April
26, 2002, 8:45 a.m. Soul
Doctor
Leon
Kass’s mission.
By Albert Keith
Whitaker
ack in the
1930's, the rumor arose that Robert Maynard Hutchins, the dashing president
of the University of Chicago, and, even more wildly, his great-books guru
Mortimer Adler, had joined secret Catholic masses late at night in the
University's Rockefeller chapel. Hutchins's admiration for the thought
of St. Thomas apparently supplied the pretext for the charge, though its
true motives were, no doubt, not so high-minded.
Now yet another U
of C luminary has ascended the national stage, and though by all appearances
Leon Kass is a conservative Jew, some on the Left have all but accused
the chairman of the President's Bioethics Council of being a closet Christian.
He has been called the "the religious right's favorite intellectual."
One fellow bioethicist went so far as to comment that "Bush could
never have gotten away with appointing a Catholic bishop to head his Council
on Bioethics; yet in Kass he gets more or less the same thing, down to
the natural law-style theorizing — but with an M.D. and Ph.D. conveniently
included to throw everyone off the trail." One can almost hear Karl
Rove chuckling.
But what is truly
funny is how these critics — and perhaps even some of Kass's defenders
— have misunderstood their man. Kass is a polymath when it comes
to philosophy and religion, and he gladly borrows from thinkers as theologically
diverse as C. S. Lewis, Paul Ramsey, and Hans Jonas. But his thought is
much closer to that of Plato and Aristotle than it is to Thomas or Augustine.
Kass argues that cloning and the quest for sempiternity are wrong for
many reasons, but fundamentally he rejects them as undermining or even
abolishing our humanity — a humanity he discovers in "the profundity
of sex." According to Kass, the mystery that is man transforms sexual
reproduction into the consciousness of sexuality. This consciousness expresses
itself as longing, love, or, as the pagan Greeks put it, eros —
a longing that directs you towards others, but also pricks you with your
own loneliness; a passion that engenders children, art, and philosophy,
but all the while dimly teasing you with the shadow of your own mortality.
In Kass's view, cloning and the rest of the "immortality project"
threaten to kill eros, and so, instead of making us gods, reduce
us to beasts. Christianity, of course, makes much of these ideas, but
by themselves they are no more Catholic than Socrates was.
Their misidentification
of Kass mainly reveals his critics' tonedeafness; they cannot hear arguments
that do not revolve around such things as consent, safety, benefits, and
rights. But it also points out Kass's own delicate position in this debate.
His attempt to promote the "good life" over the protection and
prolongation of "mere" life rebels against the spirit of the
modern scientific project, a project, as formulated by such men as Francis
Bacon and Descartes, to "conquer nature" and "relieve man's
estate," to regain "Eden" and the "tree of life"
— but by our own efforts, on this earth. His Socratic insistence
on following reason, not passion, also distances Kass from America's —
and the American president's — favorite emotion: compassion. Though
a deeply kind and sensitive man, Kass won't rely on pity. He praises "humanity,"
love, and longings while his adversaries — and many of his friends
— point to human beings and their sufferings.
Whether Kass can
do some good in this precarious position depends very much on his ability
to steer the council — and the country — away from idolizing
any and all life and towards realizing the threat that the "immortality
project" poses to human families, aspirations, and even love. If
he succeeds, maybe more people will also recognize that you don't have
to be a priest to speak meaningfully about the soul.
—
Mr. Whitaker is a professor of philosophy at Boston College.
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ack in the
1930's, the rumor arose that Robert Maynard Hutchins, the dashing president
of the University of Chicago, and, even more wildly, his great-books guru
Mortimer Adler, had joined secret Catholic masses late at night in the
University's Rockefeller chapel. Hutchins's admiration for the thought
of St. Thomas apparently supplied the pretext for the charge, though its
true motives were, no doubt, not so high-minded.
