CHAPTER 3
CHAPTER 3
HUMAN IDENTITY:
MAPPING THE LANDSCAPE
People travel so that they can wonder at the heights of the mountains, the huge waves of the sea, the broad flow of the rivers, the vastness of the ocean, the orbits of the stars—and yet fail to wonder at themselves.
AUGUSTINE OF HIPPO
“I praise you, for I am fearfully and wonderfully made” (Psalm 139:14). The complexity and beauty of the human body has long captured the imagination of writers and artists, whether religious or secular. Augustine saw the human mind and body as objects of wonder, perhaps even more marvelous than the vastness of the natural world. The great philosopher Immanuel Kant singled out two aspects of the natural world as rich in significance. “Two things fill the mind with ever new and increasing admiration and awe, the more often and steadily we reflect upon them: the starry heavens above me and the moral law within me.”[1]
But who are we? What are we? What do we mean? Though easily stated, such questions are notoriously resistant to the clear and simple answers that some are seeking. We so easily conform to social pressures and in-group loyalties in our reflections on human nature, preferring to overlook harsher realities. Yet false answers do not arise merely in response to social pressures and expectations. Every answer given to the question of human identity is necessarily false for another reason—because it is forced to omit so much that it cannot be considered to be either comprehensive or reliable. In affirming something, such an answer will always tend to marginalize or deny something else. It may be true in part, yet it is false as a whole because of what it excludes.
Now most of us would agree that the falsity of incompleteness is greatly to be preferred to the falsity of duplicity. Nevertheless, any pretension to offer a complete account of humanity has the potential to mislead in that it invites collusion with a discredited reductionism. While simplicity is doubtless an intellectual virtue in many contexts, it is unquestionably a vice when it comes to human nature. One-liners on the nature of humanity might make for great newspaper headlines; they don’t help us in the least to wrestle with the enigma of human identity and significance.
On Avoiding One-liner Accounts of Human Nature
Many accounts of human nature make reference to a line by Alexander Pope (1688–1744) in his Essay on Man: “The proper study of mankind is man.” This is often represented as marking a decisive move away from religious to secular concerns, reflecting a growing hostility towards religious perspectives. However, even a casual reading of Pope’s Essay makes it clear that his recommendation that humanity should study itself rather than God does not arise from any hostility towards religion. As our limited capacities mean that we can know so little about God, Pope argues, we ought to think about ourselves instead—because it’s easier.
Know then thyself, presume not God to scan,
The proper study of mankind is man.[2]
Pope’s Essay affirms the human need for faith in the face of a half-comprehended and seemingly meaningless world. The limits placed on the human intellect are such that we can only know partial truths, being able to grasp and understand only a small part of our universe. Human beings turn out to be both great and powerless, wise and foolish, and subject to significant limitations. We are “born but to die, and reas’ning but to err,” trapped in an unsettling shadowy world suspended delicately between skepticism and certainty.[3] Pope’s universalization of the category of faith thus extends it beyond the limited realm of religion to human knowledge as a whole.[4] And what of science? While lauding Newton’s scientific genius, Pope deftly observes that it is one thing to describe how the universe works and quite another to know what it—and we—might mean.[5]
So who and what are we? A number of one-line answers might be given to the question of the essence of human nature. We are rational animals; we are social animals; we are prone to violence and self-destruction; we actively seek out meaning in life. All of these individually are true and can be shown to be true; indeed, they may even be interconnected. Some have rightly wondered whether there might be a correlation between our desire to create imaginative and spiritual identities on the one hand and our proneness to both homicide and suicide on the other.[6]
Yet none of these elements or aspects of human nature on its own is adequate as a characterization of human nature. Nor does the recognition of the accuracy of one of them entail the rejection of the others. All are part of a bigger picture; none must be allowed to define or dominate that greater understanding, which ultimately transcends and relativizes its individual components. Words fail to do justice to human nature, yet we have to use words to talk about all the great issues of life, including human identity.[7] We are embodied creatures located within a limiting world, who struggle to grasp and express what lies both within and beyond that world.
