Avocado and artichoke view of human nature

CHAPTER 3 Human Nature: Who or What Are We, and What Are We Doing Here?

BEFORE YOU READ . . .

Ask yourself whether there is a “real you,” fixed at birth, or whether you see yourself more as a work in progress.

Imagine that you have been having an Internet relationship with John for the past six months. During that time you have discussed many issues, and you have gradually come to respect John's intelligence and perceptive questions. The two of you have connected on so many levels that you have begun to look forward to your evening meetings on the Net. Although many of the people with whom you live and work seem preoccupied with trivial and superficial things, John always focuses on the “big picture” and appears to understand what really matters.

When you suggest a face-to-face meeting, John puts you off. As you become more insistent, John finally admits that this will be impossible because “he” is a computer program. But this revelation should not harm your relationship, John contends. You can go on just as you have done for the past six months. Still, you feel confused and a little betrayed by this new information. How, you wonder, could you have been fooled for so long? Realizing that you have had a relationship with a computer, you are embarrassed, and even angry. Continuing these conversations now seems out of the question.

The Tom Hanks character in the movie Splash faced a similar problem. When the beautiful woman who seemed to return his affection and readily agreed to move in with him turned out to be a mermaid, Hanks responded with indignation, “I can't love you. You're a fish.” The mermaid took the same approach as John, the computer, insisting that this new revelation need not have any effect on the relationship: “Whatever you connected with, fell in love with, I'm still that. The fact that I'm a mermaid has nothing to do with anything.”

The Issue Defined

Would you be able to accept a skillfully constructed android, made to appear and act human in every way, as a love partner? What about a mermaid, if this were possible? Or is there something in you that recoils from the less than human and insists that only a member of your own species can be an acceptable mate? Paying close attention to your feelings as you consider this question might give you some insight into your own view of human nature.

As a variation on this thought experiment, imagine yourself in a room with two computer terminals. You know that one is connected with a computer program and the other with a human being, but you don't know which is which. Your task is to sit at both keyboards and carry on conversations with whoever or whatever is on the other end. At the conclusion you must render a judgment about which is the human and which the computer. Known as the Turing test—after its inventor, British mathematician Alan Turing—this experiment assumes that if a computer can convince you it is human, perhaps it could reasonably be said to think.

A few years ago, a program called “PC Therapist III” convinced half the people who interacted with it that it was indeed a therapist and not a series of computer bytes. Part of the program's success was due to its stock phrases, each useful in many contexts, such as “Does that interest you?” “How does that make you feel?” and “Tell me more.” Its whimsical creator, Joseph Weintraub, did not stop there, however; he added some original questions (“Were you always so sick, sick, sick?”) and some literary lines (such as “What is moral is what you feel good after, and what is immoral is what you feel bad after”—from Ernest Hemingway's The Sun Also Rises) to convince PC Therapist III's “clients” of its rationality. 1

David Cope, a composer at the University of California at Santa Cruz, created a program called EMI (Experiments in Musical Intelligence) as a way to generate ideas for his own compositions. When he taught it to scan pieces by the musical genius J. S. Bach and to pick out the musical “signatures” unique to Bach, it created new compositions using the same ingredients. EMI does its job so effectively that audiences are convinced they are listening to the real thing. Music theorists are now wondering how a machine can create engaging music with no experience of what we call “life” or the world. What makes Bach's music so special if a computer program can imitate it? And, what can EMI possibly “mean” when it composes the music it does? 2

If a computer can pass for a human being, does this mean there are no essential differences between humans and computers? More to the point, are we unique among animals? Is there something that sets us apart and makes us human? Over the centuries we have claimed that toolmaking, culture, language, reason, and morality make humans distinct from and superior to other animals. The difficulty is that, one by one, these supposedly human characteristics have been observed or cultivated in other animals.

Chimps, for instance, make tools and plan ahead for their use. After breaking off a long reed, stick, or stalk of grass, a chimp strips off any excess leaves or twigs, shortens it to the appropriate length, carries it to another, often distant location, inserts it into a termite tunnel, shakes it to attract the tasty insects, and then carefully removes it without dislodging too many. Because the technique takes years to perfect, adults teach it to their eager young as they mature. One anthropologist spent months trying to learn it and found that, despite intense instruction from a chimp named Leakey, he was unable to find the entrances to the termite mounds and remained hopelessly inept at selecting, preparing, and using the stalks. 3

Macaques can be inventive, too. On the small Japanese island of Koshima, scientists began leaving sweet potatoes and wheat on the beach to feed a colony of macaques, once their natural food supply dried up. One young female named Imo discovered that dipping the sand-covered potatoes in a brook washed off the inedible grit. Later, she transferred the technique to the more difficult task of separating sand from wheat. When she dropped them both into the water, the sand sank while the wheat floated. Other macaques noticed Imo's cleverness and soon her playmates and young relatives began imitating her. Gradually, adult females learned the tricks and taught them to their offspring. 4

Humankind differs from the animals only by a little, and most people throw that away.

CONFUCIUS

Andrew Whiten, of the Scottish Primate Research Group at the University of St. Andrews in Scotland, synthesized the field studies of nine of the world's top primatologists, including Jane Goodall. Whiten's report covers 151 years' worth of chimpanzee observations. Citing thirty-nine behaviors found in seven chimpanzee communities, the primatologists conclude that humanity's “closest cousins” display what has long been thought to be a uniquely human ability: cultural variation. Subtle and not-so-subtle variations in behavior from site to site offer convincing evidence that chimps can observe and imitate behaviors and then pass those learned skills on to neighbors and kin. Many of these skills involve styles of insect retrieval or methods of grooming, but some of the cultural behaviors have an almost religious sense to them. In six of the seven communities, for example, the chimpanzees perform a rain dance. “You're in awe when you see this,” one human observer said. “The chimpanzees go into a quasi-trance, dancing even when they're alone, with no [observed] spectators, as if they were ritually celebrating the rainstorm.” 5

Although apes lack organs of speech and can never make the sounds humans use, some of them have learned to use language quite proficiently. Researchers tried unsuccessfully to teach an adult pygmy chimp named Matata to communicate using symbols on a computer keyboard and then were astounded to find that her six-month-old son Kanzi, who had come along for the lessons, had mastered the skill. Described as functioning at the level of a two-year-old child in 1991, Kanzi also understands hundreds of words of spoken English and can execute such complex commands as, “Put the backpack in the car,” “Take the mushrooms outdoors,” “Go get the lettuce in the microwave,” and “Do you see the rock? Can you put it in the hat?”—even when the commands come through a microphone from another room and no visual cues are possible. 6

Some chimps have gone beyond computer keyboards to learn American Sign Language, the manual language used by deaf and hearing-impaired humans. Using this language, they display the ability to lie and deceive, make jokes, uncover trickery in others, and even relate cause and effect. Chimps who have mastered the significance of word order use their knowledge of signs to demand that word order be respected. Kanzi, for example, has learned to request activities in the order in which he desires them. If he has asked to be chased and then tickled, Kanzi will not allow the tickling unless a little chasing occurs first. 7

Quite astounding is the ability of Kanzi and other chimps to use word order to convey meaning. On his own, Kanzi figured out the difference between “Matata bite” and “bite Matata.” Using what appears to be a form of abstract reasoning, he deduced the difference in meaning that results when the words in these simple sentences are transposed. All of us understand that “man bites dog” differs from “dog bites man.” What is significant is a chimp's discovery of the principle.

