Disaster and disease won’t alter the human condition

Issue 88, 14th May 2020 (iai.tv)

Silvia Camporesi 

| Senior Lecturer in Bioethics & Society and Director MSc Bioethics & Society, in the Department of Global Health and Social Medicine at King’s College London

Do some societies trust each other and their governments more than others, and does this explain why stringent lockdown rules have been applied in some places and not others? Or should we be wary of this binary sliding scale reinforcing social stereotypes? 

After the lockdown, as measures start to be eased up around the world, who will we trust to see without a mask? Who will we trust with a kiss and hug? Who will we trust to have intimate relationships with?

These are some of the questions on my mind as we very slowly emerge from one of the most stringent lockdowns in Europe. In Italy, Phase 2 has officially started.

After eighty days of isolation, I am free to go out, and can finally go for a run in the park. I can also visit family within the limits of my region, albeit not friends until the Phase 3 is rolled out.

A friend of mine put this beautifully in an email: “I think people will have to restack their self-identities and relationships with family, friends and community. Will we be able to trust the judgment, behaviour of others to ensure our safety before the vaccine and even after? Trust will take on a new dimension I think. But so too will love”.

What does trust even mean?

Trust pervades the everyday reciprocity of social relations: it is the oil that permits the cogs in the wheels of society to run.

As the British sociologist Anthony Giddens theorised in his book “The consequences of modernity, 30 years ago, trust is the foundation of self and provides ontological security. Through primary relationships with parents and carers during the early years of life, we learn to trust others, trust ourselves, and navigate the world.

As we grow up, we learn to do this by trusting others beyond our family unit: from the first persons that our parents trust for childcare, to teachers, and then friends and lovers. Trust pervades the everyday reciprocity of social relations: it is the oil that permits the cogs in the wheels of society to run.

Trust is often quantified. Is there trust? Isn’t there trust? Discussions around covid-19 were dominated by numbers, as pointed out by sociologist Mark Davis at the University of Melbourne. Infection rate, mortality rate, graphs showing the number of daily tests, discussions on whether the expected target was reached, etc… all summed up the calculations and projections which we have been absorbing in the past three months. They have determined in one way or another (although, in ways that have not always been transparent), whether we are confined within the walls of our homes, or whether and when we are able to go out again.

Philosopher Nancy Cartwright asks if science deserves the trust we place in it

Research aimed at assessing the levels of trust of individuals linked, in a statistically significant way, with the compliance to public health measures is not new. To cite one of many similar studies, surveys conducted by researchers at the University of Georgia in the United States on public responses to the 2009 H1N1 pandemic found that respondents who exhibited lower trust were less likely to comply with public health advice. Similar surveys are being conducted now to measure compliance with public health advice in the pandemic.

Governance and politics are imbued with questions of trust and distrust. The expertise and authority of science and medicine are an object of trust, since so many of the life choices individuals are required to make depend on the expert knowledge possessed by others. This was evident in the discussion around lockdown measures and governments claiming to be ‘following the science’.

However, different governments have come up with different solutions (different public health measures) to the same problem. Can that be reconducted to low and high trust in governments? An article appeared in the Guardian which conceptualised trust in a binary way by investigating the cultural factors that shape different countries’ responses. The authors compare the lockdown model of Spain (the most stringent lockdown in Europe, on a par, with Italy’s) with Sweden’s, where social distancing was not enforced by the police but was left to individuals’ moral responsibility. The authors write that they were both “convinced that the “Swedish model” could not be exported to countries such as Spain or Turkey, where levels of social and institutional trust are much lower”.

This is an intuitively appealing view and one shared by many.

I have discussed my critical views on stringent lockdown policies with some friends and family. Fellow Italians have rebuked me: “Yes, of course, this could work in Sweden, or maybe in the UK” – apparently, along this continuum of ‘disciplined and highly-trusting societies’, Sweden ranks higher than the UK – “obviously it couldn’t have worked in Italy, where we don’t know how to queue (though we have been forced to learn in recent months) and we respect the laws only if they are actively enforced.” Plus, they would add: “Italians don’t trust their governments”. Had it been left to us Italians to behave responsibly and socially distance, this reasoning implies, we would not have done it. Trusting societies will follow guidelines voluntarily, it suggests, untrusting societies must have guidelines enforced.

The expertise and authority of science and medicine are an object of trust, since so many of the life choices individuals are required to make depend on the expert knowledge possessed by others.

