry, member of a species originating in Africa -- and (in that sense, like you) I am African too -- male, (depressingly) forty-eight years-old (!), free to choose himself through affective capacities, with others, especially by means of his loves. To love, again, is the only way to be fully human, to be a person, since it both makes us moral and takes us beyond morality.

Loving and being loved -- something that is only possible for free beings -- is more crucial to human being-in-the world than the "residence" of one's appendix or any other part of one's anatomy. To recognize this, is to see that being human or a person is entering the moral realm, for it means that I must grant the same moral and ontological status to others, like me, and that I am constrained in what I may do to them and in the attention that I am compelled to give to them, also in the respect to which they are due from me. (Simone Weil) A person is, unavoidably, a moral being. This becoming fully human or a moral being is the acquistion of a soul. (See my story "The Soldier and the Ballerina.")

To point to my moral failures or anyone else's is no criticism of what I am saying, since a person can only be accused of behaving badly if there is such a thing as behaving well, in a moral sense. To suggest that there is such a thing as morality, which is essential to what we are as persons, is not to claim that one is better than other people. In fact, the effect is to counsel humility and a reminder of all of the ways in which most of us -- myself especially -- may fail to live up to our own standards. The worst mistake to make is to reject the standards because we don't always meet them. A better idea is to try harder next time.

The deepest wisdom found in our religious traditions is confirmed by our scientific learning and not disproved by it. As physicist Paul Davies suggests in his discussion of God and the New Physics: "We may therefore choose to reject the belief that the mind is nothing but brain cell activity, for that is to fall into the reductivist trap."

The internationally recognized paleontologist and Catholic theologian Pierre Teilhard de Chardin in The Phenomenon of Man, echoes this point in discussions of science and human spirit (pp. 245-251), but also of "love as energy" (pp. 264-268), see his discussion of the "noosphere," defining persons as "organized complexity," leading ultimately to an identity with that evolving universe in which we find ourselves and also (for him) with God.

Discussions by rigorous thinkers, making use of the concept of the soul, in a scientifically respectable manner, are plentiful. For example, June Singer speaks of the soul in Boundaries of the Soul: the Practice of Jung's Psychology, so does philosopher of science, Ian Hacking in Rewriting the Soul: Multiple Personality and the Sciences of Memory. Professor Hacking will get the last word in defining this concept of "soul," that we need now more than ever:

Talk of the soul sounds old fashioned, but I take it seriously. The soul that was scientized was something transcendental, perhaps immortal. Philosophers of my stripe speak of the soul not to suggest something eternal, but to invoke character, reflective choice, self-understanding, values that include honesty to others and oneself, and several types of freedom and responsibility. Love, passion, envy, tedium, regret, and quiet contentment are the stuff of the soul. This may be a very old idea of the soul, pre-Socratic. I do not think of the soul as unitary [-- notice that Professor Hacking is suggesting, as I read him, that persons are unitary, bringing together in souls, minds and other aspects of the unique multiplicity that each of us is --] as an essence, as one single thing, or even as a thing at all. It does not denote an unchanging core of personal identity. [This is because what is unchanging in us, as Roberto Unger argues, is the capacity to change.] One person, one soul may have many facets and speak with many tongues. To think of the soul is not to imply that there is one essence, one spiritual point, from which all voices issue. In my way of thinking, the soul is a more modest concept than that. It stands for the strange mix of aspects of a person that may be, at some time, imagined as inner -- a thought not contradicted by Wittgenstein's dictum that the body is the best picture of the soul.

A Bookstore Romance.

The image accompanying this post may be blocked or substituted by hackers. My profile can longer provide a photo. So here is an image to accompany this essay: http://www.reel.com/Content/reelimages/reviews/dvd/dvd_2211.jpg


The following item appeared in New York Press recently:

"A survey of 1003 New Yorkers between the ages of 25 and 35 revealed that the hottest current pick-up joints in town are no longer bars, nightclubs or church groups, but rather chain stores. Topping the list were Barnes & Noble and Starbucks."

I have known this for some time. The best place to "meet" a woman now is in a bookstore. Border's will do just as well, by the way. To begin with, this reduces the competition from other men, since most of them are incapable of reading books. In fact, most of them are incapable of reading. Bookstores are also great places to meet women who are in a nostalgic or romantic frame of mind already, based on the books that they happen to be glancing at -- as they used to say in the fifties, they are "pre-heated."

Loiter, inconspicuously, near the poetry section on any weekday evening, for example, and you are likely to see a number of women browsing through collections of romantic verse and blowing their noses.

Although I have now "sheathed my sword," as it were, if I were still in a questing mood, I'd approach one of these women and whisper some lines from one of the greats, preferably Keats or Byron. Especially now, in my slim and dashing (if graying) "poet phase," when I have so much wisdom to offer. I'd be doing them a favor. And I am a charitable person. Naturally, I reserve Shakespeare for that one great passion in my life.

This literary approach is almost guaranteed to get one's foot -- and perhaps more -- in the door, shall we say.