An African Grey parrot, named Alex by his owner Professor Irene Pepperberg, had a parrot's capacity to imitate human speech sounds. He could add and he understood concepts like bigger, smaller, more, fewer, and none (or zero). With a brain the size of a shelled walnut, Alex demonstrated his capacity for thought and intention. Bored with the repeated trials necessary to validate scientific work, Alex sometimes rebelled.

In one experiment, involving objects of different materials and different colors, Alex looked at Pepperberg in a way she “could only describe as wryly” and repeatedly gave the wrong answer (the correct answer was two). Realizing what was going on, Pepperberg told Alex she was giving him a time-out and took him to his room. As she closed the door, she heard “Two . . . two . . . two . . . I'm sorry . . . come here!” 8

In another demonstration involving plastic refrigerator letters, Alex was correctly identifying phonemes, the sounds of different letters or combinations. After each naming, he repeatedly said to Pepperberg, “Want a nut.” Since there were guests from the media present, she pressed on. Finally, frustrated, Alex said, “Want a nut. Nnn . . . uh . . . tuh.” Pepperberg was stunned—Alex had leaped ahead of his training to sound out the parts of a complete word. 9

Rio, a sea lion, seems to understand the basics of logic. Trained to match pictures of objects, Rio quickly mastered the logical principles of symmetry and transitivity. After learning that object A matched object B and object B matched object C, Rio was able to match object A with object C. This is transitivity. If A equals B and B equals C, then A equals C. The principle of symmetry asserts that if A equals C, then C also equals A. On Rio's first trial, after learning the principle of symmetry, she correctly made A–C connections eleven out of twelve times and correctly made C–A connections seventeen out of eighteen times. She is the only nonhuman animal known to display this ability. 10

Killer whales form groups, called pods, that have distinct cultural patterns and language dialects. Some pods hunt in large groups, apparently using sounds to exchange information during the hunt, whereas others hunt in small groups, maintaining total silence. Moreover, each pod has its own language dialect, distinct from others and apparently determined by family connections rather than by geography. One theory is that unique dialects may be used during mating to prevent inbreeding. 11

In May 1999, Damini, an elephant at the Prince of Wales Zoo in Lucknow, India, died—apparently losing the will to live after the death of her companion. When the younger elephant Champakali died after giving birth to a stillborn calf, Damini lost interest in food and could not be tempted, even by her favorites—sugar cane, bananas, and sweet grass. She stood for days in her enclosure. When her legs swelled and eventually gave way, she lay listlessly on her side. Tears rolled down her face and she rapidly lost weight. Finally, Damini stopped drinking, despite the 116 degree heat. Veterinarians pumped more than twenty-five gallons of glucose, saline, and vitamins through a vein in her ear, but, despite their efforts, Damini died. 12

The question is not “Can they reason?” Nor “Can they talk?” But, “Can they suffer?”

JEREMY BENTHAM

This empathy for a fellow creature might help explain the ethical behavior displayed by a group of macaques presented with two very undesirable alternatives. If they were willing to pull a chain and administer an electric shock to an unrelated macaque, they were fed; if not, they went hungry. In one experiment, only 13 percent pulled the chain; 87 percent preferred to go hungry rather than hurt another macaque. One went without food for nearly two weeks rather than harm another. 13

This experiment is particularly impressive when we recall a similar model using humans. Participants, who received a small amount of money for being part of the study, were told that its purpose was to investigate the effects of punishment on memory. Each time a human subject in another room (actually, researchers only feigning participation) failed to remember correctly, participants were instructed to move levers to administer electric shocks of increasing severity. Despite hearing moans and screams from the other room, 87 percent moved the lever to a zone marked “Danger! Severe Shock” when instructed to do so. The conclusion of this study by Stanley Milgram was that 87 percent of humans (receiving money and instructions from authority figures) will hurt others. What caused the macaques (facing the deprivation of food) to resist?

If we are indeed unique, the task of proving it seems to be getting more difficult. The central questions of this chapter are, Who or what are we (a little lower than the angels? a little higher than the aardvarks?), and what are we doing here? We will delay the exploration of what we are doing here until a little later in the chapter; first we will ponder who or what we are. Another way to pose this question is to ask, Is there is a distinct human nature?

Who or What Are We?

To aid in our inquiry, we can use the structures of the avocado and the artichoke as metaphors for human nature ( Figure 3.1 ). An avocado is a pear-shaped tropical fruit with yellowish flesh and a single large seed at the center. If the avocado seed is planted, an entire new avocado plant may grow, which, if it reaches full maturity, is capable of producing another generation of avocado fruit. The seed at the center contains all the essential information about what makes an avocado an avocado.

FIGURE 3.1 AVOCADO AND ARTICHOKE VIEWS OF HUMAN NATURE

When we peel away an avocado's outer layers, we find the seed that contains its essence, but when we remove an artichoke's outer layers, we find no central core.

For contrast, consider the artichoke. Sometimes cooked as a vegetable, an artichoke is the flower head of a thistle plant. It consists of spiny layers that can be peeled off one after the other. When the last layer has been removed, there is nothing left. The “heart” of the artichoke is actually the base of the flower. Although it is tasty to eat, the heart does not contain the essence of the artichoke. The artichoke is nothing but its layers. Because it is a flower, no part of the artichoke—not even its heart—can be induced to produce another generation.

So, we might want to ask, Are we more like avocados or like artichokes? If we could peel away our layers, would we find a central core or merely emptiness as the last layer is removed? Do we consist entirely of our layers—genetic instructions and environmental effects—or is there something central that contains and represents the essence of who and what we are?