And what of other aspects of being human? What of gender? Or ethnicity? In what way can the many facets of human identity, both physical and cultural, be woven together to give a coherent view of human nature as a whole, without denying the significance of individuality? Augustine of Hippo is one of many Christian writers to struggle with the “sheer incompleteness of the endeavor of self-knowing,”[8] which prevents us from securing a premature closure on some core questions of human limits. Many of the great questions of human identity lie far beyond the scope of this work, which focuses on human beings as meaning-seeking animals. There is so much more that needs to be said!
Any quest for a greater understanding of human nature is marked by paradox and tension, rather than the slick and glib simplicities offered by colder forms of algorithmic rationalism. When Pascal famously spoke of humanity being characterized by both “misery” and “grandeur,” he was merely pointing out the tensions experienced within human life, rather than attempting to resolve them. It proves impossible to give a scientific account of humanity that does justice to the richness of our aspirations and longings for truth, beauty, and goodness on the one hand, and on the other, our failures to live up to the standards that we intuitively believe to be right, not merely for us but for everyone else. One of the defining enigmas of human nature is our awareness of higher values and aspirations, which we seem unable to achieve. Such transcendent goals may lie beyond our capacity, yet we nonetheless recognize them as worthy and admirable.
Given this complexity, it seems appropriate to look at some influential sketches of human distinctiveness and reflect on how they might illuminate and inform our thinking in this study. This chapter maps the landscape of human nature by considering four influential and generative visions of humanity, each of which casts light on some aspects of our identity and challenges us to reconsider some of our easy and comfortable assumptions about our darker sides. The four figures are:
These four dialogue partners map out some of the great questions for discussion about human nature while at the same time disclosing the fundamental divergence and disagreement which is such a characteristic feature of human attempts to make sense of their own significance and identity down the ages.
Our four illustrative thinkers are probably better at raising fundamental questions than providing definitive answers. Yet the diversity of their emphases and responses—which reflects a comparable breadth within the broader human discussion of our nature and identity—reminds us that there are no definitive or intellectually compelling answers to these core questions. We can at best hope for justified beliefs about human nature, not proven certainties. Perhaps this absence of certainty goes some way towards explaining the amplified rhetoric and lapses into dogmatism which invariably seem to accompany any attempt to discuss religion, ethics, or politics—to name only three areas of characteristically human discourse which lie beyond the realm of the provable.
Only the first of the four thinkers I have chosen to open up the question of human identity is generally considered to be explicitly religious, though two of the others recognize the importance of religion, both as a human undertaking in the first place and as a way of framing human identity and existence. In selecting these figures, I have tried to offer a broad spectrum of reflection on the issue of human nature, which opens up some questions for wider discussion and allows other voices to make significant contributions to the wider discussion that will follow.
Augustine of Hippo
The period of late classical antiquity witnessed the slow decline and death of the Roman Empire in Western Europe and North Africa, prompting sober reflection on the fragility of human institutions and the ultimate grounds of human security. One of the most remarkable writers of this period was a Roman civil servant who returned to his native Africa after his conversion to Christianity and became bishop of the colonial town of Hippo Regius. It is dangerous to try to summarize Augustine of Hippo’s reflections on human nature, mainly because they are so rich that there is a serious risk of reducing them to superficial platitudes. Nevertheless, the effort is worthwhile, not least because of Augustine’s considerable influence in shaping both cultural and religious thinking about the mystery of human identity and significance.
Augustine’s Confessions, written between 397 and 400, is often described as a spiritual autobiography. While this is correct as far as it goes, there is much more that needs to be said. As Augustine reflected on his own conversion to Christianity, he became increasingly aware of the importance of autobiographical memory.[9] Augustine’s analysis of the nature of time emphasizes both the awareness of the subjective time in which the individual thinker exists and the awareness of the individual existing in subjective time. For Augustine, we simply cannot know ourselves completely; the fact that we are known by God thus helps anchor us in the midst of this transitory and unstable world.
