Lenn E. Goodman Library of Contemporary Jewish Philosophers

Editor-in-Chief Hava Tirosh-Samuelson, Arizona State University

Editor Aaron W. Hughes, University of Rochester

VOLUME 9

LEIDEN • BOSTON The titles published in this series are listed at brill.com/lcjp 2015 Lenn E. Goodman

Judaism, Humanity, and Nature

Edited by Hava Tirosh-Samuelson and Aaron W. Hughes

LEIDEN • BOSTON 2015 Cover illustration: Provided by Steven Green.

The series Library of Contemporary Jewish Philosophers was generously supported by the Baron Foundation.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Lenn E. Goodman : Judaism, humanity, and nature / edited by Hava Tirosh-Samuelson and Aaron W. Hughes. pages cm. — (Library of contemporary Jewish philosophers, ISSN 2213-6010 ; Volume 9) Includes bibliographical references. ISBN 978-90-04-28074-8 (hardback : alk. paper) — ISBN 978-90-04-28076-2 (e-book) — ISBN 978-90-04-28075-5 (pbk. : alk. paper) 1. Goodman, Lenn Evan, 1944– 2. Jewish philosophy—20th century. I. Tirosh-Samuelson, Hava, 1950– editor. II. Hughes, Aaron W., 1968– editor. B5800.L46 2015 181'.06—dc23 2014038152

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This book is printed on acid-free paper. CONTENTS

The Contributors ...... vii

Editors’ Introduction to the Series ...... ix

Lenn E. Goodman: An Intellectual Portrait ...... 1 Alan Mittleman

Value and the Dynamics of Being ...... 23 Lenn E. Goodman

Respect for Nature in the Jewish Tradition ...... 41 Lenn E. Goodman

Leaving Eden ...... 71 Lenn E. Goodman

Time, Creation, and the Mirror of Narcissus ...... 113 Lenn E. Goodman

Interview with Lenn E. Goodman ...... 177 Hava Tirosh-Samuelson

Select Bibliography ...... 231

THE CONTRIBUTORS

Alan Mittleman (Ph.D., Temple University, 1985) is Professor of Modern Jewish Thought at the Jewish Theological Seminary in New York. He is the author, most recently, of Human Nature and Jewish Thought (Princeton University Press, 2015), A Short History of Jewish Ethics (Wiley-Blackwell, 2011), and Hope in a Democratic Age (Oxford University Press, 2009). He works in the fields of ethics, political theory, and German-Jewish intellectual history.

Hava Tirosh-Samuelson (Ph.D., Hebrew University of Jerusalem, 1978) is Irving and Miriam Lowe Professor of Modern Judaism, the Director of Jew- ish Studies, and Professor of History at Arizona State University in Tempe, Arizona. Her research focuses on Jewish intellectual history, Judaism and ecology, science and religion, and feminist theory. In addition to numerous articles and book chapters in academic journals and edited volumes, she is the author of the award-winning Between Worlds: The Life and Work of Rabbi David ben Judah Messer Leon (1991) and the author of Happiness in Premodern Judaism: Virtue, Knowledge, and Well-Being in Premodern Judaism (2003). She is also the editor of Judaism and Ecology: Created World and Revealed Word (2002); Women and Gender in Jewish Philoso- phy (2004); Judaism and the Phenomenon of Life: The Legacy of Hans Jonas (2008); Building Better Humans? Refocusing the Debate on Transhumanism (2011); Hollywood’s Chosen People: The Jewish Experience in American Cin- ema (2012); and Jewish Philosophy for the Twenty-First Century (2014). Pro- fessor Tirosh-Samuelson is the recipient of several large grants that have funded interdisciplinary research on religion, science, and technology.

Aaron W. Hughes (Ph.D., Indiana University Bloomington, 2000) holds the Philip S. Bernstein Chair in Jewish Studies at the University of Rochester. Hughes was educated at the University of Alberta, the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, and Oxford University. He has taught at Miami University of Ohio, McMaster University, the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, the University of Calgary, and the University at Buffalo. He is the author of over fifty articles and ten books, and the editor of seven books. His book titles include Abrahamic Religions: On the Uses and Abuses viii the contributors of History (Oxford, 2012); Muslim Identities (Columbia, 2013); The Study of Judaism: Identity, Authenticity, Scholarship (SUNY, 2013); and Rethinking Jewish Philosophy: Beyond Particularism and Universalism (Oxford, 2014). He is also the Editor-in-Chief of Method and Theory in the Study of Religion. EDITORS’ INTRODUCTION TO THE SERIES

It is customary to begin studies devoted to the topic of Jewish philosophy by defining what exactly this term, concept, or even discipline is. We tend not to speak of Jewish mathematics, Jewish physics, or Jewish sociology, so why refer to something as “Jewish philosophy”? Indeed, this is the great paradox of Jewish philosophy. On the one hand it presumably names something that has to do with thinking, on the other it implies some sort of national, ethnic, or religious identity of those who engage in such activity. Is not philosophy just philosophy, regardless of who philosophizes? Why the need to append various racial, national, or religious adjectives to it?1 Jewish philosophy is indeed rooted in a paradox since it refers to philosophical activity carried out by those who call themselves Jews. As philosophy, this activity makes claims of universal validity, but as an activity by a well-defined group of people it is inherently particularistic. The question “What is Jewish philosophy?” therefore is inescapable, although over the centuries Jewish philosophers have given very different answers to it. For some, Jewish philosophy represents the relentless quest for truth. Although this truth itself may not be particularized, for such individuals, the use of the adjective “Jewish”—as a way to get at this truth—most decidedly is.2 The Bible, the Mishnah, the Talmud, and related Jewish texts and genres are seen to provide particular insights into the more universal claims provided by the universal and totalizing gaze of philosophy. The problem is that these texts are not philosophical on the surface; they must, on the contrary, be interpreted to bring their philosophical insights to light. Within this context exegesis risks becoming eisegesis. Yet others eschew the term “philosophy” and instead envisage themselves as working in a decidedly

1 Alexander Altmann once remarked: It would be futile to attempt a presentation of Judaism as a philosophical system, or to speak of Jewish philosophy in the same sense as one speaks of American, Eng- lish, French, or German philosophy. Judaism is a religion, and the truths it teaches are religious truths. They spring from the source of religious experience, not from pure reason. See Alexander Altmann, “Judaism and World Philosophy,” in The Jews: Their History, Cul- ture, and Religion, ed. Louis Finkelstein (Philadelphia: Jewish Publication Society of Amer- ica, 1949), vol. 2, 954. 2 In this regard, see Norbert M. Samuelson, Jewish Faith and Modern Science: On the Death and Rebirth of Jewish Philosophy (New York: Rowman and Littlefield, 2008), e.g., 10–12. x editors’ introduction to the series

Jewish key in order to articulate or clarify particular issues that have direct bearing on Jewish life and existence.3 Between these two perspectives or orientations, there exist several other related approaches to the topic of Jewish philosophy, which can and have included ethics,4 gender studies,5 multiculturalism,6 and postmodernism.7 Despite their differences in theory and method, what these approaches have in common is that they all represent the complex intersection of Judaism, variously defined, and a set of non-Jewish grids or lenses used to interpret this rich tradition. Framed somewhat differently, Jewish philosophy—whatever it is, however it is defined, or whether definition is even possible—represents the collision of particularistic demands and universal concerns. The universal or that which is, in theory, open and accessible to all regardless of race, color, creed, or gender confronts the particular or that which represents the sole concern of a specific group that, by nature or definition, is insular and specific-minded. Because it is concerned with a particular people, the Jews, and how to frame their traditions in a universal and universalizing light that is believed to conform to the dictates of reason, Jewish philosophy can never be about pure thinking, if indeed there ever can be such a phenomenon. Rather Jewish philosophy—from antiquity to the present—always seems to have had and, for the most part continues to have, rather specific and perhaps

3 See, e.g., Strauss’s claim about Maimonides’ Guide of the Perplexed, perhaps one of the most important and successful works of something called Jewish philosophy ever written. He claims that one “begins to understand the Guide once one sees that it is not a philosophic book—a book written by a philosopher for philosophers—but a Jewish book: a book written by a Jew for Jews.” See Leo Strauss, “How to Begin to Study The Guide of the Perplexed,” in The Guide of the Perplexed, trans. Shlomo Pines, 2 vols. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1963), vol. 1, xiv. Modern iterations of this may be found, for example, in J. David Bleich, Bioethical Dilem- mas: A Jewish Perspective, 2 vols. (vol. 1, New York: Ktav, 1998; vol. 2, New York: Targum Press, 2006). 4 See, e.g., David Novak, Natural Law in Judaism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998); Elliot Dorff, Love Your Neighbor and Yourself: A Jewish Approach to Modern Personal Ethics (New York: Jewish Publication Society of America, 2006). 5 E.g., the collection of essays in Women and Gender in Jewish Philosophy, ed. Hava Tirosh-Samuelson (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 2004). 6 E.g., Jonathan Sacks, The Dignity of Difference: How to Avoid a Clash of Civilizations (London: Continuum, 2003); Jonathan Sacks, To Heal a Fractured World: The Ethics of Responsibility (New York: Schocken, 2007). 7 E.g., Elliot R. Wolfson, Language, Eros, Being: Kabbalistic Hermeneutics and Poetic Imagination (New York: Fordham University Press, 2004); Elliot R. Wolfson, Open Secret: Postmessianic Messianism and the Mystical Revision of Menahem Mendel Schneerson (New York: Columbia University Press, 2009); Elliot R. Wolfson, A Dream Interpreted within a Dream: Oneiropoiesis and the Prism of Imagination (New York: Zone Books, 2011). editors’ introduction to the series xi even practical concerns in mind. This usually translates into the notion that Judaism—at least the Judaism that Jewish philosophy seeks to articulate— is comprehensible to non-Jews and, framed in our contemporary context, that Judaism has a seat at the table, as it were, when it comes to pressing concerns in the realms of ethics and bioethics. Jewish philosophy, as should already be apparent, is not a disinterested subject matter. It is, on the contrary, heavily invested in matters of Jewish peoplehood and in articulating its aims and objectives. Because of this interest in concrete issues (e.g., ethics, bioethics, medical ethics, feminism) Jewish philosophy—especially contemporary Jewish philosophy—is often constructive as opposed to being simply reflective. Because of this, it would seem to resemble what is customarily called “theology” more than it does philosophy. If philosophy represents the critical and systematic approach to ascertain the truth of a proposition based on rational argumentation, theology is the systematic and rational study of religion and the articulation of the nature of religious truths. The difference between theology and philosophy resides in their object of study. If the latter has “truth,” however we may define this term, as its primary object of focus, the former is concerned with ascertaining religious dogma and belief. They would seem to be, in other words, mutually exclusive endeavors. What we are accustomed to call “Jewish philosophy,” then, is a paradox since it does not—indeed, cannot—engage in truth independent of religious claims. As such, it is unwilling to undo the major claims of Judaism (e.g., covenant, chosenness, revelation), even if it may occasionally redefine such claims.8 So although medieval Jewish thinkers may well gravitate toward the systematic thought of Aristotle and his Arab interpreters and although modern Jewish thinkers may be attracted to the thought of Kant and Heidegger, the ideas of such non-Jewish thinkers are always applied to Jewish ideas and values. Indeed, if they were not, those who engaged in such activities would largely cease to be Jewish philosophers and would instead become just philosophers who just happened to be Jewish (e.g., Henri Bergson, Edmund Husserl, and Karl Popper). Whether in its medieval or modern guise, Jewish philosophy has a tendency to be less philosophical simply for the sake of rational analysis and more constructive. Many of the volumes that appear in the Library of

8 A good example of what we have in mind here is the thought of Maimonides. Although he might well redefine the notion of prophecy, he never rejects the concept. On Maimonides on prophecy, see Howard Kreisel, Prophecy: The History of an Idea in Medieval Jewish Philosophy (Dordrecht: Kluwer, 2001), 148–56. xii editors’ introduction to the series

Contemporary Jewish Philosophers will bear this out. The truths of Judaism are upheld, albeit in often new and original ways. Although Jewish philosophy may well use non-Jewish ideas to articulate its claims, it never produces a vision that ends in the wholesale abandonment of Judaism.9 Even though critics of Jewish philosophy may well argue that philosophy introduces “foreign” wisdom into the heart of Judaism, those we call Jewish philosophers do not perceive themselves to be tainting Judaism, but perfecting it or teasing out its originary meaning.10 The result is that Jewish philosophy is an attempt to produce a particular type of Judaism—one that is in tune with certain principles of rationalism. This rationalism, from the vantage point of the nineteenth century and up to the present, is believed to show Judaism in its best light, as the synthesis or nexus between a Greek-inflected universalism and the particularism of the Jewish tradition. What is the status of philosophy among Jews in the modern period? Since their emancipation in the nineteenth century, Jews have gradually integrated into Western society and culture, including the academy. Ever since the academic study of Judaism began in the 1820s in Germany, Jewish philosophy has grown to become a distinctive academic discourse practiced by philosophers who now often hold positions in non-Jewish institutions of higher learning. The professionalization of Jewish philosophy has not been unproblematic, and Jewish philosophy has had to (and still has to) justify its legitimacy and validity. And even when Jewish philosophy is taught in Jewish institutions (for example, rabbinic seminaries or universities in Israel), it has to defend itself against those Jews who regard philosophy as alien to Judaism, or minimally, as secondary in importance to the inherently Jewish disciplines such as jurisprudence or exegesis. Jewish philosophy, in other words, must still confront the charge that it is not authentically Jewish. The institutional setting for the practice of Jewish philosophy has shaped Jewish philosophy as an academic discourse. But regardless of the setting,

9 This despite the claims of Yitzhak Baer who believed that philosophy had a negative influence on medieval Spanish Jews that made them more likely to convert to Christianity. See Israel Jacob Yuval, “Yitzhak Baer and the Search for Authentic Judaism,” in The Jewish Past Revisited: Reflections on Modern Jewish Historians, ed. David N. Myers and David B. Ruderman (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1998), 77–87. 10 Indeed, Jewish philosophers in the medieval period did not even see themselves as introducing foreign ideas into Judaism. Instead they saw philosophical activity as a recla- mation of their birthright since the Jews originally developed philosophy before the Greeks and others stole it from them. editors’ introduction to the series xiii

Jewish philosophy as an academic discourse is quite distinct from Jewish philosophy as constructive theology, even though the two may often by produced by the same person. Despite the lack of unanimity about the scope and methodology of Jewish philosophy, the Library of Contemporary Jewish Philosophers insists that Jewish philosophy has thrived in the past half century in ways that will probably seem surprising to most readers. When asked who are the Jewish philosophers of the twentieth century, most would certainly mention the obvious: Franz Rosenzweig (d. 1929), Martin Buber (d. 1965), and Emmanuel Levinas (d. 1995). Some would also be able to name Abraham Joshua Heschel (d. 1972), Mordecai Kaplan (d. 1983), Joseph Soloveitchik (d. 1993), and Hans Jonas (d. 1993). There is no doubt that these thinkers have either reshaped the discourse of Western thought for Jews and non- Jews or have inspired profound rethinking of modern Judaism. However, it is misleading to identify contemporary Jewish philosophy solely with these names, all of whom are now deceased. In recent years it has been customary for Jews to think that Jewish philosophy has lost its creative edge or that Jewish philosophy is somehow profoundly irrelevant to Jewish life. Several reasons have given rise to this perception, not the least of which is, ironically enough, the very success of Jewish Studies as an academic discipline. Especially after 1967, Jewish Studies has blossomed in secular universities especially in the North American Diaspora, and Jewish philosophers have expressed their ideas in academic venues that have remained largely inaccessible to the public at large. Moreover, the fact that Jewish philosophers have used technical language and a certain way of argumentation has made their thought increasingly incomprehensible and therefore irrelevant to the public at large. At the same time that the Jewish public has had little interest in professional philosophy, the practitioners of philosophy (especially in the Anglo American departments of philosophy) have denied the philosophical mer- its of Jewish philosophy as too religious or too particularistic and excluded it entirely. The result is that Jewish philosophy is now largely generated by scholars who teach in departments/programs of Jewish Studies, in departments of Religious Studies, or in Jewish denominational seminaries.11

11 See the comments in Aaron W. Hughes and Elliot R. Wolfson, “Introduction: Charting an Alternative Course for the Study of Jewish Philosophy,” in New Directions in Jewish Phi- losophy, ed. Aaron. W. Hughes and Elliot R. Wolfson (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 2010), 1–16. xiv editors’ introduction to the series

The purpose of the Library of Contemporary Jewish Philosophers is not only to dispel misperceptions about Jewish philosophy but also to help nudge the practice of Jewish philosophy out of the ethereal heights of academe to the more practical concerns of living Jewish communities. To the public at large this project documents the diversity, creativity, and richness of Jewish philosophical and intellectual activity during the second half of the twentieth century and early twenty-first century, showing how Jewish thinkers have engaged new topics, themes, and methodologies and raised new philosophical questions. Indeed, Jewish philosophers have been intimately engaged in trying to understand and interpret the momentous changes of the twentieth century for Jews. These have included the Holocaust, the renewal of Jewish political sovereignty, secularism, postmodernism, feminism, and environmentalism. As a result, the Library of Contemporary Jewish Philosophy intentionally defines the scope of Jewish philosophy very broadly so as to engage and include theology, political theory, literary theory, intellectual history, ethics, and feminist theory, among other discourses. We believe that the overly stringent definition of “philosophy” has impoverished the practice of Jewish philosophy, obscuring the creativity and breadth of contemporary Jewish reflections. An accurate and forward looking view of Jewish philosophy must be inclusive. To practitioners of Jewish philosophy this project claims that Jewish philosophical activity cannot and should not remain limited to professional academic pursuits. Rather, Jewish philosophy must be engaged in life as lived in the present by both Jews and non-Jews. Jews are no longer a people apart, instead they are part of the world and they live in this world through conversation with other civilizations and cultures. Jewish philosophy speaks to Jews and to non-Jews, encouraging them to reflect on problems and take a stand on a myriad of issues of grave importance. Jewish philosophy, in other words, is not only alive and well today, it is also of the utmost relevance to Jews and non-Jews. The Library of Contemporary Jewish Philosophers is simultaneously a documentary and an educational project. As a documentary project, it intends to shape the legacy of outstanding thinkers for posterity, identifying their major philosophical ideas and making available their seminal essays, many of which are not easily accessible. A crucial aspect of this is the interview with the philosophers that functions, in many ways, as an oral history. The interview provides very personal comments by each philosopher as he or she reflects about a range of issues that have engaged them over the years. In this regard the Library of Contemporary Jewish Philosophers editors’ introduction to the series xv simultaneously records Jewish philosophical activity and demonstrates its creativity both as a constructive discourse as well as an academic field. As an educational project, the Library of Contemporary Jewish Philo sophers is intended to stimulate discussion, reflection, and debate about the meaning of Jewish existence at the dawn of the twenty-first century. The individual volumes and the entire set are intended to be used in a variety of educational settings: college-level courses, programs for adult Jewish learning, rabbinic training, and interreligious dialogues. By engaging or confronting the ideas of these philosophers, we hope that Jews and non- Jews alike will be encouraged to ponder the past, present, and future of Jewish philosophy, reflect on the challenges to and complexities of Jewish existence, and articulate Jewish philosophical responses to these challenges. We hope that, taken as individual volumes and as a collection, the Library of Contemporary Jewish Philosophers will inspire readers to ask philosophical, theological, ethical, and scientific questions that will enrich Jewish intellectual life for the remainder of the twenty-first century. All of the volumes in the Library of Contemporary Jewish Philosophers have the same structure: an intellectual profile of the thinker, several seminal essays by the featured philosopher, an interview with him or her, and a select bibliography of 120 items, listing books, articles, book chapters, book reviews, and public addresses. As editors of the series we hope that the structure will encourage the reader to engage the volume through reflection, discussion, debate, and dialogue. As the love of wisdom, philosophy is inherently Jewish. Philosophy invites questions, cherishes debate and con- troversy, and ponders the meaning of life, especially Jewish life. We hope that the Library of Contemporary Jewish Philosophers will stimulate thinking and debate because it is our hope that the more Jews philosophize, the more they will make Judaism deeper, durable, and long-lasting. Finally, we invite readers to engage the thinkers featured in these volumes, to challenge and dispute them, so that Judaism will become ever stronger for future generations.

LENN E. GOODMAN: AN INTELLECTUAL PORTRAIT

Alan Mittleman

Lenn Goodman is an American Jewish philosopher, currently serving as Professor of Philosophy and as the Andrew W. Mellon Professor in the Humanities at Vanderbilt University. Goodman’s additional appointment to a chair of Humanities reflects the breadth of his interests, erudition, and work. Trained in medieval Arabic and Hebrew philosophy and intellectual history, he is also a scholar of ancient philosophy and—most importantly for our purposes—a prolific constructive philosopher in his own right. One of Goodman’s distinctions is his ability to bring not just Plato and Aristotle but Saadia, Maimonides, Bahya ibn Pakuda, not to mention Avicenna and al-Ghazali, among others, into a contemporary conversation. Goodman draws not only on classical and medieval thinkers in his constructive work but from the same sources which nourished his medieval philosophical predecessors: Bible and midrash, mishnah and Talmud, Quran and hadith. Against the conventional academic style of our time (“analytic philosophy”), Goodman describes himself as a “synthetic philosopher.” No one should imagine, however, that synthesis entails inattention to analysis, rigorous argument, or deep, critical engagement with contemporary analytic philosophy and its central problems. Goodman’s work is no less technical or fundamental than the work of a Quine, a Nelson Goodman, a John Rawls, a Christine Korsgaard, or a Thomas Nagel. But it is incomparably more richly textured, more historically capacious. To read books or essays by Lenn Goodman, such as the ones comprising this volume, is a demanding but deeply rewarding experience. The intrepid reader who has never encountered his work before is in for an experience of unparalleled intellectual stimulation.

Biography and Career

Goodman was born in 1944 in Detroit, and raised in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and Putney, Vermont, before his family settled in Los Angeles. He is the son of the late Calvin Goodman, a Harvard-educated World War II veteran, whose career path led him to being an arts consul- tant, and Florence Goodman, a poet and professor of English. His frequent 2 LENN E. GOODMAN: AN INTELLECTUAL PORTRAIT references to art, his focus on the theme of human creativity, and the pecu- liar artistry and power of his prose no doubt may be traced to these early influences. He was educated, like his father, at Harvard, where he pursued Arabic language and literature, as well as philosophy, graduating in 1965, summa cum laude. His work in Arabic actually preceded his undergraduate career, as he had begun a study of the language at UCLA when he was still in high school. His undergraduate thesis was a translation of Ibn Tufayl’s philosophical novel, Hayy ibn Yaqzan. Remarkably, Goodman was able to publish the translation and study of Ibn Tufayl in 1972; it remains in print, expanded and updated, with the University of Chicago Press. It is doubtful that many undergraduate theses have such a distinguished afterlife. Goodman won a Marshall Scholarship in 1965 and journeyed to Oxford for doctoral work. Once there, he continued his medieval and Arabic studies with Richard Walzer and Samuel Stern, read modern Islamic thinkers with Albert Hourani, and deepened his study of philosophy with J. O. Urmson, Isaiah Berlin, Gilbert Ryle, A. N. Prior, and others. He earned his doctorate in 1968, writing on the Muslim theologian al-Ghazali. His dissertation focused on al-Ghazali’s arguments for the creation (as opposed to the Aristotelian eternity) of the world and “his critique of the rationalist/ intellectualist notion that causality is a matter of logical necessity.”1 The interest in creation as a concept that supports an empirically encountered, contingent world discoverable through experience and inductive reason is, as we shall see below, ongoing and basic to Goodman’s mature views. Before arriving at Vanderbilt University in 1994, he taught at UCLA (1968–1969) and at the University of Hawaii (1969–1994) in the Department of Philosophy. He is the recipient of numerous awards, including the Baumgardt Memorial Award of the American Philosophical Association, the Gratz Centennial Prize, and the Earl Sutherland Prize, Vanderbilt University’s top research award. Most notably, he was a Gifford Lecturer at the University of Glasgow in 2005. Goodman was a Littman Fellow at the Oxford Centre for Postgraduate Hebrew Studies, a Humanities Fellow at the East-West Center, an Arts and Humanities Faculty Fellow of the University of Hawaii, and a fellow of the Center for the Study of Religion and Culture at Vanderbilt University. In 1995, he was at the Institute for Advanced Studies at the Hebrew University in Jerusalem. He is the recipient of grants from the National Endowment for the Humanities, the American Council of Learned Societies, and the Matchette Foundation.

1 Personal communication with Prof. Goodman. LENN E. GOODMAN: AN INTELLECTUAL PORTRAIT 3

Aside from masterful critical translations of medieval Arabic works and reconstructions of Muslim and Jewish thought, Goodman’s oeuvre consists of constructive contributions to Jewish (and general) philosophy. With respect to the former, he is the translator of Saadia Gaon’s Arabic commentary to the Book of Job, The Book of Theodicy (Yale, 1988). A contribution to the authoritative Yale Judaica Series, the book recovers a medieval Jewish classic of philosophical theology previously unavailable to the reader without Arabic. Goodman’s book-length study of the Muslim philosopher, Avicenna, has gone into a second, updated edition (Avicenna, Cornell, 2005). Rich essays exploring the “crosspollinations” of Muslim and Jewish philosophy may be found in his Jewish and Islamic Philosophy (Rutgers, 1999), where the arguments of ancients such as Epicurus and medievals such as Bahya ibn Pakuda, al-Ghazali and Moses Maimonides are brought into conversation with moderns such as Benedict Spinoza and Immanuel Kant. His critical translation and commentary of The Case of the Animals versus Man before the King of Jinn, with Richard McGregor (Oxford, 2009), brings thoughts from a medieval philosophical fable to bear on modern views of nature and ecological responsibility. Goodman’s purely constructive, general philosophical work appears in many articles and also in his book-length study of truth, In Defense of Truth: A Pluralistic Approach (Humanity Press, 2001), to which reference is made below. A select bibliography may be found at the end of this volume; I simply want to indicate the scope of his work here. It is axiomatic for Goodman that contemporary Jewish philosophy must not be cut off from prior eras and exempla of Jewish thought. What is needed is a critical appropriation (or reappropriation) of tradition. Jewish history is long and reflective. Indeed, it is often reflexive, taking its own experience as the matter to work with. But disruptions have been frequent, and continuity is hard won. Repeatedly, Jewish thinkers have had to rediscover or reinvent what was lost or forgotten, reframing the old stories to live again and light up a new context, rediscovering old meanings, and plumbing the old texts for meanings not yet brought to light.2 Thus, the tradition of Jewish philosophy, arcing back to Philo, is not one of continuous development. It is a tradition of interruptions, gains and

2 Lenn E. Goodman, “Doing Jewish Philosophy in America,” in Jewish Philosophy: Perspectives and Retrospectives, ed. Raphael Jospe and Dov Schwartz (Boston: Academic Studies Press, 2012), 34–35. 4 LENN E. GOODMAN: AN INTELLECTUAL PORTRAIT losses, forgetting and remembering. Intellectual paradigms shift and shat- ter, but always the same task remains: making sense of existence and of Judaism at the same time. Goodman does not see any unbridgeable gaps between the ancients and the moderns. No veracious teaching of the past, whether moral or metaphysical, whether scriptural or interpretive, can be treated as a mere artifact. All may (or must) be responsibly retrieved, critically appropriated, and given a voice in a contemporary conversation. The ancients and medievals did not think or speak “more slowly than we do.”3 The fundamental philosophical and religious questions abide. Modern skepticism, scientism, and atheism were encountered in older dress by our philosophical ancestors in antiquity and in the Middle Ages. They cannot, in their modern uniforms, defeat the core commitments and insights of the Jewish tradition.

An Ontic Theory of Justice: The Critique of Rawls

They do, of course, pose formidable challenges. Goodman’s essays in Jewish philosophy rise to them. To start, consider one of the leading works in twentieth-century Anglophone moral and political philosophy, John Rawls’s A Theory of Justice. Goodman’s first major constructive work, On Justice: An Essay in Jewish Philosophy (Yale, 1991; Littman Library, 2008) represents a fundamental critique of Rawlsian theory. Rawls famously privileged the right over the good, disallowing comprehensive doctrines or visions of human flourishing to influence the arrangements that, ideally, should constitute public justice. Justice (more precisely, political justice) is no more (nor less) than fairness between persons. Persons should be conceived as responsible, albeit rather solitary agents abstracted from their own particu- larities and futures (the “veil of ignorance”). They are to choose a social contractual arrangement that will maximize their utility, minimize the possibility of harm, and correct for potential economic disprivilege. A good political society is a fair society, full stop. Justice needs to be conceived along procedural lines—no substantive answer to the questions of what liberty, equality, security, and prosperity are for should enter deliberation because, it is thought, in a modern secular society citizens will perma- nently differ over such matters. (The question of the good, of what counts as a good life, is a private, not a public question. As such, it is irrelevant to what Rawls is after, namely a political conception of justice.) Ruling out

3 Goodman, “Doing Jewish Philosophy in America,” 44. LENN E. GOODMAN: AN INTELLECTUAL PORTRAIT 5 such substantive bases for justice as natural right or divine law, what is left is “reflective equilibrium,” a process of public deliberation that comes to rest when moral norms are thought to cohere, to be widely acceptable, and therefore vindicated. There is no deeper right or wrong. Metaphysical justification for norms, which requires a “comprehensive doctrine,” is neither necessary nor allowable. Goodman finds this approach radically inadequate. He counters with a frankly metaphysical theory of deserts, putting into the foreground what Rawls reserves for the private sidelines. Rawlsian conventionalism, descended from Hobbes and the social contract tradition, is just another instantiation of ancient conventionalism, as articulated by Epicureans and Sophists. For them, “justice is a convention, an artificial arrangement among men.” Nature knows no right or wrong; they are human overlays upon the natural world. Goodman disagrees. “If all duties arise by convention and have no moral force beyond what the participants create by agreement, there is no obligation to abide by such agreements.”4 For a strict conventionalist/contractualist the question of why we ought to abide by our (social contractual, founding) agreements is unanswerable, at least in normative terms. But for Goodman there is a prior level of normativity which licenses the obligatory force of promises, agreements freely undertaken, consent, and so on. Without that, conventionalism is circular: people take norms to be binding because they take them to be binding.5 Goodman pushes justice back from the conventional and political into nature, into an objective condition in which all beings participate. As such, he broadens justice beyond fairness into a universal, truly “comprehensive” scheme of claims and deserts. He propounds an “ontic theory” of justice. All beings seek to advance their being—to survive, flourish, and realize their ontic possibilities in a manner requisite to the kind of being they are. Being as such is dynamic, and value-laden.6 All beings—animals, plants, microbes, as well as the biosphere as a whole, and even artifacts of human creativity such as paintings, sculptures, and buildings—attest to underlying value. The chief underlying value to which they all give expression is goodness; to be is better than not to be. (The biblical creation story

4 L. E. Goodman, On Justice: An Essay in Jewish Philosophy (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1991), 14. 5 L. E. Goodman, “Prescriptivity,” Journal of Jewish Thought and Philosophy 5, no. 2 (1996): 155. 6 Goodman here shows the influence of Spinoza, on whom he has written extensively. Each being has a project or “conatus,” which establishes its fundamental right or claim. 6 LENN E. GOODMAN: AN INTELLECTUAL PORTRAIT of Genesis, chapter 1, where God repeatedly pronounces his work good is an important reference point here. It is not, of course, an argument, nor does Goodman treat it as such.) That there is a universe full of beings is better than nothingness. It is objectively better; it is not merely a matter of our thinking it better. Sharply formulated, being is value. “I find value in all beings,” he writes, “and argue that if value does not reside in beings there is nowhere else to find it.”7 Goodman is thus a normative realist. Values are not projections of human subjectivity. They are part of the natural order; human subjectivity responds to their independent reality. This is to efface the modern fact/value or is/ought distinction in the name of a richer ontology than much modern analytic philosophy would allow. It is not to say that mere facticity amounts to legitimacy; it is to say that being is more than mere facticity. “To assume that reality is a bare or neutral fact, devoid of value, is to beg [the] question . . . For to deny the identity of being and value is to deny that being is an achievement and thus to deny the most manifest fact of our experience, the dynamism of being.”8 All beings assert, in their dynamic perdurance, their own claims to recognition, space, and conditions of flourishing. Their being makes claims upon other beings. But that cannot be the end of the matter, for beings exist in a finite world of limited resources. Furthermore, their “projects” of survival, flourishing, and assertion conflict with those of other beings. The influenza virus, as an emergent product of nature, makes a claim to persist in being but its claim cannot be allowed to override that of a human infant or adult. Justice, given this objective world of beings and their claims, amounts to giving beings their due (that is, what they deserve; their deserts). Claims must be equilibrated, balanced, and adjudicated. The projects of the relevant beings must be assessed and deserts distributed on the basis of that assessment. “The primary rule of the general theory of deserts is that all beings should be treated in accordance with what they are.”9 Beings present claims to which human beings ought responsibly to respond. Their claims to recognition are analogous to the claims made by facts, which demand cognitive acknowledgment. In both cases, reality itself presses upon us, demanding recognition—acknowledgment of truths in the cognitive case and of deserts, that is, justice, normatively. In both cases, human beings

7 Lenn E. Goodman, “Respect for Nature in the Jewish Tradition,” in Judaism and Ecology: Created World and Revealed Word, ed. Hava Tirosh-Samuelson (Cambridge: Center for the Study of World Religions, 2003), 241 [p. 54 in this volume]. 8 Ibid. 9 Ibid., 233. LENN E. GOODMAN: AN INTELLECTUAL PORTRAIT 7 are not automata, merely processing by algorithms underlying natural conditions. Human personhood and freedom emerge from the dynamism of natural being and provide us with the capacity to judge claims and respond to truths. That human beings are subjects is uniquely valuable. Humans thus stand at the top of a hierarchy of beings, highest in ontic worth in a universe already suffused with value. Should it be the case then that the claim a human being makes always overrides the claim of another form of life? Goodman, following Maimonides, who holds that human beings should not think that the world was created for their sakes, is chary of a dogmatic assertion along those lines. Nonetheless, the criterion for ascribing desert is the complexity of the project of the relevant being. And beings who are subjects, who not only have consciousness but also full self-awareness, who can, furthermore, deliberately direct their own projects of being, have a higher worth than beings who can’t. Human beings then perforce have higher deserts than other creatures.10 There is nothing moral in scanting one’s child’s nutrition in order to adhere to a strict vegetarianism. Cows deserve some measure of our recognition and protection, but human deserts exceed theirs. Goodman endorses the protection of the natural world—not for whatever value it may provide for us but for its own sake based on the validity of its own ontic claims—but not the ascription of rights to beings other than ourselves. To rule out hierarchies of value is to negate the whole notion of deserts, which assumes competing, unequal claims. Persons, being subjects, capable of giving as well as receiving moral regard, stand on a moral plateau in Goodman’s terms, all persons being equally, existentially, deserv- ing of respect and regard. Here it becomes fitting to speak of dignity, and proper in a strict sense to speak of rights. Human beings are holy.11

10 Goodman considers whether a fetus, who is genetically human but who is not a subject in the relevant sense, makes the same kind of claim to life that a full human person makes. Giving a philosophical articulation of the relevant halakhic texts on abortion, he argues that the fetus is neither fully a person nor merely an appendage. Understanding the ontic status of the fetus, and hence what claims it legitimately makes, yields a normative position equivalent neither to the standard Catholic view nor to the standard liberal view. See Lenn E. Goodman, Judaism, Human Rights, and Human Values (New York: Oxford University Press, 1998), 95 11 Goodman, “Respect for Nature in Jewish Tradition,” 236 [p. 50 in this volume]. His actual argument against animal rights and the corresponding relativization of human rights is something of a tu quoque argument. Those who claim that an insect has “rights,” that its life matters as much to it as our lives matter to us, are in a mood of romanticism and alienation that undermines all universal values, including the ones they claim to uphold. Such proposals are not only incoherent but feckless. 8 LENN E. GOODMAN: AN INTELLECTUAL PORTRAIT

Justice has its conventions—laws are instituted by human beings and are relative to cultures and societies—but its ground is not conventional. Its ontic ground allows us to criticize and reject (or affirm) the conventions of existing societies. Human justice builds upon, indeed, completes and per- fects natural justice. Nature provides opportunities, conditions, and possibilities for “existentiation” (coming into being): that is its justice. “Such a system [as nature] is to be called just and generous not because it realizes all tendencies and desires (a natural impossibility) but because it affords a theater for the attainment of some potentials, the development of others, and the expression of all that involve real capability. Nature denies much that beings claim. But it is only in nature that making and fulfilling claims is possible.”12 Nature is the medium whereby the goodness of being becomes manifest. (And not just goodness but novelty, beauty, exuberance, and generosity inter alia—nature is replete with values.) That is justice of a kind. But it is a category error to confuse natural with human justice; we must not bring the expectations we have for our own discernment and adjudica- tion of claims and apply them to nature. We may put murderers in prison for the harm they have done but the sun will shine upon them no less than upon the graves in which their victims are buried. It is irrational to expect of nature what we expect of ourselves. Human justice goes farther than natural justice, yet natural justice is the basal condition for the emergence of human justice. “[W]e forget, in our disappointment at nature’s refusal to call upon us by name, as a human family or community might do, that only in nature do we acquire the individuality and find the community to give us a name. We take our gifts for granted and carp at their conditionality.”13 The gifts that nature has given us—first and foremost the gift of existence— attest that nature gives beings what they deserve, at least in this fundamental, restricted sense. One might object that a justice so indifferent to human differences and destinies is no justice at all. Justice, we might assert against Goodman, is a purely human phenomenon. Justice is extended to nature only rhetorically. Furthermore, we might press, even the claim of the goodness or generosity of nature—the expression of its supposed justice—is derided by nature’s immense cruelty. The vast waste of the evolutionary process, the countless extinctions of innumerable species, even the death of stars, of our own sun some day, all of these militate against the fundamental thesis.

12 Goodman, On Justice, 122. 13 Ibid., 128. LENN E. GOODMAN: AN INTELLECTUAL PORTRAIT 9

Against this, Goodman’s naturalism and value realism appeal to our experience. We might imagine, in a philosophical thought experiment, a world consisting only of torture. “That,” Goodman concedes “would not be good. But that is not the world we live in. There is pain in our world, but pain is not the norm, and it is hard to see how it could be. Pain, in the actual world, evolved as a warning against harm: its very existence presupposes the reality of other, better things.”14 Goodman trusts that our experience, on the whole and all things considered, truthfully reflects the way the world is, especially with regard to its value. He finds aggressively skeptical claims to be self-defeating. Characterizing nature, its indifference, violence, and entropy notwithstanding as just, generous, and good is not merely perspectival for him or based on some epistemic necessity of practical reason, as an analogous move would be for Kant. For Goodman, these descriptions capture more adequately than their negative or skeptical rivals the objective truth of the matter. “Nature makes room for Shakespeare but also for the worm that gnaws his brain. We hate cancer, AIDS, malaria, and polio. But the teeming organisms that are unwitting vectors and vehicles of such sufferings are also prime instances of the exuberance of life. They need not be our allies. We have no obligation to preserve them. But their conatus marks and mimics the early stages of a history that was once our own.”15 Values such as exuberance, fecundity, and novelty help to balance the harm that their “unwitting vectors” cause. The knowledge that we gain of the workings of nature, even in its malignity, redeems to some considerable extent its occasional assaults. The good is ontic and fundamental. The idea of evil, like evil itself, Goodman holds, is parasitic on the good. We cannot coherently speak of harm or injury without reference to the claims to being that it violates. In this sense, the notion that evil holds sway in the world, Goodman argues, is radically incoherent. “There would be no evil were there not an ontologically prior goodness for it to prey upon.”16

14 Lenn E. Goodman, “Value and the Dynamics of Being,” Review of Metaphysics 61, no. 1 (September 2007): 74 [pp. 34–35 in this volume]. 15 Ibid., 78 [pp. 38–39 in this volume]. 16 Personal communication with Prof. Goodman (December 1, 2013). 10 LENN E. GOODMAN: AN INTELLECTUAL PORTRAIT

Belief and Truth

This confidence, which pervades his methods and substantive arguments, seems partly a matter of his scientific (but never scientistic) naturalism and partly a matter of faith. Let us come—carefully—to the “believing” part of what I would characterize as a believing naturalism. Goodman is, after all, a constructive Jewish philosopher whose aim is not only a sound general metaphysics and ethics but the critical reappropriation of Jewish ideas and normative commitments. Belief, in the sense of responsible fidel- ity to core Jewish concepts, is crucial to his project. Belief does not imply blind faith, leaps of faith, fideism, dogmatism, second naïveté, or anything suppositious or lacking in evidence or warrant. Religious belief, as a subset of belief, has for Goodman, as for Maimonides and Spinoza no “credo quia absurdum” quality to it; religious beliefs must cohere with everything else we hold about the world and our place in it. Religious beliefs do not get a free pass; faith should be rational. (Piety is a virtue but it must be united with other moral and intellectual virtues.17 The rationality that piety helps virtuously to support is crucial to happiness, to human flourishing.)18 Goodman’s general account of belief is holistic and coherentist, albeit with anchorage in a correspondence view of truth. A coherent view of the world is to be sought, but “a relatively coherent account of an integrated world does not guarantee the truth of that account.”19 (Hence, Goodman is not a pure coherentist.) Nonetheless, a relatively coherent account positions us to grasp the mind-independent facts of nature and correctly evalu- ate them: The mind detects patterns—symmetries, asymmetries, likenesses, unlike- nesses, complementarities and oppositions, rhythms, and (may we say it) gaps and distortions, in the data that comes before it. It translates these into local knowledge. Linking up such bits of knowledge, putting coherence into the service of correspondence and explaining one phenomenon by reference to another, we create a record so formidable that rival accounts become mere fables, sent gibbering to the margins of the epistemic realm,

17 Lenn E. Goodman, “Monotheism and Ethics,” in Monotheism & Ethics, ed. Y. Tzvi Langermann (Leiden: Brill, 2012), 19. For a full integration of piety and reason, see Goodman’s interpretation of Plato’s Euthyphro: “Ethics and God,” Philosophical Investigations 34, no. 2 (2011): 135–50. 18 Lenn E. Goodman, “Happiness,” in The Cambridge History of Medieval Philosophy, vol. 1, ed. Robert Pasnau and Christina Van Dyke (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010), 460. 19 Lenn E. Goodman, In Defense of Truth: A Pluralistic Approach (Amherst, NY: Humanity Books, 2001), 213. LENN E. GOODMAN: AN INTELLECTUAL PORTRAIT 11

much as the disparate gods and spirits of pagan piety are scattered, by their very ineptness to integration, to become the sprites and jinn of legend. For integrated theses can explain one another. Mere disparate givens remain undigested surds. Integrated accounts map a world in charts that gain clarity and authority with every connection they make, confirming externally and unasked what was supposed internally and heuristically, or metaphysi- cally, all along: That the world in itself is an integrated system, its causal connections reflected in our causal narratives.20 Ontic realism underlies epistemic coherence. A coherent causal account tells stories that can capture the way the relevant slice of the world so accounted for actually works. A coherent account helps us to see what is truly going on externally, to make valid inductions and predictions, and to make abstractions and generalizations about underlying principles. What is truly going on externally affords beliefs or knowledge claims the traction to survive and come into coherence with one another. True, the context in which accounts are given, the intentions imputed to them by their speakers, the conventions of natural languages, and other factors condition their relation to extra-linguistic, mind-independent reality. But language should not be imagined to create reality ex nihilo: “The world that made us is not the world we made.”21 Religious beliefs accordingly must stand before the bar of reality. They can’t just cohere among themselves, sequestered in a mental fantasy world. Yet the initial expression of religious beliefs seems to constitute just such a domain. Religious beliefs are often embedded in myths, highly fluid, symbolic, category-confusing accounts that “more faithfully [serve] to celebrate than to explain.”22 Goodman devotes a full chapter to getting myths right in his In Defense of Truth. Myths should neither be dismissed by scientific reductionists as botched physical explanations nor celebrated by romantics as tokens of an enchanted universe. They ought to be seen in terms of their truth-bearing relation to reality: myths express, teach, and preserve values, often more vividly than do other forms of expression. Religions have mythic content, but religion also crucially refines and parses myth: “Religion,” Goodman writes, “has among its core functions the creation of a milieu in which the values that myths may voice can be articulated, explored, and critiqued, even apart from any question of the empiric truth of the lan-

20 Lenn E. Goodman, “An Idea Is Not Something Mute Like a Picture on a Pad,” Review of Metaphysics 62, no. 3 (March 2009): 624–25. See also Goodman, In Defense of Truth, 208. 21 Goodman, In Defense of Truth, 162. 22 Ibid., 340. 12 LENN E. GOODMAN: AN INTELLECTUAL PORTRAIT guage to which those values are entrusted, or the pragmatic efficacy of the corresponding symbolic actions.”23 The biblical creation stories are myths in this sense. (“Biblically, the story of creation takes the form not of science but of myth, an account kept alive by the values it projects.”)24 They are not competitive accounts vis-à-vis scientific cosmology, nor are they pure exaltations of fecund imagination; they are rich fictions that capture values such as the goodness of being, the generosity and dynamism of nature, the reality of growth and change, beauty and order, and the intelligibility of the world. They enshrine the belief in the contingency of the world—it need not have been—and in the goodness of its Source, who granted all beings the gift of being, thus underwriting gratitude as a fundamental orientation toward existence.

The Philosophic Implications of Creation

Creation is a major topic in Goodman’s thought, as the various pieces collected in this volume all attest. Goodman’s approach to the biblical creation stories is decidedly non-literalist; they are, after all, myths. (This basic stance allows him to show the complementarity of creation with a Darwinian evolutionary account of nature since what is at stake is the values that motivate both explanatory frameworks, not the literal truth of the scriptural one.)25 However, he does not take the concept of divine creation or its possible actuality a parte ante as a mere useful fiction. The possibility that the universe was created by God, the evidence in favor of creation (over eternalism), the work that the concept of creation does, and the biblical stories in which the motivating values and concepts are canonically expressed must be analytically distinguished. What work then does the concept of creation do and what argues in favor of creation over its alternatives? First, a methodological point: “We must remember Saadiah’s advice: when we set out to find the cause of nature we are not seeking yet another natural phenomenon but something that transcends time, change, perception, and so can explain natural events rather than simply needing explanation along with them . . . Our thirst for sensory evidence should not trap us into taking our principle of explanation back to the level it was invoked

23 Ibid., 374. 24 L. E. Goodman, “Time, Creation, and the Mirror of Narcissus,” God of Abraham (New York: Oxford University Press, 1996), 238 [p. 116 in this volume]. 25 Lenn Goodman, Creation and Evolution (New York: Routledge, 2010). The second chapter of this work, “Leaving Eden,” is included in this volume, pp. 71–111. LENN E. GOODMAN: AN INTELLECTUAL PORTRAIT 13 to explain.”26 Thus, the atheist’s frequent taunt that positing a Creator God cannot account for the origin of the world for, after all, who or what created God, has no purchase. God cannot be another contingent, caused being, nor can our sensory encounters with the things that make up the world provide direct evidence of God.27 A perfect being, self-caused and wholly other, is not logically analogous to any contingent being. This will lead Goodman to purge God of all sensuousness and creature-likeness (like Maimonides) and characterize the concept of God as a value concept. Value is real but not physical, effectual but not material. That is the level of reality at which and for which we must seek an ultimate explanation.28 But let us hold the analysis of his view of God in abeyance for now. Creation provides an explanation therefore rather different in kind from a physical or purely causal form of explanation. (Say, the universe emerging from the Big Bang perhaps after the death of a previous universe or black hole, for example.) For sheer physicality is not the entirety of what needs to be accounted for. What needs accounting for is a universe suffused with value. And value does not just supervene on facts, placed there by human subjectivity; value is instinct in the universe. Creation is a way of talking about that primordial and mind-independent state of affairs. Creation accounts for, as noted, the contingency of the universe—it might not have come into being—as well as its design and its novelty. What bearing does contingency have on value? Contingency underwrites freedom (a crucial value)—both God’s freedom to create a world (rather than having necessarily to emanate one from his essence or, on the eternalist account, for a world to have always existed) and our freedom to cognize it. Goodman argues that the successful pursuit of science requires induction and fal- sification—science cannot be a purely deductive enterprise. Induction entails that we cannot know how things must be a priori; we must explore and investigate them insofar as they have their own dynamic being. This

26 Goodman, “Time, Creation, and the Mirror of Narcissus,” 237 [p. 115 in this volume]. 27 I say “direct evidence” because Goodman is alert to the problem of God’s radical transcendence. “Transcendence poses a . . . danger for theists. For, paradoxically, placing too great a gap between the world and God may rob the world of the very awe that first turned our glance toward the transcendent, leaving a wasteland of alienation, vanity, and anomie. Monotheism addresses this problem by striving to attain its primal vision of the world as an expression of God’s creative energy. Thus the Sabbath is a recurrent symbol of the act of creation, and the Hebrew liturgy treats every raindrop as a miracle and an act of grace.” Goodman, God of Abraham, 8. 28 On the need for and possibility of ultimate explanation as against positivism’s “this is just the way it is and no further explanation is possible,” see Lenn E. Goodman, Avicenna (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2006), 64–65. 14 LENN E. GOODMAN: AN INTELLECTUAL PORTRAIT

demonstrates contingency: “Things are not fixed eternally in the necessities of their natures but might have been—might yet be—otherwise.”29 Finding some measure of necessity, such that explanations can invoke principles and laws, is finding intelligibility in nature, not simply in our own minds. The process of discovery assumes freedom. “I count the process of discovery itself as an argument of cumulatively mounting force in support of the realist account of the necessity of induction and, thus, in support of the reality of an open universe. This is to understand the gift of freedom in a particularly strong sense.”30 Creation, as understood by medieval philosophers such as Maimonides and al-Ghazali, in their rejection of Aristotle’s eternalism, lent support to scientific discovery through induction. Creation is allied with empiricism, with the trial and error process of exploration into nature’s particularity and contingency. Nothing is determined in advance by some categorical deductive necessity. Creation, empiricism, and metaphysical and epistemological freedom are mutually implicated. These are some of the values and practices funded by creationism. Their salience shows “the kind of price one may have to pay in apriorism if one abandons the creationist mode of discourse.”31 So there are powerful pressures within reason, on Goodman’s view, to affirm divine creation. But what of the God who creates? Is God, who qua idea has already been classified as a value concept, more than an idea? Does an adequate, monotheistic idea refer to a perfect being? Goodman is not an idealist, like the great German Jewish rationalist, Hermann Cohen; he is a naturalist. So this isn’t an inappropriate question. A naturalist holds that there is a fully mind-independent, judgment-independent world to which consciousness, cognition, and evaluation respond. We might not be able to say more than our ideas enable us to say, but there is more to reality than our ideas. How does God relate to that reality? Even if God must absolutely transcend the natural world, ontological questions about God are in order. (Unless one is a logical positivist, for whom such questions are nonsense. But Goodman shows why the sclerotic metaphysics of logical positivism and its descendants is inadequate.)32 Granted that a necessary, perfect

29 Goodman, “Time, Creation, and the Mirror of Narcissus,” 241 [p. 121 in this volume]. 30 Ibid., 242 [p. 122 in this volume]. 31 Ibid. 32 See Goodman, God of Abraham, 40–43, where Goodman shows, on technical epistemological grounds, that “verification by means of sense data is an unworkable and ill-conceived project” (p. 43). He also makes short work of Wittgensteinian fideism and pragmatism. The upshot is that questions about the existence of God are no more odd or intractable than questions about the existence of causality, necessity, values, etc. LENN E. GOODMAN: AN INTELLECTUAL PORTRAIT 15 being does not exist in the way that contingent and imperfect beings exist, does God exist as more than an idea, concept, or principle and, if so, how? Goodman himself asks the question: “Is there a being of infinite perfection? The question is natural.”33 Goodman, unlike some Christian philosophers who claim to know divinity in the person of Jesus—a man who walked among us—takes a consistently Maimonidean approach. We can conceive the idea of God, at least formally and heuristically, but we cannot perceive God. There are no experiences available to us of God in any unmediated sense. Any experience, such as those attested to by mystics, requires interpretation; no experience is self-interpreting or self-verifying. “Even if I directly sense something as God,” Goodman writes, “that does not entail that it is God.” Hermeneutics is ineluctable. But “how can a finite consciousness like mine experience God as God, if God is infinite Perfection?”34 The answer is: it cannot. There is no short cut to the reality of God unmediated by ideas. So we must remain, in a sense, at the level of ideas. But ideas relate to the world. There is no cogent reason to dig an unbridgeable trench between ideas and the realities that we intend to represent by them. Goodman’s strategy is to show that the rationality of the idea of God is per se no bar to the actual existence of God. In order to do this, he has to take on Hume, Kant, and many contemporary philosophers, and destabilize, in a series of detailed and technical essays in epistemology and metaphysics, the familiar distinctions between analytic and synthetic statements, a priori and a posteriori judgments, and universals and particulars. These distinctions fund the typical moves that seem to disallow knowledge of divine existence. The point of Goodman’s philosophical arguments is to show that there is nothing illogical or self-contradictory in the claim that an infinite perfect being exists. That cuts against much of modern philosophy, for which existence is a matter of fact, not a priori necessity. Everything that exists exists contin- gently. God, as a perfect being, theists claim, exists necessarily (as a consequence of his perfection). But no existence can claim necessity, that is, can be made on an a priori basis. Whether x exists or not is a matter of observation, of synthetic judgment, not of formal logical deduction. The idea of a necessary being hovers between category mistake and absurdity. On the typical modern view, a necessary being “is a spurious hybrid. Existence

33 Ibid., 37. 34 Ibid., 39. 16 LENN E. GOODMAN: AN INTELLECTUAL PORTRAIT must be contingent. To call God a necessary being makes him both necessary and nonnecessary, a square circle.”35 Against this, Goodman rejects the Humean (and, with qualifications, Kantian) dichotomy between matters of fact and relations of ideas. He rejects the idea that experience or understanding provides us with brute sensuous particulars, empiric givens, which reason then relates in modal ways, such as cause and effect, necessitation, etc. It is not the case that experience gives us evidence only of contingent beings and that reason imports a necessity that does not actually exist in the world. We cannot know that. Contingency should not be viewed as the ground-level condition of mind-independent reality such that necessity becomes a fictive overlay. “The presumption that contingency is the default position, so that we must regard the universe as contingent except insofar as we have constructed or construed its relations, seems to ignore the fact that contingency and facticity are as much or as little constructs of judgment as are necessity and impossibility.”36 It may be epistemically cautious to exclude necessity from the world, reserving it for mind, but caution is not knowledge. “We simply do not know that necessity is not found in things. So what grounds have we for modeling reality on our modes of construing it?”37 (Here again is Goodman’s underlying realism. The world is not identical to our construal of it. We should not mistake our forms of judgment for the ontology they seek to discern.) We cannot know then, as philosophical atheists claim to know, that “the idea of a necessary being is incoherent.”38 God, as a necessary, perfect, and infinite being can be thought and that thought can refer to reality. But must it? Goodman is fascinated by the ontological argument, which, if it were to succeed would provide a positive answer to the question. He finds in God’s self-expression in Exodus 3:14 a biblical insight akin to Anselm’s formal argument. But just as the Bible’s “I am that I am” addresses someone who already knows that God is, so does Anselm’s argument address those with faith who seek understanding. It doesn’t prove the existence of God; it refines and clarifies, for those who already believe, what the nature of God must be like. It draws out the implications of divine perfection. But it doesn’t carry one over from word to world in as utterly compelling a way as its advocates hope. One must already accept the premise of God’s existence for the argument to do its work. Is there any compelling reason to accept

35 Ibid., 54. 36 Ibid., 54. 37 Ibid., 55. 38 Ibid., 55. LENN E. GOODMAN: AN INTELLECTUAL PORTRAIT 17 that premise? Goodman believes that there is—and not just on a kind of Kantian ground that requires the worlds of nature and morality to hold together so that morality can have force. For Goodman, as a scientifically minded naturalist, both axiological coherence and cosmic intelligibility point toward God. This is because the very practice of explanation, in the sciences, in ethics, in daily life, hangs on the possibility of ultimate explanation. Without the ultimate perfection and the goodness of God, local explanations falter and explanation per se is enfeebled. It comes back to the postulate of sheer contingency. To accept that things simply are the way they are and that there is no further transcendental explanation for them is to give up on explanation altogether. To accept a world of basal brute facts is to arrest the process of reasoning; it is to abandon “the rationalist program of explanation.”39 An explanation is more than just a simple answer: Explanation differs from other ways of answering questions in that it fills not just the gap a question opens but the area around and behind that gap, relieving a doubt but also illuminating related questions—even helping us to see what our questions should be. So an explanation is more satisfying than a simple answer. It meets a more general curiosity. For the same reason, it is costlier. Explanations are always metaphysical. They gain their powers of prediction and of satisfying the mind by making assumptions about the nature of the world and taking those assumptions beyond what is before us.40 Explanations point beyond the particulars of what they explain. They traffic in a prioris and formal values. If successful, they make it possible to know such factors as cause, necessity, identity, permanence, elegance, comprehensiveness, likeness, or order. Explanations do not just fit the data of experience to a sphere of ideas. They draw back, as it were, and situate themselves amidst all the facts they can accommodate, making sense not just of the data but of themselves in the process—thus helping our finite intelligence situate itself in the world. Explanation, for just this sort of reason, intends an ultimate, a “final term” of the explanatory program. “For every conditioned event there is always a prior cause, signaling the insufficiency of that which it conditions and urging us onward, beyond the merely conditioned toward what can be explained only by its self-sufficiency or absoluteness.”41 To repudiate

39 Ibid., 73. 40 Ibid. 41 Ibid., 74. 18 LENN E. GOODMAN: AN INTELLECTUAL PORTRAIT this drive toward ultimacy is to lose one’s footing on the slope of explanation and fall into an unqualified positivism of brute facts. For all one’s partial explanations (or justifications) lose what gains in understanding they seemed to promise without an anchor intending something that will make sense in its own right. Without that anchor, they’ve been living on unsecured credit. Even a partial positivism, Goodman argues, “rests on a paradox” because “it seeks to render reality at large intelligible through the general pronouncement that it is unintelligible.”42 Explanation intends ultimate explanation. Eliminating the latter undermines the former. Only children, as it were, are satisfied with “Because I said so,” and then only sel- dom or perhaps not at all. Things do not explain themselves. Any residue of inexplicable positiv- ity renders rationalism incomplete. An ultimate principle of explanation must be absolute, categorically other than the contingent, imperfect, time- bound things and states it seeks to explain. The choice of such an explanation is the “theistic option.”43 “Monotheism is the belief,” Goodman avers, “well grounded in our grasp of nature, that the divine is absolute and so not finite or contingent or conditioned. It is this concept, that the ultimate explanatory principle must be absolute, infinite and perfect, irreducible to the world’s categories but explicable solely in itself, that is expressed in the words ‘In the beginning God created heaven and earth.’ ”44 The monotheist affirmation is not a necessity of logic. There is no logical need that anything be explained. In seeking an ultimate intelligibility for the world and for our own lives as persons, we are attending to matters of fact, setting out within the context of our own experience to make sense of the whole. What we need, if the explanatory project is not to end in bankruptcy, is “not some new law of gravity or some broader field theory, but a name for the Perfection toward which all things grope, the Source of the gifts—the strengths and energies—by which we strive.”45 The best name that we can give this ultimate and perfect source of goodness, which funds the conatus of all things, is God. And yet, “because God’s reality is the apex of reasoning, the summit toward which all explorations point, the monotheist’s affirmations of God’s reality can bear no certainty.”46 We cannot know for certain that our state-

42 Ibid. 43 Ibid., 77. 44 Ibid., 78. 45 Ibid., 77. 46 Ibid., 79 (emphasis added). LENN E. GOODMAN: AN INTELLECTUAL PORTRAIT 19 ments about God refer to an actually existing ultimate and perfect being; we can only clear the conceptual ground on which we erect the intellectual structure of our faith. An absolute being cannot be known as all lesser beings can; our very language about God must reflect a Maimonidean epistemic chastity. Goodman is blunt and deflationary: “The idea of God, like any idea, is necessarily a fiction, but it intends a reality no less than do our ideas of gravity or causality. Because God’s reality is absolute, all the best we can say of him sounds like the children’s stories that we dignify with the name of poetry.”47 This is the point where a theologian might introduce the doctrine of Revelation, a unique disclosure by God of His teaching, Law, and truth but that is rather alien to Goodman’s project of philosophical and religious naturalism. His métier is natural, not revealed, theology. The canonical text of Judaism, the written Torah, is redolent with truths of great philosophical significance, but they don’t come from the mouth of the Absolute, in any direct way. Truth is a kind of self-revelation of God, but that is true for all truths. The moral insight and power of prophetic teaching partake of the poetry that seeks to render the Source of goodness intelligible. The poetry which the tradition remembers as having come as close as possible to the truth of the Source gained the status of Scripture; God’s speech, as it were, in a human tongue. But the insight and teaching are not per se controlling; they prove their bona fides by according with, while purifying and height- ening, intuitions of the Good, of which we are already aware. Here we enter into Goodman’s ethics, a major dimension of his oeuvre.