Is There an Essential Human Nature?—The Avocado View

We will begin our study with the avocado view, because it has had a profound impact on Western culture. As we saw in Historical Interlude B, Greek rationalist thought and Hebrew religious thought became intertwined as Christianity came to theological maturity and planted its Hebrew roots in Greek soil. These two thought systems represent the avocado view of human nature in the West. After discussing each of them, we will look at their impact on ideas about women and consider the influence of technology on the assumption that organic human nature is unique.

The Judaic and Christian Traditions

The Hebrew Scriptures assert that we humans are made in the image and likeness of God. Into the mud of our material stuff, the book of Genesis tells us, the Creator breathed the breath of life. Humans, in a special way, are believed to share in the divine nature. Other animals, according to this tradition, may have excellent instincts and perhaps even intelligence, but they are not made in the image and likeness of God.

Like the Creator, we know who we are—we are self-conscious—and we have the capacity for love. Indeed, we are moral selves obliged to love and serve our Creator. Like the avocado, we have a fleshy outward appearance, which makes us appear similar to other animals, but at our core we share the divine nature and that makes us unique.

The essence of the avocado is not in its flesh but in its seed. The proof of this can be found by planting the seed, which so contains the essence of “avocadoness” that it can produce another whole avocado plant. Whatever it is that makes an avocado an avocado—and not, for instance, a peach or an apple—is condensed into that seed. In a similar way, the Judaic and Christian traditions affirm that what makes you a person, rather than a chimp or a computer, is your special creation in the image of God.

The Islamic Tradition

Islam also affirms this sense of human uniqueness, which we have been calling the avocado view of human nature. In the words of contemporary Muslim scholar Seyyed Hossein Nasr, the human person (male and female) “is the viceregent of God on earth . . . responsible to God for his actions and the custodian and protector of the earth of which he is given dominion on the condition that he remain faithful to himself as the central terrestrial figure created in the ‘form of God,’ a theomorphic [divine form] being living in this world but created for eternity.” 14

As humans, our model is the Universal Man, whose full reality is expressed only in the lives of prophets and seers—only they are fully human. Through Universal Man, God is able to send revelations into the world. In a famous hadith , God speaking to Muhammad insists, “If thou wert not, I would not have created the world.” And, this unique relationship between Universal Man and God existed even before creation. In the Qur’an (7:172), God's call, “Am I not your Lord?,” and Universal Man's response, “Yea,” ratify the mystery of this pre-eternal covenant. 15

hadith a sacred saying of the Prophet Muhammad, but not part of the Qur’an in which God speaks in the first person through the mouth of the Prophet

After God created the first man (Adam) and breathed his Spirit into him, God ordered the angels to prostrate themselves before this theomorphic image. All did, except Iblis (Satan). Quoting the Quranic verse: “And when we said unto the angels: Prostrate yourselves before Adam, they fell prostrate, all save Iblis. He demurred through pride, and so became a disbeliever” (2:34). 16 This account differs from the one in the Hebrew Scriptures by placing the humans-as-theomorphic image as the cause of Satan's rebellion.

As in the Genesis story, Adam and Eve dwelt in paradise, until they disobeyed God's command, ate the fruit from the forbidden tree, and became tainted with forgetfulness ( al-ghaflah ). Forgetfulness characterizes fallen human beings, but there is no original sin, as we find in the Christian version. Adam and Eve are jointly responsible—Eve does not tempt Adam—and both retain “deep within their souls that primordial nature ( al-fitrah ) which attests to Divine Unity.” 17

al-ghaflah in Arabic, forgetfulness; used to describe the human tendency to forget our true essence and our relationship with God

al-fitrah in Arabic, the primordial or original and true nature of humans

Human intelligence knows the Divine Unity. But, human will, distorted by the passions, can prevent the intelligence from functioning correctly. The task of religion is to help humans remember who they are and return to their primordial nature. Our dual status is as both servant or slave ( al-’abd ) and viceregent ( al-khalifah ) of God on Earth. This requires a nimbleness—to be both “perfectly passive toward Heaven,” as servant or slave of God, and active toward the world around us, in our role as viceregents of God. 18

al-’abd and al-khalifah in Arabic, servant and viceregent; refers to the status of humans, in relationship with God

Having experienced neither a Renaissance nor an Enlightenment, Islamic society has no historical tradition of “creatures in rebellion against Heaven.” Actually, the grandeur of humans is always gauged by the perfection of their submission to God (the literal meaning of the word islam). With submission comes true human dignity, enabling “every Muslim, male and female, [to be] like a priest who stands directly before God and communicates with Him without the aid of any intermediary.” 19

The struggle to remember who we really are is sometimes referred to as “the greater jihād .” The Prophet Muhammad once remarked in a famous hadith, “I return from the lesser jihād [outer armed conflict] to resume the greater jihad [the never-ending inner struggle].” In Islamic theology, this ongoing challenge is often captured using the term nafs . In a general sense, nafs is the Sufi (mystics of Islam) word for the “false, temporary identities” that keep us from experiencing our true spiritual essence. Nafs can describe the many inner and outer ways we think of ourselves—as student, worker, American, athlete, addict, achiever—and there are even cultural nafs, such as science and progress, that masquerade as universals, but are actually particular ways of seeing the world and ourselves within it. 20

jihād in Islam, struggle or striving in the path of God, both within oneself and, when necessary, in external battle

nafs in Arabic, the false, temporary identities that keep us from experiencing our true, spiritual essence

In Arabic, as Iranian scholar Iraj Anvar explains, there are actually five nafs: “the nafs al-ammārah is the imperious self, the one that commands. Then you have nafs al-lawwāmah. That is the one that scolds you, tells you that this is not right. And then there's the nafs al-mulhimah, the one that inspires you. The nafs mutma’innah gives you certainty and peace. The highest, nafs al-natiqa, means the divine soul, the breath of God . . . In reality, the three higher work together under the nafs al-natiqa to tame the lowest one.” 21 According to this view, we have help in this lifelong challenge to avoid mistaking the part for the whole and to avoid losing ourselves in one of “our many temporary and partial nafs.” 22

Taming the nafs involves remembering who we really are. In the Qur’an, we read, “And He taught Adam all the names,” indicating power and dominion. However, our human status as khalīfah is contingent on remaining “in perfect submission to Him who is the real master of nature. The mastery and power of man over nature is only a borrowed power given to man because he reflects the divine names and qualities.” 23

Our technological prowess might make us think we are masters of the planet—a forgetting of both our servant and viceregent status. To be viceregent is to assume full responsibility: “Man is either Viceroy or else he is an animal that claims special rights by virtue of its cunning and the devouring efficiency of teeth sharpened by technological instruments . . . But if he is Viceroy, then all decay and all trouble in the created world that surrounds him is in some measure to be laid to his account.” 24

The Greek Rationalist Tradition

We have already met the other avocado view of human nature in Chapters 1 and 2 . For Plato and Aristotle, it is our reasoning ability that sets us apart from other creatures. Recalling the prisoners in Plato's cave allegory may make it easier to understand the essential role of reason in the philosophy of the Greek rationalists. While relying only on their senses, the prisoners seem subhuman. Trapped in a world of shadows, they are missing what is real. To be fully human and to understand reality as it is, Plato tells us, they must leave the cave and use their reason to become enlightened.