Augustine developed an intellectual and imaginative framework which preserves the subjective importance of the present moment, allowing him to affirm and integrate the significance of his memories of the past and his hopes for the future. Recent psychological research has confirmed the importance of the notion of “subjective time” for human identity,[10] as well as creating space for a religious or metaphysical enrichment of the notion, along the lines developed by Augustine. If Augustine has a popular successor today in this respect, it is probably C. S. Lewis, whose integration of memory and reflection is probably seen at its best in Surprised by Joy.[11]
Yet many would argue that Augustine’s most important reflections on human nature concern sin—a notion, sidelined by many modern self-congratulatory visions of humanism, which tries to articulate what is wrong with us and what can be done about it. Augustine is easily depicted as a moral and social pessimist, overwhelmed by the social turmoil of his age. Yet this is unfair. Augustine’s concern is to expose the consequences of human beings existing within an historical process which limits our capacities and ability to think and act. We cannot see things as they really are. Our eyes are dimmed and unfocused, requiring both divine healing and training if they are to see our world and ourselves properly.[12] And even if we could achieve such a proper vision, we are trapped within our own self-referential schemes of thought that dispose us not to want to accept, still less act upon, such a true knowledge.[13]
We need a fundamental realignment and recalibration if we are to live rightly and wisely—and this is something that we cannot do unaided. Augustine’s emphasis on God as the one who heals our souls and enlightens our minds captures something of the human problem while at the same time expressing the difference that God makes to human existence and experience.
Why is this so important? Like a prophet speaking from beyond the grave, Augustine challenges the naive and optimistic view of human nature that continues to entrance some within Western culture. Some believe that we can see things as they really are; others that we are masters of our own souls and destinies; others that we are fundamentally good and are unproblematically capable of doing what is right once we know what is right. Augustine would see all of these as understandable delusions that fail to come to terms with our own human natures. We shall explore these themes further later in this work.
Giovanni Pico della Mirandola
The European Renaissance is regularly and rightly highlighted by cultural historians as a remarkable period of creativity, reconstruction, and renewal. What many regarded as a stale and decaying culture was brought to new life through a deliberate and imaginative process of cross-fertilization, in which the artistic and aesthetic glories of the ancient world were transfused into the veins of Western European thought. To its critics, this process of reappropriation was highly selective, even arbitrary; to its supporters, it was in effect a filtering process that allowed the best of the wisdom of the ancient world to enrich a stagnant modern age.
Any attempt to single out one specific work of this age as somehow encapsulating its essence is fraught with danger, not least on account of the obvious difficulty of identifying precisely what the essential core of the Renaissance might be.[14] Yet many would still point to Giovanni Pico della Mirandola’s Oration on the Dignity of Humanity (1486) as a brilliant vignette of the core vision of the Renaissance.[15] Although only the opening section of this oration deals with human nature and identity, the ideas it develops resonated with many at the time, as they do today.[16]
Pico delivered this flamboyant oration at the age of twenty-four. Often dubbed the “Manifesto of the Renaissance,” it was written in a highly polished and elegant Latin style, affirming a traditional Christian doctrine of the creation of humanity yet giving a particular emphasis to one of its core elements—the creativity of humanity. Humanity’s position within the created order is not fixed but is determined by what individual human beings choose to enact.
Pico argues that God created the “Great Chain of Being,” in which every creature was allocated a specific place. Following Augustine, Pico suggests that God, having created such a beautiful and complex universe, longed for someone who might take delight in its beauty and be impressed by its grandeur of scale. God thus created humanity. Yet every place in the “Great Chain of Being”—from angels to worms—was already allocated. There was no missing link, no gap into which humanity might be inserted. God therefore made the decision to allow human beings to determine their own place within the created order.
Humanity was thus created by God as a “creature of indeterminate image,” with the capacity and permission to determine its own place in the greater order of things. For Pico, humanity has been endowed with the active capacity to determine its own identity, rather than being obliged to receive this passively in any given or predetermined fixed form. The oration emphasizes the preeminence and unique potentialities of human beings, which mark out the human species as unique on earth.
