On learning from Leon Kass, and "a more natural science"

The pursuit of a more integrated account of nature and the supernatural has become increasingly important to me over the course of my life. The deadly Scylla and Charybdis on either side of this pursuit are a magical account of the supernatural and a materialist account of the natural. The wrong kind of supernaturalist is a world-denying, ahistorical gnostic, and the wrong kind of naturalist is a utilitarian or pragmatist who believes that the correlation of unusual brain chemistry to visionary genius is enough to explain its causation.

One person who has thought long and well about this matter is Leon Kass.

If I could claim at all that Leon Kass was a mentor of mine, it would only be at a distance, through imitation and awe. I was certainly in his orbit as an undergraduate at the University of Chicago studying in the Kass-designed Fundamentals: Issues and Texts program. He was a member of the Committee on Social Thought, a collection of scholars that appeared in my youthful estimation to exist in the unsullied empyrean of pure thought, in endless rigorous reflection on the good, true, and beautiful. I have since, ruefully, learned better about the character of some of the Committee, but Mr. Kass has never disappointed. If anything, Kass existed in my world as something of a demigod, a hero, an archetype whose outlines could be approximated but never truly imitated, much less exceeded. In retrospect this is of course utterly embarrassing, but nonetheless true.

I learned three things in his class on the Nicomachean Ethics, but only one had anything to do with Aristotle. The first was how to recognize gravitas. When a boisterous, misguided undergrad burst through the door, loudly demanding to know the number of the classroom while we were in midst of trying to pummel some significant dialectical point out of our cloudy minds, Mr. Kass regarded the boy, and with unmalicious but entirely impatient intensity he expelled the phrase, "Sir. Please!" The molecules in the air ceased their motion. There was no choice in the matter. The undergraduate returned to his proper station, in search of his classroom, silently, outside of ours.

The second was that there are times in a person's life when, for whatever reason, he or she literally cannot understand a given line of philosophical inquiry. In my case, it had to do with a kind of intellectual immaturity with which Kass unwittingly forced me to come to grips. This is in part, I suppose, a more literate riff on George Bernard Shaw's aphorism that "youth is wasted on the young." When I sat in Mr. Kass's legendary Aristotle seminar, and pored over my Loeb translation at night, week in and week out, it gradually dawned upon me that I didn't have a clue what I was reading. I was bewildered, befuddled, resentful, incredulous. Surely Aristotle didn't believe that mediocrity (which was, youthfully, how I was understanding the famous "golden mean") was the most virtuous road to human flourishing. Surely he was wrong to suggest that courage was anything other than the self-abnegating sacrifice of total surrender to the needs of others, without regard for one's own interests or telos. I was not Christian enough at the time to see the psychological naiveté of this stance that I had imputed to the character of Jesus Christ. And so on and so on.

So I had a problem. My inability to read Aristotle slowly, carefully, on his own terms, without condescending interruptions from the vast annals of my just-post-adolescent life experience, caused me to be unable to complete my writing assignments for the class. One day, I went to see Mr. Kass, to express my frustrations at my predicament, and some of my incredulity at the things that Aristotle seemed to be try to teach us. When I say that I "went to see Mr. Kass," I didn't just go, I went in fear and trembling. Even though I thought Aristotle was a barking madman, Mr. Kass was on the Committee on Social Thought! My palms were sweating, my stomach had butterflies, but what could I do? I was unable to complete my assignments and I needed help.

Help I received, but not in the form I expected. When I entered Mr. Kass's office, pushing harder than I wanted to on the vast hundred-year-old oak door, I was greeted not only by his familiar, sober visage, but also by a print hanging on the wall behind him which seemed to have been hung there with the explicit purpose of breaking me. It was a World War Two era image of Winston Churchill in a bowtie pointing at the viewer, and under it was written the phrase "Deserve Victory!" Suddenly I began to feel alienated from myself, as some people say that they do when they have a brush with death. My reasoning soul began to come loose from my body and flee, outgunned, leaving me stranded under the bicameral laser gaze of Kass and Churchill. I began to sweat more, and then, internally, I utterly crumbled. I did not deserve victory. I did not even deserve to be in the room. I forgot all of my arguments against Aristotle, and why Jesus was better, and all of the reasons why I couldn't seem to complete the assignments. I am sure that I asked some questions, received some gracious help like "Just start writing..." or "Find a quotation and begin there..." but I was just counting seconds till I could hit the doorhandle and have my paltry, unrenewed nous back. Too many more minutes in there, and I might have been doomed for good. For reasons that have absolutely nothing to do with Mr. Kass (who it turns out is a kindly advocate) and everything to do with the way that God helps a person to grow up and become wiser, I felt like Isaiah in the sixth chapter, beholding the glory of the Lord. I was totally undone. I did not have what it took.

