Paideia

Sawdust Diet - an Interview with Leon Kass

What does it mean to be human?

I think that I would come at the question of our humanity partly through the essential human activities and the fundamental human relations. The fundamental human relations are partly given by the facts of our neediness and our mortality and our aspirations and our affections. Our needs drive us to have some relation to the world. Our mortality leads us to be mindful of time and also to provide for our replacement. Our aspirations and our attachments bring us in relation to other human beings, particularly those who give us life and those whom we befriend and love and those whom we beget and those communities which nurture us and which we serve and ultimately to some kind of relation to the divine. At the heart of all human lives are the activities of loving and working and learning. Going in reverse order, learning provides awareness and understanding of this astonishing place into which we have been thrown. Work is a particular kind of human effort to use our energies to make and do in order to make the world a more hospitable and better place. Our loves overcome our isolation, and in a deep way fulfill both our needs and our generous impulses to have our lives spill over into the lives of others.

How changeable is what it means to be human?

Things change a lot, but I tried to give the answer in terms of things that are enduring. It’s true that some cultures might make it easier to find meaningful work. It’s true that some cultures might find it easier to encourage real intimacy and friendship. It’s true that some cultures make it easier or more difficult to pursue the truth or to understand things. It’s possible that some cultures make it at once both easier and harder. Easier in the sense that more people than ever have an opportunity to learn and harder because there is so much rubbish that gets in the way of learning. I think I’m inclined to say that loving and working and learning—one could then add other things such as rejoicing and worshipping and some form of self-ruling—these are enduring human possibilities. These are more likely to flourish under some cultural conditions than others. But I would be inclined to say that there is something in the human soul that moves towards these things and the cultures that don’t give them room, let’s hope, [will be] rejected.

So, culturally, during your lifetime, what has dimmed the views of individuals seeking to appreciate and to recognize what makes them distinctly human and the value of that recognition.

I think the reigning intellectual orthodoxies today, outside of religious communities, say there is no permanent nature. The human animal is a historical animal and has no nature, only a history. The cultural differences are decisive and that we should be very slow to mistake our culturally determined view of what humanity is for the truth of what humanity is. We shouldn’t judge adversely other cultures who might put forth different ways of doing these things. And I think that the so-called cultural elite in America, and in the West more generally, has—in my lifetime, your lifetime—lost its nerve in being willing to defend a much more confident view that we were basically on the right track of emancipating human possibilities for learning and the pursuit of truth. Give people the economic wherewithal so that they can in fact flourish, humanly speaking. And precisely now that more and more people really have the opportunity to flourish, the cultural elite is basically saying that there really is no such thing as human flourishing: you do what you like, we’ll do what we like. Let’s not judge one another, lest we be judged. I think that the rise of relativism is especially sad because it undercuts the natural aspirations of young people. To say that there really is no such thing as the truth, there’s just your truth and my truth. To say that love is an illusion, that is it basically a form of exercise of power—that you should enter the world seeing the world solely through the lens of power. Or what was once thought to be either good or beautiful were [actually] merely positions of a ruling elite who imposed its way on others, I think is to feed hungry souls sawdust.

How do you see the role of technological development, or advancement reshaping the central features of humanity?

I have a mixed view of this. I’m generally thought to be an enemy of technology and that’s just silly. Nobody who wears glasses, communicates with his children on the phone, or is able to travel to see them, or enjoys hot running water can be an enemy of technology. In fact, as a now deceased colleague of mine put it—speaking of the advances and the improvement of human life that largely technology has been responsible for—“Leon, before the twentieth century, human life was impossible.” And what he meant was that the possibility of realizing our human potential was very truncated, if not quite impossible for all but the upper crust of society. And it’s now the case that the average American lives a healthier, more prosperous, more open human life than dukes and duchesses of two hundred years ago. For that, one has to be grateful. The question remains whether technology is simply neutral in lifting us up from poverty, sickness, and toil and thus enables us to make of ourselves whatever we want. Or whether it doesn’t also begin to change the aspirations, alter the sensibilities, affect the character of the people that it has so liberated. And there I think the jury is out.

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Have you found your students grow and appreciate, or recognize, how these ideas and literature could impact their lives and their choices?

Teaching is one of these mysterious activities. You have no immediate idea of what’s really going on on the other side of the room even in conversational classes. You never know which remark moves somebody to think something and so on. It’s an activity one engages in out of hope and trust. We’ve had all kinds of ample testimony over…coming up close to 40 years of doing this from former students who have become our friends and from students that write absolutely out of the blue. I got an email just today from a fellow from the first class I taught at the University of Chicago who is now reading my Genesis book with a study group at his synagogue, and he writes to me saying, “I don’t know if you remember me but I can tell you what this and this and this has meant to me.” Well, I actually remember him as if it were yesterday because of something that he said in class. He’s the only person who has ever said, on a class on Aristotle’s Ethics, that, “Of course the way you get to be virtuous is through habituation—that’s what the Talmud teaches: ‘First you will do and then you will hear.’ All the other intellectuals think it all comes through the head and not through the doing.” This was his first class in a secular institution; he had been through yeshivas before.

an Interview with Leon Kass from Wunderkammer Magazine. Find it here.

The Law the Lawyers Know About

The Law the Lawyers Know About

The law the lawyers know about
Is property and land;
But why the leaves are on the trees,
And why the wind disturbs the seas,
Why honey is the food of bees,
Why horses have such tender knees,
Why winters come and rivers freeze,
Why Faith is more than what one sees,
And Hope survives the worst disease,
And Charity is more than these,
    They do not understand.

 	-- H.D.C. Pepler

"The Sirens" - Robinson Jeffers

Perhaps we desire death: or why is poison so sweet?

Why do the little Sirens

Make kindlier music, for a man caught in the net of the world

Between news-cast and work-desk,-

The little chirping Sirens, alcohol, amusement, opiates,

And carefully sterilized lust,-

Than the angels of life? Really it is rather strange, for the angels

Have all the power on their side.

All the importance:- men turn away from them, preferring their own

Vulgar inventions, the little

Trivial Sirens. Here is another sign that the age needs renewal.

"This is the very rest and life of the saints..."- St Augustine

“Blessed are the meek, for they shall by inheritance possess the earth: that earth, I suppose, of which it is said in the Psalm, You are my refuge, my portion in the land of the living. For it signifies a certain firmness and stability of the perpetual inheritance, where the soul, by means of a good disposition, rests, as it were, in its own place, just as the body rests on the earth, and is nourished from it with its own food, as the body from the earth. This is the very rest and life of the saints. Then, the meek are those who yield to acts of wickedness, and do not resist evil, but overcome evil with good. Let those, then, who are not meek quarrel and fight for earthly and temporal things; but blessed are the meek, for they shall by inheritance possess the earth, from which they cannot be driven out.”

- from St Augustine’s commentary on the Sermon on the Mount