Moral Philosophy

The themes of ontic desert, creation, and God as the source of good limn the shape of Goodman’s moral philosophy. The conatus of all created beings intends the perfection of each according to its mode of being. God’s perfection is both source and goal; “God’s goodness binds all to the good not by logic but by aspiration.”48 Creation is an essay on the theme of originary and emergent goodness. Ethics is the aspiration and the practice of giving all beings their due. This aspiration, in human persons, is felt as imperatival; in the language of Scripture, as a command. “The broadest norm that the

47 Ibid. 48 Ibid., 82. 20 LENN E. GOODMAN: AN INTELLECTUAL PORTRAIT biblical commandments point to is the obligation to pursue perfection.”49 The pursuit of perfection is both deontic and telic. “Perfection issues a command which no imperfect being ignores.”50 The profuse biblical use of the language of commandment should not conjure images of God as arbitrary or authoritarian. God’s commands channel, integrate, and ennoble our deepest strivings and highest values. There is no gap between what sound moral sense recognizes as our highest values and our idea of God. The two rise together and refine one another. Our values purify our originally mythic, culturally freighted ideas of God. The idea of God stabilizes, deepens, universalizes, and enriches our highest values. What “commandment” makes thematic is not the provenance but the absoluteness of value, the Torah’s uncompromising demand for justice and love. Commands are not imposed in a manner foreign to our nature; the authority of norms, such as those enshrined by the Torah, is immediately intelligible to persons in pursuit of perfection. Goodman holds that the response to divine Perfection as the creaturely pursuit of perfection needs no deeper justification. None exists. “[J]ust as we should recognize truths just because they are true, we ought to love what is good and perfect just because it is such, and we ought to do justice, to pursue justice, as the Torah puts it, just because it is justice.”51 Goodman’s approach seeks to dissolve classic philosophical problems, such as posed by Plato (at least in the conventional reading) in the Euthyphro or Kant in the Groundwork. Goodman sees no tension between the good that God requires and a good that binds God. Nor does he see a tension between the Torah’s commandments as an allegedly heteronomous source of normativity and an autonomous endorsement of norms. What is truly good is good intrinsically, not just because God has pronounced it so. We discern it in nature; our receptivity to and knowledge of value mediates our grasp of the good. But we also view God as nature’s author and source, so in discerning the good we discern God’s commands. Similarly, in willing the good, in doing what is right, our grasp of obligation is simultaneously a grasp of divine command. “The monotheist’s moral system, then, is not simply a top-down affair. God is the author of all value. But all our sound apprehensions of value, for that very reason, lead back to God: It’s not just

49 Ibid., 82. 50 Ibid., 81. 51 Lenn E. Goodman, Love Thy Neighbor as Thyself (New York: Oxford University Press, 2008), 26. LENN E. GOODMAN: AN INTELLECTUAL PORTRAIT 21 that we know the right because we know God’s will. We also know God’s will because we know what is right.”52 Goodman’s ethics, as we saw at the outset in his critique of Rawls, is anchored in a metaphysics. It is poles apart from contemporary convention- alisms of all kinds, but also from the religious ethic of a divine command morality. His naturalism and rationalism underwrite a moral realism in which human beings have broad access to compelling values (and disturbing disvalues) but also need help in choosing, adhering, strengthening and activating the power of the highest one. God and the Torah greatly facili- tate that lifelong personal and communal endeavor. Thus, what “revelation and the idea of God contribute to ethics is dialectical, not foundational.”53 The Torah gives context and content to values; it does not invent them ex nihilo. The idea of God gives absoluteness, depth, spirituality, and grandeur to ethics. Ethics is etiolated but not absurd without God. The relationship between religion and ethics is dialectical. Goodman sometimes uses the rock climbing term, chimneying. One works up two sheer facing cliffs by using the surfaces of both. In contemporary terms, Goodman’s moral philosophy is a virtue ethics. As with much medieval Jewish moral philosophy, the virtues are integrated by the human imitation of God. The imperative of Deuteronomy 6:18, “Do what is right and good in the eyes of the Lord,” in its open-endedness reflects “God’s infinite perfection, which we are called to emulate.”54 The prescriptions of the Torah—not only in their aspirational dimensions but also in their pointedly legal formulae—project a path toward perfection. “They guide us toward actions where there is merit in exceeding the letter of the law. Concrete as the steppingstones may be, the goal is to enhance our inner likeness to God. So it remains open-ended.”55

The selections from the work of Lenn Goodman that follow flesh out the positions that I have sketched above. In these essays, Goodman clarifies and defends the values that motivate the concept of creation, such as freedom, comprehensibility, personhood, and the goodness of being. The numerous Jewish texts that he cites will have authority, but not an authority that comes from the top down, as if they must be accepted with obedient deference. Rather, they earn their authority by the human and

52 Ibid., 51. 53 Ibid., 53. 54 Ibid., 60. 55 Ibid., 61. 22 LENN E. GOODMAN: AN INTELLECTUAL PORTRAIT moral wisdom that they reflect. He works toward the divine, not from it (as if that were possible). Lenn Goodman’s thought continues the legacy of giants such as Saadia Gaon and Moses Maimonides, not just in form but in inspiration. Catholic moral philosophers have a more or less continuous tradition of Thomism in which to situate themselves. Jewish philosophers must reinvent their relationship with their forbears in every generation. This opens the Jewish philosopher to too great a dependence on the prevailing paradigm. For some moderns, it has been Kantianism; for others, existentialism. Today, it is likely to be postmodernism. Goodman falls prey to none of that. He is original and radical. His making the medieval Jewish and Islamic philosophers contemporaries liberates him from the narrowness and hubris of the present, without neglecting its urgent human problems. Nor does he take only the easy lessons from the past; he conveys more than the chapter headings. Like his ancestors, he does the hard work of ontology, axiology, epistemology, logic, political theory, philosophy of language and of mind and of science, and more—all at a very high level of technical expertise and scholarly precision—in a way that would make a Maimonides proud. To my knowledge, no contemporary Jewish philosopher achieves either his range or his depth. He seems to have avoided the fate described by the Talmudic aphorism: he who tries to grasp too much will grasp nothing. Goodman has grasped a very great deal and those who would be his students will grasp much as well. VALUE AND THE DYNAMICS OF BEING*

Lenn E. Goodman

It was in a search for ultimates (archai) that Aristotle thought human curiosity found its highest object: Our thirst for answers would find the understanding we naturally seek when the mind had struck the most universal themes running through the varieties of things, discerned the most general character of being, and followed up on the quest for causes by tracing things to an ultimate cause. If the search went well, it would find an ultimate value as well, discover the roots of value in things and satisfy the Socratic itch to see how Intelligence orders the world and “arranges each thing in the way best for it.”1 Presocratics like Thales and Anaximenes thought they had caught sight of an underlying unity and ultimate causal ground in the matter of things. Their quest survives in the modern physicist’s search for ultimate particles. But values, for the Physikoi, took a back seat, except for rather stark values like stability and the fecundity that could unfold a colorful and clamorous world from the womb of material uniformity. In Aristotle’s larger quest, the search for basic matter was just a very partial first step. What we are really after, as Aristotle saw it, are basic principles, the rules of nature’s game. Thus the talk in Heraclitus of a logos, a pattern that makes sense of change,2

This article was first published as Lenn E. Goodman, “Value and the Dynamics of Being,” Review of Metaphysics 61, no. 1 (2007): 61–80. Copyright © 2007 by The Review of Metaphys- ics. Used with permission. Correspondence to: Vanderbilt University, Department of Philosophy, 111 Furman Hall, Nashville, TN 37240. * Metaphysical Society of America Presidential Address. March 11, 2007. 1 Plato, Phaedo 97d, trans. Hugh Tredennick, ed. Edith Hamilton and Huntington Cairns (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1961), 79. 2 Heraclitus, Fragment 1, from Sextus, Adversus Mathematikos 8.132, G. S. Kirk, J. E. Raven and M. Schofield, The Presocratic Philosophers (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985), §194: “Of the Logos which is as I describe it men always prove to be uncomprehend- ing, both before they have heard of it and when once they have heard of it. For, although all things happen according to this Logos men are like people with no experience, even when they experience such words and deeds as I explain, when I distinguish each thing according to its nature.” In speaking of each thing according to its nature (kata physin) Heraclitus shifts subtly from a material to a more dynamic conception of the patterns of change. For the Logos as a principle of unity, see Fragment 50, from Hippolytus, Ref. 9.1 24 VALUE AND THE DYNAMICS OF BEING and the advice to look to the common3—although change itself seemed the most general rule in nature. To Parmenides, however, change seemed at war with logic. Did not change demand, against all logic, that a thing become what it is not? Plato, deferring to his friend Cratylus, conceded nature, in large part, to the rule of change, for mutability was a challenge not just to logic, or to life, but to the very possibility of knowing. It made things teasing, elusive, always slipping the epistemic net, denying them definiteness and definition, the determinacy that would make knowledge possible and the stability that Plato expected reality to manifest. Still in tune with the Eleatic intellectualism that barred the ontic door against the unthinkable, Plato reasoned that if nature cannot hold still, it cannot be known; and what cannot be known in principle should not be said to be but only to become. So reality of any ultimate sort was kicked upstairs, to the realm of pure Ideas. Being demanded constancy. Thus it was in the realm of the immutable that the highest causes, and the highest good, were to be sought. Aristotle fought shy of that outcome, at least in part. Focusing on what does stay constant in nature and unwilling to banish knowledge from the natural realm, he found intelligible forms in the species of things. As that choice reveals, he did not relinquish the Parmenidean bias against change. So species, as stolid objects of scientific predication, became immutable and unoriginate. This they had not been for Plato, who adjusted the likeli- ness of his likely story to the flickering light of nature’s cave but allowed for a becoming not just of individuals but of their natural kinds. For Aristotle, by contrast, species were pristine. Individual differences could be dismissed as insignificant, mere accidents, sports of nature that do not touch the universal essences of things.4 Science studies what is constant. Its aim is to discover, in the universal essences of things, why they must be as they are. Here Aristotle’s science paid a price. Perhaps overreacting against the Democritean reduction of qualitative to quantitative change, Aristotle favored the qualitative and lost sight of the possible significance of the seemingly negligible discrepancies in pattern. As for narrative modes of

(Kirk, Raven and Schofield §196). Translations from the Presocratics in this article follow the first edition of Kirk and Raven (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1963). 3 Heraclitus, Fragment 2. 4 See Aristotle, Physics 2.8; History of Animals 2.17.507a20–3; 6.2.559b20, and so forth. Unless otherwise noted, translations from Aristotle in this article follow the Revised Oxford translation, ed. Jonathan Barnes, The Complete Works of Aristotle (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1984), 2 volumes. VALUE AND THE DYNAMICS OF BEING 25 explanation, which Plato’s poetry had sought to enfold at least within the rhetoric of philosophy, again Aristotle sought purity at the expense of his usual openness to diverse views and methods. Narrative was the mode of myth, and Aristotle saw mythic discourse as an inchoate snatching at philosophical questions that inevitably escaped the poet’s net.5 Myth could symbolize,6 and history could situate (as it does in the background stories of constitutions in the Politics), but history would not become a science. Moreover, no myth could offer genuine explanations—any more than Plato’s conceptual analysis in search of normative definitions could function as a method of discovery.7 Cosmology, then, could never be cosmogonic. Tales of the world’s origins were simply mythic surrogates for philosophy, not a source of knowledge, let alone of understanding. Enchanted with the constancy of pattern in nature, Aristotle did not move on from, say, dissection and report to controlled experiment and organized validation of assembled evidence. The historical modes of explanation remained underexploited in his work. So did the quantitative focus that would become the emblem of modern science. So did the mathematical interest that Plato had foregrounded, following a taste for mathematics that Aristotle did not share. There was a price to pay in metaphysics too: ultimate causality hovered beyond time, in the unchanging Nous. That Intelligence was just the sort of mind that Socrates had hoped for and found wanting in Anaxagoras. Aristotle’s Nous was a mind adept at ordering all things, not by pushing or pulling or any other mechanical process that would send Nous stumbling into nature’s causal quicksand, where all things are followed and preceded, and in touch with other causes like themselves. Natural causes were many, but Nous was singular, albeit not unique. Its causal work was no menial craft or even literal design, but genteel and indirect: it governed more by what it was than what it did—ruling by the very perfection of its life.

5 Aristotle writes with a mixture of awe and a serene sense of the superiority of philosophy and science: “[A] man who is puzzled and wonders thinks himself ignorant (whence even the lover of myth is in a sense a lover of wisdom, for myth is composed of wonders).” Metaphysics 1.2.982b17–20. But late in life Aristotle wrote: “The more solitary and isolated I am the more have I come to love myths.” Fragment 668, in Aristotelis qui ferebantur libro- rum fragmenta, ed. Valentin Rose (Leipzig: Teubner, 1886). 6 Thus, for example, Aristotle’s vision of humanity with and without civilization is profoundly informed by the Homeric tableaux of the lives of the Cyclopes, Calypso, Circe, and the Phaiacians. Most informative in this regard is Norman Austin’s Archery at the Dark of the Moon (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1982). 7 See Aristotle, Posterior Analytics 2.4–7. 26 VALUE AND THE DYNAMICS OF BEING

The perfect self-sufficiency of that divine Mind’s life of thought drew the all-governing spheres into their unending and unchanging choric dance, the revolutions that visibly express the yearning of lesser gods for the perfection of the highest. In the same way, divinity would activate every realization in a lesser mind and impart to all natural beings the energies—the formal patterns and telic reach—that allow the elements in their elemental way and living species in their lives to pursue their own invariant cycles, the motions and changes in which they too, like the eternal heavens, exhibit, each in its own way, a striving for perfection. Motion, Aristotle argued, could not move itself. Nor could thought boot- strap itself into actuality. It was the God who did that, not clumsily like a puppet master, or, in Aristotle’s own analogy, a deus ex machina in a bad play,8 but drawing them by inboard motives toward a goodness that is also their own, a pros hen recension of actuality and self-sufficiency. Aristotle showed a deep ambivalence here. On the one hand he argued that bodies cannot move themselves; and, on the other, that all move by intrinsic natural tendencies. And again, he argued that thoughts cannot just originate themselves—as if starting to think by starting to think of thinking, and so to an infinite regress. But on the other hand, the active intellect, although divine, impassive and imperishable, is also ours. For, after all, it is we who think what we think.9 Clearly the divine in Aristotle works from within. The immortal soul that Plato spoke of is itself divine—as the Socratic inversion of the Delphic ora- cle more than hinted.10 And the prime mover of the Physics works imma-

8 Assimilating Anaxagoras and Empedocles to Hesiod, Aristotle writes: “These thinkers, as we say, got hold up to a certain point of two of the causes which we distinguished in our work on nature—matter and the source of movement—vaguely, however, and with no clearness, but as untrained men behave in fights; for they go round their opponents and often strike fine blows, but they do not fight on scientific principles, and so these thinkers do not seem to know what they say; for it is evident that, as a rule, they do not make use of their causes except to a small extent. For Anaxagoras uses reason as deus ex machina for the making of the world, and when he is at a loss to tell for what cause something must be, then he drags reason in, but in all other cases ascribes events to anything rather than reason.” Metaphysics 1.4.985a11–21. 9 Eudemian Ethics 7.14.248a15–29; De Anima 3.5. 10 The Epinomis (988a) urges: “Let none of the Greeks fear that it is not right for mortal men ever to busy themselves with matters divine; they must hold entirely the opposite view”; see Aristotle, Metaphysics 1.2.982b28, which echoes the next page of Plato’s Epi- nomis, arguing that the divine is not jealous of its knowledge; and see Nicomachaean Ethics 10.7.1177b31–2, rejecting the counsel given in Euripides’ Bacchae 395 and 427 that we must hew to our mortality. See Werner Jaeger, Aristotle (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1934), 164 note. For the Socratic inversion: see Alcibiades 127e, 132b and Plato’s Philebus 48c, Charmides 164d. For the later history of the Socratic inversion, Alexander Altmann, VALUE AND THE DYNAMICS OF BEING 27 nently, within things. It is absent only by abstraction. It helped Aristotle here to be no monotheist. And it helped the later platonists to know that the arithmetic of Plato’s Forms is far from clear cut. As neoplatonists would put it, where separate bodies do not individuate things, the notions of same and different do not successfully apply. Goaded by the dynamism of the Stoic cosmos, with its tonos and its sympatheia,11 the neoplatonists saw more liveliness in nature than Plato had allowed for when (to Aristotle’s embarrassment) he made changeless Forms the ultimate causes of all that is real in a changeable reality. Just as Hellenistic sculptors breathed new life and passion into the fluttering wings and draperies of the divine spirit of Victory, so the Middle Platonists framed a livelier description of the linkage between Being and becoming than even Plato’s poetry had been able to capture in the static language of the logic of participation. We can see this in Philo’s making the Logos at once the wisdom and the word of God, an attribute, but also an expression of God’s wisdom in and for the world. We can see the same eagerness to connect the temporal with the timeless in the general Middle Platonist strategy (reliant on the Aristotelian identity of thought, thinker and thinking), of housing Plato’s Forms in Aristotle’s Nous.12 For the neoplatonists, Plato’s highest Form and highest god, the god he called the One and the Form of the Good, was not just ultimate but also infinite and dynamic. Those two notions, of infinity and power, were

“The Delphic Maxim in Medieval Islam and Judaism,” in Studies in Religious Philosophy and Mysticism (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1969), 1–40. 11 See Shmuel Sambursky, Physics of the Stoics (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1959). 12 See John Dillon, The Middle Platonists (London: Duckworth, 1977), 95: “If, as we have seen, the Demiurge—and the World Soul—are identified by Antiochus with the Stoic Pneuma-Logos, there is nothing left for the Paradigm of the Timaeus to be but the content of the intellect of the Logos, the sum-total of his logoi spermatikoi, on the pattern of which the physical world is constructed. Now by agreement among all later Platonists, the Paradigm of the Timaeus was nothing but the sum total of the Ideas, which are given no place as such in the Timaeus. The logoi spermatikoi of the Logos thus inevitably become for Antiochus the Ideas in their ‘transcendent’ or ‘objective’ aspect. A suitable home has been found for them; they may now be termed ‘the thoughts of God’. Unfortunately, Antio- chus (as filtered down to us through Cicero) never makes this identification in so many words, and so certain scholars have persisted in regarding the origin of this concept as a mystery, but since it appears as noncontroversial in the writings of both Philo Judaeus and Seneca, as we shall see, and as it is the natural conclusion of Antiochus’ general theory of knowledge, the matter seems hardly to admit of much doubt.” Dillon goes on to note that Varro (ap. Augustine, De Civitate Dei 7.28) actually allegorizes Jupiter, Minerva, and Juno as God, Ideas, and Matter; see pp. 254–5, 410; for immanent ideas, 136–7; and see Harry Wolfson, “Extradeical and Intradeical Interpretations of Platonic Ideas,” in Religious Phi- losophy: A Group of Essays (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1961), 27–68. 28 VALUE AND THE DYNAMICS OF BEING rescued by Plotinus from the metaphysical discard heap of Hellenic philosophy. The classical philosophers had tended to equate infinity with mere indefiniteness, polar opposite to the determinacy that was a chief mark of being. Aristotle had seen dynamis as mere potential, an answer to Megarian logicist polemics against the possibility of change. Aristotelian dynamis was immured in matter and thus identified (with telling androcentrism) with receptivity, not form and actuality. Still, the ultimate causal dynamism of neoplatonism, the emanation that gave life and form to all things, remained divorced from time. So, how it was that eternity might acquire a moving image remained a mystery. Plotinus could argue that Soul must think discursively. In that way, he creatively proposed, sounding almost like the Indian gymnosophists he had so hoped to meet, that Soul gives rise to time. Soul, however, even for Plotinus, remained the timeless product of a timeless Mind, Aristotle’s Nous, now made the handmaid of the Good and receptacle of the Forms. Thus it is hard to see, in neoplatonism, where temporality would arise. The old Aristotelian fear of dragging divinity into the toils of time led neoplatonists to disrupt the unity that was their ultimate goal. They would fix a duality at every step of their many-tiered ontology and then station some intermediary at every tier of that ontic wedding cake—a hypostasis that would, of course, bear with it a new duality and demand yet further intermediation.13 We can see the healthy distaste for the resultant baroque ontology when Judah Halevi asks the medieval admirers of the neoplatonic edifice, with earthy common sense, why God would need Pythagorean numbers, spheres, or angels to carry out the work of creation—especially if creation is absolute, as Genesis suggests. Halevi’s God (Philonically) uses and needs no intermediary beyond his commanding Word. To postulate, as claimants to the title of philosopher seemed to think necessary, that the spheres pre- cipitate from disembodied intellects is “sheer supposition,” Halevi writes, “without a shred of cogency.”14 How, he asks, does God’s simplicity yield

13 E. R. Dodds traces to Iamblichus “the triadic scheme” enshrined in the system of Proclus, of monos, phrohodos, and epistrophe, that is, “the law of mean terms,” and the more general principle it typifies, “the mirroring at successive levels of identical structures.” He writes, too, that to Iamblichus, “Mystagogue and thaumaturgist that he was . . . belongs the honour or the reproach of being the first scholastic.” Introduction to Proclus, The Elements of Theology (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1964), xix–xx. 14 Judah Halevi, Kitab al-Radd wa ’l-Dalil fi ’l-Din al-Dhalil (The Book of Rebuttal and Argument in behalf of the Abased Religion), known as the Kuzari 4.25, ed. David Baneth (Jerusalem: The Hebrew University Press, 1977), 174. See Harry Wolfson, “Hallevi and VALUE AND THE DYNAMICS OF BEING 29 complexity, as the neoplatonists would have it, if the simplex, on their account, gives rise only to the simplex?15 And why should awareness entail ever new intellects into existence—let alone celestial spheres? If that could be, why did Aristotle’s self-knowledge not give birth to a sphere? It was Spinoza who found the essences of things and thus the answer to the general question about the nature of being, not in what was static, but in what was dynamic in each reality. Essences now were unique and individual, not uniform by type; and they were conative. Change, as Aristotle saw, is not random. Indeed, its constancy gives the mind a tail to catch it by, and the finitude of its speed eases Plato’s worries as to its inconstancy. But if change is not random, neither is it wholly determined externally and by what has gone before. For if that were so, as Maimonides argued, there would be no change at all.16 Rather, as Spinoza argued, change moves as demanded by the project of each being and is limited or conditioned by the action of beings. Medieval neoplatonists, seeking ultimacy in the absoluteness of the One, found nothing in things that was distinctively and decisively their own— beyond the otherness that gave finite composites their embodiment. All determinacy, truth and beauty were imported from above. All essences were the gifts of the Active Intellect in its role as Form Giver. Descartes exploited that model when he used doubt and abstraction to strip all natural bodies of their properties, on the grounds that no sensible attribute is irreplaceable. That left bare geometrical extension as the one unremovable essence that must count as the true nature of the physical. But Spinoza found an inner liveliness in things, even an inchoate “perception,” if we take the term in a broad and general sense, indicating, as it were, a Stoic affectedness of each thing by all the rest. Inertia, as Galilean physics showed, was not just a brake on change. It was also the source of a momentum by which all bodies stay at rest if stationary but press onward if already in motion. In a larger sense, as Spinoza saw, the same could be said, at a higher order of complexity, for those complex “ratios of motion and of rest” that

Maimonides on Design, Chance and Necessity” (1941), reprinted in Studies in the History of Philosophy and Religion, ed. Isadore Twersky and George H. Williams, vol. 2 (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1977), 1–59. 15 See Arthur Hyman, “From What Is One and Simple Only What Is One and Simple Can Come to Be,” in Neoplatonism and Jewish Thought, ed. Lenn E. Goodman (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1992), 111–35. 16 Moses Maimonides, Dalalat al-Ha’irin 2.19 (The Guide to the Perplexed), ed. with French translation by Salamon Munk, vol. 3 (Paris, 1856–66; repr., Osnabrück, 1964), 39b. 30 VALUE AND THE DYNAMICS OF BEING constitute the identities of more elaborate physical systems. The striving of each thing to persist in being is evident in the relative stability of such systems. This is not a striving to persist in sameness. For that, as Maimonides saw, would militate against change, and, if successful, would exclude it. In a dynamic world, persistence itself demands change, a demand brilliantly met in living beings, where the conatus plants the seeds of life. Descartes, as Leibniz saw, by making extension the sole nature in the perceptible world, overlooked both cohesion and impenetrability.17 And Newton, Leibniz’s rival for the authorship of the calculus that rescues change from Plato’s charge of inscrutability, would press beyond Leibnizian intensional properties, to introduce the idea of mass, successfully explaining inertia (which Leibniz had hoped would account for cohesion) by way of gravity. But that was an expedient in which Leibniz sought no share. For Newton’s theory of gravity would always seem to him to posit an occult property, and thus to call upon nature for a perpetual miracle.18 After all, wasn’t gravity a force operating at a distance? Newton’s laws of motion and of gravity, despite the body blow they dealt to the premises and predilections of mechanistic physics, would become the rallying cry of a new reductionism, much as Cartesian extension and Democritean atomism had been before. But Newton found a dynamism that runs far deeper than mere impenetrability or even inertia, an aggrega- tive tendency that even Epicureans could not inject into the Democritean cosmos without positing a mystic, uncaused swerve. Gravity, however, only opened the door. The discovery that matter is in constant motion, that heat is motion’s inseparable shadow—indeed, Joule’s discovery of the mechanical equivalent of heat—the recognition that subatomic particles are charged as well as swiftly moving, the fuller apprehension of the ways in which chemical compounds bear properties unseen in the reagents conjoined in their composition, the realization that even the elements of such compounds may break down or fuse, with immense

17 See Leibniz’s letter to Hobbes of July 13/22, 1670, his “Confession against the Atheists” (1669), “Theory of Abstract Motion” (1671), Letter to Arnauld (early November, 1671), and critique of Descartes (1692)—all in Leibniz: Philosophical Papers and Letters, ed. Leroy E. Loemker (Dordrecht: Reidel, 1976), 106, 111, 140–41, 148, 402–5. 18 Leibniz scouts the theory of gravity in the Leibniz-Clarke Correspondence, ed. Henry Gavin Alexander (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1956), Letter 3 (February 25, 1716), §17; Letter 4 (June 2, 1716), §45; and Letter 5 (August 18, 1716), §§118–23. As Alexander writes in summary (in his introduction to the correspondence, p. xviii), Leibniz continues in all his later writings to call Newtonian gravity “either an occult property or a perpetual miracle.” VALUE AND THE DYNAMICS OF BEING 31 consequence in energetics (now in the modern sense): all these revealed varieties of dynamism in nature that the sheer mechanism of positive impact—of hammers and nails and pincers and tongs—could not anticipate. And all that holds true even before we reach the threshold of life. Darwin will be made the poster child of mechanism by those who think that evolution by natural selection puts paid to the very idea of species, let alone all notions of teleology. But Darwinian species, albeit not discrete, remain distinct. Otherwise, there would be nothing for evolution to explain. Moreover, it was Darwin who gave real meaning to the idea of species, not by falling back on some ancient notion of archetypes but by anchoring taxonomy in genealogy—vouched for, as we know now, not just by the fossil record or the structural markers of analogy and homology but independently, by the dna. No less a Darwinian than Stephen Jay Gould will lobby for the proposition that species are the real individuals in biology.19 Even quite apart from any such scholastic, mereological dispute, we can see that adaptation, the pivotal concept for natural selection, is as teleological an idea as health or disease. It does not entail forethought, to be sure, if that means an over- arching, anthropocentric, normative plan. But it tellingly links value to causality in the history of life. What Darwin preserves is local value, to be sure. The ends are those of species. These are protean, unquestionably. But they are clearly values, and nothing merely neutral. For whatever is adaptive is advantageous, selected for by the benefits it confers on a population in an environment. There is no value free biology. Considering biology from an evolutionary standpoint, that is, the standpoint of nature’s dynamism, we can see that ‘reproduction’ was a misnomer—or an ill-formed concept. For it is not the case, pace Jacques Monod, that “the source of information expressed in the structure of a living being is always another structurally identical object.” Procreation is not “invariant reproduction,” or mutation would be nonexistent and evolution impossible. It is not, as Monod wrote so fluently, the remarkable ability

19 See Stephen Jay Gould, The Structure of Evolutionary Theory (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2002), 604–8, 612, 703–4: “I propose, as the central proposition of macro- evolution, that species play the same role of fundamental individual that organisms assume in microevolution. Species represent the basic units in theories and mechanisms of macroevolutionary change. In this formulation, the origins and extinctions of species become strictly analogous to the births and deaths of organisms—and just as natural selection works through differential proliferation based on schedules of organismal births and deaths, so too does species selection operate upon the frequencies and timetable of origins and extinctions.” 32 VALUE AND THE DYNAMICS OF BEING of organisms “to reproduce and to transmit ne varietur the information corresponding to their own structure” that enables living species to surmount and indeed profit from altered conditions.20 Invariant replication, as Monod saw, is not a bad description of crystal formation, perhaps.21 But it is not the way life works. Living beings adapt to their environment. So do living species. The genetic material, whose comprehension Monod so brilliantly pioneered, varies from one generation to the next. Often it varies by means that shuffle the genetic deck without shredding the chromosomal cards. So mutations that have proven beneficial in their context are retained even as new combinations are essayed. Writing when the genetic process was just beginning to be brought into the light, Teilhard de Chardin compared it to groping in the dark: trials made at random yield outcomes that forge a direction for themselves.22 From the earliest coalescence of particles, to the fusion of new elements “cooked” in the stars, to complex, self-regulating systems like the Krebs and citric cycles, to the thought processes of human beings, the great theme in cosmic history is not stasis but emergence, projection of ever more complex and ambitious projects, the rise of ever more autonomous, and ever more interdependent beings. (That conjunction is not a paradox, for complexity demands interdependence—symbiosis as well as serendipity.) Henri Bergson would thematize the dynamism of nature under the name of creativity. Part of what evolutionary processes have in common with creativity in the arts is that outcomes are not wholly determined by what has gone before. Beings emerge that are ever more able to set their own course, project their own future—even, within limits, to define their own project.

20 Jacques Monod, Chance and Necessity (New York: Knopf, 1971; first French edition, 1970), 12; italics are Monod’s. 21 I say perhaps, since my physicist friends tell me that crystals often have multiple states and need not always fall into the lowest of these in terms of energy level. 22 Groping, on Teilhard’s account, is “the specific and invincible weapon of all expanding multitudes.” This “fundamental technique,” he writes, “strangely combines the blind fantasy of large numbers with the precise orientation of a specific target.” That target, we hasten to add, is not singled out in advance. Hence the force of the metaphor. “Groping is directed chance,” Teilhard insists. But the direction is not that of a marionette master. It is internally driven and situationally, environmentally steered. Groping “means pervading everything so as to try everything, and trying everything so as to find everything.” Thus, “it is precisely to develop this procedure (always increasing in size and costs in proportion as it spreads) that nature has recourse to profusion.” Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, The Phenomenon of Man, trans. Bernard Wall (New York: Harper, 1965; first French edition, 1955), 110; see 118, 223–4. Italics are Teilhard’s. Note that when investment in the individual becomes too great to allow profusion at the organismic level, gametes like pollen or sperm remain prolific. VALUE AND THE DYNAMICS OF BEING 33

For Teilhard, the linkage of stability and autonomy, complexity and cooperation, lights up the path of what he calls Ariadne’s thread. Guiding him through the seeming labyrinth of taxonomy, that thread was the clue to discerning which evolutionary salients are productive and which are dead ends.23 None, as I would insist, are dead ends in any real sense. For the neoplatonists were right to say that every being and every kind exists for its own sake and finds its worth in the being it has. The golden thread that Teilhard traces, however, leads not just to life but to thought, and not just to thought but to caring.24 Insects, like every living being, struggle for life. But the exoskeleton, by its weight, constrains their mass to a scale that precludes higher nervous organization, making survival of any higher sort a social project, to a degree that blocks the path to autonomy and stifles the prospects of the sort of recognition that would give meaning to the idea of love.25 It is because the elemental givens bear potentials for emergence, and not because the prospect was determined from the outset, that Teilhard can see the evolutionary project as directional and can find in its telic character roots of the values it will grope for and attain—much as Darwin found roots of emotion, devotion, expression, and even conscience in the evolutionary forbears of those phenomena. The Alpha, in Teilhard’s biblicizing language, fuses, beyond time and history, with the Omega.26 Or, as the Hebrew liturgy has it: Sof ma‘aseh, be-mahashavah tehilla—What was last in the making was there from the beginning, not actual but virtual, in the idea.27 It is the conative character of being that leads me to equate being with value. If being were static, there would be little basis for this claim, and no one, of course, to make it. I do not think of value as a property of things, natural or nonnatural, or supervenient. Rather, I think of being itself as a value. The value of a being is its essence in Spinoza’s sense, its conative project. It is this project that gives beings worth—through the claims they make. Those claims are the prima facie deserts of any being; and the relative worth of beings is in the measure of their claims arrayed beside each other, whether in rivalry, or use, or collaboration.

23 Ibid., 141–6. 24 Ibid., 164–80. 25 See ibid., 153–5. 26 Ibid., 309–10. 27 The line is from Lecha Dodi, the sixteenth century epithalamion by Rabbi Solomon Alkabets celebrating God’s mystical Sabbath reunion with his manifest presence, the She khinah. Philip Birnbaum, ed., Daily Prayer Book (New York: Hebrew Publishing Company, 1949), 245–6. 34 VALUE AND THE DYNAMICS OF BEING

It is impossible to say a priori and in general what those claims amount to or how they stack up against one another, for the same reason that it is impossible to predict a priori what the outcome of a creative process will be—and for the same reason that science is empirical. We do not study being a priori. We learn of its potentials and actualities through experience. It is here that we see elements and compounds as an achievement, but an achievement that does not reach so high as the living beings they constitute—beings energized by sunlight and nourished by those elements and compounds, and by one another. When we survey nature and see what is achieved within it, we recognize being as value: beings make claims that deserve not to be ignored. It is not the case that there is nothing to be chosen between the existence of something and the existence of nothing at all. It is not the case that, say, undif- ferentiated being would be a more worthwhile state of affairs than is the sort of cosmos that we actually encounter. The weakness of most varieties of moral realism lies in its troubles over what makes for the truth of moral facts. There is a search for natural properties or states of affairs whose very occurrence makes the world a better place. If such are identified, the realism begins to look like a kind of naturalism, subject to the critique leveled by Hume and later Moore against all attempts to reduce the good to natural terms. But if ‘good’ is meant to name a nonnatural property, it falls into a mare’s nest of issues about how any property of natural beings could be nonnatural, and how nonnatural properties might be identified, appraised. Do we need a nonnatural faculty—intuition, inspiration?—even to spot them, let alone distinguish or describe them, or gauge their relative worth?28 I think there are moral facts—that the world is a better place for the existence, say, of human virtues. But I do not think the good reduces to the sort of sheer facticity that Hume’s arguments targeted. Clearly not all that happens is good just because it happens. I still think it is better that something exists rather than nothing. I can believe that because experience gives me a pretty concrete idea of what sort of somethings there actually are: it is good that life exists, and better for there to be sensation and awareness than just, say, vegetation. Richard Gale issues a familiar challenge: What if there were a world where torture was the sole experience? That, I concede, would not be good.

28 See John Leslie Mackie, Ethics: Inventing Right and Wrong (New York: Penguin, 1977). VALUE AND THE DYNAMICS OF BEING 35

But that is not the world we live in. There is pain in our world, but pain is not the norm, and it is hard to see how it could be. Pain, in the actual world, evolved as a warning against harm: its very existence presupposes the reality of other, better things. Those things—realities, not just experiences, but the beings that suffer or enjoy experiences and that can alleviate each other’s pain and give each other joy—are what give this world its worth. Part of what I see in the world is that natural beings, by nature, tend to reach beyond themselves. The conatus that is the essence of each being makes claims that deserve consideration—even respect, sometimes “rever- ence,” as Albert Schweitzer put it. If so, the is/ought contrast projects a false dichotomy, and so does the natural/nonnatural distinction. Philosophers who treat reality at large as value neutral neglect the dynamism of nature. They fail to see the inherent value of beings. They strip the claims that beings make of their prescriptive force—partly by ignoring the transcendent dimension that makes all things in nature more than merely natural. Value, as I see it, is not a property supervenient on the being of things. It is their being and the project of their being. I see value in the very existence of things, because that existence is dynamic and conative. Beings make claims, and those claims establish prima facie deserts. The equilibration of such claims in relation to each other lays out the basis of actual deserts. In the resultant hierarchy, persons, by dint of their subjecthood, reach a moral plateau that grounds human worth and dignity, existential rights and equality. The search for value as a nonnatural property was an artifact, a hang- over of the logicism of an era when the work of philosophy was widely supposed to be linguistic analysis, and values were sought by parsing value judgments—as if the good were to be found (or found missing) in a term. That, I think, was a category error, perhaps connected to another: trying to derive value judgments deductively, from a propositional or linguistic source—as if justification meant implication. But just as causal laws will never be discovered by deductive reasoning, so will prescriptive principles never be unearthed among the properties of a predicate. If value is real it must reside in the only things that are real, not in sentences or terms but in beings. The approach I am taking is as old as Genesis, where God beholds the light and sees that it is good. He does not just call it good and impose that description. Nor does He make its goodness dependent on anyone’s opin- ion, or use, or appreciation. God (in the poetry of Genesis) sees that the light itself is good, as a work of art might be judged good, not for its uses but for what it is. 36 VALUE AND THE DYNAMICS OF BEING

The worth of beings, I think, is what validates their claims; and their worth advances in the measure of those claims—their projects, purposes, creative activities. It is the merit and promise of those projects that warrants ethical response. But no response follows analytically from the mere making of a claim. Ethics arises not by implication but by invocation, invitation, receptivity and response. Claims ask for a response, nuanced, attuned, sensitive, and itself creative. But such responses are not a given, and the fact that what is right is what we ought to do does not necessitate ethical action. It is up to us to act and choose. Even modus ponens does not determine a response. It just specifies what an appropriate response should be. Beings are not norms any more than they are propositions. Most of the claims that beings make are unspoken. Recognizing those claims, insofar as they are not overridden, is like acknowledging a truth. It too is a response to what is there. But it is we, the conscious subjects, moral agents, persons, who make the response. We do not find it already made for us. The realism I propose, in short, is not a realism of predicates, properties, and propositions but an ontic realism that can lead to varieties of virtue ethics and perfectionism. It finds value locally, in the strivings of all beings, not just in their utility. One of the strengths of the metaphysical approach I am sketching here, then, is that it warrants an ontic normative theory.29 By equating prima facie deserts with the claims beings make (that is, their essences, dynami- cally conceived), this normative approach avoids making right or justice matters of convention, contingent, say, on the agreement of the parties to a real or virtual contract. Still less does it make the difference between right and wrong subjective, or relative to social norms. Such norms can be critiqued, often by triangulation against one another. No human norm is above reproach. Nor are desires legitimate merely because they are felt or consensual or accepted. Desire is a marker of desert, and agreement is a sign of legitimacy, but neither is an all sufficing condition. The metaphysics of conatus grounds ideas of natural law and natural rights. That grounding is not a matter of implication but again of invitation: All beings make claims, by their very nature. The merit of their claims, the real desert of beings as distinguished from their prima facie desert, calls on all thoughtful subjects for recognition. So we need to measure claims and projects against one another. This, I believe, is a significant part of the work

29 See Lenn E. Goodman, On Justice: An Essay in Jewish Philosophy (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1991; updated paperback with new introductory essay, Oxford: Littman Library of Jewish Civilization, 2008). VALUE AND THE DYNAMICS OF BEING 37 of cultures: to equilibrate diverse claims and articulate standards of subordination, superordination, and most vitally, coordination, so as to set rival or parallel or complementary claims into a prescriptive system. Cultures, including religious cultures, can be judged by their success in accommodating the values we encounter in nature. That reverses the fields of the familiar relativism that would rather make cultures the arbiters of value. But, as Saadiah says, belief does not control reality; the warrants run in the opposite direction.30 Animals, plants, species, econiches and ecosystems all make claims. Inanimate objects also make claims, most notably, the monuments of nature and of culture. These too must find their place in nature and win their place in our consideration—insofar as we are capable of judging and effectuating our judgments—for we may weigh and weight deserts well or badly, influenced, appropriately or inappropriately by our encounter with the interests of other beings. The claims of persons are not relative in the way that those of other beings are. Persons, as I put it, stand on a plateau that distinguishes their deserts from those of all lesser beings. The reason is that persons are moral agents and intellectual subjects: having consciousness and conscience, persons can recognize deserts. Recognition here is more than mere awareness, and it rests on and demands more than mere reciprocity. It means (and asks for) an active seeing, judging, and fostering, promoting the projects of the beings we can and ought to further. Persons are never rightly exploited or enslaved, neglected or ignored. They are never rightly made mere objects— a denial of their subjecthood. Even their embodiment is sacred. It is not just an extension or expression of their subjecthood. (Even property can be that!) It is the vehicle and emblem of their subjecthood. Even the moral space that surrounds a person’s body casts a penumbra of privacy that it is violence to invade. And even after death, it preserves a dignity, in virtue of its history in embodying a person. Subjecthood is highly individual, and yet relational in its nature: persons can bond with one another in friendship or in intimacy, and in more formal and limited ways. They can make and receive promises and expect commitments to be filled. Even persons not party to a given arrangement have a right not to be harmed, neglected or ignored by others. Liminal subjects, too, hovering at the brink of life, or death, have a dignity vested in what

30 Saadiah Gaon al-Fayyumi, Kitab al-Mukhtar fi ’l-Amanat wa ’l-I‘tiqadat (The Book of Critically Chosen Beliefs and Convictions, known as the Emunot ve-De‘ot) Introduction, Part 4, ed. Joseph D. Kafih (Jerusalem: Yeshiva University, 1970), 12. 38 VALUE AND THE DYNAMICS OF BEING they have been or might become. And all persons have equivalent dignities, rights and responsibilities, in virtue of their subjecthood and not of any similarity to or difference from other subjects. An obvious line of objection to the metaphysics of nature I have proposed could be called the problem of waste: Is all the natural achievement that this metaphysic celebrates and values anything more than exploitation of one being by another? How is it any different from any mere forming of complexes by processes that are at bottom automatic, productive of system and order but typically leaving widespread disorder in their wake? Aggregation among inanimates may seem untroublesome. But coloniza- tion and appropriation of one organism as food or raw matter for another’s advance, not to mention the engulfing and incorporating of one organism into another, on the model of the mitochondria,31 may seem more problematic. How can predation and parasitism enhance the order of the cosmos at large? Organisms lay waste to their environment in two senses: For animals ravage the plants and one another. But they also spew waste, inevitably in excess of the order they attain. The second law of thermodynamics headlines that inevitability: Does it not entail that death and disorder will always outpace life and in the end overtake even evolution? The sun’s energy, lavished on the earth, will cease in time, since every sun will die. Diseases beset every organism, and black holes loom in the intermundia where Epicureans once sought safe havens for their carefree gods. These gravitational maelstroms can devour worlds without regard for any of the beings that may crawl upon a planet’s surface, swim in its waters, or skim through its atmosphere. To this there are a few replies to make. First comes the recognition that nature is not personal—and still less divine. If nature’s dynamism points to a deity, as I believe it does, it is by the possibilities for emergence opened by that dynamism, including by the emergence of persons and personality, not because nature itself is personal or moral. If there is grace in nature, it is because creatures arise that are beautiful, including some that are capable of recognizing one another’s dignity and acknowledging the beauty, bounty and intrinsic goodness of being, not because nature itself can call on us by name—or should be expected to, or faulted for not doing so. Grace in nature is more general, less limited, and perspectival than personhood. Nature makes room for a Shakespeare but also for the worm that gnaws his

31 See Lynn Margulis, Symbiosis in Cell Evolution (San Francisco: Freeman, 1981). VALUE AND THE DYNAMICS OF BEING 39 brain. We hate cancer, AIDS, malaria, and polio. But the teeming organisms that are unwitting vectors and vehicles of such sufferings are also prime instances of the exuberance of life. They need not be our allies. We have no obligation to preserve them. But their conatus marks and mimics the early stages of a history that was once our own. Beyond that, impersonality and even prodigality should not mask nature’s tidiness and thrift. We do not quite know whether the universe, as an energy economy, is closed or open—whether new energy is constantly entering the game, or some fixed sum is playing out its piece en route to entropic silence. The medievals, who thought the world’s whole duration, from Genesis to Armageddon, was far shorter than the span we know it has already traced, let alone the course we think we can foresee, saw providence in nature’s finitude and justice in the limits on each player’s part.32 What we do know is that all the processes that run to entropy open opportunities in the very flow of energy across a differential. Just as waterfalls and rapids allow us to run a mill or turbine, and sea vents or hot flats nourish life by their effluence of heat, so the processes of nature open econiches at every tier of their sustained cascades. Beyond that, if we speak of waste, we cannot help noticing, as the ancients noticed, that nature recycles. That is one reason why Aristotle faulted Empedocles—for assuming that beyond his four elements, he needed a basic principle of love and another of strife, the one to explain construction and the other to account for destruction in nature. What Empedocles had missed was that the building up of one thing is the break- ing down of another.33 Natural processes are often cyclical. Thus waste for one is a resource for another. The cycles will not always link up like poppet beads, and they will not yield a perpetuum mobile. But they do sustain themselves, often rather stably. And opportunity at every tier, in every niche, breaks entropy’s fall.

32 See Lenn E. Goodman, “Ibn Khaldun and Thucydides,” in Jewish and Islamic Philos- ophy: Crosspollinations in the Classic Age (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1999), 201–39. 33 In the Eudemian Ethics 7.1.1235a25, Aristotle cites Heraclitus as rebuking those who wished strife were abolished—since there would be no musical scale and no male and female without opposition; see Politics 2.6. See also Heraclitus, Fragments 8 and 60, from Hippolytus, Ref. 9.10.4 (Kirk, Raven and Schofield, §200): “The way up and the way down are the same.” At Metaphysics 1.4.985a21–29, Aristotle writes, “Empedocles, though he uses his causes to a greater extent than Anaxagoras, also fails to use them adequately and consistently. Often he has love separating things and strife combining them. For when all is broken down by strife, fire is gathered into one, and so is each other element. But when all is brought together again by love, the elements are inevitably dispersed.” 40 VALUE AND THE DYNAMICS OF BEING

What then of black holes? It is hard to know quite what to say about them, beyond seeing a parallel in cosmic origins to the origins of life itself. That is, black holes may be implicated in the formation of galaxies, just as viral-like particles may mark the pathway to the origins of life. Origins can be violent. Or, in more neutral terms, the kind of changes and forces that can generate a cosmos are not on a scale to gentle living beings. Fusion yields temperatures far too hot for us. Nothing lives on the sun. And yet, without the cooking of elements in the sun, there would be no chemistry and no life on earth. What we perceive as violence, or destruction, as Aristotle saw, has genesis as its counterpart. So perhaps there is wisdom in the Hindu images of Shiva as Nataraja, Lord of the Dance, who brings creation out of destruction, and dances ecstatically/ascetically, through time, into eternity, and back into time. RESPECT FOR NATURE IN THE JEWISH TRADITION

Lenn E. Goodman

The Torah pioneers in developing the ideas of a political contract, and it fosters the notion of the consent of the governed by making God himself a party to covenants with Israel, and with humanity in general. But the Torah does not rest the authority of its Law on the idea of a contract. Many of those who are subject to the requirements of that Law were not literally present when it was accepted and revealed—and besides, a covenant is made with nature as well as with humanity in general and Israel in particular: “While the earth remaineth, seedtime and harvest, cold and heat, summer and winter, day and night shall not cease” (Gen. 8:22). What God is doing here, clearly, is to assume responsibility for the con- tinuance of nature in its rhythmic patterns and regularities—those which benefit humanity and those which simply sustain the natural continuity. The warrant for that commitment of God’s is no reciprocity on nature’s part, but rather, divine regard for creatures and creation. Creation is sustained for its own sake and not for any yield or reciprocity it may bring to God. What is recognized, even by God, are the deserts of the beings He has created. And God here is made the model of human concern for nature, a responsibility that is seen to rest on human shoulders in recognition of the objective deserts of beings and the capabilities that humans have for respecting those deserts. The biblical position is admirably summed up in a typical jewel-like midrash: “When the Holy One, blessed be He, created the first man, He took him and led him ’round all the trees of the Garden of Eden, and said to him: ‘Behold my works, how fair and lovely they are. All that I have created, I created for your sake. Take heed that you do not corrupt and destroy my universe. For, if you spoil it, there is no one to repair it after you’ ” (Eccl. Rabbah 7.13). Here, working at the heart of the teleological and anthropocentric conception of nature, for which the monotheistic tradition is so often blamed, we find God commending His creation to humanity, not for its utility or

This article was first published as Lenn E. Goodman, “Respect for Nature in the Jewish Tradition,” in Judaism and Ecology: Created World and Revealed Word, ed. Hava Tirosh- Samuelson (Cambridge: Harvard Divinity School, 2002). Used with permission. 42 Respect for Nature in the Jewish Tradition commodiousness but for its beauty. And the rhetoric that urges a sense of responsibility for nature is not a prudential warning against fouling one’s own nest or polluting one’s own well, but an appeal to the preciousness and irreplaceability of each of God’s creations—whose paradigms are the trees in Eden. The argument parallels the Mishnah’s appeal to the uniqueness and, thus, irreplaceability of each human individual as the mark of the sanctity of human life (Sanhedrin 4.5). Indeed, the argument in the human case is made a special case of the argument in behalf of nature at large and the species it contains. For the Mishnah predicated the special sanctity of each human life on the likeness of each human being to a world or a natural kind. Note the order of the argument: Not, thou shalt respect and protect nature because it is the abode of human beings, but rather: thou shalt respect and protect human lives because they are, in their own way, miniature worlds and complete natural kinds. For some twenty years now I have been elaborating and developing an ontological theory of justice grounded in what I call a general theory of deserts.1 Human rights, I have been arguing, are a special case of a larger class of deserts that pertain to all beings. All deserts, I argue, arise ontically, from the conative and entitative claims of beings. Deserts belong not just to humans or persons, but to all manner of beings, including individual animals and plants, species, econiches and habitats, monuments of nature and of art, ideas, and, of course, the ecosystem and nature at large. This line of thinking is rooted in the Torah, and my purpose here is to discuss the footings and paradigm cases of the approach in the classical and canonical Jewish sources. After briefly sketching the general theory of deserts, I want to discuss the metaphysical foundations it affords for an ethic of respect for nature and to call out some of the concretely codified applications of that ethic and the ethos that it builds.

Deserts and the General Theory of Justice

Contract theories of justice suffer from what I have called the Skyhook Problem and the Exclusion Problem. On the one hand, they find no warrant

1 See Lenn E. Goodman, On Justice: An Essay in Jewish Philosophy (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1991), and God of Abraham (New York: Oxford University Press, 1996). The theory was first elaborated in my Baumgardt Lectures of 1979, published as Mono theism: A Philosophic Inquiry into the Foundations of Natural Theology and Ethics (Totowa, N.J.: Allanheld Osmun, 1981). Respect for Nature in the Jewish Tradition 43 beyond agreement or convention for assigning authority or prescriptivity to the norms and obligations that they seek to legitimate. This leaves no room and affords no basis for assigning authority to agreements or conventions themselves. On the other hand, contract theories exclude from moral concern all parties who are not actual signatories or participants in the putative agreements or conventions that are their moral nerve. In both cases, such theories are highly anthropocentric. Not only do they leave out of account the interests of foreigners, the very ill, the socially inactive or alienated, but they systematically exclude the concerns of future generations and the interests of nonhuman species, their habitats and ecosystems, and the larger, material environment, including the nonorganic environment. In place of the notion that right and wrong are matters of negotiated convention, I have proposed that we seek value in beings themselves. Beings are the loci of value. Indeed, the being of things is their value. One strength of adopting an ontological approach to values is that it obviates the quest for a “property,” of goodness, which we must then deem natural or “non-natural.” The being of things is their nature. But that nature is no static and neutral fact. Each being constitutes itself in its own project. For that reason beings vary in kind. They also vary in attainment or achievement. For although we can never judge one being’s project by the standards of another, the fact remains that in absolute terms not every project is as significant as every other. Value here is not dependent on some external evaluator but on the intrinsic merit of the claims each being makes. For all beings make claims, and those claims belong ultimately to the beings that make them and have a legitimacy reflective of the reality of the claimant. The appraisal of claims remains a task for intelligent beings, a task that is more than hinted at in the biblical idea that humankind is created in the image of God: we have the responsibility to understand and care for nature—to master and preserve it, in the biblical language. No other creature can make the necessary judgments or even recognize the pertinent claims. Stewardship is part of the human condition, an inalienable charge. For even neglect is a policy choice, and even wilderness areas (as long as humans exist) require management. All beings make claims. These I take to be the equivalent of their being. For what I take to be the being of a thing is its project, what Spinoza called its conatus. The prima facie deserts of a being are equivalent to its claims. But objective deserts are the resultant of all claims balanced against one another. The deserts of beings rest on their intrinsic value. But such value resides in all things. It is found in persons par excellence. For consciousness 44 Respect for Nature in the Jewish Tradition renders persons subjects. They conceive themselves as ends, they choose values and plan a life, they are capable of good and evil, and for that reason we must say that finitude finds its most powerful means and most compelling meanings in the lives of persons. But the ends of persons are not the only ends—just the only self-consciously self-constituting ends. All living beings pursue a project. All are at least virtual subjects, whose implicit goals, even if not articulated by a consciousness, still constitute an identity with objective interests of its own. Even inanimate beings make claims, to space, to endurance, to the expression of their natures, which may be simple without thereby becoming inchoate. Human fallibility and liability to bias in evaluating deserts may seem to argue the subjectivity or conventionality of deserts themselves. But such limitations on our part, I think, prove just the opposite. For the notions of bias and error, long pled as evidence for subjectivism or relativism of some other sort, presuppose a legitimacy that can be strayed from. Where there is corrigibility, there is a truth to be known; and where unfairness can be detected—as it is when bias is uncovered—there are Socratic grounds to hope that fairness can be found as well. Found, not merely imposed. For some standard of fairness was implicit in the knowledge by which bias was exposed. The fact of subjectivity, then, is not the ally but the enemy of subjectivism. Subjectivity has no meaning if there is no truth or objectivity against which it can be disclosed. Societies do not create justice. Rather, justice creates societies. Justice is the imparting of what beings deserve. Thus, it is not out of place, but indeed morally appropriate and necessary, to speak of justice to other species and to nature at large and in all its parts. All beings have deserts, insofar as they are beings. Deserts reach a plane of sanctity and mutuality in the case of persons. It is here that we rightly talk of rights. For the legitimate claims of all beings are scaled to the stature of their projects; and the claims of persons (and so of human beings) are grounded in their subjecthood. This is an objective matter. It is not because we humans belong to the same taxon or have affinities to one another that we privilege humanity in our moral schemes, but because the human species is the only species in which we have encountered personhood. Personhood makes society possible. That is, it makes practical a mode of cooperation or collaboration that is grounded in the mutual, conscious, and explicit recognition of subjects by one another. But the pervasiveness of such recognition at the foundation of virtually all our actions should not distract us from the moral basis of our obligations to our fellow persons: it is not because they can aid us or accord us recognition that we owe special recognition to our fellow human Respect for Nature in the Jewish Tradition 45 beings, but because of what they are. Their subjecthood, like our own, is a thing of beauty and value, to be cherished for its own sake. (For to predicate the preciousness of others on their usefulness to us would dangerously leave open the question why there was any special worth in ourselves that would warrant our making instruments of any things at all, let alone our fellow humans.) Similarly, our obligations to animals are not grounded in their similarities to us. Rather, what we must respect in all beings—to the extent possible—are the claims made by their projects. What makes human claims unable to be compromised, at least in certain crucial areas, are the splendid prospects opened up by the possibility of choice and the fact of consciousness. What imparts value to other beings as well are the projects they pursue, not in the first instance as objects of our potential use but as constituents of a world and loci of intrinsic value. All beings are dynamic in some measure. All affirm, as it were, a certain character that is their own and that they define in the course of their history. A being, viewed telically just is the agency that stakes out for itself a project, an identity grounded in a system of interests that is constituted in part through its own activity. Any claim or interest is worthy of concern and attention. The interests of a being, prima facie, lie in the furtherance of its project, an open-ended goal. Any dynamic claim is implicitly or potentially infinite in some respect. Yet wisdom demands recognition of the limitations inherent in all claims made by finite beings. Moral wisdom is the ability to adjudicate among rival claims and to discover among them not only the roots of competition but the potentials for complementarity. My view that beings are constituted by and through their claims is akin to the existentialist identification of a being with its project, and to Spinoza’s equation of the essence of each being with its conatus, its striving to preserve and promote its reality. A being is not the mere sum of its history or amalgam of the facts about its static self-identity. Still less can it be identified with its apprehension by other subjects or its impact on other objects. For both impact and apprehension are aspectual. Perception or conception can apprehend only some abstract or sampling of a thing; to engulf it would not be to know it but to eat it, absorb it, and destroy it. By the same token, a thing cannot be its impact on another, or even the sum total of its impacts on all other things. For what, then, would remain as the cause of all those impacts? I find it striking and amusing that philosophers who, in an epistemological context, stress the aspectual character of all our apprehensions turn in pragmatics to an identification of things with those very surface encounters that they have so carefully shown us cannot be the whole. 46 Respect for Nature in the Jewish Tradition

The moral realism of our theory of deserts rests on an ontic realism: it is because beings are not just aspects of our experience or functions of their effects that they have deserts of their own. The world contains a great variety of beings, each actively affirming its identity, setting out its own project and interests. If there were nothing to contradict such interests, their affirmation might well warrant their legitimacy. But in a world of multiple particulars, interests will collide. They may also harmonize or complement one another. But because interests can conflict, we cannot simply equate deserts with claims. Interests are prima facie deserts. To find the legitimate deserts of all beings we must attend to their specific and particular projects, consult the conflicts and the potentials for complementary results. Ecology and the economy of the garden are valuable models here— but models, not oracles. They yield no trivial or automatic resolutions to all conflicts. To map the hierarchy of deserts in detail is not a necessary part of the philosophical theory of justice, and efforts to do so might seem only to appeal, suppositiously, to familiar notions of the relative worth of beings and their projects. The normative task of regulating our practical and notional responses to claims of all sorts is a task of cultures in general and of laws and religions in particular. Indeed, it is among their chief tasks. Philosophy cannot successfully usurp it. But philosophy can observe and thematize the criteria in use and criticize intellectually and morally the outcomes of various systematizations and axiological schemes. We can say that the interests of a being, its project or conatus, are the very essence of that being as it expresses itself in the world. That means they are the being; they are what it is. Sensation, sensibility, considerate- ness and consideration are strengths, not weaknesses, in conatus. For they enable a being to seek, discover, or even devise its own good, and to confront its own limitations without first being brought up short by them. Sentient beings are adept at finding complementarities that will optimize the realization of deserts. Conscious beings, that is, persons, can uncover or create intellectual realms in which even infinite claims are not invidi- ous or self-undermining. And, as self-conscious beings, persons, can expand their individual identities to accept as their own the interests of other beings. But, for all beings, legitimate deserts are grounded in claims. Indeed, deserts and claims are identical if the claims are evaluated contex- tually and not taken as if in isolation (where they are never found). Justice will be the recognition of each being’s deserts, equilibrated against those of all others. For there is no reason why one being’s deserts should count more than the equivalent claims of another. Respect for Nature in the Jewish Tradition 47

But not all claims are equivalent. For beings vary in ontic worth; their deserts must be scaled to their reality. Claims vary in merit, and their equilibration is not easy. Yet even without a recipe for assaying the relative worth of all rival claims, I can say with confidence that justice cannot be achieved, or understood, if we do not assign deserts to beings; and it will never be complete or universal if we confine deserts to ourselves. The primary rule of the general theory of deserts is that all beings should be treated in accordance with what they are. We can compare this demand for a proper response to the claims all beings make with the recognition called for by facts: just as facts demand cognitive acknowledgment, deserts claim moral recognition. In both cases we have an obligation to respond to things’ being as they are. In neither case have we a tautology. For the according of recognition goes beyond the demand for it, although the demand is implicit in the self-affirmation of a being (or a fact). Otherwise, the recognition sought would not answer the demand made, or the demand would not be needed. To implement so broad and potentially nebulous a rule as the demand that the reality of things be recognized, two cardinal principles are needed: 1) Deserts are scaled to the reality each being claims. We do not rightly sacrifice a child to a virus, as though their claims were equal—even though the quasi-life of the virus is all it has. 2) The interests of persons take special precedence and make a special claim. Persons need not be human. They do not win their special consideration on the grounds of looking like us or behaving as we do, nor even, in the first instance, by their potential usefulness to us or others, but on the grounds of their subjecthood, a precious achievement in nature. Persons evoke and deserve special recognition because of what they are, not simply because they are capable of returning regard—for a dog can respond to recognition, and a person often cannot, whether in infancy or incapacity, or simply in ignorance or absence. It is the status imparted to persons by their standing in the hierarchy of being, not their affective claim on our sympathies or their effective impact on our interests, that grounds their deserts—their rights and dignity, as subjects, as moral persons, choosers of their life patterns and their destiny. Persons, then, stand on a moral plateau. Personhood, in whatever form it discovers itself, is never to be sacrificed to interests of some lesser order; and even the highest subjects may not rightly subordinate or negate the subjecthood of the rest. All subjects deserve a level of consideration that can be called absolute, in the sense that nothing can be traded for it; it has no price or counterpart; it is not measured on a scale commensurate with other interests. Underlying the special regard deserved by subjects is our 48 Respect for Nature in the Jewish Tradition primary rule, that all beings must be treated in accordance with what they are. Subjects, in self-consciously constructing their own life-projects, call upon one another in a language that is not to be ignored, not only for cooperation but for recognition of the intension of their aims. The moral consideration that is the due of nonpersons can be treated as an extension of the model we use in assigning deserts to persons. That, in fact, is what is done by those who adopt the language, say, of animal rights. But this political, rhetorical way of stating the case lays claim to the status of subjects in behalf of nonpersons. That is a misappropriation, and when efforts are made to extend the notion still further, the breakdown becomes complete. For plants do not have rights, and it is a category error to speak of habitats or ecosystems in such terms. But animals, plants, even ecosystems have deserts. In ontic terms, subjects are the special case. The general rule is to respect beings for what they are, not for their approximation to our self-image. Living organisms, species, ecosystems like the riverbank or the canyon, the mountain range or the shore, implicitly claim recognition. Persons claim recognition explicitly. The difference is one not of degree but of kind. It is not simply a matter of language or commerce, any more than it can be reduced to a matter of appearance and sympathy. Persons genuinely are subjects, whereas nonpersons are analogous to subjects in having projects and thus interests. In both cases recognition is deserved by the reality that is each being. But those realities differ crucially because of the role that consciousness plays. The interests of nonpersons deserve consideration, other things being equal. But those of persons are in some sense inviolable, so long as the persons can be treated as such, and not, like the sniper in the tower, as a public menace or a pest.2 The ontological theory I have proposed assigns a special status to persons, but it does not confine interests to persons. The relative deserts of animals, plants, species, monuments of nature and of art, institutions and practices, make claims upon our consideration. But the legitimacy of

2 Operatively, the sniper in the tower must be treated as the exigencies of his pragmatic role demand, as long as he represents an immediate danger. Once disarmed, he is a full person once again. He now forfeits many of the civil presumptions that society has accorded him in fleshing out the dignity of personhood. For his actions defeat many of those presumptions. But he does not lose all of them. And never does he lose the basic existential rights of personhood: He may not be tortured to reveal the whereabouts of his accomplices. Even while armed, his deserts as a person are not nugatory. Thus, the moral requirement of phased measures: Deadly force may not be brought against him, even as he fires, if lesser measures would suffice to halt the danger he presents. Respect for Nature in the Jewish Tradition 49 such claims never extends as far as the categorical claims of personhood. To underscore this point, I would urge, for example, that I think it is an error of moral judgment to compromise the nutritional needs of a child to meet the demands of vegetarianism, as I have sometimes seen done. But norms of stewardship can be derived from an ontic account of justice. They cannot be derived from a strictly Kantian view. Kantian ethics, crucially, rejects cruelty to animals on the grounds that humane sensibilities are a virtue to be cultivated. It does not elicit regard for animals as a corollary of the categorical imperative. Still less can a universal ethic be derived from a consistently contractarian account. As for the effort to derive the standards of a universal regard from Utilitarian precepts, such attempts are fraught with paradox and inconsistency. For appeals to sentience like those of Bentham or Tom Regan try to warrant rights by identifying a lowest common denominator of sensibility among the various forms of animal life. By proposing susceptibility to pain as that denominator, they transform an emotive appeal for the “rights” of sentient beings into an undermining of the special place of subjecthood, upon which the idea of rights depends, and still they fail to regard the claims made by trees and other nonsentient life-forms—let alone species and ecosystems, institutions, practices, cultures and ethnicities. An ontic theory can and should acknowledge a hierarchy of deserts, in which personhood makes singular claims. Some romantic programs deny such hierarchies—engratiatingly, for the element of ritual necessary in implementing any value system can grow so familiar as to become at once transparent to view, and irksome. But to exclude hierarchies of value is to negate deserts. For recognition, like nourishment, must be shaped to the contours of beings’ claims. I cannot claim that the life of the mantis or the ant means as much to that creature as your life or mine means to us, since the insect has no plan of life in the sense that you or I have. But, more importantly, I cannot claim that the insect’s life matters equally with ours in the universal scheme of things. Only alienation fosters so sardonic a romanticism as that; and such alienation presses for the negation, not the affirmation of universal values. In practice, when such schemes are imple- mented, lesser claims are honored only expressively and in the breach; human claims are diminished, and a broad passivity takes hold at both levels, symptomatic, perhaps, of alienation and loathing for life. In practice, once the special claims of personhood are made commensurate with those of lesser beings, the principle of ontic recognition is violated, and no sound basis remains for the allocation of recognition. The same is true even if deserts that are lesser only in degree are placed on a par with others 50 Respect for Nature in the Jewish Tradition that exceed them, as, for example, when a whole ecosystem, say, a forest, is placed at risk by the protection in it of some feral species or invading weed. Efforts to extend the rights of persons to other sorts of beings, then, are not just inappropriate (since animals cannot vote and plants cannot enjoy an art museum) but are misguided. The effect is not an extension of rights (as though plants were now made voters), but the spread of the relativity of deserts into the realm where deserts are properly conceived as rights and are not relative at all. The outcome is not the announced expansion of the moral franchise, but debasement of its meaning. Animals and plants, species and eco-niches deserve protection, for what they are as well as for what they may mean to us, pragmatically or otherwise. But persons have dignity as well as the more graded sort of value that every being attains in its own way. Persons are holy. Genesis expresses this by saying that humans are created in God’s image. Rabbi Akiva draws the moral: “Cherished is man, being created in the divine image; but all the more cherished is he, in that this was made known to him, as it is said: ‘For in the image of God did He make the man’ ” (Avot 3.18). Our ontological account fosters an objectivist idea of justice. And it allows, indeed requires, a general, rather than a restrictive assignment of deserts. Far from confining attention to the interests of some consensual body, it extends consideration to all beings, subjects and nonsubjects, animate and inanimate, natural and artificial. It finds deserts in animals and plants as well as in humans; in mountains, rivers, species and ecosystems, as well as in sentient beings; in works of art, institutions, memories, traditions, sciences and ideas, as well as planets and galaxies. Not all value depends on the value of persons or on the values assigned by persons. Claims may deserve recognition even if they are not are own, even if they are not of the type we make. Indeed, our ability to recognize claims other than our own is part of what gives precedence to human claims. What a general theory of deserts entails is that utility, to ego or to us, is not the sole basis of worth. Recognition of deserts extends to those persons who are not in league with us. Nor need we cloak our impulse to save the rain forest in appeals to the usefulness of its biomass as a source of oxygen. Mere instrumental values, after all, might be secured by alternative means, perhaps technologically; the interests they once protected might then be overridden by the commercial value of the lumber in the Matto Grosso, or the gold in its streams. Discovery of intrinsic worth in persons, and in all beings, obviates embarrassing appeals to Epicurean anxiety fables: even if the Amazon watershed harbors no cure for cancer or AIDS and will never be enjoyed or appreciated as wilderness by the bulk of humanity, its intrin- Respect for Nature in the Jewish Tradition 51 sic value is not the less for that. For the worth of things does not depend exclusively on their use or appreciation. On the contrary, these rest on intrinsic worth. The theory I have proposed is a form of naturalism. It is not, as some may fear,3 a form of materialism. For the natures in which it finds value are dynamic seekers of goals, which they themselves help to constitute but which are never reducible (as matter traditionally is) to the mere facticity of the given. That is, part of what is precious in beings, signaled by the open-endedness of their quest, is their linkage to eternity. We see evidence of that linkage clearly in human becoming. But even beings that are not sentient at all show their linkage to the divine, in the transcendent reach of their projects. The ontology underlying our general theory of deserts avoids the reductionism familiar in most forms of naturalism. The theory equates being with value in the classic way that regards being as a perfection—and, in the case of finite, contingent beings, as a gift. The theory is naturalistic in equating interests with claims and claims with prima facie deserts. “Interest” here is understood objectively rather than subjectively, as in Ralph Barton Perry’s famous equation of value with the object of any interest. Interests need not be consciously articulated. Value need not be instrumental, because interest need not be external. It need not belong to someone else. A being can have interests, and so deserts, even if no one cares about it. Its worth is not proportioned to the extent and intensity of the concerns of others for it—let alone, their desires to appreciate, possess, or consume it. But the naturalism I have proposed avoids the naturalistic fallacy, because it does not equate any mere fact about a thing with its value. Still less does it entail that whatever exists should exist. Rather, the thesis is that the claims of beings deserve recognition, prima facie, simply because they are the claims of beings: beings deserve recognition insofar as they are beings. It follows that recognition of claims should be scaled to the magnitude of the claims. Justice, classically understood as giving each his due, here would mean the adequate or optimal recognition of the deserts subtended in the claims of beings. But claims are made (and can only be made good) in a world where there are other claims. They could never be made in isolation; and they can never be fairly recognized unless they are equilibrated, balanced, or reconciled, with one another.

3 See Jude Dougherty, review of On Justice, by L. E. Goodman, Review of Metaphysics 46 (1993): 614–15. 52 Respect for Nature in the Jewish Tradition

Ultimately, all beings, perforce, obey the laws of nature. But nature’s sentence may be delayed, as when the Soviet Union, for example, had not yet fallen under the growing weight of its long battle with history. Such denouements, dark as the fate of the house of Atreus, are not inevitable. For we humans can study nature’s imperatives, which the biblical idiom calls the laws of life. We can adapt consciously, not just genetically, grasping and even rethematizing nature’s commands, accepting or rejecting or restruc- turing what presents itself as the given. We may celebrate and enhance or despise and degrade the values we encounter in nature, seeking to ignore them, or struggling to enshrine and enlarge them in individual memory and communal practice. It is because nature lays out the parameters of every creature’s project, defining what it is for each being to be and to become, that the laws of nature are prescriptive. Their prescriptivity rests on the worth of each ontic status that nature provides and on the conatus of each being to which nature opens a path, or a fork in the road. The same is true, of course, of the laws of nature’s God. Each being has its own worth; each person, his own dignity. This worth or dignity is the substance of God’s existential gift and is nothing different from the project imparted by the act of creation. In the riot of nature, such projects may and will encroach on one another. The exuberance of the lightning or the tornado, the easing of the earth in its traces, relaxing the tension along fault lines—the Lisbon earthquake and Job’s stormwind—acknowledge no face. But persons, as persons, have the power and responsibility to give names to one another, to recognize faces and acknowledge individual worth and dignity. We persons, and we alone, can grant one another recognition, not just as objects of use or annexes of ego, but as subjects. That, too, is part of the special worth and dignity of persons—where the worth inherent in all things reaches the pitch of awareness and so is capable of returning or acknowledging but, primarily, of according and receiving consideration and regard. The special deserts of personhood, like the general deserts of all beings, issue a demand for recognition. Like any demand, it is rightfully curbed only to the extent that it is undermined by incoherence or overreaching. Exploitative demands, like those of a pimp, a thief, a tyrant, or a traitor, are undermined by the incoherence of the notion that one person grows in stature by threatening the being or negating the dignity or trust of another. Pestilent demands, like those of a virus, a spot of mold, or a serial killer, are overruled by the victim’s higher standing or more innocent claims, and by the demands and presumptions of civil society, on which the realization of all human claims depends. The serial killer, of course, is not a virus or a spot Respect for Nature in the Jewish Tradition 53 of mold, but a person. Yet, in negating the deserts of others, he becomes, pragmatically, little more than the threat he represents, and the responsibility devolves upon society of removing that threat while preserving what it can of the killer’s residual deserts. The moral scheme, like being itself, is hierarchical, since deserts arise in the measure of the beings they constitute. But the laws of nature are not the same as the laws of God. For the latitude of natural beings to aggress and the freedom of persons, out of ignorance or willfulness, to withhold recognition allow intrusions, encroachments, neglect, and violation of legitimate deserts. The natural power to withhold recognition is the counterpart of the capacity to recognize deserts, cherish worth, and sanctify dignity. Freedom and naming are counterparts. Both are gifts of God. For God loves freedom as much as He loves the play of nature; and God’s explicit law makes room for and presupposes freedom in the same way that His implicit law, the law of nature, leaves room for and gives energy to the play of nature, while allowing freedom to those who claim it. Negligence is the natural concomitant of freedom. Without freedom humans would never rise above the blind justice of nature or attain a dignity beyond the animal claims of the organism, in which subjecthood is given body and thereby comprised as an actor and compromised as an object in the world. Nature allows the wildfire to overwhelm the forest, although man must not; and nature allows man to drain the wetlands, but God (as we now think) commands us to restore them.