In imagining what an ideal society would be like, Plato makes a connection between the classes of people in society and the parts of a human being. Most people, Plato suggests in his utopia, Republic, are driven by their appetites. A good meal, some sensual pleasures, and the gadgets that money can buy are the things this class of people values most. And, we all have this element in ourselves. We crave food, sex, and material comfort to satisfy these appetites.

A second class of people is driven by their emotions. In Republic they are the soldiers who guard the city. Their spirited nature makes them capable of strong words and even stronger deeds when conditions demand. We, too, Plato believes, share this element. It gives us the energy to commit ourselves to causes and the enthusiasm to carry a project to completion.

It costs so much to be a full human being that there are very few who have the enlightenment or the courage to pay the price. One has to abandon altogether the search for security and reach out to the risk of living with both arms. One has to embrace the world like a lover and yet demand no easy return of love. One has to accept pain as a condition of existence.

MORRIS L. WEST, LAZARUS

At the highest level in Republic are the rulers. They have the same appetites and emotions as the other two classes do, but through training and education, they have cultivated the highest human faculty and live their lives chiefly in accordance with reason. We will discuss Plato's political system in depth in Chapter 8 ; for now, it is enough to observe that in society and in the human person Plato believes rationality to be the highest element. To be fully human we must exercise our reason; to do otherwise would be to risk slipping to the level of animals or being ruled by our passionate impulses.

Using our avocado image, it is reason that lies at the core of the human person for both Plato and Aristotle. As discussed in Chapter 1 , the Nicomachean Ethics emphasizes the role of reason in determining the golden mean of proper ethical conduct. Aristotle explains that our passions may drive us to rashness and our animal survival instincts may make us cowards; only reason reveals the path of courage.

Recall that Plato, speaking through the character of his mentor Socrates, thought much of what we call learning is more accurately remembering. Like the slave boy who used reason to understand geometry without being taught it, we have memories of the world of Forms, which we glimpsed before our birth and to which we return at our death. For Plato, the soul is the immortal part of us. Its true home is not in this world of matter and the senses but in the higher world of pure Forms—a world that only our reason can reveal.

It is in the darkness of men's eyes that they get lost.

BLACK ELK

Aristotle agrees that at our core we are rational beings. He begins Metaphysics by asserting that “all men by nature desire to know” and continues by distinguishing humans from other creatures. “The animals other than man live by appearances and memories, and have but little of connected experience; but the human race lives also by art and reasonings.” 25 Where he and Plato part company is on the question of the soul's origin and final home. For Aristotle, the Forms exist and can exist only in matter. In most of his writings, this ontology implies that souls can exist only in bodies and that when the body dies the soul dies with it. Only Plato's theory of a separate world of Forms makes possible the pre- and post-existence of the soul in another world.

For Plato and Aristotle, the soul represents the highest faculty of human nature. By proclaiming the uniqueness and superiority of human reason, Plato and Aristotle mean to capture our essence (in the avocado sense we have been using) and to distinguish us from other animals. Although we clearly have the capacity to behave like beasts and are just as likely to be swept away by our emotions or passions, only humans are capable of living in accordance with reason. To do this, Plato and Aristotle agree, is to be fully human—to express most truly what we are (in avocado terms, the seed at our core).

The Influence of Western Essentialism on Women

According to the avocado view, there is an essential human nature, analogous to the seed at the core of the avocado. In the Western intellectual tradition, both Judaic and Christian religious thought and Greek rationalist thought have been filtered through the social system of patriarchy . Literally meaning “father rule,” patriarchy has come to stand for government in society and in the family as well as image making controlled by men. In more recent times, feminism —the theory that women should have political, legal, economic, and social rights equal to those of men—has challenged some aspects of both of these traditional thought systems, as well as the assumptions of patriarchy.

patriarchy a form of social organization in which the father is recognized as head of the family or tribe and men control most of the formal and informal power, as well as define the role of women

feminism the theory that women should have political, legal, economic, and social rights equal to those of men and should define their own roles

In considering the influences of essentialism on women, let's begin with the Greeks. As a result of the strength of the Greek rationalist tradition and especially Plato's tripartite soul, a life dominated by reason has been a cultural ideal in the West for more than 2000 years. Elevating reason to the highest place and commanding it to rule over emotions and appetites seems harmless enough. The difficulty is that Western culture has identified rationality with men and emotionality with women. From that connection, it was an easy step to declare that, just as reason must rule over emotion and the desires of the body, so men must rule over women in human society.

Aristotle reaches a similar conclusion, although his model is based on two rather than three elements of the human soul—the rational and the irrational elements. Like Plato, Aristotle asserts that the political condition of women being ruled by men is understandable because, although both sexes share a rational principle, in women the rational element is easily overruled by the irrational element. One of the difficulties with this argument, according to Elizabeth V. Spelman of Smith College, is that Aristotle argues circularly. Our understanding of why the rational element in the souls of women is often overruled by the irrational element depends on our understanding of relationships in the political arena, and the reverse is also true: We can understand the political realities of Athenian life, in which men rule over women, by reference to the relationship between the rational and irrational elements within women's souls. In other words, men rule over women because women are by nature more likely to be influenced by the irrational elements in their souls, and this is clear because women are ruled by naturally- more-rational men. 26 Although each of these premises justifies the other, there is no independent or outside justification for either of them. René Descartes, in Chapter 5 , will be accused of a similarly circular type of reasoning in his proof for the existence of God.

Although the reasoning is flawed, the argument has prevailed. There is, in Western culture, a presumption that men are more rational and women more emotional. Given this equation, women who want to be taken seriously as rational decision makers appear to have two options. One is to deny their emotions and desires and strive to fit into the rational, male model as fully as possible. Women entering the workforce during the 1970s did something like this. They bought plainly cut dark suits (with skirts) and wore them with plain blouses and ties. Looking as much like men as possible, many women also went out of their way to prove that they could work as hard, act as tough, and be as distant from their emotions as the male cultural ideal demanded.