True, there are cynics who are dismissive of romance as self-deception. H.L. Mencken once defined romantic love as "the delusion that one woman differs from another." Voltaire unkindly remarked that, "When the lights are off, all women are the same." To which women might respond that "there are many men who may wish that the same could be said of them." On the other hand, Balzac spoke for those of us who disagree by defining romance as "precisely to the moral nature what the sun is to the earth." I agree with Balzac.

There is nothing that can compare with the look in a woman's eyes of joy and happiness when you, the person she loves, have made her laugh and feel beautiful, turning her day into a romantic comedy. As for what you should do to make her evenings more interesting, I will remain tactfully silent. Romance is like that moment in Wizard of Oz when Dorothy finds herself in a technicolor Oz, on a yellow brick road, having left a dreary black-and-white Kansas far behind. Romance is, in the best sense, magical.

"Never pass up an opportunity to have sex," Gore Vidal said, "or to go on television." What would he say about the chance to have sex while on television? I cannot say, but I am sure that Myra Breckinridge would approve. That's what I call a romantic surprise for a woman. "Look, honey, we're on candid camera!"

I am a bookstore prowler. A few evenings per week, usually Tuesdays and Thursdays, I stroll through my beloved Manhattan and visit some favorite bookstores, coffee shops, video and music places, relishing the anonymity and freedom of the city in the enveloping darkness. Recently, I was in the huge Barnes & Noble bookstore accross from Lincoln Center, found some books I wanted to look through, then went upstairs to the coffee shop and darted over to a table that quickly emptied.

As I sat down, I noticed a woman sitting at the next table with her back turned to me. Her hair was collected in a kind of bun, so that the back of her neck was visible to me -- and her neck was so erotic, graceful, long and feminine. She wore a simple light sweater, her hair was auburn colored. She turned only once to see me, but offered me a melting smile as she rose to leave. Suddenly, time was frozen. No one moved. The clock stopped. I had one of those cartoon epiphanies, when a tiny version of me dressed in red and with horns sat on my left shoulder, while another tiny version of me, dressed in a white suit and with a halo, like an angelic Tom Wolfe, sat on my right shoulder. The evil me (but which was it, the one in the white or red suit?) said: "This is a golden opportunity, boy. This is achievable, Juan!"

I just thought of John Updike's most passionate prose passage: a page and half describing a single "act of love," whose nature I will not disclose. Wouldn't I love to have something like that to describe for a page and a half? I might casually walk up to her and mention Count Vronsky and Anna. She had a copy of Anna Karenina. Besides, we are in the vicinity of Julliard. Chances are that we are dealing here with an artsy-fartsy type dance major or music student, possibly a graduate student, which makes the odds even better for me. If I simply offer some chat about Stravinsky and an invitation to listen to music together, sprinkle some Leftist politics over everything, I'm in, as it were.

She had kicked off her shoes, I noticed, so I might rise slowly and smilingly mention that her glass slipper seemed to have been left behind. Might I help her to slip it back on? ... But then, that annoying other guy chimed in with his two cents' worth.

"Juan," he said. "Think about this. She is very young, lovely, but much too young. Would it really be right? How would you feel about this later, after spending some time achieving an unconditional victory, what about your commitments and your so-called real life?"

Mistakenly, I had taken some philosophy books upstairs to the coffee shop, including a volume on ethics. I hate ethics. Isn't it all relative? Conscience, that dreaded thing, began to struggle against eros. Suddenly, my evil self began to speak in a voice very similar to Richard Burton's classically trained baritone. He shrugged his tiny shoulders: "Once more into the breach!, Juan."

I did the right thing. I allowed a golden opportunity to slip away.

I admit to a Jimmy Carter-like "lust in my heart," and in other parts of me too. I am also cursed with a moral conscience and reluctant to get involved with someone that I might hurt. Luckily, there is the enchanted country of the imagination, where everything is possible. After all, it is so depressing to consider that there are only a limited number of high C's for any tenor, in a manner of speaking, no matter how "heroic" he may be. I am in my Operatic prime right now! I am ready for the "heldentenor roles" and I allowed a perfectly fine soprano to get away last night. I am burdened with what Nietzsche would describe as a crippling case of the "bite of conscience." In more prosaic terms, I can't stop thinking about whether I fucked up.

So I have devised several plots involving the two of us, this mysterious young woman and me, getting ourselves into a romantic adventure -- like those characters in "Brief Interlude," a great film from the thirties or forties.

I dress her in a forties outfit and we are suddenly in a train station. Everything is black and white. Everyone is trying to get out of Paris because the Germans are coming. The night is foggy. There is a tear in her eye, as she looks at me. True, it may be indigestion, but I prefer to think the best. I kneel before her and slip her shoe back on. We embrace. There is only one ticket and it has to be for her. We embrace again and kiss. She says: "I can't ... " But I insist: "You must." There is music. Stravinsky perhaps. No, Rachmaninoff is better. Lots of piano keys flutter. More fog begins to roll in, right on cue. (It's never wise to skimp on the fog at such moments.)