I remain unconvinced. Isn’t this the exact sort of reasoning itself which reifies the stereotype? In other words, if this sort of argument forms the basis for stringent lockdown policies, it will also – necessarily – end up reinforcing those same behaviours that the public health measures were put in place to counteract.

As a matter of fact, the idea that trust varies along a continuum, and that there are ‘high trust’ and ‘low trust’ societies has been challenged by social scientists before. Among many other researchers, I have also investigated with colleagues the factors that lead to compliance with expert advice in a variety of settings from vaccination , to pharmacological treatment, to climate change, and in a variety of countries and cultures. Our research has shown that more complex and qualitative notions of trust, beyond quantifications along a gradient, are needed to explain the complexities of trust in expert knowledge systems.

There is not a single, simple answer behind child immunisation refusal, nor is there one which can explain compliance or lack thereof. Unfortunately, to make sense of the pandemic, simple and easy answers do not work. Iit is not a coincidence that the authors of the Guardian article cited above write that they could not explain, on the basis of their discrimination between low trust societies (i.e. Spain, Italy) and high trust societies (i.e. Sweden), why the model was not adopted by other Nordic countries, such as Denmark, Norway, that share many of Sweden’s social characteristics. This is because, while enticing, such binary notions of trust need to be abandoned. Other factors will need to be investigated to explain the difference between Sweden and the fellow Scandinavian countries, and the differences between Italy and Spain.

Vaccination elicits strong opinions. So does lockdown. Along the lines of pro or against lockdown, new friendships and relationships are being forged, others are being damaged.

Many people have found themselves divided along the lines of “pro” or “against” lockdown. I, for one, have been reluctant to discuss openly my views about lockdown with some of my friends, because I was afraid of their reactions. What if they did not agree with my views? Would I think less of them? Would they think less of me? Instead of sharing our views, and the information we believe support them, with peers we fear disagreeing with, we turn to the web and fnd other people who, although far away, may be closer in sentiment. After a while, the algorithms behind Facebook and Twitter may just propose back to you the same arguments and ideas, reinforcing your convictions that you are in the right.

Given this complex background, what will trust mean in a post covid-19 world? After the lockdown, as measures start to be eased up around the world, who will we trust to see without a mask? And who will we trust to kiss, hug, and have sex with?

Unfortunately, to make sense of the pandemic, simple and easy answers do not work.

Trust goes hand in hand with vulnerability as a concept. As humans, our condition is to be vulnerable. The Italian poet Giuseppe Ungaretti (1888-1970) captured the human condition beautifully in his poem: “Si sta come d’autunno sugli alberi le foglie” or “we are vulnerable, like leaves on a tree branch in the fall”. This is the human condition; it has not changed with covid-19. Worse and more devastating diseases have ravaged the world before covid-19, and we should be prepared for still worse diseases to emerge in the post-covid-19 world. We are still leaves on a branch as fall is approaching. On a day breezier than others, more leaves than usual will fall. Eventually, they will all fall.

Research is needed to discover the ways in which vulnerable people want to be protected, including, the older people, and those at risk of experiencing severe covid-19 due to pre-existing conditions. I suspect that many people classified as vulnerable — including the older demographics — will not want to spend the last years of their lives isolated from their children and most importantly grandchildren. I suspect that many would rather run the risk of being infected, and dying, by being closer to those they love. I may be wrong. The important message here is: we need, to ask them. The question to ask ourselves is then transformed from “Who will we trust in the post-covid-19 world” to “Who will we allow ourselves to be vulnerable with?”

Shifting the burden from ‘trusting’ others to ‘allowing oneself to be vulnerable’, allows us to think in a different way about the future, and to act differently in the present to make that future possible. Natural disasters and emergencies, including pandemics, will not change the human condition, and should not change the way we live and relate with others. Unless we let them do so.

 Find Silvia’s research here, and follow her on Twitter at @silviacamporesi

Silvia Camporesi
Issue 88, 14th May 2020

ESSAY

by Jake Skeets (emergencemagazine.org)

Observing the grief that has arisen during the coronavirus pandemic, poet Jake Skeets explores apocalypse, time, and futurity from a Diné perspective.

My family tells many stories. They are the best storytellers. They use language efficiently and precisely. They have a keen sense and understanding of time. It is through the reimagining of time within their storytelling that they conjure survivance. Of course, we are not allowed to gather today, as the world battles a virus. As a child, I remember the many times my family gathered over mutton, watermelon, and tortillas. We gathered near our hogan at the Other House. My aunts and their families live a short walk from my childhood home. We all refer to their collective homes as the “Other House.” Each home of the Other House holds memories that I remember during these long, tense days. The Other House holds time through our memories. The Other House as a construct and physical space is as sophisticated as any technology. The energy of our landscapes is enough to hold so much of ourselves. The reimagining and reconfiguring of time, I believe, starts with the land.

