February 18, 2006
Wieseltier Ponders Dennett
In The New York Times, Leon Wieseltier reviews Dennett's Breaking the Spell.
It will be plain that Dennett's approach to religion is contrived to evade religion's substance. He thinks that an inquiry into belief is made superfluous by an inquiry into the belief in belief. This is a very revealing mistake. You cannot disprove a belief unless you disprove its content. If you believe that you can disprove it any other way, by describing its origins or by describing its consequences, then you do not believe in reason. In this profound sense, Dennett does not believe in reason. He will be outraged to hear this, since he regards himself as a giant of rationalism. But the reason he imputes to the human creatures depicted in his book is merely a creaturely reason. Dennett's natural history does not deny reason, it animalizes reason. It portrays reason in service to natural selection, and as a product of natural selection. But if reason is a product of natural selection, then how much confidence can we have in a rational argument for natural selection? The power of reason is owed to the independence of reason, and to nothing else. (In this respect, rationalism is closer to mysticism than it is to materialism.) Evolutionary biology cannot invoke the power of reason even as it destroys it.
[Hat tip: Dan Balis.]
Posted by Robin Varghese at 12:03 PM | Permalink
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This review is beneath contempt. To paraphrase Wolgang Pauli, Leon Wieseltier is not even wrong. I refuse to dignify his confused and disrespectful hack job with a point-by-point rebuttal, though any 1st-year philosophy grad student worth her salt could utterly destroy his feeble attempts at argument rather easily.
I am sorry that you chose to give such nonsense space and exposure at 3QD!
For those of you who are actually interested in what Dennett's excellent book is about, I suggest looking at ( http://www.sciam.com/article.cfm?chanID=sa006&articleID=00099B8B-DBD6-13A1-9BD683414B7F0000&colID=12 ) this review in Scientific American.
Or even my own review here at 3QD.
Extremely well-respected people have had nothing but praise for Dennett's book, like Jared Diamond who called it a "Crystal clear, constantly engaging, and enjoyable new book." Wieseltier obviously knows nothing about science, and seems to know even less about philosophy, though the arrogance and hubris of his anti-science stance is unmatched in my recent-book-review memory.
Posted by: Abbas Raza | Feb 18, 2006 3:37:52 PM
Yes, I agree. I posted it because it is important to see what drives the "respectable" side of TNR (Wieseltier's side). Peretz lost all sense and decency decades ago.
Wieseltier himself told the story of when, as a undergrad majoring in philosophy, he was assigned Morgenbesser as an advisor. He went into Sidney's office for advice. Sidney told him which classes to take first, many classes in logic and in the more rigorous side of philosophy. After talking for a few minutes, Sidney suggests that Wieseltier is perhaps ill-suited for them and should take less demanding philosophy classes.
Posted by: Robin | Feb 18, 2006 4:33:53 PM
To me, what is more interesting than what this text says about the New Republic is what it says about the Times. For the Times to publish this god-awful (pun not intended) dreck as a serious review (which is presumably what they intended) simply shows once again the contempt that the proprieters of the paper seem compelled to bestow on philosophy. I don't understand why, but they seem incapable of treating the subject seriously (see also Deborah Solomon's weird treatment of Dennett a week or two ago in the Magazine). Whenever they want to review a book of philosophy, they invariably come up with someone who could be put away by a smart undergraduate philosophy major, to say nothing of a 1st-year grad student, as you say.
Once again we see the complete inability of the Times people to think at an adult level, and their contempt for their readers, as well, who they clearly believe are as incapable as they are of performing this feat. Why, otherwise, would they have the notion that publishing this kind of thing is a service to their readers?
I must also say, however, that I am curious to find out why Dennett thinks that proving or disproving God's existence is not very important. Too bad Wieseltier didn't think it was very important to tell us why Dennett wrote that.
Posted by: JonJ | Feb 18, 2006 5:38:16 PM
Jon,
Dennett says that in this book he is not interested in examining traditional philosophical proofs of God's existence, like the Ontological argument, or the argument from design, as nothing very interesting or new has come out along those lines for a very long time. Instead, he proposes to take a scientific look at the natural phenomenon of religion, an eminently sensible project. It is just a matter of scope and focus.
Posted by: Abbas Raza | Feb 18, 2006 6:03:24 PM
The central point in his review, the reason why he thinks this book and its stance is so abhorrent is:
"As an attitude to life, it represents a collapse of wisdom."
Just becuase the author sees no wisdom in it doesn't mean there isn't any. Just because it isnt distilled into an easily or romantically digestable "kernel and husk" doesn't mean it's not true.
It's not palatable to a man who spent years looking at higher level phenomena thinking he was at the base, thinking he was at the source, when all he's been doing is seeing shadows on his literary platonic wall.
Posted by: psl | Feb 18, 2006 7:21:04 PM
At least he waited until paragraph 9 before telling us that science can't explain the Missa Solemnis.
Posted by: Dave M | Feb 18, 2006 8:07:02 PM
The review is rather off-putting, and I'd rather they had selected an atheist or non-religious person to write it. The author makes no statement as to his beliefs, but he doesn't have to, really -- the seething hatred is patent throughout. I was willing to hear Weiseltier out until he stated that there was something abhorrent in the idea that reason is a biological process. It became clear (to me) then that the simple fact is that Weiseltier is offended by the claim that he is nothing more (in real terms) than a lump of cells, and that apparently stained his reading of everything Dennett wrote.
This review makes me even more eager to read the book, believe it or not.
Posted by: verbatim | Feb 18, 2006 9:37:34 PM
I am disappointed in Leon Wieseltier's review of Dennett's “Breaking the Spell”, as much for its poor analysis, as for its closing, ad hominem insult. As a scientist, I know of no others who meet Mr. Wieseltier's definition of Scientism. They and Dennett are more accurately characterized as believing that science is the only arbiter for describing the properties of things in the natural world – things like liquid water, and theoretical constructs like the particle theory of subatomic phenomenon, and the evolution of religious behavior.
There is no problem in Dennett's assent to Hume's two questions regarding religion (its foundation in reason, and its origin in human nature), while not accepting Hume's response to the first. How many of us agree on a question while differing on our enlightened responses and discourses? Yet, Mr. Wieseltier uses the distinctions in Dennett's thought process to accuse him, inappropriately and unfairly, of misquoting and misrepresenting Hume.
Dennett is very clear, if not forthright to a fault, by saying he is offering his own speculation on what science may find in a study of religion as a natural phenomenon. Is he not explicit about doing so from the perspective of evolutionary (instrumental and functional) biology. Wieseltier seems to delight in uncovering Dennett's words on this, as if he has uncovered a secret, revealing passage, and hitting Dennett with a Gotcha!
Wieseltier dismisses Dennett's reasoning because Dennett's view presupposes human reason to be a natural phenomenon, based in biology. Then when Dennett uses the word 'transcend' to describe high levels of human reasoning, Wielseltier gives him another Gotcha!, and attaches the opprobrious label of 'animal' to Dennett's human reason. Wieseltier assumes an 'obvious truth' that human reason is a faculty that exists apart from its biology, a la Descartes. Well, here is where the discussion should begin. Instead, Wieseltier chose to end it, not prematurely, but before it even started.
Posted by: Norman Costa | Feb 21, 2006 10:29:50 PM
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