Minutes later, I wave to her as the train pulls out of the station. (Close up on me.) I resemble ... let's see, ... Oh, I know: Douglas Fairbanks, Jr.! I am in a trenchcoat, dark suit underneath. I push the hat back from my forehead and light a cigarette. (Fade to black.)

William Trevor has spoken of the writer's habit of turning strangers into characters in stories. Who is she? This delightful ingenue. Does it matter? She will live in my imagination now forever, along with a few other women ... no, ultimately becoming only one other woman, yet another color in my pallette. In my imagination, the conflict vanishes. In dreams, to borrow from Delmore Schwartz, I escape responsibilities and pursue the one quest that I will not give up, EVER. Maybe that's my ultimate responsibility.

Everything is possible in imagination.

Maybe I'll write the story. Maybe she'll read it. Will she recognize herself? But then, it will no longer be that young woman in the bookstore. It will be someone else -- that someone else knows who she is, in my stories and in my life. If one is separated from a lover, an agony which is beyond even Kafka's dark imagination, then dreams come to the rescue and every work of art and idea, nearly every experience, becomes amenable to re-interpretation in terms of the lover's quest. An absent lover lives in every page of one's imagination.

I just realized that I have written the story after all.

Leszek Kolakowski on Edmund Husserl's Encounters With Kant and Hegel.

Leszek Kolakowski, "Totalitarianism and the Virtue of the Lie," in Irving Howe, ed., 1984 Revisited: Totalitarianism in Our Century (New York: Harper & Row, 1983), p. 122.
Leszek Kolakowski, Modernity on Endless Trial (Chicago: University of Chicago, 1997), pp. 44-55, pp. 255-260.
Leszek Kolakowski, Husserl and the Search for Certitude (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1975).



The Polish-born philosopher Leszek Kolakowski is the rarest creature in academia, a philosopher with a sharp sense of humor. He is witty and clear in his writings, a rare combination in recent Continental thought. There is a fascination in his work with ultimate issues of good and evil, also moral seriousness. Yet he is never pedantic or pompous.

Kolakowski is a recent recipient of philosophy's equivalent of the Nobel prize, the John W. Kluge prize -- which includes "a nice chunk of change" -- as we say in New York. I think the cash prize is now over a million dollars. Who says philosophy does not pay? Kolakowski is doing just fine.

Kolakowski began his academic career as a Marxist and is now a sort of Phenomenologist-Christian. Very few people remain Marxists after winning more than a million dollars. Kolakowski's doubts about Marxism were expressed while he was living in a Marxist society, however, and when he was far from wealthy. It took courage for him to speak freely when he did. Kolakowski is a true philosopher with the courage of his convictions and with the integrity to have some convictions, even when convictions are inconvenient. These are rare qualities today.

I picked up Kolakowski's book on Husserl and could not put it down. I think his essay on Husserl's phenomenology can be linked to his interest in Kant's ethics ("Why we need Kant today"), then to his ultimate religious or metaphysical concerns. These are my interests too. I have also read his book on Bergson.

Kolakowski sees Husserl's project as a quest for certainty in order to refute skeptics and nihilists, but also as an effort to build a bridge to others, thus escaping scientism and all forms of ideological naturalism or materialism. Paul Ricoeur calls this move from self to other, the search for an "Ogival crossing."

Kolakowski concludes that Husserl's project ultimately founders, since certainty is unattainable by humans. Yet that Husserl's project must always be renewed. This is because it is the only way to defend the human concern with truth. Without truth, ethics collapses and we are on our way to the concentration camps, run by self-proclaimed "scientists," who are actually only adherents of a dehumanizing form of popular scientism.

Skepticism and relativism can be overcome [for Husserl] only if we discover the source of ... absolute certitude. This certitude can be gained where we do not need to worry about the bridge from perceptions to things, where there is an absolute immediacy, where the act of cognition and its content are not mediated in any way (even if their distinction remains valid), where we simply cannot ask how we know that our acts reach the content as it really is -- where the content is absolutely transparent to the subject and is immanent. ... Ego and object together have no other, which encompasses them both than transcendental consciousness.

Two issues arise at this point: 1) The pragmatist objection says that we can forget about certainty and foundations and just muddle along. Richard Rorty might offer such a response. The problem is that we are then without intellectual resources when we find ourselves muddling along to a Gulag. 2) The mystical objection says that we cannot reach other persons anyway, since truth is ultimately "incommunicable," so that we must retreat from the world, if we wish to save our souls.

I have never been persuaded by either of these objections, since "muddling along" only gets you muddled; and the only way to save one's soul, in my judgment, is by a concern with the good of the Other, by reaching out to others, lovingly, which (I believe) is the truth in Christianity. This was the lesson of Kolakowski's fellow Pole, Pope John Paul II. "The answer," John Paul said with a lovely smile to a capacity crowd at Shea Stadium, "is love." Kolakowski says that Husserl believes ...

