Nobody expects atoms and molecules to have purposes, so why do we still think of living things in this way?

Illustration by Claire Scully

Michael Ruse

is the Lucyle T Werkmeister Professor of Philosophy and director of the history and philosophy of science at Florida State University. He has written or edited more than 50 books, including most recently On Purpose (2017), Darwinism as Religion (2016), The Problem of War (2018) and A Meaning to Life (2019).Listen here

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Edited by Brigid Hains (aeon.co)

One of my favourite dinosaurs is the Stegosaurus, a monster from the late Jurassic (150 million years ago), noteworthy because of the diamond-like plates all the way down its back. Since this animal was discovered in the late 1870s in Wyoming, huge amounts of ink have been spilt trying to puzzle out the reason for the plates. The obvious explanation, that they are used for fighting or defence, simply cannot be true. The connection between the plates and the main body is way too fragile to function effectively in a battle to the death. Another explanation is that, like the stag’s antlers or the peacock’s tail, they play some sort of role in the mating game. Señor Stegosaurus with the best plates gets the harem and the other males have to do without. Unfortunately for this hypothesis, the females had the plates too, so that cannot be the explanation either. My favourite idea is that the plates were like the fins you find in electric-producing cooling towers: they were for heat transfer. In the cool of the morning, as the sun came up, they helped the animal to heat up quickly. In the middle of the day, especially when the vegetation consumed by the Stegosaurus was fermenting away in its belly, the plates would have helped to catch the wind and get rid of excess heat. A superb adaptation. (Sadly for me, no longer a favoured explanation, since latest investigations suggest that the plates may have been a way for individuals to recognise each other as members of the same species).

But this essay is not concerned with dinosaurs themselves, rather with the kind of thinking biologists use when they wonder how dinosaur bodies worked. They are asking what was the purpose of the plates? What end did the plates serve? Were they for fighting? Were they for attracting mates? Were they for heat control? This kind of language is ‘teleological’ — from telos, the Greek for ‘end’. It is language about the purpose or goal of things, what Aristotle called their ‘final causes’, and it is something that the physical sciences have decisively rejected. There’s no sense for most scientists that a star is for anything, or that a molecule serves an end. But when we come to talk about living things, it seems very hard to shake off the idea that they have purposes and goals, which are served by the ways they have evolved.

As I have written about before in Aeon, the chemist James Lovelock got into very hot water with his fellow scientists when he wanted to talk about the Earth being an organism (the Gaia hypothesis) and its parts having purposes: that sea lagoons were for evaporating unneeded salt out of the ocean, for instance. And as Steven Poole wrote in his essay ‘Your point is?’ in Aeon earlier this year, the contemporary philosopher Thomas Nagel is also in hot water since he suggested in his book Mind and Cosmos (2012) that we need to use teleological understanding to explain the nature of life and its evolution.

Some have thought that this lingering teleological language is a sign that biology is not a real science at all, but just a collection of observations and facts. Others argue that the apparent purposefulness of nature leaves room for God. Immanuel Kant declared that you cannot do biology without thinking in terms of function, of final causes: ‘There will never be a Newton for a blade of grass,’ he claimed in Critique of Judgment (1790), meaning that living things are simply not determined by the laws of nature in the way that non-living things are, and we need the language of purpose in order to explain the organic world.

Why do we still talk about organisms and their features in this way? Is biology basically different from the other sciences because living things do have purposes and ends? Or has biology simply failed to get rid of some old-fashioned, unscientific thinking — thinking that even leaves the door ajar for those who want to sneak God back into science?

Biology’s entanglement with teleology reaches right back to the ancient Greek world. In Plato’s dialogue the Phaedo, Socrates describes himself as he sits awaiting his fate, and he asks whether this can be fully explained mechanically ‘because my body is made up of bones and muscles; and the bones… are hard and have joints which divide them, and the muscles are elastic, and they cover the bones’. All of this, says Socrates, is not ‘the true cause’ of why he sits where and how he does. The true cause is that ‘the Athenians have thought fit to condemn me and I have thought it better and more right to remain here and undergo my sentence’. Socrates describes this as a confusion of causes and conditions: he cannot sit without his bones and muscles being as they are, but this is no real explanation of why he sits thus. In the Timaeus Plato develops this further, describing a universe brought into being by a designer (what Plato called the Demiurge). An enquiry into the purpose of the bones and muscles was not only an enquiry into the ways of men, but ultimately an enquiry into the plans of the Demiurge.

Now, however, the governing metaphors of nature changed. No longer did scientists think in terms of organisms: they thought in terms of machines

Aristotle, Plato’s student, didn’t want God in the business of biology like this. He believed in a God, but not one that cared about the universe and its inhabitants. (Rather like some junior members of my family, this God spent Its time thinking mostly of Its own importance.) However, Aristotle was very interested in final causes, and argued that all living things contain forces that direct them towards their goal. These life forces operate in the here and now, yet in some sense they have the future in mind. They animate the acorn in order that it might turn into an oak, and likewise for other living things. Like Plato, Aristotle used the metaphor of design but unlike Plato he wanted to keep any supervisory, conscious intelligence out of the game.

All of this came crashing down during the Scientific Revolution of the 16th and 17th centuries. For both Plato and Aristotle, the question of final causes had applied to physical phenomena — the stars, for example — as much as to biological phenomena. Both thought of objects as being rather like organisms. Why does the stone fall? Because being made of the element earth it wants to find its proper place, namely as close to the centre of the Earth as possible. It falls in order to achieve its right end: it wants to fall.

Now, however, the governing metaphors of nature changed. No longer did scientists think in terms of organisms: they thought in terms of machines. The world, the universe, is like a gigantic clock. As the 17th-century French philosopher-scientist René Descartes insisted, the human body is nothing but an intricate machine. The heart is like a pump, and the arms and legs are a system of levers and pulleys and so forth. The 17th-century English chemist and philosopher Robert Boyle realised that as soon as you start to think in the mechanical fashion, then talking about ends and purposes really isn’t very helpful. A planet goes round and round the Sun; you want to know the mechanism by which it happens, not to imagine some higher purpose for it. In the same way, when you look at a clock you want to know what makes the hands go round the dial — you want the proximate causes.

