Faithful Reason. - "A Mind's Matter: An Intellectual Autobiography" - book review

National Review, Sept 16, 2002 by M. D. Aeschliman

A Mind's Matter: An Intellectual Autobiography, by Stanley L. Jaki (Eerdmans, 328 pp., $25)

Since the publication of his breakthrough book, The Relevance of Physics, in 1966, Stanley Jaki has generated a body of intellectual work that is perhaps unequaled over the last third of a century in range, magnitude, learning, and importance. An emigre who came to the U.S. from Hungary -- via Rome -- after World War II, he has written over 40 books and dozens of essays, introductions, and encyclopedia articles, and received some of the highest intellectual honors, including the Templeton Prize (1987). He has delivered two series of Gifford Lectures at the University of Edinburgh, and Fremantle and Farmington Institute Lectures at Oxford. He has been intermittently associated with Princeton.

Yet a certain pathos and irony characterize this enormous accomplishment, whose nobility and power they only enhance. For Jaki's work on the history and philosophy of science -- and his examination of the relation of science to religion, theology, ethics, philosophy, and culture -- has been steadily resisted and is far from receiving the attention and credit it deserves. His work has been the object of envy, neglect, and hostility; he has also been the victim of plagiarism, as a kind of cruel compliment.

Since World War II there has been no more learned, profound, or judicious guide than Jaki to the increasingly important questions that are indicated by phrases such as "the two cultures" and "qualitative and quantitative." A high literary standard of discussion of these themes was set in the Anglophone world in the 19th century by Matthew Arnold, J. S. Mill, John Henry Newman, and T. H. Huxley. Learned and supple minds sharpened their wits and pens on these issues and shed much valuable light on them in the 20th century: One thinks of Alfred North Whitehead, Aldous Huxley, Michael Polanyi, C. S. Lewis, Jacques Maritain, Hans Jonas, Jacques Barzun, Gertrude Himmelfarb, and Leon Kass.

But a familiarity with much of this valuable literature only increases one's admiration of Jaki's accomplishment and one's regret at the intense opposition and studious neglect it has encountered. Recently Jacques Barzun wrote, with Swiftian understatement, that the penalties imposed by the current regime of political correctness "have been mild -- opprobrium, loss of employment, and virtual exclusion from the profession." Jaki's great offense against this intellectual establishment is that he is skeptical about modern cultural and intellectual currents, espousing instead an articulate, combative Christian rationalism.

Perhaps because he was born and raised in Hungary and lived under both Nazis and Communists, Jaki -- a Benedictine priest -- has apparently never subscribed to the most widespread and pervasive ideology of the 20th century, both on the left and on the right: the idea of a cumulative, inevitable, and irreversible human progress, built on and primarily powered by discoveries in science and innovations in technology. It was another continental European emigre, the German- Jewish Leo Strauss, who perhaps put this point most clearly and unanswerably. "The idea of progress in the modern sense," Strauss wrote after World War II, "implies that once man has reached a certain level, intellectual and moral or social, there exists a firm level of being below which he cannot sink. This contention, however, is empirically refuted by the incredible barbarization which we have been so unfortunate as to witness in our century."

One need not be a specialist in the history of science such as Jaki or a political philosopher such as Strauss to recognize the truth of this assertion, but Jaki's reinterpretation of the history of science has proved particularly unnerving or offensive to believers in the "Whig interpretation of history." These latter have, consciously or unconsciously, used the history of science as a means of attacking and demoting the ethical legacy transmitted to the modern world by Judaism and Christianity in their centuries-long deliberation on and dialogue with each other and with the great tradition of classical moral rationalism inaugurated by Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle.

Though himself vastly learned in mathematics, physics, and astronomy -- he did his Ph.D. in physics under a Nobel laureate -- Jaki insists that "the scientific method [provides] no guidelines for the proper handling of the awesome tools science provides." This insight was bitterly resisted and widely denied in the 20th century, perhaps most banefully by Lenin and the now-defunct Bolshevik "scientific socialism" -- Michael Polanyi reproached the ill-fated Bolshevik theoretician Bukharin about it in the 1920s -- but also, insidiously and influentially, by apparently well-meaning secular-liberal "humanist" science-worshippers such as John Dewey. "Science without conscience is the death of the soul," Rabelais wrote nearly 500 years ago, but this sturdy truth is today implicitly or explicitly denied by the Darwinians in fields such as biogenetics, not to mention many garden-variety science teachers. They are ignorant of and impatient with the very idea and tradition of moral reasoning; they assume that ethics is simply a utilitarian afterthought to or rationalization of science, and has no independent source or validity. As the Nobel laureate Enrico Fermi brutally but revealingly put it, "Whatever Nature has in store for mankind, unpleasant as it may be, men must accept."