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This is the first volume of the series, Liturgiam Aestimare: Appreciating the
Liturgy. The series is part of the project, Documenta Rerum Ecclesiasticarum In-
staurata, whose aims include the publication of detailed studies of the Latin texts
of the Modern Roman Rite, and whose directors are Leachman and McCarthy.
As the editors explain in their Preface, this collective work employs the method-
ology favoured by the Pontifical Liturgical Institute in San Anselmo, Rome.
The methodology uses eight keys, arranged in four ‘dimensions’ (anamnesis,
epiclesis, doxology, koinonia) and four ‘foundations’ (theandric, christological-
pneumatological, ecclesial, symbolic). The editors have found a ninth key: Chris-
tian maturation.
Chapter 1: ‘History of Collect Studies’, by James G. Leachman, is a survey
which includes references to research tools. It ends with a list of twelve ‘perennial
difficulties’ encountered in the study of liturgical texts. Chapter 2: ‘Collectarum
latinitas’, by Reginaldus Thomas Foster with Daniel McCarthy, is a master class
given by a great Latinist. It works its way through the tenses of the Latin verb, the
principles of the subjunctive mood, the sequence of tenses, and the many ways of
expressing purpose. It draws attention to the decisions which have to be made by
translators, and warns against a number of pitfalls. Chapter 3: ‘How to Interpret a
Collect’, by Renato De Zan, translated from the Italian by James Leachman and
Ephrem Carr, begins with a brief survey of some of the authors who furthered a
scientific study of the collects. It then explains the method used in the Pontifical
Liturgical Institute. It considers the role of textual criticism, philology, semantics,
historical analysis, literary criticism, and pragmatic analysis. It ends with the hope
that out of the wealth of tradition new formulas will emerge, expressing in new
ways the Church’s faith in Jesus Christ. This chapter is De Zan’s re-writing of his
contribution to the handbook edited by Chupungco. It is curious that De Zan does
not list the eight keys which are mentioned in both the Preface and Chapter I, that
is, the four dimensions and four foundations of a celebration, although he does
mention them, with due acknowledgment of Lodi’s work, in his contribution to
Chupungco. Chapter 4: ‘The Collect in Context’, by Patrick Regan, expertly and
easily guides the reader through the history of the prayer which concluded the
entrance rite of the Roman Mass, variously called oratio, collectio, and collecta.
It deals with the traditional explanation of the collect as the presidential prayer
which collects the prayers of the assembled people. It then comments critically
on the Modern Roman Rite, where the collect ends a series of introductory rites,
of which the entrance rite is only the first.
The next five chapters contain studies of particular collects. Chapter 5: ‘The
Collect for the Easter Vigil’, by James G. Leachman, applies the full force of
the proposed methodology to one collect. It shows how the method can bring
out the richness of a text. It is longer than the other articles, and might have
been pruned of some interesting but distracting paragraphs, e.g., the excursion
into what The Apostolic Tradition says about candidates for baptism. Perhaps it
remains too close to its origin in a colloquium. Leachman’s interpretation of the
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collect contains some surprising ideas. He argues that the opening words evoke not
only Easter night but also Christmas night, resurrection and incarnation. Without
doubt it is possible to make this connection, but does the prayer itself really invite
us to do this? The contention that the prayer evokes God’s self-emptying raises a
similar question. Chapters 6–9 are fine examples of how to interpret collects. They
are: ‘An Anglican Experiment in Appreciating the Liturgy: The Easter Day Collect
(First Holy Communion) in The First Prayer Book of Edward VI’, by Bridget
Nichols; ‘The Opening Prayer for Epiphany: A Linguistic and Literary Analysis’,
by Anthony O. Igbekele; ‘The Vocabulary of the Collects: Retrieving a Biblical
Heritage’, by Gerard Moore; and ‘Between Memories and Hopes: Anamnesis
and Eschatology in Selected Collects’, by Daniel P. McCarthy. Nichols includes
reflections on the modifications which occurred in the transition from Sarum to
Prayer Book. Igbekele includes the intriguing suggestion that stella duce evokes
‘a natural process of revelation’. Moore shows how the careful reading of a collect
can discover biblical references; he also questions Mohrmann’s idea that the high
style of a collect would have made it inaccessible to the original congregations.
McCarthy, well known to readers of The Tablet, is accurate and readable.