But surely machines have purposes just as much as organisms do? The clock exists in order to tell the time just as much as the eye exists in order to see. True, but as Boyle also saw, it is one thing to talk about intentions and purposes in a general, perhaps theological way, but another thing to do this as part of science. You can take the Platonic route and talk about God’s creative intentions for the universe, that’s fine. But, really, this is no longer part of science (if it ever was) and has little explanatory power. In the words of EJ Dijksterhuis, one of the great historians of the Scientific Revolution, God now became a ‘retired engineer’.

On the other hand, if you wanted to take the Aristotelian approach and explain the growth and development of individual organisms by special vital forces, that was still theoretically possible. But since no one, as Boyle pointed out, seemed to have the slightest clue about these vital forces or what they did, he and his fellow mechanists just wanted to drop the idea altogether and get on with the job of finding proximate causes for all natural phenomena. The organic metaphor did not lead to new predictions and the other sorts of things one wants from science, especially technological promise. The machine metaphor did.

Yet even Boyle realised that it is very hard to get rid of final-cause thinking when it comes to studying actual organisms, and not just using them as metaphors in the rest of the physical world. He was particularly interested in bats, and spent some considerable time discussing their adaptations — how their wings were so well-organised for flying and so on. In fact, almost paradoxically, in the 18th century the study of living things became more interested in teleology, even as the physical sciences were turning away from it.

‘Running fast in a herd while being as dumb as shit, I think, is a very good adaptation for survival’

The expansion of historical thinking played a key role here. History no longer seemed static and determined, and the belief that humans could make things better through their own unaided efforts meant that there was no longer a need to appeal to Providence for help. This secular ideal (or ideology) of progress put talk of ends and directional change very much in the air. If we as a society aim for certain ends, let us say an improved standard of living or education, could it be that history itself has ends too — ends that are not dictated so much by the Christian religion (judgment and salvation or condemnation) but that come as part of a general end-directed force or movement? Could life, and human history, be directed upward and forward from within?

Alongside philosophers and historians such as Hegel, in the 19th century natural historians began to speculate about organisms in proto-evolutionary ways, and to talk of goals — usually, one admits, goals involving the arrival of the best of all possible organisms, namely Homo sapiens. Here is ‘The Temple of Nature’ (1802) by Erasmus Darwin, Charles Darwin’s physician grandfather:

Organic Life beneath the shoreless waves

Was born and nurs’d in Ocean’s pearly caves;

First forms minute, unseen by spheric glass,

Move on the mud, or pierce the watery mass;

These, as successive generations bloom,

New powers acquire, and larger limbs assume;

…

The lordly Lion, monarch of the plain,

The Eagle soaring in the realms of air,

Whose eye undazzled drinks the solar glare,

Imperious man, who rules the bestial crowd,

Of language, reason, and reflection proud,

With brow erect who scorns this earthy sod,

And styles himself the image of his God;

Arose from rudiments of form and sense,

An embryon point, or microscopic ens!

In the writings of some of the early evolutionists, notably the French biologist Jean-Baptiste Lamarck, we get a strong odour of Aristotelian vital forces pushing life up the ladder to the preordained destination of humankind. No longer was teleological language confined to the purpose of individual organisms and organs such as the hand or the acorn, but now it seemed to explain a general direction for the development of life itself.

It was in this atmosphere of fascination for the history of life that Charles Darwin developed his theory of natural selection. Darwin’s On the Origin of Species (1859) was the watershed. He nailed the question of individual final causes, by explaining why organisms are so well-adapted to their environments. Teleological language was appropriate because such features as eyes and hands were not designed, but design-like. The eye is like a telescope, Stegosaur plates are like the fins you find in cooling towers. So we can ask about purposes. (Of course, questions about the dinosaur could not have been Darwin’s own: when the Origin was published, Stegosaurus still slumbered undiscovered in the rocks of the American West.)

Natural selection explained how design-like features could arise, without a designer or a purpose. There need not be any final cause. There is a struggle for existence among organisms, or more precisely a struggle for reproduction. Some will survive and reproduce, and others will not. Because there are variations in populations and new variations always arriving, on average those surviving will be different from those not surviving, in ways that will have contributed to their greater success. Over time, this adds up to change in the direction of adaptation, of design-like features. No God is needed — even if he exists, he works at ‘arms-length’ — and neither are any vital forces. Just plain old laws working in a good mechanical fashion. The teleological metaphor was just a metaphor: underneath it lay quite simple mechanical explanations.

So this cracked one side of the teleology problem: that of why individual organisms were well adapted to their environments. But what about the other side, the question of whether life itself had some overall direction, some overall sense of progress? What about the process that led to the development of humans? Darwin did believe in some kind of progress of this nature — what the Victorians called ‘monad to man’ — but he wanted nothing at all to do with Germanic, Hegelian kinds of world spirits taking life ever upwards. That smacked too much of a kind of pseudo-Christian faith, which he did not share.

There was a Newton of the blade of grass and his name was Charles Darwin

Characteristically, Darwin thrashed about on the matter of whether evolution had a direction. He agonised in his notebooks, and never really came up with a definitive answer. The closest he got was suggesting that improvement comes about naturally because each generation, on average, is going to be better than the previous one. Adaptations improve, and eventually brains appear, and get bigger and bigger. Hence humans. Darwin wrote: ‘If we look at the differentiation and specialisation of the several organs of each being when adult (and this will include the advancement of the brain for intellectual purposes) as the best standard of highness of organisation, natural selection clearly leads towards highness.’ What Darwin never really considered is the fact that brains are very expensive things to maintain, and big brains are not necessarily a one-way ticket to evolutionary success. In the immortal words of the late American paleontologist Jack Sepkoski: ‘I see intelligence as just one of a variety of adaptations among tetrapods for survival. Running fast in a herd while being as dumb as shit, I think, is a very good adaptation for survival.’

Darwin might have solved the teleological problem in biology once and for all, but his solution was not an immediate success. Most people really could not get their heads around natural selection, and frankly most people were not troubled by the question of whether the evolution of life had an end point. Obviously humans were it, and were bound to appear. All sorts of neo-Platonists were happy to believe a Christian interpretation of Darwin’s view of life: God set evolution going in order to ascend to Man. They could have Jesus and evolution too! In the words of Henry Ward Beecher — the charismatic preacher, prolific adulterer, and brother of Harriet Beecher Stowe — ‘Who designed this mighty machine, created matter, gave to it its laws, and impressed upon it that tendency which has brought forth the almost infinite results on the globe, and wrought them into a perfect system? Design by wholesale is grander than design by retail.’