... that solipsism can be overcome but that this can be done only within transcendental idealism. The certitude he believed to have discovered was intended to be universally valid -- valid for any rational being and accessible to everybody.

The subjective stance and transcendental move -- Kant is invoked here -- leads to a space shared with other subjects, "as knowers," never to a perception of others as only material bodies in empirical space, things to be moved around from the outside, like chess pieces. As a transcendental ego, my intentionality allows me to go beyond my own existence to others, through my awareness of perceptions or sense faculties and cognitions, like mine, "in" others. Notice the ubiquity of the problem of locality in the metaphysics of mind, even as we seek to escape locality.

The immediacy of knowledge in Husserl's transcendental reduction may indeed be incommunicable -- except that it is shared -- to the extent that others are also transcendental subjects. We always stand on common ground in the act of knowing. Christians and other religious persons say the common ground is simply love.

At this point, Husserl's work may be associated with Kant's discussion of the "transcendental unity of apperception," but also with Hegel's dialectics, in terms of the ultimate resolution of contradictions in Spirit's "self-discovery," or compared to F.H. Bradley's "Absolute."

Thus, I see the body of another person as such, not as a symptom of another person. Still, the other person has the status of alter ego only as it is constituted within my transcendental field. The transcendental intersubjectivity of separated monads is formed in me, but as a community that is constituted in every other monad as well. My ego can know the world only in community with other egos, and only one monadologic community is possible ... Transcendental intersubjectivity, being the absolute foundation, carries the world -- and absolutely founded knowledge is based on universal knowledge.

This leads to a powerful insight derived from Husserl: "Alter ego cannot be anything else but a concretion of my consciousness." I am that other in the act of transcendental reduction since the realm of knowing is necessarily shared, and all of us stand within it. Kolakowski's philosophy can be brought together with John Paul's Christian teaching in the conclusion that, ultimate knowing is love. I urge readers to search for a summary of John Mctaggart Ellis's theory of love, since his books are mostly out of print.

When I seek inside myself for the foundations of all knowledge, I find what is universal. I discover how I think, in American terms, only to realize that it is how others must think, even if they disagree with me. In finding my subjectivity, I also find what I share with others, their subjectivity. Hence, subject becomes object, fact and value are merged, and what is most singular becomes universal. From any number of directions, we are brought to this insight of unity, again and again. Think of Richard Le Galliene's "Parable of the Magnet."

I am reminded of Dietrich Bonhoeffer's mission, as described in a documentary on PBS that I saw yesterday. It was impossible for Bonhoeffer to walk away from others who were trapped within Hitler's evil society. Choosing to share in the plight of the oppressed -- if Hitler's evil could not be halted -- was the only way Bonhoefer could live with himself, after such a revelation or insight.

A great concern of evil or totalitarianism in our times is to deny persons access to this communal space through mind-numbing distractions, through an increasingly prevalent ideology of materialism and scientism, ethical relativism or nihilism. Most especially, by denying persons access to humanity's deepest cultural memories, closing off that universal space of aesthetic or philosophical "knowing," that provides the only realization of humanity in community. (See "Say Goodbye to Unwanted Memories.")

Totalitarianism seeks to destroy the possibility of true community by offering a false one, either in hatred or through consumption of flashy objects and material waste. If it is true that persons always seek an object of worship, and if the choice is between a flashy car, gold watch, plasma t.v. set or Christ, then I choose Christ as symbolic of love -- other symbols (Star of David, compassionate Buddha) may serve equally well for persons in different religious traditions -- I say this knowing that this choice of love will mean embracing pain. My universal symbol at this point is the crucifix.

If your subjectivity is taken away and replaced with Alpo dog food commercials, or any of the numerous fundamentalisms that substitute for thought (which is not true religion), then your ability to connect with other people, so as to be fully human, is denied. America is not and should not be about money or weapons, as those who fail to understand the nation would have you believe. The greatest wealth of the United States is the Constitution and the tradition of reflection and interpretation of that document, which is our true community, symbolized by magnificent buildings, the flag or a judge's black robes. It is that tradition which we must not lose, which I believe to be endangered right now.

Consciousness IS memory, as Bergson would have put it. Creatures whose memory is effectively manipulated, programmed, and controlled from outside are no longer persons in any recognizable sense and therefore no longer human.

This is what totalitarian regimes keep unceasingly trying to achieve. People whose memory -- personal or collective -- has been nationalized, become state-owned and perfectly malleable, totally controllable, are entirely at the mercy of their rulers; they have been deprived of their identity; they are helpless and incapable of questioning anything they are told to believe. [A torturer once said: "Most people want to be told what to believe."] They will never revolt, never think, never create. They have been transformed into dead objects. They may even, conceivably, be happy and love Big Brother, which is Winston Smith's supreme performance.

When persons are emptied of subjectivity in this way, they can be "educated to hate," as Kolakowski says elsewhere. It is then possible to reduce the world to a cartoon, in which there are evil Americans oppressing everyone and "good" true believers, whose task it is to kill themselves and as many others as possible -- preferably Americans -- by flying an airliner into a crowded office building.