Chapter 10, ‘Concluding Synthesis’, by Ephrem Carr, mildly regrets that not
all the chapters make full use of the methodology. But perhaps it is a good thing
that authors adopt a fairly flexible approach.
The book’s focus on the collects does not prevent it from including a wide
range of material and reflections, and, like McCarthy’s writings in The Tablet, it
should appeal to readers who are not professional liturgists or Latinists. Future
volumes in the series will be more user friendly if they give English translations
of all quotations in foreign languages, including Latin. The present volume does
this sometimes, but not always.
The close reading of any liturgical text inevitably raises questions about the
relationship between the text as a written text and its use in celebration. De Zan,
in drawing attention to the need for pragmatic analysis (what does the text do
in the celebration?) shows he is aware of this question. Indeed he mentions the
way in which Enrico Mazza focuses not on the text of the collect as text but on
the role of the prayer in celebration. Regan too is attentive to this question. The
texts as such are part of the heritage of Latin euchology. They deserve careful
study, and should be translated as accurately as possible. New collects should be
composed in such a way that they stand up to detailed study. But of course it
is possible, even normal, for people to join fully in the Church’s liturgy without
accounting for every clause in every liturgical text.
PHILIP GLEESON OP
This book arose from Cortez’ doctoral studies under Professor Alan Torrance.
The work constitutes a sustained argument for the necessity of theologians to
address anthropological questions christocentrically, an exploration into the na-
ture of christological anthropology, and its application to a key issue in human
ontology.
Cortez begins by noting that, although there is a widespread consensus among
theologians concerning the need for a christological centring in the area of theo-
logical anthropology, sustained attempts actually to do this remain scarce. He also
draws attention to the mind-body debate as an example of a complex, unresolved
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while seeming to preclude both monistic materialism and substance dualism, may
not necessarily preclude certain refinements of physicalism and dualism. In terms
of the criteria for the success of his project defined by Cortez himself, this first
half of the book would seem to be an impressive addition to Barthian scholarship.
On this basis alone the work deserves to be read by anyone who wishes to engage
with this or related aspects of Barth’s theology.
In the second half of the book (Chapters 5 and 6), Cortez examines a range of
modern theories of human nature, evaluating their strengths and weaknesses both
in terms of consistency with Barth’s christological anthropology and their own
inner and contextual coherence. Chapter Five considers a range of non-reductive
physicalisms (NRP) and Chapter Six a range of holistic dualisms (HD). With
regard to the former, Cortez argues that any NRP theory, to be viable chris-
tologically, must be able successfully to address challenges particularly in the
areas of mental causation, phenomenal consciousness and continuity of personal
identity. He concludes that while such theories tend to struggle to explain the
mental causation required for personal agency and freedom, they are able to ac-
count convincingly for consciousness and personal continuity through death and
resurrection. His final assessment of NRP theories is that while there are substan-
tial issues associated with them that still require resolution, they are nevertheless
viable candidates for christologically adequate human ontologies. In my own esti-
mation, Cortez treats too lightly the problems for physicalist theories concerning
personal identity, essentially asserting, rather than adequately arguing for, their
ability to offer a coherent account.
As far as HD is concerned, Cortez argues that the key challenges centre on
mental causation, embodiment and contingent personhood. He judges that, in spite
of a priori intimations to the contrary, this type of theory may be able to address
the issue of mental causation more convincingly than NRP theories. Concerning
the problem of personal embodiment he thinks that, while emergent and Thomistic
versions of HD in particular may have the potential to offer coherent accounts
of the body-soul relationship, a significant weakness of all HD theories is their
simultaneous adherence to the separability of body and soul on the one hand,
and the primacy of the embodiment relation on the other. At this point there are
some significant lacunae in the exposition which perhaps render this conclusion
a little premature, but given Cortez’ main focus and the impressive amount of
ground covered in the second part of his book (as in the first), this is perhaps
understandable.
Cortez considers that dualistic ontologies run the risk of threatening contingent
personhood with their tendency to assume the natural immortality of the soul. He
thinks, however, that there is no reason for HD proponents to commit to this idea,
possibly preserving contingency through adhering to special divine intervention
to preserve the soul prior to resurrection. Cortez’ analysis at this point is a little
unconvincing, seeming to conflate primary and secondary causation at crucial
points (as indeed Barth appears to do also). On the whole though, Part Two
of Cortez’ work is an impressive piece of scholarship which evidences deep
familiarity with all the pertinent issues and which certainly achieves the purpose
of the author: to contribute to contemporary philosophy of mind by serving as a
clarification, analysis and evaluation of recent theories. As a sourcebook for those
working in the area of human ontology it is an invaluable addition, providing an
extremely helpful taxonomy of the debate and a wide-ranging bibliography.
