A Truer Humanism

By Leon R. Kass

Science gives us many gifts, but it cannot keep us from losing our souls in the bargain.

Let me illustrate Prof. Heyd’s naivete in matters of “improving ourselves” through technology by looking at his concrete assertions regarding contraception and in-vitro fertilization—admittedly not the main subject of his critique or of my paper. He points out, correctly, that the primary intent of birth control pills is to assist couples in preventing unwanted pregnancies. But he ignores the effect of this separation of sex from its procreative possibility and its inner meaning on the attitudes toward sexuality and erotic desire in the entire population, including the unmarried and the un-coupled. Does he think that the pill has played no role in the transformation of our thoughts about intimacy, in which “making love” has become “having sex,” and where “having sex” is itself regarded as “no big deal,” much like scratching an itch? Does he think that the pill has played no role in the decline of sexual restraint or modesty, itself the condition of the transformation of animal lust into erotic longing for the one true love?

Likewise, Prof. Heyd correctly points out that in-vitro fertilization enables couples who suffer from infertility to become parents. But he ignores the meaning of placing the origins of human life in human hands, available for manipulation and selection. Before in-vitro fertilization, every child-to-be took up residence in its mother’s womb unnoticed and unannounced, as the gift and mysterious stranger that each child truly is, a being who—by its very being—needs, merits, solicits, and receives our warmth, protection, and love. Now, in the age of reproductive technologies, a child comes increasingly to be seen as a project and product of our wills rather than as a gift of nature or nature’s God, and his existence (or hers—we can, after all, today choose both the gender and the correct pronoun) is now precisely arranged to satisfy parental wishes for their self-fulfillment. Thanks to in-vitro fertilization, Americans have become comfortable storing 400,000 so-called spare embryos in freezers and regarding nascent human life as one more natural resource to be mined and exploited for use and profit. Thanks to in-vitro fertilization, biologists—who ought to appreciate, more than anyone, the meaning and mystery of developing human life—come now to look upon human embryos, in the words of a distinguished neuroscientist-ic friend of mine, as “no different from piles of lumber lying in the home-building lumber yard.”

I mention the examples of contraception and in-vitro fertilization, taken from Prof. Heyd’s essay, not to condemn these practices, but merely to show how such welcome innovations have unintended and undesirable consequences, both in our practice and (especially) in our thinking. Only on the preposterous faith that whatever happens by human design is always for the good are we free from the difficult task of assessing—critically—the often bittersweet fruits of our technological and “self-fashioning” labors.

Not content to rest his case on Pico della Mirandola’s hubristic seizing of the voice of God to proclaim his own radical view of human nature, Prof. Heyd concludes by offering, in the spirit of Pico, his equally radical interpretation of God’s creation of man in “his own image” (Genesis 1). Midrash is, of course, a venerable sport, and no one needs a license to play. But Prof. Heyd’s offerings are wildly implausible, to say the least, and ill-supported by the text, both near and far. After caricaturing other ways (none of them, however, mine) of interpreting the meaning of “creation in the image of God,” he attempts to deduce the meaning of tselem elohim from the surrounding context—an eminently reasonable practice. But rather than consider what I have suggested that we learn about the divine from the entire first chapter of Genesis, he focuses only on the further entailments of man’s god-like standing—“have dominion”; “be fruitful and multiply”—and asserts that it is these derivative entailments themselves that constitute our special nature as god-like. But read carefully, the verses suggest that it is because man’s “nature” already shares something of the divine capacities—that is, man as created is already in God’s image, or god-like—that it then makes sense for God to give him dominion over the other animals.

Prof. Heyd then compounds his error by his remarkable claim that it is in procreation that human beings most clearly resemble the divine, also making “something out of nothing.” (I note in passing that the biblical text does not expressly say that God’s creation was ex nihilo; this is a latter-day theological interpretation, and in my view hardly a necessary one.) But the divine mode of creation in Genesis 1 is entirely through intelligible speech, not through generative concourse: Creation is not generation. Indeed, one of the chief targets against which the Bible is silently polemicizing is the view that the cosmos has its origins in the sexual coupling of (two) gods, for example, Sky Father impregnating Earth Mother. Prof. Heyd also ignores a crucial textual fact that vitiates his entire thesis: The same injunction, to be fruitful and multiply—is it a command, or is it part of the blessing?—has previously been offered to the creatures of the sea and the fowl of the air, beings that are in no way said to be god-like (image of God) (Genesis 1:22).

Ignoring the fish and the fowl, we may still ask: Why are only human beings (among all the land animals) exhorted to be fruitful and multiply? Perhaps it is because only human beings, capable of “rational choice,” will freely refrain from the natural (animal) work of procreation, preferring, selfishly, their own self-fulfillment to the self-sacrificing activity of making way for the next generation. When the injunction to be fruitful and multiply is repeated after the Flood—first to Noah and all the animals, but then, in the Noahide code, only to human beings³—it seems likely that a command to procreate is needed against the twin dangers of self-indulgence or despair, either of which would keep human beings from devoting themselves to future generations and the perpetuation of life.

