The Golden Cord: A Short Book on the Secular and the Sacred

Chapter 1: Love in the Physical World

15 c h A p t e r 1 LOVE IN THE PHYSICAL WORLD Midway this way of life we’re bound upon, I woke to find myself in a dark wood, Where the right road was wholly lost and gone. —Dante, Inferno When I was in my twenties, a graduate student at Harvard University and not yet midway on life’s journey, I attended a philosophy seminar on the nature of language, with a focus on metaphor . The professor requested that we come up with a sentence that expr essed obvious nonsense. The usual example employed in many texts at the time was N oam Chomsky ’s great line, “Colorless green ideas sleep furiously.” Rather than invoke green ideas, the professor wrote on the blackboard: “Gravity is a manifestation of love.” There was some forced laughter, though I felt a little un easy when I realized that I actually believed that this “obvious nonsense” was true and foundational to life itself. 16 T H E G O L D E N C O R D At the time, I was in a D ante reading group (about twelve of us met on Sunday nights in a tiny apar tment on Beacon Hill in Boston to read out loud and discuss Dante’s Divine Comedy over wine). Perhaps my professor came up with his example of “obvious nonsense” after seeing my T-shirt, which featured a reprint of Gustave Doré’s illustration of the Beatific Vision (the “Celestial Rose”) and the famous last lines of theParadiso : “My will and my desire were turned by love, / The love that moves the sun and the other stars.”1 Before reveling in Dante’s vision of love and delving into the ways in which earthly love may provide a path into eternal, divine love, we need to explore why such a divine expedition seems to many philosophers absolutely preposterous and pathetic. Without a plausible challenge to the rather hostile state of play in some quar ters of the world of philosophy , the task of this book will seem like a fool’s errand. Intellectual Climates Graduate schools, and univ ersities in general, hav e their o wn atmosphere . At Harvard, at least in the philosophy department or, more specifically , in the seminars and classes I took in the 1970s, the atmosphere was decidedly materialistic. “Materialism” can be described variously as the view either that all that exists is in space and time or that all that exists can ultimately be explained by the physical sciences, and so on. Exact definitions are not crucial here, except to highlight the form of materialism that lay behind my professor’s choice of examples. At Harvard in the 1960s and 1970s, the great Willard van Orman Quine argued that, ultimately , references to mental realities such as beliefs, desires, and so on (including references to love) should give way to a vocabulary of science that lacked such terms. As a friend of B. F. Skinner, Quine preferred behaviorist accounts of human action. Daniel Dennett captures the mood of the time: The prevailing wisdom, variously expressed and argued for , is materialism : there is only one sort of stuff, namely matter—the physical stuff of Love in the Physical World 17 physics, chemistry, and physiology—and the mind is somehow nothing but a physical phenomenon. In short, the mind is the brain. According to the materialists, we can (in principle!) account for every mental phenomenon using the same physical principles, laws and raw materials that suffice to explain radioactivity, continental drift, photosynthesis, r eproduction, nutrition, and growth.2 While I postpone at the outset any serious questioning of this “wisdom,” note that Dennett defines the material in terms of physical sciences— physics, chemistry, physiology. Perhaps under “physiology,” the scientific study of the function of living systems, Dennett would include a wide array of disciplines, but noticeably absent fr om Dennett’s explicit identification of alpha modes of cognition ar e, for example, psychology, sociology, and history. It is perhaps not surprising that philosophy and theology are excluded, but Dennett seems to be mor e confident in the reality of explanator y significance of the “physical principles, laws and raw materials that suffice to explain radioactivity, continental drift, photosynthesis , reproduction, nutrition, and growth” than in the reality and explanatory power of “mental phenomenon.” But doesn’t the very process of science and the practice of explaining things and forming...