The clot in his coronary artery, his ruptured bowel, or whatever diseased body part that the pathologist displayed as the putative explanation of his death was utterly incommensurable with the awesome massive fact, the extinction of this never-to-be-repeated human being, for whom I had cared and for whom his survivors now grieve.
Despite these inchoate reservations, however, I continued to follow the path of science, indeed to an even more molecular level. I entered the Ph. But my biggest discovery came outside of the laboratory.
In summer , interrupting my research, my wife and I went to Mississippi to do civil-rights work. We visited many families in the community, participated in their activities, and helped with voter registration and other efforts to encourage the people to organize themselves in defense of their rights.
This deeply moving experience changed my life, but not in any way I would have expected. On returning to Cambridge, I was nagged by a disparity I could not explain between the uneducated, poor black farmers in Mississippi and many of my privileged, highly educated graduate-student friends at Harvard.
Yet in Mississippi I saw people living honorably and with dignity in perilous and meager circumstances, many of them illiterate, but sustained by religion, extended family, and community attachment, and by the pride of honest farming and homemaking. They even seemed to display more integrity, decency, and strength of character, and less self-absorption, vanity, and self-indulgence, than many of my high-minded Harvard friends who shared my progressive opinions.
How could this be? In summer , my closest friend had me read Rousseau's explosive Discourse on the Sciences and the Arts , for which my Mississippi and Harvard experiences had prepared me. Rousseau argues that, pace the Enlightenment, progress in the arts and sciences does not lead to greater virtue.
Rousseau complains that writers and "idle men of letters" — the equivalent of our public intellectuals, not to say professors — subvert decent opinion and corrupt the citizens: "These vain and futile declaimers go everywhere armed with their deadly paradoxes, undermining the foundations of faith and annihilating virtue. They smile disdainfully at the old-fashioned words of fatherland and religion, and devote their talents and philosophy to destroying and debasing all that is sacred among men.
Rousseau also complains that cultivation of the arts and sciences leads to inequality and contempt for the common man: "One no longer asks if a man is upright, but rather if he is talented; nor of a book if it is useful, but if it is well written. Rewards are showered on the witty, and virtue is left without honors We have physicists, geometers, chemists, astronomers, poets, musicians, painters; we no longer have citizens. And Rousseau complains also that formal education corrupts the young: "I see everywhere immense institutions where young people are brought up at great expense, learning everything except their duties Without knowing how to distinguish error from truth, [your children] will possess the art of making them both unrecognizable to others by specious arguments.
Could Rousseau be right? Is it really true that the natural home of intellectual progress is not the natural home of moral and civic virtue? Is it really true that, as the arts and sciences climb upward, so morals, taste, and citizenship slide downward, and, what's worse, that the rise of the former causes the fall of the latter? If so, all that I had believed about the simple harmony between intellectual and moral progress was called into question. And if the Enlightenment view was not correct, what should I think instead?
For the first time in my life, I acquired some real questions, pressing questions, more challenging than those one can answer in the laboratory. A crevice had opened in my understanding of mentschlichkeit , between the humane commitments of compassion and equality and the human aspiration to excellence and upright dignity.
Lewis's The Abolition of Man. Eliminated are war, poverty, and disease; anxiety, suffering, and guilt; hatred, envy, and grief; but the world thus "perfected" is peopled by creatures of human shape but of stunted humanity. They consume, fornicate, take "soma," enjoy the "feelies" and "centrifugal bumble-puppy," and operate the machinery that makes it all possible. They do not read, write, think, love, or govern themselves. Precisely because "progress" has eliminated the need for struggle or the call to greatness and adventure, no one aspires to anything higher than bodily health and immediate gratification.
Worst of all, the denizens of the Brave New World are so dehumanized that they have no idea of what they are missing. By expunging from its account of life any notion of soul, aspiration, and purpose, and by setting itself against the evidence of our lived experience, modern biology ultimately undermines our self-understanding as creatures of freedom and dignity, as well as our inherited teachings regarding how to live — teachings linked to philosophical anthropologies that science has now seemingly dethroned.
Could we continue to reap the benefits of our new biology and our emerging biotechnologies without eroding our freedom and dignity? What features of our humanity most needed defending, both in practice and in thought? What solid ideas of human nature and human good could be summoned to the cause?
Pursuit of these questions would require a change of direction and a different approach to human affairs. Without realizing it, I became a humanist. At that time, some scientists and humanists, not a few of them enthusiasts of a "post-human" future, were addressing the gap between our science and our ethics by proposing a new, "science-based ethic" and by calling upon us to "keep up" with, and to adapt ourselves to, the massive changes in human life caused by galloping scientific and technological advance.
In these pursuits, I have sought out the best that has been said and thought by those who have gone before — not because they are old and not because they are ours, but because they might help us discover vital truths that we would otherwise not see on our own.
No friend of humanity should trade the accumulated wisdom about human nature and human flourishing for some half-cocked promise to produce a superior human being or human society, never mind a post-human future, before he has taken the trouble to look deeply, with all the help he can get, into the matter of our humanity — what it is, why it matters, and how we can be all that we can be.
As I look back over the nearly 40 years since I left the world of science to reflect on its human meaning, three distinct but related pursuits stand out: First, addressing the conceptual danger stressed by Lewis of a soulless science of life, to seek a more natural science, truer to life as lived. Second, addressing the practical danger stressed by Huxley of dehumanization resulting from the relief of man's estate and the sacrifice of the high to the urgent, to convey a richer picture of human dignity and human flourishing.
And third, addressing the social and political dangers stressed by Rousseau of cultural decay and enfeeblement, to find cultural teachings that could keep us strong in heart and soul, no less than in body and bank account.