Judaism and the Metaphysics of the General Theory of Deserts

All things, even inanimate objects, have a worth and beauty, not merely for or to anyone else, but in themselves, in virtue of what they are. Thus, the Torah commands us not to make an enemy of the tree in the field (Deut. 20:19–20) and warns us that even the land will be requited for the Sabbaths of fallow years it may be scanted (Lev. 26:34). The world is the better for the existence of Mauna Kea or Diamond Head, the Mona Lisa or Venus de Milo. We would not suffer the destruction of these in equanimity. Yet the first two were not made for us, and none of them is human. Clearly persons have and deserve a lexical priority to things in our moral calculus, and the fetus is no person. But it is a work of art, or rather a marvel of nature that far outshines Diamond Head. It is the only marvel of nature that will ever become a person. So I find it hard to see the moral grounds for according it less worth than the rain forest or the wetlands. I find it a 54 Respect for Nature in the Jewish Tradition daunting display of the social power of conformity over conscience that a woman who would not dream of marring a Michelangelo would not hesitate to destroy the fetus within her, or would stridently defend the right of others to do so, for any reason at all, or for none. My point here, however, is a broader one: the anchoring of norms in the being of things. This is what laws must respect. It is by reference to the value of beings that laws can be made, enlarged, applied, revised, and even—insofar as they fail to respect the worth of things and the dignity of persons—rescinded. I do not possess some algorithm for adjudicating all conflicts among claims. Nor do I have some divining rod for discovering all the complementarities latent among the claims that beings make. The “art of measurement” capable of assaying ontic claims, adjudicating among them and discovering their complementarities will be no mere Benthamite calculus but a broad appreciation of the open potentialities of nature in general and human nature in particular. We can readily understand why Plato would urge that only by access—direct or indirect, clouded or clear—to the pure idea of the Good can we adequately assay the relative worths among which our finitude calls on us to assign priorities. But even without reference to such thoughts, the aspirations visible in the projects of all beings make me confident that the naturalism I am broaching is nonreductive. If being is so variously realizable and is always dynamic and creative, as I have suggested, there is no danger of its being confused with mere facticity. I find value in all beings and argue that if value does not reside in beings there is nowhere else to find it. The legitimate criticism of the naturalistic fallacy by Hume, Moore, and others, shows that facticity does not entail or amount to legitimacy. But being is more than facticity. To assume that reality is a bare or neutral fact, devoid of value, is to beg that question, and in a direction belied by every natural quest and attainment. For to deny the identity of being and value is to deny that being is an achievement and thus to deny the most manifest fact of our experience, the dynamism of being. Part of what I am arguing is that existence is better than nonexistence. Certainly there are many things that the world might be better without. But I do not think that any reality is purely evil. For, as evil in a thing increases, so does its incapacity to sustain itself. Evil tends to self-destruct, partly because it saps the strengths (for which read virtues) of those in whom it takes hold, and partly through its destructiveness to the milieu on which any being must depend. Thus, evil disappears long before it can reach totality. Beings are sustained only by the perfections they win. The things we picture as evil are such by their destructiveness to other things; but what Respect for Nature in the Jewish Tradition 55 preserves even the most destructive is their small measure of good. So a universe could not survive, let alone come to be, if it contained only evil. That is not a truth of logic but a fact of metaphysics; its necessity arises from the nature of being as it is constituted; its universality is the hallmark of God’s handiwork and grace. A universe of beings whose perfection is only partial and relative can exist and does sustain itself. That, I believe, is the sort of universe we live in. What I have claimed is that to make all values subjective and to find none in reality is to deny that anything has any real worth. That position, I believe, is untenable. It is refuted, I argue, by every act we make, including every speech act. For one who speaks, implicitly affirms the value of his speaking. Even in taking a breath one implicitly affirms the value of life—denying it, perhaps, in words, but affirming it again as one inhales. Yet, lecturing around the country about the ontological theory of justice that I have been advocating here, I have often heard professional philosophers deny that there is any value in being at all. Some defenders of the idea that values are only notions are apparently so committed to that view (doubtless because they link the claim with their own moral freedom, taking that in turn to be the same as the power to legislate morals for themselves) that they would rather deny that there are any values at all than admit that there is value in things. This leads me to ask again: What else is there, besides beings in general and persons in particular, that could warrant our acts of valuing? Or is valuing always irrational? One who actually thought being itself devoid of value would be committed to the view that the universe at large might just as well not exist. I find it very hard to understand such nihilism about being, but moral con- ventionalists and subjectivists, in earnest conversation, seem not to shrink from it. Against such a rejection of realism about values, I respond that even to affirm a subjective value seems to entail an affirmation that what I choose is good or right objectively, even if only for me. To act at all seems to entail that something in the world—if only my will and the assertion of its desires—is worthwhile. Obliquely, it seems to affirm the worth of the willer. But all such arguments are only dialectical. I cannot refute the nihilism I reject without appealing to some value. So there might seem to be an impasse between my affirmation and the nay- saying of those who voice disagreement—unless I beg the question in favor of being. For it is the value of anything at all that is in dispute. But the position is not quite so symmetrical as might seem. If I assume what my inter- locutor denies, at least I do not assume the contrary of what I hold, as one who denies all value to reality must do, to affirm anything at all. 56 Respect for Nature in the Jewish Tradition

Dialectically, I can say that one who rejects all value in being would have no grounds for staying the hand of some nuclear or ecological terrorist bent on destroying the universe. If there were a doomsday machine (a possibility far more readily envisioned than a real person who found no value in anything), and if some maniac had his finger on the button, the nihilist would have no reason even to try to prevent the madman from pushing the button. I do not rest my affirmation of the value of beings on such negative and dialectical considerations, but on an open appreciation of being as we know it. In such an appreciation, scientific understanding, aesthetic awe, and religious celebration all respond to the same underlying givens. The Jewish sources are of help here, for they attest to the value of being and invite our appreciation of it. When God surveys the newly created world and sees that it is good, He might appear to be making a redundant judgment. Was He not the almighty author of it all, who made exactly what He wanted? Who was present, or qualified, to judge His work? Yet, like a craftsman who has made a table or a cabinet, God assays His creation and judges that it meets His expectation and intent. And more, that it is a good thing, good in itself, a thing that should exist, that deserves to exist, for the beauties it now bears, through no prior claim, but for its value now—not to God, who stands in need of nothing, but in itself, as a work of art might be valuable, not because it can be sold or put to some use, but intrinsically. For, although the world holds many utilities, they serve no function beyond it, but are perfections relative to its purpose, which is the sustenance and flourishing of all sorts of beings—all the myriad things, as the Chinese philosophers might say. All these things, in their diverse ways and to their diverse degrees, exist for their own sakes and plot their own projects. Maimonides writes: According to our doctrine of the creation of the entire world out of nothing, the search for a final cause of all existence might well seem necessary. Thus it might be supposed that the end of all existence is simply that the human species should exist to worship God and that all things are done solely for man’s sake, even the heavens turning solely for his benefit and in order to bring his needs into being. . . . If this view is examined critically, however, as intelligent men ought to examine views, the fallacy in it is exposed. For the advocate of this belief has only to be asked, “This end, the existence of man—is God able to bring this about without all these preliminaries, or is it the case that man cannot be brought into being until all these things have been done?” If he replies that it is possible for God to give being to man without, say, creating the heavens, then it must be asked, “What is the utility to man of all these things which were not themselves the object but which exist ‘for the sake of’ something that could have existed without any Respect for Nature in the Jewish Tradition 57

of them?” Even if the universe does exist for man, and man’s end, as has been said, is to serve God, the question remains: What is the object of man’s serving God? For His perfection would not be augmented by the worship of all things that He created, not even if they all apprehended Him as He truly is. Nor would He lack anything if nothing but Him existed at all. . . . For this reason, the correct view, in my judgment, in keeping with religious belief and in consonance with the theories of reason, is that all beings should not be believed to exist for the sake of man’s existence. Rather all other beings too were intended to exist for their own sakes, not for the sake of something else. . . . We say that all parts of the world were brought into being by God’s will, intended either for their own sake or for the sake of something else intended for its own sake. . . . This view too is stated in the prophetic books: “The Lord made each thing le-ma‘anehu” (Prov. 16:4). The reference might be to the object [each thing for its own sake]; but if the antecedent is the subject [the Lord], the sense is ‘for Himself,’ i.e., His will, which is His Identity . . . also called His glory . . . Thus His words, “All that are called by My name and created for My glory, I created, yes and made” (Isa. 43:7). . . . If you study the book which guides all who seek guidance toward what is true and is therefore called the Torah, this idea will be evident to you from the outset to the end of the account of creation. For it never states in any way that any of the things mentioned was for the sake of something else. Rather, of every single part of the world, it is said that He created it, and its being agreed with His purpose. This is the meaning of its saying, “God saw that it was good” (Gen. 1:4). For you have learned what we have explained on how “Torah speaks according to human language” (B. Bava Metzi‘a 31b, cited at Guide to the Perplexed, 1.26; cf. 1.46, citing Gen. Rabbah, 27.1). ‘Good,’ for us, refers to what agrees with our purpose. (Guide to the Perplexed, 3.13, citing Guide, 1.2) In saying that God created all things by His own will and intent, then, Scripture is saying that God created them for their own sake, and only sec- ondarily for the uses they may afford one another. If we judge anthropo- centrically, we shall inevitably find many things whose “purposes,” in terms of utility to us, baffle us; many will seem to have no purpose at all or to be “detrimental.”4 Yet all serve God’s purpose, which is their existence. That is what is meant by their existing for God’s glory, distinguishing God’s

4 The anthropic principle, popular among speculative cosmologists in recent years, is a special case of the anthropocentrism Maimonides criticizes here, an intellectualist version that presses all values in the direction of service to science. The principle is subject to a similar line of attack to the one that Maimonides raises against anthropocentrism in general: If God created the universe so as to make it intelligible to us (or if we “create” it in the fashion that will make it intelligible), then we must ask why so much that is extraneous to that purpose is included—and why there remains so much that is unintelligible. 58 Respect for Nature in the Jewish Tradition purpose from any merely instrumental end. God’s glory is found in the creation of all things for their own sakes. Maimonides is aided to this view by the Neoplatonic response to Stoic anthropocentrism.5 But the thesis, which he aims at the occasionalists and anthropomorphizers of providence in his own day,6 is clearly biblical. His reading of “God saw that it was good” is borne out in Isaiah’s vision (6:3) of the complementarity of God’s transcendence (“Holy, Holy, Holy”) with his immanence: “The fill of all the earth is His glory.” Genesis envisions God examining His creation and seeing that it is good. What we see here is neither the bending of God’s judgment to the world’s standards nor the capricious imposition of God’s demand—as if we were ordered to call the world good because it is the work of a powerful artisan. Rather, nature, the world, is God’s, not only in the sense that He is its Creator and the Author of the values it displays but also in the sense that God has scrutinized His work and found it a fair expression of the values intended. Even here, God’s judgment cannot substitute for our own, but it can instruct ours, aid us in seeing God’s more universal goodness exemplified in the multiplicity of things. The varieties of goodness in nature make it a text in which we can recognize God through the references to His goodness and wisdom implicit in His handiwork. The finite goodness in things intends the Infinite. It points beyond itself, toward the Ultimate that is its Ground.

The Sufferings of Living Beings

Relatively few biblical passages directly address human regard for and responsibility toward nature. But the nisus of the commands these passages voice is not mistaken when the rabbis set about thematizing the Mosaic law. Consider the biblical response to what was perhaps a pagan frisson of cruelty. We are commanded no less than three times: “Thou shalt not seethe a kid in its mother’s milk” (Exod. 23:19, 34:26, Deut. 14:21). Legislatively, this mitzvah is made the foundation of an elaborate system of ritual separations of dietary milk from meat that are a matter of daily attention for obser-

5 See, e.g., Porphyry, De Abstinentia, 3.20; Ikhwan al-Safa’, The Case of the Animals vs. Man before the King of the Jinn, trans. L. E. Goodman (New York: Twayne, 1978). 6 Thus, he plays on their views about omnipotence and voluntarism to generate the inference that God created things that would be otiose on their assumptions; see Guide to the Perplexed, 3.17.3, 25. Respect for Nature in the Jewish Tradition 59 vant Jews to this day. But, if the Law is to affect our ethos and not just our behavior and is thereby to contribute to the Torah’s declared aim of making Israel “a kingdom of priests and a holy nation” (Exod. 19:6), it would help to have some inkling of the connection of the biblical restraint with the idea of the holy. The sages find the hint they need in the structural relationship between this prohibition and that against taking a mother bird with her young. They immediately draw the inference as to the pertinent theme: Just as God shows mercy to man, so too does He show mercy to beasts. How do we know? Because it is said, “[Whether it be cow or ewe,] ye shall not kill it and its young on the same day” (Lev. 22:28) . . . and in the same way God was full of mercy for the birds, as it is said, “If along the road thou comest on a bird’s nest, in a tree or on the ground, with fledglings or eggs and the mother bird sitting on them, thou shalt not take the mother with the young. Thou must surely let her go and take only the young” (Deut. 22:6–7). (Deuteronomy Rabbah 6.1). Mercy is the theme, which God himself introduces, since God provides the ordinances here. Human beings are the subject, and God’s creatures are the object. Human needs are not rejected, but their service is restricted. Beasts will be slaughtered and sacrificed or eaten; birds and eggs will be taken for human use. But excess will be curtailed. The frisson of cruelty is restrained, barred from becoming a religious, or a secular, value. The grasping and gobbling that would say, of all of nature, “This is mine, I take the mother with her young,” is disciplined and gentled. The context of the prohibition against seething a kid in its mother’s milk seems to matter in the rabbis’ recognition of an ethical rather than merely ritual (e.g., totemic or ascetic) significance in the Law. For it is nestled among commandments about our responsibility to restore lost property, assist at the scene of a roadside spill, and avoid hazardous negligence in construction (Deut. 22:1–8). The ethical thrust that the ancient rabbis discover here is pursued by the authors of the codes. Taking up the biblical prohibition against yoking an ass and an ox together (Deut. 22:10), they derive a prohibition against setting a bird on eggs of another species. The stated reason is not the biblical distaste for hybridization but the rabbinic identification of this practice as a form of cruelty to animals (Code of Jewish Law 191.4). The ultimate paradigm of cruelty in the Mosaic system, as the rabbis understand it, is a practice once again associated with paganism, namely, ’ever min ha-hai, tearing or taking a limb or member from a living animal, a practice that rabbinic jurisprudence conceives as forbidden to all mankind—the children of Noah (Gen. 9:4)—by the basic laws of humanity. The Talmud (B. Bava Batra 20a) does not confine the restraint here to the 60 Respect for Nature in the Jewish Tradition dietary realm, where the human ethos would be most immediately tainted. Cutting off a limb from a living creature, even to feed it to the dogs and even in the case of animals that are not to be eaten at all, because they are unclean, is prohibited. The grounds are clearly stated: they are the demands of humaneness toward animals. I assign pagan associations to such practices as ’ever min ha-hai, because I take it that their frissons can be made loci of the pagan horrendum when piety has not sundered shock from sanctity. But the direction of the rabbinic reasoning must remain clear: It is not because the act is pagan that it is forbidden as cruel, but because it is cruel that it is forbidden and branded as pagan. The analysis is underscored by the biblical legislation regarding sacrifice and the slaughter of animals for the table. For the nisus of all that ritual legislation is toward the pacific in the choice of animals (the dove, the bullock, the sheep and goat), away from beasts of prey and carrion; and toward the swift and merciful in modes of slaughter (a sharp clean blade, not a jagged, toothed, or notched edge). Again rabbinic authority is not reti- cent in making the thematic principle explicit: “This is the reason (ta‘am) for shehitah (the ritually restricted practice of animal slaughter): the biblical regard for the suffering of animals” (Nahmanides on Gen. 1:29). Humaneness is not the sole concern. It is balanced, as the Rambam argues, against the desiderata of nourishment and economy. It matters to the Holy One, blessed be he, as the rabbis say, whether a poor house- wife needs to spend a few extra pennies, or waste good food.7 These, too, are ethical concerns. The Torah is not a romantic document, concerned only with emotive rhetoric. But it is concerned with cruelty, and with the human ethos. My friend David Shatz argues, on Kantian/Aristotelian lines, that the Torah recognizes the suffering of living beings as a kind of “spring training” for humaneness in our character. Clearly that is true in part. The prohibition against seething a kid in its mother’s milk does concern the ethos. The kid is dead, after all, before it is cooked. But the biblical prohibition and all that is strung from it looks beyond the ethos to a way of living and being that would orient the ethos appropriately and that would test that ethos against identifiable, conceptually coherent, and materially appropri- able standards.

7 Cf. Maimonides, Guide to the Perplexed, 3.26, ed. Munk 3.58b: “As necessity occasions the eating of animals, the commandment was intended to bring about the easiest death in an easy manner.” Respect for Nature in the Jewish Tradition 61

It is the suffering creature that we are called upon to regard. And the principle invoked is a general one, against causing or countenancing undue suffering. Behind that demand lies the ontic claim that living beings do suffer. They are not, as on some Cartesian model, mere automata. Morally, moreover, these sufferings matter. That is why they are relevant to a humane ethos—and why real sufferings matter more than, say, mere notional or semeiotic sufferings, such as might be inflicted virtually or sym- bolically in a video game or pictorial representation. The focus on actual sufferings clearly regards not simply the observer or afflictor but the victim. If humaneness is a virtue, it is a virtue that extends toward all potential sufferings and that rejects all wanton causing of pain, that is, all cruelty. It is not just a matter of delicacy about the infliction of pain. It is true, as Hogarth saw, that cruelty to animals is a stepping stone toward greater cru- elties. But there are intrinsic as well as instrumental reasons for not countenancing cruelty in any of its forms. Such reasons, after all, are what give moral weight to the orientation of any ethos. Thematizing the biblical concerns does lead on from negative protec- tions to positive obligations. Vegetarianism is not one of them. This is an option that is repeatedly ruled out, for humanity at large, when Adam’s permission to eat freely of every tree but one in the garden (Gen. 2:16) and of the herb of the field (Gen. 3:18) is enlarged to Noah’s ration of clean animals (Gen. 2:7) and every moving thing that liveth (Gen. 9:3), and for the Israelites when Moses finds that they require quails as well as manna (Exod. 16:3, 12–13; cf. Num. 11:31; Ps. 105:40). But the Law does require positive acts of kindness toward animals. As we read in the Code (191.1): “It is biblically forbidden to hurt any living creature. On the contrary, it is one’s duty to save any living creature from pain, regardless of whether it has an owner or not, and regardless of whether or not its owner is a Jew.” The same complementarity that transforms negative liberties into positive rights can here be seen to be at work in transforming the deserts of animals to be free from sufferings imposed by the hand of man into a positive desert to be freed from unnecessary pain and suffering. We may say, if we like, that the aim of such legislation is the refinement of the human ethos or the evincing of respect for God’s creation. But the impact on the animals is the same regardless; and, in fact, the legislation will be empty if the sensibilities of the animals themselves, that is, their liability to sufferings, is not the focus of human concerns. The principle laid down here, however, is far from empty. One could say that it has numerous concrete applications. But, as so often happens, the concrete applications here are the substance of the Law. The general 62 Respect for Nature in the Jewish Tradition principle is simply an underlying premise that later jurists derive induc- tively from thematizing surveys of the laws and their intent—and then use in forming further applications. Chief among the deserts of animals under biblical law is the Sabbath rest: Six days shalt thou labor and perform all thy work. But the seventh day is a Sabbath unto the Lord thy God. Thou shalt do no manner of work—thou, thy son, thy daughter, thy man servant, thy maid servant, thine ox and thine ass, and all thy beasts, and the stranger who liveth within thy gates—so that thy man servant and maid servant may rest as thou dost. And thou shalt remember that thou wast a servant in the land of Egypt. (Deut. 5:13–14) The commandment has multiple tiers of application: to the self and family, to servants of both sexes, but also to the beasts. The ethical regard for servants reflects the experience of slavery in Egypt—as does the inclusion of strangers. For the Israelites in Egypt were strangers as well as slaves. The verse suggests that animals are spared for the sake of sparing the servants. But, regardless of the reason, animals are included in the Sabbath rest, and the Codes devise their inclusion not as an incidental by-product of human rest, but as an independent biblical mandate, implying, inter alia, that beasts are not to be laden or made to carry a burden on the Sabbath (Code 87.1). As usual with the rabbis, the point is carried further. Suppose one has, purposefully or in error, mounted or loaded one’s animal on the Sabbath. Is one permitted to dismount or unload? To compound an original infrac- tion would normally be forbidden. But the Law permits one to dismount and requires one to unload the beast. For under no circumstances may one leave a burden on an animal over the Sabbath. The reason, plainly stated, is the alleviation of suffering in a living being (Maimonides, MT, Shabbat 21.9–10, following B. Shabbat 154b). Similarly, one must alleviate the suffering of an animal that has fallen into a cistern or ditch on the Sabbath, bringing food, or pillows and blan- kets to help it climb free. The normal restrictions against such labors on the Sabbath are waived. For they are of rabbinic provenance, whereas the duty to alleviate animal suffering is biblical (MT III Shabbat 25.26, following B. Shabbat 128b). Even a measure of casuistry is permitted, so as to prevent the suffering of an animal (Maimonides, MT III Repose on a Festival 2.4, following B. Betzah 26a). Just as the Sabbath does not take precedence over risks to human life or health, so its restrictions are overridden by the suffering of animals. Cattle must be milked and geese fed, lest the buildup of milk in the one case or Respect for Nature in the Jewish Tradition 63 hunger in the other cause suffering to a living being (Code 87.9). The fresh wound of an animal must be dressed with oil, to ease its pain (Code 87.23). An animal that has overeaten may be run in the courtyard, to ease its pain (Code 87.24). Even a stray dog must be fed—and in doing so one emulates God, who enabled it to live for as long as three days on what it has been able to find (Code 18.18). The Sabbath provides a good measure of the seriousness of the provisions against animal suffering, but it is not their sole occasion. The Torah directly mandates that an ox shall not be muzzled when it treadeth out the corn (Deut. 25:4). Once again this ordinance falls in the context of varied ethical commandments, such as the provision that a condemned man not be humiliated when he is punished (Deut. 25:4) and that a widow shall be given an opportunity for offspring by her husband’s surviving brother (Deut. 25:5–10). The rabbis generalize the anti-muzzling provision to cover any working animal and any restriction of its free access to food—even by hollering (Code 186.1). If lack of water prevents a beast from eating, one must water it as well (Code 186.3), for one must not frustrate the beast. Suffering, then, is not confined to direct, physical torment. Accordingly, when a beast is hobbled in a field, one may not tie the fore leg to the hind leg or bend one leg upwards and tie it in place, leaving the animal to walk on three legs, for such hobbles cause suffering to the animal (Code 87.7). Again, regarding the key ethical provision to help even an enemy reload his fallen ass (Exod. 23:5; Deut. 22:4), while the primary obligation is to the enemy—an obligation that Maimonides reads as aiming to help us overcome our irascible tendencies and so improve our character— there is an obligation as well toward the animal that lies sprawled (rovetz) beneath its load. For the obligation to unload a fallen beast takes precedence to a similar obligation to help load one for an owner who needs assis- tance loading up. As Maimonides explains: “If one encounters two animals, one sprawled under its load and the other unburdened because the owner needs help in loading, one is obligated to unload first to relieve the animal’s suffering. . . . But if one owner is an enemy and the other a friend, one must load for the enemy first, so as to subdue one’s evil inclination (Maimonides, MT XI Laws of Murder and Preservation of Life 13.13; Code 189.1). The laws regarding the suffering of animals may seem to reach an ethical peak of sorts when we read that when one sees horses drawing a cart uphill or over a rough spot that they cannot manage, one has a religious obligation to help push—lest the owner beat the animals to force them to pull more than their strength permits (Code 191.2). But the laws go further. It is forbidden to eat a thing before having fed one’s beasts. The proof text: 64 Respect for Nature in the Jewish Tradition

“I will provide grass in the fields for your cattle, and thou shalt eat and be sated” (Deut. 11:15). God again here is the model, providing first for the cattle in the pattern Israelites are meant to follow: “only then,” when the animals have been fed, the Talmud urges, shall we humans “eat and be sated” (B. Berakhot 40a). Naturally, the ideal is to create a sensibility of love and kindness. The sages, as they read the Torah for its themes, clearly see that such a sensibility reaches far beyond the treatment of animals alone. It is a way of relating to God, of emulating His mercy and thus fulfilling the commandment to pursue His holiness (Lev. 19:2). And it is a way of acquiring the character we need to relate to our fellow human beings and, when the desired virtues are most perfected, to lead them. For leaders need to emulate the divine attributes of mercy above all, as Moses learned when he sought to know God for the sake of learning how to lead (Exod. 33:13, 34:6–7). The rabbis put it simply: the great leaders of Israel were chosen only after showing mercy first to a flock of animals (Exod. Rabbah 2.2). The point is relevant not only with regard to leaders. If compassion is a virtue, then compassion at its most basic and most general is learned and practiced in our comportment toward other living creatures. But the relevance of compassion as a virtue is not confined to the human case. Compassion lies at the core of our regard for all creatures, in treating them, insofar as in us lies, as is their due. It is in that sense that compassion is most relevant to leadership. For in the Judaic conception, compassion is no supplement or antagonist, but the very heart of justice.

“Is a Tree a Man . . .?”

It is sometimes said that the biblical imperative, “Be fruitful and multiply,” pronounced as blessings upon all living things at the creation (Gen. 1:22), upon humanity in general (Gen. 1:28), and upon the new founders of animal (Gen. 8:17) and human (Gen. 9:1, 7) life on earth, represents an ethos of conquest and subjugation. The same ethos, it is said, was already spoken for in God’s original blessing to Adam and Eve, admonishing them to “fill the earth and master it and exercise dominion over the fish in the sea and the fowl of the sky” (Gen. 1:28). These words and others like them are often taken as imparting a license for environmental exploitation, even rapine.8

8 The position is critiqued in John Passmore, Man’s Responsibility for Nature: Ecological Problems and Western Traditions (London: Duckworth, 1974), 3–40. Respect for Nature in the Jewish Tradition 65

Commentators and glossators may seek to soften the language, just as others have read a harshness into the words that is redolent more of the issues they nourish than of the values bespoken in the text. Some understand mastery apologetically, as a reference to acts of understanding; others take it accusingly, as a mandate for wanton and wasting usage. But the Jewish tradition has clearly and articulately understood the biblical theme in terms of stewardship. De facto, humanity has charge over nature. We do dominate our environment, and the text of Genesis starts from acknowledgment of that fact, which it sees as a divinely imparted blessing. Creation at large, nature, as it will later be called, is good, very good when man and woman are added to the scene. It is good for nature to be “filled,” to teem with life—nonhuman as well as human; and when life is diminished, almost to extinction, it is good for it to be replenished, and not by humans alone (Gen. 9:2). Thus we read in Isaiah, “So saith the Lord, who created the heavens, God, who formed the earth and fashioned it, who founded it: He did not create it as a waste but made it to be lived in” (Isa. 45:18). Here, as in Genesis, we do not read, to be lived in by man, but simply to be lived in. The world is not meant to be empty. It is better full, and the fullness here, as in Genesis, is not just the absence of void but the fullness of life, the opposite of desolation. For the words of Isaiah reflect the vision of Genesis, “the fill of all the earth is His glory” (Isa. 6:3). Genesis arrays not just the panoply of creation but a hierarchy of values. Indeed, it tables the hierarchy of creation as a panoply of values—heaven and earth as the setting, plants as the adornment and the food for animals (Gen. 1:30); animals as a higher good, in virtue of their higher claims; humankind, as the crowning achievement, the creation that makes the whole no longer merely good but very good, in God’s eyes and in reality. Man is the crowning achievement on earth for no arbitrary reason but because of his capabilities. His dominion and his charge rest on those capabilities. For these are what make us responsible for nature and to nature. To repeat our opening midrash: “When the Holy One, blessed be He, created the first man, He took him and led him ’round all the trees of the Garden of Eden, and said to him: ‘Behold my works, how fair and lovely they are. All that I have created, I created for your sake. Take heed that you do not corrupt and destroy my universe. For, if you spoil it, there is no one to repair it after you’ ” (Eccl. Rabbah 7.13). Fruit trees are the symbolic cynosure of human responsibility for nature at large, just as blood and suffering are the cynosure in the special case of the human responsibility toward animals. For fruit trees are singled out in the biblical account of creation, and again in the biblical law: 66 Respect for Nature in the Jewish Tradition

When thou besiegest a city for many days in the course of warfare, in order to capture it, thou shalt not destroy the trees by taking an ax to them. Thou mayest eat of them, but mayest not cut them down. For is a tree of the field a man to retreat before you into a fortified place? Only trees that thou know- est are not food trees mayest thou destroy, cutting them down so as to build siege works against the fortified city that maketh war against thee—until it be reduced. (Deut. 20:19–20) Warfare here, as in the law of the fair captive or the law sparing newlyweds from conscription, serves as an index of the Torah’s priorities. Trees may be cut down for siege works, but only those that are known not to be food trees. The reasoning proffered by the text shows that it is not to preserve their fruit alone that these trees are spared. For the appeal is to what I have called virtual subjecthood,9 the same that was used when the text gives a voice to Balaam’s ass, to remonstrate with him for beating it when Balaam, in his moral blindness, fails to see the obstacle that blocks his path. The trees are assigned interests, and their interests are made vivid, rhetorically, by pleading the trees’ defenselessness: they cannot withdraw into the city. Indeed, they have given no offense by locking themselves up in a warlike posture. They are innocent, and it follows that they should be spared. The trees have interests, and because they have interests they have deserts,10 not absolute deserts like the right of the accused to a trial, but phased deserts, that make them worthy of protection, so that fruit trees, the more valuable prudentially, but also, in the biblical scheme, the more valuable intrinsically, deserve to be spared, even against the demands of military exigency, even (or especially) amid the ravages of war. As the Midrash makes clear, the Law points up the value of fruit trees, because “man’s living comes from the tree”—but Rabbi Ishmael goes further. He says: “Hence we learn that God’s mercy extends even to the fruits. For if Scripture cautions you concerning the tree, which merely grows the fruit, how much more so to the fruit itself” (Sifre to Deut., Piska 203). We might say the reverse: If R. Ishmael can find grounds for asserting that God’s mercy extends to the fruit, how much more so may we infer that it applies to the tree, which is the fruit’s living source. Thus we read: “Whenever they cut down a fruit tree, the cry rings out from one end of the earth to the other” (Yalkut Reuveni to Genesis). The Midrash, indeed, sets forth the instance of a king who kept a special garden of non-fruit bearing trees,

9 See Ikhwan al-Safa’, Animals vs. Man, trans. Goodman, 12, 15–17, 20, 22, 29. 10 Cf. the imputation of hope to a tree in Job 14:7, again a projection of the nisus of growth and life as a claim of virtual subjecthood. Respect for Nature in the Jewish Tradition 67 so as to spare any fruit trees that might be threatened in an emergency (Exod. Rabbah 7.4). Note the parallel between this bit of homily and the operative command to assist a struggling beast lest its owner beat it. With jurisprudential diligence, the halakhah extends its protection from cutting with an ax, as biblically specified, to other means of destruction, including diversion of a water channel (Maimonides, MT XIV Laws of Kings and Wars 6.8, Sanhedrin 19.4). And the ethos represented in the laws sparing fruit trees in siege warfare reaches out from the military to the civil sphere, allowing fuller generalization of the biblical theme: the precedence of stewardship over ownership as the model of the human relationship to nature. Like the canon itself, we start from God’s placement of Adam in the Garden of Eden, “to work it and tend it (le ‘ovdah u-le-shomrah)” (Gen. 2:15), or, translating less literally, “to dress it and keep it” (Old JPS), “to till it and tend it” (New JPS). However we render the simple and transparent Hebrew words, the point is clear that Adam was not the owner but the caretaker. A fortiori was this so when Adam and Eve went out into the world of the human condition as we know it, which was no Eden and no garden, where Adam had to learn to till the ground that was “cursed” to him, to grow his livelihood from soil that seemed, in irony and spite, to yield only thorns and thistles (Gen. 3:17–18). Even now, the model was one of caring. Only the hardship was new. Taking God as the paradigm of human responsibility, the Midrash makes God himself the first agriculturalist: “The Holy One, blessed be He, from the very beginning of the creation of the world was, before all else, occupied with planting, as it is said: ‘And the Lord God planted a garden at the outset (mi-qedem) in Eden’ (Gen. 2:8).” The Midrash playfully reads mi-qedem, in the East, as though it meant, “at the outset,” establishing the primacy of agriculture. It then goes on, pointedly and in earnest, to draw the moral: “So do you also, when you enter into the land: Occupy yourself first with nought else but planting, as it is written: ‘And when ye come into the land, ye shall plant’ (Lev. 19:23)” (Lev. Rabbah 25.3). Leviticus goes on to reserve fruits of the fourth year for dedication to God (Lev. 19:24), but the homilist’s concern is with the primacy of planting, and the reason is the role it assigns to man, as a participant at God’s table, but also as a tenant who cares for God’s land and tends His crops. Thus, the transition is easily made from the universal human condition to the role of Israel in particular. God instructs Isaac, even in time of famine: “Go not down into Egypt. Dwell in the land” (Gen. 26:2). The Midrash glosses: “Dwell, that is, cultivate the land. Be a sower and a planter” 68 Respect for Nature in the Jewish Tradition

(Gen. Rabbah 64.3). The homilist wants to assign intrinsic, rather than merely economic, value to this activity. Tenure in the land is a value for Israel, and tenure means cultivation. The rhetoric is pressed in the well- known story of Hadrian’s observing an ancient man planting a fig tree whose fruits he will never enjoy (Lev. Rabbah 25.5; Tanhuma, Kedoshim 8). It is pointed up still further in the rabbinic admonition: “If you have a plant in your hand and they tell you that the Messiah is coming, first plant it and then go and welcome the Messiah” (Avot de-R. Nathan 2.31). We can say that these stories celebrate and valorize ordinary life and human hope for the future, since the old man plants for his offspring, as his ancestors planted for him, and since the worldly task of planting is given precedence even to the welcoming of the Messiah. But the fact remains that both the hope and the content of a fulfilling life are expressed in terms of planting. The land exists not to be laid waste but to be used, and planting is emblematic of the intrinsic worth as well as the instrumental worth of the simple tasks of everyday life by which human beings integrate themselves in nature and find themselves—make themselves—at home there. Is the concern only with use and habitation? Thematizing the values of the Mosaic Torah, the Talmud does not confine its interest to fruit trees or to wartime exigencies but pronounces broadly: “Those who cut down beautiful trees will never see a sign of blessing” (B. Pesahim 50b). Rashi cautiously glosses this in terms of cutting down fruit trees for their wood. But the Talmud itself corrects his caution: “For four reasons are the lights of heaven eclipsed . . . and because of people who cut down good trees” (B. Sukkah 29a). This time, Rashi glosses more in keeping with the biblical thematic: even if the trees cut down are one’s own property, there is a wrong in destroying them, “because those who do so are acting destruc- tively and seem to be spurning God’s blessing.” The blessing spreads beyond utility to mankind, opening up to a notion that even vegetation has deserts. Hence the mishnaic laws regulating trees that impinge on wells hinge not simply on economic value but on precedence: if the tree was there before the well, or if there is doubt as to which was present first, the tree takes precedence (Mishnah Bava Batra 2.11; Y. Bava Batra 7a). Which is to say, the tree has deserts; and, indeed, its deserts can take precedence to human economic interests. Accordingly, we find the Talmud moving beyond the biblical issue of fruit trees in wartime, to speak of any wanton destruction of plants. It takes green shoots as its exemplar of what need not, and so should not be destroyed. The talmudic text reads that “One who cuts off his own shoots, even though he has no right, is exempt from punishment” (B. Bava Kamma). Respect for Nature in the Jewish Tradition 69

But the force of the statement, made clear by the stress on the fact that the shoots are one’s own, is that, even though such destructive actions are exempt from punishment, they are wrong: Even though the cutter is exempt, he has no right. The theme is biblically grounded in the commandment that one is not to plant one’s field with alternating rows of incompatible crops (Deut. 22:9). Lest we doubt that the concern here is for the vitality of the crops, the text itself confirms it, by warning that those who do so place both of their two crops at risk.11 This issue of the crops’ vitality itself has both a pragmatic, utilitarian side and a side that regards the intrinsic worth of the plantings and their flourishing. But in the laws of shemitah (Lev. 25:1–7), intrinsic desert comes clearly to the fore. For the fallow, seventh year is called a sabbati- cal (shabbaton) “for the land.” The land itself is entitled to a rest. There are still utilities involved: the produce of the land is to be left for the poor, the land itself will regain its fertility if fallow years are kept to preserve it from exhaustion. But alongside these stand the deserts imputed to the land itself, expressed, once again, in terms of virtual subjecthood, when the Torah warns, with bitter irony, that the land will be repaid for the Sabbaths it may be scanted (Lev. 26:34; cf. 2 Chron. 36:21).

“His Mercies Are on All His Works”

Fruit trees, for the rabbis, are a paradigm case of God’s blessings, and thus of the act of creation, much as animals are. That, perhaps, is why fruit trees are numbered talmudically among the amenities that must grace a town that would in turn be graced by the presence of a scholar (B. Sanhedrin 17b). Here, fruit trees play a role similar to the one that Aristotle was prone to ascribe to the agora, the palaestra, theater, temples, and other public places: they help to humanize the conditions of human life. But the reason, I have suggested, is not just the pleasantness of the fruit. Rather, it seems to lie in the discovery of a palpable and biblically endorsed instance of the bounty of creation. That bounty surely does benefit humanity and is even said rabbinically to be provided for our sake. Yet the human share in God’s bounty does not exhaust its blessings. Animals and even trees and other plants receive that bounty too. And they too have deserts. Part of what the scholar seems to need to ponder is how and why this can be so. The answer,

11 The particle pen clearly introduces a warning here, not the threat of a penalty. Cf. Gen. 3:3, 19:19, 26:7, 31:31; Exod. 23:29; Lev. 10:7; Deut. 6:15, 8:11, 19:6, 20:5–7, etc. 70 Respect for Nature in the Jewish Tradition expressed thematically throughout the Law, is that if nature does benefit humanity, it does not exist exclusively for that benefit; nor does humanity exist only to reap the benefits that nature affords. Rather, all creatures exist for their own sake, and man exists, in part, to tend and care for nature. The ideal is a garden—nature tended and cared for. Man in general and Israel in particular are to be planters. They are to put down roots, to settle and dwell in the land that God provides and not to exhaust or overtax it. They may eat not only of its fruits but of the flesh that those fruits nourish, and they may do so with a clear conscience. But, just as they may not pollute or corrupt or despoil the land or spurn its bounties, so they may not cause, or even allow needless suffering to animals. These basic principles are constitutive in the good life, and they are building blocks for the emergence of character, including the character of those who would wield authority. The Midrash tells us (Gen. Rabbah 33.3; B. Bava Metzi‘a 85a) of R. Judah the Prince, the author of the Mishnah, that while studying the Law, he chanced to hear a calf that cried out on its way to market. “What can I do?” he said, “It was for this that you were created.” With an irony characteristic of midrashic narrative—and perhaps of life in some of its phases— R. Judah suffered a toothache for thirteen years, “as a punishment for his heartlessness.” According to the Midrash, he learned his lesson, reproving his daughter when she was about to kill some creeping creature that was running across her path. The point the Midrash draws is not that one should never kill a calf; still less that one should never swat a fly or crush a scorpion—quite the contrary. The themes the Torah teaches run broader and deeper than concern for humankind in ourselves and others. They include regard for the sufferings of living creatures. They include the deserts of trees and other plants. They include even the intrinsic worth of the environment that houses living beings but does not exist solely for their sake. As Judah the Prince put it, in the verse he cited to instruct his daughter but that summed up what his thirteen-year ordeal had taught him about God and nature and the relevance of compassion: “His mercies are on all His works” (Ps. 145:9).

LEAVING EDEN

Lenn E. Goodman

What does Genesis actually say about creation? Can we learn from a message sprung from so deep in antiquity? In the beginning, God created heaven and earth. The earth was formless and void, darkness on the face of the deep, God’s spirit brooding over the face of the water. God said: “Let there be light,” and there was light. God saw the light, that it was good. God divided the light from the darkness. God called the light day and the darkness he called night. Evening, and morning. One day. Painted in somber grays, the scene is suddenly lit up, then wanes into evening. The procession of days and nights begins. God remains unseen, beyond the light and dark, the earth and watery abyss. He is called Elohim here. The noun is in plural form but takes verbs in the singular. This opening gives a freshness to the God idea: The Creator is no familiar deity but unknown, unique.1 The plural form, says Abraham Ibn Ezra, is honorific. It sounds generic, abstract, setting a courtly distance, sidestepping deep per- sonification. God here is not the hero of some saga; creation is not a literary fiction. The word for heaven too (ha-shamayim) is not singular in form, but dual, perhaps reflecting some long dead cosmic architecture, yet already no more portentous than our speaking of the sunrise. The definite article (ha- sha-mayim), Ibn Ezra explains, shows that the familiar sky is meant. The plain intent: to account for the world we live in. Heaven and earth means everything natural: God made the world—earth, sky, and all they contain.2

The article was first published as Lenn E. Goodman, “Leaving Eden,” in Creation and Evolu- tion (London and New York: Rutledge, 2010), 42–75. Used with permission. 1 Targum Onkelos, the ancient Aramaic translation, renders Elohim here by the tetra- grammaton, meaning God Himself, lest one imagine some other deity is meant. 2 As the exegete Rashbam, Rabbi Shmuel ben Meir explains (at Genesis 1:1), the Hebrew Bible often uses summary statements that anticipate the subsequent narrative. Sasson notes summary sentences here and in 2:3: All was God’s work. If there were prior exis- tents, that “in no way deters God from creating many things out of nothing. For example, light . . . is created ex nihilo, and then simply contrasted with darkness. . . . In fact, no item which God orders into being by using the jussive y’hi (let there be) within a va-yo’mer (He said) statement can be said to emerge from preexisting materials,” “Time . . . to Begin,” 187–90. 72 LEAVING EDEN

The vision of a unified cosmos shines through in a homely ancient gloss: God made heaven and earth together, “pot and lid.”

Ultimate Causality

The Torah assigns God neither lineaments nor lineage. There is no back- story. Other creation accounts, some familiar to ancient Hebrews, tell of battles subduing the Sea or River. But here the writhing coils of Levia- than or Tanin, the turbulence of Rahab are stilled.3 The Mosaic Law, Philo writes, is no mere fiat. It has a cosmological preface. The legislator is the Creator. But the Law is not tricked out with mythologies, as if to bare God’s motives. This is no aftermath but the beginning. That speaks pow- erfully, if obliquely, of God’s goodness. The only face here is the surface of the deep. Brooding over it, with a rustling hinted in the sound of the word (meraḥefet), is a wind or spirit said to be of God. In the bold whimsy of one ancient reader, that rustling presence is the human soul.4 The rare word for brooding, a participle, feminine, to match the gender of ruʾaḥ, wind or spirit, recurs when the song of Moses recalls God’s finding Israel in a howling waste, brooding over them as an eagle stirs his young (Deu- teronomy 32:11), no alien god beside him (32:12). The fierce, protective presence that brooded over the waters still sustains God’s beloved. In the Talmud (B. Hagiga 15a) Ben Zoma will say that this spirit was hovering like a dove over its young. An eagle, Rashi explains (at Deuteronomy 32:11), does not just burst into its nest but flutters overhead, not settling its weight on the fledglings but hovering, “touching but not touching.”

3 Bible critics know Rahab as a turbulent goddess. In the Psalms (89:10) and Isaiah (51:9) she is cut to pieces—a deity no more. Here she is simply absent. “It is now practically impossible to locate a biblical commentary which does not devote many pages to Enuma Elish. . . . I doubt, however, that Israel was much interested in the theologies of other nations, if only because its own theologians did not have ready access to Pritchard’s hefty Ancient Near Eastern Texts Relating to the Old Testament from which to mount their polemics. Lin- guistically tehom [the deep] could be related to Tiamat [the pagan goddess] only indirectly, through a link which is missing from the evidence at hand. Tehom as an adversary for God makes fullest sense only in creations where the combat metaphor is dominant. While this particular metaphor appears frequently in Scripture, it is not featured in Genesis where there are metaphors of rearrangement and of craftsmanship. Therefore we should recognize that here, as elsewhere, tehom is a poetic term for bodies of water . . . theogony or the birth and emergence of God from preexisting matter is a theme which the Hebrew writer could not profitably discuss. It is this reluctance which makes the Hebrews so different from their more mythopoeic neighbors who repeatedly retold how deities emerge either from unformed matter or from each other.” Sasson, “Time . . . to Begin,” 188–91. 4 Ginzberg, Legends of the Jews, 57, following Ezekiel 37:14. LEAVING EDEN 73

Neoplatonists visualize God’s immediacy in geometrical language: Plotinus’ word, aphe, describes the weightless contact of a tangent with a circle, or a wrestler’s touch5—thus, Jacob’s contact with the angel (32:25)—not union but communion. On the Sistine Chapel ceiling Adam’s finger all but touches God’s outstretched hand: Our being is our own; we are of God, yet apart. Genesis does not detail God’s creative methods. The implied metaphor is of a monarch, who has only to speak for his will to be done (Ibn Ezra at 1:3; Rashi at 1:6). God commands, nature obeys; both object and instrument of creation. The Gospel of John will hypostatize God’s word. For a word embodies thoughts, and can seemingly demystify creation. But the reifica- tion, prefigured in Philo and the Jerusalem Targum, is perhaps too graphic. Genesis, humbler in its metaphysics and hardly intellectualist in its poetics, does not analyze the act. Its focus is on creation itself, and light, the primal fact. God called the light day. There was, as yet, no human to do the naming. Scripture looks ahead, Ibn Ezra observes (at 1:8; cf. Nahmanides at 1:10). “But God sets the boundaries, as if telling the light, ‘Day shall be your province’; and the darkness, ‘Night shall be yours’ ” (Genesis Rabbah 3.7; Nahmanides at 1:5; cf. Rashbam at 1:14). Day followed night, and night day. The division of light from darkness set nature’s rhythms, lest all remain in murk—or conflict, as Philo says, dawn “gently restraining darkness,” and evening “gently welcoming” the dark.6 “We are being alerted to the invention of time,” Sasson remarks,7 “a medium forged out of darkness, decidedly the least promising element available to the universe”—until God assigns its role. So darkness too is good. But light’s goodness is worthy of remark—first for its beauty, falsifying the cliché about Hebrew moral sense missing the aesthetic. The first command was an artist’s. Light shone before it had a name, just as a virgin is lovely before she’s loved. God didn’t just find the light and call it good. He gave it being and saw that it was good.8 Light was good not just because it served God’s purpose. It had no use as yet. It was good in itself. The old commentators compare Pharaoh’s daughter, examining the infant Moses and seeing that he was good (Exodus 2:2)— well formed, full of vitality.9 Nature too is a good. “Reality,” Sarna writes (at Genesis 1:4), “is imbued with God’s goodness. The pagan notion of inherent,

5 Plotinus, Enneads, V 3.17, VI 9.11. 6 Philo, De Opificio Mundi 33–34, ed. Colson, 24–27. 7 Sasson, “Time . . . to Begin,” 191. 8 Nahmanides, on 1:4, citing Ecclesiastes 2:13. 9 Cf. Rashbam, On Genesis, 34–35. 74 LEAVING EDEN primordial evil is banished. Henceforth, evil is to be apprehended on the moral and not the mythological plane.” Nahmanides finds a commitment to preservation implicit in God’s seeing it was good. That hardly makes natural kinds changeless, as he (at 1:10, 12, 1:31) and Ibn Ezra (at 2:4) urge. Unchanging species are foreign to Genesis. As Maimonides explains, stiffly fixed natures yield an unchanging universe (Guide II 19). The Talmud (B. Hullin 60a) does deny that nature changes. But that means the causal order, not species: God does not capri- ciously alter nature’s course. Preservation matters because nature deserves sustenance. God’s free act of creation, Hermann Cohen argued, like any act of love, entrains commitment. And, like law, God’s creativity enriches the freedom it imparts. Need and vulnerability are present from the start, Kass writes: But hunger is met with blessings. Indeed, even appetites are blessings: “From this germ of appetition . . . emerge desire, feeling, and a rich inner life, a badge of distinction for the higher animals and man. Life, precisely because it is perishable, has aspiration for what is eternal.”10 Creatures, Genesis assumes, will pursue their interests. Nature (as Aristotle saw) recycles its materials. But that means more than Aristotle knew. For natures, as we now know, are dynamic: God delegates creative responsibilities. Individuals grow; species evolve. Biblically, light will stand for all the blessings of life, and insight: For with Thee is the fountain of life; by thy light do we see light (Psalms 36:10). God said, “Let there be a vault (rakia) amid the waters, dividing water from water.” God made the vault to separate the water below it from the water above it, and it did. God called the vault the sky. Evening, and morning: A second day. The verses suggest an artisan at work. The curtains part a bit as we follow his glance: God himself made the vault of heaven. Genesis, unlike Plato, is not queasy about ascribing work to the Highest. God’s face remains unseen, but a product of his art comes into view: a barrier to keep the waters above from flooding earth below. The rare word rakia, the so- called firmament, suggests hammered metal (cf. Exodus 39:3; 2 Samuel 22:43), dome-like, dividing the waters much as darkness divides the days. In the Babylonian Enuma Elish fresh water (Apsu), commingling with the surrounding Sea (Tiamat), engenders the gods. But biblical chastity fosters naturalism: The waters are not powers. They are naturalized under God’s control.

10 Kass, Beginning of Wisdom, 36. LEAVING EDEN 75

In ancient texts rainwater pours from cisterns in the sky (Psalms 104:13; Genesis Rabbah 4.2, 4.5). But no one need take that literally. If hailstones are missiles, their storehouses would be armories. God asks Job if he has seen such armories. The point is that we mortals don’t control the hail (38:22). God challenges Job again, asking if it’s he who binds the Pleiades or loosens Orion’s cords, or if he knows the womb from which ice issues (vv. 29, 31). Is it faith to think frost comes from a womb, or that stars are reined with leather traces? In the Psalms (104:3) God’s upper rooms house waters. Is it piety to miss a metaphor? Ecclesiastes knows the source of rain: When clouds are full, they pour down rain on earth (11:3). In Job too rain comes from clouds (37:11). R. Eliezer, a Talmudic sage, knew that clouds are replenished from the sea; he cites Job (36:28) to confirm that clouds distill the water they yield as rain.11 Saadiah sought no cisterns in the sky. Didn’t Job pair them poetically with clouds? “The substance of rain is the moist vapor that rises into the air by a force of its own. Once it reaches the limit of its power to rise it falls back upon the earth by its own nature.”12 Ibn Ezra, similarly, cites Amos (5:8): God calls the waters of the sea and pours them on the face of the earth. God acts through nature here. Literalism would only dilute the message: That God made the world, marked the seasons, and set limits to all natural forces. God said, “Let the waters beneath the sky be gathered up, and dry land appear.” And it was so. God called the dry land earth; the gathered waters, he called seas. God saw that this was good. God said, “Let the earth sprout herbage—grass bearing seed, fruit trees on earth, yielding fruits of their kind with their seeds in them.” And it was so. The earth brought forth herbage—grass, bearing the seeds of its kind, and fruit trees yielding fruits with the seeds of their kind within. God saw that this was good. Evening, and morning. A third day. It’s good that the earth shows above the water. Philo pictures the alternative: water everywhere, “as if soaking a sponge.”13 Land makes room for plants. Their creation is good in itself. But it also portends opportunity. And nature joins in God’s plan, Ibn Ezra stresses: It is the waters that teem with life, the earth that puts forth grass and living creatures (Genesis 1:11, 20, 24). The fecundity is nature’s, but still God’s blessing, cheered on by God’s be fruitful and multiply (1:22), ending the earth’s barrenness. All life

11 Genesis Rabbah 13.10; cf. Resh Lakish at 13:11, citing Psalms 135:7. 12 Saadiah, The Book of Theodicy, at Job 37:11, tr. Goodman, 192, cf. 377. 13 Philo, De Opificio 38, ed. Colson, 1.29. 76 LEAVING EDEN on earth, says Ibn Ezra, comes from the natural elements (at 1:24). But even a fertile earth does not yield plants without seeds.14 The ancient word for gathering here connotes boundary setting (Genesis Rabbah 5.1)—limits once again. So was the earth once wholly under water? That again would miss the point. We’re asked to imagine how things might have been—no light, no division of day from night. The Torah acknowl- edges dry land, grasses, trees, not to preach a fantasy history but in the vein of those modern authors who urge that without tiny differences in the quantities of matter and anti-matter nothing would have survived the Big Bang. Genesis is explanatory in a way, pointing to the work of a transcendent God—but also celebratory: Without God’s act there would be no natural order to explain.

Biblical Naturalism

Genesis does not say that land was made for plants but only that the waters were gathered up, so land showed above the water. For terrestrial plants that’s marvelous. But the plants are not immortal, nor continuously created. They have seeds inside, yielding others of their kind. No organism literally reproduces. Living beings produce others of their kind, just as the Hebrew says. But of its kind just means “of all sorts,” as the parallels show in God’s charge to Noah (6:20) and in the dietary laws (Leviticus 11:14–16, 19, 22; Deuteronomy 14:15). Species do breed true: “Baboons don’t produce peacocks,” as one polemicist put it.15 But here the focus is on profusion and variety, not reproductive isolation. The Bible knows about hybridization. It tends to disapprove (Leviticus 19:19, Deuteronomy 22:9). But mules are well known (Genesis 36:24, 1 Kings 10:25, 18:5, 1 Chronicles 12:40, 2 Chronicles 9:24, etc.). “Fixity of species,” as Shai Cherry remarks, “never became a Jewish doctrine.” The old exegetes readily imagine species changing, crossing, dis appearing.16 In the Midrash the snake loses not only his feet but his guile.

14 Cf. Sasson, “Time . . . to Begin,” 193; Augustine, De Genesi ad Literam, 175. 15 John Roach Straton, Evolution vs Creation, in R. Numbers, ed., Creation—Evolution Debates, 2.120. 16 The taḥash, variously identified as a seal, dugong, dolphin, or badger, is homiletically problematic, its skin used in the biblical tabernacle (Exodus 25:5, 26:14, 35:7, 23) but its flesh unfit as food. Later it is romanced as a fabulous creature, but Ezekiel (16:10) mentions taḥash soled sandals. Rashi (at Exodus 25:5, following B. Shabbat 28b) deems it extinct. LEAVING EDEN 77

Even his scales, molting, and forked tongue alter his original condition (Genesis Rabbah 19.1, 20.4). The mole lost its eyesight; frogs, their teeth— lest they destroy everything (Psalms Rabbah 58, 300; cf. B. Moed Katan 6b). The mouse’s mouth and raven’s gait and courtship changed after the Flood; the steer’s nose lost its hair when Joshua kissed it for bearing him into battle at Jericho (Alphabet of Ben Sirah 25–26). The enmity of cats and dogs, midrashically, like cats’ mousing, is acquired. The homilies, like any fables, accept species change—quite innocent of the notion that creation, being perfect, must hold constant, or can only decline from its primordial state. Dolphins, in midrashic legend, are half man, half fish and can gender with humans. Noah, on God’s instructions, is said to have selected for the ark only submissive beasts. He excluded dogs that bred with wolves, and roosters that mounted peahens.17 He chose for purity and obedience, just as God chose him for probity, not hardihood. God created many worlds before ours, says the Midrash, and other humans before Adam—all discarded (Genesis Rabbah 3.7; Psalms Rabbah 90:13; cf. B. Shabbat 88b). Moral worth was the test, not sheer survivability. God said, “Let there be lights in the vault of heaven, dividing day from night, marking the seasons, days, and years, as lamps in the vault of heaven, lighting the earth.” And it was so. God made the two great lights, the greater light to preside by day, and the lesser light to preside by night; and the stars. God set them in the vault of heaven to light the earth and preside by day and night and divide light from darkness. And God saw that it was good. Evening, and morning. A fourth day. Genesis does not say that plants were made for human use. It cites their enjoyment (2:9), prospectively, not to delimit their purposes.18 But fruit trees are delightful. One midrash remarks: The whole world was like a table set for man, yet he came last, like a latecomer to a feast19—a lesson in humility: Even the gnat predates us. Maimonides, in this spirit, calls it

Israel Gedaliah Lipschutz is well aware of extinction; see Shuchat, “Attitudes Towards Cosmogony and Evolution among Rabbinic Thinkers,” 25. 17 Tosefta Bekorot, Second Alphabet of Ben Sirah 25a–27a, 34a–36a; Sanhedrin 108ab. 18 In Aristotle’s Politics I 8, 1256b 15 plants do exist for animals’ sake. But that hardly seems their sole purpose. Teleologically, Aristotle looks to outcomes and not always to intentions; cf. Nussbaum, Aristotle’s De Motu Animalium, 74–99. 19 Sanhedrin 38a, citing Proverbs 9, where wisdom invites the simple to her feast; cf. Tosefta Sanhedrin 8.7–8. 78 LEAVING EDEN the height of arrogance to imagine that celestial bodies exist for us alone: “The right view, in my judgment, religiously and rationally, is not that all beings should be taken to exist for man’s sake but that they too exist for their own sakes. . . . Don’t be misled when it says of the stars, to light the earth, and preside by day and night (Genesis 1:17–18) . . . this only discloses their nature. . . . as when it says of man, rule over the fish of the sea (1:28)— which does not mean that’s why we were created but only describes the nature God was pleased to bestow on us” (Guide III 13). Celestial bodies do mark the seasons. But that’s not their purpose. Starlight and sunlight spread in all directions. Only a fraction comes our way. The inference Genesis invites is simply this: Without God’s act, none of this would have been. Like the first light, heaven’s lamps are as precious for their beauty as for their later uses. Their sublimity betokens fealty to God (Ben Sirah 9:17, Genesis Rabbah 6.2). Their beauty is God’s hallmark. So the Psalms say they praise God (19:2, 148:1–6). But the sun was not made to ripen crops. Ancient commentators often wondered about the light created before the sun. Nahmanides suggests (at 1:12) that the vault of heaven blocked the primal light, so the earth needed lamps of its own. A fanciful expedient. Plainly not all light came from the sun. But Genesis does not make light the first object of creation so as to teach astronomy. Nor should readers be troubled, Ibn Ezra explains (at 1:17), that it says God set the stars in the firmament. They’re far above the sky, but scripture puts them there just as it speaks of God’s setting the rainbow in the clouds (9:13): where it’s seen, not where it is. Genesis aims to situate us in the world, but it’s not a map. Some ancient exegetes have the sun and moon created on the first day but situated on the fourth (B. Hagigah 12a). Maimonides generalizes the approach, to vindicate biblical naturalism: The whole cosmos was created as an integrated system—the laws of nature, the heavenly bodies, time itself—nature’s history, typified (as in Galileo) by the placement of the stars (Guide II 17, 19, 30; cf. III 32). The Malbim thus envisions the progressive development of the Godgiven potentials of things, bringing nature to the state we know.20 Modern apologists sometimes make background radiation the light that antedates the stars. But the Bible’s disenchanting of nature affords a better explanation: When Genesis dethrones the pagan gods it naturalizes their emblems. The polemic is muted but powerful: The sun is a created thing.

20 Rosenbloom, “Mysticism and Science in Malbim’s Theory of Creation,” 81. LEAVING EDEN 79

Genesis tells of vegetation before the sun shone, Philo explains, precisely to exclude the sun’s divinity. It too is created. It is not life’s ultimate source.21 The greater and lesser lights preside. They do not fix our destiny. Indeed, as Kass notes, the heavenly dome or vault is the first created thing not marked as good by God:22 The sky is not divine. It’s just a hunk of metal, as it were. Compare the scandal to Athenian piety when Socrates was calumnied as having called the sun a rock.23 The sun and moon give light, but they’re not alive, or even named.24 The planets get no separate mention, although, as Ibn Ezra notes (at 1:16), Jupiter is far larger than the moon. The great lights, he explains, are so called for their brilliance, not their size. Genesis mentions the stars almost as an afterthought, slighting their supposed powers. Jeremiah inveighs against awe at celestial portents (10:2); other texts find star worship revolting (Deuteronomy 17:3, 2 Kings 21:3, 2 Chronicles 33:3–9). To curb its hubris, the moon, midrashically, is diminished, and made to wax and wane (B. Hullin 60b). In the eighth-century hymn El Adon, the planets are beneficial, but created servitors—not dreadful gods but cheerful ministers of God’s intent, acclaiming his sovereignty by spreading their light, exercising a delegated power and no arbitrary dominion,25 their procession, calming, like the regular changing of the guard at a royal palace. God said, “Let the waters teem with living things, let birds fly over the earth, across the vault of heaven.” God created the great sea creatures and every kind of crawling animals that teem in the waters, and all sorts of winged fowl. God saw that it was good, and God blessed them, saying: “Be fruitful and multiply and fill the waters of the seas, and let the birds increase on earth.” Evening, and morning. A fifth day. God’s creativity is compounded in his be fruitful and multiply. Life itself flourishes, on land and in the seas—the plural in that last word fore- stalling confusion with any sea god. The Tanin, too, ancient ally of the Sea, defeated in its theomachy with Baal, is now just another creaturely kind, blessed by God with all the rest (Sarna, at 1:21). Again there’s delegation. Nature’s call to living beings to thrive in their diverse ways is God’s command, but also a blessing, the Torah’s first such pairing. Plants,

21 Philo, De Opificio 45–46, ed. Colson, 1.34–37; cf. Genesis Rabbah 6.1. 22 Kass, “Evolution and the Bible,” Commentary 86.5 (November, 1988) 35. 23 Plato, Apology 26d; Anaxagoras was the proper target of the charge; see Hippolytus, Ref. 1.8.3–10 = dk 59a 42, Kirk and Raven § 502. 24 The Torah, similarly, numbers the months, bypassing their pagan names. 25 Cf. Nahmanides at Genesis 1:18. 80 LEAVING EDEN

Nahmanides writes (at 1:22), need no special blessing; their proliferation is seen to in their seeds. But animals procreate more actively. The mandate, Rashi notes, is to be fruitful, and to multiply. But the mandate, as Ibn Ezra writes, is no guarantee of fecundity. There’s little worry that life will overrun the earth or overfill the seas. Creatures have their work cut out for them staying alive and sustaining their kinds. Animals need special blessings, in fact, since humans will decimate them (Genesis Rabbah 11.2). But God seeks their preservation. For life is a blessing; its profusion shows God’s bounty: God said, “Let the earth bring forth every sort of living being: beasts, creeping things, all sorts of land animals.” And so it was. God made land animals of all kinds, beasts of all sorts, and every kind of creature that crawls in the soil. And God saw that it was good. The Hebrew table benediction blesses God for bringing forth bread from the earth. Everyone knows that people bake bread. Loaves don’t just spring from the soil. But the prayer echoes the Psalmist’s allusion to our partnership with God (104:14), focusing on God’s role since He imparts the powers by which all ends are won. The natural progression from seed to wheat, to harvesting, threshing, milling, kneading, and baking, holds miracles at every stage. Similarly here: The earth brings forth living beings—at God’s command, with many intermediate stages. Again Genesis celebrates the variety of living kinds, not their invariance: The living creatures are good. As with first light, the standard is intrinsic worth, not utility. Hence, as Ibn Ezra notes, the inclusion of wild beasts— even predators (cf. Nahmanides at 1:24). The wild ass, as God reminds Job, laughs at city traffic; the wild ox ploughs no furrow, seeks no manger, and scorns the threshing floor (Job 39:5–7, 9–11). God feeds the badger, wild goats, storks, and lions; dolphins serve him by their play (Psalms 104:17–27). Nature’s exuberance is God’s glory. God said, “Let us make man in our own image and likeness. Let him rule over the fish of the sea, birds of the sky, beasts of the earth, and every creeping thing that crawls upon the earth.” And God created man in his own image. In the image of God did he create him: Male and female created he them. God blessed them, and God said to them: “Be fruitful and multiply, fill the land and master it. Rule over the fish of the sea, the birds of the sky, and every living creature that crawls upon the earth.” Saadiah reads Let us make as a plural of majesty. Nahmanides sees a hint of the earth’s collaboration, providing Adam’s matter (at 1:26). God LEAVING EDEN 81 addresses the angels, Ibn Ezra suggests. For humans, unlike the rest, are no mere compound of the elements. They have a higher destiny. Image and likeness, Nahmanides writes, announces man’s affinity to God: “In bodily dispositions he will be like the earth from which he was taken; in spirit, like the supernal beings. For the spirit is not a body and will not die.” God, Sarna notes (at 1:26), does not just command man into existence, like the light and all the rest, with an impersonal jussive verb. The hortative let us make suggests deliberation—as if God were musing, R. Hila says, as when we say to ourselves ‘Lets see . . .’ But the Midrash finds a springboard here (cf. 11:7): God consulted, as it were, with his retinue. So should we, in determining any great matter (Sanhedrin 38b, Genesis Rabbah 8.8). God needed no help, Rashi explains (at 1:26–27). He was modeling deference, even to one’s inferiors. Maimonides takes the heavenly host more cosmologically: Angels are the natural forms and forces God deploys—just as Plato’s craftsman god, the Demiurge, consults an ideal pattern (Guide II 6, alluding to Timaeus 29–30). But matter too is God’s creation. So is energy. As Elijah Benamozegh writes (citing Nahmanides and Genesis Rabbah 8.3), “The words, Let us make man, addressed all the forces in the universe.”26 Nature’s created powers were God’s medium and vehicle.