Pico expresses this idea in a somewhat free rewriting of the second creation account of the book of Genesis, in which he portrays God as addressing Adam in the following way:
We have given you, Adam, neither a fixed dwelling place, nor a form that is yours alone, nor any function that is peculiar to you alone. This is so that you may have and possess whatever dwelling place, form, and functions that you yourself may desire, according to your longing and judgment. The nature of all other beings is limited and constrained within the bounds of laws prescribed by us. You are constrained by no limits, and shall determine the limits of your nature for yourself, in accordance with your own free will, in whose hand we have placed you.[17]
It is thus the God-given privilege and responsibility of humanity to determine its own place and function within the “Great Chain of Being” through the proper exercise of its freedom and intelligence. Human beings can thus choose to act as an animal, by following their lower instincts; alternatively, they can function as angels, by acting according to their higher instincts.
Why is Pico’s approach so interesting? The standout point of his vision of humanity is that we have the capacity to determine what we are (or what we might become). This echoes a theme familiar to all scholars of classical Greek culture—the famous maxim in Pindar’s Second Pythian Ode, written about 475 BC: “Become what you are.” Many now follow the philosopher Martin Heidegger’s influential misreading of this phrase: “Become what you happen to be, not what you think you ought to be.” While Heidegger’s reading of Pindar chimes in with postmodern values, Pindar really meant something like this: “Become such as you are, having learned what that is.”[18] For the great thinkers of the classical age, we each have a telos—a goal that we are meant to achieve, which defines our true self. The “good life” is lived out in trying to discover what that self is, and thus to become who we truly are.[19] We have to choose between different visions of ourselves, recognizing that this choice is of decisive importance in shaping how we act and think.
Pico’s optimistic vision of the human capacity to choose our own vision of our identity has a certain romantic attraction. But if he is right, there might turn out to be a dark side to our humanity. Let’s look at just one problem that arises. What happens if someone else chooses that identity for us, imposing upon us their decisions? G. K. Chesterton put his finger on the problem here: “When once one begins to think of man as a shifting and alterable thing, it is always easy for the strong and crafty to twist him into new shapes for all kinds of unnatural purposes.”[20] If human nature is malleable, the powerful will merely reshape it to serve their own interests—as in the “hatcheries and conditioning centers” of Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World (1932).
Iris Murdoch
Earlier we noted the quote from the ancient Greek philosopher Pindar: “Become what you are.” Another maxim of the ancient world was inscribed in the Temple of Apollo at Delphi: “Know yourself.” This piece of advice seems to have been commonplace in Greek literature of the classical age and was often understood (for example, by Plato) as a criticism of speculative knowledge about the world or the gods. If you didn’t even understand yourself, how could you hope to understand these greater matters? The beginning of wisdom lay in knowing ourselves and acting on that knowledge.
It is, of course, an important piece of advice. Yet it all too easily becomes an empty platitude. What if we refuse to accept such a knowledge of ourselves, preferring an illusion to the reality? What if we prefer to construct our own identities, like the autobiographer who creatively and generously rewrites her personal history to portray herself as someone who was constantly at the center of everything? Or as a figure of wisdom and goodness, when the reality is actually somewhat less flattering?
The question at stake is whether humanity has both a propensity and a love for self-deception. Such a trait would be nothing new. The royal inscriptions of the Assyrian king Sennacherib (reigned 705–681 BC) about his military campaigns are clearly propaganda, rather than simple history, with an ideological agenda which modern readers might regard as amounting to self-deception within the royal household.[21] But if we have a vested interest in concealing an awkward truth, how can we learn from our failings and difficulties?