Today, I notice, among the newfound excitement of working from home, small moments of tense air. These small pockets of density last only moments before another joke cracks or a sarcastic remark bursts the room into laughter. My house is composed of three young adults in their late twenties. We are all relatively healthy, except for the existential dread of our family histories that include diabetes, high blood pressure, certain types of cancers, alcoholism, and mental illness, which are not uncommon among most Native populations across the United States. These temporary moments, though small, are still large enough to notice in the room. I feel their heft balloon in the room before it pops and plastic ribbons fall gently around us. I saw an article headline recently that said this stillness is actually grief. If grief, what are we grieving?

Perhaps grief is related to time. Once upon a time, I considered my best childhood experience to be the many times my older cousin brother would drive us to Gas Man, a local convenience store, to buy junk food. I would stock up on Mr. Goodbar, Flamin’ Hot Cheetos, and nachos with extra cheese. It is still argued that our Gas Man store has the best nachos because of the cheese. The store sits on checkerboarded land, so it is actually not on the reservation. This means it can and does have a liquor license. Each Sunday, while my brother drove us to Gas Man, we would see a line out the door of men and women looking to enjoy a drink, or many. Reflecting now, perhaps that is not the best experience to recall, as today some of my cousins have become those very men and women. Hell, even I have waited in one of those lines. Maybe the small air that heavies when I drive past the store is also filled with grief, and only with time is this grief possible.

Where Gas Man at?
Where Gas Man at?
Shí ga’ anishní
Far away, Far away,
Shí ga’ anishní1

Diné College (DC), where we all work, is considered the first tribally controlled college in the United States. It was founded in 1968 to address the needs of the Navajo Nation. Today its Board of Regents is selected by the Navajo Nation government. When the coronavirus pandemic first hit the United States, DC was very quick to respond. The college has restricted access to the campus. Like a majority of faculty and staff, we are at home. Our days are relatively routine. My partner and I make breakfast and then continue our day as a mix of work, chores, and breaks. My breaks are spent mostly playing solitaire, Scrabble Go with my older sister, or checking social media. Lately, my breaks also included writing this essay and other small poems. Several posts on Twitter and Facebook lament the impossibility of poetry. How can we write poetry at a time like this? How can we write poetry during the apocalypse? Why poetry? How poetry? This essay is not a reflection on why poetry is or is not necessary. Instead, this essay focuses on these so-called end times. I write through and about the concept of apocalypse, time, and futurity from a Diné perspective.

I ask again, if this stillness that envelops the room cyclically is grief, what are we grieving? The world faces a global pandemic, and that type of devastation reaching our reservation, where basic infrastructure and healthcare are already limited because of past and current conquest, would be catastrophic. It would be apocalyptic even. So each day passes with a reminder from the Navajo Nation President to remain at home and limit visiting our families. Each day more cases are confirmed and I am sure each one of us worries about a confirmed case within our family. The Navajo Nation now has the highest number of coronavirus cases per capita in the US, higher than even the hardest hit states of New York and New Jersey. High schools are now being turned into rooms for beds. High schools that once housed Navajo families watching a game of basketball, because rezball is everything on the reservation, are now housing Navajo people infected with this virus. That, for me, is enough for grief. However, there’s something else as well in all that grief, I think.

As with time, I find yearning is an element of grief because we yearn for and desire an absence of grief. As an undergrad, I would run several miles on Johnson Field, an outdoor track on the University of New Mexico’s main campus. During these runs, I would yearn for and desire several things. First, it was hard not to desire the mostly white men completing their workouts on the field. Second, I would imagine myself publishing a book and talking about a book. I would imagine titles of potential collections. I told myself, in true American Dream fashion, that I would become successful. My success, however, was tied to money, capitalism, and advancement of the individual (and not necessarily the self). Today it seems foolish to imagine myself not connected to my community. My community is what molded me, and my success is only possible because of this place. So I often imagine my younger self running on Johnson Field, yearning for something that is causing the current troubles of the world today.

Where Johnson Field at?
Where Johnson Field at?
Shí ga’ anishní
Far away, Far away,
Shí ga’ anishní

As with time, I find yearning is an element of grief because we yearn for and desire an absence of grief.