The Human Image

God’s image and likeness, Maimonides reasons, is the human mind (Guide I 1).27 For God has no physical likeness. As Ibn Ezra writes, “Scrip- ture clearly rejects such notions, saying, To whom will you liken me? (Isaiah 40:25).” Indeed, Genesis deconstructs its own anthropomorphism; for both man and woman are created in God’s image (1:27). Yet humans, like God, speak, command, name, bless, and hallow, work creatively, behold and assay their work, care for its goodness, and sustain other beings. All traits, Kass notes, that “lift us above the plane of merely animal existence.”28 Does Genesis make God in the human image? Not quite. True it uses anthropomorphic terms, but only for traits we esteem and can hope to emulate—not God’s absoluteness but his goodness and mercy; not

26 Benamozegh, Israel et l’Humanité 154. 27 Cf. Philo, De Opificio 69; Quis rerum Divinarum Heres, 231; Legum Allegoriae 3.96. 28 Kass, Beginning of Wisdom, 37–38. 82 LEAVING EDEN rapacity or violence but God’s holiness, which the Torah finds in love (Leviticus 19:2, 19:18). Like other animals, humans are mandated/blessed with procreation, but separately (B. Kiddushin 35a)—not vegetatively like plants, or even actively like animals, but more consciously and conscientiously. The blessing, Nahmanides notes (at 1:28), is introduced by said rather than saying: It’s no longer implicit in the procreative act, as if pronounced by God. For humans are articulate: We grasp commands and can recognize blessings. “Here,” Sarna writes, “God directly addresses man and woman. The transcendent God of Creation becomes the immanent, personal God, who enters into unmediated communion with human beings.” God, the Rabbis say, taught mankind how to bless when he blessed Adam and Eve.29 Humans hold dominion not by dint of language or culture but by God’s command. Our talents, like every facet of creation, are God’s gift. But human supremacy is the premise, not the thesis here. Responsibility is the implication. God’s mandate legitimates man’s rule, but Genesis aims not to warrant the gift but to prize it and acknowledge its obligations. God said, “Behold, I have given you every seed bearing plant on the face of all the earth, and every tree with seed-bearing fruit. These are yours to eat. To all the animals of the land, birds of the sky, and all living creatures that creep on the earth, I give every green plant for food.” And so it was. God saw all that he had done, and lo, it was very good. Evening, and morning. A sixth day. Once again God saw the goodness of his work, critic as well as creator. Creation now, as every commentator notes, was not just good but very good. What was very good, Ibn Ezra reasons (at 4:1), was the totality. By themselves nature’s constituents were only good. Indeed, their deficien- cies and oppositions could make them just the opposite. But each had its role in the panoply. “Even things that you may think utterly superfluous to the world’s creation, like fleas, gnats, and flies, are included. God achieves his purpose in all things, even snakes, scorpions, gnats, and frogs” (Gen- esis Rabbah 10.7). Moses Almosnino, a Renaissance exegete, wrote: “when God saw the sum of all created things, duly arranged and interacting, he saw a special goodness in the whole beyond the worth of each separate thing. The rabbis allude to this, saying God was called complete when the world was complete (Genesis Rabbah 13.3).”30

29 Pesikta de R. Kahana, Supplement 1.11, to Genesis 5:2. 30 Almosnino, Sermon on Eleh Pequde (1568) in Saperstein, Jewish Preaching, 228. LEAVING EDEN 83

What made the world complete was humankind: me’od, very, is a Hebrew anagram of adam, man—the crowning touch (Genesis Rabbah 9.12, 14). Yet humans were not the be-all and end-all. They were given all manner of fruits to eat. But so were the animals. Meat, it seems, was not yet allowed (Genesis 9:3, B. Sanhedrin 59b). Dominion was not carte blanche. Some take human dominion to signify intellectual mastery. Hertz goes further. Quoting Lyman Abbott, he learns from the verse of mind’s governance of matter. Others see a charge of stewardship. For the Torah protects the land and ordains that even in a siege fruit trees must be spared (Exodus 23:10–11; Leviticus 19:23; Deuteronomy 20:19–20). The Midrash embroiders: “When the Holy One, blessed be He, created the first man. He took him and led him ’round all the trees of the Garden of Eden, saying, ‘Behold my works, how fair and lovely they are. All that I created, I created for your benefit. Take care not to spoil or destroy my world. If you ruin it, there’s no one to repair it after you’” (Ecclesiastes Rabbah 7.13). Even when God seems to dedicate everything to human usufruct, nature’s uniqueness, beauty, and fragility ordain responsibilities. Adam must work the garden and preserve it. The world was created with ten sayings, the Rabbis say, to show how precious it is! (Avot 5.1). But God’s work is not toil (Genesis Rabbah 27.1). Rather, each command marks a stage in nature’s history. The labor was done at God’s behest: His creativity, nature’s work. Noting that the chronicle of the world’s history is labeled toldot, a genealogy,31 Ibn Ezra takes the generations (toldot) of heaven and earth (2:4) to include all that they generated: all that God made through nature’s instrumentality. The ancient rabbis often thought of nature as preformed (Genesis Rabbah 12.4), but unfurled, developmentally. Along with heaven and earth, Maimonides reasons, God created all that they contain: “The universe was created at one fell swoop, and then things differentiated gradually. The Sages compared this to the simultaneous sowing of various grains: Some sprout after a day, some after two days, or three, although all were planted at once” (Guide II 30). The accounts jibe with the naturalism of Genesis itself: Nature is given scope to develop. Following an elegant schematization by Umberto Cassuto and Leo Strauss, Kass sees Genesis as setting nature’s constituents “in order of progressively greater freedom of movement.” Humans outrank

31 Cross reads These are the generations . . . as introducing what follows; Canaanite Myth and Hebrew Epic, 301. But what follows is about Adam and Eve, not heaven and earth. So Hyers sees a closing summary: these are the generations—this, and no theogony, is the history of heaven and earth; The Meaning of Creation, 45, 197 n. 2. 84 LEAVING EDEN the stars, not by outshining them but by exercising freedom. Like the sky, humans are not called good, although the world that includes them is “very good.” Freedom, Kass infers, makes man good potentially. Adam, as created, is not yet good.32 Heaven and earth were finished, and all their array. On the seventh day God completed the work he had done. So, on the seventh day God ceased all his work. God blessed the seventh day and hallowed it, since it was then that he ceased all the work he had done to create. Such is the history of heaven and earth at their creation— The world was finished on the sixth day. But then we read that God completed his work on the seventh. “What did the world still lack?” Rashi asks. “Rest,” he answers, dissolving the apparent paradox by answering the rid- dle: What could be done in which nothing was done? “With the Sabbath came rest. Only then was the work complete!” (at 2:2). Glossing further, the Rabbis see the Sabbath as marking the boundary between nature as we know it and God’s setting out the laws under which nature is governed. Sabbaths signal the harmony of nature’s laws with God’s will and gain a cosmic sanction by their institution at the creation. By sanctifying the Sabbath, God models the holiness humans must seek, lest workaday needs overwhelm all else. God is not reduced to his creative work; and human dignity mirrors God’s, as befits the human image. Unceasing efforts to control nature enslave us. A halt makes us free and becomes the emblem of our freedom. Understanding the linkage of this emblem historically to Israel’s redemption from slavery and cosmically to God’s freedom, as celebrated in the creation narrative and constantly retold, is the key to grasping the prominence of the six days of creation in the Torah’s cosmogony. Special creation in the vexed sense that concerned Darwin’s critics was not the issue. Sarna (at 2:3) contrasts our passage with the Babylonian myth, “which culminates in the erection of a temple to Marduk by the gods.”33 The first biblical mention of holiness, Heschel notes, sanctifies not a place but a time.34 Even slaves, even animals, share in Sabbath rest (Exodus 20:10).

32 Kass, Beginning of Wisdom, 31–33, 39–40. 33 Jacob Agus, in Jewish Identity in an Age of Ideologies, 232–81, indicts Babylonian myth, and Bergson’s elán vital idea, for reducing the divine to functionality. 34 Heschel, The Sabbath. LEAVING EDEN 85

Humans are dehumanized, Aristotle will argue, without leisure to think or freedom to choose our ends. Yet he justifies enslaving some, to give leisure to a few, and fulfillment to those wise enough to seek it and fortunate enough to find it. Tacitus sneers at Israel’s indolence: They give servants the ease of gentlefolk. But the Torah secures leisure not through slavery but through sabbaths, marking, mandating, and guarding the holiness of each person. Scripture mandates six days of work (Exodus 20:9), crowned by the Sabbath. No astral rhythm inscribes the pattern. Rather, it projects a law imparting dignity and allowing humans to reach toward God. Sabbaths, the ancient homilists will say, make kings of all who keep them. Laboring to revere the words, For in six days did the Lord make heaven and earth, the sea and all that is in them, and he rested on the seventh day, would be inerrantists slight the normative cap: Therefore did the Lord bless the Sabbath day and make it holy (Exodus 20:11). They freely shift the protected day to the first of the week and compromise its safeguards but vehemently defend a six day creation. Philo found such literalism “utterly foolish,” since there was no sun until the fourth day. God, he reasons, transcends time, which must have begun with the heavens that mark its measure.35 God’s week, Nahmanides reasons, might outlast the world. The hexaemeron poetically parses the cosmos. It is not a timetable of God’s creativity. Is Genesis just the story of a spectacular construction project? Would creation be less awesome if it took billions of years? The Midrash, spurning literalism, asks: “Does he tire? Does it not say, He faints not, nor does he grow weary. . . . He gives strength to the weary (Isaiah 40:28, 29). . . . Yet he let it be written of him that he created his world in six days and rested on the seventh”36—to demonstrate in practice what it means for humans to be made in God’s image. Alluding to the creation, scripture says: He ceased and was refreshed (Exodus 31:17). The rare word va-yinaffash etymologically suggests a breather, as in that your ox and your ass may rest and your bondman and the stranger be refreshed (Exodus 23:12). How is that if God neither sleeps nor slumbers? Homilists, taking va-yinaffash transitively, as the causative verb form seems to invite, find a hint of God’s breathing life and spirit into Adam’s form. Stacking midrash upon midrash, they see Sabbaths imparting

35 Philo, Legum Allegoria 1.2, 1.20; cf. De Opificio 13, 26, 28, 67. 36 Mekhilta, ed. Lauterbach, 2.255–56. 86 LEAVING EDEN a second soul (nefesh) to all who keep them, lifting spirits to a higher plane. The poetic wordplay strikes home, since sacred rest opens a window on transcendence. That theme is lost if creation is just a conjuring trick, making a world appear in six days and nights.

The Human Condition

Having sketched the origins of the cosmos, Genesis backtracks to detail the human story. The narrative, as Kass notes, differs in sequence: The first creation story focuses on heaven and earth . . . the second focuses on human beings. . . . The first story ends with man; the second begins with him. . . . In the first, man is to be the master of life on earth (1:28); in the second, he is to be the servant of the earth (2:5, 15). In the first male and female are created together; in the second they are created sequentially. . . . In the first story, man is made directly in the image of God (1:27); in the second he is made of earthly dust and divine breath (2:7) and becomes godlike only at the end—‘now man is become like one of us’ (3:22)—and only in transgressing.37 Still, the large themes hold steady. The day the Lord God made earth and heaven, before there was any shrub of the field on earth, before any grass of the field had sprouted, since the Lord God had not yet caused rain to fall on earth, and there was no man to work the soil, but mist rose from the soil and watered all the face of the earth, the Lord God formed man of clods of earth and blew into his nostrils the breath of life, and man became a living soul. God works directly here, forming a man from the soil. Puffed alive by God’s breath, Adam is hardly exalted, shaped from the clods he will one day work. Rabbi Meir, chief architect of the Mishnah, glosses clods of earth as hinting that Adam’s clay came from the whole earth, presaging the common origins of all nations.38 Adam’s name reflects his origins. He came from the soil (adamah). Our word human and the Latin homo similarly connect with humus, soil, and humilis, humble. Indeed the Hebrew root a-d-m may also connect with

37 Kass, Beginning of Wisdom, 55. 38 Sanhedrin 38a, citing Psalms 139:16, Zechariah 4:10. LEAVING EDEN 87 homo, as suggested by the Akkadian a-m-l, and the Arabic a-n-m, both meaning human.39 Darwin affirms a less humble origin: The Simiadae then branched into two great stems, the New World and Old World monkeys; and from the latter, at a remote period, Man, the wonder and glory of the Universe, proceeded. Thus we have given to man a pedigree of prodigious length, but not, it may be said, of noble quality. . . . Unless we close our eyes, we may, with our present knowledge, approximately recog- nise our parentage; nor need we feel ashamed of it. The most humble organism is something much higher than the inorganic dust under our feet; and no one with an unbiased mind can study any living creature, however humble, without being struck with enthusiasm at its marvelous structure and properties.40 Darwin’s point is rhetorical, of course. His humans too stem ultimately from non-living matter. But he focuses on the many steps preceding our present state. That does not obviate the miracle that both he and scripture address: the rise of living, conscious beings. Humans, midrashically, were not God’s first creatures. That distinction goes to the behemoth mentioned in Job (40:15, echoing Genesis 1:24). The rabbis love such humbling notes. In Hebrew living soul can also mean animal, as Ibn Ezra notes (at 2:7, citing 1:20, 1:21, 9:10). Rabbi Yehudah, long before, had inferred that man at first had a tail, removed by God, to spare our dignity (Genesis Rabbah 14.10). To Naftali Halevi, a rabbi of the Jewish Enlightenment, such accounts seem to anticipate Darwin: Eden was a state of nature, thousands of years of struggle and competition, in fact, before humans arose from the beasts.41 Despite our earthly origins, humans consummate God’s work. His face remains unseen, but the breath enlivening our clay is his. Genesis is silent about immortality. Nefesh here, as Orlinsky explains, means breath—life by synecdoche. It will come to mean a creature (Numbers 6:6, 19:13). But disembodied souls await the Maccabean interest in resurrection; “even then it is not nefesh but neshamah that becomes the term for ‘soul’.”42 Still, Genesis sees more in life than its components; and human life is unique: The spirit

39 Klein, Etymological Dictionary; American Heritage Dictionary, s.v. human and the “zero-grade form” dhghem-, earth, the source of cthonic, chameleon, chamomile, humus, humble, homage, hombre, the Russian zemlya (land), and Persian zamín, earth or land. 40 Descent, 21.171. 41 Naftali Halevi, Toldot Adam (The History of Adam), citing Genesis Rabbah 2.7. 42 Orlinsky, Notes on the New Translation of the Torah, 60. 88 LEAVING EDEN

(neshamah) of man is God’s candle (Proverbs 20:27). Matter too is a gift, Philo writes, but Adam’s breath links him with divinity.43 Genesis harks back to a barren, untilled earth, not because two disparate stories are rudely stitched together but because this image, like the earlier vision of emptiness, sets off the richness of God’s bounty. Would-be literalists clash with Bible critics here, who oddly share their literalism. But traditional exegetes, more open to the biblical idiom, have no such difficulties. The Torah, Rashi writes here, heeds no strict chronology. “Scripture, you must see,” the Rabbis say, “teaches nothing whatever about what came first or later” (Genesis Rabbah 2.7). Adam is the type and figure of humanity. To miss that is to miss everything. God did not make two bodies in one, as Plato, satirically, has Aristophanes propose (Symposium 189d–193e), and some midrashim, in Plato’s wake, imagine, playing on male and female created he them (1.27).44 Philo thinks the pre-physical human Form governed both sexes.45 Justin Martyr (Cohortatio ad Gent. 30) and Clement of Alexandria (Instructor 3) follow Philo. Tertullian sees the first mention of mankind’s creation as a general summary, followed by details (Adversus Hermogenem 26).46 Rabbinically and liturgically, every raindrop brings special grace.47 Genesis dramatizes the coming of rain, suggesting complementary responsibilities: God waters; humans till the soil. Accordingly, Ibn Ezra and David Kimhi gloss asher bara’ elohim la-‘asot (2:3), literally, which God had created to make, as a call for reciprocity—“which God had created (for creatures) to make.” Creation remains to be completed (Genesis Rabbah 11.6). Paradigmatically: “God rooted procreative powers in all species” (Ibn Ezra at Genesis 2:3). The Lord God planted a garden to the east, in Eden. There he placed the man he had formed. The Lord God caused all sorts of trees to sprout from the ground, lovely to see and good to eat; the tree of life in the midst of the garden, and the tree of knowledge of good and evil . . . The Lord God took the man and settled him in the garden of Eden, to work it and tend it. The Lord God commanded the

43 Philo, De Specialibus Legibus 4.24, De Legum Allegoria 1.13, De Opificio Mundi 51, ed. Colson and Whitaker, 1.115, 171, 8.85. Cf. Ecclesiastes 12:7; Nahmanides at Genesis 2:7. 44 Samuel ben Nahman in Genesis Rabbah 8.1, Midrash on Psalms, 139:5, Tanhuma Tazria 1, B. Berakhot 61a, Eruvin 18a. Eusebius, Praeparatio Evangelica 585c, complains that Plato assigns Aristophanes a distorted version of Eve’s formation from Adam’s rib. But the comedian was “used to scoffing even at sacred things.” 45 Philo, De Vita Contemplativa 7.63. 46 Cf. Ginzberg, Legends of the Jews, 5.88–89 n. 42. 47 B. Bava Batra 16a, Genesis Rabbah 13.15; cf. the Nishmat prayer. LEAVING EDEN 89

man: “Of every tree in the garden you may eat. But of the tree of knowledge of good and evil you shall not eat. For the day you eat of it you shall die.” Human needs came easily in God’s orchard (cf. Ezekiel 31:3–9)—including the needs for work and caring. The tree of life was not forbidden. Indeed, since Adam typifies the human condition, Maimonides says this tree is still at hand! It is emblematic, Benamozegh will say, of humanity’s struggle for regeneration.48 Genesis Rabbah identifies the forbidden fruit variously (15.7): Some say it was wheat, since a naif is said never to have tasted wheat. Others blame the vine, a source of sorrow and folly. Some, noting God’s command not to eat of the tree, name the citron, whose wood, like its fruit, is edible! Others specify the fig tree, which showed contrition for abetting the couple’s disobedience by affording their first coverings. In one tradition the offending tree was a pomegranate, holding a seed or two of trouble for everyone. But Joshua ben Levi says the tree remains unnamed, lest it be shamed for the ills it brought. In all these homilies the tree is symbolic. As Ibn Ezra remarks (at 2:9), only in Eden do life and knowledge grow on trees. But the symbolism remains for the narrative to reveal. The Lord God said: “It is not good for the man to be alone. I will make him a helpmeet.” Having formed from the earth each beast of the field and bird of the sky, the Lord God brought it to the man to see what he would call it. Whatever the man called each animal was its name. The man named all the beasts, birds of the sky, and every wild animal. But for Adam no helpmeet could be found. So the Lord God cast the man into a deep slumber and while he slept took one of his ribs and closed up the flesh again. From the rib he had taken from the man the Lord God fashioned a woman. He brought her to the man, and the man said: “This time, bone of my bones and flesh of my flesh! She shall be called woman (ishah) because she was taken from man (ish).” Therefore does a man leave his father and his mother and cleave to his wife (ishto), to become one flesh. The two were naked, the man and his wife, but unashamed. Until now Adam has been “the man” (ha-adam), named for his origin, strikingly reversing mythic linkages of woman with earth. Now he is Adam, a person, not a type—although hitherto, as Philo says, “ignorant of himself and his own nature.”49 He acquires an identity only when he finds his mate.

48 Benamozegh, Israel et l’Humanité, 168. 49 Philo, Legum Allegoria 1.91. 90 LEAVING EDEN

Adam is articulate, Ibn Ezra notes (at 2:7, 2:17), ready to invent names. There is no story of his maturation. That would only open a pointless regress. Darwin will follow the roots of the human tree into non-human soil. But scripture is not seeking the headwaters of the human stream in a prehuman past. In a way Genesis is less mythic than many a museum diorama: It does not try to picture quasi-humans. Adam and Eve are naive but never crude. Humanity begins with the birth of consciousness. Where evolution asks how we came to be, Genesis probes what it is to be human. It answers in terms of thought and moral agency. These are personal. They need embodiment, but also a social matrix. This Scripture finds not in some primal clan or pack. That would both presume and ignore too much. Genesis looks to a dyadic relation—not Freud’s mother and infant, or Hegel’s master and slave, or even Aristotle’s friend with friend, but the couple: woman and man. Three things, Proverbs says (30:18–19), are too marvelous for me, four I cannot fathom: the way of an eagle in the sky, the way of a snake on the rock, the way of a ship in the sea, and the way of a man with a maid. Language is human. Just as God gives things their energies and pen- chants, he lets Adam name the animals. “Only one species,” Peter Lawler says, “is composed of beings who name.”50 Gardening, evidently, not pros- titution, was the oldest profession; biology, the first science. Taxonomy will be objective: Although naming is conventional, there are natural kinds. So in finding his counterpart Adam faces objective constraints. He can name his mate but cannot make her in his image. Still she is uniquely apt to him, answering his incompleteness. The Midrash warns misogynists: “He who is without a wife lives without good, without help, without joy, without blessing, without atonement” (Genesis Rabbah 17.2). ‘Helpmeet’ is Tyndale’s coinage, following the Hebrew ʿezer ke-negdo, sometimes rendered a “fitting helper.” Genesis hushes ancient fears of women by choosing a word of unmarked gender: ʿEzer, like ‘mate’, entails support. But God is too often called help, Sarna writes, for the word to be demeaning. Two are better than one (Ecclesiastes 4:9), Ibn Ezra explains (at 2:18). Nahmanides concurs: Reality is good, and Eve enhances reality: “Man cannot be called good when alone. He cannot even exist” (at 2:18). Eve and Adam are one flesh. Yet she is as much God’s work as he. Their partnership stands against all notions of some inveterate battle between the sexes. The moral textually drawn from their affinity is a command, conveyed, Rashi says, by the Holy Spirit: Therefore does a man leave his father

50 Lawler, “Manliness,” 156. LEAVING EDEN 91 and his mother and cleave unto his wife, to become one flesh. Social fact, natural norm, and blessing merge here: Blood is not thicker than water. Our first loyalty, even above parents, is to our spouse. As David Hartman explains, we are linked to our parents (and God) existentially: They give us being. But commitment to a spouse, like every covenant, is freely chosen. It needs continual care and renewal.51 There are young men alive today who have incinerated their brides at the kitchen fire for failing to bring to the parental household sufficient bridal gifts—electronics, consumer goods. Many cultures countenance, even celebrate sexual adventurism, yet demand “honor killings.” The Torah stands forcefully against all this, finding in created nature the proper precedence of human attachments. Its moral message here is too easily obscured by wilful literalism about Eve’s origins, if not by misogyny and an ambivalence about sexuality and eros that is radically unbiblical. The stunning biblical symbolism of a man, just this once, giving birth to a woman, is glossed in Genesis itself: Woman is not of alien flesh but an ally and kindred spirit, herself in the image of God. Imagine bandaging that thought in some feat of faith affirming that once a woman was made from a man’s rib! God, at least, closed up Adam’s flesh and left no gaping hole where the moral once stood. Dogma, like midrash, will always find a hook. But a faithful midrash takes its cue from larger textual themes, not from some extraneous enterprise. Celsus knows that both Jews and Christians take Adam’s rib allegorically.52 Philo says: “The language is mythic. How could anyone assume that a woman or any human, came from a man’s side?”53 But two millennia of wiser readings don’t hold truculent literalism in bounds. A medieval case study offers a fitting object lesson: Seeking strictly to obey God’s words they shall become one flesh, Karaite exegetes treated the kin of brides and grooms as relations in the same degree—spawning a tangle of consanguinities: A bride’s sister became the groom’s sister, her daughter by a previous marriage became his daughter, relations of a second wife became her new husband’s kin. The resulting marital restrictions, dating to the eighth-century origins of the sect, wreaked havoc, especially in small communities, binding virtually everyone, in time, in chains of forbidden relations. By the late tenth century vigorous opposition arose; by the eleventh it was accepted that they shall be

51 Hartman, Lecture delivered in Jerusalem, June 9, 2008. 52 Origen, Contra Celsum 4.38. 53 Philo, Legum Allegoria, 2.19. 92 LEAVING EDEN one flesh had no bearing on the laws of incest. The resulting reform, Leon Nemoy notes, was “the only one in the history of Karaite law.”54

The Birth of Morals

Why was the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil forbidden? Was God protecting humankind (cf. Ibn Ezra, at 2:18)? “Some people,” Maimonides remarks, “are horrified when grounds are given for any of God’s laws. They would rather no sense were found in any injunction or prohibition.” Such readers see God’s first ban as a test of faith—as if bald authority were the theme and sheer obedience had worth without any determinate content. That kind of submission, Maimonides argues, discipline for its own sake, would make God’s commandments vain or idle. God does not need human deference. All of his commands seek our good, as the Torah declares (Guide III 31, citing Deuteronomy 6:24). The real question was, and remains, whether we humans would judge goods objectively, using our Godgiven reason, or choose selfishly, subjectively, driven by appetite, passion, or convention (Guide I 2). Now the serpent was the subtlest of the wild beasts the Lord God had made. Said he to the woman, “Did God really tell you to eat of no tree in the garden?” The woman said to the serpent, “We may eat of the fruit of any tree in the garden, but of the fruit of the tree in the middle of the garden God said, ‘Do not eat of it, do not touch it, lest ye die’.” Said the serpent to the woman, “You shall not die actually. God knows, in fact, that the day you eat of it, your eyes will be opened. You will be like gods, knowing good and evil.” Seeing that the tree was good to eat and delightful to the eyes, and a wonderful source of wisdom, the woman took some of its fruit and ate it. She gave some to her husband too, who ate it. Their eyes were opened, and they knew that they were naked. So they stitched up fig leaves and made themselves loincloths. There’s much wordplay here. The Hebrew for subtle echoes the word for naked. The word for serpent also means copper—perhaps because copper veins may have a serpentine form. No one, we might suppose, would expect to gain wisdom from a piece of fruit. Yet I vividly recall how Leary and Alpert drew my Harvard classmates

54 Nemoy, “Two Controversial Points in the Karaite Law of Incest,” 247. LEAVING EDEN 93 to experiment with lsd, to expand their consciousness. Bearing no hint of danger, the invitations appealed to romantic notions that inhibitions stifle creativity and shutter the portals of the mind. Many pursued quick, drug-mediated insight. I still encounter the casualties of that deception. The Midrash, however, says the serpent told the truth (Pirka d’Rabbeinu ha- Kadosh, § 3), and God admits that the humans became godlike in knowing good and evil (3:22). Evidently the serpent’s subtlety held a deeper deception than a simple lie. Adam, Ibn Ezra argues (at 2:17), must have had discernment already, when he named the animals. Indeed, he must have had moral discernment to receive divine commands. So what came from the tree? Plainly Genesis is reflecting on responsibility. But that too does not grow on trees. Besides, Adam and Eve had duties from the start—tending the garden and avoiding one tree while enjoying the rest. Was it conscience they acquired? Answering a questioner who worried that moral knowledge seems a reward, not a punishment—as with those mythic figures “whose sins and crimes were so great that they were made stars in the heavens”— Maimonides argues (Guide I 2) that the forbidden fruit brought not moral wisdom but the opposite. For its first effect was that Adam and Eve suddenly felt naked (3:7). Such embarrassment, Maimonides reasons, reveals no great moral truth. Modesty is a matter of convention. What the two acquired was not conscience but a rude sense of propriety. In place of moral knowledge, derived from living in God’s presence, they had gained subjectivity. Their shame represents all the biases and conventions that tincture our moral judgment with promptings of interest and desire. We become godlike, in our own eyes, creators of our own values. But our appetites and passions set us, in fact, on all fours with the beasts. Autonomy does make us like gods in one way. But we lack the calm wisdom we might need for its exercise. Independent judgment comes with fallibility and bias. Eve’s choice to eat what seemed attractive, harmless, even enlightening, signals the weld of freedom with fallibility that marks every human choice. Sexuality is not the great theme here. Like reason, that was present from the start, presumed with typical biblical earthiness—Adam and Eve were man and wife. The muddling of sex with guilt is a Hellenistic preoccupation. Nor was death the price of disobedience. Science, Nahmanides (at 2:17) notes, declares Adam mortal from the start, since he was compounded of diverse elements. Hadn’t Maimonides cited Galen (De Usu Partium III 10, at Guide III 12), to quiet unreasonable expectations 94 LEAVING EDEN about the body? Likewise Ibn Ezra (at 3:6): “A Greek physician has proved beyond doubt that it is impossible for a man to live forever.” Thus: “As animals are destined to die, so too must man. Man’s superiority to the beasts lies in our gift from on high.” Adam and Eve did not die the day they ate the fruit. So there are numerous glosses of God’s warning. Some make the day last a thousand years, Adam’s lifespan, less 70 years reserved for his descendants (Genesis Rabbah 19.8, citing Psalms 90:10). Some say Adam died the same day of the week; others, that when the couple tasted the fruit they began to die. But, far from dying, Philo notes, Eve conceived a child: The couple died morally, he reasons, by succumbing to the passions.55 Many assume that human mortality began at Adam’s lapse. But what crime did Adam’s offspring commit, Ibn Ezra asks. The notion of inherited sin is incoherent and morally repugnant. Adam repented, Ibn Ezra concludes, and God relented. For the ancient rabbis say: “Wisdom said, Evil pursues sinners (Proverbs 13:2); prophecy said, The soul that sins shall die (Ezekiel 18:4); but the Holy One, blessed be he, said, Let them repent and be forgiven. . . . Therefore does he show sinners the way (Psalms 25:8)—of repentance.”56 Death did not enter the world with a single sin. As Adam says in a trenchant midrash: “You die on your own account, not mine” (Ammi ben Nathan in Midrash Tanhuma, Hukkat). The Talmud does link death with sin (B. Bava Batra 16b). But the Hebrew for sin means misstep. And overreaching, all too human, is found in every living being. Eve, whom scripture calls the mother of all that live, typifies life’s assertiveness in her thirst for wisdom. All creatures reach for life and light. But finitude is of the essence in creation. Death, in that sense, is life’s counterpart, not sin’s consequence. Genesis is not the first canto of a saga of redemption by a dying god but the tale of the human condition, each of us repeating Adam’s choice, overreaching (and redressing) in our own way. Existentialists, drawing on Pascal’s sense of creatureliness, see both earthy and godlike sides to our humanity. The tension between our need to frame universal moral judgments and our weakness in doing so lies at the heart of the biblical narrative: A human couple naively confront the serpent’s subtle nakedness, the tempting fruit, the threat of death and promise of immortality, a tree of life, and another of earthly wisdom, bought at the price of subjectivity. Exile from Eden is no punishment but the emblem of our situation. As Kass writes:

55 Philo, Legum Allegoria 1.105–8. 56 J. Makkot 2.6; cf. Philo, Legum Allegoria, 1.88–89. LEAVING EDEN 95

the prototypical human being gets precisely what he reached for, only to discover that it is not exactly what he wanted. He learns, through the revealing conversation with God, that his choice for humanization, wisdom, knowledge of good and bad, or autonomy really means at the same time also estrangement from the world, self-division, division of labor, toil, fearful knowledge of death.57 Eve erred, the Midrash says, in adding to God’s words a warning against touching the tree. That gave the serpent an opening: She had already touched the tree unscathed, so the serpent could wheedle: “See, that didn’t kill you.” Tasting came next (Genesis Rabbah 19.3). The tree of life is forgotten for the moment. Genesis, Sarna remarks (at 2:9), drops the pagan thirst for immortality, prominent in Gilgamesh or the story of Adapa, focusing on our relationship with God. Acceptance of life, even with mortality, is scripture’s greater theme. Hearing the sound of the Lord God walking in the garden in the afternoon breeze, the man and his wife hid from the Lord God in the garden woods. The Lord God called to the man, “Where are you?” He answered, “I heard you in the garden and was afraid, since I was naked, so I hid.” He answered, “Who told you you were naked? Have you eaten of the tree I commanded you not to eat?” The man answered, “The woman you gave to be with me gave me of the tree, and I ate.” The Lord God said to the woman, “What have you done?” The woman replied, “The serpent beguiled me and I ate.” Adam’s sin, the Rabbis say, was ingratitude (B. Avodah Zarah 5b). Trapped in a lie, he blames Eve, as if God were at fault for giving him his mate. Adam was not banished, Rabbi Abba says, until he had thus dishonored God (Genesis Rabbah 19.12). Adam did not sin unwittingly, Ibn Ezra notes. Eve had reported the serpent’s words. Indeed, Sarna argues, Adam heard the whole exchange with the snake (at 2:6). For the serpent consistently used the plural. “The woman is not a temptress. She does not say a word but simply hands her husband the fruit, which he accepts and eats.” One midrash has him freely share Eve’s fate, refusing to give up his beloved companion even for a chance of remaining in the garden. That lovely patch of embroidery assigns Adam a romantic nobility, gentling the bruise of his petulant finger pointing when found out by the garden’s owner.

57 Kass, Beginning of Wisdom, 94–96. 96 LEAVING EDEN

Ancient and medieval commentators alike (Genesis Rabbah 19.12; Maimonides, Guide I 24) balk at thoughts of God’s strolling in the afternoon breeze. What Adam heard, they stress, as the Hebrew has it, was God’s voice, not his tread. But God had not yet called when the couple hid, and Scripture, Nahmanides observes (at 3:8), often has God walking among humans (e.g., Leviticus 26:12). The anthropomorphism signals that the story is not meant literally: It’s not that God couldn’t find Adam. He calls him, as he will summon Cain, baring the face of evasion. The Lord God said to the serpent: “Because you did this, accursed shall you be beyond all cattle and wild beasts. You shall go on your belly and eat dirt all your life, and I will set enmity between you and the woman, and between your seed and hers. They shall strike your head, and you shall strike their heel.” So, reading literally, animal forms were not fixed from the creation. Only now does the serpent slither on its belly. The anti-pagan undertow, Sarna notes, would be plainer to the original audience: Serpents, divinized in Canaan and Egypt, are humbled. They were already naturalized, as just another of God’s creatures, albeit the subtlest. God’s all your life (3:14) stresses their mortality. Midrashically, the serpent once had not just speech and cunning but legs and upright stature (Genesis Rabbah 20.5). All these now are lost. Snakes become mere vermin. Swatting the detested worm, Eve’s offspring attack the head; snakes bite back, pathetically, at the heel. In divine reproofs (Deuteronomy 28:13, 44), success is the head, failure the tail: The serpent is all tail, and no god. To the woman he said: “I will sharply increase your labor pangs. In travail shall you bear children. You will long for your husband, but he shall rule you.” Biologists ascribe women’s labor pains to the size of the fetal brain case, a concomitant of humanity. For Genesis this is women’s lot, a consequence of the disobedience that marks the human condition. The serpent is cursed, but Eve’s fate is not called a curse. Benno Jacob glosses homiletically: She needed no punishment. Biology gives women enough trouble. The Midrash likes the parataxis of birth pangs with longing: Fear of pain might discourage love making. Pregnancy makes a woman a nursemaid, Nahmanides writes. But desire draws her back (Genesis Rabbah 20.7). Rashi (at 3:16), rejecting male domination, completes the sense thus: “You will long for your husband (sexually, but lack the face to assert your demands), but he shall rule you. (He will take the lead, not you. The longing here is sexual desire.)” As the Talmud says, a woman may court with her eyes, but only men, typically, do so verbally (B. Eruvin 100b). LEAVING EDEN 97

To Adam he said: “Because you heeded your wife and ate of the tree I commanded you not to eat of, cursed is the ground for you. By toil shall you eat of it all your life. Thorns and thistles shall it sprout for you, and you shall eat of the grasses of the field. By the sweat of your brow shall you eat your bread, until you return to the earth, for from it were you taken. You are dust and to dust you will return.” Adam’s fate is a life of toil. His labor, ʿitzavon, matches Eve’s, ʿetzev (Gen- esis Rabbah 20.9); his food, not far from the dirt the serpent crawls in. Tilled soil, says Ibn Ezra, is no Eden. But nature is not condemned, as Morris imagines. The irony strikes humankind: We cultivate yet seem to see more weeds than crops. Fruits become luxuries. Grains become the staff of life. But “Unlike cattle,” Ibn Ezra writes, “you will have to labor at winnowing, grinding, kneading and baking, before you can eat.” The earth that gave our bodies grudges their sustenance and reclaims them in the end. Even our handful of earth, the Rabbis say, is not ours to keep (Genesis Rabbah 20.10). The man named his wife Eve (Ḥava). For she was the mother of all that live. And the Lord God made Adam and his wife tunics of skins and clothed them. Eve too now has a name. She was the mother of humans, not literally of all life, as Onkelos and Saadiah note. Her name plays on the idea of life. But this mother figure, Sarna writes, is “demythologized and naturalized,” testifying to human unity.58 Motherhood, given the Torah’s powerful pronatalism, was hardly a punishment. Abraham’s promised offspring, numerous as the stars or the sand at the sea (Genesis 22:17), are but a fraction of Eve’s progeny. God models charity, respecting his creatures’ needs and new notions of dignity. The skins are rough, since weaving is not yet known, but better than leaf-wraps. Gender-marked garments come later (Deuteronomy 22:5), but the tunic (ketonet) God fashions, Sarna notes (at 3:21), reflects late Bronze and Iron Age styles. God did not neglect appearances. The Lord God said, “Now that the man is like one of us, knowing good and evil, he might put out his hand and take of the tree of life too, and live forever.” So the Lord God sent him from the garden of Eden, to work the soil from which he was taken. He banished the man and set the cherubs east of the garden of Eden, and a flaming, whirling sword, guarding the way to the tree of life.

58 Benamozegh sees more: the unity of all living things; Israel et l’Humanité, 148, 168. 98 LEAVING EDEN

Cherubim are familiar figures (see Exodus 25:18–22, 26:1, 31; 36:8, 35; 37:7–9). So they are not described. But Eden’s signage is clear: The road is closed. Eternal life is a virtuality; the unreachable tree bespeaks mortality. Man is estranged. Moral choice does make us gods in a way, but it robs us of the intimacy with God that nature still enjoys. Subjecthood completes the work of creation but sunders our connectedness. It makes us both free and fallible. We are not told whom God meant in saying like one of us. Again an angelic court is suggested. The Rabbis embroider: Some angels, they say, plead for mercy, and their pleas were not unanswered. Repentance brought humans back to God, closer in exile than in Eden. Adam and Eve face moral adulthood. Relations with God are harder now, and more precious. The man knew Eve his wife. She conceived and bore Cain, saying: “I have gotten (kaniti) a man with the Lord.” She went on to bear his brother Abel. Much has been written about knowing in the biblical sense—a metaphor, not a metaphysic. As Owen Barfield taught in Poetic Diction, any exotic idiom may sound poetic if read too literally. Still, connotations count. ‘Coitus’ is clinical; ‘intercourse,’ abstract, missing the rich resonance of intimacy in the Hebrew: Not just erotic play (cf. Genesis 26:8) or experiment but discovery is meant, hinting at the cognitive depth of eros and the creative power of knowing. Guilt is absent. Sexuality is not Adam’s crime or Eve’s punishment. The Midrash assumes it even in Eden. But children arrive outside the Garden, softening the blow of exile, despite Eve’s birth pangs and the grief awaiting both parents as their offspring grow. Sexuality is the key to individuality. Budding and mitosis yield no such clear identities. Death grows sharper as individuality grows more pronounced. But personhood arises too, setting our humanity apart from its matter. For little parental matter reaches offspring. Chiefly conveyed is a message, opening potentials that underscore the ancient recognition that there is more to our humanity than the embodiment that makes it possible. That thought gives special poignancy to Maimonides’ bold claim that the tree of life, in no crude sense, is still at hand, the spinning sword glittering with flashes of insight.59

59 Maimonides, Guide, Introduction, Munk 1.4; “Eight Chapters,” 8; Genesis Rabbah 15.5. LEAVING EDEN 99

Procreation is a more immediate response to death, offering an immortality quite distinct from personal persistence. The Torah rejects after- worlds. It accepts both the weakness and the power of our embodiment. Here progeny are the blessing that fulfills our strength and redresses our weakness. That stance anchors the mission biblically assigned to Israel, to become a nation by which all families of the earth will be blessed (Genesis 12:2–3, 15:5, Exodus 19:5–6, Leviticus 19:2, Deuteronomy 7:6, 14:2). Adam in exile, the Midrash imagines, had no wish for offspring, until his despond was met by visions of Israel’s accepting the Torah: The human project still had meaning; life, despite the loss of Eden, was not in vain (Genesis Rabbah 21.9). That thought, a homily not a dogma, points to grounds for hope: Sufferings find their answer in moral and spiritual futurity. Life is not absurd. Grasping the miracle she has shared, Eve freely credits God. He is as much the author of the second man as the first. But God is not the father. Adam knew Eve, she conceived and bore her child. Parents are proximate causes. God’s is the ultimate agency. The Torah sees no conflict in setting the two kinds of explanation side by side: God acted through nature, just as he used the wind to gather the waters or caused flowers to spring from seeds (Rashbam at Genesis 1:1). The causal doubling is critical: Creation would mean nothing unless it energized the natural causes that animate the world: “Neither man without woman, nor woman without man, nor the two together without God’s immanence (shekhinah)” (Genesis Rabbah 22.2; cf. 8.9). The Talmud (B. Niddah 31) paraphrases Eve’s thought: “When God created me and my husband, he acted alone; now we are partners.” At Abel’s birth the process is familiar—still miraculous, and still natural.

My Brother’s Keeper

Abel became a shepherd; Cain, a tiller of the soil. In time, Cain brought an offering to the Lord from the soil’s fruits, and Abel too brought one of the finest first- lings of his flock. The Lord favored Abel and his offering. But Cain and his offering he favored not. Cain was enraged and crestfallen. The Lord said to Cain, “Why are you so incensed and discouraged? If you do what is good you can recover. If not, sin lurks at the door. It ravens for you. Yet you can master it.” Sin is a beast licking its chops. To avoid a tragic misstep, Cain must overcome his resentment. Grudges provoke deadly extremes (Leviticus 19:17–18). Indeed, a prior grudge distinguishes murder from manslaughter 100 LEAVING EDEN

(Numbers 35:20–23). God heeds his own law by warning Cain against the crime he contemplates (Sifre 173 at Deuteronomy 18:12; B. Sanhedrin 56b). But Cain, free and thus responsible, fails to master his feelings. Exegetes have long scratched their heads over God’s preference for Abel’s sacrifice. It was his best, and the Midrash fancifully disparages Cain’s offering. But the story is less about the offerings than about the birth of crime, typified in a dreadful fratricide—since Adam’s fatherhood makes all men brothers (Malachi 2:10). Cain spoke to Abel his brother. When they were out in the field, Cain attacked his brother Abel and killed him. The Lord said to Cain, “Where is Abel your brother?” He answered, “I don’t know. Am I my brother’s keeper?” He said, “What have you done? The voice of your brother’s blood cries out to me from the ground!” Cain had words with Abel, their content unstated. The Septuagint and other versions fill in with some empty challenge or an invitation to step outside, but the added words add little. They look conjectural and leave the issue looking insubstantial. The textual weight falls on the repeated word brother: Cain has killed his brother. The enormity does not strike him until God calls him. Even as he denies responsibility, his sarcastic Am I my brother’s keeper? betrays him. We eavesdroppers catch the dramatic irony: We are each other’s keepers. Sarna doubts that the brothers’ quarrel prefigures a pastoral-agrarian rivalry. For the two ecologies and economies were complementary. Nor does Genesis disparage Cain’s vocation, although God was not pleased with his offering. God himself planted a garden, which Adam tended. Humanity faces agrarian labors, and Cain’s descendants figure prominently in the rise of craftsmanship and culture (Genesis 4:20–22). It matters biblically, I think, that Cain’s crime looks arbitrary; the irritant, trivial, as in the ballad: “What fell ye out about? Little son pray come tell me. / Twas over a withy- withy wand, that never could be a tree.”60 The brothers quarrel not for their father’s favor, or their mother’s favors. Abel dies, but it is Cain who falls prey to the beast skulking at the door. Sin looks for an opening. Still, we can master it, despite its fatality. The figures are archetypal: a killer ducks responsibility. His victim need not be pure, regal or heroic. Even a simple shepherd’s blood cries out to

60 “The Murdered Brother,” Niles 10 (Child 13) in Niles, Ballad Book. LEAVING EDEN 101

God. Each human life matters, cosmically. Thus the Mishnah, noting the poetic plural: It is written the bloods of thy brother cry out . . . his and his posterity’s . . . just one man was created—to teach us that whoever causes the death of a single soul is seen biblically as if he’d caused a world to perish; and whoever saves one life, as if he’d saved a world—also, for peace among mankind, lest anyone say to another, “My ancestor was greater than yours.” . . . And to proclaim the greatness of the Holy One blessed be he. For a mortal stamps many coins with a single die, and all are alike. But the King of kings, the Holy One blessed be he, stamped every human with the type of the first. Yet not one is like another. (Sanhedrin 4.5) These famous homilies, framed to caution witnesses in a capital case, pin the sanctity of human life to irreplaceability. They reject all claims to noble birth and celebrate uniqueness as God’s hallmark: Where Plato and Aristotle prize unity of type, the Torah finds inestimable value in the individual. To make an act of faith out of the facticity of Abel’s murder while neglecting the story’s moral charge, the imperative to cherish each human life and accept responsibility for one another, is completely to miss the point. “Now are you cursed from the soil that gaped to take your brother’s blood at your hand. When you work the soil, no longer will it give you its strength. A restless wanderer shall you be on earth.” The earth that witnessed Cain’s crime now executes his sentence. But, again, the earth was not literally cursed, as Ibn Ezra and Nahmanides stress. Nor does soil literally gulp blood. Cain violated nature not by watering the soil with Abel’s blood but by his murder. The earth remains God’s dominion; nature, personified, cries out against the crime. Murder will out, as Chaucer and Cervantes will say. The earth will expose the blood she has drunk and disclose the slain she has immured (Isaiah 26:21). Cain is exiled, not just from Eden but from any fixed abode. The earth still gives its strength to others. But Cain has become a stranger there (Genesis Rab- bah 22.10). Then Cain said to the Lord, “My sin is too great to bear. You have exiled me today from the face of the earth. Banished from your face, I’ll be a restless wanderer on earth. Anyone who finds me will kill me.” Cain repeats God’s words restless wanderer—outlaw and fugitive. His fears anticipate the cities of refuge, where homicides other than murderers find sanctuary (Numbers 35:6–29, Deuteronomy 4:41–43, 19:1–13). The 102 LEAVING EDEN world Cain pictures, populated perhaps with Abel’s kin, seems ready to avenge him. God moves swiftly to mitigate those fears: The Lord said to him: “Wherefore, whoever kills Cain shall suffer vengeance sev- enfold.” The Lord set a mark on Cain, lest anyone who found him smite him, and Cain left the Lord’s presence and dwelt in the land of Nod east of Eden. Nod is not a place. The word is symbolic, Sarna notes, playing on restless wanderer (naʿ ve-nod)—Wanderland. God’s “wherefore,” Sarna adds, is formulaic, evoking a legal context: Cain is said to leave God’s presence, as if a trial had ended. Cain’s mark, vulgarly confounded with his curse, has been fantastically identified with the melanin of black races, a thought utterly unfounded biblically. The mark is protective and is not inherited. Only Cain needs it, since Abel’s murder is his crime alone. Cain owns his act when he calls his sin too great to bear. He does not ask for mitigation of his punishment, Nahmanides explains (at 4:13)—only that it not be compounded, by vigi- lante zeal. The ancient rabbis differ about Cain’s mark or sign. God made the sun shine on him, one says; another, that God gave him a dog. God showed Cain a sign, says Ibn Ezra, to help him face the world (at 4:15). Nahmanides concurs. Two ancient exegetes see Cain himself as the sign: an object lesson, says R. Hanina; a sign to penitents, says Rav. Both are right, of course. In one midrash (Genesis Rabbah 22.13) Adam meets Cain and asks the outcome of his case. Cain tells of his repentance and reconciliation, and Adam claps his hands to his face, exclaiming: “So great is the power of penitence, and I did not know!”

The Rise of Culture

Now begin the begats. They support the biblical theme of human unity. Genesis, Sarna notes (at 1:27), does not say “of every kind” when it comes to human beings. The genealogy, like Homer’s catalogue of ships, will matter deeply to seekers of roots and ancestral eponyms. But, for us, the ancient equation of history with pedigree has faded in the constellation of human values. So I skip over these verses here. I’ve written elsewhere about their impact on the idea of universal history, first stitched together LEAVING EDEN 103 with the sinews of genealogy.61 I’ve also noted how Lamech’s boast to his wives—If Cain is avenged seven-fold, then Lamech seventy-seven fold—sets off his spiteful machismo against Mosaic norms, which fit the punishment to the crime and not, like Hammurabi, to the parties’ status.62 The text records the emergence of music, agriculture, the pastoral life of those who dwell in tents (4:20). There is no steady state world here but a progression climaxing in the revelation of God’s law. Many of the names in Genesis bear meanings. Enoch, for instance, connotes learning and culture. But Ibn Ezra (at 4:19) warns against making too much of ancient names: “even if we knew Hebrew perfectly, how could we tell the events they commemorate?” Lamech, the first polygamist, is Cain’s descendant. Does that suggest disparagement, Sarna wonders. Clearly, the patriarchs were polygamous, although their stories also hint at matriarchal norms and matrilineal conventions. But the model of Adam and the linkage of natural with divine law in the expectation that a man cleave unto his wife sets biblical norms apart from biblical history. Many actions of the patriarchs are hardly made exemplary: Abraham’s ruse in twice calling Sarah his sister, Rachel’s theft of her father’s household gods, Judah’s resort to a presumed prostitute and subsequent readiness to put his widowed daughter- in-law to the flames for harlotry, Joseph’s sale into slavery, the treacherous vengeance of Dinah’s brothers after her rape by Shechem. So patriarchal practice does not make polygamy a norm. The practice was long tolerated but ultimately, like slavery, extruded by the Torah’s higher values.63 The names of Lamech’s wives, Adah and Zillah, may mean dawn and dusk. The Midrash reflects: In those days men took two wives, one for procreation, one for recreation. The former was kept like a widow; the latter, given a contraceptive drug and encouraged to act seductively (Genesis Rabbah 23.2). Lamech, midrashically the best of the generation lost in the Flood, is no ideal. But to Nahmanides (at 4:23) he is a skillful craftsman who taught his sons their animal husbandry, metal working, and music. Tubal-Cain is

61 Goodman, Islamic Humanism, 162–65. 62 Goodman, God of Abraham, 101–2, 119–20, 125; Hammurabi’s Code, tr. Driver and Miles, 1.17; 2.47, 79, 83, 500. 63 Similarly Levirate marriage and the laws of the suspected adulteress; see On Justice, 13; God of Abraham, 117–18, 137–38, 163. 104 LEAVING EDEN apparently the eponym of his people. His sister Naamah, the fair or lovely, seems to be a lady of distinction. Her story is lost in the mists, but Genesis Rabbah (23.4) honors her goodness by making her Noah’s wife. Nahmanides, however, balks at the suggestion that any of Cain’s seed survived the Flood, perhaps fearing lest efforts to name them aggravate group enmities. All the culture heroes named are mortal. None has supernatural powers. Egyptian and Mesopotamian mythologies credit each new tool and art to some deity. But the Torah demythologizes culture along with nature: Just as all heaven and earth are the work of one God, using the natures he imparts, human crafts and artifacts are the work of human hands. Unlike Noah’s ark or Bezalel’s art (Exodus 35:31), they are not ascribed to inspiration. Bible readers have long worried that Genesis seems to commit Eve’s progeny to incest. Jubilees (4:9) and the Talmud (B. Sanhedrin 58b) bite the bullet: If Cain did not sleep with his mother, his spouse must have been his sister. But I think the silence about Cain’s mate reveals something rather different: Scripture’s concern is its teachings. Cain may model contrition or redemption, or crime and uncaring, or of all of these. But unlike Adam and Eve he is not a model of marital relations, so nothing is written of how he found a mate. Relevance to Mosaic norms is what casts light or shadow in the Torah’s chiaroscuro. The drama lies in humanity’s unfolding relationship with God. So biblical narratives remain episodic. Adam knows Eve again, and Seth is born, his name suggesting a new beginning. Eve says God has given her Seth in Abel’s place, because Cain slew him (4:25). Why should she state the obvious, the Midrash asks. Does Eve hint at something beyond her grief? The syntax allows her words, counter intuitively, to mean that Abel killed Cain: Cain died, ultimately because of his crime—“as if two trees stood near each other, and the wind uprooted one, whose fall brought down the other” (Genesis Rabbah 23.5). Glossing Adam knew his wife more (4:25) Genesis Rabbah (23.5) takes more to mean more deeply: Previously he desired her only when he saw her; now, even out of sight—“a tip to seafarers to remember their families and come directly home.” Ibn Ezra reasons: Since Cain’s progeny perished in the Flood, his name was effaced. If progeny are the ultimate blessing, their loss is the ultimate punishment. Seth’s son is Enosh, another name for humankind. Religion began in his time: It was then that the name of the Lord was first invoked (4:26). Ibn Ezra refutes the rabbinic innuendos about pagan profanations of God’s name. Genesis welcomes piety, however oblique its intent. As the Psalmist writes: From the rising of the sun to its setting praised is the Lord’s name (113:3). LEAVING EDEN 105

Genealogy steams ahead with the ages of key figures at death and the begetting of their firstborn. The lifespans are immense—if modest beside the millennia of some monarchs in Babylonian king lists. Sasson sees an effort to round out history’s epochs. But change is coming: As humans began to increase on the face of the earth and daughters were born to them, sons of the gods saw how goodly human women were and espoused those they chose. Said the Lord, “My spirit will not lodge in man forever. For he too is flesh. Let his days be one hundred twenty years.” The nephilim were on earth in those days, and later, when the gods’ sons consorted with the daughters of men, who bore them offspring, the heroes and famed men of old. Sarna writes: “humans strove to rise to the level of divine beings, and God intervened. Humankind cannot be immortal.” Spurning the man-god idea is one way of affirming this life. Mortals still dream of congress with extraterrestrials. But Scripture sequesters the offspring in antiquity. The word nephilim sets an ironic tone. It recurs only in the alarmist majority report of Moses’ spies (Numbers 13:33). Alert to the disparagement but with one eye cocked to his own day’s ills and the monarchy that would martyr him, Tyndale renders nephilim tyrants. Genesis Rabbah (26.5) similarly spurns demigods: The sons of the gods were oppressive nobles exercising droit de seigneur. Still, Genesis does not tap the problematic matings to provide spouses for Cain or Seth. It simply reassures the credulous by calling the spawn of the putative unions heroes of yore, much as Greek myth banishes disused gods as vanquished titans. But the specters of antediluvian decadence mark the segue to visions of a humanity depraved.

A Sentence Suspended

The Lord saw how very evil man was on earth, how every plan formed in his heart was evil all the day. He regretted making man on earth, grieved at heart. The Lord said, “I will blot out man, whom I created, from the face of the earth— man and beast alike, and the creeping things and birds of the sky. I’m sorry I made them.” But Noah found favor with the Lord. The Midrash notes the heavy anthropomorphism: “How bold of the prophets to liken the Creator to his creature” (Genesis Rabbah 27.1). Ibn Ezra invokes the rabbinic dictum: “Torah speaks in human language” (B. Yevamot 71a). For “If a human did as God did, destroying his own creation, he’d be called sorry he’d made it” (at Genesis 6:6). 106 LEAVING EDEN

The Lord saw again suggests court proceedings, Sarna remarks. But the juridical persona slips as God passes judgment even on the animals. Human evil provoked God’s sorrow.64 But disappointment wearies God as the work of creation never had. Man was to have been the crown jewel. It’s as if a king had built his son a bridal chamber but slew him in a fit of rage and then turned on the lovely room, rending its draperies and partitions (Genesis Rabbah 28.6). For any flaws in the design God could blame only himself. But man’s failing lay not in the nature God gave him but in not living up to it. Reducing the world to its elements meant havoc. But at least the elements would never flout God’s law (Genesis Rabbah 27.4, 28.2). Where the creation narrative celebrates God’s work, the Flood story attests to the destructive impact of decadence, eclipsing nature’s beauty and delight. Noah was Lamech’s son, named for the respite Lamech expected from him. But Genesis (5:28) links his name with consolation (n-ḥ-m), not rest (n-w-ḥ)—strikingly, Sarna notes, since niḥamti is the word for God’s regret over his unhappy experiment (6:6–7). Noah’s merit is a consolation weighed against that sorrow. Some commentators have God favor Noah for his descendants’ sake (Genesis Rabbah 29.5). But, textually, Noah was chosen for his own sake, being upright where others were not (7:1), as Nahmanides insists (at 6:8). For others too might have been spared for their descendants’ sake. This is Noah’s history. Noah was a righteous man, perfect in his generation. With God did Noah walk. Noah begot three sons: Shem, Ham, and Japhet. For God, the earth was ruined now, filled with outrage. God saw the earth: ruined. All flesh on earth, on a path of ruin. God said to Noah: The time has come for me to put an end to all flesh. For the whole earth is filled with their outrage. I’ll ruin them, and the earth. Righteous and perfect, Ibn Ezra writes, mean that Noah’s acts were just and his heart pure. In his generation, sparks a famous debate. Rabbi Yehudah sees hints of a reservation: Yes, in those corrupt times, Noah was saintly; but he would hardly shine alongside Moses or Samuel. Rabbi Nehemiah reads more generously: If Noah remained pure even in those dark days, imagine his virtues had he lived in Moses’ time (B. Sanhedrin 108; Genesis Rabbah 30.9).

64 Genesis Rabbah (28.8, citing Genesis 6:12) implicates the animals and even the earth in sin—the animals, for crossbreeding or growing fierce, the earth, for yielding sham grain—darnel or rye-grass. Biblically, the fault was clearly human. LEAVING EDEN 107

The word ruin re-echoes in God’s promise to spoil the spoilers. But the devastation they have wrought is moral, not physical: Violations of right and justice ruined the world. Still, God’s sentence was not passed in the heat of passion. He bore with the world until outrages and violence had become pervasive. In ancient Mesopotamian flood stories, what brings the deluge was a clamor disturbing the gods’ sleep. Here it is corruption—just as vicious mores are later said to pollute the land, rendering the evildo- ers unworthy and incapable of continued tenure (Numbers 35:31–34, Deuteronomy 21:22–23, cf. 24:1–4). The outrage, ḥamas, that provoked the Flood, the Rabbis say, was lawless- ness, larceny too petty for prosecution but too general to endure (Genesis Rabbah 31.5). Nahmanides (at 6:13) specifies robbery and oppression. Ibn Ezra adds rape and perversion. Genesis Rabbah (31.6) finds overtones of murder, idolatry, and incest. Rabbi Huna (Genesis Rabbah 26.5) elaborates: “The generation of the Flood were not eradicated from the world until they wrote nuptial songs celebrating pederasty and bestiality.” Citing contexts where ḥamas means falsehood, deceit, and bloodshed, Sarna understands “flagrant subversion of the ordered processes of law. From the divine enact- ments for the regulation of society after the Flood, detailed in Chapter 9, it may be deduced that ḥamas here refers predominantly to the arrogant disregard for the sanctity and inviolability of human life.” What was ruined was the world’s ethos. Custom may condone a practice or make it seem insignificant. But actions are accountable. Long before Sinai there were standards people should have known. The Torah is sparing with abstract language, but the underlying idea broached here is what later thinkers will call natural law, with its counterpart, natural rights. Warning Noah of the coming flood, God instructs him to build an ark of gopher wood—cedar according to the Targums and the Rabbis (B. Sanhedrin 108a, Genesis Rabbah 31.8); cypress, say some moderns— and seal it with pitch. The Midrash envisions the number and layout of its chambers, its provisions and portholes for shoveling out wastes (Genesis Rabbah 31.10–11, 14). The ark is a tevah, like the ark for the infant Moses (Exodus 2:3–5). In Mesopotamian flood stories, Sarna remarks, a real ship is built, seaworthy and crewed. Noah’s craft is boxlike and crewless, adrift before God’s will. With the ark complete, God is ready to act: I will bring the flood now—water on earth—effacing from under the heavens all flesh with the breath of life. Everything on earth shall perish. But I establish my covenant with you. Enter the ark, you, and your sons, your wife and your 108 LEAVING EDEN

sons’ wives with you. Bring with you into the ark two of each animal, a male and female of all flesh, to preserve alive with you. Two of each—of the birds of every kind, beasts of every kind, creatures that creep upon the earth of every kind— shall accompany you to survive. Take every sort of food and stow it with you, for you and them to eat. All this Noah did, as God commanded. Then the Lord said to Noah, Enter the ark, with all your house. For you have I found righteous before me in this generation. God makes Noah his partner, not in the destruction but in preserving humanity and the animals. Notice the words of every kind (le-minehu), confirming that after its kind in the creation narrative indicates comprehensiveness and variety. Discreteness and fixity are not at issue. God’s pact with Noah, the first biblical covenant, like any contract, involves reciprocity. God preserves Noah’s household, but Noah must save the animals—just as Adam tended the garden. The earth is laid waste, but life must be preserved (Ibn Ezra at 6:19). The creatures find Noah; he need not hunt them down (Genesis Rabbah 32.8; Ibn Ezra at 6:20): Just as seeds propagate plants, animals fend for themselves. Noah’s obedience typifies his virtue. Similar language will describe adherence to God’s law (Deuteronomy 31:5). God’s instructions are now enlarged: Noah will need seven pairs of clean animals and birds—allowing for later sacrifices (8:20). Genesis and its early audience are innocent of what genetics finds about the critical size of breeding populations. But the moral case is clear: Noah must preserve each species (7:3) lest nature be diminished (Genesis Rabbah 32.4). The ark bespeaks life’s value and man’s responsibility. Noah need not love the animals. But he must save them, whether or not they seem useful or attractive. God brings 40 days and nights of rain, to wipe from the face of the earth every being I created (7:4). All the fountains of the abyss and floodgates of heaven burst open. Noah’s family, with their menagerie, rest safe in the ark, which God himself has sealed behind them. Borne up by the flood, the ark floats free. Even mountain tops are submerged fifteen cubits deep. No breath of life remains on earth. But God remembers Noah and the animals. After 150 days, he sweeps the earth with wind. The waters subside. Mountain tops are seen. Noah sends out a raven, then a dove, which returns, as doves do, bearing an olive leaf on its second visit: Branches appear above the surface. The raven, an accomplished forager, might have fed on carrion and not needed to return; but when the dove stays away, land has clearly emerged from its watery confinement, as at the first creation. Opening a hatch, Noah sees dry land. The earth dries, and God invites the survivors into the open air, to release their charges to teem again on earth. LEAVING EDEN 109

Noah builds an altar and sacrifices specimens of each clean kind, a sweet savor (reʾaḥ niḥoʾaḥ) to the Lord, the phrase later applied to fitting offerings (Leviticus 1:9, 26:31, etc.)—and another play on Noah’s name (Genesis Rabbah 33.3). The absence of a libation, Sarna adds, may signify that God needs no sacrifices. The Mesopotamian gods have a disquieting appetite for beer. In Gilgamesh they crowd the altar “like flies.” Smelling the sweet savor, the Lord said to himself: No more will I curse the ground on man’s account. For the bent of man’s heart is evil from his youth. No more will I smite every living thing as I have done. A seeming non sequitur. Is this the vengeful God so often made a foil of Christian love? Why does a bad bent win promises of survival? A parallel is God’s command, Do not hate the Egyptian. For you were a slave in his land (Deuteronomy 23:8). The move is moral. Pace Nietzsche, Thou shalt projects no vengeance morality but empathy for the stranger, the oppressed, even appreciation for the Egyptian (Exodus 23:9, Deu- teronomy 10:19). Scripture does not say, like Hannah Arendt, “We too might have been oppressors.” Clichés about the banality of evil might readily rationalize new crimes. But the Torah recalls a happier side of the Egyptian sojourn. Even in bondage, Israelites were in some ways the Egyptians’ guests (cf. Numbers 11:5). That must be recalled on meet- ing their descendants. Here the moral turnabout takes another route: As Lyman Abbott wrote, “The Hebrew myth of the deluge embodied the truth that destruction of sinners can never cure the world of sin.”65 God knows human weaknesses. The heavens don’t open up and strike down the wicked. God is forbearing, as Jonah knows (4:2). Nature is stable. That too is part of Noah’s covenant: So long as earth endure, seedtime and harvest, heat and cold, summer and winter, day and night, shall not cease. The rainbow, emblem of God’s covenant with life and nature (9:12–17), is a sign of hope poised against any omen drawn from storms and floods. Man may now eat meat. But murder becomes a capital crime, and even animals’ blood must be respected. Limbs must not be savagely devoured from the living creature.66 The rhythm of the seasons and the interplay of

65 Abbott, Life and Literature of the Ancient Hebrews, 80. 66 The Rabbis find seven laws in God’s covenant with Noah, binding on humanity at large; Genesis Rabbah 34.14. 110 LEAVING EDEN nature with culture will continue. Human weaknesses, recognized in the narrative as if newly discovered, mark the autonomy we enjoy or abuse. Nature’s constancy is freedom’s matrix, not its straitjacket, just as the constancy of the law is no constraint but the enabling condition by which freedom flourishes.

What, then, do we learn from the biblical creation story? Beyond the rumbling undertones of its ancient polemic against paganism, we hear moral messages: Woman and man are partners, not of alien flesh. Human life is irreplaceable. We are indeed our brothers’ keepers, and stewards of nature, even beyond God’s garden. There are spiritual messages too: Life and light are good, gifts in fact, pointing to a caring Source. Time itself can be sanctified, a day set apart from labor, not at any astral signal but in testimony to our links with the Transcendent. At the interface of the spiritual and moral: God, well aware of human weakness, forbears to disrupt nature’s course. But moral choice, a point of human pride, comes at a price, the risk of its suborning by our seeming interests, appetites and passions, usages and prejudices. Evolution is the story of our origins and the natural causes that brought us to the plateau on which we stand. Genesis addresses what it means to stand there, empowered to think and choose, act and care, little less than divine, the psalmist says (8:5), but with more than a world to win or lose. All this drops out of sight in the flurry of defensive literalism: God’s love of life in its rich diversity is masked by dogmas of species fixity, uninteresting to Genesis and ill fitted to its tracing of all flesh to the dust of the earth. Even the rainbow is eclipsed by searchlights scanning the skies for the source of Noah’s floodwaters. Biblical naturalism and human dignity, never breached in Genesis, are crusted over with alien and incongruous dogmas. The would be defenders of inerrancy and inspiration seem to assume (along with their foes) that the sacred text will lose its dignity and profundity once its poetic workings are understood. The refusal of would be literalists to see poetry in scripture, although it is poetry that gives scripture its beauty and truth, is not a way of taking revelation seriously but a side-gutter diminishing scripture’s seriousness and making its text a carica- ture of all that is imagined primitive and crude. Centrally for us, literalism loses sight of the biblical idea that God works through nature. Anti-Darwinists remove God from nature yet expect him to manipulate it. They underrate the local agency and purpose of all creatures, whose ultimate source we biblical monotheists infer must be divine, of infinite reality and goodness, not reducible to the phenomena its act and LEAVING EDEN 111 presence were invoked to explain. For the core message of biblical monotheism is this: that the wind or spirit that is of God still hovers over the waters, not denaturing them but imparting the nature by which they flow and ripple in the wind—touching, but not touching, as Rashi has it—ever present, in and beside all things, imparting the agency and freedom that allow all things, actively, to be what they are. Genesis sees God’s governance enacted, his creativity expressed, in the liveliness of all that he creates; his purpose, realized in the life and consciousness of his creatures, each seeking, not always with insight or success, a good that is its own.