Such questions lie at the heart of the moral philosophy of Iris Murdoch, who argued that humanity is characterized by its tendency to deceive itself. We are imprisoned within a cocoon of our own making, which makes us blind to the way things really are—above all, the way we really are. Moral philosophy is called on to challenge our radical tendency towards self-deception. Murdoch argues that the reality of the world and our own moral reality lie hidden from us until we are compelled to see it properly. “By opening our eyes, we do not necessarily see what confronts us. . . . Our minds are continually active, fabricating an anxious, usually self-preoccupied, often falsifying veil which partially conceals the world.”[22]
We do not naturally see ourselves as we really are. The ability to discern the truth about ourselves is an acquired habit, something that we need to develop over time. It is “a task to come to see the world as it is.”[23] Seeing things as they really are, penetrating beneath the surface of appearances, is thus both the goal and the outcome of the cultivation of perceptual attentiveness. Murdoch thus holds that “objectivity and unselfishness are not natural to human beings”[24] and rightly notes that the Christian notion of sin offers both a vocabulary and an intellectual framework for engaging this disturbing human trait.
So how is this human self-deception to be confronted? And how can it be overcome? Murdoch’s core argument is that this enslaving spell of self-preoccupation and self-deception needs to be broken and that art and literature are the main ways through which this liberation may be achieved.[25] “[Great literature] breaks the grip of our own dull fantasy life and stirs us to the effort of true vision. Most of the time we fail to see the big wide real world at all because we are blinded by obsession, anxiety, envy, resentment, fear. We make a small personal world in which we remain enclosed.” Literature and art appeal to a “liberated truth-seeking creative imagination,” which seeks to discern and embrace “what is true and deep.”[26] Art leads us towards “a juster, clearer, more detailed, more refined understanding of human nature, or of the natural world which crowds upon our senses.”[27]
Art thus shows us that there is a veil placed over our gaze on the natural world and ourselves and helps us to remove it. For Murdoch, great art shows us “the world as we were never able so clearly to see it before,”[28] allowing us a heightened perception and clearer vision of reality and thus enabling us to engage with it more justly. “Virtue is the attempt to pierce the veil of selfish consciousness and join the world as it really is.”[29] Murdoch’s assessment of the human situation is thus that it is characterized by a habit of self-deception, which can be broken by the imaginative or moral power of great art, which allows us to see ourselves from outside our self-created webs of meaning, thus both exposing their falsity and creating a longing to connect up with this wider world which is not of our own invention.[30] Great art attempts to show us reality untainted by “the intrusion of fantasy” or “the assertion of self.”[31]
Murdoch raises important questions about human nature, especially our disturbing tendency to deceive ourselves—perhaps most obvious in the lazy and complacent contemporary cultural assumption of the fundamental goodness of humanity. There are obvious questions to be explored here. Can we really escape from a delusional view of reality by ourselves? Or do we need help? While the Christian doctrine of grace affirms the goodness and kindness of God, it also discloses the incapacity of humanity to distance or detach itself from its self-created world of deceptions. Yet perhaps the important thing here is not the solution that Murdoch advocates (although this has many insights worth noting), but her insistence that there is a problem here with human nature that cannot be overlooked, and must be engaged with.
Richard Dawkins
The British biologist Richard Dawkins published The Selfish Gene in 1976. The work is now regarded as one of the most influential studies of human nature published in the last generation. It is unusual in that it popularized a scientific idea with such elegance and sophistication that it had a significant impact on wider cultural conversations of the 1980s. The Selfish Gene developed a series of memorable analogies and lucid explanations to explain the core themes of Darwinian orthodoxy in general while at the same time advocating Dawkins’s own “gene’s eye” view of evolution.
In the late 1960s, Dawkins came to the conclusion that the “most imaginative way of looking at evolution, and the most inspiring way of teaching it” was to see the entire process from the perspective of the gene. This “gene’s eye” approach is best seen as a creative reworking of the “fundamental logic of Darwinism,”[32] which allows the fundamental coherence of Darwinian evolutionary theory to be grasped imaginatively. The core theme of Dawkins’s approach can be summed up in a sentence from his lecture notes of 1966: “Our basic expectation on the basis of the orthodox neo-Darwinian theory of evolution is that Genes will be selfish.”[33] This idea is developed and given further substance and justification in The Selfish Gene: “A predominant quality to be expected in a successful gene is ruthless selfishness. This gene selfishness will usually give rise to selfishness in individual behavior.”[34] Human selfishness is thus an expression of an underlying genetic predisposition over which we have no control. Even altruism, Dawkins argues, can be explained in terms of this paradigm of selfishness, in that it represents a mechanism by which genes are able to ensure their survival overall, even if some individual gene-bearing individuals have to be sacrificed along the way.