The other extreme option for women is to affirm the value of a rich emotional life and identify themselves with it. To do so, they must risk accepting second-class status. As long as emotionality is devalued, there are few socially acceptable ways for women or men to express and cultivate healthy emotional lives. Yet, by insisting that only logic can lead to knowledge, suppressing our feelings, and denying whenever possible and for as long as possible that we have bodies at all, we risk both physical and mental/emotional illness.

As some social critics have observed, the physical ideal for women in Western culture is an emaciated body. Models must deny themselves food, dieting continually to achieve the kind of no-fat body image that allows clothes to simply hang. At the extreme are the illnesses of anorexia and bulimia. Continuing to see a fat image, some ninety-five-pound women starve their bodies, and most middle or junior high school girls have been or are now on diets. Others are out of control, bingeing on rich foods and then vomiting or taking laxatives to prevent the food from turning to fat. And this is not just a modern-day problem. Mary Wollstonecraft, whose ideas we will examine in Chapter 8 , wrote in 1792: “Genteel women are, literally speaking, slaves to their bodies.”

Be who you are and say what you feel, because those who mind don't matter and those who matter don't mind.

DR. SEUSS

If we maintain this patriarchal view in which the virtues of the mind are projected onto men and the vices of the body attributed to women, men as well as women must pay the price. Heart attacks and strokes, as well as cancer, may be our bodies' last, desperate attempts to get our attention. By pretending we are only rational minds, it is possible to suppress emotions and ignore physical symptoms—at least for a while. A better solution might be questioning the Greek ideal and asking whether a life lived in accordance with reason has to mean a life lived without emotion and without attention to the body. The Greeks themselves led much more balanced lives than we, holding as an ideal “A sound mind in a sound body” and honoring the place of leisure and sports in a life devoted to rational thinking.

Women in the workforce in the early years of the twenty-first century are wearing softer clothing. Rejecting the model of the driving and driven emotionless “boss,” some women and some men have discovered that being a leader means empowering everyone to act rather than giving orders from the top. The ideal of collaborative leadership has been given a new twist in The Tao of Leadership:

If I am not for myself, who will be for me? If I am not for others, what am I? If not now, when?

THE TALMUD

· The leader can act as a warrior or as a healer. As a warrior, the leader acts with power and decision. That is the Yang or masculine aspect of leadership. Most of the time, however, the leader acts as a healer and is in an open, receptive, and nourishing state. That is the feminine or Yin aspect of leadership. This mixture of doing and being, of warrior and healer, is both productive and potent. 27

Let's now consider the patriarchal influence on Hebrew religious thought. It is not necessary to be a religious person in Western society to be influenced by Judaic and Christian views of human nature. John Milton's 1667 epic poem Paradise Lost gives us the story. Adam, the first man, is created in God's image. Lonely for a companion, he petitions God for other creatures. As God obligingly provides a variety of animals, Adam names them. They are fine, but only when God removes one of Adam's own ribs and creates woman (literally, “out of man”) is he fully satisfied. As Milton has God say in the poem:

· Return, fair Eve,

· Whom fliest thou? Whom thou fliest, of him thou art

· His flesh, his bone; to give thee being I lent. 28

Indeed, this story does appear in the second chapter of Genesis, the first book of the Bible. The first chapter of Genesis, however, tells the story another way. It begins with the familiar “In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth.” After dividing the seas from the dry land and placing the Sun and Moon in their proper positions, God begins creating living things—plants, animals, and, finally, humans. Here is the last part of Chapter 1 :

· Then God said, “Let us make humankind in our image, according to our likeness; and let them have dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the birds of the air, and over the cattle, and over all the wild animals of the earth, and over every creeping thing that creeps upon the earth.” So God created humankind in his image, in the image of God he created them; male and female he created them. God blessed them, and God said to them, “Be fruitful and multiply, and fill the earth and subdue it.” And it was so. God saw everything he had made and indeed, it was very good. 29

There is nothing in this version about Adam's rib. Instead, woman and man are created together at the high point of Creation and together given dominion over Earth. Chapters 1 and 2 of Genesis each contain a separate and complete creation account. They derive from two different oral traditions and both were included, yet our patriarchal culture has popularized only the second chapter. Some people are totally unaware that the first even exists.

When the Western religious tradition speaks of man being created in God's image, it has sometimes seemed to mean human males only. Woman has appeared to be created in Adam's image, not God's. As Milton puts it in Paradise Lost, “He [Adam] for God only, she [Eve] for God in him.” Today's philosophers wonder what the implications are for women if we define human nature this way. Does our human uniqueness apply to men only? When the culture emphasizes the Adam's rib story to the exclusion of the other more egalitarian account, how can women identify with this tradition and see themselves as created in the image of God and sharing equally in the divine essence?

Macrina on Emotions and the Soul

Macrina of Cappadocia had an extended conversation with her brother Gregory on this very question during the fourth century. Her response spoke to an urgent theological question of her day because, as she lay dying, the church fathers of Western Christianity were arguing about whether or not women were made in the image of God. Because in the secular world women typically played subordinate roles, some church fathers linked this with the story of Eve's creation from Adam's rib and contended that woman was made in the image of man rather than the image of God.

THE MAKING OF A PHILOSOPHER

Macrina

(CA. 327–380)

Born into a wealthy Christian family in Cappadocia (present-day Turkey), Macrina grew up on stories of the persecutions her great-grandparents and grandparents had suffered because of their faith. Her mother's father had lost his life and all his possessions, yet the family's faith remained strong. Macrina was the eldest child of ten, and after her father died, when she was only twelve, she took over the education of her baby brother Peter. She also persuaded her mother to convert the family home into a monastery in which former slaves and servants were treated as sisters and equals. Although she had been engaged at the age of twelve to a lawyer, when the young man died, Macrina decided to remain unmarried and devote her life to asceticism.

As an architect of the monastic ideal, she can perhaps be seen as a cocreator with her more famous brother Basil the Great, of the Eastern form of monasticism. Her brother Gregory, like Basil also a bishop, recorded the dying words of his sister in On the Soul and the Resurrection, and he also wrote a tribute to her called The Life of Macrina. We are told that when Basil came home from the university smug with learning, it was Macrina who converted him to the humility of a seeker after wisdom. She remained at the center of a remarkable family and regarded both philosophy and religion as paths to truth.