If grief is tied to yearning and we are indeed grieving and thus yearning, for what or whom do we yearn? The world before this pandemic was already lethal: see the list of conditions above and add to it the long list of things impacting Native and Indigenous communities across the country. I grew up with several cousins I consider brothers. More than half of them we either lost to death or incarceration. Every month, there are numerous headlines announcing the deaths that occur in border towns around the reservation. So if we yearn for the time before this virus, are we also yearning for those ills as well? Or do we yearn for the post-pandemic, which will include either further disaster capitalism or the so-called end times, both of which would be catastrophic for families in the United States? The strangeness for me exists in the fact that even yearning has been conquered. Our yearning has been colonized to such an extent that we can only yearn for the very things that result in colonization. Perhaps that is an apocalypse of the human condition as much as the human experience on earth.

Apocalypse is a funny thing. I do not mean funny as in humorous but funny as in there is not much to feel about it. For me, apocalypse has always been represented in two ways: as an end to human life or a replacement of human life. In the feature film Resident Evil: Extinction, we follow the story of Alice navigating post-apocalyptic Las Vegas where human life has ceased to exist due to zombie outbreaks. On the other hand, X-Men: Apocalypse is a prophetic tale about the character Apocalypse’s intention to destroy the current world and to replace it with a new super civilization. (Cut to my partner mocking Apocalypse’s line, “Everything they built will fall.”) Both of these representations seem overly dramatized. Apocalypse is actually a project of colonialism. The linearity of beginning and ending is the very construct of the American Dream (for which we yearn and grieve). Our futures are set in a binary of success or apocalypse, depending on how tight we tie our bootstraps. The essay “Rethinking the Apocalypse: An Indigenous Anti-Futurist Manifesto” posted by Indigenous Action (indigenousaction.org) details the way apocalypse is a linear project that relies on a colonial past.² It asks the question, “Why can we imagine the ending of the world, yet not the ending of colonialism?” Colonialism is somehow both immune to an end and reiterates that human lives can and do end. The essay rejects a colonial future and relies on the deep time of Indigenous people. After all, Indigenous people have gone through many beginnings and endings, but never linearly and never without teaching.

There is a joke my father told me as a child. Language and culture loss continue to worry many Diné elders on our reservation; there are several revitalization efforts ongoing to address these losses. As a result, high school students can take Navajo language classes to fulfill foreign language requirements, and most universities and colleges now recognize Navajo as a foreign language, despite its millennia-long existence in the Southwest and its Athabascan relatives to the north and south. The joke my father told captures the politics of language and culture loss and revitalization within a singular punch line. The joke takes place in Chinle, Arizona, a small town located near the heart of the Navajo Nation. Its place name in Diné is Chʼínílį́. The joke is as follows: Two men are arguing over a meal about the correct pronunciation of Chinle. One says they are in Chinle, using the English pronunciation. The other says they are in Chʼínílį́, using the Diné pronunciation. To settle the dispute, one stops a restaurant worker and asks her, “Are we in Chinle or Chʼínílį́?” The worker replies, “Sir, you are in Burger King.” The joke acknowledges the existence of a Burger King near the heart of the Navajo Nation.

Today the Burger King is still a popular destination. Before the outbreak, I myself traveled the twenty minutes down to enjoy a burger and fries. Outside, numerous unsheltered Diné relatives asked for money or rides. Today the Burger King still has the unsheltered Diné, but no patrons dining inside. Instead a drive-thru line extends out into the main road. I repeat: apocalypse is a funny thing.

Where Burger King at?
Where Burger King at?
Shí ga’ anishní
Far away, Far away,
Shí ga’ anishní

Ever since I was a child, I have heard tales of apocalypse and rebirth. In the Diné creation story, worlds are destroyed in apocalyptic ways, most famously by a flood. Each time, the Diné were able to escape through the sky to find a new world. Each time, the Diné took teachings and items from the previous world into the new one, thereby building our current reality from the ground up. Today, in ceremony, we bless ourselves first with our feet and then upward toward the sky. Diné weavers start a rug from the bottom and work their way up. So apocalypses have occurred within our history. Each time, we were reborn from the ground up. I have attended many presentations by Diné medicine people, and they each talk about another apocalyptic event, never with grief but with hope. Right now, it seems hope is hard to feel amid all this grief. Perhaps the social media questions and posts should not be about the impossibility of poetry but about the impossibility of hope.

