12. Joseph Needham, Physics and Physical Technology, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1987, p. 14.
13. Richard E. Nisbett, The Geography of Thought: How Asians and Westerners Think Differently – and Why, New York, Free Press, 2003.
14. Carol Gilligan, In a Different Voice: Psychological Theory and Women’s Development, Cambridge, MA, Harvard University Press, 1982.
15. Ibid., p. 173.
16. Lawrence J. Walker, ‘Sex Differences in the Development of Moral Reasoning: A Critical Review’, Child Development, 55.3, 1984, p. 677; Sara Jaffee and Janet Shibley Hyde, ‘Gender Differences in Moral Orientation: A Meta-analysis’, Psychological Bulletin, 126.5, 2000, pp. 703–26; Christina Hoff Sommers, The War against Boys: How Misguided Feminism Is Harming Our Young Men, New York, Simon & Schuster, 2000.
17. Steven Pinker, The Blank Slate: The Modern Denial of Human Nature, New York, Viking, 2002, pp. 337–71.
18. Simon Baron-Cohen, The Essential Difference: The Truth about the Male and Female Brain, New York, Basic Books, 2003.
19. Jerome Bruner, Acts of Meaning, Cambridge, MA, Harvard University Press, 1994.
20. Jerome Bruner, Actual Minds, Possible Worlds, Cambridge, MA, Harvard University Press, 1986.
21. Roy F. Baumeister, The Cultural Animal: Human Nature, Meaning, and Social Life, Oxford, Oxford University Press, 2005.
22. Martha Nussbaum, Poetic Justice: The Literary Imagination and Public Life, Boston, Beacon, 1995.
23. See Michael Polanyi, Personal Knowledge: Towards a Post-critical Philosophy, Chicago, University of Chicago Press, 1958; John Macmurray, Persons in Relation, Atlantic Highlands, NJ, Humanities International, 1991.
3. Diverging Paths
1. Cervantes, Don Quixote, 2, 62.
2. Harvey Cox, The Future of Faith, New York, HarperOne, 2009, p. 221.
3. Johann Gottfried Herder and Frank Edward Manuel, Reflections on the Philosophy of the History of Mankind, Chicago, University of Chicago Press, 1968; Heinrich Heine, Sämtliche Werke, Darmstadt, Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft, 1992; Ernest Renan, History of the People of Israel till the Time of King David, Boston, Little, Brown, 1905; Matthew Arnold, Culture and Anarchy, Oxford, Oxford University Press, 2006; David J. Delaura, Hebrew and Hellene in Victorian England: Newman, Arnold, and Pater, Austin, University of Texas Press, 1969; Jacob Shavit, Athens in Jerusalem: Classical Antiquity and Hellenism in the Making of the Modern Secular Jew, London, Littman Library of Jewish Civilization, 1997. For a brief introduction, see Tessa Rajak, ‘Jews and Greeks: the invention and exploitation of polarities in the 19th century’, in her The Jewish Dialogue with Greece and Rome: Studies in Cultural and Social Interaction, Leiden, Brill, 2001, pp. 535–57.
4. There is a vast literature on the subject. See, for example, Martin Hengel, The ‘Hellenization’ of Judaea in the First Century after Christ, London, SCM Press, 1989; E. P. Sanders, Judaism: Practice and Belief, 63 BCE – 66 CE, London, SCM Press, 1992; Louis H. Feldman, Jew and Gentile in the Ancient World: Attitudes and Interactions from Alexander to Justinian, Princeton, NJ, Princeton University Press, 1993; Lee I. Levine, Judaism and Hellenism in Antiquity: Conflict or Confluence, Seattle, University of Washington Press, 1998; Martin Goodman, Jews in a Graeco-Roman World, Oxford, Clarendon, 1998; Tessa Rajak, The Jewish Dialogue with Greece and Rome: Studies in Cultural and Social Interaction, Leiden, Brill, 2001.