TIME, CREATION, AND THE MIRROR OF NARCISSUS

Lenn E. Goodman

Mounting evidence supports the idea that the world is of finite age. Sir John Eccles writes of “Einstein’s derivation in 1915 of an expanding universe from his geometric account of gravitation, the General Theory of Relativity”: To him at that time with his belief in a stationary everlasting universe, the idea of an expanding universe was highly distasteful, so he introduced a cosmological term into his equations to counteract the derivation of expansion. Then in 1912 the red shifts observed by Hubble in the spectrograms of galaxies produced empirical evidence for the expanding universe. Forthwith Einstein rejected his cosmological term, calling it “the biggest blunder of my life,” and accepting the distasteful expanding universe. The clear formulation of the expanding universe from an initial great cat- aclysm was first made by Lemaître in the early 1930’s and in 1940 Gamow refined this proposal, and applied the emotive term “Big Bang” to the cata- clysm. However the initial estimates by Hubble for the rate of expansion were too high. They gave a date for the Big Bang of only 2 billion years ago, which was in conflict with other estimates for the age of the Universe. Hence there was then good reason for the alternative hypothesis proposed by Gold, Bondi and Hoyle, the steady-state hypothesis: the Universe had always existed; there was no origin in a Big Bang; the observed expansion was exactly compensated by the continuous creation of atomic particles; these particles in time aggregated to form new nebulae. Hence the composition of space was approximately steady, and it was isotropic, despite the continuous recession of already formed nebulae from each other. In terms of Natural Theology it would appear that, in their efforts to escape from a supernatural creation in the Big Bang by a Transcendent God, they had unwittingly proposed continual creation by an Immanent God! However, redetermination of the recession rate of nebulae now gives a much earlier dating for the Big Bang, about 19 billion years according to the present best estimates. We shall see that, because of the continuous slow- ing of the expansion rate by gravitational pull, this figure has to be reduced to 10–12 billion years, which is in good agreement with dates that can be derived for the origin by several methods. Furthermore the evidence for the Big Bang has now become most convincing by the discovery of the predicted faint “echo” of the Big Bang, as an all-pervasive microwave radiation with

Originally published as Lenn E. Goodman, “Time, Creation, and the Mirror of Narcissus,” in God of Abraham (New York: Oxford University Press USA, 1996), 236–75. 114 Time, Creation, and the Mirror of Narcissus

a frequency corresponding [to] the average temperature of cosmic space, 3.0 degrees K.1 Only a few years ago the “big bang” and “steady state” theories seemed near-equal rivals. Both theories involve ideas of creation. The steady state requires continuous origination of new matter. The big bang opens the possibility of a moment of creation, not of a finished cosmos but of an evolving universe, emergent in phases, rather more as suggested in the biblical account of a phased creation. Neither theory leaves room for Aristotle’s eternal cosmic rhythm, preserved without essential change through infinite ages. That model has faded since Galileo’s day, and evolutionary views increasingly command the evidence. Defenders of special creation have been on the defensive since the mechanics of biological evolution began to be understood; they forge alibis against the evidence and treat the fossil record as a special test of faith.2 But creationist cosmologists have become almost triumphalist. Fred Hoyle, the chief advocate of the old steady state view, some years ago retreated to an ingenious account of the extrater- restrial origins of life, which, as Spinoza might have said, proved only its author’s brilliance. Religiously inclined cosmologists find astronomy vindi- cating biblical theism.3 Science News tells of physicists ready to dismiss the ancient axiom ex nihilo nihil fit: if matter and antimatter combine to anni- hilate one another, could not nothing become something, if “separated” into matter and antimatter? The magazine’s cover pictures William Blake’s sinewy God the Father measuring, with celestial dividers, the cosmic tohu ve-vohu, between Alpha and Omega, while about his bearded head the rotund words echo in the void: “oh I got plenty o’ nothin’, an’ nothin’s plenty for me.”4 The big bang, of course, does not imply that God created the universe. Logic allows that the cosmos might have come to be by itself, or from some lesser cause. And the evidence may allow an eternal cycle of origins and destructions. Some of the ancient Rabbis used to wonder (Genesis Rabbah 9.2) if this world was created only after several prior trials were discarded. But the homiletic riposte was always open: perhaps ours is one of the failed essays. Some physicists argue that the force of the original explo-

1 John Eccles, The Human Mystery, Gifford Lectures of 1977–1978 (Berlin: Springer, 1979), 12–13. 2 See Goodman and Goodman, “Creation and Evolution.” 3 See C. W. Misner “Cosmology and Theology,” in Cosmology, History and Theology, ed. W. Yourgrau and A. D. Breck (New York: Plenum, 1977). 4 Science News, August 3, 1985. Time, Creation, and the Mirror of Narcissus 115 sion will one day be spent and gravity will start a gradual but accelerat- ing contraction, climaxing in a cosmic implosion, then, perhaps, another explosion. If the world oscillates between implosion and explosion, the big bang is not the unique event, the absolute beginning. But it may have been. Absolute origination is one explanation of what we see. And origination can be explained by creation. Peering into the explosive past from the safe distance of the present, as we now can do, with telescopes like the one now in space that bears Hubble’s name, we still will not see all that we may wish to know about creation. We must remember Saadiah’s advice: when we set out to find the cause of nature we are not seeking yet another natural phenomenon but something that transcends time, change, and perception, and so can explain natural events rather than simply needing explanation along with them.5 That is why Aristotle reasoned that the cause of all motion must itself be unmoved, and why Plato saw that the Ground of all becoming must transcend temporality and particularity, the distinctive marks of natural existence. Our thirst for sensory evidence should not trap us into taking our principle of explanation back to the level it was invoked to explain. Sensuous divinities and what Voegelin called “historicized” images of cre- ation6 are symptomatic of a drive to reduction that equates reality with what we or our machines can palpate or manipulate. It was not this that the biblical writers and ancient philosophers and sages hoped to awaken to us or in us. What I want to consider in this last chapter are the values intended by the idea of creation, as a unique event in the distant past, but also as an ongoing expression of God’s active presence. When a medieval creationist like al-Ghazālī argued that all processes, being temporal, are originated, he and his readers readily inferred origination from change.7 They accepted Plato’s sharp division of being from becoming. What was eternal was unchanging and so nontemporal. Temporal events were bounded by a beginning and an end. We cannot so readily appropriate al-Ghazālī’s argument. Few of us have followed Plato quite as far on the “second voyage.” Yet we have better reason than Philoponus had to believe that the world had a beginning, and we cannot isolate ourselves in a historicist cocoon from the powerful argument lodged

5 ED I, Exordium, ed. Kafih, 33, trans. Rosenblatt 38–39. 6 Eric Voegelin, Order and History, vol. 4: The Ecumenic Age, Order and History, 112–13. 7 See al-Ghazali, Jerusalem Letter in Iḥya‌ʾ ʿUlūm al-Dīn, Qawa‌ʾid al-ʿAqāʾid (Bastions of Convictions), Fasl 3; ed. and trans. A. L. Tibawi in Islamic Quarterly 9 (1965): 78–122; and my “Ghazālī’s Argument from Creation.” 116 Time, Creation, and the Mirror of Narcissus in a rhetorical question asked by many medieval philosophers: How can anything create itself? We have learned from Hume to say that if things did begin, they might have begun of themselves—for no reason at all, or no reason beyond their own natures. But we saw in chapter 2 how much we give up when we think this way—ultimately, the idea that anything can be explained. The watershed between us and our forebears is not that we have found an unconditioned world but that we more freely posit origination without creation, blinkering from ourselves the consequence, that in so doing we have obviated explanation. The forming of a world does not need a demiurge. So sensualist or neomythic theologians now project the same images as are common in naturalistic fable—the same molten lava as primal element, the same swirling mists and gases, cast as God’s spirit brooding on the waters. But absolute creation is not to be imaged or imagined. Could we witness the events of the beginning, whose light and radiant energy are only now reaching us from deep space, after traveling for ten billion years or more, we would not discern creation perceptually from the mere eruption of being out of nothingness, or out of something very small. Our view of genesis would differ in no religiously relevant way from our present view of the world. For this too—all that we see, not just the molten basalt and the steam of Kilauea but the desk before me, the window I look through, the trees beyond—all has an origin as much flung from the primordial event as the light of the most distant stars. Our forebears who conceived the idea of creation or accepted or defended it when they read of it in Scripture had no ringside seat at genesis. What did they mean by creation? Did they jump the gun, buy the story before they grasped its premises or fathomed its conclusion? Or have we settled for an incomplete account? For reason, as Saadiah argues, affords our only access to the idea. Images of creation—the cosmogonic vignettes of a Cecil B. DeMille movie or a Nova telecast—are curiously shorn of the values the idea once proudly bore, values that made it in some ways easier for the ancients to call the world created than it has become for us. Biblically, the story of creation takes the form not of science but of myth, an account kept alive by the values it projects. To grasp what is at stake in the ancient idea, we can reawaken some of those values. They show startling vitality. I will group them under the headings of contingency, design, and newness. After touching on these, I want to turn to their coherence with some related values often thought to compete with the idea of creation, and some that are genuinely at odds with it. Time, Creation, and the Mirror of Narcissus 117

Contingency

Generalizing still more ancient myths of origin, the Torah advances a comprehensive version of the cosmological argument. God’s reality, transcendent and thus undescribed, is found through the reality of nature. All of this—heaven and earth, light and shadow, sun, moon, and stars, all that grows or creeps, walks, flies, swims, prowls, or laughs—need not have been. The Torah knows that God is good because creation is an act of grace (ḥesed; see Ps. 89:3). God made the world good and judged it good (Gen. 1:18, 31). The goodness of being is a theme not out of place in the cosmogonic prelude to God’s Law; it is an axiom of that Law. For it is in support of being that the Torah legislates. As the Law draws to a close, the same axiom is restated: God calls heaven and earth to witness to the perfection of his work, not only in the realm of nature but in the Law itself (Deut. 32:1–4; cf. Ps. 19). In Avicennan terms, only God is self-sufficient. The world and all things in it are dependent: necessary by reference to their causes but contingent in themselves. Their essence does not entail their existence; their idea does not assure its instantiation; nothing about each thing and kind requires its reality, and the whole of nature need not have been. For Avicenna the world’s contingency seemed compatible with its eternity, as the ageless product of eternal emanation. But to other monotheists it seemed clear not only that a conditioned world was contingent but also that a contingent world had begun. As al-Ghazālī argued, protective of the Qurʾān’s creationism, Neoplatonists could give no meaning to God’s creativity if they did not believe the world to be originated. What sense was there in speaking of an Author (Sānīʿ) if the universe could not fail to exist and the cause made no real difference to the reality or character of its effect? Eternalism, al-Ghazālī argued, made the philosophers unwilling or unwitting atheists (TF III, IV, X). Maimonides judged more gently. Committed to the idea that the Torah teaches by symbol and indirection (Guide III 27), he would not dogmatically impugn the faith of Aristotelian philosophers. Of course they were theists. But the nexus they preserved between God and nature was perilously attenuated. What theists seek is God’s goodness as the source of goodness in the world.8 But how do we ascribe goodness in the world to the

8 For al-Ghazali, as for Maimonides, this life’s goodness is critical in the argument for creation. Thus al-Ghazālī’s claim that “Nothing in the realm of possibility is more 118 Time, Creation, and the Mirror of Narcissus act of God, if that goodness was always there? Surely, Maimonides argued, God’s authorship makes more sense if it chooses among alternative possibilities. Temporal creation, as distinguished from eternal emanation, leaves room for that possibility. Besides, if emanation is necessitation from divine simplicity, the world’s differentiation becomes needlessly problematic, and change of any kind begins to seem impossible. So creation seemed preferable theologically and more probable epistemically than God’s eternal authorship (Guide II 19–22). For Aristotelians and those who came under the powerful spell of their philosophy, the very idea of creation seemed to undermine itself, by pre- supposing the cosmic principles it promised to explain. For how could any change not presuppose matter, from which to begin, and potentiality abiding in matter, to make the alteration possible, and time, eternally measured by the ceaseless motions of bodies, to mark the progress of the change? The world might be formed, some allowed;9 it was not created. But, as Saadiah pointed out, formatio mundi is no less a denial of absolute creation than is Aristotle’s eternal cosmos (ED I 2–3). And it was no more satisfactory to Aristotelians than de novo creation.

wondrous than what came to be” qualified theistic subjectivism and was criticized by purist Ashʿarites; see Eric Ormsby, Theodicy in Islamic Thought: The Dispute Over al-Ghazālī’s ‘Best of All Possible Worlds’ (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1984), and my review in JHP 25 (1987), 589–91. Joseph Stern questions the world’s goodness. I find its denial coherent internally but radically incoherent with the other judgments of those who propose it. Puzzled by the obscurantist readings of Maimonides popularized in the 1950s, Stern also asks if Maimonides didn’t want us to believe (1) that God is unknowable and (2) that there is no relation of any kind between God and nature. But (1) is refuted by Maimonides’ elaborate discussion of the Torah’s use of indirection to convey positive knowledge of God, as the all-perfect Being (Guide I 1–63); (2) fails internally and textually. For if we take “relation” abstractly, as in current usage, no two things are unrelated; even unrelatedness is a relation. And Maimonides specifically countenances descriptions of God as Creator. Textually the Arabic term (nisba), commonly translated “relation,” has a more restricted reference. Like the Latin ratio, it denotes relations of proportion; see Munk, ed., Guide des Égarés, 1.200 n. 1. There is no proportion between us and God’s perfection. For proportion requires a common measure. Yet there are structural symmetries, the basis of what Thomists will call analogy, not in the sense of a qualitative similarity but in the sense of a structural symmetry. Thus Maimonides can say that we become godlike by perfecting our humanity. We realize our affinity to God by perfecting what is best in us, and what is most perfect in our humanity links us to God’s perfection. As Narboni notes, the Guide opens by identifying human understanding as our affinity with God. The reason, we must understand, is not that divine intelligence is like our own, but rather that what is highest to us has, for that very reason, an affinity to that which renders God the Highest. 9 Al-Rāzī, for one, thought formatio mundi afforded the only viable argument “against the eternalists,” because it found an origin for the world but not for time, space, or matter. See my “Rāzī’s Myth of the Fall of the Soul.” Time, Creation, and the Mirror of Narcissus 119

The key Aristotelian claim was that a beginning of change is itself a change and so needs time in which to occur; thus, Peripatetics argued, creation cannot be posited without supposing eternal time, and with it, motion, matter, and materially grounded potentiality. Maimonides’ refutation was swift and incisive: it was suppositious, he argued, for Aristotelians to project their ideas of matter, time, potentiality, and change, notions gleaned from the settled order of nature, onto a radically evolving world—let alone onto the moment of origin. A perfect man who had no idea of his beginnings would deny that humans could emerge from the womb: surely respiration, nutrition, locomotion, and excretion are impossible in that environment; how could life be sustained there? Such a priorism, however, is deceiving. Natural necessities, and even time itself, emerge with the emergence of the natural order. The necessities of nature are not logical necessities. The entire natural order is just one of the possibilities God might have chosen.10 We cannot know its principles, or even its categories, a priori. God knows the world as the inventor knows a clock, prior to its making, even prior to its design. But human knowledge is typically a posteriori: we take the clock apart to learn how it works (Guide III 21). The brunt of the objection is against a metaphysics that, pace its advocates, seems to allow no scope to virtuality. Freedom, as a value ascribed in different senses to God, humanity, and nature, is part of the metaphysical freighting of the idea of creation. Creation points to the openness of the future and the possibility of discovery. Thus, despite his Ashʿarism, al-Ghazālī is even more outspoken than Maimonides in linking empiricism with creation. For empiricism underwrites his mysticism as well as his critique of essentialist accounts of causality.11 The intellectualist philosophy, he argues, might lead one to deny that something no larger than a grain can devour an entire town and then itself. Yet fire has that nature. Philosophers ascribe the effects of opium to its coldness and say that earth and water are the cold elements. Yet pounds of earth and water have not the effect of a single dram of opium. Just as the blind know nothing of color, so those who lack practical experience know nothing of the complexities of nature, the reach of God’s power, or the strengths and liabilities of the human soul.12

10 Guide I 73.10, II 17; cf. Francis Oakley, “Christian Theology and Newtonian Science: The Rise of the Concept of the Laws of Nature,” Church History 30 (1961); reprinted in Creation: The Impact of an Idea, ed. D. O’Connor and Oakley (New York: Scribners, 1969), 54–83; and my “Maimonides and Leibniz.” 11 TF XVII; cf. my “Did al-al-Ghazālī Deny Causality?” 12 al-Ghazālī, Munqidh, ed. Jabre, 50–51; cf. 35, 42; trans. Watt, 78–79; cf. 55, 64–68. 120 Time, Creation, and the Mirror of Narcissus

The alliance of empiricism and creationism is no accident.13 Since the world is not an eternal, self-sufficing substance, nor the passive product of fate, extruded from the entrails of the gods, pressed between the rollers of the seasons and ground out between the upper and nether millstones of heaven and earth, it does not trivially bear its explanation on its face. Nature’s character, biblically, is not a product of inevitability but an expression of the living God. It reflects God’s grace not as fatality but as the image of his own freedom and creativity. Thus both Maimonides and Saadiah treat the causal dispositions of things and the human power of choice as gifts of God. Freedom and contingency are the first elements of a perennial idea of creation. Avicenna, too, recognized these values in the idea of creation. He saw emanation not as an alternative but as an interpretation of creation. The eternity of the cosmos was not a mark of its inherent necessity but an expression of God’s essential and immutable creativity. Critics of eternalism like Maimonides and al-Ghazālī did not, for their part, reject emanation. They adopted it but sought to strip it of its eternalist connotations, and Avicenna’s work made clear the feasibility of that approach. For contingency was the linchpin of his analysis of being, and creationists like al-Ghazālī and Maimonides did not reject that analysis but only held contingency to be preserved most effectively by the red-blooded notion that the world’s dependence upon God is manifest in its finite age. It was because emanationists shared the values of contingency and freedom that creationists could argue effectively with them dialectically. And Ibn Ṭufayl, seeking to reconcile Avicenna with al-Ghazālī, urges that creationism and eternalism are equivalent theologically.14 Maimonides makes a similar claim when he derives the chief doctrines of rational theology from the premises of the Neoplatonic Aristotelians (Guide II, introduction). He parts company with these philosophers when he treats their eternalism as a postulate and in fact unwarranted, rather than a self-evident axiom or demonstrated conclusion. But he is careful to show that neither creation nor eternity can be demonstrated apodictically. For any such proof would make creation (or emanation) a matter of necessity and rob God of the volition that Maimonides saw was central to the idea of creation. Responding to the Aristotelian notion that the world’s possibility needed an eternal substrate, al-Ghazālī went out of his way to subjectivize modal

13 M. B. Foster, “The Christian Doctrine of Creation and the Rise of Modern Natural Science,” Mind 43 (1934); repr. in O’Connor and Oakley, Creation. 14 Ibn Ṭufayl, Ḥayy Ibn Yaqzān, trans. Goodman, 130–33. Time, Creation, and the Mirror of Narcissus 121 notions: “The possibility of which they speak comes down to a matter of subjective judgment: Whatever the mind can consider as existent, finding no obstacle to the making of that judgment, we call possible; but if we find such an obstacle, we call it impossible. If we cannot deem it non-existent, we call it necessary. All of these are subjective determinations with no necessary external reference.”15 Al-Ghazālī’s claims, paralleling some of Kant’s, raise serious questions for the theistic enterprise, and for the cosmological argument in particular: Given the limitations of our judgments and the parochialism of anchoring absolute possibility and necessity in matter, can we make any judgment at all as to the contingency of nature? As Maimonides’ examples of the fetus and the clock, and al-Ghazālī’s of the dram of opium and the “grain” of fire, suggest, one realm or sea of evidence lies in the enterprise of science itself: if all things are necessary categorically, then the necessity of logic is coextensive with that of nature, all real possibilities are actual, and the sciences in principle could be deductive. If all necessities are subjective, on the other hand, then science is impossible. But if science is possible and any part of inquiry is necessarily inductive, so that we cannot infer how things must be because things, in interaction with one another, have dynamic control over their own destinies, then there is contingency in the world, things are not fixed eternally in the necessities of their natures but might have been—might yet be— otherwise. In that case we can read the necessities of nature, even those that we schematize in logical terms, as hypothetical rather than categorical necessities—contingent in themselves, in Avicenna’s language, although necessary with reference to their causes. Induction is our necessary method in the sciences.16 But does this requirement stem from the nature of things or strictly from the predisposi- tions and limitations of our understanding? Does it reflect the openness of the future or the structure of our minds? I find the realist explanation more credible, since it places being first and makes knowledge dependent on the way things are. Our minds are capable of non-inductive thinking about

15 al-Ghazālī, TF I 4 corresponding to ed. TT, Bouyges 102. Cf. Hume in Dialogues Con- cerning Natural Religion IX; but contrast Hume’s account of necessity in relation to liberty and al-Ghazālī’s comparable theistic determinism. 16 Would perfect knowledge be deductive? Such perfection could belong only to God, in whom the distinction between induction and deduction is meaningless, since God is timeless. In God, determination of what shall be done (God’s will) and what is so (God’s understanding) are one and the same; the distinction between necessity and contingency dissolves. Indeed, that distinction is irrelevant even to us insofar as we act; it is relevant only insofar as we are acted upon. 122 Time, Creation, and the Mirror of Narcissus nature; they are just not capable of assuring the accuracy of their premises without recourse to experience. The lesson of empiricism, I would argue, is relearned and the theses of empiricism given new meaning with each new scientific discovery. I count the process of discovery itself as an argument of cumulatively mounting force in support of the realist account of the necessity of induction and, thus, in support of the reality of an open universe. This is to understand the gift of freedom in a particularly strong sense. Others, deferring to nuances of experience that seem salient to them and incompatible with real contingency, may draw different conclusions. But our failure to find deductive certainties in experience confirms the world’s contingency and so supports the idea of creation in one of the key dimensions of meaning that al-Ghazālī and Maimonides gave the term. By enlivening us to the nexus between empiricism and creationism, they show not the inevitability of creationism but the kind of price one might have to pay in apriorism if one abandons the creationist mode of explanatory discourse. From the ancient biblical idea of creation, then, we learn that goodness in the world argues for a divine Creator. From the medieval discussions we learn that empiricism reflects the contingency of the world’s existence and character, and thus obliquely argues for creation once again.

Design

Along with the ideas of value and contingency expressed in the idea of creation is the idea of purposiveness. The worth of the world is bound up with its purpose and the ability of creatures to fulfill that purpose. The idea of design emerges naturally enough from the thought of creation, since accounts of creation are modeled on myths of craftsmanship: the features of nature, like the works of culture, are products of divine intentions. Viewed in this light, whether in a hopeful spirit of appreciation or with an anxious eye toward propitiation, nature is scaled to human wishes: the cosmos becomes our abode (Isa. 45:18); the heavens, a tent over our heads (Isa. 40:22); the seas, highways for our transport (Ps. 104:26; Prov. 30:19; Qurʾān 2:164, 10:22, 14:32, 16:14, 17:66, 22:65, 43:12, 45:12); the meadows, fields for our crops. Warfare and disease become instruments of chastisement; death and its sequel, vehicles of judgment. Saadiah still thinks this way when he argues that this world was created as an abode of trial, to determine whether we will do God’s will:17 all things were made for man, and man that

17 Saadiah, Book of Theodicy, trans. Goodman 126; ED IX 4, trans. Rosenblatt, 333–34. Time, Creation, and the Mirror of Narcissus 123 he might worship God.18 Voltaire might archly draw a line between easily agreeing that the eye was made for seeing and doubting that the nose was made as a perch for a pince-nez. But the Stoics were typically earnest when they urged that a thing as noble as a soul was given to a pig only to keep its meat fresh.19 Teleology careens dangerously toward anthropocentrism. The trouble may go beyond our human tendency to reduce all purposes to our own. The very category of purpose is perhaps inextricably projective. Thus Spinoza’s overt rejection of teleology rests on recognizing that classic design arguments typically rely on a reductio ad ignorantiam; Hume’s rejection of such arguments flows from a recognition that the modern versions depend on stretched analogies between nature and a machine. Both men find suspect the projection of human purposes onto nature at large, Spinoza saying that our ability or inability to find order in a system reflects the limitations of our intellect; Hume, that notions of the world as a machine are at best projections of our limited experience.20 Later, more scientistic thinkers argue less subtly, urging that the world is not a system but a chaos or (taking a contrary tack!) that machines might construct, govern, or even reproduce themselves. A careful analysis of the idea of creation is as instructive here as in the case of contingency. Foster sagely contrasts creation with artisanship, the ordering and forming of nature and its parts by a Demiurge or craftsman god. The key to the contrast is a difference between crafts and fine, that is, creative, arts: a craftsman works with a preconceived purpose, to a predrawn plan, accommodating to the limitations of the available materials. But in creative arts the purpose emerges only as the work is done, the plan itself is a product of the creative act, and the materials (ideally) are not arbitrarily afforded and externally limiting but organically appropriate vehicles, called for, not just obeyed, necessitated by determinations inherent in the work.21 Plato’s Demiurge “consults” the eternal pattern of the Forms, as a craftsman consults a blueprint, paradigm, or jig—or as a culture hero consults the needs of his presumptive, or presumptuous, beneficiaries; he

18 Saadiah, ED IV Exordium; cf. III Exordium. 19 Chrysippus ap. Porphyry De Abst. III 20, “God mingled soul, as if it were salt, with the flesh of this animal.” Also Cicero, De Natura Deorum II 160. 20 Spinoza, Ethics I, appendix; cf. II 18 Scholium; Hume, Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion, II–III, ed. Kemp Smith 143,146; cf. VI–VIII. 21 See Foster, “The Christian Doctrine of Creation,” 46. 124 Time, Creation, and the Mirror of Narcissus works with existing, often recalcitrant, materials. But a creator God, like a creative artist, chooses his materials as well as their form or order. Radically so, in the case of the God of Abraham, since he is their maker. A craftsman god must submit his will to his understanding; any failure to do so is a failing in the world. But in a Creator, the end itself, in Foster’s words, is a product of the activity; thus a will is expressed that is not reducible to any prior purpose, our own or that of any external plan or destiny. Here again we catch some of the savor of Maimonides’ insistence on a volitional aspect in God’s determination of nature—of existence over nonexistence and of all the particularizations of nature, law, history, and the powers of human character. And we feel some of the force of his remark that God’s knowledge, unlike that of the human being who wants to follow the workings of a clock, is inventive and productive, not merely mimetic. Even when Maimonides marvels that Plato, like the talmudic Sages, uses the word “consults” to describe God’s work,22 he brings something more to the image than is contained in Plato’s vision of a Demiurge who consults the Forms. For the consultation that the Rabbis mention is deliberative; its outcome is itself a product of the creative work. And, to be fair to Plato, we must add that the pattern consulted by his Demiurge is a living being, suggesting the dynamism, if not the creativity, of the model and the liveliness of its representation in nature. Maimonides linked the volitional in God with matter23 and thus with the absoluteness of creation. The idea of a pattern or design was not unwel- come to monotheists, so long as that plan did not become an independent hypostasis. Philo, paradigmatically, saw the rational principle of creation as an attribute of God, his wisdom, made manifest as a word, the Logos.24 The Talmud’s trenchant commentary on that approach is the famous remark of Mishnah Sanhedrin (4.5), which we noted near the end of chapter 4, that a mortal craftsman’s mold or type turns out each exemplar exactly like the last; but when the Holy One, blessed be he, makes human beings, no two emerge identical from the mold.25 Nature, too, is a unique original. Its plan is immanent, not externally imposed. Thus, as Maimonides argues, it is absurd to seek a single purpose

22 Maimonides, Guide II 6, citing Plato, Timaeus 28a and Sanhedrin 38b, which glosses Gen. 1:26 as an allusion to God’s “consulting” his heavenly retinue. 23 See my “Matter and Form as Attributes of God in Maimonides’ Philosophy.” 24 See H. A. Wolfson, Philo (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1962), 1.200ff.; David Winston, Logos and Mystical Theology in Philo of Alexandria (Cincinnati: HUC Press, 1985). 25 “Therefore everyone must say, ‘For my sake was the world created.’” Time, Creation, and the Mirror of Narcissus 125 in it. It is not an artifact like a machine or tool. When Scripture says that God created all things for his glory, it means that (like a creative artist) he created all things for their own sakes—to fulfill their own natures and to manifest perfection in their own distinctive ways, through their God-given strengths. It is in this sense that “the heavens declare the glory of God”;26 in this sense, that it is possible for us to fulfill the injunction to make all our actions for the sake of heaven.27 “God saw that it was good” is surely neither an ex post facto discovery nor an arbitrary stipulation. Rather, we stand, as it were, looking over the Artist’s shoulder, sharing his satisfaction at the adequacy of the execution of his plan. Here again, then, two criteria emerge that help us to judge that the world has a Creator, without our being eyewitnesses to the event. The two arise in our practice of science, but less as findings than as critical underpin- nings, vindicated more by the success of the enterprise than by any isolated datum. They are the intelligibility and the autonomy of nature. The fact that nature can be understood, that rational explanations are possible, that causal regularities warrant inductive intuitions, shows the apposite- ness of the idea of creation.28 As for the autonomy of nature, by this I mean that things exist for their own sakes—that beings project ends; and human beings, purposes, which they can, at times, fulfill. Neither of these ideas entails that there is a Creator. But each is a datum allowing explanation. The resident teleology of autonomous agency is what Spinoza did not exclude but acknowledged as the very essence of things, under the name conatus. In his Short Treatise, he called it providence.29 For we need not impose our own purposes to recognize the art and the miracle of creativity in the fact that beings of all kinds can project and pursue values of their own. Such purposes are not precluded but presupposed in the work of Darwin and his successors. Intelligibility, too, is corroborative of divine creativity, as Einstein intimated when he said that the most incomprehensible thing about the universe is that it is comprehensible. The idea of creation offers a line of explanation of that comprehensibility: nature is an act of God; its intelligibility is an expression of God’s wisdom, to which we have access, as broad or narrow as our own understanding will allow.

26 Guide III 13; cf. II 6 and Mishnah Avot 6.11. For Maimonides each natural being has its own imparted essence to fulfill; thus the delegation of free will, Code I, Hilkhot Teshuvah, 5.1–4; contrast al-Ghazālī, Munqidh, trans. Watt, 37. 27 Mishnah Avot 2.17; see chap. 5. 28 Here I part company with Foster. My understanding of induction is Socratic, like Aristotle’s, not Humean. 29 Spinoza, Short Treatise on God, Man and His Well-Being, trans. Curley, 1.84. 126 Time, Creation, and the Mirror of Narcissus

The ancient philosophers and the classic exponents of design did not mean something radically different from this. It was part of what Plato meant by the metaphor of a craftsman working to a plan that was in fact a living idea. And the metaphor was preserved by Aristotle, even when he rejected the image of a world that was literally a product of divine work: Of perishable plants and animals we have abundant information, living as we do in their midst, and ample data may be collected concerning all their various kinds, if only we are willing to take sufficient pains. . . . The scanty conceptions we can reach of celestial things give us, from their excellence, more pleasure than all our knowledge of the world in which we live; just as a half glimpse of persons whom we love is more delightful than an accurate view of other things, whatever their number and dimensions. But in certitude and completeness our knowledge of terrestrial things has the advantage, and their greater nearness and affinity to us balances somewhat the loftier interest of the heavenly things that are the objects of the higher philosophy. . . . if some have no graces to charm the sense, yet nature, which fashioned them, gives amazing pleasure in their study to all who can trace links of causation, and are inclined to philosophy. Indeed it would be strange if representations of them were attractive because they disclose the mimetic skill of the painter or sculptor and the originals were not more interesting, to all at least who have eyes to discern the causes. So we must not recoil with childish aversion from the examination of the humbler animals. Every realm of nature is marvelous. And, as Heraclitus, when the strangers who came to visit him found him warming himself at the furnace in the kitchen and hesitated to go in, is reported to have bidden them not to be afraid to enter, since even in that kitchen gods were present, so we should venture on the study of every kind of animal without distaste; for each and all will reveal to us something natural and something beautiful. The absence of chance and conduciveness of everything to an end are to be found in nature’s works in the highest degree, and the end for which those works are put together and produced is a form of the beautiful.30 Medieval analysis refines the idea of creation and renders it more precious and more precise, following up on Plato’s image of the cosmos as an organism, not a machine. A mature and modern creationism sees God’s purpose and plan as constituted within and through the work rather than outside

30 Aristotle, De Partibus Animalium I 5, 644b 26–645a 25, after J. Barnes, ed., W. Ogle, trans., Revised Oxford Translation of the Complete Works of Aristotle 1.1003–4. Aristotle’s artificer is immanent, thus allegorical. Refusing to make the divine a deus ex machina, Aristotle avoids resolving Plato’s imagery, retaining the metaphor of an artificer: there is no better description of the effect than as a product of design—yet the design is the work of natural causes. Time, Creation, and the Mirror of Narcissus 127 and prior to it. Matter is integral in what the creative act provides. For what is created is not an implement but a creature. The gift of existence includes each creature’s chance to be in some measure an end in itself, a thing of intrinsic worth, thus testifying to the Creator’s glory. Here again, then, we find indices for evaluating the claim that the world is not merely originated or eternally necessitated but created by a transcendent God: intelligibility in nature—the possibility of science, explanation, understanding—militates in favor. It does not prove the world created. For there are rival accounts of our understanding. But it tends to confirm creation. The more our grasp of nature grows, the more extensively confirmed are those models that view the world as a manifestation of divine intelligence.31 Similarly, all autonomous value—not just the values of intelligibility, but the beauty, goodness, and sheer exuberance of nature—can be read as an expression of divine creativity. The discovery of such values inherent in things can, of course, be taken to support a kind of radical pluralism, egoism, even anarchism. But where the natural world is seen as an ordered system, such projections are excluded by cosmology and rebuked (as romantic projections should be) by the moral self-discipline of the inquirer. Clearly a stronger claim is made here than the mere compatibility of creation with the world’s order, beauty, and freedom. For the claim is made that accounts of our understanding that dispense with divine intelligence offer a weak explanation that does not do justice to the human phenomenon. And, similarly, our claim is that accounts of the beauty and order of nature in general that dispense with divine generosity do not do justice to nature itself. Our evidence, perforce, is finite and experiential. But, to the extent that the values resident in the idea of creation more effectively conciliate and save the data, those data support creation as against rival accounts. The exuberance of being specifies the meaning of creation, showing us in God’s act not an imposition but an imparting of freedom and power, the relative independence by which all natural things establish themselves in their milieux and express in their own ways the pure and universal, otherwise unspecified grace and glory of God.

31 It is no part of our project, however, to seek to choose between volition and intelligence as models of God’s creativity. For Maimonides showed us that these two aspects should not be too sharply dichotomized. 128 Time, Creation, and the Mirror of Narcissus

Newness

According to ancient tradition, God created miracles in the twilight of the sixth day.32 But creation belongs to the morning. The Torah relates no genealogy of the gods, no theomachy before the world’s origin— partly out of monotheistic chasteness but partly to convey the sense of freshness and beginning. The opening word of the Torah is Bereshit, “in the beginning.” The story that will unfold begins at its logical and ontological beginning. There was no prior history. Even the celebrated ban, “Whoever reflects on four things, it were a mercy had he never come into the world: what is above, what is beneath, what is before and what is after” (Ḥagigah 2.1), does not outlaw metaphysics, which is, after all, practiced and modeled, invited and encouraged by the Torah. Rather, what it seems to disparage is any quest for a cause of the Cause of causes, the motives of the All-Good, the genealogy of God. Genesis is a story of absolute origination. Its chaste imagery suits the naturalistic clarity and metaphysical economy of the account. Stage designers still seek that mise-en-scène when they hang a pure blue-gray scrim as a backdrop to balletic scenes and allow a wisp of mist to suggest God’s spirit brooding on the waters. But architects catch the mood more clearly in a sheer, brilliantly lit, clean surface. When Arabic philosophers contrast genesis with an eternal cosmos they use the words ḥādith, new, and qadīm, ancient. The created world is not old but young, of measured age, beyond which stands God alone, eternal, timeless. When occasionalists sought to prove creation a necessity, from the logic of finite being, the outcome was an affirmation of continual new creation. Emanation, too, was continuous creation, the newness generalized to a constant renewal of becoming. But voluntaristic versions preserve the idea of its newness more vividly, complementing and interpreting contingency and design: the world is an invention. It did not have to be; its structure and particularity are not mere entailments of God’s goodness or unity; they serve no need of his but express his glory, as a work of art (in lesser measure) serves no utilitarian functions but expresses and embodies an idea, and exists (in some ways) for its own sake. The ancient meaning of the newness of creation, then, is freedom once again, God’s freedom as Creator, and each creature’s echoing freedom to be.

32 Mishnah Avot 5.9; cf. Genesis Rabbah 5.5. The imagery supports naturalism by treating miracles as stipulations in God’s original covenant with nature. Also in support of naturalism Maimonides (Guide II 29) cites Eccles. 1:9 and Avodah Zarah 54b: “There is nothing new under the sun,” and “The world runs in its accustomed course.” Time, Creation, and the Mirror of Narcissus 129

For Genesis is a universal story. Everyman is born in the forming of Adam and the infusion of God’s breath of life into our otherwise inert earth. Thus the newness of creation abides beyond the first creative act. Nature renews itself in each moment, and the seasons mark not passing or cyclicity but birth and new growth out of decay. Again the ancient idea of newness acquires a new meaning in later hands. But now the pioneers of the change are modern rather than medieval. New force is given to the idea of newness by the discovery of evolution and, more specifically, by the idea of emergence. For being itself is active and dynamic. Creatures use the powers and freedoms they find within themselves. They grow, persist, reproduce, striving to preserve and promote their own being, express, perfect, and develop their natures. Their essences are not fixed but evolving, not merely self-actualizing but emergent, susceptible of a redefining in which they themselves are actors.33 It is in this sense (not the passive sense of the kalām) that creation is continuous and ongoing, renewed at each moment. Thus the daily Hebrew liturgy argues playfully that God “in His goodness reneweth each day, continually, the act of creation, as it is said, ‘To Him who maketh great lights, for His favor is eternal’.”34 If God’s act is eternal, his work will be present at all times. Intelligibility is most evident cosmologically in the past, in the determinate order of nature; grace, in the openness of the future; creativity, in the present, in the efficacy of freedom, where determination meets the openness of possibility and marks it indelibly with its unique character and stamp. Again we see the creativity of the artist and not the artisan. For evolution does not work to a blueprint; its design is fully real only in the execution, and static not even then. Stars emerge from dust, elements from stars, compounds and living beings from elements. No feature of a higher order is present in its constituents, or even describable in their terms: chemical properties are not deducible from the laws of physics or even describable in their

33 Emergence does not imply discontinuity (“saltation”) and is not confined to the differentiation of levels (e.g., the biological from the chemical). It does imply that prior givens are insufficient to determine outcomes, since subjects active in the present also play their roles. Emergence is critical not only in evolution but in learning, invention, discovery— all forms of creativity. See my “Determinism and Freedom in Spinoza, Maimonides and Aristotle.” 34 From the blessings before the Shema: U-meḥadesh be-tuvo be-khol yom tamid maʿaseh bereshit, ka-amur: “le-ʿoseh orim gedolim, ki-le-ʿolam ḥasdo,” glossing Ps. 136:7, by stressing the imperfect verb and linking eternal and continuous grace (ḥesed) with the ongoing creation of the “great lights” of the heavens. 130 Time, Creation, and the Mirror of Narcissus terms. Similarly with biological properties and the principles of chemistry, or with psychological traits, powers, and capacities in relation to biology: the principles of the prior order afford the environment; the “matter,” in Neoplatonic terms. But at each new level of integration new capabilities, new powers of expression and self-direction, new degrees of freedom emerge. This is what we must understand by the need for a prime mover, the incapacity of inanimate matter to enspirit and envigorate itself. Physics does not “determine” chemistry any more than the notes of a key in music “determine” an étude of Chopin; it sets the stage, as chemistry does for biology, and biology for psychology, preparing the ground, as it were, for the emergence of consciousness, intelligence, a soul. The laws of physics set parameters for chemistry, and those of chemistry for biology. This is what reductionists have in mind when they say that physical laws determine chemistry or that biology is determined by chemistry in turn, the higher-order properties accounted for by reference to a Democritean mystique of complexity. But what is this complexity? Subtle atomic interactions generate properties that are not describable in merely atomic terms and whose outcomes are not predictable from the atomic givens. I am not speaking here about indeterminacy, as though the blind sta- tistical distribution of electrons somehow made a haven for fugitive human freedom, rescuing rational volition from blind necessity by subjecting it to blind chance. On the contrary, I am speaking of the emergence from a world of atoms and electrons of beings that are not adequately described in the language of atoms and electrons, beings that project ends and exis- tentiate themselves through the values they define for themselves, acting in their environment and controlling, in some measure, the very matter they are made of and the forces that give it shape. Chemistry emerges from physics synthetically, as geometry might be said to emerge from arithmetic, and similarly, biology from chemistry. The principles needed to derive one from the other can be known only by one who already comprehends both. Here, where knowledge must deal with realities, not just with the stipulations of mathematics, such comprehension, ultimately, would be infinite. In the electric, magnetic, and other properties of subatomic particles, to be sure, the basis was laid for chemistry, and thus for biology as well. But it is only in the interaction of the subtly varied constituents of nature that such potentialities are fulfilled. The complexity that emerges is not (as the medievals imagined) the additive product of nuanced variation in the min- gling of the givens but their constructive product, in which the dynamics of the more primordial forces are mastered by new orders of being, capable of increasingly self-integrative expression and self-directive activity. Time, Creation, and the Mirror of Narcissus 131

Complexity is not the explanation but the outcome of this dynamism. The explanation is the restless urge toward transcendence present in all things, the active and dynamic conatus that is the essence of each being. Selves are the emergent product of the evolutionary dynamism that flourishes in our universe and whose efflorescence is manifest not only in our own being but in the commandeering of chemical forces by the biological, and in the birth of stars. Mechanists will say that evolution is no more than the survival of the stabler or more durable among the random products of chance combina- tion. But this is to put the cart before the horse. For values like stability or durability, and the subtler values of reproduction, or the adaptability represented by an evolutionary strategy like sexual reproduction, have no meaning apart from the interests that the emergent beings project and constitute as aims. In Aristotelian terms, chance is the intersection of causal trains among events not regularly related by the natures of their constituents; it is called fortune or “luck,” when the outcome recognizably affects the interests of the participants. Chance in this sense abounds in nature—so much so that the randomness of interactions is a chief source of natural order. Of course it is of the essence that interactions contain a large random compo- nent, insofar as they relate things not intrinsically or even regularly related. But it is also of the essence that interactions are opportunistic. Beings tend to express their identities upon and through one another. In so doing they enhance their environment, from their own standpoint, exploit the orderli- ness of randomness itself to generate stabler, higher-order, and more information-rich complexes, compounds, and communities, which are capable of still greater enhancement and enrichment. In this sense randomness in nature is not helter-skelter, and opportunity is a natural product of the self-actualizing character of things and the rich potential of their surround- ings. It is the dynamism of individual things that pessimists (projectively) neglect when they argue somberly that all energy flows to disorder. They regard it as somehow accidental that beings can generate order even out of the flow to entropy. Newness in its ancient application means freedom from history and determination, the fresh and unencumbered start that belongs to the universe at large and, in lesser measure, to every creature in it. In more modern terms, newness is evolution and emergence, in which the past is not the sole determinant of the future but present actors are determinants as well, and the powers imparted to creatures make them in some measure self-transcending, capable of rising above the limitations of their primal natures, self-creative in some degree, imaging the artistic creativity of God. 132 Time, Creation, and the Mirror of Narcissus

Just as we have visible evidence of the world’s roundness when we look to the horizon, so we experience its newness when we recognize its unencum- beredness, in the fact of evolution or the possibility of human creativity. The world, we find, is still abuilding. We can know the world to be created, then, by discovering its newness, not only in signs of its finite age but in marks of another newness that are freighted with significance for us and that enrich our idea of God’s act— when we see the extent to which the world is unencumbered and recognize the ability of its creatures to be true to form not by remaining true to form but by creating themselves, individually, intellectually, generationally, historically, and by species, genera, phyla, and kingdoms. God’s creativity here is far more immediate than the distant and therefore ancient stars. Its evidences are no less to be found at the objective of a microscope than in the eyepiece of a telescope. They are, in the Qur’anic (50:16) phrase, nearer to us than our jugular vein. Our analysis of the idea of creation gives us many things to look for that will count as evidence of God’s creation. It has closed off no area of our knowledge or understanding from such explorations. And it has given us some fairly decisive considerations, which rival theses might account for otherwise or attempt to discount or dismiss, but which together make a case for creation while adding richness to its meaning: a universe in which understanding is possible but science is necessarily empirical, in which there are freedom and evolution and in which beings exist for their own sakes and according to their own emergent nisus, in which worth is intrinsic and not merely instrumental—a universe that is open rather than closed, that has an open future, not blockaded by an infinite or overreaching past—is the sort of universe that a transcendent God might be conceived to have created as an expression of his glory. That is the sort of universe, I believe, in which we live.

Time and Creativity

To understand the continuing relevance of the idea of creation and its linkage to the idea of creativity, I want now to examine the concept of time. For the claim has been made that creation, paradoxically, renders creativity either impossible or irrelevant, since it means (so we are told) either that God determined all things for all times or that God abandoned what he created. I want to show that both these views are false and that creativity, as our historical analysis suggests, is not at all incompatible with creation, Time, Creation, and the Mirror of Narcissus 133 from which it springs. But in showing this I will need to discuss a fundamental disagreement about the nature of time, a disagreement expressed in some philosophers’ disappointment with the legacy they received from Henri Bergson. “If Bergson believed anything,” Charles Hartshorne writes, “it was the asymmetry of time, the openness of the future and determinateness of the past.”35 But Bergson, Hartshorne argues, too readily forgot that the denial of determinism, so central to his philosophy, rests on the denial of the symmetry of time. Determinism, Hartshorne urges, following Peirce and Bergson himself, takes an essentially symmetrical view of time. That is why, on Laplace’s model, one can as readily retrodict the past as predict the future, given an adequate knowledge of the present state of the world and its unchanging laws. The core of Bergson’s message was that the determinism that negates human freedom and closes the open future arises in a false analogy between time and space: space is an affair of mutual exclusion of elements, “whereas time is an affair of mutual inclusion.” By preserving a certain symmetry in both space and time, Hartshorne argues, Bergson compromises the ultimate asymmetry of time and falls into “the most glaring confusion in Time and Free Will.” Is there a kind of symmetry in time? Bergson thought there was. He described it in terms of the mutual inclusion of temporal moments. What are the consequences of denying that claim? I want to argue that Bergson’s idea of the mutual interpenetration of temporal moments allows expansion of the idea of the specious present from a brief span of subjective immediacy to the full duration needed in nature for the unfolding of an event. This expanded view of duration will accommodate actions sustained over long periods, including extended collaborations by members of a community or a culture over history. Time, I will argue, can be asymmetrical in one respect and symmetrical in another: the interpenetration of temporal moments is not a denial of the unalterable differentness of the future from the past. Rather, it is an affirmation of continuity. But my motive here goes beyond affirmation of that simple fact. The idea that there is a certain symmetry among the moments of time proves critical in relating traditional ideas of creation to Bergson’s own emphasis on creativity. The attempt simply to discard creation for more recently favored

35 Charles Hartshorne, “Bergson’s Aesthetic Creationism Compared to Whitehead’s,” in Bergson and Modern Thought, ed. Andrew C. Papanicolaou and Pete A. Y. Gunter (Chur, Switzerland: Harwood, 1987), 372. 134 Time, Creation, and the Mirror of Narcissus notions of process, by contrast, endangers many of the insights and values, both scientific and moral, that Bergson sought to preserve within his broad conceptions of creativity, duration, and the asymmetry of time. Following the thrust of some of the more stridently eternalist recent readings of the outcome of a debate that has continued since Western speculation about cosmology began, we find a starkly scientistic outlook that seems to be inseparable from the endeavor to cut off the future from its past, whether in human or in cosmic terms. Toward the end of this final chapter I want to examine the rhetoric and the consequences of this outlook, after first offering some counterarguments to its claims. Surely it is true that time is profoundly asymmetrical. The unlikeness of the future to the past is critical to its being future. Even if Nietzsche, Epicurus, and the Stoics are right about eternal recurrence, an idea that was tempting to no less a philosopher than Plotinus,36 still recycled events are not the same as what they repeat, or there would be no meaning to the claim that the same events recurred: there must be at least the fact that this Socrates, Xanthippe, and Meletus are repetitions of those. But is time symmetrical in some respects, or is it simply a confusion for Bergson to speak of interpenetration, the mutual openness of temporal moments to one another? In Matter and Memory Bergson discovers the same interpenetration in space that he had earlier found in time and used to break down the linearity of events. Zeno’s paradoxes rest on the assumption that time and events are either a Euclidean continuum or a Pythagorean pointillistic series. But, in fact, Bergson argued, the moments of time are neither the dimensionless knife edge that temporal analysis invokes as a virtual limit nor the static freeze-frames of a misplaced spatial analysis. On the contrary, each particular moment of change involves an onwardness—what Plato called ‘becoming’, and Bergson ‘duration’—which no merely geometric model can capture and which static abstractions only deaden, in fictive denial of the fact of change, as anatomical sections cut from the living tissue with microtomes arrest and thereby negate the processes of life they are meant to reveal.37

36 Plotinus, Enneads V 7.1–2; for the Stoic view, see Nemesius 309.5, 311.2. 37 For Bergson’s reflections on Zeno, see his “L’Intuition philosophique,” Revue de Méta physique et de la Morale 19 (1911); reprinted in La Pensée et le mouvant (Paris: F. Alcan, 1934). Bergson came to Zeno’s paradoxes and thus to the problem of time with the background of a promising mathematics student. Of his school days he writes: “It was at Condorcet that I experienced the first and perhaps the only hesitation of my life. I was attracted equally by science and by letters; I felt an equal aptitude for mathematics and philosophy. And Time, Creation, and the Mirror of Narcissus 135

Time itself is denied by the analysis that seeks to compose it in the Augustinian way, of a vanished past, an unborn future, and an infinitely diminishing present.38 The present, Bergson saw, cannot be instantaneous or atomic. It must have duration—both asymmetrical, melting into the future even as it emerges from the past, and blurry-edged, not bounded sharply by dimensionless points, since the dimensionless point is a mere fiction of geometry. The same is true of space: it is impossible to compose what will have magnitude out of what has none. Bergson’s real quarrel, then, was not with space but with overreliance on a fiction most familiar from its use in the analysis of space: the fiction of separateness, of discrete and frozen temporal moments, in this case, that are at once fully determinate (thus fixed) in their character, yet somehow (paradoxically) determinative—each of the character of the rest and holding, without omission, all that ever was or will be in all the rest. Bergson first expressed what was misleading in this fiction by saying that time is not like space, but he came to see that space itself is not like space in the sense that the economies and abstractions of geometry would have it. The Cartesian project of geometrizing nature is as much an underrepresentation of matter as it is of time. To render time atomic is to render change impossible and, as Hume saw clearly, to arrest causality—thus Hume’s sly insistence that time is a succession of infinitesimal instants:39 the static, durationless instants of Humean time prejudge the question of causality in favor of a kind of logical atomism. But suppose (like true empiricists) we had begun from the fact of change. Or suppose we were to understand change not in terms of succession but in terms of the conditionedness of one moment or event by another. Then causality would be a given,40 and the simple sensa of extreme empiricism

then, when I had decided for letters, my teacher of mathematics came and made a scene before my parents, telling them I was about to commit an irremediable act of folly.” For the impact on Bergson’s thought of the ideas of Jules Tannéry, Jules Lachelier, Emile Boutroux, and others in subverting the claims of mechanistic science and the geometrical modeling of nature, see Ben-Ami Scharfstein, Roots of Bergson’s Philosophy (New York: Columbia University Press, 1943), 8–19. 38 Augustine, Confessions XI 19–37. 39 Hume Treatise, bk. I, pt. II, sec. II, ed. Selby-Bigge, 31. 40 Cf. Albert Éduard Michotte, The Perception of Causality, trans., T. R. Miles and Elaine Miles (1946; reprint, London: Methuen, 1963), 256: “If Hume had been able to carry out experiments such as ours, there is no doubt that he would have been led to revise his views on the psychological origin of the popular idea of causality”; see D. C. G. Macnabb’s fictive dialogue between Hume and Michotte, “Michotte and Hume on Mechanical Causation,” in Hume and the Enlightenment: Essays Presented to Ernest Campbell Massner (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1974). The Bergsonian critique of Hume rests not, of course, 136 Time, Creation, and the Mirror of Narcissus would be recognized for what they are, elaborate constructs, achievements of perceptual and cognitive synthesis and selection. Only if the moments of time themselves have real duration is change conceivable,41 and only in such duration is there the theater of action for causality, which will not merely determine the future out of the givenness of the past but also allow actors to differentiate the future from that givenness—allow genuine change, and indeed evolution, emergence of what is conditioned by the past (to use Spinoza’s word) but never pre- contained in it, or locked in place by what is already over and done with. When Leibniz held that the past was great with the future, and the future laden with the past,42 he knew better than to imagine sheer preforma- tion: it was because mere geometric figures could not explain the forces of cohesion or mutual exclusion among bodies that Leibniz remedied the Cartesian reduction of bodies to extension, by proposing intensive qualities that would allow the emergence of events not yet present in their causes.43 Similarly Bergson, admiring the cosmogony of Lemaître, settled on the fact that the primitive datum of energy/mass from which the world emerges cannot contain or determine all that it will engender. As Lemaître wrote, “Clearly the initial quantum could not conceal in itself the whole course of evolution; but according to the principle of indeterminacy, that is not necessary. Our world is now understood to be a world where something really happens; the whole story of the world need not have been written down in the first quantum like a song on a phonograph record.”44 Bergson’s early arguments about time relied on the phenomenology of felt duration. His descriptions were of consciousness, and his paradigm on the immediacy of any impression of causal force but on the relationality, and thus temporality, in the sense of duration, implicit in the Humean idea of succession. This relationality is concealed when Hume treats succession as the mere occurrence now of one sensum, now of another. 41 My physicist friend David Yount has argued (in an unpublished paper) that the temporal moment should be envisioned “as an arbitrarily short interval” and duration as “the sum or integral over a number of such intervals.” The profit is that the Laplacean fiction of a point instant that is still somehow pregnant with the future (indeed, with all possible pasts and futures) dissolves, and the causal efficacy of events at a given moment is not reduced to their logical relation to all other events via a set of ontologically mysterious “laws.” 42 Leibniz, Discourse on Metaphysics, 13; cf. to Arnauld, March 23, 1690; to John Bernoulli, February 21, 1699; all in L. E. Loemker, ed. Leibniz: Philosophical Papers and Letters (Dordrecht: Reidel, 1976), 310, 360, 513. Cf. my “Leibniz and Futurity: Was It All Over with Adam?” 43 See M. Čapek, “Leibniz’ Thought Prior to the Year 1670: From Atomism to a Geometri- cal Kinetism,” Revue Internationale de Philosophie 20 (1966): 249–56. 44 G. Lemaître, The Primeval Atom: An Essay on Cosmology, trans. after B. Korff and S. Korff (New York: Van Nostrand, 1950), 18–19. Time, Creation, and the Mirror of Narcissus 137 case of duration was our awareness of a melody. Bergson’s father was a musician, and the son knew well that our hearing of a melody cannot be composed of durationless instants if we are ever to hear it as a melody, hear its notes in relation to one another, as parts in a whole, or even as rhythmic or tonal contrasts.45 The same, we must say, of the rich complexity of an orchestral chord; the same, we now know, of our perception of colors: they are perceived relationally, against a contextual background, and the comparative process is, of course, a temporal act.46 Our ability to mix (or even see!) a hitherto unknown shade of blue, which was such a mystery for Humean epistemology, is no mystery at all when we recognize that there are no atomic sensa but that even the “simplest” patches of color are com- plexly constructed syntheses of very complex events.47 Thus a psychological dissolving of the conundrums of dogmatic empiricism was a by-product of Bergson’s biological, indeed evolutionary, epistemology, which saw

45 Cf. Augustine, Confessions, XI xxviii 38: “I am about to repeat a Psalm that I know. Before I begin, my expectation is extended over the whole; but once I have begun whatever I pluck off from it and let fall into the past enters the realm of memory. So the life of this action of mine extends in two directions, my memory of what I have repeated and my expectation of what I am about to repeat. But all the while, my attention is present with me, so that through it what was future may be conveyed over to become past.” 46 See Johannes Itten, The Art of Color, trans. E. van Haagen (New York: Van Nostrand, 1973); Errol Harris, Hypothesis and Perception (London: Allen and Unwin, 1970), 237–92. Bergson remarked trenchantly in his Huxley Lecture at the University of Birmingham, May 29, 1911: “When I open and close my eyes in rapid succession, I experience a succession of visual sensations each of which is the condensation of an extraordinarily long history unrolled in the external world. There are then, succeeding one another, billions of vibra- tions, that is a series of events which, even with the greatest possible economy of time, would take me thousands of years to count. Yet these momentous events, which would fill thirty centuries of a matter become conscious, occupy only a second of my own consciousness, able to contract them into one picturesque sensation of light” (quoted in Milič Čapek, “Bergson’s Theory of the Mind-Brain Relation,” in Bergson and Modern Thought, ed. Andrew C. Papanicolaou and Pete A. Y. Gunter (Chur, Switzerland: Harwood, 1987), 139–40. 47 Hume, Enquiry, sec. II, 16, ed. Selby-Bigge, 20–21; cf. Treatise, bk. I, pt. I, sec. I, ed. Selby-Bigge, 6. Hume candidly allows that one who had never seen a particular shade of blue would still notice its absence from a continuous progression of the remaining shades and would be able to supply it. He infers: “the simple ideas are not always, in every instance, derived from the correspondent impressions.” But he evades the implication, that “simple ideas” and even “simple impressions” may be simple only superficially. And he treats the case as “so singular, that it is scarcely worth our observing, and does not merit that for it alone we should alter our general maxim.” Hume does not see how typical the case really is, that all simple percepts are the achievements of integrative activity, their supposed simplicity merely emblematic of their phenomenal givenness or all-at-onceness. Physiologically, even phenomenally, all sensations will be complex. They must be, if they are temporal. Their givenness is not indicative of an underlying atomicity but only reflects our attending to the integrated product, which is itself, in part, an outcome of that very attending. 138 Time, Creation, and the Mirror of Narcissus perception as an act not only of synthesis but of abstraction, filtration, and exclusion.48 Because of its pioneering reliance on phenomenology, Bergson’s theory of time set up a sharp contrast between public or cosmic time and subjective time. It relied heavily on James’s idea of the specious present, the moment that is immediate for consciousness, and it seriously attempted to measure that present, marking it off against public time—despite the affirmation that spans of time are not strictly superposable. Values were assigned between a maximum of 12 seconds, the longest span that James believed consciousness could hold together as a single now, and a mini- mum of .002 seconds, the briefest event that seemed accessible to sense perception.49 Committed followers of Bergson still take seriously this con- founding of psychological temporality with real duration. But Bergson himself came to see that public time, cosmic time, the time of natural events, must be structured in the same way as phenomenal time: the dissolving of sugar in his coffee was a sequence of natural events isometric with his own impatient expectation of its outcome. Strictly speaking, Bergson’s reference to subjective experience here was quite unnecessary. Natural time no more requires anchoring in phenomenal time than phenomenal time requires natural time to authorize it. If the present is the locus of events, it will last as long as those events require. This will be denied only by those who bear a metaphysical animus against the notion that events occur. Thus Bergson’s central thesis about time is as true of physical as of psychological events, and Kantian or post-Kantian phenomenology is not needed to validate it. Time in nature, as in consciousness, has the character of duration, and its asymmetry is not a matter of perception or intuition but a fact of nature: in nature, as in thought, time is not a series of atomic instants, whether dimensionless or instantly evanescent, but the inexorable onwardness of change itself, the inevitable qualitative differentness of the future from the past, and the inevitable referentiality of the present to the future and the past. That reference is made by the events themselves, and must be if they are to have unity as events. Objective moments, then, interpenetrate as much as subjective ones do; and the flow or stream of consciousness that loomed so large for Proust, or Joyce, or Virginia Woolf, is just a special case of the nature of time at large. For what Bergson first saw in terms of memory and anticipation is equally

48 Milič Čapek, Bergson and Modern Physics (Dordrecht: Reidel, 1971), 30–39. 49 See Čapek, “Bergson’s Theory of the Mind-Brain Relation,” 141–42. Time, Creation, and the Mirror of Narcissus 139 true without the mediation of consciousness, for causes and effects, pre- conditions and aftermaths.50 The specious present, then, is misnamed not only on Čapek’s ground that there is nothing false or illusory or even secondary about it51 but also on the ground that there is nothing essentially subjective about it: the thick temporal present necessary to the occurrence of any event is the time the event requires to unfold.52 By that standard, the present (like an Aristotelian place) is of any size, or many sizes, from a duration much shorter than consciousness can capture to one that spans the centuries. In the writing of a book or the birth of a volcano, the event is a whole not because of any imagined discreteness from other events but because of the organic connectedness of its parts, the conditioning of what comes later by what went before, and the dependence of the outcome as a whole upon what happens now. The present is not over until all that can give determinacy to the whole has occurred. Then and only then the present lapses into past, the imperfect becomes perfect; the indeterminate, determinate. Thus the events of a war or of history in general, the subtle collaboration across the centuries between an Edward Fitzgerald and the many poets whose quatrains were gathered under the name of Omar Khayyam,53 the composition of a Bible or a Talmud through an intricate dialogue or continuing discourse across the generations, and the collusion or falling out of authors and their readers, translators, and interpreters, or of painters with those who view or scorn their works, all reveal that the idea of a single definitive present (let alone a rapidly passing one) is a sham. There are many presents of varying durations and with no more perfect discreteness than events themselves possess. Time is thick because events are nested within one another, much as places are. And Bergson’s pedagogical explanation that time is unlike space because in time there is no simultaneity of mutually excluding parts is only a first approximation. For, as Čapek makes clear, where Bergson and

50 It was a device of Hume’s to assign the elements of a natural event different names, so as to accentuate their logical discreteness, but this was achieved only by ignoring the ontological unities and continuities. When medieval philosophers called cause and effect “correlatives,” they were canonizing in logic the same natural linkage that Hume canonically concealed. 51 Čapek, “Bergson’s Theory of the Mind-Brain Relation,” 140. 52 Čapek urges that “the volume of the present, or what may be called ‘the mnemic span,’ is variable.” But he applies the point strictly psychologically; “Bergson’s Theory of the Mind-Brain Relation,” 141–42. 53 Cf. Ali Dashti, In Search of Omar Khayyam, trans. L. P. Elwell-Sutton (London: Allen Unwin, 1971). 140 Time, Creation, and the Mirror of Narcissus his many critics were never perfectly clear, the real impact of relativity on Bergson’s philosophy is to exclude the notion of instantaneous, universe- wide simultaneity. If so, the effect of Bergsonism on relativity is not at all to wreck or seek to derail but to complete Einstein’s project of discovering the ultimate temporality of space itself.54 Bergson’s philosophy achieves this end not by the Kantian expedient of arguing that space can be apprehended only in a temporal tour by consciousness through its parts and regions but by the more properly Bergsonian recognition that the parts of space make reference to one another and can do so only through the medium of differentiated time. What follows is the recognition, despite all Eleatic wishes, that time cannot be excluded from the most fleeting snapshot of the universe—or rather, we should say, from the universe itself. The intuitive, naturalistic core of Bergson’s insight about time rests in the fact that time is not truly one-dimensional. Space allows an event to occupy a durational present, beginning here in one respect before it has begun otherwise elsewhere. Here and now, without reference to Einsteinian relativity, in a single inertial frame and with middle-sized objects that may or may not be observed, we find the thickness of duration, the cross talk of referentiality—the linear dimension, or longeur, of an event, but also, in the multifacetedness of the same event, its largeur, which in turn involves the temporality of space, the need for time in which the parts of an event or act come together as a whole occurrence. Bergson’s brief was the overcoming of determinism. A false analogy between time and space, he argued, led mechanists to suppose that time was a continuum of atomic instants, each one of which was ultimately static and each one of which uniquely determined and was determined by any of the rest. The result was the denial, in effect, of the fundamental psychological, biological, indeed physical asymmetry of duration and the collapsing of time into a series of strata or slices whose relations of mutual implication made them in principle undistinguishable from one another— thus eliminating time altogether. To dissolve time in such a fashion was a desideratum, perhaps, for Megarian or Stoic would-be monists of the stamp of Diodorus Cronus. But if achieved it would prove a disaster for those scientific or scientistic determinists whose tight grip upon the twentieth century Bergson sought to relax. Bergson’s strategy was to argue that time is not a discontinuous continuum of discrete moments; the nows that represent the present are not

54 See Čapek, Bergson and Modern Physics, 226–36. Time, Creation, and the Mirror of Narcissus 141 isolated and dimensionless instants but interpenetrating and persistent spans that afford a platform to action and so to freedom. Where mechanism collapses the present and thus time itself, since time is nothing if there is no present, Bergson reclaims time, by the very expedient Proust would adopt from Bergson’s teaching, recapturing the past, through the recognition that consciousness and ultimately everything present makes itself what it is through retention of the past: “There is no consciousness without memory, no continuation of a state without the addition, to the present feeling, of the memory of past moments. That is what duration consists of.”55 Phenomenology or analogy, and ultimately the pure analysis of the anatomy of natural events, broadens the claim to a fact not merely about consciousness but about the character of the cosmos: Time is “the indivisible and indestructible continuity of a melody where the past enters into the present and forms with it an undivided whole which remains undivided and even indivisible in spite of what is added at every instant or rather thanks to what is added.”56 The strength of Bergson’s account is that it leaves room—he would say time—for the emergence of the future. Because it allows actors to differentiate the future from the past, it allows for creativity, a creativity that is emergent—neither locked within the past nor radically severed from it. But this is not enough for Hartshorne. Objecting to any form of symmetry between past and future, he denounces mutual inclusion as vociferously as mutual exclusion. There is, he insists, nothing mutual in the case: “Nowhere does Bergson make clear that symmetry, rather than dependence or its negative, is the mark of space and asymmetry, of time.” Hartshorne’s target is Bergson’s sense of continuity, indeed community, between the future and the past. Potentiality, he insists, is mere virtuality, no determinant at all, since it is nothing actual. This Bergson saw but failed to follow up on: “It is absurd, as Bergson sees, to imagine exact duplicates of actual particulars and baptize them as antecedent possibilities (or group them as denisons [sic] of possible worlds). . . . Possibilities are always more or less general. Becoming is creation of particularity, not its rebaptizing as ‘actual,’ whatever that could add if particularity were already there.”57 There is a major

55 Henri Bergson, A Study in Metaphysics: The Creative Mind, trans., Mabelle L. Andison (Totowa, N.J.: Littlefield Adams, 1965), 211. 56 Bergson, The Creative Mind, 83; cf. Čapek, Bergson and Modern Physics, 129–30. Mem- ory for Bergson (like ‘perception,’ in Leibniz) was not confined to the mental; it had something of the sense that metallurgists give the term. 57 Hartshorne, “Bergson’s Aesthetic Creationism,” 372. 142 Time, Creation, and the Mirror of Narcissus point here, of much relevance to the ontological argument, as we have seen: a possible dollar is not the same sort of thing in the least as the actual dollar that might replace it. Indeed, it is not a thing at all but a notion, an abstract generality, dependent on the suspension of some but not all of the assumptions we normally make about the world. But Hartshorne overstates the implications of this idea.58 It does not imply that the past has no purchase on the present or that virtualities lie wholly in the future, untouched and untouching present action. To make that assumption would be to reat omize time, to overcome the atomization of mutual implication only to fall into a new atomization of radical isolation and absolute indeterminism. Surely the future does not create itself. Agents act in the present, against the background of conditions they inherit from the past. Whitehead adopted and assiduously adapted Bergson’s idea of duration.59 But he both departed from Bergson and in a way enshrined what Bergson had taught, by the special emphasis he gave to what he called “perpetual perishing.” He once claimed to have tried to do for perishing what Aristotle had done for becoming. The very fixity of the past, he argued, makes it an inextricable element of the future, grounding the sense we sometimes have “that what we are is of infinite importance.”60 It is this special perishing, a notion forecast in Plato and central in Philoponus (for similar Christian reasons to those that move Whitehead—or the cinemateurs of Places in the Heart) that Hartshorne wants faithfully to preserve when he castigates

58 It is somewhat disingenuous for Hartshorne to rely on the logical contrast of potentiality with actuality to ground the claim that the potential is nothing actual. In fact, the ontic status of potentialities is quite varied. Aristotle cannot have been entirely wrong to locate some in matter. Surely dispositions, talents, and capacities are not virtual. A dis- position may govern several possibilities, and these are virtual. Masa harina can be made right in the kitchen into a tortilla or a tamale but not into a chili relleno. There must be something real that allows the one and not the other. 59 See A. N. Whitehead, The Concept of Nature (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1920), 71, and the discussions led by Margaret Masterman and Dorothy Emmet in “The Pardshaw Dialogues: Sense Awareness and the Passage of Nature,” in Process Studies 16.2 (1987): 91–92, 103–4. Under the influence of quantum discoveries, Whitehead came in the end to quantize time; I think that in so doing he lost some of the value of his original, more Aristotelian and Spinozistic approach that regards occasions as differentiated more by the relations of their active constituents than by isolation from their environment. 60 Whitehead, Essays in Science and Philosophy (New York: Philosophical Library, 1947), 117; Dorothy Emmet “The Pardshaw Dialogues,” 126. What Hartshorne values most in Berg- son is the theological grounding of this point of Whitehead’s: “But Bergson is consistent in taking preservative becoming as the paradigm of reality. This was a great step” (“Berg- son’s Aesthetic Creationism,” 373). True, Bergson sees the living presence of past acts. But what mattered to him most was the taking up of the past in life, not the embalming of its pastness. Time, Creation, and the Mirror of Narcissus 143

Bergson for neglecting time’s asymmetry: “Bergson shows no sign of real- izing that a definite plurality of unit cases of becoming . . . can be combined with emphatic acceptance of the unity of present with past. It is only the unity of past with present that must be rejected. Where in my childhood was there any unity with my present state? I might have died long ago. Retrospective unity does not entail prospective unity.”61 Hartshorne, it seems, does not agree that the child is father of the man. But he can hardly fail to admit that the choices I make now contribute to what I will be. They are registered in my character, and have been ever since I was a child. If this be false, there is no such task as education, and no such event as a life.62 The radical asymmetry of time that Bergson missed, Hartshorne argues, is that while the past does influence the present the present cannot affect the past: “Nothing we do will ever change the career of Shakespeare between his birth and his death.”63 This seeming truism is meant to be as damaging to Bergson’s conceptualization of time as Hartshorne’s telling comment about possible worlds is to philosophers who imagine that possibilities live somewhere else than this world, as constituents of (actual) possible worlds. Granted, efficient causes cannot touch the past. But much that we call past is not past at all in the sense of this precise asymmetry. True, “possibles” are not ready-formed particulars lurking in the wings and lacking only some key of entry to actuality. But that does not mean that there is no mutuality between past and future. When the past is active, in memory, or in causality, it is not as past but as present actuality that it acts. By playing a role in the formation of the future, even if only as a springboard or dialectical antithesis, it becomes part of the present and is distinctively affected not in the sense that the facticity of what is truly past is altered retroactively but in the sense that the significance of what is past, whether for consciousness or for nature, is made other than what it was.

