I didn’t give Will enough credit, because here he seems to anticipate my argument.

It seems to me, if you are going to talk about human nature, you have to have some idea of freedom. In other words, there is a limit on what you can say if you are talking in terms of behavioral regularities and cause-and-effect relationship. Once you do that you are no longer talking about evolution or using the language of science. It is not enough to wave your hands and say that the infinite march of science will get there eventually. It also seems to me–and I’m betraying my philosophical commitments here–that the most coherent account of “human nature” begins from what we don’t know and builds from there. We can explain alot of human behavior if we begin with desire, and the desire for what human beings can never have–nothing. You would then have to read Lacan to get an idea of what the desire for this nothing might mean. But modern science was never very good at dealing with something that can’t be given but which still has consequences for human life, and it’s too sophisticated for most Straussians, whose philosophical training usually ends with Rousseau.

Of course, Will would say that this is more poetic rhetoric. That’s fine, but so is the evolutionary account if it pretends to be a comprehensive account of human nature. If the scientist is intellectually rigorous, he recognizes that there are fundamental limits to his understanding, and that he is not in the business of giving a comprehensive account of “human nature.” That’s why, it seems to me, the scientist’s attack dogs, people like Dennett or Wilkinson, are sort of like the “deputy assistant to the scientist,” and like any subordinate, both more imperious and more servile than their masters.

I never said that science and science alone is able to explain reality, etc. We don’t live in the third-person, and it’s true that external explanations of human nature don’t get an obvious grip on our practical identities or our thinking about what to do. There is certainly a first-personal, internal kind of practical wisdom.

Ahh–but you see? How can Will say this when according to his own professed convictions he’s a bona fide Daniel Dennett compatibilist; which I would take thus to mean this obliges Will to accept Dennett’s explanation (explaining away) of consciousness. John Searle all but defenestates Dennett on this very point (Searle’s arguments for consciousness as indubitable ontological entity, cf. Mystery of Consciousness, NYRB).

I avidly welcome all further discoveries and blessing coming from the brain sciences; however, even when all questions about consciousness as a possible “emergent property” are satisfactorily answered, this then doesn’t tell us diddly about what to do in the most fundamental aspects of right, as if to claim we’ve then acquitted ourselves as “been there done that” with all fundamental questions present to all historical, human experience.

I disagree with you on Bloom. As a libertarian like you and Will, and even though I take umbrage with many of Bloom’s policy positions, his book really makes you “think” seriously about these issues. And in addition, for someone like me with a strong interest in political science yet taken few college courses in it, I learned a great deal about political philosophy from The Closing of the American Mind.

Also, as I write about this sometimes on my blog, the Straussian understanding of political philosophy is useful for libertarians in that they argue convincingly that this country is founded on man’s reason, on classical liberalism, the Enlightenment. Walter Berns, himself not at all a libertarian conservative, has nonetheless done yeomans work in explaining the strong secular foundations of the political philosophy that founds this nation.

http://reason.com/9707/fe.bailey.shtml

The fact that there is a gap in an explanatory scheme does not license an inference to whatever silly alternative explanation one likes (e.g., God; Nature) in order to fill the gap. If the best general explanatory strategy doesn’t fill the gap, it remains that it’s the best general explanatory strategy. You don’t improve a system of explanation by filling gaps with unwarranted theories. It’s like trying to fill a pothole with marshmallow fluff. Doesn’t help.

Anyway, I don’t see any big problem in principle with explaining consciousness. I like the general strategy exemplified by my professor, Peter Carruthers in Phenomenal Consciousness.

It’s sort of weird. Do you really think it’s a condition on an adequate theory of human nature that it makes us happier and wiser, and is incomplete if it doesn’t. That’s just WEIRD! You should probably just leave it open that a complete theory of human nature may tell us precisely why knowing they true theory of human nature isn’t going to make us happier or wiser. Anyway, the POINT of Darwinian science isn’t to make us happier or more self-aware. It is to explain why organisms are what they are. It’s doesn’t need to slice, dice AND julienne.

We are separated from animals by at least two distinctive characteristics, our overwhelmingly superior intellectual capacity (which gives rise to science) and our even more striking ability to be self-aware, to feel, and to love (which gives rise to philosophy, literature, and bad movies like “Waiting to Exhale”).