Finally, as noted, Cortez sees his distinctive contribution as the drawing to-
gether of the two fields of Barthian theology and human ontology in order to
shed the light of the Incarnation on the latter. In this he achieves no small suc-
cess, his profound familiarity with Barth’s thought in this area helping to make
visible the relevant issues for any such enterprise in terms of ground, scope and
methodology, and shedding valuable light on those dimensions of both NRP and
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or the medieval world of Aquinas’. At a time when a good number of his con-
temporaries were leaving the priesthood, Liddy’s existential struggle with Insight,
together with his deepening prayer life, kept him both a priest and a Catholic.
Rather than philosophy having nothing to say, the drama of his encounter with
Lonergan’s thought and with rival philosophical conceptions now brought home
to him the personal nature of the opportunities and challenges of philosophy.
In the late 1960s a work by Langer appeared in which she frankly professed
a metaphysical materialism and reductionism which entailed that the religious
world-view was so much myth. Liddy could no longer view such challenges to
religion as items to be learnt for a theology exam soon to be forgotten. One had
to be authentic in facing the alternatives: was this materialist world-view right
or was the Christian one cogent and true? His Archimedean ‘eureka’ moment
occurred not in a bath but, in true American style, in a shower and was a
resolution of this intellectual and personal conflict. Liddy saw the way the central
features of Lonergan’s Insight fitted together in such a fashion as to show that a
materialist metaphysics, arising as it does from an empiricist view of cognition, is
erroneous. Not only that, he saw also that the alternative, critical realist position
on epistemology, metaphysics, ethics and natural theology, adumbrated in Insight,
is something to be personally verified (in its fundamental aspects) in one’s own
conscious experience.
The ‘startling strangeness’ of the book’s title refers to Lonergan’s way of
describing the breakthrough to a critical realism which is experienced to be at
once a home coming to what, as Wittgenstein would put it, we have always in
some obscure way ‘known’ about ourselves as persons who know, choose and
love, and at the same time a challenging and awkward experience. Why the
latter? Because the inveterate empiricism to which we are prone as part animal
makes it difficult for us to appropriate the intelligent and reasonable operations
of which we have been conscious since we were small children and in accord
with which we operate. Even small children assess the evidence of what they
see and what they are told in order to come to a reasoned judgment and through
such judgments make claims about reality. But the history of philosophy shows
that spelling out such operations and following through on their implications is a
very tricky matter.
I believe that both the engaging drama and humour of Liddy’s autobiographical
introduction to the study of Lonergan’s thought, and his clear and judicious
presentation of key arguments in Lonergan’s philosophy, make this book a most
valuable contribution to the secondary literature on this seminal thinker in the
Catholic tradition.
ANDREW BEARDS
One scarcely knows how to endeavor to write a brief review of Charles Taylor’s
recent magnum opus, A Secular Age, which comes in at just under 900 pages.
If I were a sociologist, I could try to evaluate Taylor’s engagement and critique
of various theories of secularism and secularization in the post-medieval west and
his proposing of a new genealogy of the rise of secularity, a genealogy centered
in the new focus on the world that appeared in Franciscan theology and piety, and
not just in the metaphysics of Duns Scotus (p. 94), and in new forms of focus on
the laity in the high middle ages (p. 94 again), a discussion that Taylor recognizes
is in some, but not radical, tension with the more idealist genealogy proposed
by John Milbank (pp. 773–776). Or I could focus on Taylor’s discussion of the
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western moderns should, at the end of the day, embrace Christianity. Here I am
taking an enormous liberty of selection – to cover every philosophical moment or
argument in this book would require another book of just about the same length
as Taylor’s.
So, first, why should we accept Christianity, and embrace it as the itinerary on
which we will live our lives and see the world? Taylor’s answer is that religion
alone, and Christianity in particular, gives to the embodied self what Taylor calls
‘fullness’ (see the Introduction). The other two options for itineraries of human
life, modern secularism and postmodern heroism, have fundamental problems.