Indiscriminate murder by terrorists is a way of demonstrating that ordinary people in those buildings -- the victims -- are evil only because they are Americans or Israelis, for example, so that they deserve to die. Their crime (as Americans or Israelis) is merely to be, which is exactly the crime committed by Jews in Nazi Germany. They existed. That was enough. One's very identity, as an American, is a category of guilt (according to terrorists), who are determined to strike out at the United States by injuring or killing ordinary people. This indiscriminate killing is how terrorists seek to prove their "moral superiority" to the United States. The ethical absurdity and insanity of such a project needs no comment.

Americans are almost expected to apologize for being Americans. The idea of collective guilt is rejected -- as it should be -- for everyone else. Germans are not held responsible for their grandparents' actions, they should not be. However, all Americans are evil, in world opinion, because the American government does things that are criticized, or as a result of the tortures at Abu Ghraib, which are (so far) attributable only to a small group of individuals. Most puzzling of all, is the obnoxious attitude among a handful of American political extremists, who seem to relish a weird self-loathing and hatred of America.

It is difficult for people to grasp this point, particularly those who are highly critical of the U.S. government at the moment, something which they have every right to be. I ask them to remember this: There are people who wish to kill you for no other reason other than the fact that you are an American.

There is no need to consider the humanity of those who are to be destroyed or to be troubled about destroying them, if you are a terrorist. They are Americans, Israelis or British citizens. No more is needed. For Nazis, a Jew by virtue of being a Jew, deserved destruction. A torturer has no need to consider the feelings of his or her victim. The victim is an object to be manipulated, conditioned, or destroyed "for his own good." Astonishingly, persons can be made to accept, through bad ideas and beliefs, that the best thing for them to do is to kill themselves and others.

People who are interested in ethics, but who are skeptical about the existence of ethical truth, will explain that such a terrorist act is only objectionable or evil, as I was once told, from "our" perspective. There is no truth to the matter. It is all relative. It is all about power. The victims are only bodies, brains that think, not minds or suffering souls. There are no souls. I disagree.

I am unfashionable enough to believe that those 9/11 victims were indeed subjects with minds, reflecting in their final moments on those they loved and aware of their imminent demise, burdened with guilt and pain at the loss of loved-ones, whose needs were uppermost in the minds of many doomed passengers, even in the face of death. I believe that, in the midst of being destroyed, the victims on 9/11 were the moral superiors of those who took their lives. A victim is always morally preferable to his or her victimizer.

On the basis of cell phone records and messages left on telephone answering machines, persons in that situation -- sitting in a plane that was about to crash and destroy them -- wished to say only "I love you." They called spouses, children, parents and friends to say, "I am thinking of you now."

If I were facing death, then I would wish to say to those I love, to one woman in particular -- and you know who you are -- "I love you." There is no sacrifice or suffering that diminishes the value of the experience of love. No pain is unredeemed by it. All that is best in what I am or have done is only, thank goodness, this love that I feel for a few others in this world. It is a small gift of what I am and have, like a kind of carving, that I present to my loved-ones.

So an ordinary human being's most honest thought in those final seconds (and all of us must understand that we are on that plane and these are our final seconds), is to dry the tears of another person, to make her laugh or to bring a smile to a child, perhaps by telling her a story. (See the film It's a Beautiful Life.)

What we must not do, in fighting evil -- as we are spit upon and insulted or tortured, as our works are destroyed before our eyes, as we are denied human recognition -- is to become what the torturers are. For this reason, I am passionate in my opposition to torture, by anyone, claiming to act on behalf of the U.S. government. Kolakowski explains why, however angry we are at injustice, we must never hate:

This, then, is the secret weapon of totalitarianism: to poison the entire mental fabric of human beings with hatred, and thus to rob them of their dignity. As a result of my destructive rage, I am destroyed myself; in my self-complacency, in my innocence, my dignity is lost; my personal cohesion as well as communication and solidarity with others are lost. Hating includes nothing like solidarity; haters do not become friends because they share a detested enemy. Except for moments of direct fighting, they remain alien or hostile to each other too. Hardly any societies seethe with more clandestine and open hatred and envy than those that attempt to base their unity on hatred and promise to institutionalize brotherhood. And to say that hatred must be repaid with hatred is to say that in order to win in a just struggle, one must lose the reasons for the legitimacy of this struggle.

Co-conspirators in a criminal enterprise turn on one another at the first opportunity when it is convenient. They inform and act against one another in order to gain personal advantages, feeling nothing but hatred for victims and also for their fellow victimizers. Spiritually, they are dead already. For them, the bridge to the Other has been destroyed. Along with Kolakowski, I urge a renewed commitment to the moral foundations of our human world, recognition of our endagered subjectivity together with that of others. Only a transcendental subjectivity makes real objectivity possible. Read Kolakowski.

My Mind/Body Problem and Yours.