5. James Barr, Biblical Faith and Natural Theology, Oxford, Clarendon, 1994, p. 56.
6. I should say, by way of qualification, that a similar synthesis did take place within both Judaism and Islam between the eleventh and fourteenth centuries, in the wake of the rediscovery of key Greek philosophical texts, the emergence of medieval neo-Platonism and neo-Aristotelianism, and the unique period of religious tolerance, convivencia, in Al-Andalus, medieval Spain. Averroes in Islam, Maimonides in Judaism – both born in Cordova – are the key figures. But the movement was shorter lived and more marginal in these two faiths than in Christianity. In fact both Averroes and Maimonides were accused of heresy in their lifetime, and their rationalism remained a minority phenomenon in their respective faiths.
7. Jeremiah 31:29–30, ‘In those days people will no longer say, “The parents have eaten sour grapes, and the children’s teeth are set on edge.” Instead, everyone will die for their own sin; whoever eats sour grapes – their own teeth will be set on edge.’ Ezekiel 18:2–4, ‘What do you people mean by quoting this proverb about the land of Israel: “The parents eat sour grapes, and the children’s teeth are set on edge”? As surely as I live, declares the Sovereign Lord, you will no longer quote this proverb in Israel. For everyone belongs to me, the parent as well as the child – both alike belong to me. The one who sins is the one who will die.’
8. See the insightful study by Richard Kearney, The God Who May Be: A Hermeneutics of Religion, Bloomington, Indiana University Press, 2001, pp. 20–38, from which these references are drawn.
9. Judah Halevi, The Kuzari = Kitab Al Khazari: An Argument for the Faith of Israel, New York, Schocken, 1964, Book I, p. 25.
10. Cicero, De Natura Deorum, ii. 34.
11. ‘For the whole sensible world is like a kind of book written by the finger of God.’ Hugh of St Victor, De Tribus Diebus. ‘To conclude, therefore, let no man … think or maintain that a man can search too far or be too well studied in the book of God’s word, or in the book of God’s works; divinity or philosophy; but rather let men endeavour an endless progress or proficience in both.’ Francis Bacon, The Advancement of Learning (1605). Charles Darwin quoted these words opposite the title page of The Origin of Species.
12. Babylonian Talmud, Berakhot 58a.
13. Maimonides, Introduction to Eight Chapters, the preface to his commentary to the Mishnah Tractate Avot.
14. Babylonian Talmud, Pesachim 94b.
15. The passage occurs in somewhat different forms in Babylonian Talmud, Sanhedrin 91b and Genesis Rabbah 34:10.
16. Max Weber, Ancient Judaism, New York, Free Press, 1967 (originally published 1952); Peter Berger, The Sacred Canopy: Elements of a Sociological Theory of Religion, New York, Anchor Books, 1990.
17. See, in greater detail, Jonathan Sacks, Future Tense, London, Hodder & Stoughton, 2009, pp. 207–30.
18. See John Rawls, ‘Two Concepts of Rules’, The Philosophical Review, vol. 64, 1955, pp. 3–13.
19. See Amos Funkenstein, Theology and the Scientific Imagination: From the Middle Ages to the Seventeenth Century, Princeton, Princeton University Press, 1986; Peter Harrison, The Bible, Protestantism, and the Rise of Natural Science, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1998; Peter Harrison, The Fall of Man and the Foundations of Science, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 2007; R. Hooykaas, Religion and the Rise of Modern Science, Grand Rapids, MI, Eerdmans, 1972; Rodney Stark, For the Glory of God: How Monotheism Led to Reformations, Science, Witch-hunts, and the End of Slavery, Princeton, NJ, Princeton University Press, 2003.
20. Stephen Toulmin, Cosmopolis: The Hidden Agenda of Modernity, Chicago, University of Chicago Press, 1994.
21. On this see Sacks, Future Tense.
22. See my introduction in Jonathan Sacks, The Authorised Daily Prayer Book of the United Hebrew Congregations of the Commonwealth: With a New Translation and Commentary, London, Collins, 2007.