While Christians could interpret evolution in a Platonic frame, as the working out of a Divine creator’s purpose, some biologists revived Aristotle’s idea of vital forces that impelled living things towards their ends. At the turn of the 20th century, the German embryologist Hans Driesch described such forces that he called ‘entelechies’, which he described as being ‘mind-like’. In France, the philosopher Henri Bergson supposed ‘élan vital’, a vital spirit that created adaptations and that gave evolution its upwards course. In England, the biologist Julian Huxley — the grandson of Darwin’s great supporter Thomas Henry Huxley and the older brother of the novelist Aldous Huxley — was always drawn to vitalism, seeing in evolution a kind of substitute for Christianity which provided people with a sense of meaning and direction: what he called ‘religion without revelation’. But even he could see that, scientifically, vitalism was a non-starter. The problem was not that no one could see these forces: no one could see electrons either. Rather it was that they didn’t provide any new explanations or predictions. They seemed to do no real work in the physical world, and mainstream biology rejected them as a hangover from an earlier age.

So what of now? Today’s scientists are pretty certain that the problem of teleology at the individual organism level has been licked. Darwin really was right. Natural selection explains the design-like nature of organisms and their characteristics, without any need to talk about final causes. On the other hand, no natural selection lies behind mountains and rivers and whole planets. They are not design-like. That is why teleological talk is inappropriate, and why the Gaia hypothesis is so criticised. And overall that is why biology is just as good a science as physics and chemistry. It is dealing with different kinds of phenomena and so different kinds of explanation are appropriate. There was a Newton of the blade of grass and his name was Charles Darwin.

But historical teleology — the question of whether evolution itself takes a direction, in particular a progressive one, is a trickier problem, and I cannot say that there is yet, nor the prospect of there ever being, a satisfactory answer. One popular way to explain the apparent progress in evolution is as a biological arms race (a metaphor coined by Julian Huxley, incidentally). Through natural selection, prey animals get faster and so in tandem do predators. Perhaps, as in military arms races, eventually electronics and computers get ever more important, and the winners are those who do best in this respect. The British evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins has argued that humans have the biggest on-board computers and that is what we expect natural selection to produce. But it is not obvious that arms races would result in humans — those physically feeble and mentally able omnivorous primates. Nor that lines of prey and predator evolve in tandem more generally.

I’ll offer no final answers here, but one final question. Could a full-blown teleology, of the more scientific Aristotelian kind, reappear, complete with vital forces? There’s no logical reason to say this is impossible, and that is why I think it is legitimate for Nagel to raise the possibility. Two hundred years ago, people would have laughed at the idea of quantum mechanics, with all its violations of common-sense thinking. But there is a big difference: quantum mechanics was invented because it filled a big explanatory gap. This is Nagel’s big mistake: his argument for returning to the idea of purposes and goals in biology is not based on an extensive engagement with the science, but a philosophical skim across the surface. Quantum mechanics is weird, but it works. There is nothing in the idea of final causes to encourage such wishful thinking.

So what’s a Stegosaur for? We can ask what adaptive function the plates on its back served, as good Darwinian scientists. But the beast itself? It’s not for anything, it just is — in all its decorative, mysterious, plant-munching glory.

“The only true aristocracy is that of consciousness.”

― D.H. Lawrence

David Herbert Lawrence (September 11, 1885 – March 2, 1930) was an English writer and poet. His collected works represent, among other things, an extended reflection upon the dehumanising effects of modernity and industrialisation. Some of the issues Lawrence explores are sexuality, emotional health, vitality, spontaneity, and instinct. Wikipedia

(Contributed by Sarah Flynn)

Begins today, May 14, 2020. Peaks on June 20, 2020.
See chart for details.
Prepared by Rick Thomas, H.W., M.

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52nd Prosperos Assembly from September 4 to September 7, 2020 at the Westin Westminster Hotel in Denver, Colorado, has been cancelled until next year, it was reported to the BB today.

Stay tuned and the BB will keep you posted.

Books May 11, 2020 Issue

For the philosopher, unhappiness became not a condition but a vocation.

By Adam Kirsch May 4, 2020 (NewYorker.com)

Kierkegaard called his melancholy “the most faithful mistress I have known.”Illustration by Rune Fisker

Imagine an educated, affluent European in his late twenties, seemingly one of fortune’s favored, who suffers from crippling feelings of despair and guilt. For no apparent reason, he breaks up with the woman everyone thought he was going to marry—not because he loves someone else but out of a sudden conviction that he is incapable of marriage and can only make her miserable. He abandons the career for which he has been studying for ten years and holes up in his apartment, where a kind of graphomania compels him to stay up all night writing at a frantic pace. His activity is so relentless that, in a few short years, he has accumulated many volumes’ worth of manuscripts.

If this happened today—say, in Denmark, the standard example of a rational modern society—the man would sooner or later end up in a psychiatrist’s office, where he would probably be given a diagnosis of depression or bipolar disorder. He would start seeing a therapist and might be prescribed medication. The goal would be to get him back to normal, as the world defines “normal”: able to take pleasure in life, to form relationships, to meet his obligations as a family member, friend, and citizen. The man would seek professional help, because, in the twenty-first century, he would recognize his propensities as symptoms—evidence of a psychological problem.

But when Søren Kierkegaard underwent these experiences in the Denmark of the eighteen-forties they had a different meaning. “At times, there is such a noise in my head that it is as though my cranium were being lifted up, it is exactly like when the hobgoblins lift a mountain up a little and then hold a ball and make merry inside,” he wrote in his journal in February, 1838, when he was twenty-four. But Kierkegaard had learned from Romantic literature that wild emotion was a sign of genius, especially when it was painful. “Real depression, like the ‘vapors,’ is found only in the highest circles, in the former case understood in a spiritual sense,” he wrote two months later. He considered his “melancholy” not a disease but a “close confidant . . . the most faithful mistress I have known.”

