My Argument With Ayn Rand.

A link for this essay has been created at the home page of the Objectivism Reference Center at http://www.noblesoul.com/orc/books/rand/pwni.html for which I am grateful. Sadly, this essay has been vandalized and censored, I believe, by Cuban-American Right-wingers. Many people believe that "Right-wing" and "Cuban-American" are coextensive terms. I am sure that this assumption is false. ("Time to End the Embargo Against Cuba" and "Fidel Castro's 'History Will Absolve Me.'")

Ayn Rand, Philosophy: Who Needs It? (New York: MacMillan, 1982), $11.00.
Jonathan Chait, "Wealth Care," in The New Republic, September 23, 2009, at p. 46.

The name of Ayn Rand is usually mentioned in discussions of philosophy in the U.S. This is bizarre because Ms. Rand was not really a philosopher. Among academic philosophers there is intense disagreement about the merits of her work. She is much admired by some far Right luminaries (who now wish to be called "neo-conservatives") and disliked by almost everybody else, yet she continues to be a popular writer for many people throughout the world.

I thought it appropriate, therefore, to examine one of Rand's essays in detail and then to publish my reactions to it. Anyone who wishes to respond to what I say is welcome to do so. I have selected a fairly typical essay entitled: "From the Horse's Mouth" dating from 1975, which appeared in her collection Philosophy: Who Needs It? (New York: MacMillan, 1982), at p. 77.

This brief work is highly representative of Randian method and conclusions. There are, literally, hundreds -- even thousands -- of pages written by Ms. Rand on roughly the same level of competence and analysis concerning basic philosophical issues. To know this essay is to have a pretty good idea of the quality of her philosophical writings.

Before turning to my criticisms of that essay, I should acknowledge what I consider to be Ayn Rand's very real talents and achievements. She writes well, for one thing, with clarity and elegance, vividly, while displaying a gift for metaphor and imagery which is rare among writers of philosophical prose. In a person whose first language is not English, this is remarkable. Not surprisingly, she is first and foremost a novelist. While I do not consider Rand a great novelist -- a novelist on a par with, say, Tolstoy or Dickens, Cervantes or Melville -- she is certainly a competent literary artist.

Literary skills are a virtue in a would-be philosopher or in anyone who feels a need to communicate by means of the written word and are not to be underestimated. The literary talents of thinkers such as Plato, Nietzsche or Schopenhauer -- or Iris Murdoch in our own day -- accounts for a great part of their success.

Regrettably, literary skills alone are not sufficient for a philosopher. A powerful intellect is also needed to do original philosophical work. Even with both of those qualities, a thinker who lacks a thorough and accurate knowledge of the history of philosophy (and knowledge of a great deal more besides), simply cannot produce philosophical work at the highest levels in the twentieth century and beyond. This is because of the great technicality and complexity of the subject.

An "error" was inserted in the foregoing sentence since my previous review of this essay. I have corrected that "error." However, the process of defacing these writings will continue indefinitely. The goal of this process is to enhance and create long-term emotional harm for the victim of these tactics. Experiments with "frustration-inducements" have produced nervous breakdowns in some victims. Others subjected to such barbarism become indestructible and motivated by intense hatred resulting from the experience of torture. Psychological torture is a dangerous weapon to use. ("What is it like to be censored in America?" and "More Cybercrime and Censorship.")

Philosophy is impossibly difficult. Iris Murdoch says: "Philosophy, unless one is a genius, is a mug's game." Some of us, who are quite ordinary in our talents and aptitudes, have no choice in the matter and find ourselves drawn to the subject, to this "mug's game," writing on philosophical topics as a matter of being human. We have to think "philosophically" and sometimes resort to writing stories out of frustration -- as did Murdoch and Rand, along with Sartre and Camus -- often discovering our best philosophical ideas, in altered form, in those stories.

Writing what Truman Capote called "non-fiction" stories and novels, or allegories, can also be a way of coping with painful trauma in our lives. Not many of us will be great philosophers, but all of us will benefit from philosophical study and effort, especially those of us concerned to examine fundamental political and legal ideas. I agree with Ms. Rand's famous response to her own question. After asking: "Who needs philosophy?" She answered: "We all do."

I suspect that Ms. Rand meant this statement to apply to scientists as well as the rest of us. We need philosophical stories or myths to make sense of things. (For one view of Rand's ideology in cinema, see "High Noon.") Keep your fingers crossed and we may avoid inserted "errors" for a while.

Ms. Rand's greatest deficiency, however, is that there are obvious and visible gaps in her knowledge of the writings of the great philosophers which no amount of literary talent can conceal even from the alert student (like me), let alone from the professionals. She has no formal training in philosophy and has not read enough independently -- or maybe, not systematically enough -- to compensate for this lack of training, so as to master the subtleties of philosophical doctrine at a highly sophisticated level. When examining the writings of philosophers such as Immanuel Kant, for example, she is simply way out of her depth.

Ms. Rand begins her essay by remarking that, during a period of illness, she came to read Friedrich Paulsen's 1898 work Immanuel Kant: His Life and Doctrine -- "I saw the long, dismal, slithering disintegration of the twentieth century held implicitly in a few sentences. I wanted to scream a warning, but it was too late."

Naturally, this sounds dramatic. But I want to focus on what is actually being said and whether it makes any sense. Friedrich Paulsen was a dry nineteenth century commentator on Kant. He is hardly worthy of being deemed a "threat" to a century that has mostly ignored his work. To lay the great crimes of a bloody century at his doorstep is absurdly excessive. Ms. Rand really wishes to attack Kant himself (the man she loves to hate), but abdicates her responsibility to actually read Kant -- all of Kant -- or most of the important texts. Although her essay is entitled "From the Horse's Mouth," she has concentrated on the wrong horse.

Only after having read at least some of Kant's writings, should she turn to the commentators, like Paulsen, as well as any of the others since, who have agreed or disagreed with Paulsen's once influential interpretations. For example, Kant is criticized and admired by thinkers from both ends of the political spectrum. This is a tribute to his achievement. There is little doubt that Western thought may be divided into "before" and "after" Kant eras. Western philosophy is still working out the implications of the dialogue between Kant and Hegel, a dialogue to which later thinkers contribute in important (if lesser) ways -- thinkers including Marx and Nietzsche, James and Wittgenstein, Husserl and Sartre, Foucault and Derrida, Rorty and West.

More "errors" inserted and corrected. In a way, it is flattering to realize that, if I were not better than the people doing such things, they would feel no need to cheat in these ways. What is disturbing is not the resort to such tactics, but the ability to get away with such crimes thanks to corruption. It was not always so in America. ("How Censorship Works in America" and "What is it like to be censored in America" then "What is it like to be plagiarized?")

To initiate a discussion of the highly difficult ideas of Immanuel Kant -- possibly the most important philosopher of the last 200 years and one of the most difficult -- with a sweeping generalization based on a casual reading of the introduction to a commentator's book from the last century, is simply not acceptable scholarly practice. If you want to fake it, something all of us who were college students have done at some point, then at least read a number of commentaries on Kant's work. Much can be learned about the richness in Kant's writings just from the disagreements among commentators about the meaning and value of his ideas. Ideally, you should not "fake it" at all.

After reading one of Kant's most famous essays, I find it surprising how much more accessible he is than I remembered. (Grounding for the Metaphysics of Morals.) Kant is very readable, especially in new translations. Best of all, why not actually quote the words of Kant to which one objects? My guess is that Kant simply does not say or believe the things that Rand thinks he does, but that she refuses to be deterred by this fact from ventilating her hostility to a set of despised ideas that, for some reason, she believes are derived from Kant.

One of the major disadvantages of not having read Kant -- nor even much about him -- is that one is likely to be mistaken about what Kant actually said and believed or advocated. Maybe the person disfiguring this essay is a loyal Randian upset at discovering that her heroine has clay feet. ("Anne Milgram Does it Again!")

We all make mistakes in reading difficult thinkers. Fortunately, there are ways to minimize the risk of this. My policy is to quote the offending passage from a text that I wish to attack. That way, if I am mistaken in my interpretation, someone can point this out to me or can direct me to a text that does so. The Rand method of not reading your adversary's work at all, not even quoting from it, is unwise for many reasons: for one thing, one is apt to find oneself arguing with a strawman, constructed by oneself, on the basis of platitudes and half-truths. This is what I think Ayn Rand does for the most part.