Modern secularism can too easily become what Taylor would call a ‘flat’ mode
of life: I embrace my ordinary work, my ordinary marriage, my ordinary hobbies,
and I fail to aspire to some kind of greatness, some kind of excess driven by my
deepest passions and instincts (see Chapter 11). My sexuality and aggression are
policed by bourgeois religion, society, and state, and I focus on making money
and living decently in society. My life is content but mediocre, I have become
Nietzsche’s ‘last man’. How do I escape from the mediocrity of the ‘last man’?
Nietzsche’s response to the problem of the ‘last man’ (and here Taylor’s reading
of Nietzsche is certainly open to debate) is to celebrate the aristocratic warrior
ethic of the Homeric poems, the life of instinct and aggression that aims at some
kind of greatness, aesthetic, perhaps, or military. While this option does give
rise to a certain kind of fullness, a certain kind of transcendence of the ordinary
into the extraordinary that modern bourgeois secularism fails to enable, it is also
very tied to sometimes spectacular embraces of violence and death. But, Taylor
would say, we want life, not death, love, not violence and the alienation that
comes from self-assertion. So we want spiritual fullness, adventure and intensity,
not complacent flatness, but we also want life and love, not death. So we turn
to the religious option: a life of aspiration and transcendence, but not one that
culminates in spectacular and destructive celebrations of licentiousness and death
and violence, but one that ends in love.
And this brings me to a second question, how does the logic of embracing
Christianity work? What does it mean to embrace the Christian path? Here Taylor
offers a picture that is at one level deeply Catholic. For it operates according to
a logic of nature and grace: Christianity somehow has to make contact with our
humanity, has to take the ‘natural’ desires of body and soul and transfigure them,
not destroy them. (Yes, the whole nature/grace question is loaded and complex,
but Taylor addresses it in a rather traditional way.) There is no purely dialectical
vision of Christian faith, no divine transformation that does violence to human
identity or human nature as it stands and is experienced before or outside the
Christian faith and life. Taylor is interesting in how he deviates from traditional
understandings of ‘nature’ (again, I am simplifying). He is, perhaps to his own
surprise, a Freudian of sorts, in addition to being a Nietzschean of sorts. Who we
are as humans is deeply identified with our sexual desire and our aggression, our
impulse to violence. Now here Taylor is to be congratulated, not least because
most contemporary Christian theologians refuse to accept just how deep the lust
for violence and power runs in our souls. (Although, in a return of the repressed,
it is interesting to note that some of the recent theologies that are most focused
on persuading readers of the ontological and ecclesial peace and harmony that are
ostensibly available only in Christianity are in fact intellectually and rhetorically
violent pieces of writing.) It is not, for Taylor, as if our sexuality and aggression
have to be whitewashed, morally purified before they can enter into the economy
of grace. Rather, it is precisely the energy of our sexuality and aggression that
makes possible our living the Christian life fully, should we choose to embrace
it. Sexual desire can become sexual desire for God, desire that does not leave the
body behind. (Here Taylor is an apt student of Augustine, who also does not leave
the body behind, as the work of Beth Felker Jones has recently reiterated.) And
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as for aggression, we have to continue to respect its ‘numinous power’ (p. 649).
But, Taylor seems to say (and here I put his points into my own words), there is
the possibility of transfiguring the energy or aggression into an energy, equally
intense and electric, of ‘limitless self-giving’ (p. 654). The attraction of violence
is in major part the excess or abandon that can be experienced by going berserk
in battle. Something of that abandon, in a more joyful way, can be experienced
in letting go of oneself in a radical gift of love to God and neighbor (p. 668).