Side by side with this fashionable style of feeling, Kierkegaard inherited from his ancestors a rigorously introspective Protestantism. His father, Michael Pedersen Kierkegaard, had grown up poor in the countryside, moved to Copenhagen to become a merchant, and ended up as one of the city’s richest men. Michael Pedersen raised his seven children, of whom Søren was the youngest, under strict religious discipline, instilling a sense of fear and guilt that never left them. “Oh, how frightful it is when for a moment I think of the dark background of my life, right from the earliest days!” Kierkegaard recalled. “The anxiety with which my father filled my soul, his own frightful melancholy.”

For Kierkegaard, unhappiness became not a condition but a vocation. In a new biography, “Philosopher of the Heart” (Farrar, Straus & Giroux), the British scholar Clare Carlisle shows that this calling consumed his life. After leaving school, at the age of seventeen, in 1830, he enrolled as a theology student at the University of Copenhagen, in order to prepare for a career in the church. But it took him ten years to complete his degree, and he never became a pastor or had any other kind of job. He never got married or had children. Other than a few visits to Berlin, then the capital of philosophy, and one trip to Sweden, Kierkegaard never left Denmark. He took no interest in politics. In 1848, the liberal revolutions sweeping Europe reached Denmark, as protests forced the king to promise a new constitution and parliament; but Kierkegaard was indifferent. “So the king flees—and so there is a republic,” he wrote in his journal that year. “Piffle.”

What he did instead was write. Until his death, in 1855, at the age of forty-two, Kierkegaard lived off his inheritance and produced a stream of unclassifiable books—hybrids of philosophy, autobiography, fiction, and sermon. Advancing deeper and deeper into the experience of suffering, he emerged with a profoundly new way of thinking about human existence. The dark exigency of Kierkegaard’s books, which he sometimes published two or even four at a time, is plain from their titles: “Fear and Trembling,” “The Concept of Anxiety,” “The Sickness Unto Death.”

In that last book, which appeared in 1849, Kierkegaard offers an uncompromising diagnosis of the human condition. “There is not a single human being who does not despair at least a little, in whose innermost being there does not dwell an uneasiness, an unquiet, a discordance, an anxiety in the face of an unknown something,” he writes. If you don’t think you are in despair, you are lying to yourself, which is an even worse form of despair. Only by acknowledging our condition, he says, can we begin to understand that the true name of despair is sin, defiance of God. We are freed from it only when we accept that “a human self is under an obligation to obey God—in its every secret desire and thought.”

This understanding of sin and redemption wasn’t Kierkegaard’s invention. Something like it was preached in Denmark’s Lutheran churches every Sunday. What made his work explosive was his insistence that those very churches had become the chief obstacles to genuine Christian belief. Nineteenth-century Europeans took for granted that they were Christians simply because they were living in “Christendom,” in countries where there were “just as many Christians as there are people,” he wrote. But a Christian, for Kierkegaard, isn’t something you are born; it is something you have to become through terrific inner effort. His “authorship,” as he called it, was meant as an alarm bell to wake the modern world from its spiritual slumber.

Kierkegaard published his books at his own expense, and they initially had a tiny readership: the most popular, “Either/Or,” didn’t sell out its first edition of five hundred and twenty-five copies for three years. Nevertheless, he became a local celebrity, thanks mainly to his eccentricities and his penchant for public feuds. The editor of one Copenhagen paper, the Corsair, observed that, in “Kierkegaard’s entire personal appearance and manner, there was something that verged on the comic.” When the Corsair portrayed him in a series of mocking caricatures, in 1846, he became even more notorious. “Every kitchen boy feels justified in almost insulting me . . . young students titter and grin and are happy to see a prominent person trampled on,” he complained.

When he died—probably of tuberculosis, though the diagnosis remains unclear—Kierkegaard had few if any readers outside Denmark. That didn’t begin to change until he found an influential champion in the Danish literary critic Georg Brandes, who, in 1877, wrote the first book about Kierkegaard and brought him to the attention of a wider European audience. (Later, Brandes did the same for Nietzsche.) The first English translations of Kierkegaard appeared in the nineteen-thirties, and it wasn’t until the sixties, more than a century after his death, that the translators Howard and Edna Hong began to produce a complete English edition of his works.ADVERTISEMENT

By that time, the Copenhagen eccentric had become one of the most important influences on twentieth-century theology and philosophy. Although the term “existentialism” wasn’t coined until the nineteen-forties, in retrospect Kierkegaard appears as the first existentialist, thanks to his insistence that life’s most important questions—How should I act? What must I believe?—can’t be resolved by abstract reasoning. They present themselves as urgent problems for each individual, demanding commitment and action. “To be entirely present to oneself is the highest thing and the highest task for the personal life,” he wrote.

The intimate connection between Kierkegaard’s thought and his personal life has made him a compelling subject for biographers. Reading the “Critique of Pure Reason” won’t tell you the first thing about Immanuel Kant, nor do you need to know anything about Kant’s life to understand it. But Kierkegaard’s work emerged, in complex yet unmistakable ways, from his own experiences. Other great thinkers specialize in technical fields such as logic or metaphysics, but Kierkegaard, as Carlisle’s title has it, was a philosopher of the heart, “an expert on love and suffering, humor and anxiety, despair and courage.”

Yet Kierkegaard also resists biography. The genre is inherently opposed to the way he thought about human existence. One of the best-known Kierkegaardian sayings, paraphrased from an entry in his journal, is that life can only be understood backward, but it has to be lived forward. In other words, at every moment, we are making a decision about how to live, one that can’t be made for us by history, society, or even religion—any of the causes that might emerge when we try to analyze the course of our lives in retrospect. My future is no one’s responsibility but my own. This is what Kierkegaard calls “the dizziness of freedom,” which he compares to the vertigo we feel when looking into a “yawning abyss.”

Biography, however, is necessarily written backward. It deals with life as a known quantity, obscuring the reality of contingency and choice. Carlisle, who has published three previous books about Kierkegaard, has tried to avoid this problem by writing what she calls “a Kierkegaardian biography of Kierkegaard,” one that “does not consider Kierkegaard’s life from a remote, knowing perspective, but joins him on his journey and confronts its uncertainties with him.”