Benedict Carey, "Searching for the Person in the Brain," The New York Times, Sunday, February 5, 2006, Section 4, at p. 1.
Peter Medawar, Pluto's Republic (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1981), pp. 64-65.
Colin McGinn, The Problem of Consciousness (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1991), pp. 126-153, pp. 153-187.
David J. Chalmers, The Conscious Mind: In Search of a Fundamental Theory (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996), pp. 106-107.



I enjoyed reading Benedict Carey's article in today's Times. Once again the error of physicalist reductivism is made, but in a blatant and almost comical manner. Mr. Carey says that it "seems" (to whom?) that "neuroscience will soon pinpoint the regions in the brain where mediocre poetry is generated, where high school grudges are lodged, where sarcasm blooms like a red rose." I promise to provide some sarcasm for Mr. Carey later in this essay.

I wish to begin my response by examining this lapse into the "category mistake" of physicalist reductivism, which is the identification of a subjective experience exclusively with the brain state to which, allegedly, it is related. According to Mr. Carey, all subjective experience is potentially "seen" in a brain scan, since it is nothing more than a specific brain state. I regard this statement as Mr. Carey's version of mediocre poetry.

He tries to qualify this conclusion in his final paragraphs, so as to hedge his bets, making a fatal error in logic and destroying his own argument. Mr. Carey's position is that: " ... it is beyond doubt that brain images reveal real biological activity that is associated with genuine human sensations." He quotes "Dr. Lucy Brown," a neuroscientist at Albert Einstein School of Medicine in the Bronx:

"Everyone thought phenomena like love and jealousy were simply impossible to study, that they were too variable, too individual. They preferred to think of them as magic."

I will examine the difficulties with this position by raising three distinct issues. None of these issues or objections involve a literal belief in magic (though, in a sense, love is indeed "magic"). While there are many others that I might discuss, these three "seem" most important to me: 1) causation and category mistake problems; 2) difficulties of culture and the complexity of emotions; 3) space and personhood problems. None of these clusters of philosophical problems "associated" with the physical reductivist position is recognized or addressed by Mr. Carey.

Notice that Mr. Carey is careful to use the slippery word "associated" to refer to the relation between the brain and mental states or experiences. No brain image will actually picture ennui or wistful sadness at the recollection of a youthful romance, for example, but it will only show a lumpy and smelly gray mass, sticky liquid and blood vessels, neurons firing and so on that are said to be "associated" with those experiences. No one can tell you "how" brains and minds, are associated or where exactly they connect. This inability is what philosophers call "a problem."

This is different from proving that such a lump of brain tissue is the same thing as, say, sadness. That suggestion is an example of a "category mistake," made by the physicalist. "Associated" is just too fuzzy a word to mean much of anything in this context. Particular brain states may be "associated" with subjective experiences, but this does not demonstrate that they cause these subjective experiences, because causation cannot be pictured in a brain scan, since causation is an abstract concept.

Abstract concepts do not have a single physical location and neither do complex emotions like love, which are inherently SOCIAL and CULTURAL, as well as INDIVIDUAL. Neither does the mind have a spacial location. Mr. Carey has fallen into the so-called "space trap" (McGinn) by assigning location to an abstract entity, the mind-in-relation -- as distinct from the brain on which the mind depends, which does have a physical location.

Two persons with normal brains from different countries will experience love and romance (a Western concept, as demonstrated in the writings of Robert C. Solomon) in entirely different ways. Although their cerebral functions would both be normal, so that this difference in their subjective experiences would be undetectable in any brain scan, since such a difference is the result of culture and history, language and mores, not just biology.

Naturally, people loving one another is universal. What that loving means or requires, the forms of expression permitted to persons, the flavor and nuance of the subjective state "associated" with love, as it is actually experienced, is different from culture to culture.

Mr. Carey's language goes on holiday at this point: Dr. Lucy Brown "could not elaborate. A camera crew from CNN was due to arrive, to talk to her about the brain in love." Metaphors are out of control again. Brain in love?

My brain is a non-sentient organ, which has no feelings, no desires or yearnings. I have those experiences. Only a person who possesses a brain has those subjective experiences. And a person is a complex entity, arising socially, through interactions with others and existing within languages, which are also social, through the acquisition of a complex culture that prescribes meanings and roles in relationships with others. None of these social factors will be seen by a brain scan.

I promised some sarcasm, this is it. My brain is never "in love" and it does not get pissed at my ear, but my spleen once had a torrid affair with a neighbor's thyroid gland.

The error in Mr. Carey's reasoning is based on confusing or personalizing biological functions of an organ (the brain), that is only part of a complex organism (a human being), then mistaking those functions and that organ for the entire organism or -- a more complex concept -- for the entire person. Especially when it comes to love, a person is not just a brain. In fact, another part of my anatomy seems even more crucial to the experience. (See "Richard and I.")