Gore Vidal and other critics have commented on Ms. Rand's unattractive lack of charity and absence of compassion for the poor in what is best described as a nineteenth century brand of liberalism that falls just short of endorsing slavery. Also, there is no excuse for failing to supply footnotes that might help the reader to identify interpretations and/or verify their accuracy. Significantly, again, in an essay that turns into a total rejection of "Kant's" ideas, there is not a single quotation from or reference to Kant's published works. The reader is expected to accept Ms. Rand's oracular comments about what Kant allegedly "believed."

I am less concerned with what Kant "believed" than with his arguments and philosophical conclusions. These Kantian arguments will not be found in Rand's critique. Ms. Rand's substantive criticism begins: "Existentially (i.e., in regard to the conditions of living, scale of achievement, and rapidity of progress), the nineteenth century was the best in Western history. Philosophically, it was one of the worst." (p. 78.)

This is a startling thing to say about the century of Hegel, Bentham, Mill, Niezsche, Schopenhauer, Compte, Bergson, James and many others. One of the worst? As compared with, for instance, the sixth or ninth centuries? I doubt it. The sheer explosive production of ideas in the nineteenth century -- agree with them or not -- should preclude such a judgment. At the very least, Ms. Rand should explain why this is so. She goes on to say:

"People thought they had entered an era of inexhaustible radiance; but it was merely the sunset of Aristotle's influence, which the philosophers were extinguishing." (p. 78.)

In fact, the "sunset of Aristotle's influence" dates from no later than the seventeenth century. But there is more:

"If you have felt an occasional touch of wistful envy at the thought that there was a time when men went to the opening of a new play, and what they saw was not 'Hair' or 'Grease,' but 'Cyrano de Bergerac,' which opened in 1897 -- take a wider look. I wish that borrowing from Victor Hugo's Notre Dame de Paris, someone had pointed to the Paulsen book, then the play and said: 'This will kill that.' ..." (p. 78.)

To suggest that poor Professor Paulsen (and/or Kant) from their respective armchairs, are responsible for the alleged decline in aesthetic standards since the nineteenth century is controversial and wildly speculative, but this conclusion is not even defended by Rand; rather, it is simply anounced as fact. While it is true that "Cyrano de Bergerac" opened in 1897, so did quite a few terrible plays. Worse, the terrible plays were usually far more popular than the good ones, just as in our own time. One has only to think of the potboilers of William Somerset Maugham for the London stage of the Edwardian period to relish the prospect of a performance of "Grease."

In our time, plays by Miller, Williams, O'neil and Beckett have opened alongside middle-brow trash like Lloyd-Weber's glitzy (but fun!) "Phantom of the Opera" and pop rip-offs of Puccini's La Boheme, like "Rent." Are these works by great contemporary authors and composers not every bit as good as what was available in 1897 in New York or London? I think so.

Ms. Rand's method is not to argue the point on the basis of the available evidence or a close reading of a text, but only to offer a startling and sweeping generalization, or to throw out a value judgment that appeals to the emotions of the reader, and then to assume that her generalization is established. None of these generalizations are even adequately stated and defended, let alone proven. At last she is ready to attack Kant directly:

"Kant gave to science the entire material world (which, however, was to be regarded as 'unreal'), and left ('conserved') one thing to faith: morality. If you are not sure which side would win in a division of that kind, look around you today." (p. 79.)

Nowhere does Kant suggest that the phenomenal (i.e., empirical) world is "unreal." On the contrary, he regards it as the very real source of sense data for the categories of the understanding. See Immanuel Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, 2nd ed., (1787), Introduction, Part I. It was Ms. Rand's next statement that took my breath away:

"The Kantian division allows man's reason to conquer the material world, but eliminates reason from the choice of goals for which material achievements are to be used. Man's goals, actions, choices and values -- according to Kant -- are to be determined irrationally, i.e., by faith." (p. 79.)

This is false. Kant is the ultimate Enlightenment thinker who celebrates freedom and the ubiquity of reason. For Kant, morality is very much a matter of practical reason, it is a necessary inference from the fact that we know ourselves to be free. To suggest that Kant regards morality as a matter of "faith" or "eliminates reason" from moral life is simply totally inaccurate. Here is what Kant has to say on this subject:

"But inasmuch as reason has been imparted to us as a practical faculty, i.e., as one which is to have an influence on the will, its true function must be to produce a will which is not merely good as a means to some further end, but is good in itself. To produce a will good in itself reason was absolutely necessary, inasmuch as nature in distributing her capacities has everywhere gone to work in a purposive manner."

Grounding for the Metaphysics of Morals, p. 9.

Kant insists also that rationality or reason dictates the necessary framework for experience and ethics. We simply know ourselves to be free, again, and this is to accept ourselves as moral subjects, necessarily, who are responsible for their actions. In its emphasis on intention and duty, Kant's ethics reveals Chritianity's influence on him, and in its attempt to ground duty in reason, Kant's theory showed him to be a thinker of the Enlightenment. By positing freedom as if it were based on a "synthetic a priori truth" (for without freedom, there can be no ethics), one can derive an ethical structure from Kant's minimalist foundations in reason.

Notice that Kant is referring to the unimpaired rational agent capable of reasoning. Kant is well-aware that not everyone is equally free, nor is everyone free in the same way. He certainly understands that some people are mentally impaired or otherwise constrained in the exercise of freedom. These impaired people like to deface the writings of others. Contemporary criticisms of the Enlightenment rational subject -- criticisms which I share -- wish to expand the scope of the concept of a "rational subject" to include previously excluded persons, not to deny rationality in human life. ("Immanuel Kant and the Narrative of Freedom" and "Is Western Philosophy Racist?")

Being a rule-guided activity, for instance, reasoning itself is based on a respect for law and rules. The rules of logic dictate that A = A. One cannot claim to disregard such rules and yet continue to reason logically. The difficult issues arising in the twentieth century and beyond have to do with the connections between sound logic and reason (if any) and empirical reality (whatever that is). I am aware of subsequent revolutions in logic. All attempts to challenge classical logical principles or understandings should begin by being clear concerning what are those principles of classical logic, not by starting from zero. I urge readers to ponder Bradley's writings on relations in logic, then P.F. Strawson's discussion of the same topic in The Bounds of Sense.

From a comparable respect for the requirements of "practical" rationality, Kant deduced his ultimate moral command, the "categorical imperative": "So act that the maxim of your action can be willed as a universal law." (Groundwork)

In the Critique of Practical Reason, the formulation is slightly different: "So act as to treat humanity, whether in thine own person or in that of any other, in every case as an end withal, never as a means."

Notice that this second formulation involves two distinct principles: (1) the "universalization principle"; and (2) the "principle of ends." The first says that all moral acts can be derived from principles that can be generalized rationally without contradiction. The second insists on the dignity of each person and demands that you not use people as a means to your ends. "We are all sovereigns," Kant says, "in the kingdom of ends." Hence, Kant was among the modern philosophers to reject torture and slavery -- or experimentation without consent on persons -- as a way of "using" people for purposes that are not their own. (Again: "Is Western Philosophy Racist?" and "John Rawls and Justice.")

Kant's work, thus, represents a great intellectual achievement with unique influence on subsequent humanistic reforms -- reforms having to do with the recognition of the dignity of every person, with concepts such as equality before the law, with the notion of the universality of human rights. These ideas bear no resemblance to the caricature constructed by Ayn Rand, so that she might tear it down. I find recent Leftist critiques of rights equally unsatisfying.

We need the concept of rights as fundamental and universal attributes of human nature, now more than ever. The very people who criticize "rights-talk," will then complain (rightly!) of the violations of human "rights" by torturers and dictators. Among the worst such violations is the denial of rights to self-expression through censorship or the alteration -- even destruction -- of the writings of persons with whom we disagree. To deny words to a person is to deny that human being's status as a person. For this reason, slaves who learned to read were risking their lives. ("Is there a gay marriage right?")

The tortures I have described and defacements of my writings at these blogs, witnessed by readers from many places, are examples of the sort of evil to which I refer. Furthermore, I am sure that Ayn Rand would agree with me on that point, even if many Cuban-Americans -- whose fanaticism and despicable racism embarasses me -- would reject this principle in practice. ("Fidel Castro's 'History Will Absolve Me.'")

"In Kant's ethical system," writes Rand, "morality has nothing to do with this world, nor with reason, nor with science ... " (p.79.)

Well, I have no idea what Rand means by claiming that Kantian ethics "have nothing to do with the world," but it seems pretty clear to me that Kant's ethics is all about reason. The Kantian system has everything to do with reason, as I have indicated in my summary, so that one does not know where to begin to correct these misimpressions. Rand, once again, offers no citations to support her claim because she is in her "guru" mode. Fair criticisms of Kant may challenge his understanding of reason or autonomy. ("Jacques Derrida's Philosophy as Jazz.") However, even such contemporary critics acknowledge their indebtedness to Kant's formulation of the essential issues in Modernity as a "philosophical project that is still underway." (Jurgen Habermas)

When my daughter was seven, she won all arguments by pausing and holding her open hand before my eyes, while uttering the immortal words: "Talk to the hand!" At that age, unknowingly, my child was a Randian Objectivist. Now, of course -- as a teenager -- she is a postmodernist-deconstructionist-nihilist of the "Whatever" school. Anyone seen "The Colbert Report" recently? As a student at an "elite" (expensive) university -- some time has passed since my previous review of this work! -- my child is developing a feminist postmodernist elaboration on Judith Butler's theory and novel brand of pragmatism inspired by Cornel West.

When a "Randian" critique of Kant's philosophy appears in print under the name of a writer one otherwise respects, who wishes to be taken seriously as a philosopher, the result is only embarassment for intelligent readers and students of philosophy. However, for readers whose understanding of the subject is even more nonexistent than Ayn Rand's superficial summaries, Rand's pontifical pronouncements may seem profound. They sure sound good, even if they do not amount to much. Rand concludes her essay with this remark:

"[Kant] sets philosophy against reason, i.e., against man's power of cognition, to turn philosophy into an apologist for and a protector of superstition." (p. 82.)

She does not quote the passage from Kant's writings in which he supposedly does this. In fact, once again, the opposite of her conclusion is true: Kant's work was an attack on traditional forms of speculative metaphysics and a plea for the application of reason to matters traditionally clouded in superstition. Kant is a symbol of everything that Rand wishes to be.

Finally, it occurs to me that the most important question for readers to consider today is not how such an ill-informed and poorly argued essay gets into print and how its author manages to be taken seriously by so many people, but how is it possible that the educational system in the U.S. can fail to provide most people with the modicum of philosophical learning necessary to identify such an essay for what it is? ("Nihilists in Disneyworld.")

Prominent American politicians and others continue to invoke the name of Ayn Rand as an important philosopher of the twentieth century, something that I do not think can be plausibly maintained, as opposed to a polemicist or novelist of influence. Ayn Rand is simply not a great philosopher. Maybe there can be no hope for moral progress and genuine social justice in U.S. society until we do something about our appalling and prevalent philosophical ignorance. Even among university graduates in related fields -- like psychology, politics and history -- real philosophy is a non-subject. If I am right about this, then a sound critique of Ms. Rand's essay may be a good place to start to build an awareness of the difference between what is truly philosophically respectable and what is the opposite.

There is so much fascinating philosophical work being done right now -- much of it by American thinkers -- that the thought that most American students will know only the name of one "philosopher" and that it will be "Ayn Rand," is frustrating and depressing for me. Frustration and depression are things one learns to overcome in a torture chamber. Read Ayn Rand, if you must, but you will be much better off reading her novels than her philosophical works -- and neither will be as good as anything written by, or about, Kant.

As for contemporary American and British philosophers, here is a partial list of my favorites: Richard Rorty (often wrong, but fun and fascinating to read); Martha Nussbaum (literary sensibility combined with philosophical rigor); Cornel West (excellent and provides a much needed perspective in America and a keen synthesizing intellect); Hilary Putnam (writes exactly as a surgeon uses a scalpel, except that he is apt to change his mind at any moment, performing an appendectomy instead of the planned vasectomy on the unsuspecting patient-reader); Robert C. Solomon (existentialist-phenomenologist, witty, clear, prolific, often agreeing with me and hence, right about most things); Camille Paglia (literary theorist, crazy, but fun and sexy, because she is not afraid of sex as a topic); Roger Scruton (usually fox hunting when not "doing" philosophy, but the best teacher of the subject out there); Bryan Magee (very readable); Bernard Williams (genius); Rick Roderick (wonderful lecturer, makes Habermas comprehensible); Iris Murdoch (superb writer, great novelist, British and an existentialist, but still made it to the National Portrait Gallery in the UK); Paul Ricoeur (elegant, almost superhumanly learned, the philosopher from "Central Casting"); Angela Davis (Hegel and Marx combined with the African-American tradition of resistance, Frankfurt School heavy theory by way of California dreaming).

Any one of these people, and lots of others, offer a much better reading experience than Ayn Rand. Read, study, write about philosophers and philosophy. "Know yourself."

Magic, Science and Civilization.

Jacob Bronowski, Magic, Science and Civilization (New York: Columbia University Press, 1978). Richard Rorty, "Method, Social Science, and Social Hope," in The Consequences of Pragmatism (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota, 1982), pp. 191-210.

Also recommended:

Floyd Matson, The Broken Image: Man, Science and Society (New York: Doubleday, 1966).
Michael Polanyi, Personal Knowledge: Towards a Post-Critical Philosophy (New York: Harper & Row, 1964).

As of April 12, 2007 at 12:31: A.M., there were 219 intrusion attempts against my computer. By the end of the day, there will be twice that many. Primary attacker today 24.192.170.120. My hotmail address will be blocked. I will be unable to navigate my blogs or do further research. Frustration and destruction of my written work will be part of my effort to examine these philosophical issues. I do not believe that such harassment can take place, over a period of years, without the active participation or cooperation of government agencies. I doubt that such harassment promotes the interest of science or is a display of scientific objectivity. For example, hackers are making it very difficult for me to write this essay, suggesting a fear of truth on their part that is distant from the scientific endeavor. I will continue to struggle to write this essay-review. You cannot torture a person into abandoning opinions or philosophical beliefs, while claiming the right to judge anyone's "ethics." Philosophical truth does not depend on physical strength or powerful friends.


What follows is a reaction to, and comment on, Jacob Brownowski's elegant essay defending scientific method as well as his strong conception of scientific knowledge claims and universalizing methods. There are several philosophical confusions on display in this essay that are somewhat surprising from a person of this author's stature. I enjoyed and admired Bronowski's "The Ascent of Man." In reviewing this work, I focus on several issues discussed by Bronowski, who sometimes fails to distinguish and even confuses these distinct, if related issues.

Richard Rorty's work serves as a useful contrast and corrective to Bronowski's confident assertions. Science-worshippers may be in for a surprise, since they tend to admire both Rorty and Bronowski, usually without realizing that their views conflict. My discussion focuses on: a) Bronowski's claims concerning scientific imperialism; b) Bronowski's humanism; c) Bronowski's unrecognized idealism and metaphysical assumptions that are contrasted with Rorty's position. I conclude with suggestions concerning scientific method put forward by leading philosophers of science and scientists. Among these thinkers Michael Polanyi and Marjorie Grene are especially important.

A. Scientific Imperialism.

Bronowski's subject in this work is "the place of science in the total field of human knowledge and that of human values as we have to reformulate them in this century." (p. 1.) Bronowski's conclusion is clear -- there is no alternative to science from now on in human history. I think he is mistaken to the extent that science is expanded to include the whole of human life and knowledge: "We are committed to a scientific way of thinking and to what it entails, a technological way of acting and we cannot go back." (p. 2.) Curiously, only a few pages later Bronowski tells us that "the great revolutions are intellectual revolutions." (p. 5.)

No intellectual revolution is the product of an experiment or was discovered in a laboratory, not even Darwin's theory of evolution. That theory was not found "in" an experiment, but invented or discovered in Darwin's materials and notes to "explain" the results of Darwin's own investigations of the fossil record. Intellectual revolutions have led to the recognition of scientific methods and benefits to be derived from laboratory work. Hence, there is a "chicken and egg" objection to Bronowski's thinking: What is it that produces science and scientific revolutions? Philosophy. But then, what is it that may be considered primary -- ideas (including philosophical ideas) at the heart of the scientific enterprise? Or scientific method? Scientific objectivity is also a kind of philosophy? Scientific method is merely the product of one set of philosophical ideas. Is it the discipline that gave rise to such things as science and scientific method, philosophy, that should be the proper object of reverence rather than science? Both?

Bronowski says: "science is primary." My response is: "For what purposes and in what context is science primary?" When proposing marriage, do you conduct an experiment? I doubt it. Notice that religion gave rise to rational philosophy, which leads to science. Religion and philosophy continue to be pervasive or foundational in all human thinking, including so-called "pure science." For example, science assumes the existence of a real world and truth, Bronowski tells us, and these assumptions already involve controversial philosophical and religious ideas. The very concept of science as distinct from biology or chemistry and the other scientific disciplines is a "universal" reflecting philosophical values and epistemological as well as metaphysical assumptions.

Bronowski finds himself providing a metaphysical theory, for example, even as he rejects metaphysics. He fails to realize that the rejection of metaphysics is a well-known "metaphysical stance," though not a very attractive one. What gave rise to the scientific revolution was philosophical ideas and changing historical conditions, as I say, which made those ideas both possible and attractive. This should be sufficient to indicate the importance of philosophy and history, apart from scientific concerns, in human life.

So many historical generalizations in this essay are based on flawed readings of history. There are very different understandings of the Renaissance and Florentine Neo-Platonists than Bronowski offers, for example, but he seems unaware of this fact. Philosophical assumptions are made in this essay that are not only controversial, but bizarre -- even as the author insists on the importance of precision and care in experimental method.

The admirable attitudes and methods used in scientific work are often disregarded by Bronowski, when he is writing on historical or philosophical topics with results that are less than entirely successful. Compare Sir John Hale, The Civilization of Europe in the Renaissance (New York: Atheneum, 1994), pp. 206-207 ("Ficino and the Neo-Platonists") and Robert Ergang, The Renaissance (Princeton: D. Van Nordstrom, 1967), pp. 263-280 ("The Rise of Modern Science"), with Bronowski's summary of Renaissance humanism. Crane Brinton places the "success" of science a bit later than Bronowski on the historical timeline. See The Shaping of the Modern Mind (New York: Prentice Hall, 1953), pp. 112-137.

At one point Bronowski suggests, falsely, that magic "died around 1500." (p. 23.) Well, the great witchcraft scare erupted in the seventeenth century, resulting in the deaths of more than a million victims -- most of them women. Also, another craze concerning "magic" exploded in France in the mid eighteenth century. This statement by Bronowski is simply factually inaccurate. At the very least, it requires clarification.

Dionysius the Areopagite is laughingly dismissed, for example, for suggesting that persons are attracted to one another because "the universe is filled with the love of God." Bronowski says: "You can't do any science with the love of God. Dionysius had an excellent idea -- bodies attract one another -- and he had a good reason to think so. But it was not a reason which was going to tell him whether the attraction fell off at the inverse distance of the inverse square." (p. 9.) French existentialism is also tossed aside, with a chuckle, because: "it won't solve any differential equations." (p. 11.)

Existentialists may not be seeking to solve differential equations. Dionysius may not have intended his observations primarily -- or at all -- as descriptive statements about empirical reality. An existentialist, including a scientist who also happens to be an existentialist -- such as the foremost philosopher of science of Bronowski's generation, Michael Polanyi -- may regard the sort of questions to which existentialism addresses itself as more primary and even foundational to the scientific enterprise than, say, differential equations. Thus, Polanyi writes:

"Upon examining the grounds on which science is pursued, I found that it is determined at every stage by undefinable powers of thought. [Intuitions?] No rules can account for the way a good idea is produced for starting an inquiry; and there are no rules either for the verification or refutation of a proposed solution to a problem."

Personal Knowledge, p. ix.

Science and philosophy or religion necessarily involve a "commitment" to a tacit epistemology, according to Polanyi (and Bronowski). This turns out to be only a form of phenomenological existentialism, which is unknowingly embraced by Mr. Bronowski, then seasoned with a little idealism, which is also unrecognized by Bronowski.

This Kantian-constructivism by Bronowski, strangely, follows his rejection of French existentialism. (p. 45.) We are required to choose, Bronowski tells us (sounding like Sartre), between "magic and science." This is exactly Polanyi's point, along with the observation that each is involved in the other. My interpretation and that of other thinkers dealing with these issues, each in his own way -- for example, Thomas Kuhn, Paul Feyerabend, Richard Rorty -- is that the distinction between these theoretical models (science and philosophy, religion and magic) is not all that clear because each continues to inform the others. Professor Floyd Matson comments:

"This recognition that, in Polanyi's phrase, 'knowledge is personal' -- and most profoundly when it is knowledge of other persons -- has been widely resisted on the assumption that it constitutes a confession of human frailty and therefore (as Hull considered it) a counsel of despair. And no doubt to those who are convinced that the stockpile of human knowledge increases in direct ratio to the distance between subject and object, the very notion of 'personal knowledge' can have the appearance of a blooming, buzzing confusion of logic."

Matson adds:

"... it is instructive to be reminded, once more, of the singular fact that throughout three centuries of scientific ascendancy the lingering suspicion that we cannot get away from ourselves -- and even, perhaps, that we should not -- has never been altogether silenced or suppressed. Phrased another way, this is the view which holds that to acknowledge the inner personal dimension in behavior, as well as in the observation of behavior, is not to confess a fatal defect but to identify a source of strength -- a unique prerogative of the human condition which provides the sole basis for genuine communication between man and man, and hence for the understanding of other voices, other minds, other behaviors."

The Broken Image, p. 238 (emphasis added).

To speak of understanding as distinct from knowledge in science is to shift into hermeneutics. Bronowski defines magic as: "... the view that there is a logic of everyday life, but there is also a logic of another world. And that other logic works in a different way and if you can only find the secret key, if you can enter into some magical practice -- particularly if you can find the right form of words -- then either the Almighty will be on your side, or you will collect all the votes, or people will believe that because you call it peace, that it's not the same word as war, and all those other things which Orwell has portrayed so brilliantly but which really always come to the same thing: trying to command the world and particularly the opinions of other people by some formula which is other than the truth." (p. 12.) (emphasis added)

Several difficulties to notice about this passage leap out at the reader: First, there are indeed several kinds of logic, even a "revolution in logic" (Peano, Russell, Whitehead) emerging in the twentieth century that called into question many of the assumptions of the early modern era that were foundational to the scientific revolution and classical logic. Godel's proof of incompleteness is a good place to start exploring these issues. Amazingly, yet another "error" was inserted in this text since my previous review only a few days ago. I have corrected that inserted "error" once again.

Also, how the world "is" may depend, for some theorists, on how we choose to describe it. (See Austin's "How To Do Things With Words.") There are any number of objectively valid and true descriptive schemes -- such as science, philosophy, art, even mathematics -- which may be used to construct descriptions that we may live in different contexts and for different purposes. The work of Michael Oakeshott, Experience and Its Modes (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1933), pp. 169-243 is helpful on this issue. Richard Rorty explains:

"To be told that only a certain vocabulary is suited to human beings or human societies, that only that vocabulary permits us to understand them, is the seventeenth century myth of Nature's Own Vocabulary all over again." (Rorty, p. 198.)

This is the myth that says there is a "way the world is" that merely needs to be seen and described. We'll just go and look. Sadly, it's not that simple. Notice that Rorty and Bronowski disagree strongly on whether there is such a thing as the truth or a single way that the world "is." None of this deprives us of a concept of truth, by the way, provided that it is context-sensitive or INTERPRETIVE. We simply slide, again, from scientific discourse and inquiry into hermeneutics, as we have in Continental philosophy of art and politics.

There are multiple and true interpretations of multiple "worlds" and their corresponding descriptive schemes. There is both a way things are, whether knowably or unknowably is a different issue, and a multiplicity of descriptions of how things are. For this reason, we need art and philosophy as well as science. Notice that descriptions or interpretations may be meaningful entirely apart from whether they are true.

We live, in other words, in the era of the "multi-world" theory, so that "other-worlds" thinking is now much more of a scientific hypothesis than a philosophical one. More importantly, it is the many perspectives on this world that should concern philosophers of pluralism, suggesting that the sort of logic useful in calculating your taxes may not be the best wisdom or method to follow in deciding whether or how to talk to an attractive woman at the next scientific symposium that one attends. ("Would you like to see my new ruler?")

Yet another kind of logic may be involved in determining the human meaning of scientific knowledge claims. Bronowski is unable to grasp this point. Also, science is much more often associated by Orwell and Huxley with totalitarian forms of domination and the ghastly horrors of the concentration camps in the twentieth century. Bronowski's response is that Mengele and the Nazi doctors were "not eminent scientists" or that they did not "conduct proper experiments." This may be true, but it is beside the point. The very notion of experimenting on persons in violation of fundamental rights to autonomy and human dignity (even Duncan Kennedy and other critics of rights are in favor of human dignity) is an abomination, though often a "scientifically-conducted" abomination:

"People such as Mengele, Entress, Professor Clauberg worked in the concentration camps particularly on experiments that tried to sterilize people in large numbers. Now it's difficult for me or for any scientist to discuss dispassionately the dreadful stupidity of the work."

Even if the scientific experiments had been done "properly" or "intelligently" they would be just as hideous, even more so!

"People like Clauberg had rows of female prisoners brought in, produced some kind of gunk which contained some proportion of acid, squirted up the women's vaginas, and then asked, 'Is it going to work or is it not?' And that was called scientific experimentation." (p. 85.)

Had the scientific methods been flawless -- conducted under perfect laboratory conditions -- sterilizing or experimenting on those women in such sexually violative ways would remain despicable and evil. However, such a thing -- as Bronowski admits -- might indeed be done with scientific efficiency. He believes that this could lead to "valuable results." (See "Terry Tuchin, Diana Lisa Riccioli, and New Jersey's Agency of Torture" and "Psychological Torture in the American Legal System.")

With a population of persons about to die in a concentration camp, Bronowski tells us, experiments on causes of cancer might be legitimate. Let's induce cancers and see what happens. I disagree. I think such violations of what a human being is and how one should be treated by other persons is an undermining of science itself, which should be based on the human value of knowledge leading to truth in the service of humanity. Scientific "inquiring" is a form of humanism, embraced by Bronowski in this same essay, even as he contradicts himself in such passages by claiming imperial and exclusive rights for science in the knowledge field, thus revealing an absence of feeling and sensitivity that can only heighten fears concerning scientists' lack of compassion and charity:

"I once said in an interview on the BBC that I have a marvelous life because I've always been paid to do what I liked -- just like a prostitute." (p. 67.)

Professor Bronowski may not have fully appreciated the lack of choice for many women in the "sexual services industry" or the suffering and self-esteem issues that many women struggle against in dealing with the effects of such a life. Many women in the sex industry are like those women sterilized against their will and sexually assaulted -- even in a Nazi concentration camp -- as they faced death. This is not a trivial or laughable matter. It is a revealing instance of what is left out and ignored in Professor Bronowski's analysis: emotive factors and considerations that should go into rational deliberations -- like empathy, sympathy and compassion, respect for the humanity and dignity of "subjects," women. No wonder they insert "errors" in this essay. ("Can you lobotomize the soul?")

Women in the sex industry need protection from exploiters. Decriminilizing of commercial-sexual acts between consenting adults is long overdue. Health care and other safety issues need to be addressed, not more stigma and suffering for women who usually have enough to deal with in their lives. Much of this can be said on behalf of men doing similar work and facing similar problems.

If it were possible to learn something about men's scientific "thinking" by inserting, secretly, a device in their rectums (let's try it on Terry Tuchin of Ridgewood, N.J.), without their consent or permission, a device that would "beep" loudly whenever male scientists were distracted from their efforts by a sexual thought, then to have attractive prospective sexual partners stroll by their laboratories, at regular intervals, the results might well be valuable. We can "learn" from such experiments. Would it be right to perform such experiments, secretly, on victims without their consent? I doubt it.

I venture to suggest that scientists subjected to such treatment would find the process somewhat invasive and inappropriate. I agree with them. I would not do such a thing even to a person who has tortured me. This flawed historical reasoning leads to Professor Bronowski's self-contradictory humanism.

B. Bronowski's Humanism.

Unlike many in the "we're-just-animals" school of scientific thinkers, Bronowski admits "... this revolution worked as much in the sciences as in the arts and that it is impossible to understand the really radical change that the Renaissance made unless we see science not as an afterthought but as an integral part of that humanism -- rhetoric, linguistics and all." (p. 26.)

Notice that, despite his criticisms of "God talk," Bronowski then makes this crucial point: "This sense that man and the universe are one, that the presence of God in the universe is a different kind of presence, is what makes the neo-Platonic revolution crucial in the science of the Renaissance." (p. 29.)

There may be what philosophers describe as a "slight tension" between these statements. Like many other scientific thinkers, Bronowski wishes to speak of the "world as it is" and of "science" as the discipline that reveals "how the world is." The problem is that there is no way the world is which can be entirely distinct from our descriptions of how the world is, descriptions which (admittedly) must be related to that external reality "somehow." This is not to deny the validity of the descriptions. Think of the debate between formalists and realists in the philosophy of mathematics. The descriptions may still be true, even if they are opposed or conflicting descriptions -- and to the extent that these descriptions are true, they are absolutely true and even context transcendent. (Kant on synthetic a priori propositions.)

For Kant's kind of reasons, we may not be able to know how the world is apart from our cognitive capacities. We cannot take the world in one hand and our minds or descriptions of it in the other. To grasp the world at all is to know it through our perceptual capacities, such as vision or touch, language and the OBJECTIVE AND TRUE concepts (including mathematical concepts) made possible by language. These human cognitive capacities are our "irremovable spectacles" that construct as they perceive, as they must for all rational agents who are similarly situated. Take another look at Kant's Critique of Pure Reason.

Hey, don't panic. Chill. We can still speak of truth and objectivity in interpretive terms. Now check out some Hegel. The interpretations may even be necessary for all rational agents, again, or persons -- except for beings from New Jersey, of course, who can "arrange" for things to be different. Anybody seen "Cheech"? In Trenton, 2 + 2 equals "whatever you want." This may explain the difficulties with the state's vanishing pension funds. Otherwise, there are rational constraints on our interpretive schemes, which have the effect of creating -- as they describe -- empirical and social realities. ("Say Goodbye to Your N.J. State Pension.")

Beyond New Jersey, the universe is rational -- that is, if we are rational and would like the universe to be rational also. By inventing the concept of gravity, for instance, scientists can explain why it is always true in human experience and in the experience of all rational agents that things fall when they are dropped on the planet earth. Just remember that we invented scientific concepts, not the other way around. If we prefer to be irrational, then we can happily claim that there is no gravity, it just looks that way to some people and not to others. However, if we leap off a tall building, I am confident that we will fall to earth -- rationalists and irrationalists alike. This sort of unpleasant experience is something else that can be arranged for annoying critics (or even Governors on the Turnpike, perhaps) in New Jersey, for a small fee. How you doing, Cheech, and how do you like it "down da shore"?

"How about God?" asks the feisty science major. The word and concept of "God" is a human invention to describe an experience of something beyond all human descriptions, which is pretty universal for humanity -- kind of like gravity. Merely because our descriptive schemes or myths to attempt to get at this unique experience of something powerful and real are inadequate, should not lead you to doubt the reality of what such flawed human minds and descriptions intuit. "Here it is, at last, the great thing ... please sit." These were the final words, according to some scholars, spoken by Henry James. What was Mr. James trying to say?

There is indeed something "out there," underlying the order of the cosmos and the music of the spheres -- and She is pretty awesome. In the immortal words of Albert Einstein: "And how."

C. Metaphysical Assumptions and Idealism.

Bronowski explains at length that he is not interested in metaphysics. He then writes:

"I have put forward the view that science is a world picture. It is not a technique; it is not a form of power; it is not even simply an accumulation of knowledge which makes a world view. And to this, I hold, we have been irrevocably committed roughly since the Renaissance. I hold that the scientific revolution from 1500 onward was an essential part of the Renaissance, that without it the Renaissance cannot be properly understood as a revaluation of man [and woman,] as what Professor Kristeller and his colleagues call in their joint book 'The Renaissance Concept of Man.'" (p. 41.)

Two problems: 1) persons have always been "committed" to creating pictures of the world and trying to live within them. Thus, there is nothing new in this statement; 2) furthermore, this is a metaphysical statement -- despite Bronowski's denials -- one which leads to a kind of idealism anticipated by Iris Murdoch contradicting Professor Bronowski's professed empiricism and realism. Read this next paragraph very carefully because Professor Bronowski failed to do so:

"With all its miraculous interconnections the brain, the human brain, the most complex brain of all, is still a very coarse instrument. And it can only find regularity in nature by digging it out or putting it there (however you like to put it) but not simply by recording nature." (p. 44.) (emphasis added)

There is no such thing for persons as "simply recording nature," Bronowski says. However, we can still have truth and objectivity in our descriptive schemes. Bronowski's reasoning undermines itself because it may well be true that we are "committed to the scientific world view," but this is only for some and not all purposes. This "putting there" of the order we find in nature is what philosophers call "idealism." This is another way of speaking of constructing as we perceive.

Among the purposes for which science will be of limited utility is deciding what values we will "put there" in our human interactions. Perhaps we will decide to treat women as equals and all persons as autonomous and inviolable subjects, who are not to be experimented upon against their will. Most importantly, persons are to be included in deciding on the scope of scientific methods and knowledge, along with areas better studied in other ways, whenever they will be affected by such methods and knowledge. No person is a slave nor an unwilling experimental animal. Scientists cannot violate fundamental rights of persons and escape liability for their actions.

Bronowski's essay was fun to read, not least because of the good professor's philosophical troubles. We all have those. I will give the final word to Richard Rorty, with a little help from me. Where would these guys be without me?

"For we shall not think that 'the study of man' or 'the human sciences' have a nature, any more than we think that man does."

Man's and woman's nature, Professor Rorty, is to wonder whether we have a nature. ("The Heidegger Controversy.")

"When the notion of knowledge as representing goes, then the notion of inquiry as split into discrete sectors with discrete subject matters goes. The lines between novels, newspaper articles, and sociological research gets blurred. The lines between subject matters are drawn by reference to current practical concerns, rather than putative ontological status." (p. 203.)

This may be "true," Professor Rorty, but you have not proven (or even argued) that there is no ontological status attached to those objects of practical and epistemic concerns -- like science, truth, or God.

Daniel Dennett, Freeman Dyson and the Science of Religion.

Daniel Dennett is a philosopher I admire. As a participant in discussions on a PBS television program examining ideas for a popular audience, he was witty and engaging, displaying an attractive screen personality representing philosophy for a large audience. Dennett is someone whose works I will continue to study because we disagree about many things, while (I suspect) also agreeing about others.

Our political views are probably similar. We are both feminists, advocates of democracy, Constitutionalists, best described as religious agnostics, some would say atheists. I am not one who accepts the rules or strictures of any organized religion, political party, club or organization, except for the United States Constitution, which allows me to be different. I should note that those rules are not, in my opinion, what is essential about religion.

I like Dennett's pragmatism and his concern -- this is an indication of his aesthetics -- to write well, clearly and elegantly, which he does. Concerning his writings, Dennett may well agree that form and substance are not easily separated. It is always a pleasure for me to read Dennett's prose and that is an important inducement to study someone's written work in this age of distractions. (Excuse me, my phone is ringing.)

I wish to comment on an exchange between Dennett and Freman Dyson in recent successive issues of The New York Review of Books. The Review is the one journal of opinion to read, whatever your interests may be, since the quality of the writing alone justifies doing so. I discovered many of my favorite writers and areas of intellectual concern in the pages of this journal of ideas, literature and politics. Mr. Dyson reviews Dennett's recent book Breaking the Spell, [NYR, June 22]. Dennet objects to the following (I think) roughly accurate assessment of his views by Dyson:

My view of religion and Dennett's are equally true and equally prejudiced. I see religion as a precious and ancient part of our human heritage. Dennett sees it as a load of superflous mental baggage which we should be glad to discard.

Dennett claims that he does not hold a position such as Dyson attributes to him. He admits that religion does much good as well as harm in the world. Dennett's pragmatism shows in this observation:

People who would otherwise be self-absorbed or shallow or crude or simply quitters are often ennobled by their religion, given a perspective on life that helps them make the hard decisions that we all would be proud to make. [NYR, August 10, 2006.]

Dennett is saying that religion "works," that the ability to improve or benefit "some" people is what justifies religion, to the extent that it can be justified rationally, which is a very American view of the "cash value" of religious ideas. I think that this capacity to "improve" people is mostly incidental to what religions are about. Such material improvements in people's lives might be accomplished equally well by secular-minded social meliorists. Before getting to what, I think, religion is about, let's give Dennett a chance to make himself clear on the "issue," as lawyers say:

... my plea for an objective approach to religions -- in which we reverse engineer their many design features to see how and why they work -- is directed as much to those who would strengthen, reform, and preserve their religions as to those who would hasten their extinction. I declare myself still agnostic about these alternatives, since I don't yet know enough -- and nobody else does either. That's why I wrote the book.

Let's begin with the idea of an objective approach to religion. Let us suppose that you come upon a man who is in agony. He is writhing on the floor. You kneel down and say to him: "The cause of your suffering, my good fellow, is a spike that is protruding from your foot. Have no fear, in due course, a medical person is bound to arrive and take you to a hospital where, with appropriate medical treatment, the spike will be removed. Assuming you have not lost too much blood, of course, it is likely that you will recover and the pain will be eased."

Suppose this unhelpful Samaritan, then explains (in tedious detail) the scientific basis for the sufferer's predicament. I suspect that the person in pain will not find this discussion very helpful. Eventually, the arrival of medical people may result in saving his life. This will involve science applied to his predicament. But if that spike was hammered into his foot by a torturer, then the suffering will not be eased by relief of his physical pain. Spiritual agony, outrage at injustice, insults and slights, denigration and dehumanization are forms of MORAL harm, damaging both psychologically and spiritually. Think of what racism does to people, how it hurts all people, worst of all racists.

What racists often fail to appreciate is that racism is a mechanism of control through division of persons with shared economic and social interests -- like blue collar and poor people in America whose economic concerns are nearly identical regardless of ethnicity or race.

Suppose that human life in our time and place -- maybe always -- involves, for many or most people, coping with the equivalent of a spike in one's foot. For some people there are many such spikes, everywhere in their bodies. Suppose that these spikes cannot be removed by physicians. Suppose that people even understand (scientifically and in other ways) the causes of their spikes and wounds: childhood deprivation, loss, cruelty, physical abuse, other forms of abuse, poverty, hunger, cultural displacement, separation from loved-ones, rape or other sexual violations, along with many other continuing horrors, like torture and the torture of loved-ones, especially children -- all of these things resulting from unsought encounters with evil persons, together with the challenge of finding meaning and a reason to live with such pain, every day.

Do you think, Professor Dennett, that an "objective" approach will be the best or most "useful" way of coping with people's spiritual needs? It is a very American confidence in us which seeks to "solve all problems," preferably by means of scientific or technological innovations. Do you, Professor Dennett, think that a new gadget will solve the problem of human affliction and suffering?

What if tragedy is inherent in the human condition (has anyone read Miguel Unamuno lately?), so that no amount of improvement will alter the reality that persons must suffer, morally and spiritually, whatever the material circumstances of their lives? Do you think that debating the improbable nature of religious stories has any bearing on the comfort and meaning provided by such stories, to those who can read them as symbols?

For most of the people of the world such a "scientific" approach to religion is insane. Americans are often perceived as capable of stunning insensitivity and stupidity about such spiritual matters. After all, not everyone is as tactful and intelligent in pursuing such inquiries as Professor Dennett. In discussing delicate emotional and spiritual matters, which are regarded in other cultures as anything but scientific subjects, feelings are as important as thoughts. For most people in the world, religion is the opposite of a subject-matter for university studies. These differences in cultural attitudes are relevant to many of our difficulties in the Middle East.

"Love is a defense mechanism," psychobabblers say. We all nod with agreement. I can only hope that someone -- an artist maybe -- will step foward and explain to social "scientists" that there may be more to love than that.

Whatever science tells us about religion, I promise you that there is more to religion than "compensation" or any other one word motive. If you see the Cuban film Buena Vista Social Club, a single gesture by a man wiping away a woman's tear -- whose smile does the same for him -- is a complete definition of religion.

We are obligated to do everything in our power to improve human lives by making use of science, technology and anything else that we can find or create. We must make things better for our children, knowing that the gift of life to them is also an introduction to pain and mortality. We kiss them gently on the forehead knowing that they will age, that loving others will be (at best) horribly painful for them. Yet love is the most important and good thing in their lives (love's absence is infinitely worse). We know that they will be prey to monsters of depravity, political evil, social injustice, torture, deprivation and hunger, sometimes resulting from the actions of persons claiming to act "for their own good." We say (sincerely) that life is good. Why? What makes life good? Your answer to these questions will contain your understanding of religion. See Roberto Benigni's film, "Life is Beautiful."

What is it that makes life good if not love and the struggle to find or create beauty and meaning? Religion is essential to loving (it teaches us what love is) and to the creation of meaning and beauty (it teaches us what is possible with love).

A single act of love and compassion, of self-giving in choosing to share the pain of a fellow human being in extremis will reveal more about religion than all the books seeking objectivity, as opposed to real theological insight, which is intuitive and impressionistic, like philosophical insight. (See Bernard Lonergan's writings on "insight.")

Feeling (religious devotion, compassion) and mind (philosophy, science, theology) are all paths to religious wisdom and insight, forms of resistance to injustice, besides whatever other benefits result from these endeavors. Hegel (mind) and Kierkegaard (feeling) embody these options in Christianity, but a single gesture or symbol will explain religion, if it is properly understood. Recall the Buddha's holding of a single flower as the totality of his sermon to bewildered acolytes. There was nothing more to say. The flower "is." So are you. End of sermon. You cannot defeat these ancient forms of wisdom and meaning in human life by altering my writings. ("Drawing Room Comedy: A Philosophical Essay in the Form of a Film Script.")

Point to a crucifix. Point to a Star of David above a synagogue in New York with barricades in front of it to protect it from terrorists. Sadly, this need to protect religious structures is something that I have experienced. I was searched when entering a house of worship. This was painful because I know that my Jewish friends have to live with these reminders of hatred when they seek to worship. Listen to the call to prayer as the sun sets in Egypt. See the people kneeling and bowing towards the East and Mecca, in a single act that is both a display and reminder of humility before the enormity of life and the universe, as well as before the God many intelligent and educated persons believe keeps all in balance. This is because such a God is balance. God is the "peace" sought in Islam. Dennett writes:

... we should brace ourselves and set aside our traditional reluctance to investigate religious phenomena scientifically, so that we can come to understand how and why religions inspire such devotion, and figure out how we should deal with them all in the twenty-first century.

Notice the assumptions being made by this highly talented philosopher:

... my book strenuously seeks to avoid both biases -- and I think it succeeds -- in the only way we have ever found to explore any complicated and controversial phenomenon objectively: by adhering to the methods and working assumptions of science, expanded to encompass the work of historians and other investigators in the humanities. ...

Become "child-like," Professor Dennett, and you will understand what is religion. Leave your lab coat at home, then volunteer to work with a charitable religious order, while living in poverty for a year. You will write a very different book at the conclusion of that year. Forget Quine and Ayer, think Spinoza and Kierkegaard.

I am called a "fool" -- among other things -- because of my respect for the truth and wisdom in religion, despite being a doubter. I recognize the irrefutable ethical truth (about which I have NO DOUBT) at the center of all three of the great religions of the West: love and compassion is what we are here to learn. Love is the only source of meaning and redemption in this world of shadows, where suffering, pain, loss and death as well as joy, meaning, achievement, beauty will be found in all of our lives. We are meant to love -- and should learn to love more -- through these contradictions and sufferings. If we do not learn this painful lesson, then I think that we will be quickly destroyed.

Whoever you are, I promise you that both pain and joy will be in your future. As Norman Mailer once said of death, "there is something out there looking for you and it's not fooling." I think great suffering, especially spiritual suffering, can be a revelation. There is always a glimmer of light that ends the dark night of the soul. If there is such a thing as religious perspective, then it must include a willingness to die for what we believe and those we love, which is another way of describing the achievement of our humanity. (See my story "The Soldier and the Ballerina.")

Professor Dennett's confidence in his methods is more than understandable. After all, science has provided so many "miracles" already, but morally and spiritually the human condition has not changed. Individuals make progress and learn; humanity is essentially the same in every historical age, apart from improvements in external conditions, which are cumulative.

Professor Dennett is a highly fortunate human being: born in a rich country, into a comfortable segment of the population, well-educated, ethical, humane, civilized and scientifically literate. No doubt he is dismayed by ordinary people's belief in myths that are ancient, whose understanding of the world belongs to the dark ages. He wants to help them "move on."

Suffering destroys the possibility of moving on. The misery and affliction of most people's lives -- pain for billions lacking education and struggling in desperate poverty -- forces them to seek religious understanding and meaning, much more than factual knowledge. Science cannot help them with such objectives. Art and religion can and do help people to cope.

I knew a man who was sent to a political prison. He told me that at one in the afternoon, some of the professors who were in this prison for their ideas would lecture on various subjects, inmates would discuss things in whispers. Some took mental tours of European capitals, knew the streets of Paris, could see them, though they had not left their cells.

All of us are in prisons of one kind or another -- including Dennett -- while religions offer us mental tours of Paris. It is love which opens the prison gate for each of us. The very worst prisons are built out of an inmate's own hatred. Love, when it is expressed and received in turn, is a tour of Paris, wherever we happen to find ourselves. Such love is the fulfillment of religion's promise.

Neutrality is not an option. It is merely another kind of bias. Find yourself at the mental equivalent of Auschwitz, Professor Dennett, then see whether neutrality is an option. It is good to understand what makes persons or societies descend to such levels (Nazism), but science will provide little assistance in this effort because it looks at people and phenomena from the "outside," whereas the deepest understanding of both will only come from the "inside," from PARTICIPATING in the human condition, in dialogue with and recognition of as well as empathy for our suffering neighbors. Think again about how Dennett is using the word "objectively" in the quotation that appears above. Can you think of another way to use that word? ("David Stove and the Critique of Idealism" and, once more, "Drawing Room Comedy: A Philosophical Essay in the Form of a Film Script.")

Imagine a God who understands this human pain, teaching wisdom and compassion by becoming human, sharing in mortal agony. Imagine a God who chooses a people for moral edification by means of unprecedented tragedy, who permits slavery and evil -- as human choices, not His choices -- as our self-imposed cost to achieve humanity for ourselves (which is freedom that allows for either love or evil), so that with freedom, all persons may learn to come closer to God. The way we come closer to God is by loving. Loving is not "supernatural." Yes, these are metaphors. Whenever you are asked whether you believe in God, it is a good idea to respond by asking in return: "What do you mean by 'God'?" (See my short story "Pieta" and "Is it rational to believe in God?")

I might go on pointing to doubtful statements in Professor Dennett's response to Mr. Dyson's review. Mostly they suggest a misunderstanding by Dennett of religion's purpose. It may be best to thank Professor Dennett for his work, as always, and to offer by way of conclusion a quotation from Oscar Wilde's De Profundis.

I remember when I was at Oxford saying to one of my friends as we were walking round Magdalen's narrow bird-haunted walks one morning in the year before I took my degree, that I wanted to eat of the fruit of all the trees in the garden of the world, and that I was going out into the world with that passion in my soul. And so indeed, I went out, and so I lived. My only mistake was that I confined myself to the trees of what seemed to me the sun-lit side of the garden, and shunned the other side for its shadow and its gloom: failure, disgrace, poverty, sorrow, despair, suffering, tears even, the broken words that come from lips in pain, remorse that makes one walk on thorns, conscience that condemns, self-abasement that punishes, the misery that puts ashes on its head, the anguish that chooses sackcloth for its raiment and into its own drink puts gall: -- all these were things of which I was afraid. And as I had determined to know nothing of them, I was forced to taste each of them in turn, to feed on them, to have for a season, indeed, no other food at all.

Wilde explains the need for an experience of darkness as well as light, of the ways in which artistic and religious development come together in afflicted souls. Perhaps this "insight" is not all that different from what Hegel means by "the beautiful soul":

... the artistic [and spiritual] life is simple self-development. Humility is ... frank acceptance of all experiences, just as love in the artist is simply the sense of beauty that reveals to the world its body and its soul.

Recall the Eucharist held high by the priest in the Catholic mass. Think of the lifting of the Torah in a synagogue. Picture the huddled worshippers in a Mosque listening to the Imam read from his people's Holy Book. For Wilde, Christ's passion explains religion. I agree, for Christ in the Scriptures ...

... understood the leprosy of the leper, the darkness of the blind, the fierce misery of those who live for pleasure, the strange poverty of the rich. [Christ's lesson is] ... whatever happens to another happens to oneself, and if you want an inscription to read at dawn and at night-time, and for pleasure or for pain, write up on the walls in letters for the sun to gild and the moon to silver, "Whatever happens to another happens to oneself."

Mary Midgley's View of Philosophy as a Kind of Plumbing.

" ... philosophers, then, need a combination of gifts that is rare. They must be lawyers as well as poets." -- Mary Midgley. (The Photo of Ms. Midgley may be blocked by N.J. hackers.)

Mary Midgley, "Philosophical Plumbing," in Utopias, Dolphins and Computers: Problems of Philosophical Plumbing (London & New York: Routledge, 1996), p. 1.

I remember a Somerset Maugham story of an English traveller who comes upon a tiny village in the mountains of Asia, only to find a nice English spinster living in the rough equivalent of a cottage in Sussex. Maugham was struck by the frequent presence of eccentric English women in the most bizarre places, lending a sense of normality (and a nice cup of tea) to the most outlandish settings. The portrait of Mary Midgley may be blocked by Cuban-Americans convinced that the aged British philosopher is sympathetic to Communism.

In a similar Truman Capote story, told in the first person, a traveller finds a "light in a window," a bit of Christmas warmth with a fellow Jane Austen enthusiast, after being stranded in the midst of a snow storm.

If Maugham and Capote were to combine their talents and invent a character living in our time in an unexpected setting, who teaches philosophy and writes books, she would be Mary Midgley. Professor Midgley is far too improbable a character to exist in the real world, and yet (somehow) she does. This should be comforting to religious believers.

Along with Philipa Foot, Iris Murdoch, Elizabeth Anscombe and very few others, Ms. Midgley was among the Oxbridge women who happened to be philosophers coming of age before the Second World War. These women were outstanding thinkers shaped by the horrors and losses of that military struggle. Without exception they rejected the scientism that came to dominate British philosophy during the post-war period.

I became aware of Midgley's work after reading her debates with Richard Dawkins. She won all of those exchanges, easily, challenging Professor Dawkins on his misuse of metaphor and spotting his rampant scientism. I enjoy her plain, direct, witty and accessible literary style. Also without exception, these women described themselves as "not clever" and/or "unimportant," including Iris Murdoch, who was both clever and important well beyond Britain's boundaries as were all of these ladies.

I wish to make a few comments about Midgley's classic essay "Philosophical Plumbing," which landed her in some trouble. Some of her British colleagues were outraged that she compared philosophy to plumbing. I have made a similar comparison, suggesting that philosophers are "intellectual sanitation workers" and that philosophy is like "housework." Professor Midgley explains:

I have made this comparison a number of times, wanting to stress that philosophizing is not just grand and elegant and difficult, it is also needed. It isn't optional. ...

Plumbing and philosophy are both activities that arise because elaborate cultures like ours have, beneath their surface, a fairly complex system which is usually unnoticed, but which sometimes goes wrong. In both cases, this can have serious consequences. Each is hard to repair when it goes wrong, because neither of them was ever consciously planned as a whole.

This sounds like an excellent description of the common law tradition. Underlying almost all of our thinking, even our social reality, is a network of concepts and relations that we take for granted, until we begin to experience some difficulties in the use of these concepts. We then find it necessary to engage in conceptual analysis and repair. The only persons who can do this sort of conceptual analysis and repair are philosophers -- especially, these days, when our conceptual structures have become so intricate and technical.

Philosophers are like "child-care specialists" caring for concepts that behave like unruly children. It is difficult to make our concepts play nicely together. The scientific concepts are always taking the humanistic concepts' toys and placing them in bizarre places. Is that nice? I don't think so.

What is a "person"? Or "memory"? What are responsibility, freedom, society, law, thinking, good, truth, knowledge, and so on?

Try reasoning about any political or social issue without making use of these concepts and others like them, which are inextricably related. All of these are philosophical concepts, incidentally, and hotly contested ones, too.

Our ideas are under critique and analysis in a way that they have not been for several centuries. This is because the conceptual structure put in place at the end of the eighteenth century ("Modernity" or the "Enlightenment," and I am aware of the controversy concerning the use of these terms) is running into some trouble with age. Perhaps it is time for a new filter or even an extra-large pump to get the waste out. It is not so easy for philosophy to keep up with all those concepts running around in the yard.

Learning is not a private playground for the learned. It is something that belongs to and affects all of us. Because we are a culture that values knowledge and understanding so highly, the part of every study that can be widely understood -- the general, interpretative part, the ideology -- always does seep out in the end and concern us all. The conceptual schemes used in every study are not private ponds, they are streams that are fed from our everyday thinking, are altered by the learned, and eventually flow back into it, influencing our lives.

Professor Midgley uses the example of social contract theory. Social contract theory was invented by the philosophers of the early modern period to solve the problem of an assumed divine right of kings that fit into a pre-modern understanding of government and politics. This pre-modern understanding made use of a view of nature and human relations as teleological, involving a great and ascending "chain of being," leading ultimately to God. To question kings and monarchy was to bring down the entire medieval intellectual edifice -- which the philosophers did, eventually, only to replace the system with one that was more congenial to the interests of a rising commercial class.

The view that political legitimacy emerges not from above ("God wills it"), but from below ("we agree to it"), in turn led to an atomistic conception of persons as "individuals" or "free agents," choosing to come together socially for strictly selfish reasons of efficiency, and then returning to the personal "private" realm of aesthetic and other satisfactions. It follows that social reality may be divided neatly into the "public" and "private" realms.

This "Modern" system of ideas certainly fulfilled the purposes for which it was created. We got rid of kings and this allowed for Capitalism and the industrial revolution to succeed -- even for them to "marry" in the modern mega-State -- but the fictions used for these purposes of liberation have since become a new prison. Hence, recent attempts by philosophers to theorize a solution to our intellectual predicament by moving beyond modernity and achieving a post-modern politics for our post-modernist "condition." ("Roberto Unger's Revolutionary Social Theory.")

If it is true that we are "individuals," then it is also and no less true that we are inherently social creatures, who can only become individuals in communities. You may wish to refer to Hegel or Marx at this point, but American thinkers from Thomas Jefferson to Royce, Peirce ("Evolutionary Love") or Dewey may also be quoted in support of this proposition. We are not pieces of Lego, attachable or detachable at will. We are not like billiard balls colliding, haphazardly or randomly into societies. We are shaped and united by more primal bonds.

Friends share their lives; they are no longer totally separate entities. They are not pieces of Lego that have just been fitted together for convenience.

... If you have been my friend [or someone I love] for years, that friendship has changed both of us. We now rely deeply on each other; we have exchanged some functions, we contain elements of each other's lives. We are quite properly mutually dependent, not because of some shameful weakness, but just in proportion to what we have put into this friendship and what we have made of it. Of course any friendship can end if it has to, but that ending will be a misfortune. It will wound us. An organic model, which says that we are members of one another, describes this situation far better than a Lego model.

Recent understandings of ourselves as social creatures, linked to a natural ecology and to the universe of energy and matter, may be associated with a renewed appreciation of the insights in British idealism and other organic theories of community. From a different direction, Marxism is also illuminating on these issues: "... we are not self-contained and self-sufficient," Professor Midgley writes, " but live naturally in deep mutual dependence." ("Drawing Room Comedy: A Philosophical Essay in the Form of a Film Script.")

The worst psychological injury that can be done to a person is to destroy the network of relationships in which he or she is located, so as to be understood, shattering his or her sense of living within a meaning-conferring community. A woman I love can reduce me to Jello or devastate me with a single smile. Action at a distance.

All of these British women -- who contributed greatly to philosophy in the twentieth century -- were influenced by idealism and phenomenology to a greater extent than their male counterparts. All of these talented philosophers were as horrified (as I am) by censorship, plagiarism, totalitarianism and efforts to suppress dissent. Everyone of these women received far less than her due in terms of professional recognition or distinction. ("Master and Commander.")

Philosophy and science rely on symbols and conceptual structures that must be examined, periodically, to determine when and where repairs need to be made. Modernity, as a conceptual system, is in need of such examination (and of many drastic repairs) right now.

Myth and symbol are inextricable from all human thinking, including scientific thinking, as Professor Dawkins learned from his exchanges with Mary Midgley. They cannot be removed from our thoughts as relics of a simpler era. Most importantly -- I wish that all lawyers could be taught this! -- Professor Midgley makes it clear that:

WE THINK AS WHOLE PEOPLE, NOT AS DISEMBODIED MINDS, NOT AS COMPUTERS. All ideas that are of the slightest interest to anybody can have unintended emotional and practical consequences -- consequences which cannot possibly be spelt out in advance. And, without this constant flow of ideas, life would grind to a halt. ...

It follows that ...

... philosophy, like food and water, is something that we must have because we are in real trouble without it.

Not surprisingly, we are in real trouble today. ("Stuart Hampshire and Iris Murdoch On Freedom of Mind and Imagination.")

Philosophy is much less widely available to students and professionals than it should be. This is unfortunate. Appalling philosophical ignorance is something which can be remedied with individual effort. Read and study philosophy, most of which is much more accessible than law books or business texts. Any law school graduate can be a philosopher of the subject. Regardless of what kind of thinking you do in your professional life, philosophy will make you better at it. You will be a better lawyer, psychologist, teacher with some understanding of the tradition of thought from which these disciplines or professions emerge, and by which they have been shaped.

A good place to start studying philosophy is with Mary Midgley's books. I am saddened to learn of the death of Ms. Foot. I have read and admired her writings for many years. I will write a brief comment on one of her essays as a small gesture of gratitude for her important work.

A Note on the Epistemology of Science.

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




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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

And:

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

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


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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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