In practice, this means that Carlisle tells the story out of chronological order and adds passages of novel-like scene-setting. “Never before has he moved so quickly! And yet he is sitting quite still, not uncomfortably—resting, even—in a ‘marvelous armchair,’ ” the first of the book’s three sections begins. We are with Kierkegaard in 1843 as he takes a train, that new invention, from Berlin to Copenhagen. Carlisle then fills in his story up to 1843, before jumping ahead, in the next section, to 1848 and again filling in the missing years—a cumbersome and sometimes confusing method.

The vignettes feel like packaging that the reader must unwrap to get to what is really excellent in the book: Carlisle’s analysis of Kierkegaard’s intellectual milieu. Copenhagen in the eighteen-forties was a small city of about a hundred and twenty thousand people, but the academic and clerical circles in which Kierkegaard moved were much smaller. His world, Carlisle writes, was “parochial, full of familiar faces”: many of Denmark’s leading clergymen, professors, and writers were his former schoolmates or family friends. And Carlisle shows that Kierkegaard’s books partly emerged out of arguments with these figures—for instance, Bishop Mynster, the head of Denmark’s state church, who became a symbol of everything Kierkegaard detested about official Christianity.

Kierkegaard didn’t seem sure whether he wanted to stand out in this sedate, provincial community or to hide from it. He published under several Latin pseudonyms, which suggests a desire for concealment, but the names were so flamboyantly odd—Johannes de Silentio, Constantin Constantius, Vigilius Haufniensis (that is, “the watchman of Copenhagen”)—that he may well have wanted to draw attention to his authorship.

His identity couldn’t have been concealed for long anyway, since he wrote repeatedly about the one real drama in his life. In October, 1841, when he was twenty-eight, Kierkegaard broke off his year-long engagement to Regine Olsen, a nineteen-year-old from a highly respectable family. His sudden change of heart left her confused and miserable. “So after all, you have played a terrible game with me,” Regine told him when they parted. The public rejection threatened to ruin her future marriage prospects. Carlisle quotes Kierkegaard’s nephew’s recollection of the affair: “It was an insulting break, which not only called forth curiosity and gossip but also absolutely required that every decent person take the side of the injured party. . . . Harsh judgments were unanimously voiced against him.”

Imagine the reaction of local society, then, when, just over a year later, Kierkegaard published “Either/Or,” a long book whose most attention-grabbing section, “The Seducer’s Diary,” is a first-person account of a man’s callous pursuit of a young girl, whom he manipulates into submission and then discards. “Now it is over and I want never to see her again. Once a girl has given away everything, she is weak, she has lost everything,” the seducer writes in his last entry. “I do not wish to be reminded of my relation to her; she has lost her fragrance.”

All this made “Either/Or” a succès de scandale: one reader observed, “I think no book has caused such a stir with the reading public since Rousseau placed his ‘Confessions’ on the altar.” But Kierkegaard’s method was the opposite of the one chosen by Rousseau, who said that when he appeared before God on Judgment Day he would present a copy of his “Confessions” and declare, “Thus have I acted; these were my thoughts; such was I.” For Kierkegaard, straightforward autobiography couldn’t do justice to the truth of his experience, which was full of ambiguity, self-division, and doubt.

Instead, he concocted a series of nested narratives, defying the reader to say where Kierkegaard himself can be found. The introduction to “Either/Or” recounts how the book’s “editor,” Victor Eremita, accidentally discovered a bundle of manuscripts in a secondhand desk. By the handwriting, he could tell that they were the work of two unknown authors; accordingly, the book is divided into two parts, attributed to “A” and “B.” Eremita even says that he is placing the author’s fee in an interest-bearing account for A or B to claim, should they ever appear.

The putative manuscripts encompass critical essays, the seduction diary, aphorisms, letters. Taken together, they illustrate the contrasting “life-views” of A and B, which Kierkegaard describes as the aesthetic versus the ethical. For A, life should be nothing but a series of interesting sensations. “How terrible is tedium—how terribly tedious,” he muses. The seducer’s diary shows how love is deformed when it is treated as just another trick for avoiding boredom. B is an older, married man who writes a series of letters to A chastising his frivolity. B argues that marriage represents not the death of romantic love but its fulfillment on a higher, more serious plane. “You talk so much of the erotic embrace, but what is it compared with the matrimonial!” he proclaims.

The title “Either/Or” implies that one must choose between these two ways of life, but that is just what Kierkegaard did not do. Whatever his readers may have imagined, he was not a cynical sensualist like A. He had courted Regine with the utmost propriety and was devastated by the end of their relationship. He never loved another woman, and when “Either/Or” was published he had two copies printed on vellum—“one for her, and one for me”—which he kept in a specially made cupboard.ADVERTISEMENT

But Kierkegaard could not become a contented husband like B. He left Regine, Carlisle argues, because marriage would mean sacrificing the freedom, the open-endedness, that he saw as the essence of an authentic life. “His life would be understood—it would be measured and judged—according to a well-established way of being in the world, shaped by a precise configuration of duties, customs, expectations,” Carlisle writes. Kierkegaard preferred to remain dizzily suspended over the abyss of his own freedom, the only position that allowed him to keep writing.

In a typically dialectical fashion—“dialectical” is one of Kierkegaard’s favorite words—he used this freedom to think about the nature of commitment. He believed that the most important commitment we can make is to God, and his work grew increasingly concerned with religious faith. Eight months after “Either/Or” appeared, Kierkegaard published “Fear and Trembling,” probably his best-known book today, which begins with the proposition that a human being becomes great “in proportion to the greatness of that which he loved.” There is no greater object of love than God, Kierkegaard writes, and the Bible’s most powerful example of what it means to love God is the story of Abraham’s attempted sacrifice of Isaac, which he subjects to a powerful and dramatic analysis.

When God commanded Abraham to take Isaac—“your son, your only son, whom you love,” the text emphasizes in Genesis 22—and slaughter him with a knife on top of Mt. Moriah, it was contrary to every natural feeling and ethical principle. It was even contrary to God’s own earlier promise that Abraham would become, through Isaac, the father of a great nation. Yet Abraham obeyed—and his reward was to see Isaac saved at the last minute, when an angel appeared and told him he had passed God’s test.