Hope, however, connotes a type of linear time wherein the subject that hopes is looking forward toward a future without the current challenge. This kind of hope I fear is linked to the onslaught of capitalism and the genocidal ideation of the American Dream. So maybe an answer lies within the reimagining of hope through the reimagining of time.The reimagining and reconfiguring of time, I believe, starts with the land.

Diné time has never been linear. As mentioned above, time is literally built vertically. Time is never on a horizontal axis, never point A to B. Time is hard to imagine through a Diné lens. I’m sure most Diné medicine people and fluent speakers of Diné know the concept of time. For me, a non-fluent speaker, I am on the periphery, ever caught between vocabulary drills and spelling tests and never between the conceptualization and actualization of the Diné language. I do not dream in Diné, and there lies the challenge. However, even from the periphery, I can see time as a nonlinear construct. In English storytelling, one famous phrase we learn early on is “once upon a time.” This phrasing marks time within a particular story as existing in a past and marked on a timeline. Hence the operative word “once,” as in “in this moment this happened.” To make a dangerous reductive comparison, Diné has a similar (but not quite the same) marker of time when storytelling, and that is ałkʼidą́ą́.³ Dą́ą́ is the reference to time. However, the words before dą́ą́ don’t mean “once upon.” After several days of wrestling with translation, I conclude now that there is no neat translation of ałk’i-, but through its broken components, we can piece together an idea of how time is constructed in Diné. K’i is related to planting, perhaps referencing the way plants grow from the ground up or a planting of a thing that took place in time, and this story is the harvest. Like “once,” the Ł takes center stage in this phrasing. I thought long and hard about the Ł and its translations. Many words use Ł, including dił (“blood”), łeezh (“sand”), łį́į́’ (“horse”), and dootłizh (“turquoise”).⁴

After conversations with my partner, we concluded that the Ł connotes a deep space that has the capacity to possess an entity within it, like time. Dił translates as “blood” and we see how the Ł here references an internal function of the body. Łeezh translates as “sand.” After each apocalypse, our deities carried with them sands from the previous worlds, sands from deep beneath us. This deepness of the world is also represented in the word dootłizh, which translates as “turquoise,” and from that translation can also mean the color blue or green. However, the Ł in this word connotes the deepness of turquoise itself. Whenever I hear the word, I first think of the deep black markings within the blue. Łį́į́ʼ is an onomatopoeia that translates as “horse.” The sound is a matching of the sounds of horses. It uses the nasal and guttural spaces of the head. A medicine person told me once that the breath is the connection between the physical external and the sacred internal, so sound, language, and breathing are considered sacred acts. The nexus being the nasal and guttural spaces of the head. Hair represents rain on a body and the neck represents clouds. This means the head makes up sky space and łį́į́’ is a direct engagement with that idea. The Ł in ałkʼidą́ą́ then becomes a reference to a story being conjured from a deep space and time.⁵ Time in actuality is built from the deepest spaces of the human and geological body and consciousness.

So perhaps time actually extends from within us and beneath us, from our pasts. And because we are in active movement, each moment of present time is actually our future. Our bodies are our future. Our landscapes are our future. So if we return to the manifesto of an anti-colonial future, we can also employ an anti-colonial hope. One that relies not on linearity but one that is deeply intimate, from the deep space and time of the self. One that is birthed from the deepest parts of our bodies and times. For me, the best way to achieve this is through storytelling and language. I think maybe this is an answer to the question about the impossibility of poetry: the possibility of storytelling. Storytelling has the ability to conjure the deepest parts of ourselves and reimagine time and thus reimagine hope. Storytelling allows us to embrace what is far away, remember what was forgotten, and hope for a future existing now. It starts with Ałkʼidą́ą́, “Once upon a time…”

Where’s the Other House at?
Where’s the Other House at?
Shí ga’ anishní
Far away, Far away,
Shí ga’ anishní
Far away,
Far away,
Shí ga’ anishní

Our bodies are our future. Our landscapes are our future.FootnotesCredits

• WriterJake SkeetsJake Skeets is Black Streak Wood, born for Water’s Edge. He is Diné from Vanderwagen, New Mexico. He is the author of the poetry collection Eyes Bottle Dark with a Mouthful of Flowers, winner of the National Poetry Series. He holds an MFA in poetry from the Institute of American Indian Arts. He won the 2018 Discovery/Boston Review Poetry Contest and has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize. He is a member of Saad Bee Hózhǫ́: A Diné Writers’ Collective and currently teaches at Diné College in Tsaile, Arizona.

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

Brought to you by Curio, an Aeon partner

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.