23. See Pamela Thurschwell, Sigmund Freud, London, Routledge, 2000, pp. 19–20; Greg Mogenson, The Dove in the Consulting Room: Hysteria and the Anima in Bollas and Jung, Hove, UK, Brunner-Routledge, 2003, pp. 71–82.
24. James Le Fanu, Why Us?: How Science Rediscovered the Mystery of Ourselves, London, HarperPress, 2009, p. 258.
4. Finding God
1. Ludwig Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations, New York, Macmillan, 1953, para. 109.
2. John Stuart Mill, Nature, London, Kessinger Publishing, 2010, pp. 28–30.
3. Genesis Rabbah 39:1. See Jonathan Sacks, A Letter in the Scroll: Understanding Our Jewish Identity and Exploring the Legacy of the
World’s Oldest Religion, New York, Free Press, 2000, pp. 51–60.
4. Maimonides, Mishneh Torah, Hilkhot Yesodei ha-Torah 8:1.
5. Babylonian Talmud, Shabbat 53b.
6. Bernard Williams, ‘Tertullian’s Paradox’, in Anthony Flew and Alasdair MacIntyre (eds), New Essays in Philosophical Theology, London, SCM Press, 1955, pp. 187–211.
7. Maimonides, Guide for the Perplexed, Book III, 31.
8. George Steiner, Language and Silence, London, Faber & Faber, 1967.
9. Mark Roseman, The Villa, the Lake, the Meeting: Wannsee and the Final Solution, London, Allen Lane/Penguin, 2002.
10. See Léon Poliakov, From Voltaire to Wagner, London, Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1975; Nathan Rotenstreich, Jews and German Philosophy: The Polemics of Emancipation, New York, Schocken, 1984; Paul Lawrence Rose, Revolutionary Antisemitism in Germany from Kant to Wagner, Princeton, NJ, Princeton University Press, 1990.
11. Jonathan Glover, Humanity: A Moral History of the Twentieth Century, London, Jonathan Cape, 1999.
12. Jorge Luis Borges and Andrew Hurley, Jorge Luis Borges: Collected Fictions, New York, Viking, 1998, pp. 82–7.
13. Ludwig Wittgenstein, Culture and Value, Chicago, University of Chicago Press, 1980, p. 18e.
14. This was later published as a book: The Condition of Jewish Belief: A Symposium, Northvale, NJ, J. Aronson, 1989.
15. Stephen Jay Gould and Richard Lewontin, ‘The Spandrels of San Marco and the Panglossian Paradigm: A Critique of the Adaptationist Programme’, Proceedings of the Royal Society of London, B, 205, 1979.
16. Bernard Williams, Moral Luck, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1981, pp. 20–39. Needless to say, this is a crude summary of an exquisitely subtle argument.
17. W. B. Yeats, ‘The Choice’, in The Collected Poems of W. B. Yeats, New York, Scribner, 1996, p. 209.
18. Viktor Frankl, The Doctor and the Soul: From Psychotherapy to Logotherapy, New York, Vintage, 1986, p. 13.
5. What We Stand to Lose
1. Leszek Kolakowski, Religion, London, Fontana, 1982, p. 215.
2. Most obviously Immanuel Kant in his principle that we treat rational beings as ends in themselves. See Immanuel Kant, The Moral Law: Groundwork of the Metaphysic of Morals, London, Routledge, 2007. But as I pointed out in the previous chapter, Kant expressed virulently antisemitic views. What is more, at his trial, Adolf Eichmann, often described as ‘the architect of the Holocaust’, showed himself to be a Kantian. As Emil Fackenheim puts it, he obeyed the two key Kantian principles: purity of motivation and universalisation. He was ‘a dutiful, idealistic mass-murderer, not merely a sadistic or opportunistic one’. And his ‘maxim’ of action was ‘to make through his own will the Führer’s will into universal law’. Emil Fackenheim, To Mend the World: Foundations of Post-Holocaust Jewish Thought, Bloomington, Indiana University Press, 1994, p. 270. When tested empirically under stress, the Kantian basis of respect for persons failed.