Because the story is so familiar, it is easy to glide past its transgressive implications. Imagine, Kierkegaard writes, that a Danish pastor in the nineteenth century made the sacrifice of Isaac the subject of a Sunday sermon, and one of his congregants was inspired to go home and murder his own son for the sake of God. If the pastor found out, he would surely go to the man’s house and exhort him not to do it—and this exhortation would be far more earnest and passionate than the original sermon, showing where his real conviction lay. Abraham had a kind of faith that even the most religious people lack: he believed that God had the power to suspend morality. More, he trusted that somehow God would make it possible for him to kill Isaac and still keep him, which is logically impossible. True faith, Kierkegaard insists, believes “by virtue of the absurd”—which is why almost no one has it.

The only reason we are able to praise Abraham for doing something that would horrify us in actuality is that we make excuses: Abraham was a great man, he lived a long time ago, things were somehow different for him than they would be for us. But Kierkegaard insists that there is no difference between the past and the present, between Abraham and you. The responsibility of choice—to believe or not to believe, to act or not to act—is always individual. “It is repugnant to me to do as so often is done, namely, to speak inhumanly about a great deed, as though some thousands of years were an immense distance,” he writes in “Fear and Trembling.” “I would rather speak humanly about it, as though it had occurred yesterday.”

During the next six years, Kierkegaard pursued the dialectic of belief through thousands of pages. His collected work in Danish fills twenty-eight volumes, almost all of it produced between 1843, the year of “Either/Or” and “Fear and Trembling,” and 1849, when “The Sickness Unto Death” appeared. Then he mostly stopped writing. The final part of “Philosopher of the Heart,” covering his last six years, reads almost like a coda. By the age of forty, Carlisle writes, Kierkegaard had become “a frail figure: more stooped and slender than ever, his hair thin, his face tired.”

He didn’t seem to miss his life of feverish productivity. In one of his last major books, the posthumously published “The Point of View for My Work as an Author,” Kierkegaard summarized the “movement” of his authorship as a journey away from cleverness and complexity. “Christianly, one does not proceed from the simple in order then to become interesting, witty, profound, a poet, a philosopher,” he writes. “No, it is just the opposite; here one begins and then becomes more and more simple.” The final simplicity is silence, and in his last years Kierkegaard truly earned the pseudonym under which he had published “Fear and Trembling,” Johannes de Silentio—John of the Silence.

When he became seriously ill, in 1855, he seemed content to die, even though he was only forty-two. The money he had inherited from his father was about to run out—he had spent much of it on the publication of his books—and he might well have felt that the timing was providential. Kierkegaard’s niece visited him in the hospital shortly before he died, and observed that “a feeling of victory was mixed in with the pain and the sadness.” One of the last things he wrote was a letter to his brother about the disposition of his estate: everything he owned was to go to Regine, “exactly as if I had been married to her.” 

♦Published in the print edition of the May 11, 2020, issue, with the headline “The Abyss of Freedom.”

Adam Kirsch is a poet, a critic, and the author of, most recently, “Who Wants to Be a Jewish Writer?”

INTELECOM Philosopher John Searle goes through the “Chinese room argument” to prove that no matter how powerful computers are, they aren’t minds. Professor Searle explains that while the computer can very rapidly manipulate formal, syntactical objects (such as words), the mind understands the meanings behind those objects. Professor Searle adds that this distinction in no way minimizes the power and value of computers. It simply proves that a computer cannot be thought of as a mind.

By Maria Popova (brainpickings.org)

A pioneer of what he called “radical-humanistic psychoanalysis,” the great German social psychologist and philosopher Erich Fromm (March 23, 1900–March 18, 1980) was one of the most luminous minds of the twentieth century and a fountain of salve for the most abiding struggles of being human.

In the mid-1970s, twenty years after his influential treatise on the art of loving and four decades after legendary anthropologist Margaret Mead turned to him for difficult advice, Fromm became interested in the most basic, most challenging art of human life — the art of being. At the height of a new era that had begun prioritizing products over people and consumption over creativity, Fromm penned a short, potent book titled To Have or To Be? — an inquiry into how the great promise of progress, seeded by the Industrial Revolution, failed us in our most elemental search for meaning and well-being. But the question proved far too complex to tackle in a single volume, so Fromm left out a significant portion of his manuscript.

Those pages, in many ways even richer and more insightful than the original book, were later published as The Art of Being (public library) — a sort of field guide, all the timelier today, to how we can shift from the having mode of existence, which is systematically syphoning our happiness, to a being mode.

Art by Jean-Pierre Weill from The Well of Being

Fromm frames the inquiry:

Full humanization… requires the breakthrough from the possession-centered to the activity-centered orientation, from selfishness and egotism to solidarity and altruism.

But any effort to outline the steps of this breakthrough, Fromm cautions, must begin with the foundational question of what the goal of living is — that is, what we consider the meaning of life to be, beyond its biological purpose. He writes:

It seems that nature — or if you will, the process of evolution — has endowed every living being with the wish to live, and whatever he believes to be his reasons are only secondary thoughts by which he rationalizes this biologically given impulse.

[…]

That we want to live, that we like to live, are facts that require no explanation. But if we ask how we want to live — what we seek from life, what makes life meaningful for us — then indeed we deal with questions (and they are more or less identical) to which people will give many different answers. Some will say they want love, others will choose power, others security, others sensuous pleasure and comfort, others fame; but most would probably agree in the statement that what they want is happiness. This is also what most philosophers and theologians have declared to be the aim of human striving. However, if happiness covers such different, and mostly mutually exclusive, contents as the ones just mentioned, it becomes an abstraction and thus rather useless. What matters is to examine what the term “happiness” means…

Art from Kenny’s Window, Maurice Sendak’s forgotten philosophical children’s book

Most definitions of happiness, Fromm observes, converge at some version of having our needs met and our wishes fulfilled — but this raises the question of what it is we actually want. (As Milan Kundera memorably wrote, “we can never know what to want.”) It’s essentially a question about human nature — or, rather, about the interplay of nature and nurture mediated by norms. Adding to the vocabulary of gardening as a metaphor for understanding happiness and making sense of mastery, Fromm illustrates his point:

This is indeed well understood by any gardener. The aim of the life of a rosebush is to be all that is inherent as potentiality in the rosebush: that its leaves are well developed and that its flower is the most perfect rose that can grow out of this seed. The gardener knows, then, in order to reach this aim he must follow certain norms that have been empirically found. The rosebush needs a specific kind of soil, of moisture, of temperature, of sun and shade. It is up to the gardener to provide these things if he wants to have beautiful roses. But even without his help the rosebush tries to provide itself with the optimum of needs. It can do nothing about moisture and soil, but it can do something about sun and temperature by growing “crooked,” in the direction of the sun, provided there is such an opportunity. Why would not the same hold true for the human species?