Which leads me to the third thing that I learned from Leon Kass's class on the Nicomachean Ethics, the shocking value of compassion in the classroom. Just a couple of weeks after the encounter with the Churchill poster, I realized that I was not going to be able to develop my capacities sufficiently quickly to be able to undertake the challenges that the course required by term's end. I needed to drop the class. However, there was no way that I was going to face Churchill a second time and, naturally, Mr. Kass did not "do" email. So I called Mr. Kass's office, to leave a message that "I very much appreciated the chance to take this class, but circumstances were such that I would need to drop it, thank you so much, etc. etc." To my horror, Mr. Kass answered the phone, and I was thus forced to stammer out my explanation in person. As is my wont, I revealed more than I intended and basically told him that I couldn't figure out how to read Aristotle so I had to drop the class.

I will never forget his response. He said that he was grateful that I had enrolled, that I had shown courage in facing these circumstances, and that I should feel absolutely no shame whatsoever about this decision. That word, spoken to a student who would eventually figure out how to read Aristotle but for the time being was doing much better with Dostoevsky and Bernard of Clairvaux, was a staggering event of pedagogical mentoring. I saw, and have continued to see on more mature reflection, that the goal of teaching Great Books is not merely the explication of canonical tradition of reflection on life and death, but rather the maieutic process in which the teacher stands both with and above the student, helping him or her in the struggle to bear out from within and express in the necessary ways those things that are most fundamentally human. Kindness, mercy, dignity, charity are not at odds with intellectual midwifery or its fruits, but rather part and parcel of them.The goal, in the end, is the realization and celebration of a human being.

This much-longer-than-intended reflection is simply an introduction to a wonderful excerpt of Leon Kass's 2009 Jefferson Lecture which I read last night. In it, Kass gives a fine interpretation of some of the crucial dynamics what would amount to more humanizing account of nature and the supernatural, the material and the spiritual, the body and the soul with which I began this essay. As I read the piece, I realized how many of my instincts, how much of what I take to be intellectually crucial in this moment I have learned from him.

I am deeply grateful.

≈≈≈≈≈≈≈≈≈≈≈≈≈≈≈≈≈≈≈≈≈≈≈≈≈≈≈≈≈≈≈≈≈

from Leon Kass's 2009 Jefferson Lecture, "Looking for an honest man: Reflections of an unlicensed humanist."
(Read the whole lecture here.)

Finding a “more natural science” would serve two important goals. First, by doing justice to life as lived, it would correct the slander perpetrated upon all of living nature, and upon human nature in particular, in treating the glorious activities of life as mere epiphenomena of changes in the underlying matter or as mere devices for the replication of DNA. Second, and more positively, by offering a richer account of human nature faithful both to our animality and to the human difference, it might provide pointers toward how we might best live and flourish. Toward both goals, a “more natural science” examines directly the primary activities of life as we creatures experience them; and it revisits certain neglected notions, once thought indispensable for understanding the being and doing of all higher animals.