Macrina's views on the soul and women's place in the divine order of Creation resonate against this theological background. Raised in a highly intellectual and spiritual family (two of her brothers were bishops), Macrina appears as a virgin-philosopher and even as the “Christian Socrates” in On the Soul and the Resurrection, her deathbed dialogue with her brother Gregory, which he later recorded. 30 Grieving the recent death of their brother Basil, Gregory presses Macrina for a clear explanation of the nature of the soul. The conversation quickly turns to the relationship between the passions and the soul. Macrina states the question and offers a thesis:

· What must we think of the desiring and spirited faculties; are they part of the essence of the soul and present in it from the beginning or something additional which come to us later . . . For the one who says that the soul is “the image of God” affirms that what is alien to God is outside the definition of the soul. So, if some quality is not recognized as part of the divine nature, we cannot reasonably think that it is part of the nature of the soul. 31

When Gregory questions how what is clearly in us (the passions of anger and desire) can be seen as alien to us, Macrina replies that reason struggles to subdue these passions and that some people such as Moses have succeeded in conquering them:

· This would not have been so if these qualities had been natural to him and logically in keeping with his essence . . . These qualities are alien to us so that the eradication of them is not only not harmful, but even beneficial to our nature. Therefore, it is clear that these qualities belong to what is considered external, the affections of our nature and not its essence . . . 32

This dialogue reminds us of the Phaedo, Plato's description of Socrates’ last day of life. As he prepares to drink the hemlock, Socrates discusses with his friends the possible fate of the soul after death. Significantly, there are no women present; even Xanthippe, Socrates’ wife, has been banished. In this dialogue we hear two possibilities for the soul's fate after death. If the soul has consistently practiced disassociating itself from the body during life, Socrates explains, it will be free at death to join the unseen. On the other hand, the impure soul will remain under the influence of the body:

· Why, because each pleasure and pain is a sort of nail which nails and rivets the soul to the body, until she becomes like the body, and believes that to be true which the body affirms to be true; and from agreeing with the body and having the same delights she is obliged to have the same habits and haunts, and is not likely ever to be pure at her departure . . . 33

In this image, the pathe , what we might call the passions, can make the soul impure. As we have just seen, Macrina offers another image: The pathe are not part of the soul's essence. In the Phaedo, Socrates believes his body will be appropriately discarded at the time of death, but Macrina defends the Christian belief that the body will be reunited with the soul on the day of resurrection at the end of time. Using an analogy, she likens the soul to the art of painting and the elements of the Earth to colors. Just as the painter knows the colors he has used, both individually and in combination, so the soul does not forget:

pathe [PAH thay] the plural of pathos, a Greek word that, when used in connection with the soul, means “emotion” and “passion”

· Thus the soul knows the individual elements which formed the body in which it dwelt, even after the dissolution of those elements. Even if nature drags them far apart from each other . . . the soul will, nevertheless, exist along with each element, fastening upon what is its own by its power of knowing it and it will remain there until the union of the separated parts occurs again in the reforming of the dissolved being which is properly called “the resurrection.” 34

In all of this, Macrina is clear that the soul, which is “the image of God,” is without gender. Women as well as men are created in the image and likeness of God. As we turn from the fourth to the twenty-first century, we consider a similar controversy: the possible “humanness” of artificial intelligence. Just as the issues raised by feminism have caused us to take a second look at Western essentialism, so the possibilities opened up by technology have further complicated the question of what it means to be a human being.

Sing a black girl's song. Sing the song of her possibilities. Sing a righteous gospel, the making of a melody. Let her be born. Let her be born and handle warmly.

NTOZAKE SHANGE

Technology and Western Essentialism

The line between human and machine is beginning to blur. When IBM's Deep Blue defeated reigning chess grandmaster Garry Kasparov in May 1997, some called the victory a “turning point in history.” Others likened it to a Greek tragedy. If we define our humanity in terms of our rationality, the superior computational skills of a computer program may threaten us. Equally unsettling to us is the idea of a computer made out of DNA. Although its applications are restricted, it “solves” problems through parallel processing: addressing all possible solutions simultaneously, rather than working serially the way an adding machine tallies a sum. A DNA computer does each step slowly but can work on billions of sites at once. This style is just what is needed for breaking a code or searching the Library of Congress for a particular piece of information. 35

With the continuing progress of work in artificial intelligence, it is easy to imagine an android that appears human but is actually a very sophisticated machine. Star Trek: The Next Generation took the idea one step further by introducing Data, an android with a positronic net for a brain and a very human-looking body. He is extremely strong, able to calculate and absorb information at an extraordinary rate, but unable to experience human emotions. In one episode, “The Measure of a Man,” a scientist's request to disassemble Data in the name of science leads to a debate on whether or not Data is a sentient being with the right to control his own fate.

A man is born into the world with only a tiny spark of goodness in him. The spark is God, it is the soul; the rest is ugliness and evil, a shell. The spark must be guarded like a treasure, it must be fanned into flame.

CHAIM POTOK, THE CHOSEN

Insisting that Data is in essence a sophisticated toaster, the scientist is perplexed when Captain Jean-Luc Picard refuses permission. At a hearing convened to decide the matter, both sides agree on three characteristics of a sentient being, creating, in effect, a definition and test of human nature. Everyone agrees that Data has intelligence, and he clearly has self-awareness—he is aware of himself and of his options. Data passes the key third test—possession of consciousness—when he demonstrates “human” attachment to a book of poetry and the hologram of a deceased lover. “Does Data have a soul? I don't know if I have,” the adjutant replies in denying permission to disassemble, “but he must have the ability to choose.”

In another episode, Data refuses to send a group of repair modules called Exocomps to their death/destruction, even though the lives of his best friend Geordi La Forge and Captain Picard are at risk, because he believes the Exocomps may be like himself, a life-form. With a twist worthy of the ethical macaques we discussed earlier, the Exocomps put their own lives at risk, and one of them voluntarily sacrifices itself so that the humans can escape. The message is that self-aware beings, whether human or mechanical, may choose martyrdom but it may not be forced upon them. As sentient beings, their own wishes must be considered.

If, as in the Western religious definition, a human being must possess a soul or be made in the image of God, it seems clear that Data and the Exocomps fail the test. Clearly, they have been created by humans and not by God. If, however, we apply the Greek rationalist definition of a human being as one whose life is ruled by reason, then androids would seem to be candidates. But, would we be prepared to grant human status in any legal or social sense to an artificial life-form like Data or the Exocomps?

Much of what probably seems most obvious and familiar to you derives from the combination of Greek rationalism and Judaic and Christian theology that supports the Western worldview. Yet, as we have seen, those views have been overlaid with patriarchy to the detriment of women and men and caused some to describe the West as out of balance or excessively rationalist. Both feminism and technology have introduced new questions. Still, the avocado view of human nature remains the commonsense explanation for anyone raised in the West. Because it currently seems to present almost as many problems as solutions, let's consider the other possibility—the artichoke view of human nature.