I don’t know if Taylor’s account of the transfiguration of sexuality and aggres-
sion fully works – certainly Nietzsche would not think his focus on the aristocratic
warrior ethic could be subsumed and redeemed in this way. Can sexual desire
and aggression be quite so completely transfigured for humane ends? Even so,
I applaud Taylor for taking human sexuality and aggression so seriously. Indeed
I would go so far as to say that one of the main challenges for contemporary
theologians is to incorporate sexual desire and violence and aggression into their
theologies. John Milbank, David Bentley Hart, and Sebastian Moore have been
at the forefront of recovering an erotic desire for God, but the confrontation with
violence and aggression needs more attention. Rowan Williams is the paradigm
example of someone whose theology is not afraid of letting the violence and
aggression in our souls breathe, although it would take more time to explain
exactly how. It is a basic insight of psychoanalysis, respected by Taylor, that
our sexuality and aggression cannot be denied, lest they return in even more
destructive ways. Humanity in its flesh and bones has to be reckoned with, and
not simply by calling our powerful sexuality and aggression sinful. Taylor is at
his strongest when he hints, tantalizingly, that our sexuality and aggression are
what they are so that they can participate in the divine pedagogy of humanity, in
a framework proposed by Irenaeus (p. 668), and be transformed into energy for
communion and love. But it is incredibly gratifying to see a Christian philosopher
value Nietzsche and Freud so highly.
JEFFREY MCCURRY
More than any other major Catholic theologian of the twentieth century, Hans Urs
von Balthasar re-set theology into the ambit of the humanities in ways unlikely to
be emulated. He managed to achieve the almost impossible, of writing an aesthetic
theology based on an awesome stock of learning whose range encompassed a
faculty of arts. Balthasar provided a theological umbrella under which those with
affiliations in the humanities might shelter, comforts which had been hitherto
unavailable. An outcome of this generosity of vision is that the shifting basis
of the human condition, and what kills its spirit in contemporary culture, can
be more imaginatively calibrated. In this scholarly and carefully crafted work,
Murphy grasps these opportunities and explores how a Catholic imagination offers
prospects of reverse from the cul-de-sacs of postmodernism.
Primarily concerned with narrative and language (Derrida looms much), Mur-
phy seeks to find a basis for coherence, a harmony that would resolve the un-
profitable dualism that increasingly governs contemporary critical thought. Thus,
construction as a response to nihilism forms his ambition for the study in which
‘the analogical imagination can staunch the wounds of deconstructionism’ (p. 72)
and this entails conversion (pp. 73–74). As he observed rightly earlier in the
study, ‘all roads, whether begrudgingly or not, lead back to questions of theol-
ogy’ (p. 20). His primary concern is with the reconciliation of opposites and their
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ZIZEK AND THEOLOGY by Adam Kotsko (T&T Clark , London 2008) Pp. vii +
174 pp., £14.99
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out of the synthesis announces that a truth has been reached. This explains why
his books contain assertions, philosophical exegesis and political commonplaces,
tell jokes, contradict themselves, often lack narrative and so on. Zizek is trying to
force the reader to emancipate her or himself from thrall to Zizek and, thus, think
for himself or herself. The irony is of course that with all of his publications
Zizek is doing nothing other than ensure that his name itself becomes part of
the big Other, and the industry of exegesis that he has inspired (and of which
Kotsko’s volume is one of the better examples) denies space for the emancipation
of the reader.
Zizek’s work is not possessed of any great humility, and therefore it is unsur-
prising that it has turned to questions of theology and, specifically, Christianity.
That turn happens because what he is trying to do is deal with the question of
what happens after there has been emancipation from the big Other. Kotsko calls
this the ‘morning after problem’. It is the problem of the fate of the moment of
emancipation.
Zizek draws on Alain Badiou’s theory of the ‘truth-event’ according to which
truth is something that happens as an event. As Kotsko shows, for Badiou a
truth-event erupts unpredictably from a situation that is occupied by all and yet
only fully apprehended by those who are excluded from the ‘official’ definition
of the situation. Badiou gives a secular reading of the conversion of St Paul
as an example of a truth-event. In Kotsko’s gloss, ‘the resurrection of Christ is
the unexpected truth-event that seizes Paul, causing him to dedicate his life to
spreading the gospel’ (p. 79). Consequently Badiou sees the truth-event as the
irruption of a ‘new beginning’, but Zizek argues instead that it is better seen
as a moment of detachment from what has gone before. For Zizek then the
truth-event is an emancipation from the big Other, a kind of death of the old.
In an interview that Kotsko does not cite (and Zizek’s output is massive so this
is no criticism), but in a passage that he makes it possible to see is typical,
Zizek said: ‘What I like is to see the emancipatory potential in institutionalized
Christianity. Of course, I don’t mean state religion, but I mean the moment of St.