3. Friedrich Nietzsche, The Gay Science: With a Prelude in Rhymes and an Appendix of Songs, trans. Walter Kaufmann, New York, Vintage, 1974, Book III, para. 125, p. 181.
4. On Darwin’s influence on Nietzsche, see John Richardson, Nietzsche’s New Darwinism, Oxford, Oxford University Press, 2004. On the loss of faith of English intellectuals in the nineteenth century, see A. N. Wilson, God’s Funeral, New York, W. W. Norton & Co., 1999.
5. Friedrich Nietzsche, et al., Twilight of the Idols, New York, Penguin Books, 1990, p. 81.
6. Friedrich Nietzsche, The Will to Power, trans. Walter Kaufmann, New York, Random House, 1967, para. 246, p. 142.
7. Ibid., para. 734, p. 389.
8. Friedrich Nietzsche, Ecce Homo, ‘Why I Am a Destiny’, p. 1.
9. Heinrich Heine, ‘Zur Geschichte von Religion und Philosphie im Deutschland’, Sämtliche Schriften, vol. 3, p. 505.
10. Will Durant, The Story of Civilization V: The Renaissance, New York, Simon & Schuster, 1954, 1.71 (italics added).
6. Human Dignity
1. Friedrich Nietzsche, On the Genealogy of Morality, ed. Keith Ansell-Pearson, trans. Carol Diethe, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1994, Third Essay, 25:115.
2. Michel Foucault, The Order of Things: An Archaeology of the Human Sciences, New York, Vintage, 1973, p. 387.
3. Oration on the Dignity of Man (1486). The text is available at: http://www.wsu.edu:8080/~wldciv/world_civ_reader/world_civ_reader_1/pico.html. See Ernst Cassirer, Paul Oskar Kristeller and John Herman Randall, Jr, The Renaissance Philosophy of Man, Chicago, University of Chicago Press, 1948; M. V. Dougherty (ed.), Pico della Mirandola: New Essays, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 2008.
4. On del Medigo see Jacob J. Ross, Sefer Behinat ha-dat, Tel Aviv, Tel Aviv University Press, 1984; Harvey Hames, ‘Elijah DelMedigo: an archetype of the halakhic man?’ in David Ruderman and Giuseppe Veltri, Cultural Intermediaries: Jewish Intellectuals in Early Modern Italy, Philadelphia, University of Pennsylvania Press, 2004, pp. 39–66.
5. Free Inquiry Magazine, vol. 17, no. 3, 1997; see Leon Kass, Life, Liberty, and the Defense of Dignity: The Challenge for Bioethics, San Francisco, Encounter Books, 2002.
6. Sigmund Freud, Totem and Taboo, London, Routledge, 2001.
7. Sigmund Freud, The Future of an Illusion, New York, W. W. Norton & Co., 1975.
8. Michael T. Ghiselin, The Economy of Nature and the Evolution of Sex, Berkeley, University of California Press, 1974, p. 247.
9. Stephen Jay Gould, Wonderful Life, New York, W. W. Norton & Co., 1989, p. 51.
10. Shakespeare, Hamlet, Act 2, scene 2, lines 303–12.
11. Nietzsche, On the Genealogy of Morality, Third Essay, 25:113.
12. The term derives from the work of Paul Ricoeur. See his Freud and Philosophy: An Essay on Interpretation, New Haven, CT, Yale University Press, 1970.
13. The most impressive treatment of the subject is Richard Weikart, From Darwin to Hitler, New York, Palgrave Macmillan, 2004. See also Dennis Sewell, The Political Gene, London, Picador, 2009.
14. Adolf Hitler, Mein Kampf, Munich, 1943, pp. 144–5, quoted in Weikart, From Darwin to Hitler, p. 211.
15. Quoted in ibid., p. 215.
16. The full story is told in Robert Jay Lifton, The Nazi Doctors, 2nd ed., New York, Basic Books, 2000, especially pp. 80–95.