The cultural background of the age created an interest in the core ideas of The Selfish Gene which went far beyond their scientific significance. Dawkins’s suggestion that human beings could be seen as collections of “selfish genes” helped to make sense of some of the social and political developments of the 1980s, such as the individualist political ideologies of Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher, which argued that greed was good for society, as it generated an appetite for new possibilities and liberated humanity from the burdens of the past.[35] Since evolution seems to help those who help themselves, selfishness should be seen as a driving force for positive change rather than as a flaw that drags us down.[36]
Dawkins argues that our genetic history predisposes us to act in certain selfish manners. So what can be done about this? Dawkins suggests that he is like an oncologist, whose professional specialty is studying cancer and whose professional vocation is fighting it. The future of humanity depends on resisting, not endorsing, this genetic legacy. “Let us try to teach generosity and altruism, because we are born selfish. Let us understand what our own selfish genes are up to, because we may then at least have the chance to upset their designs.”[37] Our genes may “instruct us to be selfish,” but we are under no obligation to obey them.
Dawkins develops the idea that, although we are shaped and conditioned by our “selfish genes,” we can achieve a state of enlightenment in which we realize the manner in which we are trapped by our genes and devise strategies for resisting their malign influence. Humanity is trapped in patterns of thought and action which are ultimately not of their own choosing. However, Dawkins declares, humans are able to assert their autonomy in the face of this genetic determinism. We can rebel against our selfish genes: “We have the power to defy the selfish genes of our birth. . . . We have the power to turn against our creators. We, alone on earth, can rebel against the tyranny of the selfish replicators.”[38] Human beings alone have evolved to the point at which we are able to rebel against precisely the process that brought us here in the first place.
Understanding the evolutionary process thus allows us to subvert its influence and redirect its possible outcomes. We shall explore this line of thought further in this work, especially when we consider the notion of “transhumanism.” Can we now take charge of our own evolution and decide what we should be?
These four authors raise important questions about human nature and identity, as well as the shape that the human future might take. Although there are interesting points of convergence, what is more striking is their points of disagreement. The outcome of human reflection on the nature and future of human beings is contested and shows no signs of being settled. Some might see this as an indication of the futility of any attempt to reflect on these matters; others, however, will see this as an invitation to revisit and reassess these great questions. We will take the second course in this book, focusing on the human quest for meaning—to which we now turn.
[1] Immanuel Kant, Gesammelte Schriften, vol. 5 of 30 (Berlin: Reimer, 1902), 161.
[2] Alexander Pope, Essay on Man, epistle 2, st. 1, lines 1–2.
[3] Pope, Essay on Man, epistle 2, st. 1, lines 10, 17–18.
[4] For discussion of this general question around this time, see Kevin L. Cope, Criteria of Certainty: Truth and Judgment in the English Enlightenment (Lexington, KY: University Press of Kentucky, 1990).
[5] Pope, Essay on Man, epistle 2, st. 1, lines 19–30, 35–38.
[6] For example, see James Gilligan, Violence: Our Deadly Epidemic and Its Causes (New York: Vintage Books, 1997).
[7] For a good discussion, see Rowan Williams, The Edge of Words: God and the Habits of Language (London: Bloomsbury, 2014).
[8] Rowan Williams, On Augustine (London: Bloomsbury, 2016), 22.
[9] Liliann Manning, Daniel Cassel, and Jean-Christophe Cassel, “St. Augustine’s Reflections on Memory and Time and the Current Concept of Subjective Time in Mental Time Travel,” Behavioral Sciences 3, no. 2 (2013): 232–43.