Is There an Essential Human Nature?—The Artichoke View

Tom Wolfe's The Bonfire of the Vanities introduces us to Sherman McCoy, a Wall Street bond trader who, at the beginning of the novel, sees himself as a “master of the universe.” Arrested for vehicular manslaughter and financially ruined, he is taken from his elegant Park Avenue apartment to a downtown New York police station for booking. Somewhere during this dehumanizing experience, the “self” he thought was so durable begins to deteriorate. Stepping in to editorialize, novelist Wolfe tells us that we need the “whole village” of our social relationships to keep our “self” in place. Citing scientific data, Wolfe tells the reader that healthy college students, if subjected to total sensory deprivation, begin to hallucinate in a few hours. When deprived of constant feedback to fuel its image, the self, it would seem, simply disintegrates. If this is so, then was the self ever real to begin with?

What you have become is the price you paid to get what you used to want.

MIGNON MCLAUGHLIN

The Protean Self

One artichoke view of human nature assumes that disintegration and re-formation of the self is not necessarily a bad thing. Based on Proteus—the shape-shifter of Greek mythology who was able to appear as a green tree, an old man, a blinding fire—this view agrees that we are nothing but our layers and finds this reasonable and healthy. Lacking a central core, as posited by the avocado view, we are able to respond to the lack of continuity we find in the world by adapting to it. If reality were stable and filled with meaning, it might make sense to strive for a core self; because it is not, the psychologically healthy approach might be to imitate Proteus and change with a changing world.

Nothing, nothing am I but a small, loving watercourse.

ROSARIO CASTELLANOS

Psychiatrist Robert Lifton suggests that people could be hippies when young and, years later, conservative businesspeople, with no loss of identity or fragmentation. In this view, a “self,” like an artichoke, is composed of many layers, each of which is real and functional only at particular times or in particular circumstances. Viewing the self as a collage rather than as a single, unchanging picture might better enable us to move successfully among incomplete, changing realities. The world is unpredictable, so we need a whole collection of selves with which to meet it. Some would say that Bill Clinton's success as president of the United States was due in part to his ability to negotiate among a repertoire of “selves.” We might think here of a pomegranate that contains many seeds, each representing a version of the self. If planted, does each have the potential to become a core self? 36

PC games such as The Sims or SimCity give all of us the opportunity to try out alternative identities. Simulated identities or Sims are called avatars, a word used in Hinduism to describe the bodily incarnation of a god. Will Wright, creator of The Sims Online, envisions an entire online world, available 24/7. The Web site ( http://www.eagames.com/official/thesimsonline/home/index.jsp ) explains: “The Sims Online is a massive world built by thousands of players. Create a Sim and play as yourself or your alternate Sim persona. Explore neighborhoods, make friends, host events, or run a business. The only limit is your imagination.”

Dr. Sherry Turkle, a psychologist who directs the Initiative on Technology and Self at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), observes that the computer has become a metaphor for thinking about the self, with each computer window representing an aspect of the self and cycling through windows a way of thinking about relationships among them. “When people are online,” Turkle says, “they tend to express different aspects of themselves in different settings . . . They find ways to think about a healthy self not as single and unitary, but rather as having many aspects. People come to see themselves as the sum of their distributed presences . . .” 37

This certainly seems to be the case for Richard L. Stenlund, who spends forty hours a week as the mutant Thedeacon on the massively multiplayer game Anarchy Online. “It's a total release of the id,” he observes. “I think people are generally false . . . but in A.O. you can really let your true character out. If I want to be a pervert, I am able to do that in A.O. and be a pervert right off the bat.” Stenlund does seem to take a dim view of human nature: “The more you deal with people, the more you hate people . . . It just feels that everybody is so asleep in this world.” And, at the same time, other players in Anarchy Online applaud his “natural entertainer's personality” as well as “how helpful and patient” he is in assisting newer players. At times he functions as a “Dr. Phil-like self-help guru and mentor.” One example is his frequently accessed guide on “Making LOTS of money as a new player.” 38

After the Meta-Physicists (one of twelve professions and the one practiced by Thedeacon) spent a year unsuccessfully lobbying Funcom to enhance their profession, Thedeacon spent two weeks organizing a virtual protest march. At least one hundred other players followed Thedeacon on a five-hour trek from the city of Hope to the planetary headquarters of the Interstellar Confederation of Corporations. 39 This trend toward online political activism is echoed on Second Life (virtual population more than fifteen million). Avatars can be banished either temporarily or permanently by the game's creator. And, there is a growing political activism among players, at least in this game. 40

Linden Lab, the game's creator, sells plots of land to players, who are then free to improve and resell the land to other players, in transactions that amount to thousands of U.S. dollars. When a character called Lazarus Divine bought up small parcels of land near extremely valuable larger sites and began erecting large blue signs that blocked scenic views for older residents, there was predictable outrage. Because the signs also had political content—“SUPPORT OUR TROOPS, End the Illegal War in Iraq” and “Restore U.S. Credibility. IMPEACH BUSH”—they prompted many proposals for “avatarcreated legal codes,” some focusing on specific problems and others designing a possible jury system for resolving disputes among avatars. 41

One Second Life player, James Miller, crafted an elaborate conflict-resolution proposal that included meetings on an off-world island. This level of interest has prompted Steven Johnson, contributing editor of Discover Magazine to observe, “The online world suddenly feels closer to 1776 in America or 1848 in France, when ordinary citizens struggled to make their revolutionary visions of social organization a reality.” Although utopias are currently out of fashion, Johnson believes that virtual communities can “serve as proof of concept for ideas that might seem implausible were they merely described on paper.” 42

Looking for certainty in a single truth to explain the world has been called modernism . Western essentialism developed in a modernist world. The protean self, by contrast, is a product of postmodernism , which denies moral absolutes and certain truth. Instead of despairing over the loss of unitive meaning, the protean self celebrates pluralism. If the realities of life are always changing, the sensible thing to do is move easily among them, altering your “self” to suit the conditions you find. Embracing postmodernism, a group of twentieth-century philosophers celebrated the chaos and hailed the freedom it would provide.

modernism the quest for certainty and unitive truth, a single and coherent explanation of reality that gives it meaning

postmodernism the recognition that certainty and unitive truth are not possible because existence and reality are partial, inconsistent, plural, and multiple

Existentialism: The Self-Created Self

According to existentialism, whose ethical theory we will consider in Chapter 10 , the key fact about human nature is that we come into being and exist without a fixed essence. Spanish philosopher José Ortega y Gasset put it this way in his 1941 book History as a System:

We grow neither better nor worse as we get old, but more like ourselves.