Even if we had no theoretical knowledge about the reasons for the norms that are conducive to man’s optimal growth and functioning, experience tells us just as much as it tells the gardener. Therein lies the reason that all great teachers of man have arrived at essentially the same norms for living, the essence of these norms being that the overcoming of greed, illusions, and hate, and the attainment of love and compassion, are the conditions for attaining optimal being. Drawing conclusions from empirical evidence, even if we cannot explain the evidence theoretically, is a perfectly sound and by no means “unscientific” method, although the scientists’ ideal will remain, to discover the laws behind the empirical evidence.

He distills the basic principle of life’s ultimate aim:

The goal of living [is] to grow optimally according to the conditions of human existence and thus to become fully what one potentially is; to let reason or experience guide us to the understanding of what norms are conducive to well-being, given the nature of man that reason enables us to understand.

Illustration by Emily Hughes from The Little Gardener

But one of the essential ingredients of well-being, Fromm notes, has been gruesomely warped by capitalist industrial society — the idea of freedom and its attainment by the individual:

Liberation has been exclusively applied to liberation from outside forces; by the middle class from feudalism, by the working class from capitalism, by the peoples in Africa and Asia from imperialism.

Such external liberation, Fromm argues, is essentially political liberation — an inherently limiting pseudo-liberation, which can obscure the emergence of various forms of imprisonment and entrapment within the political system. He writes:

This is the case in Western democracy, where political liberation hides the fact of dependency in many disguises… Man can be a slave even without being put in chains… The outer chains have simply been put inside of man. The desires and thoughts that the suggestion apparatus of society fills him with, chain him more thoroughly than outer chains. This is so because man can at least be aware of outer chains but be unaware of inner chains, carrying them with the illusion that he is free. He can try to overthrow the outer chains, but how can he rid himself of chains of whose existence he is unaware?

Any attempt to overcome the possibly fatal crisis of the industrialized part of the world, and perhaps of the human race, must begin with the understanding of the nature of both outer and inner chains; it must be based on the liberation of man in the classic, humanist sense as well as in the modern, political and social sense… The only realistic aim is total liberation, a goal that may well be called radical (or revolutionary) humanism.

The two most pernicious chains keeping us from liberation, Fromm observes, are our culture’s property-driven materialism and our individual intrinsic tendencies toward narcissism. He writes:

If “well-being” — [defined as] functioning well as a person, not as an instrument — is the supreme goal of one’s efforts, two specific ways stand out that lead to the attainment of this goal: Breaking through one’s narcissism and breaking through the property structure of one’s existence.

Illustration by Maurice Sendak for Bearskin from a special edition of the Brothers Grimm fairy tales

He offers the crispest definition of narcissism I’ve encountered (something that took Kafka a 47-page letter to articulate):

Narcissism is an orientation in which all one’s interest and passion are directed to one’s own person: one’s body, mind, feelings, interests… For the narcissistic person, only he and what concerns him are fully real; what is outside, what concerns others, is real only in a superficial sense of perception; that is to say, it is real for one’s senses and for one’s intellect. But it is not real in a deeper sense, for our feeling or understanding. He is, in fact, aware only of what is outside, inasmuch as it affects him. Hence, he has no love, no compassion, no rational, objective judgment. The narcissistic person has built an invisible wall around himself. He is everything, the world is nothing. Or rather: He is the world.

But because narcissism can come in many guises, Fromm cautions, it can be particularly challenging to detect in oneself in order to then eradicate — and yet without doing so, “the further way to self-completion is blocked.”

A parallel peril to well-being comes from the egotism and selfishness seeded by our ownership-driven society, a culture that prioritizes having over being by making property its primary mode of existence. Fromm writes:

A person living in this mode is not necessarily very narcissistic. He may have broken through the shell of his narcissism, have an adequate appreciation of reality outside himself, not necessarily be “in love with himself”; he knows who he is and who the others are, and can well distinguish between subjective experience and reality. Nevertheless, he wants everything for himself; has no pleasure in giving, in sharing, in solidarity, in cooperation, in love. He is a closed fortress, suspicious of others, eager to take and most reluctant to give.

Growth, he argues, requires a dual breakthrough — of narcissism and of property-driven existence. Although the first steps toward this breaking from bondage are bound to be anxiety-producing, this initial discomfort is but a paltry price for the larger rewards of well-being awaiting us on the other side of the trying transformation:

If a person has the will and the determination to loosen the bars of his prison of narcissism and selfishness, when he has the courage to tolerate the intermittent anxiety, he experiences the first glimpses of joy and strength that he sometimes attains. And only then a decisive new factor enters into the dynamics of the process. This new experience becomes the decisive motivation for going ahead and following the path he has charted… [An] experience of well-being — fleeting and small as it may be — … becomes the most powerful motivation for further progress…

Awareness, will, practice, tolerance of fear and of new experience, they are all necessary if transformation of the individual is to succeed. At a certain point the energy and direction of inner forces have changed to the point where an individual’s sense of identity has changed, too. In the property mode of existence the motto is: “I am what I have.” After the breakthrough it is “I am what I do” (in the sense of unalienated activity); or simply, “I am what I am.”

In the remainder of The Art of Being, Fromm explores the subtleties and practicalities of enacting this transformation. Complement it with legendary social scientist John W. Gardner, a contemporary of Fromm’s, on the art of self-renewal, then revisit Fromm’s abiding wisdom on what is keeping us from mastering the art of love.