Here are but a few high points from these three inquiries. Finding a "more natural science" would serve two important goals. First, by doing justice to life as lived, it would correct the slander perpetrated upon all of living nature, and upon human nature in particular, in treating the glorious activities of life as mere epiphenomena of changes in the underlying matter or as mere devices for the replication of DNA. Second, and more positively, by offering a richer account of human nature faithful both to our animality and to the human difference, it could provide pointers toward how we might best live and flourish.
Toward both goals, a "more natural science" examines directly the primary activities of life as we creatures experience them; and it revisits certain neglected notions, once thought indispensable for understanding the being and doing of all higher animals: aliveness, neediness, and purposive activity to preserve life and to meet need; openness to and awareness of the world; interest in and action on the world; felt lack of, and appetite for, desirable things from the world; on the one hand, selfhood and inwardness, on the other hand, active communication and relations with other beings, of same and different species.
Against the materialists who believe that all vital activities can be fully understood by describing the electrochemical changes in the underlying matter, a more natural science would insist on appreciating the activities of life in their own terms, and as known from the inside: what it means to hunger, feel, see, imagine, think, desire, seek, suffer, enjoy. At the same time, against those humanists who, conceding prematurely to mechanistic science all truths about our bodies, locate our humanity solely in consciousness or will or reason, a more natural science would insist on appreciating the profound meaning of our distinctive embodiment.
But the greatest help in pursuit of a more natural science came, most unexpectedly, from studying pre-modern philosophers of nature, in particular Aristotle. I turned to his De Anima On Soul , expecting to get help with understanding the difference between a living human being and its corpse, relevant for the difficult task of determining whether some persons on a respirator are alive or dead.
I discovered to my amazement that Aristotle has almost no interest in the difference between the living and the dead. Instead, one learns most about life and soul not, as we moderns might suspect, from the boundary conditions when an organism comes into being or passes away, but rather when the organism is at its peak, its capacious body actively at work in energetic relation to — that is, in "souling" — the world: in the activities of sensing, imagining, desiring, moving, and thinking.
Even more surprising, in place of our dualistic ideas of soul as either a "ghost in the machine," invoked by some in order to save the notion of free will, or as a separate immortal entity that departs the body at the time of death, invoked by others to address the disturbing fact of apparent personal extinction, Aristotle offers a powerful and still defensible holistic idea of soul as the empowered and empowering " form of a naturally organic body.
This is not mysticism or superstition, but biological fact, albeit one that, against current prejudice, recognizes the difference between mere material and its empowering form. Consider, for example, the eye. The eye's power of sight, though it "resides in" and is inseparable from material, is not itself material.
Its light-absorbing chemicals do not see the light they absorb. Like any organ, the eye has extension, takes up space, can be touched and grasped by the hand. Sight and seeing are powers and activities of soul, relying on the underlying materials but not reducible to them.
Moreover, sight and seeing are not knowable through our objectified science, but only through lived experience. A blind neuroscientist could give precise quantitative details regarding electrical discharges in the eye produced by the stimulus of light, and a blind craftsman could with instruction fashion a good material model of the eye; but sight and seeing can be known only by one who sees. Even the passions of the soul are not reducible to the materials of the body. True, anger, as ancient naturalists used to say, is a heating of the blood around the heart or an increase in the bilious humor — or, as we now might say, a rising concentration of a certain polypeptide in the brain.
If my first major pursuit was a richer view of human nature, looking afresh at the unadorned powers of the human animal, my second major pursuit was a richer account of the human good and the good human, one that would reflect the richer anthropology just discussed and one that could counter Brave New Worldly and other shrunken views of human happiness and goodness.
Not surprisingly, the disagreements of the great authors regarding the human good are even greater than those regarding human nature. Yet once again, ancient philosophers offer modern readers a soul-expanding teaching, and none more than Aristotle's Nicomachean Ethics , a book that I have taught a dozen times and that transformed how I look at ethics and human flourishing. For most Americans, ethical matters are usually discussed either in utilitarian terms of weighing competing goods or balancing benefits and harms, looking to the greatest good for the greatest number, or in moralist terms of rules, rights and duties, "thou shalts" and "thou shalt nots.
How liberating and encouraging, then, to encounter an ethics focused on the question, "How to live? How eye-opening are arguments that suggest that happiness is not a state of passive feeling but a life of fulfilling activity, and especially of the unimpeded and excellent activity of our specifically human powers — of acting and making, of thinking and learning, of loving and befriending.
How illuminating it is to see the ethical life discussed not in terms of benefits and harms or rules of right and wrong, but in terms of character, and to understand that good character, formed through habituation, is more than holding right opinions or having "good values," but is a binding up of heart and mind that both frees us from enslaving passions and frees us for fine and beautiful deeds.
Mishra is reportedly close to the Congress party. On the occasion, Chief White House photographer shared glimpses from some of the other state dinners hosted by President Obama over the tenure of his presidency.
The photo series began with the photograph of former Prime Minister Manmohan Singh and his wife Gursharan Kaur being escorted by the Obamas. This image was significant because it was the first official state visit hosted by President Obama after assuming office in There were no pictures of Narendra Modi in this collection of photographs. The viral message is based on a half-truth. Yes, a photograph of Manmohan Singh featured prominently in the images shared during a state event by the White House photographer.
A social media post claiming that former Prime Minister Manmohan Singh topped an American survey of 50 most honest people in the world is being shared across social media platforms.
The post further claims that Manmohan Singh is the only Indian to be featured on the list. Claim: Manmohan Singh topped an American survey of 50 most honest people in the world. Fact: Although Manmohan Singh was conferred with few international awards and featured in a Times survey, there is no such American survey rating Manmohan Singh as the most honest person in the world. If at all any such survey by the US indeed features Manmohan Singh as claimed, news agencies would have reported it.
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