Particulars Matter And The Limits Of Reason

Review of David Berlinski's book, "Human Nature"

Note: I wrote this piece back in 2019 when “Human Nature” came out and shelved it. In light of David Berlinski’s recent interview with Eric Metaxas, I revisited it and thought it’s worth sharing.

David Berlinski is one of those rare individuals where a deep love for—and therefore command of—abstract theories meets an even deeper love for humanity.

The former is held in check by the latter, which makes Berlinski the ideal field guide to the lower quarters of intellectual life, where the postmodern relativists dwell and where Enlightenment Warriors are just a rival gang competing for the same turf.

Berlinski seems to have developed a kind of sixth sense that allows him to detect platitudes, shallowness, and analytical excess—and resist them with gusto. In that respect, his writing reminds me a bit of the late David Stove (“Thomas Hobbes, forsooth!”), although Berlinski is more cultivé in his brawls with lesser minds meditations on certain popular ideas.

In fact, it was Berlinski who, in a footnote in his The Devil’s Delusion, made me aware of Stove, whose book Darwinian Fairytales forever cured me of the ghastly grip Darwinian thinking about morality had had on my being. Thank you for that, David.

It seems to me Human Nature, collection of essays in widely different styles that it is, argues for three ideas: first, that there is such a thing as human nature and that it is essential; second, that it will forever defy definition by the clumsy clutches of human reason; and third, that this doesn’t mean we cannot know more about it. Au contraire.

This book definitely tells us more.

Where Rationality Goes Wrong

Maybe the closest Berlinski comes to admitting that human reason, as so many among the Enlightened believe, can pierce the veil and reveal the secret laws of the Cosmos in the form of definitive statements, is when he talks about language. He recounts the progress linguists have made in formulating a Universal Grammar from which all languages can be derived simply by changing parameters. It is a glorious endeavor:

Universal Grammar is like the ultimate Platonic form; its existence would make the process of acquiring any language analogous to the seedling growing into a tree, whose ideal form is part of another sphere of existence that is somehow intertwined with our own. Universal Grammar is akin to the discovery of the transcendent, a triumph of rational inquiry.

And yet, Berlinski says about the man who has provided us with this triumph, Jean-Roger Vergnaud, that his break-through idea was brought about by his taste, by his intuition: “His reasoning was exquisite because, in so many respects, it was not reasoning at all.” Vergnaud’s endeavor was “the expression of his desire to see beneath the infernal arbitrariness of description to the place where unity prevails.” And that desire enables progress because it switches on intuition, taste, and other gifts. Is it possible to reach the place “where unity prevails” using all those gifts? Berlinski does not say.

With other, more fashionable and more widely disseminated theories, Berlinski is less polite and makes no bones about them being completely unsuitable for solving any big question worth pondering.

They certainly don’t reveal human nature. They do reveal human folly, though, and Berlinski takes great pride in extracting at least this information from those failed attempts.

It All Starts With History

R. G. Collingwood put his finger on the absurdity of interpreting history by means of some 19th century idea of what constitutes science. We cannot create abstractions, supposed general historical laws, and then pretend they explain what we are seeing—as if history was a billiard ball universe and historical events Copernican planets—only to be utterly puzzled that the most important events in history don’t fit our model at all.

Treating historical events as physical objects and human traits as Darwinian payoffs must be among the poorest—and perhaps most foolish—ways to understand the human condition.

What we should do instead, Collingwood argued, is to try our best to re-enact history: to truly understand people and what they were up to in each moment. This also means that historical facts are not mere blips on the statistical radar, but—since they touch the very core of human existence—run infinitely deep.

Take one historical fact, drill down deep enough, and you will find it to be connected to the entirety of the cosmos. Inevitably, each “fact” will lead you to the big questions: why are we here? What is good? Why have we fallen? How do we get out?

A good example of how this works is when Berlinski talks about the statistical measurement of historical violence that some Enlightenment proponents take as proof for progress. Berlinski considers such things as one glorious set of category errors. He writes:

Violence appears analytically as a state or emotional condition, but also as an act or disposition to action. It may simmer, boil, erupt, explode, seethe or subside; or seep, ooze, infract, derange, madden, escalate or intensify; it may be confined, regulated, distributed, sealed off; or liberate, intoxicate and purge; it may be insensate, demented, irrational, careless or incidental; or muted, indirect, verbal, or hidden; and as these constructions might indicate, there is nothing obvious or isolated that by itself answers to the name of violence. Like greed, generosity, love, cupidity, cunning, or artfulness, violence is a part of a dense matrix in which everything is held in suspension by the reciprocating pistons of human nature.¹

Berlinski’s words show that for Collingwood’s “re-enacting” to work, we need the deepest understanding of human nature—here is that word again—that we can muster, beginning with a deep knowledge of ourselves. If we don’t grasp the bottomless depth of the human heart, mind, and soul, we cannot even begin to think adequately about historical developments. It works the other way round, too: by grappling with history, we can learn more about ourselves and human nature, which then makes it easier to understand historical events.

How fitting, then, that Berlinski opens his book with a history lesson about World War I, a massive anomaly in relation to the Enlightenment abstraction of humanity’s linear march towards a rational golden dawn.

Berlinski focuses on the individual actors that brought about this catastrophe and puts his finger on their shortcomings. It is in these specific circumstances that the war came to be, circumstances that defy a simplistic causal chain theory. Similarly, in the later chapters about people and places, he provides us not with “data” but with raw observations by a great mind. There’s a difference. Human nature is not defined here; it announces itself in the process of reading the book, depending on how we read it and what we bring to the table.

All We Could Have Asked For

Berlinski’s book is an uplifting one.

It leaves us with more knowledge, a little wiser, and a little nobler. Perhaps this is the best any book about humanity, about the big questions, can do, whether it be literature, philosophy, or a formal argument. And it’s no easy feat, because so many books, theories, and ideas about big questions leave you dumber and baser. If you doubt this, Human Nature will guide you through many examples.

Still, the book’s last chapter, I must say, leaves me with a sense of gloom. Berlinski’s observations are rich, but what he observes is painful.

Roger Scruton remarked that art which shows us the depravity of the human condition can at the same time transcend it: by this he doesn’t refer to certain forms of postmodern art that violently shoves the ugliness of this world in our faces and therefore celebrates it, but art that depicts this ugliness beautifully and full of spirit, and therefore imbues our terrible condition with something nobler.

Such art brings together the two poles of human nature in the depraved object and its beautiful rendition. The light of the observer, manifest in the artist’s skill and piercing eye, shines on our suffering and shows us that maybe our sacrifice is worth something.

And so it is with this last chapter: Berlinski’s prose is superb; what he describes is strange, sad, and at times, obscene. One cannot help but wonder how it is even possible that a spirit like Berlinski’s dwells in these spheres (the world?), that he is somewhat part of the slice of reality that he observes, which, of course, he must be.

But then again, don’t we all dwell in our own underworlds as much as we try to get the hell out?

Maybe this, too, is part of human nature.

1. David Berlinski, Human Nature, Discovery Institute Press, 2019, p. 46 (emphasis added)