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Jacques Lacan
Born	13 April 1901 Paris, France
Died	9 September 1981 (aged 80) Paris, France
Education	Collège Stanislas (1907–1918) University of Paris (certificate of specialist in legal medicine, 1931; M.D., 1932)
Era	20th-century philosophy
Region	Western philosophy
School	Psychoanalysis Structuralism Post-structuralism
Institutions	University of Paris VIII
Main interests	Psychoanalysis
Notable ideas	Mirror phase The Real The Symbolic The Imaginary Graph of desire Split subject Objet petit a
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Influenced[show]

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Jacques Marie Émile Lacan (/ləˈkɑːn/;^[1] French: [ʒak lakɑ̃]; 13 April 1901 – 9 September 1981) was a French psychoanalyst and psychiatrist who has been called “the most controversial psycho-analyst since Freud“.^[2] Giving yearly seminars in Paris from 1953 to 1981, Lacan influenced many leading French intellectuals in the 1960s and the 1970s, especially those associated with post-structuralism. His ideas had a significant impact on post-structuralism, critical theory, linguistics, 20th-century French philosophy, film theory, and clinical psychoanalysis.

Biography

Early life

Lacan was born in Paris, the eldest of Émilie and Alfred Lacan’s three children. His father was a successful soap and oils salesman. His mother was ardently Catholic – his younger brother entered a monastery in 1929. Lacan attended the Collège Stanislas between 1907 and 1918. An interest in philosophy led him to a preoccupation with the work of Spinoza, one outcome of which was his abandonment of religious faith for atheism. There were tensions in the family around this issue, and he regretted not persuading his brother to take a different path, but by 1924 his parents had moved to Boulogne and he was living in rooms in Montmartre.^[3]

During the early 1920s, Lacan actively engaged with the Parisian literary and artistic avant-garde. Having met James Joyce, he was present at the Parisian bookshop where the first readings of passages from Ulysses in French and English took place, shortly before it was published in 1922.^[4] He also had meetings with Charles Maurras, whom he admired as a literary stylist, and he occasionally attended meetings of Action Française (of which Maurras was a leading ideologue),^[3] of which he would later be highly critical.

In 1920, after being rejected for military service on the grounds that he was too thin, Lacan entered medical school. Between 1927 and 1931, after completing his studies at the faculty of medicine of the University of Paris, he specialised in psychiatry under the direction of Henri Claude at the Sainte-Anne Hospital, the major psychiatric hospital serving central Paris, at the Infirmary for the Insane of the Police Prefecture under Gaëtan Gatian de Clérambault and also at the Hospital Henri-Rousselle.^[5]

1930s

Lacan was involved with the Parisian surrealist movement of the 1930s associating with André Breton, Georges Bataille, Salvador Dalí, and Pablo Picasso.^[6] For a time, he served as Picasso’s personal therapist. He attended the mouvement Psyché that Maryse Choisy founded and published in the Surrealist journal Minotaure. “[Lacan’s] interest in surrealism predated his interest in psychoanalysis,” former Lacanian analyst and biographer Dylan Evans explains, speculating that “perhaps Lacan never really abandoned his early surrealist sympathies, its neo-Romantic view of madness as ‘convulsive beauty’, its celebration of irrationality.”^[7] Translator and historian David Macey writes that “the importance of surrealism can hardly be over-stated… to the young Lacan… [who] also shared the surrealists’ taste for scandal and provocation, and viewed provocation as an important element in psycho-analysis itself”.^[8]

In 1931, after a second year at the Sainte-Anne Hospital, Lacan was awarded his Diplôme de médecin légiste (a medical examiner‘s qualification) and became a licensed forensic psychiatrist. The following year he was awarded his Diplôme d’État de docteur en médecine [fr] (roughly equivalent to an M.D. degree) for his thesis “On Paranoiac Psychosis in its Relations to the Personality” (“De la Psychose paranoïaque dans ses rapports avec la personnalité”.^[9][10][a] Its publication had little immediate impact on French psychoanalysis but it did meet with acclaim amongst Lacan’s circle of surrealist writers and artists. In their only recorded instance of direct communication, Lacan sent a copy of his thesis to Sigmund Freud who acknowledged its receipt with a postcard.^[11]

Lacan’s thesis was based on observations of several patients with a primary focus on one female patient whom he called Aimée. Its exhaustive reconstruction of her family history and social relations, on which he based his analysis of her paranoid state of mind, demonstrated his dissatisfaction with traditional psychiatry and the growing influence of Freud on his ideas.^[12] Also in 1932, Lacan published a translation of Freud’s 1922 text, “Über einige neurotische Mechanismen bei Eifersucht, Paranoia und Homosexualität” (“Some Neurotic Mechanisms in Jealousy, Paranoia and Homosexuality”) as “De quelques mécanismes névrotiques dans la jalousie, la paranoïa et l’homosexualité” in the Revue française de psychanalyse [fr]. In Autumn 1932, Lacan began his training analysis with Rudolph Loewenstein, which was to last until 1938.^[13]

In 1934 Lacan became a candidate member of the Société psychanalytique de Paris (SPP). He began his private psychoanalytic practice in 1936 whilst still seeing patients at the Sainte-Anne Hospital,^[14] and the same year presented his first analytic report at the Congress of the International Psychoanalytical Association (IPA) in Marienbad on the “Mirror Phase“. The congress chairman, Ernest Jones, terminated the lecture before its conclusion, since he was unwilling to extend Lacan’s stated presentation time. Insulted, Lacan left the congress to witness the Berlin Olympic Games. No copy of the original lecture remains, Lacan having decided not to hand in his text for publication in the conference proceedings.^[15]

Lacan’s attendance at Kojève‘s lectures on Hegel, given between 1933 and 1939, and which focused on the Phenomenology and the master-slave dialectic in particular, was formative for his subsequent work,^[16] initially in his formulation of his theory of the Mirror Phase, for which he was also indebted to the experimental work on child development of Henri Wallon.^[17]

It was Wallon who commissioned from Lacan the last major text of his pre-war period, a contribution to the 1938 Encyclopédie française entitled “La Famille” (reprinted in 1984 as “Les Complexes familiaux dans la formation de l’individu“, Paris: Navarin). 1938 was also the year of Lacan’s accession to full membership (Membre titulaire) of the SPP, notwithstanding considerable opposition from many of its senior members who were unimpressed by his recasting of Freudian theory in philosophical terms.^[18]

Lacan married Marie-Louise Blondin in January 1934 and in January 1937 they had the first of their three children, a daughter named Caroline. A son, Thibaut, was born in August 1939 and a daughter, Sybille, in November 1940.^[14]

More at: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jacques_Lacan