I deny that my brain is ever "in love," but my penis certainly has been infatuated at times. The totality that "I" am has and does love other persons. I hesitate to identify the complex entity that I am with either of those parts of me. My self includes both brain and penis, fortunately, and also many other aspects of that being-in-the-world that is me. Most importantly, my identity includes other people, shaping and altering me, in relations of love and trust, but also of enmity and hostility, when it is directed at me.

It is most certainly not beyond doubt to question such physicalist reductivism ("the mind is just the brain thinking"). Some of the leading thinkers on the nature of mind and consciousness have done exactly that. One example should suffice:

Physical explanation is well suited to the explanation of STRUCTURE and of FUNCTION. Structural properties and functional properties can be straightforwardly entailed by a low-level physical story, and so are clearly apt for reductive explanation. And almost all the high level phenomena that we need to explain [the mind as dependent on the brain, operating well,] ultimately come down to structure or function ... But the explanation of consciousness is not just a matter of explaining structure and function [there is also the content of minds]. Once we have explained all the physical structure in the vicinity of the brain, and we have explained how all the various brain functions are performed, there is a further sort of explanandum: consciousness itself. Why should all this structure give rise to experience? The story about the physical process does not say. (Chalmers, p. 107.)

Even an opponent of all forms of dualism, who is a Nobel laureate in biology, denies any identity between brain states and mental reality, though obviously brain states are necessary to those realities. Peter Medawar insists that mental disorders must not be attributed to either mental or cerebral factors alone.

"Both contribute, though sometimes to very unequal degrees, and the contribution made by one will be a function of the contribution made by the other." (Medawar, p. 65.)

Finally, Mr. Carey undermines his position as he grudgingly acknowledges: " ... the interlocking symphony of activity that make us individuals, [sic.] ... are absent, despite all the color coding and exotic names for areas of the brain."

I hate to break the news to him, but neurologists looking for the person only in the brain are embarked on a doomed quest for the "Schrodinger's cat" of consciousness, after all the boxes are empty. A bowl of milk and a ball of string may be more useful in trapping a real cat. A search through Romantic poetry and the literature of love may be more helpful than any brain scan in understanding love between real persons.

Do we need ideals?

R.D. Laing, The Politics of Experience (New York: Pantheon, 1967), $10.00.
Adam Phillips, Equals (New York: Perseus, 2002), $15.95.
Philip Roth, The Facts: A Novelist's Autobiography (New York: Vintage, 1988), $12.00.

"Every moment of pure compassion in a soul is a new descent of Christ upon earth to be crucified."

Simone Weil, The New York Notebook (1942). (See my story "Pieta.")



During much of the twentieth century and into the new millennium there has been an unfortunate tendency to undermine some of our loftiest ideals merely to replace them with the absence of ideals -- that is, to substitute for positive values the negative or utter absence of values of an increasingly nihilistic society.

This tendency has been accompanied by a snide, insulting rudeness on the part of persons who know "very well" those few things that they know very well, and have decided that neither they nor anyone else needs to know much more. Most of these persons, for some reason, subscribe to the Nation magazine and eat organic rice. I will not say a word about black Converse high tops (which I love) or nose rings. I think that this disdain for high culture and lofty, time-honored ideals is a mistake. I also suspect that this effort to "start" anew, to dispense both with what is good and bad in our heritage, cannot succeed.

In the first place, it may be impossible to live without ideals of some sort. Those who dismiss all ideals -- whether aesthetic, ethical, romantic, political or other -- have simply adopted one set of ideals over others. In other words, they favor the ideal of a life of brutal "factuality." (I call this the "Joe Friday" view of life: "Just the facts, mam.") Needless to say, there are many kinds of facts. Whether ideals are truly believed may also be a fact. The question whether an ideal is "true" may be factual, for example, depending on how it is understood or discussed. It is also the case that exalting facts over "wishy-washy" values is a "value judgment."

Time for a disclaimer: I am fully in sympathy with those whose motive is to liberate sexual mores. "Let's all have sex and forget the world's troubles!" This is a rallying cry which I fully endorse and to which I subscribe. As the politicians say, "I am for that." Yet such freedom about sexuality, ultimately, also depends on time-honored ideals of respect for personal autonomy and self-determination, and is hardly a celebration of nihilism.

The impoverished conception of life without higher ideals seems excessively bleak, to me, and is bound to be unsatisfying. The debunking mentality and "anti-ideals" attitude is based on one set of subjective and arbitrary ideals, I think, which are no more sophisticated or true than the, allegedly, unrealistic and impractical values of the nineteenth century's Romantic poets. In fact, today's trendy contempt for high culture and designer anarchism is shallow and insincere. It reeks of the Left Bank and Madison Avenue, of that sentiment captured by Oscar Wilde's observation of a hat in a chi-chi London shop: "With this hat, the mouth is worn slightly open ..."

Today's popular dismissiveness towards values and ideals may well be a symptom of our diminished emotional lives, not to mention indicative of a lack of imagination and intelligence. It is certainly symptomatic of a poverty of feeling that I find distressing. It is the attitude of the college sophomore who discovers that his first love has been disappointing. Real love deepens with pain, including the pain of loss and betrayal. Ideals do not exist to make us happy, but rather to guide us in the task of being human. Our trendy cynicism, I think, is an attitude that should be worn "with the mouth slightly open."