[10] See, for example, Karl K. Szpunar, “On Subjective Time,” Cortex 47, no. 3 (2011): 409–11; Karl K. Szpunar, “Evidence for an Implicit Influence of Memory on Future Thinking,” Memory & Cognition 38, no. 5 (2010): 531–40.
[11] See especially Alister E. McGrath, “The Enigma of Autobiography: Critical Reflections on Surprised by Joy,” in The Intellectual World of C. S. Lewis (Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell, 2013), 7–30.
[12] Lydia Schumacher, Divine Illumination: The History and Future of Augustine’s Theory of Knowledge (Malden, MA: Wiley-Blackwell, 2011).
[13] See the detailed discussion in Jesse Couenhoven, Stricken by Sin, Cured by Christ: Agency, Necessity, and Culpability in Augustinian Theology (New York: Oxford University Press, 2013).
[14] For example, see Charles G. Nauert, Humanism and Renaissance Civilization (Basingstoke: Ashgate, 2012).
[15] The Latin title is Oratio de dignitate hominis.
[16] The rich diversity of Renaissance understandings of human nature is considered in Andreas Höfele and Stephan Laqué, eds., Humankinds: The Renaissance and Its Anthropologies (Berlin: Walter de Gruyter, 2011).
[17] Giovanni Pico della Mirandola, Oration on the Dignity of Man (Chicago: Gateway Editions, 1956), 7 [I have altered the translation at points for accuracy].
[18] For this translation, see William H. Race, Pindar: Olympian Odes; Pythian Odes (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2002), 239.
[19] For reflections on these themes, see Pierre Hadot, What Is Ancient Philosophy? (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2002).
[20] G. K. Chesterton, What’s Wrong with the World (San Francisco: Ignatius, 1994), 180.
[21] Isaac Kalimi and Seth Francis Corning Richardson, eds., Sennacherib at the Gates of Jerusalem: Story, History and Historiography (Leiden: Brill, 2014). For an overstatement of these concerns, see Antti Laato, “Assyrian Propaganda and the Falsification of History in the Royal Inscriptions of Sennacherib,” Vetus Testamentum 45, no. 3 (1995): 198–226.
[22] Iris Murdoch, The Sovereignty of Good (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1970), 82.
[23] Murdoch, Sovereignty of Good, 91.
[24] Murdoch, Sovereignty of Good, 50.
[25] Iris Murdoch, Existentialists and Mystics: Writings on Philosophy and Literature (London: Chatto and Windus, 1997), 14.
[26] Iris Murdoch, Metaphysics as a Guide to Morals (London: Penguin, 1992), 321.
[27] Iris Murdoch, “Ethics and the Imagination,” Irish Theological Quarterly 52, no. 1–2 (1986): 81–95, quote on p. 90.
[28] Iris Murdoch, The Fire and the Sun: Why Plato Banished the Artists (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1977), 78.
[29] Murdoch, Sovereignty of Good, 93.
[30] For a fuller consideration of this theme, see Maria Antonaccio, Picturing the Human: The Moral Thought of Iris Murdoch (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000).
[31] Murdoch, Sovereignty of Good, 58.
[32] Alan Grafen, “The Intellectual Contribution of The Selfish Gene to Evolutionary Theory,” in Richard Dawkins: How a Scientist Changed the Way We Think, ed. Alan Grafen and Mark Ridley (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006), 66–74, quote on p. 73.
[33] Typewritten text of 1966 lecture notes reproduced in Richard Dawkins, An Appetite for Wonder: The Making of a Scientist—A Memoir (London: Bantam, 2013), 200.
[34] Richard Dawkins, The Selfish Gene, 2nd ed. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1989), 9–10.
[35] See Marek Kohm, “To Rise Above,” in Grafen and Ridley, Richard Dawkins, 248–54.
[36] Frans de Waal, Our Inner Ape: The Best and Worst of Human Nature (London: Granta Books, 2006), 21.
[37] Dawkins, Selfish Gene, 10.
[38] Dawkins, Selfish Gene, 200–201.