17. Quoted in ibid., p. 134.
18. Primo Levi, Survival in Auschwitz, The Nazi Assault on Humanity, New York, Collier, 1961, p. 96.
19. Friedrich Nietzsche, The Gay Science: With a Prelude in Rhymes and an Appendix of Songs, trans. Walter Kaufmann, New York, Vintage, 1974, p. 344.
20. Babylonian Talmud, Eruvin 100b.
21. Friedrich A. Von Hayek and William Warren Bartley, The Fatal Conceit: The Errors of Socialism, Chicago, University of Chicago Press, 1989.
22. This is the point famously made by Robert Nozick in the passage about the ‘experience machine’ in Anarchy, State, and Utopia, New York, Basic Books, 1974, pp. 42–5. If we were offered the choice to spend our life plugged into a machine that would simulate a stream of pleasurable experiences that we could not tell were not real, would we opt for this as against real life? Nozick assumes we would answer, ‘No.’
23. See Nicholas Wolterstorff, Justice: Rights and Wrongs, Princeton, NJ, Princeton University Press, 2007.
7. The Politics of Freedom
1. John Plamenatz, Man and Society, London, Longman, 1963, pp. 45–88.
2. Christopher Hill, The English Bible and the Seventeenth-Century Revolution, London, Allen Lane, 1993.
3. See Dan Jacobson, The Story of the Stories: The Chosen People and Its God, New York, Harper & Row, 1982.
4. Eric Nelson, The Hebrew Republic: Jewish Sources and the Transformation of European Political Thought, Cambridge, MA, Harvard University Press, 2010.
5. Thomas Hobbes, Leviathan, Book 1, 11.
6. Lord Acton, ‘The History of Freedom in Antiquity’, Essays in the History of Liberty: Selected Writings of Lord Acton, ed. J. Rufus Fears,
Indianapolis, Liberty Classics, 1985–8, pp. 5–28.
7. Hannah Arendt, The Human Condition, Chicago, University of Chicago Press, 1998, pp. 23–47.
8. Friedrich Nietzsche, On the Genealogy of Morality, ed. Keith Ansell-Pearson, trans. Carol Diethe, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1994, Second Essay, pp. 35–6.
9. See Johannes Lindblom, Prophecy in Ancient Israel, Philadelphia, Muhlenberg, 1962; Michael Walzer, Interpretation and Social Criticism, Cambridge, MA, Harvard University Press, 1987.
10. See the works of Daniel Elazar in the section ‘For Further Reading’ on p. 336 of this book; also John Witte, Jr, Religion and the American Constitutional Experiment: Essential Rights and Liberties, Boulder, CO, Westview Press, 2000; Glenn A. Moots, Politics Reformed: The Anglo-American Legacy of Covenant Theology, Columbia, University of Missouri, 2010.
11. Inaugural address, 20 January 1961.
12. Inaugural address, 20 January 2009.
13. For classic covenant renewal thinking, see Reinhold Niebuhr, The Irony of American History, New York, Scribner, 1952; and Robert Bellah, The Broken Covenant: American Civil Religion in a Time of Trial, New York, Seabury, 1975.
14. Joshua Berman, Created Equal: How the Bible Broke with Ancient Political Thought, Oxford, Oxford University Press, 2008.
15. Plato, The Laws, trans. Thomas Pangle, New York, Basic, 1980, p. 24.
16. Thomas Paine, Political Writings, ed. Bruce Kuklick, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1997, p. 3.
17. Montesquieu, The Spirit of the Laws, vol. 1, book 20, sect. 7.
18. Memoir, Letters, and Remains of Alexis de Tocqueville, London, 1861, vol. 2, p. 397 (letter to M. De Corcelle, 2 July 1857). I owe this and the previous reference to Gertrude Himmelfarb, The Roads to Modernity, New York, Knopf, 2004, pp. 25–52.
The Great Partnership: Science, Religion, and the Search for Meaning Page 32