If life is correctly described as a movement towards death, then it does not necessarily follow that death is the purpose or meaning of life. The assumption that "death is what life is about" is a version of the post hoc, ergo propter hoc fallacy. By the same token, all romantic love between a heterosexual man and woman may have an underlying physical explanation and a corresponding possibility of fulfillment (you think?), but this does not make the love of men and women (or of any two adults) something which is reducible to copulation, or worse, to a matter of genitals only.

The same may be said of sex -- sex is not (and this should be on the obvious side of things by now) always about "love." By the same token, eroticism is about much more than the sexual act. But when spiritual love finds its perfect physical expression, then in the words of that great poet Don Juan De Marco, "Wow, there is nothing like it." Nancy Malone, a Catholic theologian and writer says: "I am concerned ... to reclaim the erotic for spirituality and to reclaim the part that the erotic in literature may play in our spirituality." Walking a Literary Labyrinth: A Spirituality of Reading (New York: Penguin, 2003), p. 154. Ms. Malone has led me to an important theological work, which is only mentioned briefly in her book, Elizabeth Johnson's She Who Is: The Mystery of God in Feminist Theological Discourse. (p. 197.)

If this celebration of eros is dismissed as a mere "protest against death" by the Freudian cynics, then that is fine by me. I like to protest against death as much as the next guy. I wish that I might do more than that, since death is "really depressing" (in the words of Woody Allen) and love is just the opposite.

It has been suggested that a "cynic is a disappointed idealist." Oscar Wilde again. Perhaps the currently fashionable cynicism in Western culture may be explained as the result of disillusion: it has followed upon the collapse of nineteenth-century Romanticism (existentialism has been described as Romanticism for the twentieth century) in the hyper-industrialized and technological "postmodernist" societies that contain such things as computer blogs and something called an "I-Pod."

Humanism and the optimism of the Enlightenment -- which I like to defend -- ran headlong into two world wars and the experience of Hitler and the Holocaust, giving rise to a sense of moral exhaustion, which is still with us. Yet to abandon the highest values of our civilization in the relatively affluent and successful period that has followed upon these wars is to give the victory to the enemies who were responsible for those horrors in the first place -- enemies who were defeated, with great effort and sacrifice, in the struggles of the last century.

It is the view of persons as "things" -- or "meat puppets," as someone once said to me -- to be used and discarded, to be thrown away, and the "ideologies of power" to which such views of the person give rise (which are certainly not scientific), along with their religious-fundamentalist counterparts, that have led to more wars and genocides. They are what lies behind the forms of terrorism that we now struggle against.

According to newspaper accounts, in the terrorist incident in Beslan, Russia -- and you can't make this up -- several of the children who were hostages were made to witness the murders of their fathers and then made to dance afterwards, for no particular reason, by persons claiming to protest, in this exemplary way, Russian and Western "cultural hegemony." I do not envy the inner lives or emotional level of the people who did those things. I shudder to think of what "cultural hegemony" under such persons might be.

Beyond what Freud called "ordinary unhappiness," is the emptiness and lack of meaning that characterizes the lives of so many of today's aging, would-be hipsters, who remain much "too cool" for values of any kind, for whom others are either chumps or sexual objects. (This is aimed at you, Alex.) The idea of self-sacrifice is "an idiotic illusion," they yawn, while the lack of taste or joy in their lives is just "the way things are," they add with a shrug, rather than the obvious result of this morbid and false philosophy of anti-idealism or nihilism which they advocate.

There is certainly no shortage of horror and suffering in the world, but (if you search for them and hang on to them) there are also beauty and generosity, joy and meaning. Most of all, there is love. Any human being who has never felt an ideal or passion for which he or she would make the ultimate sacrifice -- a loved-one, an idea, a value, or the safety of a child -- is a deeply impoverished and sad excuse for a human being.

For such a person one feels not so much anger or an inclination to engage in debate, but only pity and disgust. This is true regardless of the faults and -- to use Monica Lewinsky's term -- "issues" that we all know ourselves to have to struggle against, as individuals, in our lives.

People say that love is an illusion, but is it more of an illusion than wealth or power, or any of the other baubles that we pursue to avoid coming to terms with the fate that awaits us? I doubt it. In his recent novel entitled The Dying Animal, Philip Roth has examined these themes with a level of sophistication and artistry that I cannot hope to achieve, so read that book if these thoughts intrigue you. Better yet, wait until my novel is written. (It may not be as good, but I need the money more than he does.) These lines are nearly a century old:

In every dream thy lovely features rise;

I see them in the sunshine of the day;

Thy form is flitting still before my eyes

Where'er at eve I tread my lonely way;

In every moaning wind I hear thee say

Sweet words of consolation, while thy sighs

Seem borne along on every blast that flies;

I live, I talk with thee where'er I stray: