Human Nature & Jewish Thought: Judaism's Case for Why Persons Matter
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Human Nature & Jewish Thought: Judaism's Case for Why Persons Matter
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Overview
This book explores one of the great questions of our time: How can we preserve our sense of what it means to be a person while at the same time accepting what science tells us to be true—namely, that human nature is continuous with the rest of nature? What, in other words, does it mean to be a person in a world of things? Alan Mittleman shows how the Jewish tradition provides rich ways of understanding human nature and personhood that preserve human dignity and distinction in a world of neuroscience, evolutionary biology, biotechnology, and pervasive scientism. These ancient resources can speak to Jewish, non-Jewish, and secular readers alike.
Science may tell us what we are, Mittleman says, but it cannot tell us who we are, how we should live, or why we matter. Traditional Jewish thought, in open-minded dialogue with contemporary scientific perspectives, can help us answer these questions. Mittleman shows how, using sources ranging across the Jewish tradition, from the Hebrew Bible and the Talmud to more than a millennium of Jewish philosophy. Among the many subjects the book addresses are sexuality, birth and death, violence and evil, moral agency, and politics and economics. Throughout, Mittleman demonstrates how Jewish tradition brings new perspectives to—and challenges many current assumptions about—these central aspects of human nature.
A study of human nature in Jewish thought and an original contribution to Jewish philosophy, this is a book for anyone interested in what it means to be human in a scientific age.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780691176277 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Princeton University Press |
| Publication date: | 06/06/2017 |
| Series: | Library of Jewish Ideas , #7 |
| Edition description: | Reprint |
| Pages: | 232 |
| Product dimensions: | 5.40(w) x 8.50(h) x 0.60(d) |
About the Author
Read an Excerpt
Human Nature & Jewish Thought
Judaism's Case for Why Persons Matter
By Alan L. Mittleman
PRINCETON UNIVERSITY PRESS
Copyright © 2015 Princeton University PressAll rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-691-14947-9
CHAPTER 1
Persons in a World of Things
Martin Buber writes of epochs in which human beings feel themselves to be at home in the world, secure in the knowledge that they belong, that they are, for all their peculiarities, a part of nature. Their being makes sense as it fits into an ordered, intelligible whole. Explaining nature explains them. "Man lives in the world as in a house, as in a home." Aristotle, a philosophical biologist, is the first great theoretician of this view. For Aristotle, "Man is a thing among [the] things of the universe, an objectively comprehensible species beside other species." But there are also ages in which human beings feel out of joint; their being is a conundrum to them. They are estranged from their world, and do not know where they belong or how, if at all, they fit in. "Man lives in the world as if in an open field and at times does not even have four pegs with which to set up a tent," as Buber puts it. Saint Augustine, explorer in his Confessions of the inner world, discovers this view. The natural integrity of Aristotle's universe no longer obtains, and "the original contract between the universe and man is dissolved.... [M]an finds himself a stranger and solitary in the world." A sense of "security in the universe" has come to an end, observes Buber; man, "who has become insecure, and homeless, and hence problematic to himself," is seized by fresh questioning. Such an age—and Buber thinks ours was one—leads to a deepened self-understanding—indeed, a more authentic way of living in the world. We discover the internal dimension to ourselves that sets us apart from the rest. We recognize that we are the addressees of our own insistent question, What are we? Buber believes that the view of human nature glimpsed in a world thought splintered and disintegrated is truer than the reassuring "scientific" view of the natural whole. He thinks that the personal view, founded on a sense of apartness from the cosmos, grasps humanity in a more adequate (but still imperfect) way.
There is an irony here. In the cosmic whole, the person is lost. In personal solitude, the whole is gained. To see human beings as remarkable yet continuous with the natural world, as Aristotle did, is to lose the peculiar reality of their personhood. To see human beings as divided against themselves, as caught between good and evil, between kingdoms of light and darkness, earthly and heavenly cities, as Augustine did, is to secure a view where personhood is primary. The irony is that the former perspective affirms a whole, but scants the significance of the human part. The latter stance, which begins after the collapse of the world as a natural, rational cosmos, grasps the person as a unique being, a whole world in itself. For Buber, any plausible teaching about human nature has to take the wholeness of the human, anchored in the personal dimension, into account. Wholeness (sheleimut) becomes Buber's criterion for whether a conceptual depiction of human nature succeeds.
Buber's younger contemporary, Heschel, affirms the same criterion. In discussing the time-honored procedure of understanding a human being as a special, perhaps-highest type of animal, Heschel asks, "In establishing a definition of man, I am defining myself. Its first test must be its acceptability to myself. Do I recognize myself in any of these definitions ? Am I ready to identify myself as an animal with a particular adjective?" For Heschel, we can get off to the wrong start in the very phrasing of the question: "We ask: What is man? Yet the true question should be: Who is man? As a thing man is explicable; as a person he is both a mystery and a surprise. As a thing he is finite; as a person he is inexhaustible." Whenever we begin to speak of human nature, we must not forget to speak as well of human personhood. Heschel is thus concerned to set human nature and human personhood at some distance from one another. "Our question is not only: What is the nature of the human species? But also: What is the situation of the human individual? What is human about a human being? Specifically, our theme is not only: What is a human being? But also: What is being human?" Heschel, then, contrasts human nature with being human—the latter term highlighting our way of being as unique, irreplaceable persons. On his account, we gain our personhood, ultimately, through our relationship with God. "I am commanded, therefore I am." Given such a perspective, it is easy to see why he is somewhat dismissive of a category so anchored in the empirical as human nature. Yet if we are to work bottom up, as I have suggested, we must be a bit critical of Heschel's dismissiveness. Human nature must have its day.
Buber and Heschel are right to point to existential concerns as markers of human personhood. They do not give us as much help as we would like, however, in defending a perspective that preserves an image of ourselves as unique personal wholes rather than an ensemble of impersonal parts. They bypass science instead of encountering it head-on. Nonetheless, their perspectives are valuable and can address contemporary debunkers. Consider, for example, the famous (or infamous) remark of Francis Crick, the codiscoverer of DNA: "You, your joys and sorrows, your memories and ambitions, your sense of identity and free will, are in fact no more than the behavior of a vast assembly of nerve cells and their associated molecules." This is a succinct instance of diminishing the whole through reducing it to those parts thought to be most basic or ultimate. Crick implies that our sense of ourselves as persons is in some deep way illusory; it needs to be explained away. We need to wake up and see ourselves as a biochemical house of cards. Our consciousness (of ourselves, others, and the world) bottoms out at a "shifting assembly of active neurons throughout the forebrain that is stabilized using massive re-entrant feedback connections." We are our brains; we are a vast assembly of neurons or more precisely, we are the molecules associated with and composing them.
What gets the last word, on Crick's view, is the human as a system of contingent, biochemical parts and neuroelectric impulses. Yet the curious thing is that persons—reasoning, evaluating, reflective beings—are asked to endorse and accept this view. Persons are both presumed and undermined. We are being invited to abolish ourselves to arrive at an allegedly deeper truth about ourselves. And that deeper truth is asserted with the authority of science. The purported truth is that in the deepest sense, we as persons do not exist. But we are being asked, as persons, to reconceptualize ourselves along molecular lines. This is paradoxical, though. It is persons, using reason, who pursue scientific truth, who see knowledge as a value that ennobles and elevates their lives. In seeking to discover and persuade, Crick (and all of us) offer reasons for our views. We appeal to others as reason-giving, reason-accepting subjects, even when, as in the case of scientism, the goal is to persuade us that we are elaborate, computationally sophisticated objects. There is a gap between the project and its addressees. We are being asked, as persons, to eliminate ourselves. Buber's criterion of wholeness or, in Heschel's version, human self-recognition as a who not a what is lost.
Persons and Particles: Competing Images of the Human
For his part, Sellars struggled with the question of what reality persons have in a world evidently composed of particles. Physics, he assumed, is the most basic, most explanatory science. At bottom, the entities and forces described by physics exhaust the accounting of what really exists. (There is pathos in Sellars insofar as he has both a conviction of a unified, cosmic whole, a la Aristotle, and human homelessness within such a putative whole.) As noted earlier, Sellars frames this as a clash between the manifest and scientific images of the human. The philosopher's task, as he saw it, is to integrate the two. What credence can we give to our manifest sense of ourselves as persons, given a physical world that seems to allow no place for such peculiar entities?
Early human thought, writes Sellars, conceived of all objects as persons. When wind blew, it was because a personlike force decided to blow, bending the branches of a tree-person in turn. The world was enchanted; personhood was everywhere. Out of this archaic conception there eventually developed a manifest image of man-in-the-world in which the category of person no longer included inanimate objects or natural entities but instead only beings capable of recognizing themselves as deliberating, acting, self-motivating individuals. The place of persons in the world shrank, but persons, in their new restricted domain, remained quite real. We saw ourselves in terms of a manifest image as natural beings, embedded in the same causal order as the rest of nature, yet also as beings who act on their own motives and reasons. In the manifest image, we are self-causing agents. We occupy a space of reasons, which are fundamentally different from causes. We apprehend ourselves as beings who think. The rational connections between concepts, formed in minds, are irreducible to associations of perceptions, images, sensory data, and even states of the brain. Perceptions, sensations, "raw feels," and so on, from the point of view of persons, are sensory events stimulated by the environment. But thoughts are different; their associative logic obeys its own laws. Unlike perception or feeling, thought has intentionality (to use the philosopher's term of art); it is "about" something in a way that perceptions and feelings are not. Thought refers to the world. From the viewpoint of a person, then, the mental world has integrity and cannot simply be reduced to those physical events, like neuronal firings, described by science.
Crucially, the manifest image of man-in-the-world entails a social dimension. Persons exist within a public world constituted by those who can share the same intentions, particularly toward matters like rights, duties, and obligations. These, too, from the perspective of persons, cannot be reduced to the states of physical systems. The social dimension has its own reality, its own integrity.
The manifest image is not naive; to the contrary, it forms the framework within which most of Western thought occurred until the scientific revolution. (Buber and Heschel as well as the entirety of the Jewish tradition that preceded them are firmly committed to the integrity of the manifest image.) But that image, according to Sellars, stands in stark contrast to the increasingly dominant scientific image. Although the latter developed within the commonsense view that we had of ourselves—that is, within the framework of the manifest image—it is today a rival image. Not only is it a rival image, but in Sellars's words, it "purports to be a complete image," one that in principle holds a monopoly on the ultimate truth of what we are. And what are we really? Sellars's reluctant answer is that persons—the objects of the manifest image—are "appearances," while our ultimate constituents, what we must really be, are "systems of imperceptible particles."
Sellars's response is reluctant because, unlike some enthusiastic others—those neuroscientists, neurophilosophers, and evolutionary psychologists—who reduce mind to brain and human uniqueness to animal sameness, he is caught between loyalty to both the materialist grasp of reality in terms of systems of particles and the world of experience populated by persons. Unlike today's scientistic debunkers, he does not want to dismiss the latter as mere appearance, but neither can he endorse the bedrock status of personhood. The result is the return of a kind of dualism—a two-tiered view. Science describes and explains. All the sciences that bear on the human, from biophysics to neuroscience, can in principle describe and explain the human. But to grasp the human fully is not wholly a matter of description and explanation. There is something that must be experienced from within. (Sellars thus reenacts Buber's drama of Aristotle versus Augustine.)
Sellars looked for something that the impersonal language of science could not quite capture, and that was the experience of being a moral agent. For him, the irreducibility of the personal is the irreducibility of the "ought" to the "is." Persons are moral beings. They exist within the framework of groups, communities, of which they consider themselves members. Communities exist because their members share common evaluative and moral intentions. Persons in communities think intentionally about moral actions; to be a person is to think about rights and duties. Hence, for Sellars, "to think thoughts of this kind is not to classify or explain, but to rehearse an intention ... Thus, the conceptual framework of persons is not something that needs to be reconciled with the scientific image, but rather something to be joined to it." That we see ourselves as moral beings who judge, value, decide, and act exempts us, for Sellars, from a world where causal explanations, the world of physics, can settle everything. We live in a world where reasons matter; the rest of the world is a world of causes.
The Persistence of Persons
The manifest image sees the category of person as its real, irreducible subject. A feature of this image is that it resists the objectification of persons into things. The rest of the world, as if viewed from nowhere, (mostly) opens itself up to scientific description. Persons are different. We can be described and on many levels explained, from the molecular to the psychological, at least in principle. But that is not enough. For we are subjects of our own experience, intention, thought, and judgment, not just objects. We experience what it is to be ourselves in a unique way. Furthermore, we assert our value as persons in our intercourse with one another as well as in our regard for ourselves. We resist consistently seeing or evaluating ourselves as things. We recoil in consternation and disgust when others view or treat us as things.
Nagel captures how the subject, personhood, cannot be eliminated with the idea that thought as such is irreducible. If thought were to be explained as a kind of neuronal activity, such an explanation, illuminating as it would be if it could be carried through, would nonetheless fall short. If it tried to reduce and locate our personhood at the level of fundamental physics, it would pretend to locate our being outside thought. But as thinking beings, Nagel argues, we cannot get outside thought. The very scientific explanations that purport to tell us what thought, rationality, or consciousness are at the level of systems of particles, what their evolutionary history and purpose are, and so forth, present themselves to us as thoughts, which need to be judged, believed, or disbelieved, as do all other thoughts. Try as we might, we cannot occupy a standpoint from which we can regard all our thoughts as psychological manifestations, neuronal electrochemical reactions, adaptive responses selected for by evolution, bourgeois false consciousness, or what have you. The very ability to identify or criticize some of our thinking from one of those perspectives assumes the objective character of some other domain of thought—the domain from which such alleged judgments are made. We cannot think ourselves to a place beyond thought. Thought is basic. Persons, in their typical, mature lives, are thinking beings. Personhood, in this respect, is a persistent feature of the world as we know it.
The other half of the equation of personhood, our status as moral beings, as agents who can and must decide and act, is also fundamental and not able to be eliminated. Nagel writes:
The only response possible to the charge that a morality of individual rights is nothing but a load of bourgeois ideology, or an instrument of male domination, or that the requirement to love your neighbor is really an expression of fear, hatred, and resentment of your neighbor is to consider again, in light of these suggestions, whether the reasons for respecting individual rights or caring about others can be sustained, or whether they disguise something that is not a reason at all. And this is a new moral question. One cannot just exit from the domain of moral reflection: It is simply there.
We are not, as Kant said, volunteers to morality. We can't decide to take it or leave it. It is the medium in which our personhood is exemplified. We cannot escape it, unless we can figure out a way of coherently annihilating our personhood. A debunking argument against morality per se, as Nagel illustrates above, becomes per force a moral contention, to be evaluated in ethical terms. We cannot step outside morality and remain human.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Human Nature & Jewish Thought by Alan L. Mittleman. Copyright © 2015 Princeton University Press. Excerpted by permission of PRINCETON UNIVERSITY PRESS.
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Table of Contents
Preface ix
Introduction 1
I Persons in a World of Things 21
II Persons in the Image of God 44
III Are Persons Free to Choose? 107
IV Persons Together 145
Conclusion 178
Notes 185
Index 211
What People are Saying About This
"This book is lucid, deeply erudite, and significant. In bringing Jewish sources into conversation with contemporary scientific claims about human nature, Alan Mittleman makes a strong and lively argument for the enduring centrality of human dignity, the profound possibilities of human life, and the importance of considering Jewish voices in ongoing debates about human nature. Anyone interested in Jewish thought, what it means to be human, or both, will benefit and learn a great deal from this wonderful work."—Leora F. Batnitzky, Princeton University"Human Nature & Jewish Thought is a personal, humane, and nuanced defense of the importance of our moral lives to what it means to be a human being, a defense that does complete justice to recent philosophical and scientific contributions yet is marked by a firm control of classical, medieval, and contemporary Jewish sources. Alan Mittleman writes with grace and intelligence. This is a wonderful example of how to write Jewishly and philosophically about central puzzles and problems that face us all."—Michael L. Morgan, University of Toronto"An eloquent, tightly written, and insightful reflection on the meaning of being human, Alan Mittleman's book bridges the gap between traditional Jewish accounts of human nature and contemporary philosophy, science, and social theory. His philosophically informed defense of personhood is an important contribution to the debate about human dignity in our technological age."—Hava Tirosh-Samuelson, Arizona State University"Alan Mittleman, an outstanding contributor to philosophically serious Jewish thought, builds a solid structure of deeply spiritual but always open-eyed reflections. He invites readers on an intellectual journey that confronts and deflates many idols of the age with reasoned argument informed by Jewish tradition, without appeal to authority or blind, reactive romanticism."—Lenn Goodman, Vanderbilt University"This timely and readable work connects biblical and rabbinic thought with enduring questions concerning human nature, highlighting the substantial contemporary relevance of those traditions of thought. Human Nature & Jewish Thought explains how ideas with an ancient anchoring remain strongly relevant to reflection on human self-understanding and to values integral to leading distinctively human lives."—Jonathan Jacobs, John Jay College of Criminal Justice, CUNY