    Against the materialists who believe that all vital activities can be fully understood by describing the electrochemical changes in the underlying matter, I saw the necessity of appreciating the activities of life in their own terms, and as known from the inside: what it means to hunger, feel, see, imagine, think, desire, seek, suffer, enjoy. At the same time, against those humanists, who, conceding prematurely to mechanistic science all truths about our bodies, locate our humanity solely in consciousness or will or reason, I saw the necessity of appreciating the profound meaning of our distinctive embodiment. So, for example, I learned from Erwin Straus the humanizing significance of the upright posture: how our standing-in-the-world, gained only through conscious effort against the pull of gravity, prefigures all our artful efforts to overcome nature’s indifference to human aspiration; how our arms, supremely mobile in our personalized action space, fit us for the socializing activities of embracing, cradling, pointing, caressing, and holding hands, no less than for the selfish activities of grasping, fighting, and getting food to mouth; how our eyes, no longer looking down a snout to find what is edible, are lifted instead to the horizon, enabling us to take in an entire vista and to conceive an enduring world beyond the ephemeral here and now; how our refashioned mammalian mouth (and respiratory system) equips us for the possibility of speech—and kissing; and how our expressive face is fit to meet, greet, and sometimes love the faces that we meet, face-to-face, side-by-side, and arm-in-arm. From Adolf Portmann, I discovered the deeper meaning of the looks of animals, whose intricate surface beauty, not fully explained by its contributions to protective coloration or sexual selection, serves also to communicate inward states to fellow creatures and to announce, in the language of visibility, each animal’s unique species dignity and individual identity. I even found evidence for natural teleology in, of all places, The Origin of Species, in which Darwin makes clear that evolution by natural selection requires, and takes as biologically given, the purposive drives of all organisms for self-preservation and for reproduction—drives the existence of which is a mystery unexplainable by natural selection.
    But the greatest help came, most unexpectedly, from studying pre-modern philosophers of nature, in particular Aristotle. I turned to his De Anima (On Soul), expecting to get help with understanding the difference between a living human being and its corpse, relevant for the difficult task of determining whether some persons on a respirator are alive or dead. I discovered to my amazement that Aristotle has almost no interest in the difference between the living and the dead. Instead, one learns most about life and soul not, as we moderns might suspect, from the boundary conditions when an organism comes into being or passes away, but rather when the organism is at its peak, its capacious body actively at work in energetic relation to—that is, in “souling”—the world: in the activities of sensing, imagining, desiring, moving, and thinking. Even more surprising, in place of our dualistic ideas of soul as either a “ghost in the machine,” invoked by some in order to save the notion of free will, or as a separate immortal entity that departs the body at the time of death, invoked by others to address the disturbing fact of apparent personal extinction, Aristotle offers a powerful and still defensible holistic idea of soul as the empowered and empowering “form of a naturally organic body.” “Soul” names the unified powers of aliveness, awareness, action, and appetite that living beings all manifest.
    This is not mysticism or superstition, but biological fact, albeit one that, against current prejudice, recognizes the difference between mere material and its empowering form. Consider, for example, the eye. The eye’s power of sight, though it “resides in” and is inseparable from material, is not itself material. Its light-absorbing chemicals do not see the light they absorb. Like any organ, the eye has extension, takes up space, can be touched and grasped by the hand. But neither the power of the eye—sight—nor sight’s activity—seeing—is extended, touchable, corporeal. Sight and seeing are powers and activities of soul, relying on the underlying materials but not reducible to them. Moreover, sight and seeing are not knowable through our objectified science, but only through lived experience. A blind neuroscientist could give precise quantitative details regarding electrical discharges in the eye produced by the stimulus of light, and a blind craftsman could with instruction construct a good material model of the eye; but sight and seeing can be known only by one who sees.
    Even the passions of the soul are not reducible to the materials of the body. True, anger, as ancient naturalists used to say, is a heating of the blood around the heart or an increase in the bilious humor, or, as we now might say, a rising concentration of a certain polypeptide in the brain. But these partial accounts, stressing only the material conditions, cannot reveal the larger truth about anger: anger, humanly understood, is a painful feeling that seeks revenge for perceived slight or insult. To understand the human truth about anger and its serious consequences, we must instead listen to the poets, beginning with Homer’s Iliad: “Wrath, sing, o goddess, of Peleus’ son Achilles, and the woes thousand-fold it brought upon the Achaians, sending to Hades strong souls of heroes but leaving themselves to be the delicate feastings of dogs and birds.” And to understand how we come to know this or any other truth, we can never stop wondering how—marvel of marvels—Homer’s winged words carry their intelligible and soul-shaping meanings, hitched to meaningless waves of sound, from the soul of genius to the hearts and minds of endless generations of attentive and sympathetic readers.

Comments

[Orionedgar]

Thanks for this Caleb, I found it interesting and it's made me think a little more 'in the round' about education and the importance of studying great books. I'm just re-reading Kass' 'The Hungry Soul' for my research on eating and he's a pleasure to read, it sounds like he must have been interesting to study under.