Paul. I find a couple of things in it. The idea of the Gospel, or good news, was
a totally different logic of emancipation, of justice, of freedom’ (‘IDEOLOGY
IS A CERTAIN UNIQUE EXPERIENCE OF THE UNIVERSE AND YOUR
PLACE IN IT, TO PUT IT IN STANDARD TERMS, WHICH SERVES THE
PRODUCTION OF THE EXISTING POWER RELATIONS AND BLAH BLAH
BLAH’ at http://www.believermag.com/issues/200407/?read=interview_zizek).
The thesis about the Gospels – note that he sidesteps Christ – leads Zizek to
a somewhat hackneyed and predictable assault on institutionalised Christianity.
For him, what happens on the ‘morning after’ is Church building and thus the
consolidation in ideology of a new big Other from which there will in turn need
to be emancipation. Zizek is not saying that it is possible to return to the Gospel
message, rather his point is that its institutionalisation needs to be negated if it is
going to be able to shatter the contemporary big Other. And the way to do that
is to draw out dialectically the conflict between the Gospels and the Church. In
all of this it is clear that Zizek is using Christianity and, by extension, theology,
for his own purposes. He is just trying to find a new place to carry out his
self-appointed task of negator in the name of emancipation: Lenin, Stalin, St Paul
are all reduced to the same status. It is in that spirit of negation that he claims
that Christianity is fundamentally a comedy. Kotsko quotes Zizek’s question: ‘is
there anything more comical than Incarnation, this ridiculous overlapping of the
Highest and the Lowest, the coincidence of God, creator of the universe, and a
miserable man?’ (p. 153).
If there is a temper that runs through this book it is, I think, one of Kotsko’s
increasing apprehension that perhaps Zizek has considerably less to say about
theology and Christianity than he thought when the project was started. Attempts
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are made to link Zizek with Altizer, Tillich, Bonhoeffer and even Kierkegaard
and Chesterton (Zizek has claimed the latter as two of the stimulants of his
thought), but the connections that Kotsko forges say more about the ingenuity of
his mind than Zizek’s own insights. Indeed, Kotsko has written a sophisticated
and knowledgeable book, but about a body of work that is perhaps best ap-
proached theologically as an over-inflated footnote to C.S. Lewis’s identification
of the Incarnation as a ‘catastophic historical event’ (The Problem of Pain 1940,
Centenary Press, London, p. 12).
KEITH TESTER
Subtitled ‘Human Identity and Neuroethics’, this book is the work of a neurosur-
geon who is also a well-trained analytical philosopher and professor of medical
ethics at the University of Orago, New Zealand. The argument ranges widely –
so widely, that it is not always easy to know where it has got to or where it is
going. And the author’s style, or rather lack of it, places formidable obstacles in
a text which would be difficult enough even if it had been written in English. It
is, however, worth persevering to the end of the book, not only because Gillett
brings together many lines of expertise and enquiry in a novel way, but also
because there emerges from these dense pages a challenging vision of the human
subject.
Gillett’s primary thesis, if I have rightly discerned it, is this. Human beings
are animals, but not merely animals. They are also persons, and from the first
they are following a particular developmental path, the end point of which is
incorporation into the world of inter-personal relations. It is only as embodied,
however, that they can participate in these relations, and the human condition
is that of the ‘embodied subject’. Such an embodied subject has a soul – not
in the sense of an immaterial entity that could be detached from the body and
endure without it, but in something like the sense of Aristotle’s ‘form’. The
soul is that which identifies the human being as somebody, by ordering his life
and activities as ‘mine’. The development of the human being is in the first
instance cognitive, involving conceptual skills, and therefore the grasp of rule-
following. However, conceptual skills are acquired only through interaction with
others. Hence the moral sense – the sense of being in relations of reciprocity
and accountability towards others of one’s kind – is an integral part of being
human.
The human being also has an individual identity: he is who he is, and not
another thing. This identity is not conferred upon him by some real essence to be
described in biological terms. For example, a person does not derive his identity
from his biological origins in the union of two cells. His identity is in some
sense the product of a continuous narrative, of which he himself is the author.
Gillett spends some time attacking the views of Parfit and others on the topic
of personal identity, while taking from Parfit the thought that what matters to us
are continuities rather than Leibnizian principles of individuation. The relevant
continuities concern the story that is accessible to me, in memory, intention,
and relationships. Hence self-attribution has a central role in the life, and also
in the concept, of the person. And my self-attributions are not determined by
the biological processes on which my life depends but are essentially revisable,
projecting both backwards in memory and forwards in intention a self-conception
that evolves through my dialogue with others.
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All that is summarized by Gillett in the statement that ‘a human being is. . . a
being-in-the-process-of-becoming-among-others where those others that one de-
velops among bring out facets of one’s own identity dependent for their expression
or articulation on the being-among that supports them.’ (p. 249.) The sentence
illustrates Gillett’s style, which is one of ‘Oxford analyticalese’ stirred up with
a dose of Heideggerian Hierunddasein: a synthesis, in other words, of the two
greatest crimes against the written word ever committed by philosophers.
A subsidiary aim of the book seems to be to rescue the concept of the human
person from biological reductionism. On Gillett’s account we are human beings,
located in human bodies and subject to biological laws. Memory, consciousness
and intention are rooted in neural networks which create the electronic links
between our environment and our response to it. But there is, ‘inscribed’ in the
human body, a narrative of self-identity, and this narrative creates the person,
not as a body, but as somebody – in other words as a node in the network
of inter-personal relations, whose identity and destiny are conferred by its own
self-attribution. Self-attribution opens the individual to the address of others. First-
person knowledge makes the I-thou relation possible, and so sets our biological
functioning within a broader framework of accountability. Gillett (rightly in my
view) sees this as containing the solution to the free-will problem, and also to the
philosophical problem raised by multiple personality disorder. Who I am is who
I take myself to be, when speaking sincerely in the first-person case. My self-
attributions, as Wittgenstein pointed out, are privileged, guaranteed by immunities
to error embedded in the deep grammar of ‘I’. This mysterious feature, properly
understood, is sufficient to refute biological reductionism, and to vindicate the
concept of the ‘soul’, in the form that Gillett introduces it.
In the course of his discussion of free will and responsibility Gillett addresses
the argument of Benjamin Libet, who famously demonstrated that the neural
processes sufficient for intentional movement occur shortly before the subject
reports that he has made up his mind. Libet and many others have taken this as
showing that there is no free will, that ‘intention’ is merely an epiphenomenon,
a helpless commentary in consciousness on events that proceed without it. That
nonsense is exploded by Gillett in a few pages of effective argument. Libet’s
‘proof’, he suggests, depends upon four assumptions: that an action is a discrete
bodily movement; that there is a mental event which is the cause of the act;
that one can fix the time of a mental event on the basis of its reportability;
and that ‘the detectable brain event is the cause of the act rather than being a
reflection of preparatory moves or neural events involved in acting with intent’
(p. 112). All those assumptions, he plausibly argues, are false. In effect Libet has
begged the argument in his own favour, by assuming that free choice must be
an event in the causal chain, rather than a condition of accountability, attributed
to the self-conscious subject – a condition that is ‘not located in neuro-time’
(p. 117).
It is impossible in a short review to cover all the topics raised by Gillett, who
has read widely in the recent literature of both philosophy and neuroscience, and
who clearly intends to produce a comprehensive synthesis of the two disciplines.
In conclusion, however, it is worth raising a question about the term ‘neuroethics’
which, the subtitle suggests, is the real discipline that the book exemplifies. Is
there such a discipline? Is there a branch of ethics that specifically concerns
matters of neurology, or a branch of neurology that raises questions that are
not general questions of ethics? The problematic use of brain surgery to control
epileptic seizures and the worst forms of depression has certainly raised moral
questions of a novel kind. Ought you to remove a terrible and distressing disability
if, by doing so, you also remove the soul? But the real questions here are more
metaphysical than moral: does the person remain at the end of the operation, or
have you effectively destroyed him? Clearly such questions are of great concern
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632 Reviews
Perhaps the last book edited by the late D.Z. Phillips (d. 25 July 2006), this
volume consists of papers delivered at the 2005 annual Claremont Conference on
the Philosophy of Religion, held at Claremont Graduate University in California.
Although of course very well known through his own work as a—if not the—
leading exponent of a Wittgensteinian approach to the philosophy of religion,
Phillips’s contribution to the field has been latterly enhanced by a steady stream
of edited or co-edited volumes consisting of the proceedings of these Claremont
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C The Dominican Council 2009
Reviews 633
C The author 2009
Journal compilation
C The Dominican Council 2009
634 Reviews
C The author 2009
Journal compilation
C The Dominican Council 2009