MAY LAMBERTON BECKER

· The stone is given its existence; it need not fight for being what it is—a stone in the field. Man has to be himself in spite of unfavorable circumstances; that means he has to make his own existence at every single moment. He is given the abstract possibility of existing, but not the reality. This he has to conquer hour after hour. Man must earn his life, not only economically but metaphysically . . . We are dealing—and let the disquieting strangeness of the case be well noted—with an entity whose being consists not in what it is already, but in what it is not yet, a being that consists in not-yet-being. 43

French existentialist Jean-Paul Sartre takes for granted the twentiethcentury despair over loss of meaning and flatly rejects belief in God. Without God, the cosmos lacks purpose and there is no moral law that must be obeyed. The positive aspect of all this negativism is that humans are not squeezed into society's preconceptions and are therefore free to become whatever they choose—to create themselves. Sartre had this to say at a 1946 lecture:

Indeed it is of the essence of man that he can lose himself in the jungle of his existence, within himself, and thanks to his sensation of being lost can react by setting energetically to work to find himself again.

JOSÉ ORTEGA Y GASSET

· Atheistic existentialism, of which I am a representative, declares with greater consistency that if God does not exist there is at least one being whose existence comes before its essence, a being which exists before it can be defined by any conception of it. That being is man . . . What do we mean by saying that existence precedes essence? We mean that man first of all exists, encounters himself, surges up in the world—and defines himself afterwards . . . Thus there is no human nature, because there is no God to have a conception of it. 44

With no fixed essence—with no “avocado seed”—people take their bare existence as a starting point and begin choosing a life path for themselves. Because there are no rules, choosing can be difficult. The key requirement, according to existentialist philosophers, is that we must choose and, having chosen, we must stand accountable for our choices. Each time you do this, you add a brushstroke to the painting that will be yourself or shape a bit more distinctly the clay of the sculpture that is you.

In the most powerful of creative actions, you create a self for yourself. In a world lacking purpose and meaning, in the absence of guidelines, you make a decision and accept responsibility for it. You have this radical freedom from all restraint, so you behave less than humanly if you try to claim a lack of freedom. It is tempting to blame your childhood, your ethnicity, or your previous experiences for what you say and do. The result might be to justify your actions or let yourself off the hook by claiming “It's not my fault.” To do so, however, is to sacrifice the opportunity to be fully human.

Power is knowing your past.

SPIKE LEE

At every moment, existentialism affirms, you have the possibility of being different than you have been in the past. Nothing is fixed; there are no boxes in which you are imprisoned; nothing can defeat you without your cooperation. As the nineteenth-century poem “Invictus” puts it, “I am the master of my fate; I am the captain of my soul.” 45 Its author, William Ernest Henley, lived with chronic, crippling pain and died young; yet he remained “unconquered” (the Latin meaning of the title) by life's challenges. It is frightening to think that even facing what Henley had to face we might be expected to be brave and self-reliant, unconquered to the end, yet existentialism insists that all our responses to life, all our states of mind, are totally within our control.

I change myself, I change the world.

GLORIA ANZALDÚA

If you are sad, Sartre insists, it is because you have chosen to be sad. Your sadness is like a coat you put on, and you could just as easily wear another—the coat of happiness. While you are alone or with a loved one, you may decide to indulge your sadness, walking around with stooping shoulders and sighing frequently. The proof of your ability to alter your mental state occurs when the telephone or doorbell rings. If a stranger appears, Sartre writes, “I will assume a lively cheerfulness. What will remain of my sadness except that I obligingly promise it an appointment for later after the departure of the visitor.” 46

Detached from community and isolated, this woman seems to embody the alienation of the human person described by atheistic existentialism.

Existentialism asserts that by facing the lack of meaning all around us, making our choices, and standing accountable for them, we have the possibility of putting together the layers that will make a self for ourselves. It will not be an easy task. The world in which we find ourselves is absurd. Sartre's existentialist colleague Albert Camus put it this way:

· In a universe suddenly divested of illusions and lights, man feels an alien, a stranger. His exile is without remedy since he is deprived of the memory of a lost home or the hope of a promised land. This divorce between man and his life, the actor and his setting, is properly the feeling of absurdity. 47

Life has no inherent meaning. Existentialism celebrates the absence of a solid center in the avocado sense. Lacking an essence, the human person is not fixed, not predetermined to be anything. Instead, each person is free to create those layers that will make a functional self. As circumstances change, the layers may change with them. At every moment, however, humans are the masters of their fate. The good news is you can be anything you want to be; the bad news is there is no one to blame but yourself.

Neuroscience and the Self

On December 10, 1996, Dr. Jill Bolte Taylor awoke to a sharp pain behind her left eye. Over the next few hours, she witnessed a gradual loss of function in the left hemisphere of her brain, as blood from a severe hemorrhage poured in, disabling the neurons that had made possible speech, time and sequence, and pattern recognition. As she gradually realized she was having a stroke, Taylor, a trained neuroanatomist, was stunned to realize that, from the perspective of her now-prominent right hemisphere, she was completely at ease. “Instead of finding answers and information, I met a growing sense of peace. In place of that constant chatter that had attached me to the details of my life, I felt enfolded by a blanket of tranquil euphoria.” 48

What light can Dr. Taylor's insights shed on the nature of the “self”? She quickly realized that she had two distinct experiences of reality—one from her long-dominant left brain and another from her newly liberated right brain. One of the first things to go was her perception of herself as a solid whole, separate from everything else. In place of this was her realization: “I am life! I am a sea of water bound inside this membranous pouch.” And, instead of the experience of past, present, and future, “every moment seemed to exist in perfect isolation.” In retrospect, Dr. Taylor surmises that she experienced what Buddhists call nirvana. 49

After eight years of rehabilitation, she has recovered all her cognitive functions. As she explains the dilemma, the question was this: “… would it be possible for me to recover my perception of my self, where I exist as a single solid, separate from the whole, without recovering the cells associated with my egotism, intense desire to be argumentative, need to be right, or fear of separation and death?” And, “… most important, could I retain my newfound sense of connection with the universe in the presence of my left hemisphere's individuality?” 50 (Note: Entering “Jill Bolte Taylor” into your Internet search engine will allow you to view a twenty-minute video of Dr. Taylor's description of her stroke and its accompanying revelations.)