61 “Bergson’s Aesthetic Creationism,” 377. For a more balanced reading of Whitehead, see Donald Sherburne, “Some Reflections on Sartre’s Nothingness and Whitehead’s Per- ishing,” Review of Metaphysics 48 (1994) 3–17: “Whitehead’s notion of perishing, and the concepts which cluster around it, provide for disconnection, for cutting off, and yet at the same time allow for connectedness, for relatedness, and for the kind of predictive regularity required by science in those areas where science requires predictive regularity. . . . for Whitehead, to be is to be in relation.” p. 7. 62 Cf. Bergson’s letter of March 25, 1903: “The more I try to grasp myself by consciousness, the more I perceive myself as the totalization or Inbegriff of my own past, this past being contracted with a view to action. ‘The unity of Self’ of which philosophers speak, appears to me as a unity of an apex, of a summit to which I narrow myself by an effort of attention—an effort which is prolonged during the whole of life, and which, as it seems to me, is the very essence of life.” 63 “Bergson’s Aesthetic Creationism,” 372. 144 Time, Creation, and the Mirror of Narcissus

Past events, as causes or as matter for creativity, do not remain what they were, and indeed are not over, not in the sense conveyed in natural languages by use of the perfect tense, over and done with, Carthago fuit, Carthago ruit. The continuing presentness of what is in some senses and for some purposes past is the very meaning of duration, and duration, as we have seen, can be much longer than Bergson supposed. What we call a past event is in some of its aspects far more lasting than the event that in other contexts we might call by the same name. There are some places, and not in any mystic or subjective, or legalistic sense, where World War II has not yet ended. Indeed, in some respects, there is nowhere in the world where it is over fully; we still belong, as Yehuda Bauer rightly argues, to the generation, to the same historic present, of those who perpetrated and underwent the Holocaust. The war continues to exercise its effects. And its outcome (thus, its impact as a whole), for that very reason, continues to be influenced and changed by the responses of living subjects now. To deny the purchase of the past upon the present and of the present on the whole it forms with the past is to deny causality, just as clearly as it is a denial of freedom to deny the power of the present to break away from the past. As Kant saw vividly, moral freedom has no meaning without causality. For only through causality can the will effectuate its designs. The echoes of the past die, blurred and averaged into forgetfulness by the din or dissonance of new and other old events. How little we know now of Elam or Ebla—how little we know of Amalek, despite the Torah’s admonition to remember. Indeed, that injunction is accompanied with the command to blot out the name of Amalek. It is true, as Bergson saw, that the ability to forget is the counterpart and condition of the ability to remember. But consciousness is not nature; the presentness of memory is not the living presence of the past (which might lie all unconscious in the genes), and the unalterability of what is past is not the same as its persistence, but its complement, the aspect no longer accessible to praxis. Who can deny, on learning of the suicide of Primo Levi or the schizophrenia of some child of the camps, that Hitler, long after his demise, is still exacting casualties, or that the Holocaust left no intact survivors? Who can deny that in retaining obloquy for Hitler or respect for Cicero we affect the consummation of their designs? Our actions affect the fulfillment of the hopes of our forebears in many crucial ways. Insofar as we constitute a community with other beings, past, present, or future, our actions affect the achievement of their projects. It is certainly of consequence to the career of Shakespeare or Horace or Thucydides whether his work continues to be read; to anyone who has Time, Creation, and the Mirror of Narcissus 145 made efforts or sacrifices for posterity, it is of moment whether those efforts fall on barren ground or are taken up and carried forward. It is for this reason that it is relevant to latercomers to determine which, if any, of those projects deserve to be taken up, how, if at all, they are to be carried forward, and in what respects. The living present may involve participants in a single action that endures over centuries. In cultural or communal terms individuals who are centuries apart may share in a single action, or a system of actions that constitute a history, an economy, a progress or progression of culture or civilization. The wise or ignorant choices, happy or unhappy turnings of later actors, are as consequential to the success or failure of their predecessors’ efforts as the latter are to the former.64 Such mutuality or community in a project only inchoately given in its earlier stages does not, of course, amount to strict or comprehensive symmetry of the future with the past. Time, like many another sequence, is symmetrical in some respects and asymmetrical in others. But the level at which there is in fact a mutuality, say between those now living and their forebears, does show in just what sense the present time, like the present place in Aristotle, is a relative notion capable of indefinite expansion: it is the expansion characteristic of the ever-enlargeable idea of the we, and not merely the subjective we but the equally expansible objective it. The cross-referentiality of the moments of time and their nestedness in one another, within systems of presentness defined only by the relevance of their components to a given event, action, or concern, does damage a Whiteheadian dogma of centrality to Hartshorne, the dogma of the conse- quent nature of God. For it means that the past is not merely antecedent to the future, but is its prologue, laying out conditions and parameters that can influence and in their measure determine the future, as well as setting the stage for creativity and the emergence of what is genuinely novel.65 God is more than an album for the storage of past occasions, and God is anything but hampered by limited potency in the way that Whiteheadians of Hartshorne’s school like to claim. We see divine efficacy as much in the determination of the future by the past as in the emergence of the new.

64 See my On Justice, esp. chaps. 4–5. 65 Under the rubric “The creativity of the past,” F. Bradford Wallack writes: “There is nothing passive or static about objects, the antecedent occasions which are the data of prehensions. Endowed with creativity, they are in fact very forceful and energetic, aspects of the efficient causation of new subjects. . . . Objects are not simply the passive recipients of the actions of subjects but the very activity fueling the subjects” see The Epochal Nature of Process in Whitehead’s Metaphysics (Albany: SUNY Press, 1980), 140. 146 Time, Creation, and the Mirror of Narcissus

Both aspects authentically represent God’s creativity, and the miracle of that creativity is nowhere more evident than in the coalescence of actuality out of virtuality at every present moment. This is what we mean when we say that God is present not only in all places but at all times. Divine agency is apprehensible under different aspects in the acts of finite beings: both in the certitude of proximate causality and in the creativity of emergence.66 Not that time is symmetrical in some all-engulfing sense. The moment has the determinacy of actuality only insofar as it is past, and the future can influence the past only in a retrospective way—only to the extent, in fact, that the future is not yet future but is seized in the same present with the past, as a virtuality to be appropriated and (here Hartshorne is quite right) given definition in the very act of being given actuality. In referring to the present in which agents act, take up the past, and define the future (whose limitations are indeed the parameters assigned it by the past), I am referring to moments whose discreteness from one another is purely notional. But that, of course, does not imply the unreality or illusoriness of the time in which we live and act. Time is neither a razor edge whose end is simultaneous with its beginning nor an atomic fragment of consciousness that does not linger even long enough to be noted as a now. Rather, since the present is the platform or worktable of events, its duration is as long as their occurrence requires. A given event, as identified by one set of criteria, might be completed long before the ending of the larger sequence in which it forms a part, and from which it draws significance when identified by other criteria. In the deathless words of Yogi Berra, “It isn’t over ’til it’s over.” As long as an event goes on—even if it takes years or centuries, like the fighting of some wars, or the building of cathedrals or civilizations, or revolutions in human relations or consciousness—every moment remains intimately connected to the rest, and the actions undertaken now play their role in determining the ultimate meaning or impact of the whole. Hartshorne’s attempt to find an absolute asymmetry behind the level of symmetry that Bergson saw thus vitiates a part of the truth that Bergson sought to explain. It reinstates the false linearity that Bergson sought to show us how to escape and sunders the connectedness of duration, all for the sake of a rather trivial point about the doneness of what is done and

66 Cf. David Burrell, “Why Not Pursue the Metaphor of Artisan and View God’s Knowl- edge as Practical?” in my Neoplatonism and Jewish Thought; Joseph Incandela, “Aquinas’ Lost Legacy: God’s Practical Knowledge and Situated Human Freedom” (Ph.D. diss., Prince ton University, 1986). Time, Creation, and the Mirror of Narcissus 147 some rather dubious theological claims that amount to a preference for natura naturata over natura naturans.

Creation and Symmetry

Surely there is one sense in which temporal moments are symmetrical: the moments (or virtual moments) before the world began, if it began, are undistinguishable. It was on that basis that Parmenides, Aristotle, Proclus, Averroës, and Spinoza sustained the eternity of the world: empty moments have neither anteriority nor posteriority, but all collapse into nullity; they do not exist. The argument is causal at the root: if all events need an objective determinant, genesis would never come about; no potential moment was better or fitter than the rest as the first moment of creation. Creationists from Philoponus to al-Kindī, to Ibn Gabirol, al-Ghazālī, Maimonides, and Leibniz saw in voluntarism the only escape from such fixity:67 the world was indeed created, but will, not reason or necessity, made the difference, where none was found, among the prospective temporal moments, making one the first. The determinant was subjective, not objective: God chose to create and chose the moment and the manner. The rejection of radical creation, as we know, has been a thesis of philosophers almost from the beginning. Anaximander (ap. Aristotle, De Caelo II 13, 295b 10) derived the earth’s stability from symmetry: “It stays still because of its equilibrium. For it befits what is seated at the center and equally disposed toward the extremes not to be borne a whit more up or down or to the side—and it is impossible for it to move in opposite directions at once—so it stays fixed by necessity.” And it was probably Anaximander himself who adapted this argument to time as well. For, just as he sought to sketch the figure of the earth and sea in his map and to chart the rhythm of the seasons with his gnomon, he enshrined the symmetry that gives stability to change in his idea of the justice of time, which obviates an absolute creation, by overseeing the coming to be of all things out of the Indefinite and their passing away into their proximate sources “according to the assessment of time.” Thus, in Aristotle’s words: “In order for generation not to fail it is not necessary for perceptible body to be infinite actually, since it is possible for the destruction of one thing to be the

67 See, for example, al-Ghazālī, TF, ed. Bouyges, 2d ed. 57, rem. 30, and my “Maimonides and Leibniz.” 148 Time, Creation, and the Mirror of Narcissus generation of the other, while the sum of things remains limited” (Physics III 8, 208a 8). Parmenides argued explicitly from the likeness of each moment to the next that being has no origin: “For what creation will you seek for it. . . . And what need would have driven it on to grow, starting from nothing, at a later time rather than an earlier?” (ap. Simplicius, Phys. 145, 1). He even alludes to Anaximander’s Justice, as what “holds reality fast,” not just spatially but temporally, so that it cannot come to be or perish but remains forever fully actual, since “it must either fully be or not be.” Parmenides’ argument from the equivalence of all moments is taken up by Aristotle and elaborated by Proclus, Simplicius, and the Muslim Aristotelians in their polemics against absolute creation. Passing from the Jewish Averroists to Spinoza, the idea of an immutable order loses its aura of divinity only in the mechanism of the nineteenth century, where it lodges in the metaphysical certitude of the conservation of matter. But the aura is never wholly lost, from the time that Anaximander claimed the apeiron to be immortal and divine as well as inexhaustible. For, in modern as in Hellenistic times, the counterpart of mechanism is nature mysticism, diffusing the aura of eternity in the afflatus of romantic poets and transcendentalist painters and essayists. Dispersed and secularized, etiolated in the aesthetic of the sublime, but still outspoken in spiritualism and pantheism,68 it persists in steady state cosmology, although battered by entropy and evolution and all but finally exploded by the big bang. Hartshorne praises eternalism in Bergson as “the well argued rejection in Creative Evolution of the idea that ‘there might have been nothing at all’.” He writes, “Hume’s belief that all existential statements are contingent is incorrect; since ‘something exists’ is necessarily true. ‘Nothing,’ the zero, the naught, has only a relative meaning; absolutized, it becomes nonsense. ‘Nothing at all’ either expresses an incoherent thought or implies some qualification, such as ‘nothing to the present purpose.’ I have only admiration for Bergson’s reasoning here.”69 But this is sheer dogmatism, the reflex

68 Spiritualism shows its materialist roots, as we have noted, in its pictorialism and unceasing efforts to physicalize the “spirit world”—to make it squeak in answer to the sensuous demands of mechanism; and again, in the conventional appearance of some fetish or sign from the “Beyond” at the climax of a chilling tale—in attempts to photograph ectoplasm or use “state of the art engineering equipment” to validate psychokinesis and “precognitive remote perception”; see R. G. Jahn and B. J. Dunne, “Consciousness, Quantum Mechanics, and Random Physical Processes,” in Bergson and Modern Thought, ed. Andrew C. Papanicolaou and Pete A. Y. Gunter (Chur, Switzerland: Harwood, 1987), 271–307. 69 “Bergson’s Aesthetic Creationism,” 373–74. Time, Creation, and the Mirror of Narcissus 149 of Kant’s or Aristotle’s, or Moore’s about the need for ‘being’ to have some specialized sense. The only way we have of knowing that something exists is phenomenal: It is true, as Descartes observed, that I cannot escape the givens of my consciousness, but it does not follow, as Descartes well understood, that my mind is a necessary being. I cannot think my own nonexistence; but that does not make it impossible. The existence that is necessary can only be of what is absolute, and monotheists are rightly chary about assigning absolute existence to just anything—as they are of assigning absolute weight to just any value. Hartshorne is rather casual about this. Just as he is ready to say that some being, any being, is necessary, he is correspondingly ready to downgrade divine transcendence: “The highest conceivable form of reality, deity, is only the highest conceivable form of becoming or duration. . . . Berdyaev is the clearest of all [about this]. . . . For he hints at a divine kind of time.”70 But was Bergson an eternalist? His disciple Jacques Chevalier claimed him as creationist, much as he and others were eager to claim him as a Catholic. The facts are a bit more complex: Bergson played down the idea of an initial moment of creation because the great theme of his philosophy was the ongoing creativity of the divine. But his voluntarism, his finitism, his commitment to the idea of entropy, as developed, for example, in the work of Émile Meyerson, his rejection of the discrete, atomic matter and infinite, absolute space of the mechanistic science of his day ally him squarely with creationists, albeit in a sense modified by his own predilections

70 “Bergson’s Aesthetic Creationism,” 373. The idea of duration originates in Plotinus’s project of discovering a temporality that would not be the mere measure and correlate of motion. Plotinian duration, the temporality of the hypostatic Soul, is psychic rather than physical; it mediates the transition from pure, timeless thought to temporal nature via the dialectic of discursive thinking. Monotheist creationists like Philo, Saadiah, Maimonides, Crescas, al-Tabrīzī, and Albo adapted Plotinian duration as the archetype of (created) time, anticipating Bergson’s discovery that real duration is not confined to the realm of thought. See Enneads III vii 8; H. A. Wolfson, The Philosophy of Spinoza: Unfolding the Latent Process of His Reasoning (1934; reprint, New York: Schocken, 1969), 1.331–46. The object was not to engage God in temporality but to derive temporality from God. Quite the contrary with the new tradition. Wallack writes: “The time spans of actual occasions are subject to many a curious calculation. . . . Lewis Ford has produced a diagram which . . . ‘standardizes the temporal length of an occasion, which may be considered to vary considerably, perhaps between 20 milliseconds for a human occasion and 20⁻24 seconds for subatomic occasions.’ . . . There is even a debate as to the exact specious present, the exact duration of the time-span of God. . . . Apparently God is to become and perish faster than any earthly actual occasion.” Hartshorne and Cobb worry over just how short the divine specious present must be for God to attend the start and finish of each worldly occasion to give it a subjective aim and receive it as objectively immortal; see The Epochal Nature, 197. 150 Time, Creation, and the Mirror of Narcissus and biases.71 The atomist tradition from Democritus and Epicurus to al-Rāzī, Gassendi, and the modern materialists made space absolute and time in effect reversible, with the constant random play of the changeless, Democritean, ultimately Parmenidean, particles. It was against this vision of nature that Bergson’s life’s work in philosophy set its face. Entropy seemed to him to argue unequivocally for the irreversibility of time, as the world’s determinations argued for its continuing origination.72 Bergson objected to Kant’s first antinomy, between eternity and creation, on the grounds that both horns of its dilemma treat the universe as a completed whole. He rejected the idea of time with nothing in it. But he did not imagine (as Hartshorne does) that if the world came to be it must have been preceded by illimitable eons of eventless time. Against the idea of absolute time, either full or empty, from eternity, he took up the classic creationist view that time itself is among the features of the world that first appears with creation. This was the position of Philo, Augustine, Philoponus, al-Ghazālī, Maimonides, and others, who accepted the Aristotelian teaching of the relativity of time but found in it a response to the Aristotelian eternalist elenchus that held it absurd to number moments in which nothing yet had moved or changed or even begun to be.73 In Bergson’s case, as Čapek makes clear,74 the same position flows naturally from the deep harmony of his view of time with Einsteinian relativity: time has no meaning apart from events. But Hartshorne fails to see that time relativism does not commit one to eternalism but takes a well-trodden route through a creationism that regards time itself as created—or, in Bergson’s case, we might say, emergent. Granted, as Aristotle saw, that there can be nothing gradual about the origin of time—the becoming of becoming, still,

71 See Émile Meyerson, Identity and Reality, trans., Kate Loewenberg (London, 1930; Identité et Réalité, Paris, 1908); and Bergson’s 1909 review, in Écrits et Paroles, ed. R. M. Mossé-Bastide (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1959); Čapek, Bergson and Modern Physics, 108, 368–97. 72 Čapek, Bergson and Modern Physics, esp. 375. 73 Philo, De Opificio Mundi vii 26; Philoponus, ap. Simplicius On Aristotle’s Physics, 1169c: “Time co-exists with the heavens and the world . . . so the assumption of the eternity of time is refuted” in Philoponus Against the Eternity of the World, trans., Christian Wild- berg (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1987), 140; al-Ghazālī: “Duration [al-mudda] and time according to us are created” (TF 56); cf. 66; Maimonides, Guide II 13. Averroës reports: “Most people who hold the world originated hold time to be originated with it,” TT, ed. Bouyges, 32. 74 Čapek, Bergson and Modern Physics, 238–56. Time, Creation, and the Mirror of Narcissus 151

Eliot Deutsch’s idea that time is what actions make of it75 well expresses the nuance Bergson sketched in the idea of the becoming of time. Ironically, Hartshorne’s discomfort with creation compromises Bergson’s thesis of the asymmetry of time. For that asymmetry is just what is at stake in the idea of creation: only God is necessary and self-explanatory; the world is contingent, temporal, perhaps ephemeral. Each individual and each event is unique, never to be repeated. When a Christian theist like Philoponus made the perishing of things a central thesis of his cosmology, he did so in behalf of creation, not as a counterpart or alternative to it. And the same dialectic is found in the vivid contrast of God’s eternity with the world’s temporality and contingency imaged in the powerful Qurʾanic phrase: “All things perish except His face.”76 As we have seen, the idea is formalized and universalized in kalām theology and forged into a systematic metaphysics by Avicenna, following the lead of Plato’s Timaeus: what is temporal is evanescent and contingent; what is immutable and (in Plotinus’s term) impassive is ultimately creative, whether continuously, as in the model of emanation, or in the discrete but unremitting fulgurations of Leibniz, the continual re-creations of the kalām—or the act of Genesis that created heaven and earth, the sea and all that is in them. The monotheistic idea of perishing is the counterpart, ultimately, not of Aristotelian becoming but of biblical creation. A crucial argument of creationists like al-Ghazālī and Maimonides was that the eternalist thesis rests on a determinism so strict as to debar change altogether and stymie emanation at the Source.77 Aristotle had paid deference to Parmenidean logic while maintaining the reality of time and change in his distinctive model of alteration. He preserved Parmenides’ thesis that a thing must be what it is and made it the cornerstone of First Philosophy. Change was a conjunction of unchanging form with unchanging matter. The Eleatic objection to a thing’s becoming what it was not was answered by distinguishing essence from accident, form from matter, actuality from potentiality: things become actually what they already are potentially. The potentials reside in matter. Matter remains constant, and the

75 Eliot Deutsch, “On the Being of Time,” in his Personhood, Creativity and Freedom (Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 1982), 92–99; “Time is uniquely performed in art” (99). 76 Qurʾān 28:88; cf. 2:115: “Whithersoever you turn, there is the face of God”; see Emil Fackenheim, “The Possibility of the Universe in al-Fārābī, Ibn Sīnā, and Maimonides,” PAAJR 16 (1947): 39–70; reprinted in Essays in Medieval Jewish and Islamic Philosophy, ed. A. Hyman (New York: Ktav, 1977), 303–34. 77 Maimonides, Guide II 19, 21; al-Ghazālī, TF, 58–59. 152 Time, Creation, and the Mirror of Narcissus changeable object remains unchanged in the only sense that really counts in logic—it preserves its essence, unless denatured, that is, destroyed, as by death. The corollaries, that all change requires a substrate, whose nature limits the scope of alteration, and that no change is absolute or radical, were welcome and scientific-seeming. But there was a price to pay: since neither essences nor matter were altered or destroyed, not only absolute creation and destruction but even the evolution and extinction of species were impossible, a priori. Sports of nature were by definition insignificant, a child’s coloring outside the eternal boundaries of species. The key that Mendel would find, but that Epicurus would forecast (see Lucretius, De Rerum Natura V, 837–77), unlocking the dynamic of biology to human understanding, was thrown away because of its resemblance to hoary myths of cosmic origin and the vulgar awe of common man, who thought the extraordinary or monstrous significant just because it was beyond the common. The Aristotelian scheme, then, was both heuristic and limiting: it opened vast fields for observation, classification, and inductive hypothesis. But it held quantitative differences rather unimportant, viewing all but gross differences of scale as non-essential, inflaming Aristotle’s impa- tience with Plato’s zeal for mathematics into a general bias against the significance of measurement. Similarly, normative Aristotelianism deemed “unnatural” events uninteresting. So for centuries it silently blocked the path to controlled experimentation, by which investigators (using Bacon’s model of Elizabethan torture) would one day take nature to the limit to make her yield up her secrets. It devalued efficient causes in favor of formal and material ones, further tilting explanation toward the conceptual and qualitative and away from the mechanical and precisely measured, and elevating Aristotle’s equation of cosmogony with myth into an axiom that accounts of origins are somehow not a form of explanation—making history not a real science, and treating the order seen in biology or astronomy as a design without a past. Creationism, less intellectualist, but more empiricist in bent, proved fruitful here, giving birth to the ideas of evolution,78 universal history,79 the

78 Nineteenth-century anti-Darwinism did not defend Biblicism but hid behind it to guard the Aristotelian essentialism in which Victorian theism was invested. But the real quarrel of today’s anti-Darwinists is with a kind of neo-Spencerian triumphalism suspected of taking aid and comfort from evolutionism; see Goodman and Goodman, “Cre- ation and Evolution.” 79 Biblical history adopts a universal perspective by taking the creation as its starting point and situating Israel within the history of the nations. All nations are blood rela- Time, Creation, and the Mirror of Narcissus 153 contingency of matter. It saw nature, including human nature, in terms of possibilities, where essentialism looked to regularities. Each view fostered a variety of science, and both were deeply religious—the Aristotelian finding marks of divine wisdom in the invariance of natural patterns, the creationist finding hallmarks of God’s grace in the emergence of novelty in nature, human life, and history. Neither view was so narrowly framed as to be incapable of responding to the other; so both, in a way, were and remain resistant to refutation. But Bergson’s bent toward what could be validated in experience80 tugged him insistently away from the unique event and toward the ongoing process. Hartshorne, however, takes him to task even for this—for ignoring Karl Popper’s concern “that if no conceivable experience could falsify an existential assertion, it is not empirical in the usual sense.”81 The criticism is not that Bergson committed himself to views that are unfalsifiable but that he gave preference to the view that he deemed best confirmed by the evidence: Bergson has betrayed metaphysics by appealing to experience. “He seems not to see Popper’s point . . .”—as though Popper’s Conjectures and Refutations (London, 1963) lay open before him! But why should Bergson’s metaphysics observe Hartshorne’s stipulations—especially if they bring it up against Popper’s legitimate concern that unfalsifiable claims say nothing about the world?82 How odd to invoke Popper, of all philosophers, to show both that metaphysical claims are nonempirical and that is what they should be! Čapek argues, much in the spirit of Bergson, that creationism is not crucially verifiable, since all the evidence that seems to converge on a first tions (Gen. 3:20), all cultures and languages spring from a common source (Gen. 10, 11) and coalesce (Zeph. 3:9) to a common end. All are subject to the same moral laws. Hence God’s concern for Noah’s lawless generation (Gen. 6:11–13), his visitation of liberations and punishments on all nations (Gen. 13:13, 15:14; Deut. 27:16–26; Amos 1:3–2:9, 9:7). Biblical history is objective in that its goal is not to celebrate the nation, and still less its kings, but to record the insights, acts, and failings of a people and its leaders, setting out an emerging order of meaning. See Eric Vogelin, Order and History: Israel and Revelation, 116–87; Paul Merkley, The Greek and Hebrew Origins of Our Idea of History (Lewiston, Ont.: Mellen, 1987). 80 Bergson did not share the positivist penchant for equating meaning with verifiability or falsifiability, but he saw the risk of vacating metaphysical judgments by making them independent of all possible evidence. He proudly and truthfully stated: “I have constant recourse to scientific argumentation” (M. Grémil, Report of a Visit to Bergson, Mercure de France 108, (1914), 397, cited in Scharfstein, 10. 81 “Bergson’s Aesthetic Creationism,” 374—a rather limp-wristed phrasing of Popper’s falsifiability test! 82 See Popper’s Peterhouse Lecture of summer 1953, in Scientific Knowledge, ed. Janet Kourany (Belmont, Calif.: Wadsworth, 1987), 139–57. 154 Time, Creation, and the Mirror of Narcissus moment of time can be taken as pointing not to an absolute origin but to the most recent in a series of big bangs. The most Čapek will say is that the evidence is compatible with absolute origination and that, in turn, with theistic explanations. We can go a step further, as we have seen. For the evidence can be read as suggestive of creation: creation is a possible hypothesis, but it may prove the most acceptable. For the evidence may render the existence of anything in nature prior to the big bang diminishingly credible, and the observed character of nature may, as we have suggested, support a creationist hypothesis. Here Bergson’s emphasis on continuing creation is vitally relevant not as an alternative to the unique event but as an avenue of access to the character of divine creativity. Classical process theology is not so accommodating. It dismisses creation, where I exponents of creation welcome creativity. Robert Neville thus trenchantly condemns the Whiteheadian sundering of God from creativity for slipping into a kind of positivism: The basic ontological problem is to account for the unity of many and one through creativity. . . . Whitehead’s response . . . would have to be that . . . there is no decision responsible for the basic togetherness of one and many in creativity. . . . Creativity must simply be accepted as something given. The issue here is whether the irrationality of the category of the ultimate must be accepted. . . . If Whitehead accepts the irrationality of the category of the ultimate, he accepts an irrationality in one place yet does not accept it in an analogous one; he might as well say that events happen with pure spontaneity and no causation. We rightly boggle at this. It is a betrayal of rational faith.83 This is just the issue posed by Spinoza’s insistence on the distinction between the self-caused and the uncaused. Neville, challenging Hartshorne, finds a lasting significance in the idea of creation: “The important category at the ontological level has to do with creation ex nihilo, not with creativity,” he writes; “at the cosmological level something like Plato’s irreducible contrast between being and becoming exhibits more intensity for experience than the swallowing of being in becoming or vice versa.”84 For Plato’s contrast finds a balance rather than seeking a reduction. Neville, in that spirit, proposes a synthesis of creation with creativity when he writes: “God is the creator of every determinate thing, each in its own occasion of spontane- ous appearance. In contrast to God’s ontological creativity, cosmological

83 Robert Neville, Creativity and God: A Challenge to Process Theology (New York. Sea- bury Press, 1980), 44–45. 84 Neville, Creativity and God, 50. Time, Creation, and the Mirror of Narcissus 155 creativity is the descriptive fact that the spontaneity in occasions brings unity out of multiplicity.”85 Paul Weiss puts the matter less technically: “To create is to make something be, to give it an existence. If Socrates’ existence does not belong to him, if it is not truly and fully and indelibly his, then surely he was never created.”86 Weiss here takes aim at Thomism, but I see a powerful affinity between Maimonides’ position and Neville’s partly Thomistic response to Whitehead and Hartshorne. For Maimonides and Thomas would concur that freedom is the sine qua non of creation. If we generalize that point, we see the act of creation continued in the creativity of each being. Finding creativity in all emergence and not regarding that creativity as the blind outcome of mechanics, we do not take its immanence as the mark of self- sufficiency but as the hallmark of pervasive grace. So the idea of divine creation remains fruitful for us in all our inquiries. We link Bergson’s creativity to Maimonidean creationism; specifically, to Maimonides’ affirmation, following the hints of Saadiah, the Rabbis, and Scripture, that nature, in both its rational and its arbitrary-seeming aspects, is the vehicle in which God’s character is made manifest87—in more familiar terms, that nature is an epiphany. Granted, absolute creation will never be verified or falsified conclusively. The same is true of any categorical claim of fact, including all the claims of science, since any hypothesis can be modified to account for seemingly conflicting evidence. The real question is how much damage must be done to the fabric of our knowledge, how much evidence must be explained away or swept under the carpet to preserve a single, increasingly isolated notion? The most we can say of any transcendental claim is that it is confirmed or disconfirmed by the evidence, harmonious or inharmonious with the consilience of experience. In these terms we can say that the findings of cosmology and physics tend to confirm the world’s origination and to dis- confirm its eternal, steady state existence—whatever construction is put upon those facts. Popper’s suspicions of irrefutable claims are sound. Such claims are too well hedged to amount to a commitment. But it was creationists who brought concern with falsifiability to metaphysics—when al-Ghazālī and then Maimonides argued that the God of emanation seemed to make no

85 Neville, Creativity and God, 8–9. 86 Paul Weiss, Beyond All Appearances (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1974), 169. 87 See my “Matter and Form as Attributes of God in Maimonides’ Philosophy.” 156 Time, Creation, and the Mirror of Narcissus detectable difference in the world.88 The same criticism can be returned (with a few hundred years’ interest) to today’s process theologians: creationists can cite evidence for the world’s finite age. In classical philosophy, from Plato to Philoponus to the high Middle Ages, such evidence was construed to include evidence that the world or matter might be destroyed. Thus Philoponus used entropy, as well as he could understand it, and the apparent changes observable in celestial bodies, to show that the world system might run down, that the stars were not “simple substances” and therefore not immutable.89 Rather, the whole cosmos was corrosible, cor- ruptible, destructible, ergo contingent, transitory, not the sort of thing that could endure forever or of its own accord—therefore, created. Today the account is easier. The red shift and the apparent “echoes” of the original cosmic boom support the thesis of the world’s origination. One family of explanations infers the world’s birth from the fullness of God’s grace, an absolute creation. What such reasoning has in common with the older tradition and with Bergson is commitment to the empirical consequences of its theses. We say that the evidence supports creation, but the evidence might have been otherwise. We know what sort of evidence would count against origination. This Hartshorne finds offensive. He defines metaphysics “as the attempt to deal rationally with noncontingent, nonempirical truths about existence,” and takes Bergson to task because “he seems to think that metaphysics is empirical.”90 But how are we to deal rationally with truths about existence if we cut ourselves off from our experience? Hartshorne urges that “only introspective observation” can give us metaphysical insights91— as though introspection were somehow independent of experience. Clearly, he is right that necessary truths will never be apprehended by “vision or touch” unaided. But any theorist must exceed those limits. To make of metaphysics something more than a general account of being and then to posit introspection as our self-sufficing guide is to invent both the subject and the faculty ad hoc, and to sunder them from any sort of knowledge that might aid them, or to which their reflections might be relevant. Our experience may be limited, but we will not get knowledge without it, and Bergson,

88 See my “al-Ghazālī’s Argument from Creation”; Maimonides, Guide II 2–21. 89 See Shmuel Sambursky, The Physical World of Late Antiquity (London: Routledge, 1962), 154–75; Richard Sorabji, ed., Philoponus and the Rejection of Aristotelian Science (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1987), esp. the chapters by Michael Wolff and Lind- say Judson. 90 “Bergson’s Aesthetic Creationism,” 374. 91 “Bergson’s Aesthetic Creationism,” 374. Time, Creation, and the Mirror of Narcissus 157

I believe, was quite right to treat metaphysics as an empirical inquiry, albeit not a collation of sense data, any more than any branch of theory is that. Hartshorne complains that to make metaphysics empirical is to make God just another contingent being in need of explanation. But that is a plain confusion. That our knowledge is contingent (and corrigible) does not make its object such. Finite experience often leads us (as in morals, or in causal explanations, or even in our talk of conscious subjects or persistent objects) to project beyond the immediate givens of sensation. No thought police bar the way. There will be problems in any such projection, and we can expect disagreements about rival outcomes, as well as the more systematic difficulties raised by skeptics, who apply in one context the standards of criticism they borrow from another, hoping that the implicit validation of the borrowed standards will not be noticed before they are returned, to be objected to in turn. But the possibility of diverse interpretations of the evidence, and even of systematic, or seriatim, objections against all sorts of inference and interpretation, does not leave us without standards of appraisal. Clearly some philosophers make more coherent sense of experience than others do. But, if a truth is indeed noncontingent, it will be exemplified in experience without exception or contradiction, and any philosopher who does not wear blinkers will take cognizance of it in some form, at some point. Dispensing with experience will not strengthen such discussions but weaken them. Indeed, it will deprive metaphysics of its matter, the objects and values it is to interpret and explain. And reliance on introspection alone, if that were possible, would only heighten the troubles we already have in communicating with one another and checking the validity of our insights. Hartshorne argues that pure potentiality is no real thing, and that pure nothingness is inconceivable. But creationists do not argue that the world came from nothingness but from God. What they mean by ex nihilo is that God’s ultimate creative act was conditioned by no prior limitation but only by the limitations inherent in finitude itself and in the determinate character of the things to be created.92 Leibniz expressed it well in the idea of compossibility. It is true, as Hartshorne argues, that in itself possibility is a mere abstraction, resting for us on the negation of something actual. But it

92 Neville writes: “Apart from the relative nature the divinity gives itself as creator in creating the world, God is utterly transcendent” (Creativity and God. 8); cf. Maimonides: “Every predicate we assign to Him either designates His act or, if intended to apply to Him rather than His work, its significance is in denying the privation of such a character”—that is, affirming his perfection; Guide I 58. 158 Time, Creation, and the Mirror of Narcissus does not follow that we cannot abstract completely from all the conditionality and givenness of things and conceive the entire universe as contingent. This precisely, is what Genesis calls on us to do: none of this need have existed. The world is not a necessary being, does not contain within itself the conditions of its own existence. If a necessary being is to be sought, as the ground of all that is contingent, it must be sought as the counterpart of the contingent. If philosophy begins in wonder, there is no good reason why it should not at times begin with wonder about why anything exists at all.93 Jacob Agus shows us vividly where we land if we follow in the direction Hartshorne approves. He does this by translating the metaphysical propositions of a Bergsonian eternalism back into the language of ritual and myth, from which they are sprung and out of which Bergson seeks escape into the cool Parisian air. Agus writes: Bergson wavers between the concepts of life and spirit . . . a blind, cosmic life-force which is unconcerned with individuals, purposeless and ruth- less . . . and . . . the élan vital . . . conceived after the analogy of the human spirit . . . revealed in the progressive refinement of man’s ethical conscience and in the esthetic organon. . . . The tension between the representation of God as Life or as Spirit reflects the dichotomy between Judaism and ancient paganism. The premonotheistic pagans celebrated the rhythms of life in their cults. There were vegetation gods, dying and coming back to life. . . . None of the gods represented an ethical absolute. . . . In Judaism, God . . . is Thought and Justice, Love and Sublimity. . . . It is in the hearts and minds of human beings that He is best revealed. God is not subject to the rhythms of life. The ancient agricultural festivals were given fresh meaning in the Torah. . . . The rhythms of sacred history were substituted for those of nature.94 The idea of creation captures both the moral and the metaphysical absoluteness of God, as ultimate Cause and Judge, God of history and the moral law as well as God of nature and its laws. It is in recognizing the same one answer to the moral and the cosmological quest for ultimates that monotheism overcomes the partiality of pagan religiosity and integrates both life and the cosmos.

93 See Milton Munitz, The Mystery of Existence (New York: Appleton-Century-Crofts, 1965), esp. 145–46, where Bergson’s (ultimately Parmenidean) argument that the idea of nothingness is somehow logically flawed is shown to be not only psychologistic but dependent on the limited capabilities of the imagination. 94 Agus, “If God Be the Élan Vital,” in Jacob B. Agus, Jewish Identity in an Age of Ideolo- gies (New York: Ungar, 1978), 249–51; cf. C. F. von Weiszsäcker, The Relevance of Science, Gifford Lectures of 1959–1960 (New York: Harper and Row, 1964), 3. Time, Creation, and the Mirror of Narcissus 159

Despite Bergson’s evangelical rhetoric about God as love, Agus argues, the élan vital, even when manifested in the spirit of man, does not adequately represent divine holiness, wisdom, reason, justice, or power. Rather, it reduces God to the energies of nature (and culture!), no longer merely cyclically envisioned but still pulsating with vernal and destructive force, still celebrated as much in the orgiastic rites of spring and autumnal sacrifice, death, and rebirth as in chaste prayers and pacific meditations or ardent but conscientious visions of the working out of justice in history, the moral liberation of human life from tragedy.95 Monotheism, where it finds one world, seeks one God and pursues one good—the same law and existential deserts for all. But paganism celebrates all energies, whether creative or destructive, and neopaganism arrogates to itself the power to create the energies it serves, typically by a psychologistic act of will, but more rarely, yet more saliently, by acts of violence or violation, material, social, or symbolic. Energies here are exalted not for their merit or coherence with one another in thought or in a life but for the intensity of their frissons. Fortunately, we need not follow Bergson down the path Hartshorne seems so warmly to approve. Teilhard de Chardin, for one, as Agus notes, takes the spiritual turning in Bergson’s philosophy. Indeed, Teilhard’s vision of the Omega Point96 returns Philo’s favor of conceiving the Logos as God’s immanent wisdom. For it shows how creation and creativity are linked in the project of nature and human perfection, as intimated in the Hebrew liturgy, where the Sabbath, time’s symbol of eternity, is “last in the making, but first in the design.”97 The idea of creativity does not undermine but rather endorses the idea of creation, by its reference to the values of moral and cosmogonic power. Thus Bergson himself did not follow the élan vital into neopagan vitalism but described God, in Creative Evolution, as a kind of “supra-consciousness,” a phrase Teilhard echoes. In The Two Sources of Morality and Religion, Bergson spoke of God as the Creator of creators.98 It is not immanence

95 Cf. Agus, “If God Be the Élan Vital,” 251–52, 255–57. 96 Teilhard de Chardin, The Phenomenon of Man (London: Collins, 1966), 257–61; The Appearance of Man (New York: Harper and Row, 1965), 271–73. 97 Sof maʿaseh be-maḥashavah teḥilla. The phrase in Lecha Dodi (Birnbaum, 245, cf. Isa. 46:10) is a poetic excursus on the Talmud’s (Shevuʿot 20b) homiletic gloss of the distinct wordings of the commandment to “observe” or “remember” the Sabbath; Exod. 20:8 and Deut. 5:12. 98 Cf. Maimonides, Guide II 36–37, III 17–18; and Tikkunei Zohar, ed. R. Margaliot (Jeru- salem: Y. A. Hendler, 1964), 17a, trans. in Louis Jacobs, Jewish Ethics, Philosophy and Mysti- cism (New York: Behrman House, 1969), 115–20. 160 Time, Creation, and the Mirror of Narcissus that jars with monotheism in Bergson’s thinking, or it would hardly do for Agus to counterbalance the élan vital with the spirit in the heart of man.99 The trouble, rather, is the reduction—of God to life, or “passage,” power, Thought or thing—of Thou to this. As Job (26:14) expressed it, after sur- veying the awesome majesty of God’s rule over nature, “These are but the fringes of His doings, and how little a snatch of hearsay do we have of Him.” Toward the end of his life, Bergson wrote about the special role of mystics in articulating the moral and social meaning of God’s love—taking the Hebrew Prophets as paradigms of his intent. He also told of his admiration for Catholicism. His chief reason for rejecting conversion to that faith was equally telling: the rise of Hitler left him unwilling to sever his Jewish roots when his people were facing persecution and would soon be facing death for their links to one another and their common past. In 1937 he wrote: “My reflections have led me closer and closer to Catholicism, in which I see the complete fulfillment of Judaism. I would have become a convert, had I not seen in preparation for years a formidable wave of Antisemitism, which is to break upon the world. I wanted to remain among those who tomorrow will be persecuted.”100 When the Pétain regime agreed to collaborate with Hitler, Bergson returned all his French medals and awards: “He stood in line to register as a Jew and wore his six-pointed star with pride until the day of his death.”101 In the climate of the day, these simple, existential acts of moral courage speak as loudly and almost as clearly as an intellectual articulation of the values, reasonings, and commitments borne by the idea of creation.

The Mirror of Narcissus

George Wald, a Nobelist in biology for his work on the biochemistry of rhodopsin, the photoelectric pigment of the eye, had a famous classroom lecture on nature or the world, which he developed into a kind of perfor- mance piece, presented to the scientists at Los Alamos and in many other

99 The Whiteheadian idea of co-creation resonates with the idea found in Saadiah, Leone Ebreo, and Spinoza that God delights “in” creation and loves himself through it. 100 Quoted in Jacques Maritain, Ransoming the Time (New York: Scribners, 1941), 101 n. Maritain in his youth was a Catholic Bergsonian. But he wrote: “Bergsonism can never be ‘baptized.’ ”; See his Bergsonian Philosophy and Thomism, trans., M. L. Andison (New York: Philosophical Library, 1955), 19. 101 Agus, “If God Be the Élan Vital,” 238. Time, Creation, and the Mirror of Narcissus 161 communities. At least on one occasion he linked it with the name of Bergson.102 When I was an undergraduate in his prize-winning biology lab course for nonscientists, the lecture was known around Harvard, with Wald’s encouragement, as “From the Electron to Hamlet.” Taken in reverse, it might have seemed to argue a reductionist sort of thesis, about man as a few cents’ worth of chemicals, or the like. But as he gave it, it was a humanistic credo on the construction of complexity out of simplicity, a Lucretian exercise in the issuance of life and splendor from the merest subatomic lego-units, with never a nod in the direction of emergent evolution, let alone orthogenesis, élan vital, or Aristotle’s priority of the actual to the potential. In later versions, however, heard by literally thousands of sympo- siasts and readily obtained in careful transcripts of the taped voice of the speaker—lecturing familiarly, always without notes, never quite repeating the same words—all that changed. The materials stayed much the same as in the 1960s, with some new arguments and illustrations; the order of expo- sition was identical. But the theme now was the need for consciousness within, behind, beneath the cosmos. More than one listener asked Wald if he had changed his tune because he was growing older, but he just smiled and said that he hoped he was growing wiser. The argument was that “we live in a life-breeding universe, that matter, as Wald once put it in a thought he shared with Einstein, “won in the fight” with antimatter, and so did say, L-amino acids win out over D-amino acids, although both of these symmetrical kinds might have seemed at the start to have an equal chance. Had the universe begun with exactly equal parts of matter and antimatter, all would have been annihilated in the big bang. “But . . . there was a little mistake in the equality, of one part in one billion. And when all the mutual annihilation had finished, one part in one billion remained, and that’s the matter of the universe.”103 Again, if electrons and nucleons were not so far apart in mass, the proton would not remain undisturbed by the behavior of electrons and there would be no solid matter, no crystals or complex stable compounds. Similarly (pace R. A. Lyttleton and Herman Bondi), if there were a difference in the charges of a proton and electron, of 2 × 10⁻18e, where e is the actual charge of either,

102 See George Wald, “Cosmology of Life and Mind,” in Los Alamos Science 16 (1988), 3–12; “Life and Mind in the Universe,” in Essays on Creativity and Science, ed. D. DeLuca (Honolulu: Hawaii Council of Teachers of English, 1986), 1–14; “Consciousness and Cosmol- ogy: Their Interrelations,” in Bergson and Modern Thought, ed. Andrew C. Papanicolaou and Pete A. Y. Gunter (Chur, Switzerland: Harwood, 1987), 343–52. 103 Wald, “Life and Mind in the Universe,” 2–3. 162 Time, Creation, and the Mirror of Narcissus

“that almost infinitesimal difference in charge would be enough to overwhelm all the forces of gravitation that bring matter together in our universe. So we would have no galaxies, no stars, no planets. . . .”104 Climbing the “scale of states of organization of matter,” Wald argued that only carbon, hydrogen, oxygen, and nitrogen have the “absolutely unique properties . . . on which the existence of life depends,”105 and that without water’s strange property of expanding when it freezes, ice would sink and grow ever thicker on the bottoms of all bodies of water, accumulating intol- erably and making life there impossible. Further, a star much larger than our sun “would probably never have a planet bearing life,” since its mass denies it enough time on the “Main Sequence” for life to evolve.106 In general, “we find ourselves in a very curious universe. It possesses exactly those properties that breed life,” and that fact, Wald argues, in the great tradition of natural theology that stretches from Genesis to Paley, but with suitable hesitation, ellipsis, periphrasis, preterition, and apology, is best explained by consciousness. Of consciousness itself Wald says, “It has no location. It will never be located”—much as Socrates hinted when asked how he wanted to be buried: “Any way you like, if you can catch me!” (Phaedo 115c). Addressing the idea of the ineluctability of consciousness Wald went on: When this idea struck me, I was elated. I enjoyed it immensely. But I was also embarrassed. I thought, “My God, Wald, senility is hitting you in a big way.” The idea violated all my scientific feelings. But it took only a few weeks to realize that that kind of idea is not just centuries old but millennia old in Eastern philosophies. . . . consciousness or mind is not, as I had believed and most biologists tend to believe, a late product in the evolution of life on this planet. . . . On the contrary, it was there all the time. The reason this is a life-breeding universe is that the pervasive existence of mind guided it in that direction for a reason.107 The warrant, then, for connecting these thoughts with Bergson’s lies in a distinctively modern gloss on the idea that the symmetry of time brings God into contact or communion with himself: evolution/creation is working out a plan that links mind in the universe with mind in us. None of this is unfamiliar to philosophers, theologians, historians of ideas. The thought that thought is responsible for nature is, as Wald sug-

104 Wald, “Life and Mind in the Universe,” 3–4. 105 Wald, “Life and Mind in the Universe,” 4. 106 Wald, “Life and Mind in the Universe,” 5–7. 107 Wald, “Life and Mind in the Universe,” 10. Time, Creation, and the Mirror of Narcissus 163 gests, perennial—in the Vedas108 but also in Western philosophies and religions. There are problems aplenty in the claim, from matters of verification and interpretation, to the provenance of the notion—is this just an idea we have suggested to ourselves or preserved for some use quite alien to its explicit content? I want to focus on just one use of this trend of thought: for it matters very much if we begin or end our search for God by looking in the mirror. That move has become almost a standard topos in the literature of scientific confessions. But even before its current vogue, Teilhard warned in the same breath against the ‘I’ that “closes the door on all the rest and succeeds in setting himself up at the antipodes of the All” and its dialectical counterpart that treats personality as “a prison from which we must try to escape,” into the impersonal, the universal, or the collective.109 A statement much like Wald’s was made on the same platform by the biophysicist Harold Morowitz, then of Yale, who speaks of a “new covenant” emerging gradually, “from the experiences of individuals who seek to understand the world.”110 Morowitz is a bit more blunt than Wald: he types the new covenant as pantheism and contrasts its revelations with the moral and spiritual revelations of the ancient God that was encountered as a person. He speaks warmly of Bergson and Spinoza, and glowingly of Richard Lovelock’s Gaia hypothesis as a religious opening: “The new pantheism” he writes, “reasons from science to a cosmic intelligence that is not unrelated to our existence.”111 What volumes are spoken by that academic litotes— not unrelated to our existence! “What we are discussing is the ascendancy of God, the waning of God, and the rebirth of god. The subject matter is so awesome that any attempts in this direction seem tinged with hubris. But

108 Thus the Nasadiya Hymn of the Rgveda 10:129, trans. Walter Maurer, Journal of Indo- European Studies 3 (1975): 234. Not non-existent was it nor existent was it at that time; There was not atmosphere nor the heavens which are beyond. What existed? Where? In whose care? Water was it? An abyss unfathomable? Neither mortal was there nor immortal then; Not of night, of day was there distinction: That alone breathed windless through inherent power. Other than That there was naught else. Darkness it was, by darkness hidden in the beginning: An undistinguished sea was all this. The germ of all things which was enveloped in void, That alone through the power of brooding thought was born. 109 Teilhard de Chardin, The Phenomenon of Man, 258. 110 Harold Morowitz, “Modern Science and Pantheism,” in Essays on Creativity and Sci- ence, ed. D. DeLuca (Honolulu: Hawaii Council of Teachers of English, 1986), 203. 111 Morowitz, “Modern Science and Pantheism,” 209. 164 Time, Creation, and the Mirror of Narcissus if these matters are vital to human existence and human happiness, then we must proceed.”112 This is not the place to wrestle with the curious greased logic of Gaia- ism, or Morowitz’s response to it.113 “The bottom line,” as Morowitz draws it, “is that our understanding of molecular biology, ecology, geophysics, meteorology, and hydrology now makes it clear that the detailed working of all the features of our planet is necessary for continuing life. This lends great force to the argument from design and urges us one step further. The precise workings of all the different components to make possible intelligent life on earth suggest that the plan of the universe somehow had us in mind.”114 If the argument is vital to human happiness, then, on Jamesian grounds, let Wald’s hesitancy and humility, let hubris itself, be damned. Such protestations as those of Wald or Morowitz might seem welcome to theists, especially when they bear the authority of scientism, confessing that it came to scoff but stayed to pray. John Eccles, a Nobel neurophysiolo- gist, is proud, in his Gifford Lectures, to cite the arguments of J. A. Wheeler that unless the universe were of a critical size there would be literally not world enough and time for intelligent life to evolve: “For example, the mass for 1011 galaxies with a total of 1022 stars, gives the time scale from Big Bang to Big Crunch of 59 billion years. If we economize and have the Big Bang pro- ducing the mass for one galaxy of 1011 stars, which is still an immense universe, the time from Big Bang to Big Crunch is reduced to 1 year!”115 Again the inference is to design and plan, intention, and ultimately (in Eccles’s version), grace. But the fly in the ointment when Wheeler elaborates the argument is its peculiarly subjectivist cast: No search has ever disclosed any ultimate underpinning, either of physics or mathematics, that shows the slightest prospect of providing the rationale for the many-storied tower of physical law. One therefore suspects it is wrong to think that as one penetrates deeper and deeper into the structure of physics he will find it terminating at some nth level. One fears it is also wrong to think of the structure going on and on, layer after layer, ad infinitum. One finds himself in desperation asking if the structure, rather than terminating

112 Morowitz, “Modern Science and Pantheism,” 203. 113 Cf. his Mayonnaise and the Origin of Life (New York: Scribners, 1985); Cosmic Joys and Local Pain: Musings of a Mystic Scientist (New York: Scribner’s, 1987); The Wine of Life and Other Essays on Society, Energy, and Living Things (New York: St. Martin’s, 1979). 114 Morowitz, “Modern Science and Pantheism,” 209. 115 Eccles, The Human Mystery, 28; J. A. Wheeler, “The Universe as a Home for Man,” American Scientist 62 (1974): 683–91; “Genesis and Observership,” in Basic Problems in Methodology and Linguistics, Robert E. Butts and Jaakko Hintikka, eds., University of Western Ontario Series in the Philosophy of Science (Boston: Reidel, 1977). Time, Creation, and the Mirror of Narcissus 165

in some smallest object or in some most basic field, or going on and on, does not lead back in the end to the observer himself, in some kind of closed circle of interdependencies.116 Wheeler fittingly wonders whether the search for ultimate causes, what Aristotle called first principles, is really a matter of finding ever-smaller particles and subparticles that display no special readiness to yield an answering simplicity—and no readiness at all to provide explanatory ultimacy in any other sense. But then, instead of saying that the search for explanations must expand itself to a search for other sorts of ultimates than those of spatial composition, must embrace the search for ultimate values, a “why?” and “wherefore?” as well as an “out of what?” he almost startlingly turns inward not to a critical examination of the conditions of our inquiry (as in Kant or Freud) but to the self as the ground of being, not pausing to ask whether the human mind, the all-judging observer, has the capacity for the role it is addressing. Like the born-again athlete who gives testimony in the service of muscu- lar Christianity, the enlightened scientist is welcomed in all simplicity and innocence. Eccles writes: Wheeler (1977) defines two contrasting views on the genesis of the Uni- verse: “. . . Life is accidental and incidental to the machinery of the Universe. . . . Or . . . is the directly opposite view closer to the truth?— that the universe, through some mysterious coupling of future with past, required the future observer to empower the past genesis? Nothing is more astonishing about quantum mechanics than its allowing one to consider seriously on quite other grounds the same view that the universe would be nothing without observership.”117 The dichotomy is, of course, a false one: that either the universe is an accident or it is somehow devised for or by our minds. This Maimonides calls the height of hubris, to take things nobler than ourselves—the celestial

116 Wheeler (1977), cited in Eccles, The Human Mystery, 29. 117 Eccles, The Human Mystery, 30–31. As Čapek shows, Bergson, read in the light of de Broglie’s 1928–1953 outlook, undercuts the popular subjectivist readings of quantum phenomena: indeterminacy would reflect not the mere involvement of the observer but the impossibility in principle of fixating the ultimacy of change in a single, instantaneous velocity and location; Bergson and Modern Physics, 284–99; page 300 cites an appreciation of Bergson by Einstein on this point. Čapek’s fine argumentation would hardly satisfy those who seek a free pass for subjectivism in the findings of science, but physics itself is hardly relevant to their quest: if subjectivism holds, physics (including the indeterminacy principle) lacks the authority they seek to build on. For further development of de Bro- glie’s approach in a realist direction, see David Bohm, The Undivided Universe (London: Routledge, 1993). 166 Time, Creation, and the Mirror of Narcissus bodies—and treat them as existent solely for our sakes.118 If we balk at the idea that the stars are nobler than ourselves, since we no longer view them as alive, and probably not as delegates of God’s power that pay fealty to their sovereign Lord, we should recall that for us the stars are worlds, and some of the apparent stars, galaxies, that is, worlds of worlds—for even Saadiah says the Milky Way might be an ascending mist, or an enduring portion of fire, but it might be an aggregate of small stars.119 Eccles wants to link the future to the past, but he seems to find the meaning of the future and the power of the past in human observership. Here the eternalism that Hartshorne prizes and elevates in Bergson’s thought and the sundering of the present from the past by which Hartshorne breaks the cord that ties his philosophy to Bergson’s begin to show their character and potential. For just as that eternalism threatens Bergson’s broader creationism, the sundering of past from present puts at risk the very values of freedom, contingency, empiricism, and the open future in whose behalf—or on the basis of which—Bergson’s theses of natural creativity and human freedom were argued. Hartshorne’s eternalism was meant to compromise divine transcendence and push Bergson toward immanence. But when the human quest for explanations doubles back upon itself, we glimpse the outcome of an immanence disconnected from any ultimate Source or Goal. Blinding God, reducing supraconsciousness to subconscious memory, and the groping of evolution to a rudderless theme- lessness called creative only out of courtesy or nostalgia was just the first step. A nameless mechanism stands in the wings. Hartshorne may think he hears a joyous meaning in the songs of birds,120 but the deeper harmo- nies and rhythms of the cosmos, once his break with Bergson is complete, will no longer sound as melody, since their relationality, the inner inten- tionality of one moment toward another, has been broken. The next step is the emergence of the self-selected surrogate for the Unmoved Mover and the Highest Aim and Good, the eager understudy for the role of God. The nameless mechanism has assigned itself a name. The anthropic principle invoked by Wheeler and many others, in behalf of a kind of humanism, compounds the fracture that process eternalism began. Where ancient creationism sought the end product of creation in the first intention of divine thought, this modern version misappropriates

118 Guide III 13; cf. Rambam, 262–77. 119 Saadiah, ED, introduction, 5; ed. Kafih, 21; trans. Rosenblatt, 23–24. 120 See his Born to Sing: An Interpretation and World Survey of Bird Song (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1973). Time, Creation, and the Mirror of Narcissus 167 the Bergsonian symmetry of time, blocking it before it can reach the absoluteness of divine purpose, making human thought not just the aim but the condition and ultimate origin of nature. What process philosophy contributes here, vividly in Hartshorne’s thinking, is demotion of God to the role of “fellow learner,” and a compensatory elevation of man to fill God’s shoes. Seeking a heritage for this view, its advocates call it Socinian, in a sense that Leibniz defines lucidly as the tendency “to conceive of God (on the pretext of upholding his liberty) . . . as a man who takes decisions according to the circumstances.”121 By conceiving God “on human lines” as Leibniz put it,122 the new, process Socinians render divinity no more than a developing condition, a modality perhaps, of the world’s flux. Freeman Dyson’s Gifford Lectures of 1985 typify the approach. Dyson invokes the anthropic principle to find in “meta-science” a meaning and purpose for existence that science itself, as he construes it, seems to debar: “Laws of nature can be explained if it can be established that they must be as they are in order to allow theoretical physicists to speculate about them.”123 Dyson links his “taste” for the anthropic principle, which “seems to imply an anthropocentric view of the cosmos,” with a conception of the divine which he labels Socinian and attributes to the influence of Hartshorne: If I remember correctly what Hartshorne said, the main tenet of the Socin- ian heresy is that God is neither omniscient nor omnipotent. He learns and grows as the universe unfolds. I do not pretend to understand the theological subtleties to which this doctrine leads if one analyzes it in detail. I merely find it congenial, and consistent with scientific common sense. I do not make any clear distinction between mind and God. God is what mind becomes when it has passed beyond the scale of our comprehension. God may be considered to be either a world-soul or a collection of world-souls. We are the chief inlets of God on this planet at the present stage of his development. We may later grow with him as he grows, or we may be left behind. As Bernal said, “That may be an end or a beginning, but from here it is out of sight.”124 There is more to Hartshorne than this, but what Dyson takes from him and finds vital in his thought is the chance to place God not within thought but within reach. Quoting from Dante, but subtly shifting the poet’s sense, Dyson ends his final lecture:

121 The Leibniz-Arnauld Correspondence, trans., H. T. Mason (Manchester, England: Man- chester University Press, 1967), 14; cf. 26. 122 Arnauld Correspondence, 19. 123 F. Dyson, Infinite in All Directions (New York: Harper and Row, 1989), 296. 124 Dyson, Infinite in All Directions, 119; cf. 295. 168 Time, Creation, and the Mirror of Narcissus

Can you not see that we are the worms, each one Born to become the angelic butterfly That flies defenseless to the Judgment Throne. Among process theologians, the idea of taking God off his pedestal often has a marked Christian or even Jewish emotive appeal, since it opens up devotional, mystical Christian, or Kabbalistic themes of divine suffering. But the unfolding of these themes, especially among the scientistic, proves anything but Judeo-Christian. The image of the butterfly is lovely, disarm- ing hearers who might have thought that physicists never speak of butter- flies, let alone quote Dante. But some ambiguity remains: Does the soul take flight to stand before the judgment throne, as Dante imagined, or to sit upon it? And behind the image of the butterfly stands the suffering and dying god. For the humanization of God is never unaccompanied, in these versions, by the divinization of man—not just to fill the vacuum left by God’s dethroning, for to meet that purpose any surrogate would do. Rather, the blurring of subjective boundaries and objective distinctions between humanity and divinity is the goal. Thus Dyson’s modest, almost Aristotelian, “I do not make any clear distinction between mind and God. . . . We are the chief inlets of God on this planet.” Religion is corrupted not only by stringency but also by a corresponding or complementary willingness to play the permission giver, pardoner, seller of indulgences, preacher of complacency in the name of self-acceptance or self-esteem. But here theology goes further, licensing the venerable and dangerous idea that man is God. Curiously enough, the seemingly abstract and innocuous metaphysical issue about the symmetry of time becomes a key to that turnabout. Bergson’s mutually interpenetrating, overlapping moments allow us to conceive the entirety of time as taken up in a single, comprehensive whole, the totality of history, evolution, the emergence of stars and galaxies. In such a whole, God’s eternal design and the unfolding project of creation are not alien to one another, and time indeed becomes the moving image of eternity. God is not a product or a process but the transcendent Source and Aim of all, the perfect Good toward which all actions grope and by which all are guided, the Perfection portended in all striving. Creation is not cut off from creativity but is its condition, and creativity is creation’s ever-present means. Bergson’s idea of duration allows the omnitemporality of all events, linking the whole history of creation into a single present moment, with meaning and direction to be found in every part within the whole. But, as Time, Creation, and the Mirror of Narcissus 169

Errol Harris remarks, with his usual astuteness, this is not a permission of which Bergson avails himself. Bergson’s “steady refusal to see the process of evolution as a whole,” which is “only a facet of his constant opposition to mechanism and determination in which tout est donné,” leaves the future open, as intended, but by the same token gives no wholeness to the flow of time.125 That outcome was not necessary. Pace Hartshorne, the future can be open without severance from the past. Even the subsumption of past and future into a single vast event would not deprive the actors in it of their agency or freedom, since they are actors, not puppets in that history. But Bergson clearly feared the loss of agency, and this fear shaped and overshaped his philosophy. His failure to link the alpha of creation to the omega of evolution opens the door to the process reduction of God. The new Socinianism seizes the opening and discards Teilhard’s Bergsonian linkage of alpha to omega through duration. It rejects creation with the old canard that if the world is of finite age, God has been idle or unemployed lo these billions of years.126 Instead of a divine purpose to guide and govern, as a beacon of Goodness answered by the good in all things, the cosmos is now piloted by a blind spontaneity that seems to have our name embroidered on its cap. Time is now the absolute, and God, just another timeserver. Man becomes the maker of values—creator and judge of the universe. The pride of Neoplatonists was the thought that the long arcing line of creative emanation led down to us and—through the miracle of human consciousness, back to its source in the Divine. But here the world is spun forth from our own minds, and the return is to ourselves. The inability to trace time to a source beyond itself is symptomatic of the shift in roles. The suffering God becomes the bearer no longer just of human sins but now of human guilt, anxiety, and fear. The father God is kept on too, at times, to hear the plaints of Job, since these will not be shouldered by the new man in the head office. But wherever vitality, creativity, emergence, youth, spring, life, or sustenance is found, the New Boss will be the one to take the credit. For hubris there is always one more step, and that step is taken, not atypically, by Bernhard Rensch, an astute but problematic evolutionary

125 Errol Harris, Nature, Mind and Modern Science (1954; reprint, London: Allen and Unwin, 1968), 398. 126 Adolf Grünbaum revives that hoary argument in “The Pseudo-Problem of Creation in Physical Cosmology,” Philosophy of Science 56 (1989): 373–94. 170 Time, Creation, and the Mirror of Narcissus biologist.127 Rensch is not as innocent of Kant or Freud as the scientists who seek to ground an amorphous idealism of pantheistic tinge on the vaunted influence of the observer in quantum physics. He sees that the subjectivism of the anthropic principle licenses not merely man’s discovery that the world was made for or by him but also man’s power to reinvent himself as God. Like Wald, Rensch finds much that is attractive in Eastern philosophy. Like others of that penchant, he may not fully know the discipline that such philosophies demand of their adherents. Perhaps he expects the idealism he finds in Eastern thought (once decontextualized and so deracinated) to prove tractable to his projects of transvaluation and self-empowerment. Speaking for the power he will reckon as divine, Rensch’s pantheistic drift seems somehow to render God not transpersonal but inhuman— dehumanized, yet all too human: We are quite rightly brought up to think modestly of ourselves. . . . But when we study man’s phylogeny, it must also seem to us extraordinary that this species, Homo sapiens, with his “godlike intellect,” as Charles Darwin called it, has emerged as the crown and culmination of the whole process of evolution. . . . Not only has this strange Homo sapiens come to an understanding of himself and the universal laws; he has developed further godlike qualities, creating his own new and complicated environment, changing almost the whole face of the earth. . . . The Faustian role brings responsibilities not for unintellectual toilers or even for “a large proportion of so-called intellectuals,” but for “those engaged in creative intellectual work,” planning for the future, developing institutions. They must become gods or demigods, the masters of human destiny: “Men have often referred to themselves as gods, or demigods. Rulers among the Egyptians, Romans, Chinese, Japanese and Incas have done so. . . .” Evolution is completed, and “its apparently most developed of

127 Rensch’s idea of the Rassenkreis gave evolutionary significance to racial variations among biological strains. His 1928 paper and 1929 monograph on the subject were bell- wethers of German biology for the 1930s. Introduced to American readers by Theodosius Dobzhansky as one of the century’s most penetrating theorists of evolution, Rensch was taken up by the racist anthropologist John Baker, who used the Rassenkreis to argue that it is “absolutely necessary” for scientists to obliterate “all distinction between races and species.” See Bernhard Rensch, Evolution Above the Species Level (New York: Columbia, 1974), and Dobzhansky’s preface; Das Prinzip geographischer Rassenkreise und das Problem der Artbildung (Berlin; Borntraeger, 1929); John Baker, Race (New York: Oxford University Press, 1974), 83 and nn. 891–94. Time, Creation, and the Mirror of Narcissus 171 creatures” who are ready to take charge.128 By a consummately Orwellian irony, freedom and creativity, the very values in which Bergson found a point of contact between man and God, will be the banners we shall follow back to the closed society that Bergson rightly named, prophesied against, feared, and faced with all his courage. The gods we are to worship, who will hand down our laws, shall be ourselves—or our own images, blown up to the gigantic proportions of idolatry, as in the final scene of The Wizard of Oz, by the puffing behind and within them of our own wind. As Rensch writes: Medical skill continues to improve, eating habits are more sensible, homes are healthier, better lighted, better ventilated. . . . The increasing tempo of scientific development will often lead to states of conflict. . . . This will lead to a spiritualization of the meaning and symbolic content of rites and customs. . . . In modernized Islamic countries there is a strong movement to have done with many ancient customs; women have ceased to wear the veil and are now emancipated, and polygamy is abolished. Many communist countries have broken with religious tradition, and modern China has gone through a rapid transformation of many customs. Examples like these show what can and what will happen in other countries. Ethical and moral ideas that do not conflict with scientific facts are the only ones that will survive. . . . The tendency to theosophy . . . will possibly increase. . . . A panentheism like that of medieval mystics may link religion with philosophical views. In our age of space research and increasing biological and psychological analysis of life, many people will find it more and more difficult to imagine Heaven and Hell, angels and devils—and it will become impossible to imagine a god who thinks like human beings, for such thinking is absolutely bound to certain physiological processes in a complicated central nervous system. Hence, many humans will abandon religion altogether, or be content with Spinoza’s ‘deus sive mundus [sic]’ or Goethe’s ‘God-Nature,’ the Hinduist Brahman, or the Buddhist Nirvana. All these processes will probably take many centuries. Religious customs, the worship of a superhuman being to whom one may pray in straitened circumstances, will be an urge, in spite of rationalistic counter-arguments. But the whole of mankind will finally be forced to realize that it will have to master its fate by itself. This messianic litany of unilinear progress has already, in the few years since it was written, proved tendentious, more wishful than prophetic, more conflicted than coherent in its prescriptions; more stereotypic than incisive in its analysis of cross-currents and alternatives to its vision.