Prof. Heyd is surely correct in noting that only with the creation of man does God declare the whole of creation to be “very good”—which is to say, “complete” or “perfect” (as in the “perfect” tense of verbs). But he does not notice that, alone among the creatures (except for heaven), man himself was not said to be good—an omission that must be related to man’s god-like status. Precisely because the human animal is created with the god-like powers of speech, reason, and freedom in doing and making—note, please, not the radical freedom of complete indeterminacy or the radical creative power of the divine—man is open, incomplete, a project unfinished. In this respect, the Bible freely acknowledges what Prof. Heyd and every sensible student of human nature (including Aristotle) know: Man is born incomplete and open, much more so than any other animal. And for the cosmic whole to be complete, there needs to be a creature like man whose openness includes the possibility of appreciating the creation and its creator, as well as the possibility of living a moral and spiritual life higher than that of the un-god-like beasts.

But man’s freedom, from the Bible’s point of view, is not simply to be celebrated. Human freedom and human reason are deeply problematic, as the so-called second creation story seeks to instruct us. Man is the one animal that stands in need of a prohibition; man is the one animal that can go astray. Human freedom needs constraint and guidance if man’s god-like potential is to be a force for good in the world, even for his own flourishing and well-being. In the biblical account, man’s unbridled efforts at radical self-recreation—celebrated by Pico and Prof. Heyd—lead to disaster and human degradation: Consider both the city of Babel, built under the explicitly self-creating motto “Come, let us make us a (new) name,” and the technological, death-denying, but God-ignorant high civilization of Pharaoh’s Egypt, where the image-of-God status of all humanity is, in practice, utterly denied. When God finally summons the Israelites to realize their god-like capacity to imitate the divine, it is not through some project of radical and Nietzschean self-creation, but through an effort at holiness—“Be holy, for I the Lord am holy”—a calling that (still) comprises Sabbath observance, reverence for one’s mother and father, and the love of one’s neighbor—not improving our memory and sexual potency through biotechnology or inhabiting virtual worlds that we design for ourselves with artificial intelligence.

Human nature, even allowing for man’s evolutionary rise from non-human origins, has for millennia remained largely recognizable. The deepest powers of the human soul, explored by Homer and Plato, Shakespeare and the Bible, are still recognizable and operative: powers of learning and doing, love and friendship, song and story, healing and comforting, serving and worshipping. So, too, is the moral ambiguity of man, precisely because he is the animal with a difference. Biology and biotechnology have many gifts to offer human life, beginning with reducing illness and improving health, both somatic and psychic. But it will take a deeper wisdom, about both the limits of science and the meaning of human life, to keep us from losing our souls in the bargain.

A proper exploration of these questions requires more than short essays and quick rejoinders, and I am grateful to Prof. Heyd for challenging me to make my humanistic argument against scientism more compelling. But as we continue the difficult search for the right way to understand our humanity and to keep life human, I suggest that we remember the encouraging advice of E.E. Cummings:

while you and i have lips and voices which

are for kissing and to sing with

who cares if some one-eyed son of a bitch

invents an instrument to measure Spring with?⁴

Leon R. Kass, M.D., is the Hertog Fellow at the American Enterprise Institute and the Addie Clark Harding Professor in the Committee on Social Thought at the University of Chicago.

Notes

1. Fuller versions may be found in my “Science, Religion, and the Human Future,” Commentary (April 2007), pp. 36-48; and “Permanent Tensions, Transcendent Prospects,” in Christopher DeMuth and Yuval Levin, eds., Religion and the American Future (Washington, D.C.: AEI Press, 2008), pp. 83-117. Readers are also referred to my books Toward a More Natural Science: Biology and Human Affairs (New York: Free Press, 1988); The Hungry Soul: Eating and the Perfecting of Our Nature (Chicago: University of Chicago, 1999); Life, Liberty and the Defense of Dignity: The Challenge for Bioethics (Washington, D.C.: AEI Press, 2004); and The Beginning of Wisdom: Reading Genesis (Chicago: University of Chicago, 2006).

2. Winston S. Churchill, from a speech in the House of Commons (meeting in the House of Lords), October 28, 1943, commenting on the need to restore accurately and fully the bomb-destroyed meeting chamber of the House of Commons.

3. Compare Genesis 8:17 with Genesis 9:1, 7.

4. E.E. Cummings, “voices to voices, lip to lip,” part 1, no. 33, in “Is 5” (1926), from E.E. Cummings: Complete Poems 1904-1962 (New York: Liveright, 1994).

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