128 Homo Sapiens: From Man to Demigod (New York: Columbia University Press, 1972), 158–61. 172 Time, Creation, and the Mirror of Narcissus

We have already reflected in chapter 1 about what God is. But, in the light of what is now being made of the élan vital, a word is in order about what God is not: God is not we, or even some subgroup, caste, or class of the we. The symmetry that links the future with the past does not transform creatures into their own creators, although we do in our own ways create, and in a sense create ourselves, not radically but more or less adequately. The asymmetry that divides the future from the past does not cut it off completely and is not a barrier to meaning, causes, reasons, powers, values, and potentials. It is not a barrier to God, to judgment or accountability, sundering past from future morally. Inevitably, in view of entropy and the fragility of what is complex and delicacy of what is subtly balanced, we show more skill in radical destruction than in radical creation. We know we are not gods when we see the bias, ignorance, and intolerance of the very projects in which the name is claimed for us, or smell the odor of the camps still lingering on the clothing of those who step up to claim the title of Creator. We have, as the existentialists were fond of saying, some measure of the freedom and responsibility of gods, but much less of the authority, and very little of the power. There will always be something more divine in knowing how and when to die and suffer than in knowing how and why to conquer and to kill. But even suffering and death will not make us gods. As Rabbi Ḥama ben Ḥanina remarked pointedly, “Man was made mortal because the Holy One foresaw that some . . . would proclaim themselves gods” (Genesis Rabbah 9.5). Like Rensch and Morowitz, Václav Havel is touched by thoughts of the intricate web of life, clearly also by the earth ethic, perhaps too by a more ancient land mystique. But Havel also knows what we are not. Speaking of the not-yet-alienated life-world that he calls our natural world, he writes: In this world, categories like justice, honour, treason, friendship, infidelity, courage or empathy have a wholly tangible content, relating to actual persons and actual life. . . . The natural world, in virtue of its very being, bears within it the presupposition of the Absolute which grounds, delimits, ani- mates and directs it, and without which it would be unthinkable. This Abso- lute is something which we can only quietly respect; any attempt to spurn it, master it or replace it with something else appears . . . as an expression of hubris for which humans must pay a heavy price, as did Don Juan and Faust. To me, personally, the smokestack soiling the heavens is not just a regret- table lapse of technology. . . . It is a symbol of an epoch which denies the binding importance of personal experience . . . crashes through the bounds of the natural world, which it can only understand as a prison of prejudices . . . an unfortunate leftover from our backward ancestors, a fantasy of their childish immaturity. With that, of course, it abolishes as mere Time, Creation, and the Mirror of Narcissus 173

fiction even the innermost foundation of our natural world: it kills God and takes His place on the vacant throne, so that henceforth it might be science which, as sole legitimate guardian, holds the order of being in its hand. . . . The fault is not one of science as such but of the arrogance of humankind in the age of science. Humans simply are not God, and playing God has cruel consequences. . . . We have rejected our responsibility as ‘subjective illusion’ and in its place installed what is now proving to be the most dangerous illusion of all: the fiction of objectivity stripped of all that is concretely human, of a rational understanding of the cosmos, and of an abstract schema of a putative ‘historical necessity’ . . . and technologically achievable ‘universal welfare,’ demanding no more than experimental institutes to invent it while industrial and bureaucratic factories turn it into reality. The fact that millions of people will be sacrificed to this illusion in scientifically directed concentration camps is not something that concerns our ‘modern person’ unless by chance he or she lands behind barbed wire and is thrown back drastically upon his or her natural world. . . . Writing in the last days of Soviet power, Havel readily sets his problematic into the same specious present as the days of the German death camps and locates his own country and the West in the same life-world: The chimney ‘soiling the heavens’ is not just a technologically corrigible design error, or a tax paid for a better tomorrow, but a symbol of a civilization which has renounced the Absolute, which ignores the natural world and disdains its imperatives. So, too, the totalitarian systems warn of something far more serious than Western rationalism is willing to admit. They are, most of all, a convex mirror . . . of its own deep tendencies . . . not merely dangerous neighbours, and, even less, some kind of an avant garde of world progress. Alas, just the opposite. . . . Perhaps somewhere there may be some generals who think that it would be best to dispatch such systems from the face of the earth and then all would be well. But that is no different from a plain girl trying to get rid of her plainness by smashing the mirror which reminds her of it.129 Another specious remedy, if we don’t like what the mirror shows us, rather than smash it, is to bend and distend it to make its surface more convex, blow up our image larger, so that at least in some moods we forget that our own image is all that the shiny surface shows. As the anthropic principle reveals clearly, we humans like to see our own image. We readily make nature our mirror and then try to reach beneath its surface, enamored of what we see and eager to get closer, forgetting that Narcissus drowned in that illusion. The Narcissus in us vainly wants to be the author, judge, and

129 Václav Havel, “Anti-Political Politics,” in Civil Society and the State, ed. John Keane (London: Verso, 1988), 381–98; 383, 386, 389–90. 174 Time, Creation, and the Mirror of Narcissus ruler of the universe. It paints itself as such in a form of subjective idealism and moral solipsism that rests on forgetting that an author’s power is vitiated if his work is just a wish. The world itself remains, the natural world, creation, its image only blurred by the ripples or stains we leave on the waters; its realities and requirements, untouched. The self, human nature, with its foibles and its graces, also remains. The image we saw was not ourselves but just an image, painted not by our minds but by the light. When it rises up to meet us, what we touch is not the self but the water. The self (all real mystics know) is not caught but lost by self-absorption. It is recovered only when we “objectify”—look away from our own image and toward nature and other persons.130 The move to metaphysics is the move from reductive, partitive questions that seek ultimacy in ever-finer levels of analysis, at a cost of ever- more-remote abstraction from the wholeness and thickness of life, what Havel calls our natural world, and toward larger questions, where ultimacy is understood in more comprehensive terms. There is nothing wrong with the partitive type of question, but, as even Thales saw, the milling of reality to ever-finer stuff is not the only kind of quest, and success at that is no guarantee of skill in answering or even adequately framing questions of another kind. Metaphysics demands a kind of discipline and chastity of mind that the arrogance of scientism does not provide, although the humility of science might. Following the suggestive remarks of Maimonides, Spinoza explains that there is an aspect of God or nature that we understand in terms of intelligence, because we have intelligence, and an aspect that we understand in terms of matter, because we have that too. But, he argues, there are infinite other aspects—as there must be, in view of the exuberance of being—which we can never know, because we have nothing in common with them.131 What is engaging in Wald’s or Wheeler’s Bergsonian meditations is the endeavor of a naturalist to seek explanations for the coherence, even

130 An old Hasidic story tells of the sage who instructs a young man to look out the window. “What do you see?” he asks. “People,” the young man answers. Turning the youth around to face a mirror, the sage asks, “Now what do you see?” “Only myself.” “And what made the difference?” Silver. Even as I wrote the preceding lines in the text, the newly liberated republic that Václav Havel helped to found and rose to lead, now divided into its Czech and Slovak parts, debated selling off its excess tanks to Syria—ironic proof of Havel’s words that the smokestack staining the horizon is no mere aberration but almost an outgrowth of the land, more a cancer to be cut out than a blemish to be salved or masked. 131 Spinoza, Ethica, pt. I, def. 6; props. 9, 10. Time, Creation, and the Mirror of Narcissus 175 commodiousness, of nature. Here science and religion come together— the questions of Aristotle and those of Job. The intricate, intimate, inner connectedness of things is somehow the stuff of the relations that respond to our whys. But it is childish sophistry to pretend that such anatomies are revealed by the announcement that the stuff of those relations is there because we put it there. Plotinus had a far grander and more cosmic idea of mind than Bernhard Rensch or Freeman Dyson does, but he saw clearly that the highest God cannot be mind, because, as he insisted, even against Aristotle, mind is not the very best of things.132

Abbreviations

APQ American Philosophical Quarterly ARN Avot de Rabbi Nathan CUA Catholic University of America ED Saadiah Gaon, K. al-Mukhtār fī ’l-Āmānāt wa ’l-Iʽtiqādāt EI2 Encyclopedia of Islam, 2d ed. HPQ History of Philosophy Quarterly HUC Hebrew Union College IJMES International Journal of Middle Eastern Studies JAAR Journal of the American Academy of Religion JAOS Journal of the American Oriental Society JBL Journal of Biblical Literature JHI Journal of the History of Ideas JHP Journal of the History of Philosophy JSS Jewish Social Studies JP The Journal of Philosophy JPS Jewish Publication Society JQR Jewish Quarterly Review JTS Jewish Theological Seminary of America KD Epicurus, Kyriae Doxai LCL Loeb Classical Library LLA Library of Liberal Arts LSU Louisiana State University MGWJ Monatschrift für Geschichte und Wissenschaft des Judenthums PAAJR Proceedings of the American Academy for Jewish Research

132 Enneads VI 9.2, 25–45; cf. I 7.1, 8.2.8, V 1.5; cf. Plato, Republic 509B. 176 Time, Creation, and the Mirror of Narcissus

PQ Philosophical Quarterly REJ Revue des Études Juives SPCK Society for the Promotion of Christian Knowledge SUNY State University of New York TF al-Ghazālī, Tahāfut al-Falāsifa TT Ibn Rushd, Tahāfut al-Tahāfut Y Jerusalem Talmud YJS Yale Judaica Series INTERVIEW WITH LENN E. GOODMAN FEBRUARY 27, 2014

Hava Tirosh-Samuelson

Let me start by asking you to talk about your life, your intellectual identity and trajectory. How do you define yourself intellectually? Are you a historian of Jewish philosophy, a constructive theologian, a historian of medieval philosophy, a moral philosopher, an interpreter of Western culture? If all of these labels fit you, how do you integrate them?

What a great question! Yes, I guess you use all of these labels on the basis of your own familiarity with my work. Indeed, I do all of those things. To start, I am a historian of philosophy because I am interested in the history of philosophy and in the anatomy of culture. But I don’t consider that kind of work to be an end in itself. I find it interesting, I find it curious, I read books that deal with the history of philosophy, but there is a difference between my treatment of Islamic philosophy and my approach to Jewish philosophy. I like to tell people that in an area like Islamic philosophy, I’m an interpreter, but in Jewish philosophy, I’m a player.

That is nicely put.

When it comes to Judaism, I’m a participant in a tradition. I study that tradition, read it, appreciate it, and translate from one idiom to another. I see the literary sources of Judaism as resources of philosophy. I find philosophy in the Tanakh, in the Talmud, and the Midrash, but this philosophy speaks a different language from the familiar language of philosophy today. And one of the things that Jewish thinkers have done through the ages is to translate. This task actually can be found in the Bible itself. For example, the Book of Deuteronomy (Devarim) translates what is found in earlier biblical texts. Similarly, the Mishnah and the Midrash, reinterpret, reinvent, and rediscover what already existed in the tradition. 178 INTERVIEW WITH LENN E. GOODMAN

The act of translation is very clear in the first Jewish philosopher, Philo of Alexandria, who tried to relate what he found in the Torah to what he read in Plato, in the Stoics, in the embryonic so-called Middle Platonic tradition, to which he contributed. In the same way, I think we have to take those themes and find out what’s alive in them and put them into our own idiom. The idiom of philosophy, as I see it, is a language of argumentation. We’ve got questions that we worry about; questions we want to try and answer. Collingwood said that the first thing to understand about a philosopher is what was the question he or she was trying to address? Often those questions are not stated but taken for granted. People tacitly assume, “That’s the problem one needs to wrestle with.” Instead, one needs to tease out those questions; you need to figure out what they are and show how a given philosopher is addressing them. It is important to explicate what kind of argumentation was implicit in the method used by the philosophers of the past, because the arguments are not always as explicit as we would like them to be in our way of doing philosophy. By bringing the old questions back to life and locating their present day counterparts one can participate in creating and continuing a living tradition. In that way to do Jewish philosophy does mean doing constructive theology and normative ethics. I have a problem with people who do their work in what they think is strictly an exegetical mode. Often that means that the key questions get overlooked, or bracketed in the past and assumed to have no enduring relevance.

Before you explain your critique tell me more about your intellectual trajectory. Your Ph.D. was actually in Islamic philosophy. So, how did you come to choose this particular area of philosophy?

Well, it started when I was a kid. I was very interested in philosophical questions, questions about God, in particular. I was an atheist as a child until I was about nine. My family moved to Los Angeles from Detroit and my mother felt that she had a pledge to her grandmother, to try and raise her own kids as Jews. My mother’s parents had been on the left end of the political spectrum: like many Jews of her generation, my mother’s mother was a socialist; her father was an anarchist, rebelling against the Jewish tradition. But my mother’s grandmother was a warm and wise and saintly woman, and her grandfather had founded four synagogues. INTERVIEW WITH LENN E. GOODMAN 179

From childhood on I was arguing with people about philosophical issues. In Los Angeles, we affiliated with a synagogue, and I began to warm up to it. I had some wonderful role models there, particularly, one teacher, Dr. Lubliner, who had a doctorate from the “Old Country.” The other thing he had from the Old Country was a number on his arm. He was a survivor.

So by “Old Country” you refer to Poland, rather than Germany. Right?

Well, since Lubliner was his last name, I guess that his family was from Lublin, which is in Poland. I’m not sure where he was really from, but he used to talk about Aristoteles, as Aristotle was called in his school background. And, of course, as a child, I didn’t know that the person he called Aristoteles was the same as Aristotle, just as I didn’t know that the Goethe he spoke about was the same person as the “Go-e-the” I read about in books. But I began to feel that if a man like Dr. Lubliner can be religious, which he truly was, as well as knowledgeable about philosophy, maybe there’s something to it. And I began to explore and get interested in philosophy and in religion. Now, you wonder how all that interest led me to be interested in Islamic philosophy. That’s an interesting question. I was sent to Hebrew school and a Hebrew high school, which was a supplementary school in the after- noons, and on Sundays. I also went to Camp Ramah in the summer. It was a camp in Ojai, California, which belonged to the Conservative Movement. There I picked up a little bit of conversational Hebrew, which still stands me in good stead, especially on trips to Israel. I enjoyed the study of Hebrew and felt (as I still do) that it was worthwhile to feel comfortable in another language. I had a teacher who later became a pretty well-known scholar at the University of Judaism, Eliezer Slomovic. He too was a Holocaust survivor, learned and observant. He used to say, “If you think Hebrew gram- mar is hard, you should try Arabic!” To me, as a teen, that was a challenge. So when I had a chance to study Arabic at UCLA while I was still in high school, I took the challenge. As a junior in high school, I had to pass the Miller Analogy Test, which was used in those days for admission to graduate school at UCLA. I enrolled in an intensive Arabic course along with graduate students and really enjoyed the study of Arabic. Beyond the language, two things drew me to study Islamic philosophy. One was a sort of ambition to try and foment understanding between Jews and Arabs. This was something encouraged by the Kennedy era and the idea that expertise could create international understanding and lead to peace. 180 INTERVIEW WITH LENN E. GOODMAN

It was part of Kennedy’s vision for the Peace Corps.

Very much so. I was inspired by people like Edwin O. Reischauer at Harvard, who was so knowledgeable about Japan. I thought if I became really knowledgeable about Islam, I could be useful in that way. The other thing, which proved to be more realistic, was the fact that my father had taken some courses at Harvard with Harry Wolfson. By the time I got to Harvard, Wolfson was already in retirement, but my father was telling me, “You know, if you study Islamic philosophy, that’s where religion and philosophy intersect.” And he was absolutely right. The study of Islamic philosophy helped me connect religion and philosophy. So, I did study those two things at Harvard, taking a dual major in Near Eastern Languages and Literatures and in Philosophy. Because it was a dual major, every semester I had to go to eight different people to sign my study card to approve all those courses. As a sophomore, I asked Sir Hamilton Gibb to be my sophomore tutor, or advisor. As you know, he was a very high-powered scholar. The graduate students told me Gibb was the best Arabist on the planet. And I figured my parents are paying all this money, I’d better get my money’s worth. So I overcame my trepidation and I asked him to be my advisor even though he didn’t normally teach undergraduates. To my surprise, he accepted me as his student, but he warned me that we were going to read many texts. Sir Hamilton was a very erudite man who knew literature and history, and in his tutorials we read through some of the main texts of Islamic philosophy. I also took his courses in Islamic history, Arabic literary texts, and Arabic syntax. So as an undergraduate I was beginning to acquire some proficiency in reading Islamic texts. Gibb made it clear that if you wanted to know something, you needed to know the relevant languages. He told me proudly how he had once copied out a whole Order of the Mishnah in a square Hebrew hand, so as to learn Mishnaic Hebrew. My rudiments of Arabic and my hopes for the work that I would do, partly inspired by reading Dag Hammarskjold’s new book, Markings, enabled me to win a Marshall scholarship to Oxford to study with Richard Walzer, who was at the time the foremost scholar of Islamic philosophy in an English-speaking country. Walzer, like my Harvard mentor Ilse Lichtenstadter, was one of the Jewish Arabists who was fortunate enough to be denied academic appointments when Hitler came to power in 1933 and who made their way to England. He was a student of the great classicist Werner Jaeger and was married to Sophie nee Cassirer of the eminent intellectual and philosophical Cassirer family. INTERVIEW WITH LENN E. GOODMAN 181

In Oxford, Walzer was at Oriel College, and then when St. Catherine’s was founded, he went to St. Catherine’s, also at Oxford. I used to see Dr. Walzer every day, and I also had the opportunity to work with his friend Samuel Stern, another great Orientalist, who had a home next door to the Walzers in Bladon Close in Oxford, but preferred to live in the Walzers’ home. I also worked with Albert Hourani, another great historian of Islamic civilization and ideas. I would see Hourani every week in his office at St Anthony’s College, but Walzer and Stern taught in the Walzers’ home, which was filled with Impressionist paintings, Renoirs, Pissarros, and the like, including the oil study for Manet’s Dejeuner sur l’herbe. Sophie’s father had been unable to secure from his father the £20,000 he needed to buy the work itself, given its subject matter, and had settled for the oil sketch, purchased with his own funds for £400. Working with Walzer was a wonderful experience, and he helped me look for the roots and interconnections between religion and philosophy in the works of medieval Muslim thinkers. With all of these scholars at Oxford and with philosophers like Urmson, Ryle, Prior, and above all Isaiah Berlin, I began to learn how to deal with the philosophical questions that interested me about God, about morality, about nationhood. I didn’t really start doing anything professional with Jewish philosophy until the early seventies and that happened in a very curious way. It was Walzer who directed me toward Jewish philosophy by the way he taught. Every week when I met him in his home he would say, “You know, Philo says interesting things about this topic.” So I would go and read Philo. Another week he would say, “John Philoponus said such and such,” and I would go home and explore that reference. Walzer was always amazed that from week to week I followed up on his references, but that is how I understood the purpose of being at Oxford. In this method of learning, I got some background in Jewish as well as Islamic philosophy, which at that point was the focus of my learning. I was studying al-Farabi, Razi, and Ibn Khaldun, and writing my dissertation on the great Muslim thinker al-Ghazali even as I was preparing the commentary on Ibn Tufayl’s Hayy ibn Yaqzan to fill out the introductory essays that would accompany my translation of that wonderful twelfth century novel, which became my first book. When I joined the faculty at the University of Hawaii in 1970, they felt that their Arabic holdings were weak, and they gave me a budget to travel to Europe and as far as Istanbul and Israel to buy books for the library. I also took some money of my own and wherever I could I bought the same books for myself. On my way home from that trip, I stopped in Oxford and was invited to a sherry party at David Patterson’s house. 182 INTERVIEW WITH LENN E. GOODMAN

At that time David Patterson taught modern Hebrew literature in Oxford, and he later founded the Oxford Center for Post-Graduate Hebrew Studies as it was called in those days. David was coediting a series of books aimed at the general Jewish reading public, volumes introducing the classics of Jewish thought. He asked me if I would do a volume on Philo, and I con- sented. But then when I got back to Hawaii, he contacted me and he told me that Nahum Glatzer had put out a book on Philo, so he did not want to step on Glatzer’s toes. So Patterson asked if I would mind doing Maimonides instead. That is how I began to write about Jewish philosophy. My first book in Jewish philosophy was the volume on Maimonides in that series, edited by David Patterson. In truth, it was quite a primitive work since I was not really versed in all the secondary literature on Maimonides. For example, at that time I didn’t yet know that Maimonides was born in 1138 rather than in 1135, as was customary to assume. Also my Arabic at the time was not as good as it has become since I wrote that book. But the book was well-received nonetheless, partly because it took Maimonides seriously as a philosopher and aimed to lay out the issues he addresses in a way that would make them accessible to general readers. The series had some wonderful volumes, for example, Eva Jospe’s book on Hermann Cohen. Part of what I did for that volume on Maimonides was to go back to the original Arabic of the Guide to the Perplexed and the Eight Chapters, which are the major sources of Maimonides’ philosophy. These were my first attempts to translate Maimonides into modern English. Today, in collaboration with my colleague Phil Lieberman, I’m working on a new translation of the Guide and some of the related texts. The new translation will eclipse my early work on Maimonides. It will be a better translation and will include a comprehensive commentary on the ideas of the Guide.

So you started to do Jewish philosophy in the 1970s.

That’s right. My book on Maimonides came out in 1976, and I was lecturing on it for B’nai B’rith Regional Institutes in that bicentennial year. These were long weekend sessions of adult education that enabled me to talk about Maimonides to Jews who were interested in ideas. I was quite attracted to this type of teaching. Later, I had a chance to work on Saadiah Gaon, the first systematic Jewish philosopher. Saadiah cannot be understood without reference to the background environment of Islamic thought. So my INTERVIEW WITH LENN E. GOODMAN 183 studies in Islamic philosophy, especially Islamic scholastic theology (the Kalam) proved very helpful. We need to recall that Maimonides, Saadiah, and Judah Halevi all lived as we do today, in a large cosmopolitan cultural environment. They were well versed in Islamic thought and in its Greek philosophical sources. For example, Maimonides was very familiar with the second-century Roman natural philosopher and physician Galen, and because of his breadth of knowledge, Maimonides’ philosophical capability went far beyond what was accessible among, say, Jews who did not know Arabic. I was able to follow those influences and to understand the language and the problems that Maimonides wrestled with because I understood his sources and knew his languages. My doctoral thesis at Oxford on al-Ghazali had dealt with his arguments for the creation of the world and against the Aristotelian idea of its eternity, and with his famous treatment of causality and the rationalistic naturalism of the Islamic philosophical school. These issues were central concerns of Jewish philosophy in the Middle Ages as well, and they remain enduring themes, that surface again and again, in different garb. They may change their emphasis or even their thrust, but the enduring questions remain even as the discussions are enriched by new generations of inquirers. As I realized the permanence of certain philosophical questions, I felt a need to understand how to deal with those questions and increasingly came to venture my own answers and essays at argumentation. Working on Saadiah’s Commentary on the Book of Job, I wrote an extended philosophical supercommentary. It was the first time the Yale Judaica series published a philosophical supercommentary rather than a short introduction. Leon Nemoy, the great scholar of Karaism, was the editor of the series, and he was a brilliant editor. He would send me four pages of handwritten comments for every typed page that I sent him. And it was a moment of tri- umph for me if once in twenty times, my interpretation, my “mistake” was really correct, and I got him and his correction was incorrect! Normally, of course, it was the other way around. The volume was published by Yale University Press, and the in-house editor, Charles Grench, wrote to me at one point as the book was at or near- ing completion and said, “You know, you’ve got a lot of philosophy here. Do you want to write something for us that’s philosophical?” At that time, I had given some lectures at Patterson’s Center at Oxford, which was located at Yarnton Manor, as you know. The lectures I delivered there were the ones I gave as a winner of the Baumgardt Prize of the American Philosophical Association, published under the title Monotheism. But in the spring of 1979 I was invited back to give another set of lectures, and these were published 184 INTERVIEW WITH LENN E. GOODMAN by Yale, under the title On Justice; later on they appeared in an updated paperback edition, in the Littman Library of Jewish Civilization—and rightly so, since these lectures were originally given as the Littman Lectures. So I began doing Jewish philosophy in my own person by building on the experience I had gained publishing papers, essays, and articles and giving public talks about the philosophical insights and opportunities I had found in the medieval texts.

I have two questions to ask you about your academic training. At Harvard, before you went to Oxford, did you study analytic philosophy? My second follow-up question is: Is this the ideal training for the Jewish philosopher?

As for the analytic tradition, I have to say “yes and no.” Of course, Harvard was a center for analytic philosophy in America, in great part because of Willard Van Orman Quine. I deliberately stayed away from him. My father too had negative impressions of him. I read a little Quine, particularly in graduate school, and I did acquire some of the skills of the analytic tradition. My tutor in philosophy at Harvard was Dagfinn Follesdall, who was an interesting figure because he was straddling analytic philosophy and phenomenology. He was a Husserl scholar and a committed Catholic. He later wound up at Stanford, but when I was at Harvard he was the token phenomenologist, or continental philosopher, even though in those days that term was not yet in wide use. He actually taught me how to run an argument. In his course, I started with a low grade which was quite a shock to me, because I always received high grades due to my rhetorical skills. But I did not know how to run an argument until he taught me the skills. It was in sophomore year and he gave a B-minus on a tutorial paper, not a grade I was used to receiving, because in high school one could often get by with clear writing and vivid language. Follesdall sat me down and explained to me that I hadn’t argued my case and showed me in outline what I needed to do in order to learn how to make cogent arguments. This experience stayed with me and taught me something that I’d later learn to impart to my own students: Philosophy in general, not just Jewish philosophy, depends on making arguments; you can’t make a case that only your mother will believe. INTERVIEW WITH LENN E. GOODMAN 185

Well, that is a nice but funny way of pointing to the strengths of analytic philosophy.

At Harvard the assumption was that the school was going to mold you; as a result of a Harvard education you were going to come out a “Harvard man,” with certain political views, certain sensibilities, and in philosophy, the mastery of certain techniques and certain texts. I found myself constantly fencing, jousting, wrestling with the figures we read. Take Hume, for example. I thought Hume had gone wrong and I would try and explain how and where and why, and argue against his views. In keeping with the great Harvard tradition of liberalism, this kind of irreverent debate was accepted. If you have an argument, people will listen to you. When it came time to write my honor’s thesis Ilse Lichtenstadter suggested I write on a text by the Muslim philosopher Ibn Tufayl. I wrote a big essay about his philosophical novel, Hayy ibn Yaqzan, which is a wonderful story. Ilse thought I should have a summa and made her maiden speech in the College Faculty to nominate me. She was a great woman, and one of the two women who were tenured at Harvard at the time. In retrospect that sounds shocking and even disturbing, but that was the fact: only two tenured female faculty. She was one, and the other was Susanne Rudolph, who was in Indian studies. In truth, Ilse was a tenured lecturer, not a professor, even though she held two doctorates, one from Frankfurt am Main, where she studied with the great Orientalist Josef Horowitz, and one from Cambridge. She was the author of several books and a very accomplished person, but she was never promoted to a regular faculty position at Harvard. She was on my committee. In order to be awarded a summa you had to pass an oral exam, and since I had that dual major, Philosophy, of course, was represented too. I did not have to worry too much because I had taken my share of good philosophy courses at Harvard, including a wonderful course in epistemology, which at the time I thought was very dull but which has stood me in good stead ever since. Harvard tended to have visitors who taught courses that were a little off the beaten track. So I took a graduate seminar in Nietzsche, taught by a visiting professor, Kurt Fischer, which was a very good seminar. Again, I fought Nietzsche every step of the way, but I enjoyed it immensely. Well, at my oral exam Ilse wanted to give me a pow- der puff, of sorts, so she gave me a passage from the Siddur to show them that I knew Hebrew as well as Arabic. 186 INTERVIEW WITH LENN E. GOODMAN

Do you mean that she asked you to translate a paragraph from the Siddur into Arabic?

No, just into English. (I did my fancy translating in Gibb’s Advanced Arabic class, putting some of the poetic passages into verse. But that too was in English. I really feel most at home with my mother tongue.) So, I read the passage from the Siddur, and that was fine. Then the philosophy professor said, “I see from what you’ve argued in your essay that you think Aristotle was right that there are essences of things. What makes you think that?” This was totally out of the blue, so off the top of my head I started reeling off what must have been thirteen or fourteen arguments in favor of Aristotle’s metaphysics. And then I sat back and said, “Well, are you convinced?” And he said, “No.” So I thought to myself, “Okay, I’m cooked. I’ve had it.”

Well, since you argued for your understanding of Aristotle, they must have given you the summa.

Yes, in fact, Ilse told me later, that it was this professor who first proposed that I should have a summa—even though I did not turn him into an Aristotelian. That B.A. thesis on Ibn Tufayl became my first book and a few years ago the University of Chicago Press reissued it in paperback. They asked me if I wanted to revise the introductory essay. I read it over and I decided to let it stand with only a few additions about the historical background and pointing out how Ibn Tufayl’s arguments remain relevant today, since we’re still dealing with the issue of determinism, as Ibn Tufayl did in the twelfth century. In retrospect, my introduction is a bit of a period piece. It’s still arguing with B. F. Skinner (another famous Harvard professor who influenced the social sciences) and people like him. The behaviorism and positivism that I was combating back in the sixties have long faded, but they’ve been replaced by other forms of mechanism and reductionism. So the arguments I made in my introduction still apply, even if they now confront new targets.

That’s terrific. So let’s go back to the question of ideal education for the Jewish philosopher.

Right. INTERVIEW WITH LENN E. GOODMAN 187

What should a Jewish philosopher know?

Well, let me start with the ideal education for any philosopher. I think a philosopher needs to know the tradition within which he or she philosophizes. Earlier I spoke about knowing where the pitfalls are, and the pratfalls; in other words, the philosopher has to engage the tradition critically. You don’t want to be reinventing the wheel. Of course, every philosopher has ideas, insights, and intuitions, but so does the world. The issue as I see it is to know how to reconcile intuitions that seem to be pulling us in different directions from each other—to put us at odds even with ourselves. And that requires certain skills. So I think the ideal philosopher’s education is vested in texts. As you know, I see myself more as a constructive philosopher than as a historian of philosophy, but even so I’m much more historical than most constructive philosophers tend to be, and that’s important in my teaching. I think the students can learn how to do philosophy well by engaging with the great philosophical minds of the past, especially when they come from different periods and different traditions and don’t necessarily share the same assumptions (and the same blind spots) that we have. For most analytic philosophers, antiquity began with David Hume! They do not possess the philosophical sources that Hume knew very, very well, and they do not have a grasp of the entire philosophical tradition at his disposal. Hume, for example, picked up his ideas about skepticism by reading Pierre Bayle, the French philosopher, who really knew the tradition of Western philosophy. In my view a good philosopher needs to know the philosophic past, to know where the bodies are buried, so to speak. You need to know that long before Kant, there was deontology among the Stoics. And you need to know Cicero, since he is a major repository of Stoic thought. Now, for a Jewish philosopher, you need to know all of that as well as the environing traditions and challenges of our own Jewish cultural and intellectual experience. So, you need to know what Philo was reading and what Maimonides was reading. When my new translation of the Guide comes out in 2017 it will include auxiliary texts from al-Farabi, from Ibn Tufayl, from al-Ghazali, from Ibn Sina, which are most relevant to Maimonides’ arguments; these are the things that led him to frame his argument in a certain way. 188 INTERVIEW WITH LENN E. GOODMAN

That will be very nice, because it will prove that philosophy is always carried out within a given tradition.

We see this point very well in regard to Maimonides’ sophisticated treatment of Kalam. Because Maimonides knew the Kalam, he was able to avoid what he sees rightly as the errors of its practitioners, the mutakallimun. Maimonides rightly saw that Kalam occasionalism resulted in the dismissal of nature. As far as those Kalam theologians were concerned, nature, or the physical world had no permanence and no causal impact, but this cannot be true.

The Kalam’s position is a good segue to the next question. The mutakallimun, who articulated Kalam, were theologians who used reason to render religious beliefs credible, as they understood it. Do you see a difference between Jewish philosophy and Jewish theology?

That’s a great question. As a philosopher, I see natural theology as one branch of philosophy. It contributes to the larger philosophical tradition alongside philosophical ethics, political theory, or epistemology. To explain the difference between philosophy and what might be called non- philosophical or dogmatic theology, let me mention al-Farabi, who characterizes the mutakallimun as people who know what they’re trying to prove and who turn the universe around to make it fit what they think is theologically acceptable. This procedure does not mean that the practitioners of Kalam were naïve believers who simply based everything on Scripture, as the stereotypical view goes; in fact they were sophisticated thinkers who offered nuanced readings of the Qur’an. The same can be said about the Jewish theologians who applied Kalam methods of interpretation to the Torah. They too came to the sacred text with definite notions about what Scripture should be telling them. And then they structured everything around that. One good reason for seeing that, say, Saadiah is not just a mutakallim is that he does not do that but insists our views must follow the facts rather than vice versa. The pride of the philosopher is to be more rigorous and a little more self-critical than the dogmatic theologian. As philosophers we want to examine our own premises and test them against each other and against rival views. We don’t see the dialectic of philosophy as merely a matter of showing the other guy’s wrong or silencing the other guy. But that was the standard objective in Kalam. INTERVIEW WITH LENN E. GOODMAN 189

A philosopher has to take risks. There are costs involved in doing philosophy. You have to be ready for the argument to go against what you think must have been right, and you have to be willing to go with the argument, wherever it leads. That’s the big difference, I think, between philosophy and dogmatic theology. You can’t start out by saying, “Okay, we’re going to do everything we can to prove that God is real or that providence is real, or whatever.” The existence of God or the functioning of providence are issues addressed by the philosopher but in a different manner and with different commitments from those of a dogmatic theologian. Take Locke’s ideas about Christianity. When Locke talks about Christianity, he’s trying to make Christianity defensible, but in order to make it defensible, he has to change it. A Jewish philosopher does something very similar when he or she contributes to the growth of philosophical understanding of the Jewish tradition. Judaism has certain values, certain commitments, certain intuitions and certain understandings, and the philosopher engages them in a self- critical manner. The Jewish philosopher can inquire where do these ideas lead us, and what’s the next step. The Jewish philosopher, as a philosopher, needs to explore how we can deal with problems in a way that’s credible and critical. The critical person is the one who knows how to be self-critical.

Would you say that Jewish philosophy is philosophy with “a Jewish twist,” to use Schwarzschild’s formulation?

I admired Schwarzschild and appreciated the chance I had to correspond with him a little before he died in 1989, especially about his interest in Georg Cantor’s thoughts about the theological implications of his exploration of the idea (or ideas!) of infinity. But I’m not sure I know what Schwarzschild meant by “twist.” Did he mean like a “flavor” as in “a twist of lemon?”

Probably. I think he meant that there are certain issues that are characteristic of Jewish philosophy, but the phrase “Jewish twist” might have referred to a certain way of posing questions, namely, a certain methodology.

Every philosophic tradition has its favorite issues, of course, so Jewish philosophy is not going to deal with the topics characteristic of Hindu philosophy or Buddhist philosophy. Of course we have our repertoire. Still, there are structural similarities between philosophical traditions. And there are 190 INTERVIEW WITH LENN E. GOODMAN some big philosophical issues that arise in all philosophical traditions, such as freedom and responsibility, universal questions addressed differently by those diverse traditions. I don’t think that Jewish philosophy has an essence. I don’t think it has a distinctive or unique flavor or method or agenda. I think that there are certain issues where we have some very strong commitments. And the continuity of the tradition rests in those commitments and in the various efforts that philosophers have made using various idioms to put those ideas across in a way that will make sense to their readers and their contemporaries.

Since the Jewish philosopher is working within the Jewish religious tradition, wouldn’t you say that within that tradition there are certain paramount ideas that will constrain the philosophical inquiry by compelling you to philosophize in a certain way? For example, the ethics of responsibility is a paramount notion in Judaism.

Absolutely. I would agree.

The belief in creation is yet another idea that characterizes Judaism and that might constrain philosophical discourse. Can we say then that there are certain ideas that circumscribe what the Jewish philosopher is going to do as a philosopher?

I agree with what you’re saying about those abiding themes of the tradition. But what I worry about is a kind of Hegelian notion that every people, every race, every era, has its own Zeitgeist or Volksgeist that is distinctive and unique and sublated and surpassed in the thought of other periods, or other places, or other races. I don’t think it works that way. I think the abiding issues are more universal than that. For example, when we consider issues such as responsibility we are dealing with a universal concern. It takes on different colorations in different traditions but also different metaphysical and epistemological constructions, which are much more than overtones. That is what makes it worthwhile to study philosophers from different traditions, because universal themes get taken up and developed and elaborated and argued and problematized in different ways in different traditions. Take, for example, the notion of Karma. When I read philosophical expositions of this idea I can identify affinities and similarities with other religious traditions, but there are also important differences between karma and the notion of collective responsibility that we find in INTERVIEW WITH LENN E. GOODMAN 191 the Torah. The affinities and differences are very helpful and instructive to me because they offer a cross-cultural comparison, very much like a controlled experiment. I don’t think that we operate simply within a tradition, as your question suggested, but rather with a tradition. We’re part of a tradition.

But when you are a part of a tradition are you not within that tradition?

Not in the sense of being contained by it, as if one were compelled by nescience or by an established agenda to exclude what is external to one’s familiar background as irrelevant. What one has to recognize is that what’s distinct from a tradition could be alien to it, but it is not necessarily irrelevant.

Is it possible for the Jewish philosopher to do philosophical work without any reference to the sacred text, especially the biblical text and probably to some extent also the rabbinic text?

Well, it would be foolish to ignore or exclude these texts.

But if so, does not the sacred text constrain philosophical inquiry?

We need to wrestle with those texts and learn from them, but I don’t find that constraining, because there are so many different ways of working with the biblical texts. Consider an analogy with literary criticism. There have been various periods in literary criticism where people have tried to manufacture a method. Counting words or doing computerized stuff, they mechanize their work. But in philosophical, as in literary textual studies, there are people who are insightful and good at what they do, who are sensitive to the values resident in a text and who know how to work with it creatively, and then there are people who are tone-deaf, and it doesn’t matter how efficient their mechanism is, it’s still going to be a mechanism. It’s not going to generate real ideas or give you creative work. One wonderful thing about the Torah is how very open-textured it is. Its text invites all kinds of worries and concerns and inspirations, and one can develop those ideas in so many different directions, some thoughtful, and some tangential. Obviously, one can read this text, or the Talmud, either well or badly because it offers infinite possibilities—as life itself does—to work 192 INTERVIEW WITH LENN E. GOODMAN

intelligently or unintelligently with what we’re given. When a good philosopher engages a biblical or rabbinic text he or she poses synthetic questions: how does this go together with that? Thus, if God is all-powerful, does that really leave us freedom? The Torah raises questions about the meaning of history, in general, and our history, in particular. Questions like these present us with philosophical challenges. They are openings to inquiry and opportunities for reflection and discovery. If you try and read too much of your own prejudices into a text when it challenges you in that way, you’re going to come up with silliness. You’ll turn the Torah into a mirror instead of a lens. But if you’re open to it, that is, open to its own internal diversity of technique and of outlook and its abiding thematics, you can really profit from the biblical text intellectually.

Could there be any situation in which what the sacred text says or the truth of the sacred text conflicts with philosophical truth?

Sure.

So, how do you resolve that conflict?

We have some good models of how to deal with that kind of issue from people who are not usually categorized as philosophers. I’m thinking of the way the rabbis (Hazal) dealt with the text where they faced a problem of the kind you describe, where they sensed that the biblical text was doing things that they didn’t think were in keeping with its own thematic. I can give you two examples of that. One is that of the rebellious son. According to the biblical text, a son who is utterly recalcitrant is supposed to be exe- cuted. Well, what do the rabbis say about that? The rabbis respond that it never happened. There never was a son, they insist, who reached such a degree of rebelliousness; the biblical text mentions it to function only as what Kant would call a regulative idea. In other words, the case is a pure virtuality. A more interesting case is the suspected adulterous woman (sotah). The Torah itself faces a problem: if adultery is a capital offense, conviction requires two witnesses. But this is very tricky when those witnesses are lacking or their testimony is found faulty (for the rabbis are very particular about excluding testimony that might be dubious in some way). So what is one to do in such a case? This is the only place where the Torah introduces INTERVIEW WITH LENN E. GOODMAN 193 trial by ordeal, which is completely inconsistent with its own rejection of all kinds of pagan, theurgical practices, and necromancy. Here, it seems the Torah faced a conundrum brought about by the lack of clear evidence that would meet its own high procedural standards. How did the rabbis deal with the resulting breakdown of the Torah’s own consistency as regards the rejection of resort to magic? The rabbis bracket the biblical provision. It takes an entire tractate of the Talmud to do it, but they impose so many conditions on the trial by ordeal as to make it impossible to implement. In the end they say that in the old days, so to speak, when people were pure and respectable, you could assume, according to the principle of clean hands, that the accuser was himself free of sins comparable to those of which he accused his wife. But we can’t make that presumption any more. So the whole question becomes academic. The Torah itself does that with the chalitzah (levirate marriage). So even within the Torah what originally was an obligation eventually becomes an onus that one is expected to waive.

But is this type of wrestling with the biblical text truly philosophical? It seems to me that it is more political, social, or cultural rather than philosophical.

I wouldn’t go too far with that distinction. The philosophical problem in the case of sotah is the issue of how to treat adultery when your procedural requirements are at odds with your theological requirements. There’s an apparent conflict here between two very serious sorts of value commitment, and it took creativity, in this case on the rabbis’ part, to come to a resolution, partly by recognizing that the Torah’s commitment to human dignity and its rejection of magical practices loom larger in its constellation of values than its deep concern with the destructive impact even of adultery. Something had to give here, but notice that it was not the procedural demand for two witnesses. The rabbis did not flinch about that standard of evidence. I fondly remember Ephraim Urbach’s telling us how Simeon ben Shetah, a rabbi of the first pre-Christian century, swore that he saw one man chase another into a ruined building and then found the aggressor standing over the victim and still holding a sword dripping with blood as the victim expired. Simeon shouted, “Villain! Who killed this man? Either you or I. But what can I do? . . . The Torah says ‘By the testimony of two witnesses . . . .’ ” 194 INTERVIEW WITH LENN E. GOODMAN

That case makes it very clear that logic alone can’t answer philosophical questions. One needs to be situated in the kind of values that can guide one’s choices, and if the Torah is to be one’s guide, one needs a deep sensitivity to the humane values that the Torah affirms and expects of us. Consider the kind of cosmological or metaphysical question that Rambam faced in dealing with potential conflicts between the biblical text and philosophical belief in dealing with the conflict between the world’s eternity or creation. I’ll lay my cards on the table: I think he believed in creation, but he tells us that he can’t prove it. What’s he going to do? He’s going to give the best arguments he can for it. And he’s going to reject al- Ghazali’s view that those who believe that the world is the eternal product of divine emanation are atheists. Those Neoplatonic emanationists, the Rambam admits and even insists, had good arguments. He thinks they have a valid argument for God’s existence. He doesn’t think it’s a sound argument because he rejects one of its premises, the eternity of the world. But he says, if they had succeeded in proving the world’s eternity, we would have to alle- gorize the biblical story of creation. We have techniques for dealing with that. We don’t say the biblical creation story is a lot of bunk. We say it’s an allegory pointing to a higher truth which is the truth of emanation. So, what I’m saying is that within the tradition, you have methods of dealing with conceptual conflict. They are creative methods and they are synthetic. The Rambam had to bite the bullet, so to speak, and admit that you can’t prove the world is created. If you try and prove it, your arguments are going to backfire. However, there’s good reason, albeit not demonstra- tive, but good reason, to uphold the doctrine of creation, so we’re going to stick with it. This is the risk the philosopher takes as distinguished from the dogmatic theologian. That kind of theologian simply states that if the Bible asserts the world is created, we’ve got to believe in creation. The philosopher doesn’t do that, because the philosopher reasons about the possible meaning of the biblical text and offers arguments in support of a certain interpretation.

The debate on the origin of the world illustrates the so-called conflict between “Athens” and “Jerusalem” in Western culture. Today, we don’t talk about “Athens versus Jerusalem” but rather about “science versus religion.” Is there a conflict between science and religion? If not, why is there a perception that science and religion are in conflict with each other?

Wonderful question. No, I don’t think there is a conflict between science and religion. But I do see a conflict between scientism and religion. INTERVIEW WITH LENN E. GOODMAN 195

Scientism likes to take over some of the territory that religion has traditionally occupied. Today religious people feel threatened, and that is the source of the perception that there’s a conflict between religion and science. Of course, the scientistic folks appeal to the authority of science, which is grounded partly in technology’s success and partly in their own metaphysical commitment to naturalism. I think that the proper relationship between science and religion is one not only of harmony but of mutual support. That is, science as we practice it is very committed to naturalism and that’s a good thing. I don’t like the notion that when naturalistic explanations sputter, we should turn to God. I think that’s a terrible mistake. I think God’s got to be there all the time. For example, the Jewish prayer book asserts, that God mehadesh be-tuvo be-khol yom tamid ma‘aseh bereshit, namely, that God in His goodness renews each day continually the act of creation. In other words, creation is an ongoing active expression of God in the world. We’re not upholding a God of the gaps who is only called on to intervene in moments of personal or epistemological crisis. Here’s a place where the naturalists who are scientistic have tied their hands behind their backs. They don’t leave room for the values that motivate science. Science, after all, is motivated not just by technological concerns but by the desire to understand. Working scientists can’t afford to shut their eyes to the awe and the wonder and the beauty that they behold, or the special kind of beauty that is critical to scientific method. For, as Einstein pointed out, what makes one theory preferable to another theory is a matter of elegance. People who blinker their vision to that kind of thing don’t make really creative scientists. They miss things. But even in the golly-gee-whiz end of it, where the scientists do allow themselves to talk about the billions and billions of galaxies, species diversity, and how marvelous the fecundity of the Earth is, they don’t leave the right kind of room for it. In modern discourse the idea of the sublime was secularized in the eighteenth century. Several philosophers were struggling with questions about where to put sublimity. Is it a matter of feeling psychologically or almost physically pressed upon by the vastness of the mountain or the sea or the stars? Is it a matter, as Kant says, of recognizing that the moral law within one overtops even those powerful mountains, the sea, or even the heavens themselves? What were these philosophers doing when they reasoned about the sublime? They were taking a religious emotion and trying to find a place for it that doesn’t acknowledge a very fundamental religious motif. I don’t think faith is a leap in the sense of jumping into the unknown, uncharted and undirected, not knowing where you’re going or why. I think that’s silly romanticism. However, there is a leap in going from what you see 196 INTERVIEW WITH LENN E. GOODMAN and behold, which is always going to be finite and limited and perspectival, to that which is infinite. So, if you see goodness in a moral action, the reductive thing would be to try and do the sociobiological trick and say, “Oh, this is just something of value to that lineage.” The religious move, which naturalists tend to deny themselves, is to recognize finite goodness as the mark and marker of infinite goodness and finite beauty as the mark and marker of infinite beauty. These finite and limited things are openings to a larger, higher reality. The leap in that case is the extrapolation from finite to infinity. And, of course, we don’t have access to infinity as such. Yet science itself presses in that direction when it dares to think of universal laws—or even of functions that approach a limit.

Yes, but in monotheistic religions, the leap is not just from the finite to the infinite but also to a personal God. That is the meaning of theism. Isn’t that where the conflict of “science” and “religion” is to be found most acutely?

Yes.

Even if we assume that there is infinite beauty, infinite truth, and infinite goodness, how do we link these absolutes to a personal God who is described in very specific ways in traditional narratives? It is not easy to make that connection.

Well, here’s a place where I have to bite the bullet, but I will look over my shoulder and make sure that Maimonides is behind me. He says even little children should be taught that God is not a person. God is bigger than a person. Recently I’ve been a reading a book by Yochanan Muffs that speaks about the personality of God as depicted in biblical narratives. Muffs would have it that in the Bible God learns from experience and hence changes, but my philosophical bones revolt against that. I don’t care how sloppy the redactor of the biblical text was supposed to be in putting the Torah together, I don’t think a thoughtful redactor put together incompatible themes. Of course there are tensions in the biblical text that reflect different periods, different idioms, and so forth, but as a philosophic reader of the Bible I’m looking to see how these ideas complement one another, rather than how they—compliment with an “i”—our romantic predilections. And what I see in Muffs is a desire to make sure INTERVIEW WITH LENN E. GOODMAN 197 that God is humanized and therefore, of course, subject to error and ignorance, and capable of learning from experience. That’s the way Muffs reads the Noah story, that’s the way he reads the Akedah, the binding of Isaac. As you know, I don’t read those stories that way. For me reading the biblical text is the exegetical side of the philosophical project. I think that one of the techniques the Torah uses is to dramatize a situation by contrasting the world we know with the way things might have been. The plainest case is the account of creation in Genesis. What would there be if God had not created the world?

In other words, first there is a philosophical truth but then it’s dramatized or enacted in the biblical narrative?

Right. You certainly see that in the Noah story. God is represented as making a discovery. Oh, goodness, God didn’t know that the creature He had made was fallible and vulnerable and could do terrible things? Come on! What’s dramatized is God’s hands-off attitude. God is saying, in effect, “I’m not going to interfere. Seed time and harvest, summer and winter, will go on, but I know that man’s bent is evil from his youth.” The obvious consequence of that realization might have been to wipe out humanity altogether. But that is not the inference God makes from his recognition of human moral frailty. The inference God makes is a commitment to sustain the world, to give a covenant to humanity and sustain nature. The story of Noah dramatizes the fact that God doesn’t intervene even though God knows.

So your view is really Maimonidean!

Very. I’m working on that now, thinking about how to interpret Jewish beliefs in non-personalist language. I can’t do the cosmology the same way Maimonides does because I can go only so far cosmologically with Maimonides, because his Aristotelian, neoplatonized cosmology was simply wrong. I can, however, still think about the universe in teleological terms. There is no conflict between teleology and modern biology. What Darwin discovered, as his own son pointed out, was not how to eliminate teleology from biology, but how to restore it. Because, after all, what Darwin was trying to explain was how natural selection works, and that was a teleological project. You can’t describe natural selection without saying that certain organs, certain behaviors, certain physiological systems were useful 198 INTERVIEW WITH LENN E. GOODMAN to the animal. Darwin has done two things, both of which are very compatible with Jewish tradition. He has localized value in living species and their lineages, and he has made it dynamic. So, as I would read the course of evolution, you can see the emergence of higher and higher stages of autonomy as evolution proceeds.

I would like to focus on the word “emerge” since it has ecological connotations and raises ecological questions.

Okay, but before we move on to discuss these ecological matters let me reit- erate my position on the personhood of God. My main point is that personal narratives in the Bible dramatize philosophical positions. I consider the dramatizing to be very, very important. I’m writing something about that right now.

So is it fair to say that the biblical drama is a kind of an artistic device?

Yes. Definitely. Definitely. I already mentioned the creation story, the Noah story, and the binding of Isaac story, and all of them function in the same manner. Another example is the Adam and Eve story that dramatizes the human condition. We don’t live in a Garden of Eden, an idyllic world in which we don’t have work but just pick fruit off the trees. We live in a world where we do have to work, bear children, suffer. The biblical story takes the human condition as we know it and compares it to a virtual condition where those conditions did not exist. The story of the binding of Isaac represents, in my view, a revolution in religious thinking. It makes as plain as can be that the highest God does not demand the highest sacrifice: it is not the case that what you love most has to be given up to God. And if you think about what the practices were at that time—I refer to human sacrifice, which are well-documented archaeologically—then you realize how religiously sophisticated was the biblical narrative. The message is that God is not the mysterium tremen- dum, as Rudolph Otto would have it. Monotheism touches the unity of God by purging those negative values about violence and horror from the idea of God. God becomes—holiness becomes—a matter of love and caring, responsibility. Holiness does not mean, go to the mountain and kill your son. This is dramatized as a discovery. And the word for discovery in the biblical text is Moriah, the mountain where the sacrifice was supposed to have taken place. INTERVIEW WITH LENN E. GOODMAN 199

It is a play on words. Today, postmodern philosophers like to use word plays as a way to tease out philosophical ideas; some of them have been better at it than others. The Torah loves to use plays on words. And the words turned around here come from an unsuspecting prediction that Abraham makes. When Isaac says, “I see the fire for the sacrifice, but where is the lamb?” Abraham answers evasively “Hashem Yireh.” We normally translate this as “God will provide,” but literally it means “God will see to it.” That verb gets turned around and shifted into the passive voice, meaning “God will be seen,” instead of God will see to it, and that idea, of God’s self-revelation, gives the mountain its name. It becomes the mount of the theophany, Har ha-Moriah, “the mountain where God reveals himself.” How did God reveal himself on that mountain, and how did that become something that would make Abraham and all his descendants a blessing for the world? Because it transformed the idea of divinity from an idea of horror, an utter awesomeness that could be good or could be bad, although the frisson Otto looked for came from the bad part. The biblical narrative transformed the idea of divinity, its message is that holiness is really a matter of goodness, that God is a God of truth and justice, the judge of all the Earth, and the standard by which goodness is understood. That’s presented as a kind of crux when Abraham is told. “No, no, no, don’t do that! Do not sacrifice your son!”

To what extent can the believer relate to a principle, or a philosophical truth? To be a religious believer requires a relationship with a person.

Maybe.

Isn’t religion all about personal relationship? It’s very difficult to pray to truth or to even believe in some kind of a general principle.

Well, lots of people have lived or died for Principle, and in Judaism that’s called living, or dying ‘al Kiddush ha-Shem—in sanctification of God’s name. But I have to balk a little bit at the use of the word “principle,” as though it were some abstraction written down someplace. When I speak about infinite goodness, truth, and beauty, it’s more a matter of reality than of abstraction. As for prayer, as I see it, it’s not a matter of asking God for something. 200 INTERVIEW WITH LENN E. GOODMAN

Isn’t prayer about thanking God?

Yes, sure.

So, prayer is about thanking, but not about asking?

Yes, because thanking is an expression of appreciation. One can appreciate the great goodness of life without asking God to change his mind about things and make reality different. One can be grateful without just asking for more. Poetically, of course, our intimacy with God, as individuals and as a people, is represented in personal language. That’s why we address God as Thou, attah, and why we bless God. We can love beauty and perfection in our everyday experience, and in our extraordinary experience we see limited examples of such values as expressions of their infinite Source and Author. That, I think, is how we finite beings can encounter God, through our experience of goodness, beauty, and truth.

But what about petition? We have many petitionary prayers?

We do, we do.

So to whom am I praying when I petition?

I would also point out, though, that in petitionary prayer, we often say, ken yehi ratzon, “so may it be God’s will.” So, we’re not asking God, as it were, to change the universe for us. We’re asking, “May the words in my mouth and the meditation in my heart be acceptable before you.”

This is precisely the point: it is this “you” with whom the believer has a relationship. It’s very hard to relate to the God of Maimonides, even though intellectually, the God of Maimonides is more consistent. Religious life, one could argue, consists of a relationship with another personality. Whether we call this the Holy Other or the Holy Thou or the Eternal Thou, it’s still a Thou. It’s still a person, right? In other words, it seems to me that you are trying to take away the personalist dimension of God or the personalist understanding of God.

To say that I am trying to take it away is not entirely fair. I am wrestling with this issue right now since I am working on my presentation for a conference INTERVIEW WITH LENN E. GOODMAN 201 on special divine action that will take place in England. The audience will consist of non-Jewish philosophers and theologians. For Christians, most of these the concerns relate to miracles in general but more pointedly to the incarnation. The problem that vexes me is how to talk about special divine action when I don’t really think in terms of divine interference or disruption. Yes, divine generosity, divine creativity, yes. But I’m not comfortable with the idea that God learns from his mistakes and that sort of a thing, and therefore, is really one of the guys like us. In this keynote address at Oxford, I will try to emphasize the special- ness and uniqueness of moments of inspiration and creativity in nature. These are indeed special moments, but they do not exemplify God in terms of interfering or disrupting the course of nature. God is not like a tyrant who thinks, “The only way I can show that I’m in charge is by doing something that’s really outrageous.” I like what Antoine de Saint-Exupery says in The Little Prince: if the Little Prince commands the sun to rise on the little world of his asteroid, that works out just fine, so long as he does it at the right time of day.

Is this a way to assert naturalism?

There is a lot of naturalism here. But it’s not a reductive, mechanistic naturalism. It’s not the naturalism of Laplace. It leaves lots of room for the reality of emergence. That’s a theater of God’s creativity.

When I hear you discuss the benevolence of God or divine creativity, I hear echoes of your training in Neoplatonic philosophy.

It’s true. It’s true. I find a lot of benefit in Plotinus. I still teach Plotinus. I remember as a graduate student asking myself the question about petitionary prayer, the very question that you raised, Hava. I read something by Pseudo-Dionysius the Areopagite, also a Neoplatonist philosopher, who spoke about prayer of that sort. He described that sort of prayer as aspirational, and I felt he had really helped me solve that problem. It’s about turning our hopes and thoughts toward divine perfection. Now, in human terms, that means perfecting ourselves as intellectual, spiritual, moral, social beings. But that’s about us, not about God. Insofar as prayer is addressed to God it is, at its best, addressed to something that is really higher than ourselves, not just a mirror image of our own personalities and faults. I have been thinking about this issue a lot lately. 202 INTERVIEW WITH LENN E. GOODMAN

I haven’t written anything about it yet, but I am working on something along those lines. Let’s take divine knowledge. What would it be like for there to be knowledge that wasn’t focused on some particular thing?

For us, it’s very difficult, and probably impossible in principle.

Exactly. Our minds are quite limited. We may focus on one thing and then have something else in the back of our mind. For example, you can think about what you’re going to say in your lecture while you’re driving to work, and, hopefully, not get into an accident. But if you start expanding beyond one or two things, our minds can’t do it. The divine mind evidently, if it’s right to speak about a divine mind, has the capacity to do all of that thinking at once. You know, it’s not like the lady who said, “God, you help total strangers, so why don’t you help me?” If God is really everywhere, you’ve got to take that very, very seriously. Neoplatonic philosophers appropriately thought of God as a circle whose center is everywhere. But that’s a piece of imagery. How much philosophical flesh and bone can we put onto that poetic image? I haven’t fully explored this issue in detail so I cannot give you a clear answer, but, in general, any of our familiar notions of personhood don’t work when we try to apply them to God. Other Jewish philosophers, for example, Yoram Hazony, whom I admire greatly for his efforts to jumpstart Jewish philosophy once again, have been wrestling with the same problem, and he wishes to solve the problem by rejecting the idea of divine perfection. That is a new and interesting move, but I think one can’t go in that direction. I think that would not be picking up on what I think are the richest themes in the Jewish tradition.

Let’s pursue some of those themes. You are one of the few Jewish philosophers who has written philosophical reflections on Judaism and ecology.

Yes.

Do you consider yourself an ecological thinker?

Well, that would be a boast, so I wouldn’t go that far. But I am very interested in nature and its relationship to ethics. INTERVIEW WITH LENN E. GOODMAN 203

You had linked your understanding of nature and your understanding of moral values: your theory of justice is rooted in ontology. There is a causal connection between moral deserts and one’s place in the ontological order.

Yes.

Could you explain how you understand the connection between ontology and ethics?

Well, it’s meant to be a naturalistic theory but not a reductionistic one. In this, the theory about deserts, there is a hierarchy of beings. Deserts are grounded in the claims beings make, which I take to be the very reality of those beings, not a static nature but a dynamic one. It’s the project or conatus of each being that makes those claims, and it’s these that constitute the prima facie deserts of a being and evoke certain moral obligations, whether with regard to persons or with regard to anything else that is real. The issue is not mysterious: one of the tasks of all cultures is to figure out how to navi- gate that terrain, the terrain of deserts, since human beings must relate to one another and to other species. We see such questions rising to the surface especially in regard to food: some people are vegetarians, and some people keep kosher, and some people are vegans. These are all efforts to figure out what moral consideration is due to different creatures. I don’t pretend to be a legislator or a cultural arbiter. I don’t pretend to know the way reality is ordered, but I do like the Jewish way of ordering that hierarchy. I know it’s not the only hierarchy available; other people do it in other ways. Buddhism and Hinduism are kindred efforts to give regard to the deserts of all beings, sentient and non-sentient. I don’t think that one’s study of nature should lead one to regard natural beings in some reductive way, as is commonly implied by much of contemporary science. They’re not just mechanisms. I think we’ve gotten past that Cartesian way of thinking—or we should have by now. In the hierarchy of beings there is an emergence, the term you picked up on earlier, of higher values and greater autonomy. My mother, who was a poet, wrote a poem entitled “Discontinuous Continuum.” I find that a good way to describe what Ernst Mayr and Stephen Jay Gould would call “punctuated equilibrium.” When we look at the natural world we see a kind of continuum but also the emergence of higher-order claims being made, greater autonomy given or achieved; from a theistic standpoint, one really should identify what is 204 INTERVIEW WITH LENN E. GOODMAN achieved with what is given. I think that as that autonomy emerges, the deserts of beings are enhanced. The basic moral principle I’m using is that we should treat beings as what they are. I think of that obligation as a structural counterpart to the epistemological imperative to see things as they are.

Do you mean that we should treat animals differently from the way that we treat plants or minerals?

Well, as a matter of fact, we do treat these classes of beings differently.

But how shall we treat plants? What does it mean to have relations with plants? Do we stand in an ethical relationship with plants, or minerals?

Well, this is what ecological ethics is all about. These questions were raised already in the seventies when the contemporary generation of philosophers began to explore, or re-explore, the ancient question of the moral standing of nonhumans. Christopher D. Stone’s wonderful book, Should Trees Have Standing? is a good starting point to explore these issues and I still teach it. One of the strengths of my theory of deserts is that I don’t make moral obligations to be a matter of convention or contract. But that, unfortunately, is the dominant outlook in the liberal tradition. Liberalism took that stance in the seventeenth century when the big issue was the divine right of kings and people said, “Hey, no, we’re the people. We decide who’s in charge.” That’s all very nice, but that doesn’t mean that we create morality. The best we can hope to do is to create standards by which moral principles get enacted.

So are moral principles objective?

Yes. One of the deep flaws in contract theory is that it opens the door to an often unexamined relativism. I’m a moral realist, and I ground my moral realism in the real claims that real beings really make in nature. So I don’t have to say that moral properties are natural or non-natural properties, they’re not properties at all. The deserts of beings are ontological; the way things are, the nisus of their strivings, is the source of the moral ought. My moral realism is not heteronomous; it is grounded in the order of nature. So you can discover God in extrapolating upwards from the realism of that position, but you don’t have to derive it from divine command. INTERVIEW WITH LENN E. GOODMAN 205

Divine command is a way to express pictorially and poetically a top-down hierarchy. If you argue from the top down for ethical obligations, all you’re going to do is leave behind everybody who differs with you about whether there’s a top at all, and who differ with you about where the top lies. In my ecological thinking not only individual animals have deserts, but so do plants, so do species and ecosystems, and so do what I call monuments of nature and culture. Since this interview is taking place in Arizona, we have a clear-cut example: the Grand Canyon. It is a magnificent monument of nature as are many other sites in Arizona.

Yes indeed.

It would be terrible to see somebody do to those monuments of nature what the Taliban in their early stages did to the ancient Buddhist monuments. I don’t have to regard those Buddha carvings as sacred objects to regard them as worthy of being preserved because they’re monuments of culture. The destruction of culture brings to mind the work of Raphael Lemkin, who almost single-handedly defined the crime of genocide and fought successfully for the international agreement that made genocide a crime. In his best and most rigorous arguments Lemkin argued that the real problem with genocide, what makes it a more egregious kind of violence than the mass murder, rape, and pillage constitutive in it, is that it destroys cultures.

In other words, we must protect the monuments of nature as much as we must protect the monuments of culture.

These wonderful phenomena that we see here in Arizona and throughout the world deserve to be preserved and respected. I see a structured system of varying deserts, so I don’t have to worry that the deserts of the virus are on a par with the deserts of the infant it infects.

Put differently, the infant has moral superiority to the virus.

That’s right. The infant is more real, his claims matter more and deserve a greater and a different kind of respect and protection. The kind of respect we give to trees is not the same as the kind of respect we give our moth- ers or our dog. Humans stand on a higher plane than plants and animals. 206 INTERVIEW WITH LENN E. GOODMAN

I like to call it a plateau, because humans are persons, and persons have an equality that’s vested in their subjecthood. With humans, you can legitimately talk about rights and about dignity, and not just metaphorically, not by license; humans have rights because they’re subjects; they’re moral subjects. And if there are other, nonhuman, species that are persons also, they have rights, too.

You have just articulated the preciousness of being human, as a principle that needs to be protected, but today the preciousness of being human is being challenged by technology. Today superintelligent machines, or artificial intelligence (AI), threaten human superiority. Many futurists envision a situation in which these machines will supersede human beings or at least challenge humans in profound ways. Are you concerned about that development?

I think that that particular myth is very, very old. It’s the myth of the golem, it’s the myth of the homunculus who rebels against its maker.

The concept of the golem or the legend of the golem is quite old, but today this is no longer a myth. Superintelligent machines are able today to challenge humans, and in turn humans depend more and more on these machines.

I heard a very interesting talk at Vanderbilt a few months ago by a woman who is a professor of exactly that sort of thing at MIT. Her name is Rosalind Picard. She makes machines that can register emotions or counterparts of emotions by measuring skin conductance. She and her colleagues have machines that can not only gauge emotions in that indirect way but also evince emotions. They deal with machines that can open the eyes when you ask a question, smile, respond, and they’re robots.

The field of robotics will indeed transform all aspects of human life.

Yes. But she made a very good but basic point: robots can evince emotions and they can acknowledge or recognize or meter emotions, but they can’t feel emotions. This is a very, very important point which I elaborate in my new book, Coming to Mind: The Soul and Its Body, written with my coauthor, Gregory Caramenico. We deal pretty extensively with this question about INTERVIEW WITH LENN E. GOODMAN 207 the nature of consciousness, the nature of creativity, the nature of memory, and we make it clear that human beings are not machines, a very common analogy among scientists, including neuroscientists, today.

I’m very glad to hear your defense of human preciousness and look forward to reading your new book, but let’s go back to humans versus natural objects as opposed to humans versus machines. How do you assess Jewish interest in ecological or environmental matters? Do Jews care about these issues? Do these issues resonate with Jews? If not, why not?

I have a colleague who does Jewish sociology and I’m sure he’d be more equipped at least to devise an instrument, do a survey, and find out what Jews in general think about those things. Without having quantitative data in my hands, I would say qualitatively, I can think of three kinds of response. There are ecological Jews, who think that Judaism is all right because it has concerns about the environment. Then, there are Jews who haven’t thought much about it and don’t care much about it. And there are those who are pretty negative about it. In 1997, as you recall, both of us took part in a conference at Harvard, whose proceedings were edited by you under the title, Judaism and Ecology.

Yes, that’s right, and I still continue to write about Judaism and ecology, but that does not mean that the topic has generated the kind of response we anticipated.

Several speakers in that conference were Orthodox Jews of a certain sort, who basically said, “Well, I’ve looked into the halakhic discussions of these things and I don’t find very much—Judaism is not really very concerned with such things.” I thought they were incorrect on those texts, but they expressed an attitude that falls into the third category I outlined.

But why should Jews care about ecological matters? How would you convince Jews to really take environmental matter seriously? How can we get more Jews into the first category you just outlined?

Well, the first category consists of people who think that the ecology drives their Judaism. 208 INTERVIEW WITH LENN E. GOODMAN

I do not share this view, but I do think that ecology is a constituent of Judaism. I wouldn’t say that Judaism is okay because it’s ecological. For me, Judaism is okay, period, and ecology is part of it. The Jewish tradition holds forth affirmative values regarding the environment. When Adam is told that his job is to take care of this garden, the biblical text articu- lates the obligation of stewardship. So, I’ve been arguing for years against Lynn White’s claim that the Bible authorizes the rape of nature. I am very much in agreement with John Passmore, the Australian historian of ideas, whom I was privileged to meet years ago in Australia, who refuted White’s charges against the Bible in his 1994 book Man’s Responsibility for Nature. Nonetheless, the notion that the Bible is the cause of human exploitation of nature still gets a lot of attention.

Yes, every discussion on environmental issues always has to start with Lynn White’s critique.

That’s unfortunate, in my view, because White’s little essay is a bad piece of history of philosophy, or history of ideas. I think there’s a reason for the massive influence of that very short essay. I think people like to beat up on Jews, and they like to beat up on the Bible, and the two are related. Voltaire, for example, did the same thing: his critique of the church was inseparable from his critique of the Bible as well as his critique of Jews and Judaism. The Jews, or the Bible, are used as a stick to beat the Christians with. Nietzsche did it too, as much as Voltaire did, so it is important to keep the record straight.

I would like Jews to become more familiar with your philosophy of nature, but how can I make your philosophy of nature relevant, accessible, meaningful to Jews who do not take environmental or ecological issues seriously? From my experience of speaking to Jewish audiences in the United States I can tell you that it is very difficult to make environmentalism and environmental philosophy relevant to Jews.

Obviously, my theories are very much of the moment, but the Torah has been there a long, long time. And the Torah is very good on this stuff and it harbors deep ecological wisdom. INTERVIEW WITH LENN E. GOODMAN 209

Yes, I agree.

Instead of speaking about the Judaism and ecology in general, it might be more effective to study relevant biblical texts. For example, the story of Noah is an ecological text, If God is going to destroy the world because human beings aren’t behaving right, why is it important that Noah should save the animals? The biblical message is conveyed in the mode of a certain kind of story, and it’s using as a framework an older Babylonian story that had a different moral. The Torah takes the older narrative and changes its meaning to convey a different moral. As the anthropologist Claude Levi-Strauss has shown, every culture does that. If you want to tell people about my philosophy of nature, I’d be gratified if you’d introduce them to the general theory of deserts. I think it’s a sound theory: right and wrong are not mere social conventions. That means it’s wrong to think that something is right just because we decided to do it or to think or speak that way and agreed about it. Understanding the objectivity of right and wrong is a good place to start. The Bible is always a good point of departure. My experience with students is that they don’t know a heck of a lot about what’s in the Bible. Students today do not know biblical narratives, what the narratives mean and what they portend, so it is always good to start with the Bible, including the ecological message of the Bible. Even in a siege, the Torah tells us, one must not destroy the fruit trees. That’s a good place to start.

To return to your philosophy of nature, would it be right to say that you have an understanding of natural law theory?

Yes. Another way to put it is in terms of moral realism. I don’t think Nietzsche is right in supposing that if an individual has chosen some course of action and is really committed to that course of action that makes it right. That’s a perversion of what Kant did. Kant made autonomy a necessary condition of entering the moral sphere, and Nietzsche made it a sufficient condition of being right. Existentialists love that because it placed the individual in charge. But it’s a little like stories about reincarnation. When people imagine themselves in past lives, they’re always some important personage, not some peon working in the fields of Egypt trying to raise grain or cotton. What are the odds that people were really incarnated into the exceptional individual rather than the ordinary? You know, it’s similar here. You read Nietzsche and you think you’re king of the universe. That lordly personality is going to be lording over you, the schnook. 210 INTERVIEW WITH LENN E. GOODMAN

So, there was a wonderful remark in Erich Auerbach in the chapter that he wrote in Mimesis about—the knight. And he’s writing this while in exile in Istanbul right in the heart of World War II. In reflecting on the knightly class and the courtly literature that celebrated and canonized the courtly ideal, Auerbach has this wonderful line: “From the beginning, at the height of its efflorescence, this ruling class adopted an ethos and an ideal which concealed its real function.” Well, of course, the literature of courtly romance won’t tell anything about the real, grisly work that knights did. You can see him connecting that grisly work the knights did with what the Waffen SS were doing in his own day. What we’ve got to recognize is that personal decisions don’t legitimate themselves any more than personal opinions legitimate themselves. That’s a dialectical way of getting people to see that one needs to be a realist about right and wrong and not an intuitionist and not an existentialist or even a consequentialist. The fact that people can get together and agree on doing something does not legitimate it either. So I have extended polemics in my new book from Cambridge University Press, Religious Pluralism and Values in the Public Sphere, critiquing John Rawls on that question. Rawls was still trying to breathe life into the old Lockean paradigm. As I said, it did its job for the seventeenth century, but we’re not worried about the divine right of kings, certainly not in this country, and not in many other countries. The key point is that conventions don’t make things right. Morality is not a matter of convention. Morality has to look higher than that.

If I get you correctly, morality is part of the constitution of the universe.

Morality is as much a part of the constitution of the universe as mathematics is. It’s as real as that. And people who are, like Quine, ready to assign reality to mathematical entities because otherwise science couldn’t function are really being silly. You don’t have to have reality for mathematical entities in order for mathematical truths to be true, and similarly, in the case of morals, obligations don’t have to be entities to be real. But we actually do have moral entities, and those entities are beings. That is where value resides. You can look at those beings and see what their strivings are. I rest on Spinoza’s idea of conatus here. You can see what this organism is trying to do and you can try and situate that in a scheme of values. This tree is reaching for the sun. Its roots are reaching for water. There’s something very conative there. It is not just happening. It’s happening for a purpose, the purpose of allowing the tree to reach its potential. INTERVIEW WITH LENN E. GOODMAN 211

I understand the notion of the conatus in terms of natural entities, but how does it apply to the moral sphere?

The conatus is the entryway to the moral sphere. The moral sphere requires us to treat the tree as we should, just as there’s a right way to treat persons, based on recognition of their strivings.

Is it possible for the conatus of one person to conflict with the conatus of another person? Is it possible for one person to flourish and really realize all its potentiality at the expense of another?

It can happen. Although, that parasitic person, I must say, doesn’t really realize all of his or her potential, not by neglecting the potential every person has to be an ally or a friend, or something more, at least, than a parasite or a pest. One of the main tasks of social institutions, whether they’re communal or societal, is to resolve or prevent the sort of conflicts that you’re speaking of. The societal norms that operate in this regard are the formal ones; the communal ones are the informal ones. The communal norms involve roles, and the societal norms involve rules. One of the main tasks of those roles and those rules is to coordinate the aspirations of human beings. Onora O’Neill, who is an outstanding Kantian philosopher, is very good on this subject. What she did that I think is very, very important is that she personalized and individualized the Kantian idea of treating humanity, whether in oneself or in someone else, always as an end and never merely as a means to an end. To personalize the Categorical Imperative means to relate to one another as persons, to relate to the other person’s project as an individual. There’s good rabbinic basis for that approach. Think about that passage in Mishnah Sanhedrin where they talk about a human king making all the coins identical, but when God, the divine King, makes human beings, each one is unique. We start out by recognizing value in that uniqueness. I have fond memories of hearing Shmuel Sambursky in a lecture explain how the Greeks tended to regard individuality as a matter of idiosyncrasy, whereas the Jews valued individuality for its own sake. 212 INTERVIEW WITH LENN E. GOODMAN

What happens when expression of this individuality goes against the rule or the law that is supposed to apply to all people regardless of their individuality?

Since such a scenario is possible, our task is to adjudicate in such situations and figure out how to resolve the tension. But to follow up on Onora O’Neill’s analysis, let me say that we have to think first about the unique individuals and their relationship. How do I treat you as an end? I treat you as an end by having regard for your self-chosen end. Having regard for it might not mean affirming it. It might mean disagreeing with it. We can talk. I can rebuke you. I can reprove you. I could say, “Hey, you know, you’re on the wrong track.” But suppose you have a talent as a pianist or a violin- ist. My moral response to you is to support and uphold that, to help you develop that. We’re talking about intimate relationships here, where people need to know each other’s concerns and know each other’s strengths and weaknesses. That’s where O’Neill takes the very impersonal formulation that Kant gives to the categorical imperative and personalizes it, thinking in terms of a marital relationship or a relationship of parent and child. Levinas understood these issues profoundly. That’s part of what he meant, I think, in speaking so trenchantly and so poignantly about the human face. Everyone has a face, but every face is different.

If we apply this to marital relationships, you can argue that the person who seeks to get out of the relationship reaches the conclusion that his or her own conatus has to develop in a different direction which will at times undermine the marital relationship. Right?

Sometimes that’s right: the conatus of one person undermines the relationship. In these conflict situations, one has to respect the individuality of the other. So it’s a matter of coordination and subordination and cooperation, and there are degrees of intimacy and distance. I mean, in some cases what we owe others is civility, and in other cases what we owe them is charity. In other cases what we owe them is justice. But all of that is vested in recognition of the conatus. The rules have to do with the sort of general tendencies that we all have in common, like the desire to stay alive and not have one’s stuff taken away by somebody else. You know, we have rules about that. But when you get into the matter of roles, then it becomes a matter of, Am I encouraging the creativity of my children, or am I stifling it? Am I setting up goals and tasks for them that are INTERVIEW WITH LENN E. GOODMAN 213 inappropriate? Am I projecting my desires onto their reality and not hearing what they are all about? So allowing others to develop their conatus is a matter of sensitivity. What I think Onora did is existentialize that Kantian imperative and apply it to concrete human relations.

I understand the connection between ethics and ontology which you have articulated, but as you well know, in ancient and in medieval philosophy, ethics was part of the science of politics.

Sure.

As a moral philosopher how do you understand the connection between ethics and politics today? More specifically, how does that connection apply to Jews who now have a state of their own where politics is not theoretical but a practical daily challenge?

Well, political matters are never just theoretical, even in our daily lives here in America. Jewish life is political even outside the Jewish state. As an astute observer once remarked, “Jews live like Episcopalians, but they vote like Puerto Ricans.” Clearly, ethics and politics are always intertwined. But let me address your question in terms of American Jews and in terms of Israeli Jews. I hesitate, and I wish others would hesitate more, to tell the Israelis how to live their lives. You know, we don’t vote there and we don’t serve in the IDF. We care about them and we support them, I hope, but we should not be legislating for them. In America, the opportunities that we enjoy and the threats we face are very much of a piece. We’re, for the moment, relatively accepted in American society in comparison to previous eras in American history, as the historical record shows. And today we Jews have lots of opportunities, particularly as individuals. Those opportunities get limited by various laws that American society legislated in order to increase equality and enhance the status of groups that have suffered discrimination, and worse. For example, affirmative action, which has been justified in terms of remediation, or rationalized in terms of diversity, has been harmful to Jews, because we’re not a big enough and vocal enough group even to count as a minority. But I think the most obvious area where Jewish values have influenced political engagement has been in aligning Jews with liberal causes. But this is not unproblematic. We supported integration heavily. We supported a lot of legislation that we felt was liberal or progressive. Our aim, typically, 214 INTERVIEW WITH LENN E. GOODMAN was to improve the lot of minorities. We sympathized with the downtrod- den, in a kind of secularized version of the biblical commands to love the stranger and champion the widow and the orphan. For many Jews, especially those who define themselves in secular, cultural terms, liberal causes took the place of religion. They were secularized ideals drawn from Jewish sources but very selectively and often not personally applied. You know, we hated those slave owners or we hated those people who would not let blacks and whites use the same restroom. But since the struggle for equality of African-Americans was not a Jewish issue it was very easy to externalize the problem. In the past two or three decades, liberalism has shifted its agenda, and in some ways has become very problematic for Jews, particularly in regard to attitudes about Israel. A lot of money has been spent, your pet- rol dollars are supporting the building of mosques and the Jihadist agenda, and the propaganda that goes with it, which is trying to turn the State of Israel into a new South Africa, with the tacit understanding that it is going to be dealt with the same way South Africa was dealt with. Jews have been turned into accessories, before or after the fact, of the crime of Zionism. Many Jews identify with the new liberal or leftist causes and discourses because they think that’s the progressive way to be. And many more dis- sociate themselves from Judaism because they don’t want to be identified with whatever that bad thing is. I think we have a real issue in this country to define the ethical side and the political and social side of what it is to be Jewish in terms that avoid confusing Jewish norms with the secular norms with which they have become reflexively identified. A lot of Jewish leftists were able to see the differences between Jewish ideals and Jewish interests, including the interest in survival, when the information came out about the doctors’ plot, for example, in the Soviet Union under Stalin during the early 1950s. Yet not all Jews have dissociated themselves from the political left. Many Jews still haven’t gotten over the idea that FDR was the friend of the Jews, even though he slammed the door in the face of the Holocaust survivors and escapees and did not want to hear about it when the information about the mass murder of Jews was brought to him by Jan Karsky and others. Many Jews found it difficult adequately to assess the policies of FDR, thinking he was a friend of the Jews because he supported the liberal causes with which Jews identified. In truth, FDR was not a friend of the Jews at all; in practical terms, he was very much part of the problem. The policies he upheld were an obstacle. Because American Jews so much identified with liberal causes INTERVIEW WITH LENN E. GOODMAN 215 and saw FDR as the promoter of these causes they treated him almost like a messiah of sorts. So, I think we need to look more closely at the alignment of Jewish political attitudes in the United States. For this reason I’m interested in the work of Alan Mittleman, who understands how Jewish traditional values differ from liberal values, especially in regard to individualism. Jews are and can be liberal but we’re not just going with the flow, whatever is named and labeled “progressive,” therefore, we’re for it. Several think tanks and foundations, such as the Tikvah Fund or the Shalem Institute in Israel illustrate the degree to which Jewish political thought has moved away from naïve liberalism.

Do you align yourself with this critique?

Well, yes, I’m very sympathetic to their ways of thinking even if I do not necessarily endorse every single thing they say. I agree with their approach that looks at Jewish values in terms of what’s going to be beneficial for Jewish survival and for upholding Jewish values. Avi Weiss is exemplary of the effort to attain the mix I’m speaking of. He’s a liberal, and so is Alan Dershowitz. But neither of them thinks Zionism is a dirty word. I mentioned Yoram Hazony earlier, and I must say that his book The Jewish State: The Struggle for Israel’s Soul, about the birth of modern Israel, is brilliant. It’s understandable that he named his new institute the Herzl Institute because Herzl was a secular Jew who articulated the vision of political Zionism. By naming his institute after Herzl, Hazony has signaled the importance of politics for Jewish contemporary life—for Jewish survival and flourishing. I find it sorrowful now that we have a president here in the United States who seems to think that the building of housing on land that was part of ancient Israel somehow strikes a blow against peace but at the same time regards a terrorist movement like Hamas to be a credible partner in the building of the peace we all desire.

The State of Israel has indeed actualized Herzl’s political theory. But isn’t there a conflict between Judaism and democracy in the Jewish state?

Indeed there is a problem here. It might be better to describe it as a tension rather than a conflict. We have enough external enemies who really do hope do destroy us. We don’t need to use quite so violent a metaphor 216 INTERVIEW WITH LENN E. GOODMAN about our internal disagreements. I don’t think Judaism and democracy are incompatible. Many of the ideals and institutions of Judaism, after all, from the idea of the consent of the governed to the protection of the innocent and the rights of the accused, have Jewish ancestry. But there is a need, as your question implies, to work out in practical terms what it means to found a Jewish state today that is a multiethnic, multicultural democracy. That’s a question I want to explore in some depth in the final chapter of a new book I’m working on now about Judaism, and I expect to be exploring that question further insofar as I’m able further down the line. I see fruitful avenues of approach in the work of David Novak and Daniel Gordis, among others, and in the work of the late Daniel Elazar. We Jews have never had a dearth of sound and practical thinkers focused on the relationship of mutual support between the needs of our survival and the sustenance of the values we cherish and hold holy. What we’ve lacked historically, and still lack, are able and adequate willing partners for peace who are more committed to the furtherance of human well-being than to ignoring or denying our rightful survival as a people on this planet.

The relationship between Judaism and democracy is not simple, because traditional Judaism is not rooted in democratic ideals.

I would have to disagree with you on this point. Judaism does have democratic roots, since it is the people of Israel who agreed to accept the Torah.

Yes, but in terms of political institutions, we have no tradition of support for democracy. Even for the Rambam, the ideal regime is monarchy not democracy!

Yes, but let’s not forget that even in the United States, we have a bit of a monarchy, although we do not call it as such. We have a president who can’t be defeated on a vote of no confidence, even if his actions are limited by the other two branches of government. Thus the United States presidential system is semi-monarchical. As for the Rambam’s thoughts about a “king messiah,” we should bear in mind that his vision of that ideal regime, which he pictures as leading the world, not by conquest but by example, is a vision of a constitutional monarchy, with the leader subject to the law and guided by those who are immersed in the law, both in their knowledge and in their values. INTERVIEW WITH LENN E. GOODMAN 217

Let’s focus on the challenges to Israel, and sharpen the question. What does it mean for the Jewish state to be both Jewish and democratic? Where do you see the main challenges?

The main challenge is precisely that: to be both Jewish and democratic. That’s the challenge. In terms of Israeli politics, I don’t have specific sugges- tions to share, given the kind of disclaimer I already stated. As an American Jew I can’t really tell Israelis what to do and how to run their state. I am very friendly with leading Israeli intellectuals who are trying to address that challenge: how to have a state that is both Jewish and democratic. Menachem Kellner, for example, interprets a lot of the classical and medieval Jewish texts in terms of what’s going on in Israeli politics today. But I must confess that Israeli politics always looks a little foreign to me. If I were to hazard one piece of advice to Israeli politicians, it would be always to bear uppermost in mind that the interests of Israel must come ahead of one’s partisan interests or political ambitions. Too much is at stake to allow those ulterior motives to take the lead. I admire Natan Sharansky for his moral courage. He seems to be aware of the priorities I’m calling to mind. I mentioned Kellner, and I find that one recurrent theme in his writing is the need not to think in ontological essentialist terms about Judaism. That’s an example of a question that looks a little foreign to me, as if Judaism were a kind of club and the question were how open we intend to be about admitting others. Here in the United States we do think about what it really means to be Jewish. But ours is a consumerist society, and the synagogues want to embrace everybody, because they need members. So the issue of exclusion is not the burning question in this country that it can be in Israel. Recently I have been reading Yehudah Mirsky’s new book about Rav Kook. Now, Rav Kook’s a very interesting, but also very problematic figure. He was a brilliant man, a brilliant Talmudist, and also a visionary. I guess the most visionary thing about him was his acceptance of those secular—and they weren’t just secular, they were militantly secularist—pioneers who played so central and essential a role in creating the Yishuv.

Let us recall, though, that Rav Kook accepted them only instrumentally because of their help in the salvific process.

Yes, that is true. Rav Kook thought that in the rebuilt land there would be a coming together of body and soul. The secular pioneers were the “body,” and the Torah was the “soul.” 218 INTERVIEW WITH LENN E. GOODMAN

In this division of roles, the secular, Zionist pioneers did the material work which was necessary for the nonmaterial salvation.

Well, they did, but I don’t think he thought that salvation was nonmaterial. He was very committed to the land and the people in material terms, not unlike Judah Halevi. His view is not so far from Maimonides as well because Rav Kook speaks about the spiritualization of the physical. Two things emerge in Rav Kook’s biography: one is that World War I was very traumatic for him, as it was for the world. But in his case, that trauma projects itself into apocalyptic notions. Therefore, he interpreted the Balfour Declaration as the beginning of the days of the Messiah. It’s partly dreaming and partly nightmare. The second point that comes through is Rav Kook’s honest and profound belief in a vast coming together of the Jewish people in the Land of Israel. That certainly did not happen, and in that sense, his life is a failure. On the other hand, he did something that literally no one else could do, just as no one else could revive the Hebrew language the way that Eliezer ben Yehudah did. Rav Kook created a conceptual scheme in which there was a place for secular and religious Jews, in which he could envision their coming together. How that would happen, I don’t think he had the foggiest idea.

Now, that’s the irony of history, given the work of Rav Kook’s son, Zvi Yehuda Kook and his disciples, since they are a major cause for the rift between secularists and religionists in Israel at least since 1967.

Yes. I agree, that is a tragic irony. But if you’re asking me where I stand, I’ll tell you what my hopes are. My hope is that religion will play a vital role in the future of the State of Israel as it does in Jewish culture worldwide. One of the things you can learn from the history of religions is that when religions become established, religion reaches a mode of decadence which is, paradoxically enough, very destructive of religion. I often mention the experience in Japan when Buddhism was an established religion, and the Bonzes were like some of the priests that Martin Luther rebelled against in his time. When the Japanese decided to be more nationalistic and made Shinto official, and all the syncretistic temples were split up, so you didn’t have an established Buddhist clerical structure, only then, for the first time, were the Japanese people able to take Buddhism seriously again as a religion and not regard religious functionaries just as greedy, fat, corrupt people, which many had become when they were on the government payroll. INTERVIEW WITH LENN E. GOODMAN 219

Do we see a similar situation with the rabbinate in Israel?

No, no, but that’s what we have to watch out for. Clericalism and estab- lishmentarianism are very, very dangerous, dangerous to the religion, not just to the society, because they change the basis of the motivation to the religion. Moses Mendelssohn in late eighteenth century understood that religion has to be based on personal, spiritual, intellectual, and moral commitment. It has to be deep inside. It can’t be something imposed from the outside by fiat or decree. In religion, there can be no coercion, as Mendelssohn explained—not if spirituality is to be sincere and from the heart. After all, what the Torah calls on us to do is love God with all our hearts, not from the pocketbook or by glancing over one’s shoulder to see what others think of us. I addressed these issues in my book On Justice, where I reflected on Haim Cohn, the Supreme Court Justice of Israel. He came from an Orthodox family and had a yeshiva training, which he outgrew and rejected. Justice Cohn thought it a pure accident of history that Israel should follow precepts and precedents of Ottoman and Mandatory law when we’ve got our own legal tradition. He said that the humanistic values of that tradition should be something that judges could cite in cases, just as American judges might cite principles of common law as it was practiced in England, even though we here in America don’t belong to England anymore. Relying on our heritage that way, I think has a rich potential. How that plays out, whether the tradition always comes down on the right side or the wrong side of a given issue is not clear. Legislators have to deal with real issues, just as the ancient Sanhedrin had to deal with real issues in antiquity. But I don’t see the effort to apply contemporary ideas and experience in bringing to bear deeply Jewish values in addressing today’s problems (say, about organ transplant, or the status of agunot) as being of the same brand that was once marketed by the militantly secular ideologues who hold that we all should be Canaanites. There’s no point to the existence of the State of Israel if we’re going to be Canaanites! Canaanite secularism is dated and people who hold it today espouse a position that is not tenable. I choose the word “dated” advisedly. 220 INTERVIEW WITH LENN E. GOODMAN

Would you consider post-Zionism a kind of a contemporary expression of Canaanite ideology, since post-Zionists are also militantly secular? What’s your position on post-Zionism?

I think it’s a death wish. If there is a purpose for the existence of the State of Israel, it is bound up with our Jewishness. And I would generalize this, if there is a purpose for the existence of the peoplehood of Israel, it lies in our culture. And the heart of our culture is our religion. If you take that out, there’s no point any longer. There are ethnicities in the world that survive on the basis of a couple of all but forgotten folk songs or fond memories of certain dishes that can be replicated in the kitchens of some distributor and microwaved right out of the freezer at home. Ethnicities that exist for the sake of survival have no real raison d’être. And given the kind of pressures that our particular ethnicity faces, it wouldn’t last long on that basis. But I don’t see the religion as what keeps the Jewish people, which I call Israel, alive, as some people pragmatically have done: “Hey, you know, we’ve got to support this religion because without it there wouldn’t be much reason to be Jewish.” It’s the other way around. Judaism is the religion of the people of Israel, not just the State of Israel but the people of Israel. And Judaism defines our mission. That’s what we are here for as a religious community, as a cultural community, as an ethnicity.

It’s interesting that this statement is coming from you since you are the father of a very famous Jewish author, Allegra Goodman.

I am.

She is a paradigm of a contemporary Jewish author, whose work is definitely culturally Jewish, but her work is not particularly religious.

I still think that religion is the heart of Jewish culture, even if a contemporary author does not define him/herself in religious terms. But much of Allegra’s fiction is deeply religious. It’s just not didactic. Good novels are rarely preachy. INTERVIEW WITH LENN E. GOODMAN 221

But as a point of fact in Israel and in the diaspora, secular Jews are the majority; even though they are culturally Jewish and define themselves as Jews, they don’t act religiously. Are these people not to be included?

One can’t argue with facts, and I would not advocate excluding any Jew. All Jews need each other. But think of the children of these cultural Jews. Will they remain Jewish in subsequent generations? The children and grand- children of cultural Jews are not going to be Jewish. That’s what the 2013 Pew study, “A Portrait of Jewish Americans,” shows. Since you asked me about my daughter’s work, your question is very ad hominem and one that comes very close to my heart. If you read Allegra’s writing closely you will see that religion is very present. Look in particular at two things, Kaaterskill Falls, where there is a very definite spiritual message. The novel is a critique of an authoritarian mode of organizing a Jewish community. It’s a fictionalized account based partly on the community of Joseph Breuer, the grandson of Samson Raphael Hirsch. And to Breuer’s great credit, he was able to hold his community together in the wake of the Holocaust. He had the authority to do that. Allegra probes the ambiguity of his position and the hard choices he made. She addresses the depth of secular culture in Germany by imagining a ride in an ambulance where the fictional Rabbi Kirshner is being driven in an ambulance by a local volunteer fireman and they’re talking about Shakespeare, which the Rav thinks is much better in the original German. I refer you to that incident in the novel, to the fate of Rav Kirshner’s library, the character of his two imagined sons, and to the rabbi who appears at the end of the story, and says some very stirring things about what Judaism can be and should be, as distinguished from that authoritarian model. The character who speaks up at the end of that novel is a fictionalized version of Solomon Grayzel. And she puts some very beautiful and stirring thoughts into his mouth.

Even though her ideas may be religious, her novel conveys the ideas through a medium that is decidedly not religious. This is a literary medium which is inherently secular. What is Jewish about the culture of secular Jews? Let me ask more broadly: what are the challenges to Jewish existence, how can Jews today respond to those challenges?

Well, it’s possible now for a philosopher like me to write as a Jewish philosopher and not just a philosopher who happens to be Jewish. It’s possible now 222 INTERVIEW WITH LENN E. GOODMAN for a writer like her to write as Jewish novelist and to be taken seriously as a Jewish thinker and as a literary artist. Let me give another example from one of Allegra’s other novels. In Intuition, which is a book about suspected case of research fraud, she deals with issues of self-deception on the part of somebody who may have committed that fraud. The interesting thing about that self-deception is that the only thing that could have remedied it would be recognition of values beyond the immediate pragmatic values—ideals, which, by a delightful and skillful fictional device, are actually written on the walls of the labora- tory where the fraud took place, although broken up by some remodeling and rarely if ever in the line of sight of those who work there. There’s a deep religious point in the book. And the leitmotif, the subtext of the book, has to do with readings from John Donne. Now, I know John Donne is not a Jewish poet, nor are his sermons Jewish sermons. But the themes that Allegra raised in that way are very Jewish themes. They are not presented in the way of sermons, but of course, we know how much attention people pay to sermons.

So, given the fact that she responds to deep religious issues in a secular modality, let me repeat the question: what in your view are the major challenges for Jewish existence today and how are we going to respond to them? And can philosophy do anything significant in that regard?

Well, one of the things that I try to do as a philosopher is to show people how the values that I discover in the tradition make sense in a way that we today can understand. Given the need for cogent argument, my desire is not simply to tell people what they think they already know. I find that my writing is more challenging to people than I expect it to be, and I regret that. My intent is to elicit those values and argue for those truths that I think can be argued and try to contribute to shaping the tradition where I think it can and should be shaped. My hope in a very small way is to make Judaism better than I found it. And to rediscover riches that may be neglected or underrated or misunder- stood. And I can make a small contribution in that way, at least for some people. I’m not eager for people to say, “Oh, if Goodman’s got it right, let’s popularize it, let’s put it on TV.” When that happens, ideas tend to get denatured and I worry about that. So having lots of followers is not necessarily a good thing. INTERVIEW WITH LENN E. GOODMAN 223

Look what happened to Gandhi: many of the different movements that came out of Gandhi’s life and work were antithetical to everything he did and stood for. So, seeking to influence a large number of people is not my goal. I don’t pretend that my take on Jewish ideas will exercise vast power over people. In fact, most people aren’t necessarily even that interested in ideas. One of the questions you posed to me in writing prior to the interview concerns my contribution to Jewish philosophy. If I were to try to look at the ethical side of my work and the metaphysical side of my work, the work that I recently published about the emergence of the human mind and the irreducibility of a human person to mechanism, all illustrate my attempt to look upward rather than downward. Of course, I can’t write from a God’s eye point of view and say this is what God told you to do, so you’d better do it. I find that people who have done that sort of thing aren’t usually heeded very much anyway. There are many ways of being in the world, and people have the choice of not believing that God said those things, or of not believing that there is a God, or not believing the person got it right, you know, or not caring what God said. “I’m me, I don’t need to argue for my way of being in the world.” But if I can look upward from the beauty and elegance of nature, from the reality of moral truth, towards something larger that those values portend, then I can do something for somebody. And some of those people will be Jewish and some of those people will go on and study and discover more, and that makes the work worthwhile. That motivates the work for me.

I understand the higher purpose that motivates your work, but how does that purpose address the challenges to Jewish existence today?

The challenges are secularism, or secularity, namely, the idea that human beings have—or should have—absolute control over themselves and the world in which they live. We want control of nature, which I find very problematic, even though I try to avoid the accusatory “we” in my writing. Since this is an interview, let me use that “we” confessionally: we want control of nature. We want control of values. We want control of our lives. We want control of each other. It goes on and on. I think the biggest challenge to Judaism today is that its core values run counter to that quest for control. Instead we should accept nature, accept the dictates of conscience, listen to the Torah and learn from it. We talked early on in the interview about reading philosophy texts in order to learn how to be a philosopher. 224 INTERVIEW WITH LENN E. GOODMAN

I find you cannot teach much to Plato, or Aristotle, or Maimonides, or Saadiah, or Halevi or any other great philosopher of the past, but you can learn from them. Openness of that kind is what we have to struggle to win for ourselves. That, I think, is the key to Jews’ accepting their own Judaism and learning to regard it as a treasure rather than a burden.

As you consider the future of Jewish life or the Jewish way of being in the world, are you optimistic or pessimistic? As you look forward toward the unfolding twenty-first century, what do you see?

Well, you know, what people say, “Philosophers like to paint themselves into the middle,” and it applies to me in this case as well. I’m not an optimist, I’m not a pessimist, I’m a realist. Because I am a philosopher I identify arguments on both sides of a given issue and I am able to see possibilities and potential pitfalls. One of the things you can learn from the study of history is that there have been lots of crises. I don’t know any sensitive person who didn’t think, if he wrote about it at all, that he lived in times of transition, of change, and upset, because all times exhibit transition, change and disruption. It is only in retrospect that we can assess our own place in history. The challenges are always new and different. Today, for the first time in human history we, that is, humanity, do not need to worry so much about how we feed ourselves. There is enough food in the world to feed the human species, even though large sections of the world still suffer from chronic food shortages or malnutrition. This is remarkable. A lot of diseases have been overcome, communication barriers have been removed, transforming the way we live and work. For example, I live in Tennessee, and in the summertime I always marvel at how it was possible for somebody to work in this place without air conditioning. Clearly, modern technology has profoundly changed our lives; we’ve solved a lot of the technical problems. But the moral problems are still with us. Technology cannot solve them and may even bring many new moral problems to the fore. Remarkably, the Torah makes it clear that that’s the way it always was. The story of Adam and Eve reflects on what it means to know the difference between good and evil. Its’ a very ancient story that addresses a very contemporary problem: the fact that we human beings think we are in charge of deciding what’s good and evil. This is the real moral challenge of our contemporary life. The Rambam brings that out in his interpretation of the biblical narrative in the Guide to the Perplexed. The challenges are the same challenges they always were, even if the material culture is different. INTERVIEW WITH LENN E. GOODMAN 225

What about modern and contemporary science? Can science help us resolve the moral challenges we face?

Science, when aided by its technological offspring, only makes life a little easier.

Does science, or scientific knowledge, pose new challenges, be they theoretical or moral?

For me there is a connection between science and naturalism. The idea that you can explain things naturalistically has been around ever since the dawn of civilization. What the naturalistic explanations were, and whether they were correct or not, that has changed over time, but the challenge that science itself poses to religion is nothing new. The challenge that science poses to ethics is also not new. I agree that science today, for example, the life sciences, offers a wealth of information that challenges our understanding of human ethics. But what do contemporary biologists or naturalists plan to do? Can they manage the takeover of ethics that some of them have dreamed of? Since they are all Neo-Darwinists, do they want to make group survival into the standard of ethics? That was proposed by Nazi theorists of biology, and it is not a good idea because it will revive the logic of the eugen- ics movement: we will need to eliminate people who would supposedly undermine or jeopardize group survival. Today biotechnology allows us to do many things, but there are lots of things that can be done but ought not to be done. Technological advances expand the scope of human effective- ness but they also increase the danger of doing those things. You know, if this interview had taken place fifty years ago, the big challenge would have been the atomic bomb. In my childhood people were deeply worried about the possibility of nuclear war and we had “drop drills” in school in which we practiced diving under our school desks in case of a nuclear attack. The drills were mandatory and taken very seriously by our young teachers, even though these drills were useless. Today, the use of atomic bombs is not the big challenge, because humanity, at least in many places, has understood the futility of using them. However, there are serious ecological challenges, such as the risk of climate change, which may require us to behave differently if we want to perpetuate human life on this planet. But more challenging to human existence are the human challenges, the question of how we are to get along with each other. Those are areas where the Torah has something to contribute, and I think people should keep looking at that. 226 INTERVIEW WITH LENN E. GOODMAN

Your answer nicely links the past and the future: in order to face the future of humanity and of the Jewish people we must live with the biblical text. The Torah remains forever relevant.

Yes, indeed: the Torah is always relevant.

Given the eternal relevance of the Torah, how do you assess the academic study of the Torah in the context of Jewish studies? What is your view of Jewish studies as a discipline within the humanities? What are the challenges to Jewish studies, of which Jewish philosophy is a part, and what is the role of philosophy within Jewish studies?

Wonderful. Well, I guess, philosophy has been the late arrival to Jewish studies. This is true not only in the U.S. but in Europe as well. Within the burgeoning programs of Jewish studies there has been a lot of scholarship, depth, and sources but the focus has not been on philosophy but on other fields of Jewish creativity. Although scholarship about the Jewish past existed all along, the notion that every self-respecting decent-sized university should have a Jewish studies program is relatively recent and dates to the late 1960s and the early 1970s. It was the result of the rise of ethnic studies, which was a generalized version of Black Pride. Jews too began to assert “we’re proud of our roots, and we demand that they be represented in the university curriculum.” But this process of self-assertion took a couple of curious turns along the way because the pride part dropped out as scholars of Jewish history and culture sought to be very objective, which means very self-critical. Where other ethnically based programs tended to be advocacy programs, Jewish studies programs tended to be hotbeds of self-scrutiny which, for us, at least, often turns out to be pointing fingers at members of one’s own group. The big impetus, financially, for Jewish studies was the concern of donors that there not be another Holocaust. That concern led Jewish philanthro- pists to establish programs or endow positions to study anti-Semitism or the Holocaust. And of course, the university administrators accepted these donations, but they situated the endowed chair or the newly established program in a larger disciplinary context within the university, such as the department of history. How to do Jewish history in the context of the university was already theorized by Salo W. Baron, a highly able, accredited, brilliant, prolific, and incisive historian, who raised a generation of Jewish historians. Professor INTERVIEW WITH LENN E. GOODMAN 227

Baron explained how Jewish history fits into Western social and cultural history. He pinpointed a key problem in comparative and historical work: we must never compare our ideals with their practices. But while Professor Baron at Columbia University worked out the intellectual challenges of teaching the Jewish past in the larger context, the ways Jewish programs were established often had little to do with his scholarship. When American universities were establishing Jewish studies programs, they would set up a committee with several faculty members from different disciplines who happened to be Jewish; whether or not they were in Jewish studies didn’t matter. The task of the committee was to figure out where the first appointment in Jewish studies should go, and the same committee also determined the second and third appointments. Because often members of the committee came from the history department, original programs in Jewish studies were heavily weighted towards the study of Jewish history. A contributing factor was the heritage of the Wissenschaft des Judentums that founded Jewish studies as an academic discipline. These nineteenth- century scholars wanted to study the Jewish past under a microscope, by dissecting Jewish texts and personalities to figure out what they were all about. Jewish philosophy comes into that scene relatively late. Many who were doing philosophy, if they had any philosophical bone in their body, thought that mainstream philosophy is analytic. They took Descartes very seriously, if they concerned themselves at all with the history of philosophy. Analytic philosophers in most American universities didn’t pay as much attention to Spinoza, let alone to any philosopher prior to Spinoza. But even when analytic philosophers began to pay attention to Spinoza, they paid attention to his Ethics, rather than to his Tractatus Theologico-Politicus, which they could not possibly handle philosophically because they had no tools for it. Jews committed to historical and social disciplines, however, tended to read that Tractatus but often neglected its philosophical impact. To fully understand Spinoza one had to be trained like Harry A. Wolfson, who possessed knowledge of the Western philosophical tradition from antiquity through the middle ages to the modern era, but knowledge of the history of philosophy was not common among analytic philosophers. Conversely, thinkers who could have been in Jewish philosophy, like Isaiah Berlin and Harry Wolfson, were encouraged not to do constructive work in philosophy. It was the heyday of Positivism; and everything, it was thought, should be bracketed and treated taxonomically. Analytic philosophy had little use for the history of philosophy, and that ahistoricism, alongside 228 INTERVIEW WITH LENN E. GOODMAN the historicism of many of the real scholars, hampered the emergence of Jewish philosophy. Somewhere in the early 1970s a few of us who were in philosophy departments started doing Jewish philosophy. Scholars began to correspond with each other and the institutional setting for doing Jewish philosophy got going in the Academy for Jewish Philosophy, under the leadership of Norbert Samuelson. And one of the rules he always pressed at the academy meetings (and I followed him in this at programs I organized at the American Philosophical Association and elsewhere) was that you had to do something that wasn’t just descriptive. You had to actually be doing constructive Jewish philosophy, not just talking about it as a historian of philosophy. That practice liberated people to begin to talk about issues in Jewish philosophy that were handled philosophically, often with analytic precision but without the constraining limits of the analytic agenda. When we started having sessions on Jewish philosophy at the American Philosophical Association, that was part of a revolution of sorts within the profession because the APA sessions had long been seen as too heavily analytic and not attentive enough to the ways philosophical topics were treated in other traditions. By the 1980s the discourse of Jewish philosophy had begun to grow, but only a handful of us, really, were doing the work. Today more than a handful of people generate Jewish philosophy, many more books are published, and more people hold academic positions, in part because academic programs have become more interdisciplinary. Today Jewish philosophy can be taught in religious studies departments or in interdisciplinary humanities departments, but it is also far more readily recognized as a bona fide area of philosophy, and even as a significant current within mainstream philosophy. Given these developments, I can be optimistic about the future of Jewish philosophy within Jewish studies, albeit with some reservations, or clouds on the silver lining. I think that scholars have been liberated and licensed to pursue all sorts of topics and cultivate many different points of view. So I am optimistic about the future of Jewish philosophy because the scholars who generate it often know each other, work together, care about each other’s work, pay attention to each other’s criticisms, and so forth. That’s very wholesome and very helpful for the future of the field. INTERVIEW WITH LENN E. GOODMAN 229

So where is the “cloud” in the “silver lining”? Where are the dangers or pitfalls for the future of Jewish philosophy?

I actually see two “clouds.” One has to do with the extent to which contemporary Jewish philosophy is oversensitive to postmodern sensibilities and intellectual fads. Some of the postmodern stuff is very romantic and not very well worked out either philosophically or hermeneutically. I think there are some scholars of Jewish philosophy who sort of do a poor man’s imitation of Emmanuel Levinas, but only Levinas could do Levinas and only he was good at it. When Jewish philosophers try to imitate Levinas they impoverish Jewish philosophy. That’s true, I think, of any band of imi- tators, regardless of their idol. The other “cloud” is that the historicist approach is still very strong and tends to muffle the discourse of Jewish philosophy. The theory that you’re being more fair and objective if you’re working in that strictly bracketing sort of way seems to me to be a mistake. As a result of the conceit of objectivity, a lot of key philosophical questions get begged. For example, historians of Jewish philosophy are too enamored of labels: Was Maimonides an “Aristotelian” or a “Platonist”? Surely he could not have been both given the tensions or contradictions between the views of Aristotle and the views of Plato. I maintain that this pigeonholing approach to the study of Jewish philosophical past is not productive or philosophically interesting, even though discovering presumed contradictions in an ancient or a medieval thinker can always get you an article in a scholarly journal. If Jewish philosophy remains limited to this historicist approach it will remain weak, and that’s a weakness that we have to watch out for.

So in the end of this interview, we come back to where we started when I asked you to define yourself. As I see it you are a historian of philosophy, a constructive philosopher, a moral philosopher, and a political thinker and your work has integrity and wholesomeness which cannot be reduced to any one of these disciplines or methodologies.

Thank you. I take this as a compliment because I do strive to see thematic unities, not by rolling over differences, but by understanding what motivated and what can continue to motivate our ideas and our work as critical thinkers today. 230 INTERVIEW WITH LENN E. GOODMAN

You are indeed a synthetic thinker and I understand why you see Jewish philosophy, and perhaps all philosophy, as synthetic work.

Very much.

Thank you, Professor Goodman, for taking the time from your busy schedule to come to Phoenix as a scholar-in-residence in Congregation Beth El, enabling us to hold the interview in Phoenix rather than in Nashville, Tennessee. This has been most enlightening conversation and I trust that others will benefit from your deep insights.

Thank you. SELECT BIBLIOGRAPHY

Books

1. Ibn Tufayl’s Hayy ibn Yaqzan, translated with commentary. New York: Twayne, 1972. Updated with new introduction, index, and bibliography, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2009. 2. Rambam: Readings in the Philosophy of Maimonides, translated with commentary. New York: Viking, 1976; paperback, New York: Schocken, 1977. 3. Saadiah’s Book of Theodicy: A Tenth Century Arabic Commentary and Translation of the Book of Job, translated with commentary. Yale Judaica Series 25. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1988. 4. On Justice: An Essay in Jewish Philosophy. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1991. Updated paperback with new introductory essay, Oxford: Littman Library of Jewish Civilization, 2008. 5. Avicenna. London: Routledge, 1992. Choice Outstanding Academic Book, 1994. Italian translation, L’Universo di Avicenna (Genoa: ECIG, 1995). Updated paperback, Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2006. 6. God of Abraham. New York: Oxford University Press, 1996. Gratz Centen nial Prize, 1997. Monotheism, the 1981 volume based on the Baumgardt Prize Lectures of 1979 is subsumed in revised and expanded form in God of Abraham. 7. Judaism, Human Rights and Human Values. New York: Oxford University Press, 1998. 8. Jewish and Islamic Philosophy: Crosspollinations in the Classic Age. Edinburgh and New Brunswick, NJ: Edinburgh University Press and Rutgers University Press, 1999. 9. In Defense of Truth: A Pluralistic Approach. Amherst, NY: Humanity Press, 2001. 10. Islamic Humanism. New York: Oxford University Press, 2003. Turkish translation, Istanbul: Iletişim, 2006. 11. Love Thy Neighbor as Thyself. Gifford Lectures. New York: Oxford University Press, 2008. 12. (With Richard McGregor) The Case of the Animals versus Man Before the King of the Jinn, critical edition from the Arabic manuscripts, with translation and commentary of the tenth-century ecological fable by 232 SELECT BIBLIOGRAPHY

the Ikhwan al-Safa (Brethren of Purity). Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009. Paperback of the translation and commentary, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012. 13. Creation and Evolution. London: Routledge, 2010. 14. (With D. Gregory Caramenico) Coming to Mind: The Soul and its Body. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2013. 15. Religious Pluralism and Values in the Public Sphere. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014.

Edited Volumes

16. (With G. Wise and Salo W. Baron) Violence and Defense: The Jewish Experience. Philadelphia: Jewish Publication Society, 1977. 17. Menachem Kellner, Maimonides on Human Perfection. Brown Judaic Studies 202. Atlanta: Scholars Press, 1990. 18. David Novak, The Theology of Nahmanides Systematically Presented. Brown Judaic Studies 271. Atlanta: Scholars Press, 1992. 19. Neoplatonism and Jewish Thought. Albany: SUNY Press, 1992. 20. (With Heidi M. Ravven) Jewish Themes in Spinoza’s Philosophy. Albany: SUNY Press, 2002. 21. Abraham Melamed, The Philosopher King in Medieval and Renaissance Jewish Political Thought. Albany: SUNY Press, 2003. 22. (With Robert Talisse) Aristotle’s Politics Today. Albany: SUNY Press, 2007; paperback, 2008. 23. (With Idit Dobbs-Weinstein and James Grady) Maimonides and His Heritage. Albany: SUNY Press, 2009.

Book Chapters

24. “Razi’s Myth of the Fall of the Soul.” In Essays on Islamic Philosophy and Science, edited by G. Hourani, 25–40. Albany: SUNY Press, 1975. Reprinted in Islamic Philosophy and Theology: Critical Concepts in Islamic Thought, vol. 3, edited by Ian Netton, 330–44. London: Routledge, 2007. 25. “The Greek Impact on Arabic Literature.” In Cambridge History of Arabic Literature: Arabic Literature to the End of the Umayyad Period, edited by A. F. L. Beeston, T. M. Johnstone, R. B. Serjeant, and G. R. Smith, 460–82. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984. SELECT BIBLIOGRAPHY 233

26. “Medieval Philosophy.” In New Trends in Philosophy, edited by Asa Kasher, 2.93–165. Tel Aviv: Yahdav, 1985 [Hebrew]. 27. (With M. J. Goodman) “Sexual Racism in Population Policy.” In Women in Asia and the Pacific, edited by M. J. Goodman, 83–101. Honolulu: University of Hawaii, 1985. 28. “Determinism and Freedom in Spinoza, Maimonides, and Aristotle.” In Responsibility, Character, and the Emotions, edited by F. Schoeman, 107–64. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987. 29. “Ibn Bajjah.” In Encyclopedia of Religion. New York: Macmillan, 1987. 30. “Matter and Form as Attributes of God in Maimonides’ Philosophy.” In A Straight Path: Studies in Honor of Arthur Hyman, edited by R. L. Salinger, J. Hackett, M. S. Hyman, R. J. Long, and C. H. Manekin, 86–97. Washington, DC: Catholic University of America Press, 1987. 31. “Maimonides’ Responses to Saadya Gaon’s Theodicy and Their Islamic Backgrounds.” In Studies in Islamic and Judaic Traditions II, edited by W. M. Brinner and S. D. Ricks, 3–22. Atlanta: Scholars Press, 1989. 32. “The Rational and Irrational in Jewish and Islamic Philosophy.” In Rationality in Question: On Eastern and Western Views of Rationality, edited by S. Biderman and B. Scharfstein, 93–118. Leiden: Brill, 1989. 33. “The Translation of Greek Materials into Arabic.” In Cambridge History of Arabic Literature: Religion, Learning and Science in the ‘Abbasid Period, edited by M. J. L. Young, J. D. Latham, and R. B. Serjeant, 477–97. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990. 34. “Six Dogmas of Relativism.” In Cultural Relativism and Philosophy, edited by M. Dascal, 77–102. Leiden: Brill, 1991. Spanish version in Relativismo cultural y filosofia, edited by M. Dascal, 109–43. Mexico City: Universidad Nacional Autonoma de Mexico, 1993. 35. “Three Enduring Achievements of Islamic Philosophy.” In Culture and Modernity: East-West Philosophic Perspectives, edited by Eliot Deutsch, 401–29. Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 1991. 36. “The Individual and the Community in the Normative Traditions of Judaism.” In Autonomy and Judaism, edited by D. Frank, 69–119. Albany: SUNY Press, 1992. Also in Religious Diversity and Human Rights, edited by Irene Bloom et al., 15–53. New York: Columbia University Press, 1997. 37. “Maimonidean Naturalism.” In Neoplatonism and Jewish Thought, edited by Lenn E. Goodman, 157–94. Albany: SUNY Press, 1992. New version in Maimonides and the Sciences, edited by Robert Cohen and Hillel Levine, 57–85. Dordrecht: Kluwer, 2000. 234 SELECT BIBLIOGRAPHY

38. “Abortion and the Emergence of Human Life: Maimonides and the Judaic View.” In Bits of Honey: Essays for Samson H. Levey, edited by S. Chyet and D. Ellenson, 163–90. Atlanta: Scholars Press, 1993. 39. “Jewish and Islamic Philosophies of Language.” In Sprachphilosophie, edited by K. Lorenz, 1.34–55. Berlin: DeGruyter, 1993. 40. “Leibniz and Futurity: Was it all over with Adam?” In Leibniz and Adam, edited by M. Dascal and E. Yakira, 301–24. Tel Aviv: University Publishing, 1993. 41. “Mythic Discourse.” In Myths and Fictions, edited by B. Scharfstein and S. Biderman, 51–112. Leiden: Brill, 1993. 42. “Rational Law/Ritual Law.” A People Apart: Chosenness and Ritual in Jewish Philosophical Thought, edited by D. Frank, 109–200. Albany: SUNY Press, 1993. 43. “Razi.” In Encyclopedia of Islam, 7.474–77. Leiden: Brill, 1993. 44. “The Sacred and the Secular: Rival Themes in Arabic Literature.” In The Literary Heritage of Islam: Studies in Honor of James Bellamy, edited by Mustansir Mir, 287–330. Princeton, NJ: Darwin Press, 1993. 45. “Albo,” “Buber,” “Cohen,” “Crescas,” “Farabi,” “Halevi,” “Ibn Gabirol,” “I and Thou,” “Kabbalah,” “Maimonides,” “Mendelssohn,” “Philo,” “Rosenzweig,” and “Saadiah.” In Oxford Companion to Philosophy, edited by Ted Honderich. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995. 46. “Al-Razi,” “Averroes,” “Avicenna,” “Ibn Daud,” “Maimonides,” “Miskawayh,” and “Saadiah.” In Cambridge Dictionary of Philosophy, edited by Robert Audi. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995. 47. “Al-Razi,” “Ibn Masarrah,” “Ibn Bajjah,” “Ibn Tufayl,” and “Saadiah Gaon.” In Routledge History of Islamic Philosophy, edited by S. H. Nasr and O. Leaman, 198–215, 277–93, 294–312, 313–29, and 696–711. London: Routledge, 1995. 48. “Jewish Philosophy.” Oxford Companion to Philosophy, edited by Ted Honderich, 429–31. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995. 49. “Toward a Jewish Philosophy of Justice.” In Commandment and Community, edited by Daniel Frank, 3–53. Albany: SUNY Press, 1995. 50. “Humanism and Islamic Ethics: The Curious Case of Miskawayh.” In Morals and Society in Asian Philosophy, edited by Brian Carr, 1–22. Richmond, UK: Curzon, 1996. 51. “Judah Halevi.” In Routledge History of Jewish Philosophy, edited by Daniel Frank and Oliver Leaman, 188–227. London: Routledge, 1997. 52. “Judaism.” In Blackwell Companion to Religious Philosophy, edited by Charles Taliaferro, Paul Draper, Philip Quinn, 43–55. Malden, MA: Blackwell, 1997; updated, 2007, 2009. Second edition, 2010, 44–58. SELECT BIBLIOGRAPHY 235

53. “Knowledge and Reality in Islamic Philosophy” and “Morals and Society in Islamic Philosophy.” In Companion Encyclopedia of Asian Philosophy, edited by Brian Carr and Indira Mahalingam, 965–99, 1000–24. London: Routledge, 1997. 54. “Political Philosophy.” In The Future of Philosophy, edited by Oliver Leaman, 62–76. London: Routledge, 1998. 55. “Saadiah Gaon,” “Bahya Ibn Paquda,” “Judah Halevi,” and “Moses Maimonides.” In Routledge Encyclopedia of Philosophy, edited by Edward Craig, 4.207–13, 4.633–36, 6.40–49, and 8.435–40. London: Routledge, 1998. 56. “The Diodorean Modalities and the Master Argument.” In From Puzzles to Principles?: Essays on Aristotle’s Dialectic, edited by May Sim, 15–37. Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 1999. 57. “Philosophy in the Majlis.” In The Majlis Book: Interreligious Encounters in Medieval Islam, edited by Hava Lazarus-Yafeh, Mark Cohen, S. Griffith, and S. Somekh, 77–100. Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz, 1999. 58. “Ibn Tufayl.” In Cambridge History of Arabic Literature: The Literature of Al-Andalus, edited by Maria Menocal, R. Scheindlin, and Michael Sells, 318–30. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000. 59. “Maimonides and the Philosophers of Islam: The Problem of Theophany.” In Judaism and Islam: Boundaries, Communication, and Interaction, edited by B. H. Hary, J. L. Hayes, and F. Astren, 279–301. Leiden: Brill, 2000. 60. “Persons.” In Personhood and Health Care, edited by D. C. Thomasma, D. N. Weisstub, and C. Hervé, 19–41. Dordrecht: Kluwer, 2001. 61. “Neoplatonism: Unity and Plurality in the Arts.” In Neoplatonism and Contemporary Thought, edited by R. Baine Harris, 2.243–56. Albany: SUNY Press, 2002. 62. “Respect for Nature.” In Judaism and Ecology, edited by Hava Tirosh- Samuelson, 227–59. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2002. 63. “What Does Spinoza’s Ethics Contribute to Jewish Philosophy?” In Jewish Themes in Spinoza’s Philosophy, edited by Heidi M. Ravven and Lenn E. Goodman, 17–89. Albany: SUNY Press, 2002. 64. “The Covenant and Religious Ethics Today.” In Two Faiths, One Covenant?, edited by Eugene B. Korn and John T. Pawlikowski, 125–43. Kansas City, MO: Sheed and Ward, 2005. 65. “God and the Good Life: Maimonides’ Virtue Ethics and the Idea of Perfection.” In Die Trias Maimonides, edited by George Tamer, 123–35. Berlin: De Gruyter, 2005. 236 SELECT BIBLIOGRAPHY

66. “Aristotle’s Polity Today.” In Aristotle’s Politics Today, edited by Lenn E. Goodman and Robert Talisse, 129–50. Albany: SUNY Press, 2007. 67. “Maimonides on the Soul.” In Maimonides after 800 Years, edited by Jay Harris, 65–80. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2007. Expanded in “The Psychology of Maimonides and Halevi.” In Maimonides—Thought and Innovation, edited by A. Ravitzky, 317–49. Jerusalem: Zalman Shazar Center, 2008 [Hebrew]. 68. “Creation and Emanation.” In Cambridge History of Jewish Philosophy from Antiquity through the Seventeenth Century, edited by S. Nadler and T. Rudavsky, 599–618. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2008. 69. “Pluralism and Consensus.” In Rescher Studies: Essays on the Philosophy of Nicholas Rescher, edited by R. Almeder, 105–20. Frankfurt: Ontos, 2008. Another version in Reason, Method, and Value: A Reader on the Philosophy of Nicholas Rescher, edited by Dale Jacquette, 455–70. Frankfurt: Ontos, 2009. 70. “Bahya and Maimonides on the Worth of Medicine.” In Maimonides and His Heritage, edited by Idit Dobbs-Weinstein, Lenn E. Goodman, and James Grady, 61–93. Albany: SUNY Press, 2009. 71. “Commitment in the Liberal State Today.” In Theology and the Soul of the Liberal State, edited by L. V. Kaplan and Charles Cohen, 25–51. Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2010. 72. “Happiness: Jewish, Christian, and Muslim Perspectives.” In Cambridge History of Medieval Philosophy, edited by Robert Pasnau, 457–71. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010. 73. “Individuality.” In Judaic Sources and Western Thought, edited by Jonathan Jacobs, 238–61. New York: Oxford University Press, 2011. 74. “Monotheism and Ethics.” In Monotheism and Ethics, edited by Tzvi Langermann, 11–23. Leiden: Brill, 2011. 75. “Doing Jewish Philosophy in America.” In Jewish Philosophy: Perspectives and Retrospectives, edited by Raphael Jospe and Dov Schwartz, 33–56. Boston: Academic Studies Press, 2012. 76. “Al-Ghazālī and Hume on Causality.” In Ishraq: Islamic Philosophy Yearbook 4, 448–72. Moscow: Vostochnaya Literatura, 2013. Another version in The Misty Land of Ideas and the Light of Dialogue, edited by Ali Paya, 49–80. London: ICAS Press, 2013. 77. “God and the Law.” In Pragmatic and Political Studies in Judaism, edited by Andrew Schuman, 85–113. Piscataway, NJ: Gorgias, 2013. 78. “Humanism and Islam.” In Encyclopedia of Sciences and Religions, edited by A. Runehov and L. Oviedo. New York: Springer, 2014. SELECT BIBLIOGRAPHY 237

79. “Toward a Synthetic Philosophy.” In Jewish Philosophy for the Twenty- First Century: Personal Reflections, edited by Hava Tirosh-Samuelson and Aaron W. Hughes, 101–18. Leiden: Brill, 2014.

Journal Articles

80. “Avicenna’s Theory of the Substantiality of the Soul.” Philosophical Forum 1 (1969): 547–62. 81. “The Epicurean Ethic of Muammad Ibn Zakariya’ ar-Razi.” Studia Islamica 34 (1971): 5–26. 82. “Ghazali’s Argument from Creation.” International Journal of Middle East Studies 2 (1971): 67–85, 168–88. 83. “Private Right and the Limits of Law.” Philosophy East and West 31 (1971): 380–93. 84. “Al-Farabi’s Modalities.” Iyyun 23 (1972): 100–12 [in Hebrew with English summary]. 85. “Ibn Khaldun and Thucydides.” Journal of the American Oriental Society 92 (1972): 250–70. 86. “Razi’s Psychology.” Philosophical Forum 4 (1972): 26–48. Reprinted in Islamic Philosophy and Theology: Critical Concepts in Islamic Thought, vol. 3, edited by Ian Netton, 310–29. London: Routledge, 2007. 87. “Equality and Justice, the Lockean and the Judaic Views.” Judaism 25 (1976): 357–62. 88. “Saadya Gaon on the Human Condition.” Jewish Quarterly Review 67 (1976): 23–29. 89. “Did Ghazali Deny Causality?” Studia Islamica 47 (1978): 83–120. Reprinted in Islamic Philosophy and Theology: Critical Concepts in Islamic Thought, vol. 3, edited by Ian Netton, 229–57. London: Routledge, 2007. 90. “Maimonides’ Philosophy of Law.” Jewish Law Annual 1 (1978): 72–107. 91. “A Historic Misunderstanding of the Keriyat Shema.” Conservative Judaism 32 (1979): 36–49. 92. “Maimonides and Leibniz.” Journal of Jewish Studies 31 (1980): 214– 25; Translation: “Observations on Rabbi Moses Maimonides’ Book Entitled—The Teacher of the Perplexed,” 225–36. 93. “Saadiah’s Ethical Pluralism.” Journal of the American Oriental Society 100 (1980): 407–19. 238 SELECT BIBLIOGRAPHY

94. “Unjust Enrichment and Regulation: Modern Application for One of the Seminal Categories of Talmudic Law.” Jewish Law Annual 3 (1980): 82–92. 95. (With M. J. Goodman) “Is There a Feminist Biology?” International Journal of Women’s Studies 4 (1981): 393–413. 96. “Bahya on Free Will and Predestination.” Journal of the History of Ideas 44 (1983): 115–30. 97. “Skepticism.” Review of Metaphysics 36 (1983): 819–48. 98. “The Biblical Laws of Diet and Sex.” Jewish Law Association Studies 2 (1986): 17–57. 99. (With M. J. Goodman) “Prevention.” Hastings Center Reports (March 1986): 26–38. 100. (With M. J. Goodman) “Medicalization and its Discontents.” Social Science and Medicine 25 (1987): 733–40. 101. “Ordinary and Extraordinary Language in Medieval Jewish and Islamic Philosophy.” Manuscrito 11 (1988): 57–83. 102. (With M. J. Goodman) “‘Particularly Amongst the Sunburnt Nations. . .’: The Persistence of Sexual Stereotypes of Race in Bio-Science.” International Journal of Group Tensions 19 (1989): 221–43, 365–84. 103. “Saadiah Gaon’s Interpretive Technique in Translating the Book of Job.” In Translation of Scripture supplement to the Jewish Quarterly Review, edited by D. M. Goldenberg (1990): 47–76. 104. “Time, Creation, and the Mirror of Narcissus.” Philosophy East and West 42 (1992): 69–112. Reprinted in Divine Intervention and Miracles, edited by D. Cohn-Sherbok, 99–151. Lewiston, NY: Mellen, 1994. 105. “Time in Islam.” Asian Philosophy 2 (1992): 3–19. Also in Religion and Time, edited by A. N. Balslev and J. N. Mohanty, 138–62. Leiden: Brill, 1993. Reprinted in Islamic Philosophy and Theology: Critical Concepts in Islamic Thought, vol. 3, edited by Ian Netton, 5–26. London: Routledge, 2007. 106. “The Trouble with Phenomenalism.” American Philosophical Quarterly 29 (1992): 237–52. 107. “Neoplatonism and Jewish Philosophy.” Journal of Neoplatonic Studies 3 (1994): 49–91. 108. “Crosspollinations: Philosophically Fruitful Exchanges between Jewish and Islamic Thought.” Medieval Encounters 3 (1996): 323–57. 109. “Prescriptivity.” Jewish Philosophy and Jewish Thought 5 (1996): 147– 75. SELECT BIBLIOGRAPHY 239

110. “Mosaic Liberalism.” Judaism 52 (2003): 21–38. Updated in Studies in Memory of Ze’ev Falk, edited by M. Corinaldi, M. D. Herr, R. Horwitz, and Y. D. Silman, 5–24. Jerusalem: Mesharim, 2005. 111. “Value and the Dynamics of Being” (Presidential Address, Metaphysical Society of America), Review of Metaphysics 61 (2007): 723–42. 112. “Science and God.” Society 45 (2008): 130–42. 113. “An Idea Is Not Something Mute Like a Picture on a Pad.” Review of Metaphysics 62 (2009): 1–46. 114. “May You Live to be 150!” Society 46 (2009): 240–46. 115. “The Perils of Public Intellectualism.” Society 46 (2009): 29–37. 116. “Ethics and God.” Philosophical Investigations 34 (2011): 135–50. 117. “Tragedy and Triumphalism.” Political Theology 12 (2011): 743–50. 118. “A Call to Higher Things: Miroslav Volf and the Life of Faith.” Political Theology 14 (2013): 786–95. 119. “The King James Bible at 401.” Society 50 (2013): 73–80.

Book Review

120. Bergson and Modern Thought, edited by A. C. Papanicolaou and P. Gunter. Process Studies 21 (1992): 260–68.