To Mansfield and others, evolutionary theory, in its current state, can explain our intellectual superiority, but does nothing to explain our conciousness. In the middle of the twentieth century Walker Percy wrote a number of books that commented on this topic. We are, undeniably, self-concious; and our self-awareness and yearning for truth cannot be explained by evolutionary theory. That “Shiver” that Julian mentions so condescendingly as a false signifier of truth, might not be so useless and redneck as he makes it out to be.

This has obvious ramifications. It does not mean that we should halt science. However, the philosophy of modernity, consistently, has been to escape the constraints of nature and the social constructs of man. We have done so rather effectively. And now it seems that we have forgotten something important about human Nature (capital N, the way Aristotle and Aquinas defined it). Greg Easterbrook pointed out in “The PRogress Paradox” that we have more technology and prosperity than we ever had; nonetheless, we are not happier than we have ever been. The rise of Darwinian philosophy has not been accompanied by an increased sense of self-awareness or happiness in the majority of the population. Evolutionary science, in other words, seems incomplete.

To Mansfield, and others, this means that there must, at least, be the possibility that evolution can’t explain everything, nor should it. There must be the possibility of Nature with capital “N” that is just as important as nature in the lower case.

Well that’s the point. The more enlightened readers can tell that this is what Mansfield means. If he just comes right out and says it, then he let’s the “cat out of the bag” too far than it should (and some folks think that Mansfield and Bloom have already gone to far in letting the cat out). Mansfield, like Bloom and yes, Strauss, is an atheist and at heart a nihilist (imbibed in Nietzsche). The “cat” is not good news. Therefore being too explicit about it will undercut what he wants to support: people who believe in the (capital T) Truth of their religious beliefs.

“That’s speaks to your relgiousity, Will”

ought read:

“That speaks to your religiosity, Will”

And your kicking a screaming about it — saying it’s not A-OKAY — don’t, to the contrary, mean a damn fucking thing.

. . . . oh heck, just one more thing (screw it I’ll be late!), Thomas Krannawitter wrote recently, and I think its quite apropos:

Only from the point of view of modern science — which assumes all being is but cause and effect — can reason be sure in its atheism. But the same reason that demanded no God can exist outside the physics of cause and effect, demanded simultaneously that reason itself cannot exist outside the physics of cause and effect.

Put differently, the argument of modern philosophy against the existence of God is at the same time an argument against modern philosophy. The only thing modern reason knows to be true is that there is no truth, including modern reason itself. At best, then, the atheist can only assert his atheist will against the wills of those who believe, but he cannot lay claim to any ground of truth or any judgment of who is right and who wrong.

Also, I copy and paste here what I’ve written before and wherein I pull a few eminently useful, telling quotes form Mr. Nietzsche:

Consider further what that naturalist Nietzsche says at section 344 of Gay Science. (BTW., it’s crucial to point out that Section 344 of GS is essentially an elaboration of section 110 of GS). It sheds quite a lot of light — er, “light” — on the problem of atheism. Nietzsche points out what life without a divine, rational nomos is like. (Nomos = Law, self-evident rational truth/morality legitimated wholly by that Law; nomos means this — self-evident rational truth about the right way of life qua Spartan, qua Zulu, qua Israelite, etc., and not the usual, corrupted, translation of “convention”). Nietzsche implies what such a life — a world — must be like without any “self-evident truths” informing man what the right way of life is.** And It’s for this reason I say anyone who KNOWS WHAT THE HELL THEY ARE TALKING ABOUT when proudly asserting atheism — i.e. as if availing themselves of credentials for being “smart” — would hardly do so with ANY sense of smug, self-serving satisfaction.

Nietzsche writes at section 110 of GS:

Not only utility and delight but every kind of impulse took sides in this fight about “truths.” The intellectual fight became an occupation, an attraction, a profession, a duty, something dignified — and eventually knowledge and the striving for the true found their place as a need among other needs. Henceforth not only faith and conviction but also scrutiny, denial mistrust, and contradiction became a power; all “evil” instincts were subordinated to knowledge, employed in her service, and acquired the splendor of what is permitted, honored, and useful — and eventually even the eye and innocence of the good.
Thus knowledge became a piece of life itself, and hence a continually growing power — until eventually knowledge collided with those primeval basic errors: Two lives, two powers, both in the same human being. A thinker is now that being in whom the impulse for truth and those life-preserving errors clash for their first fight, after the impulse for truth has proved to be also a life-preserving power. Compared to the significance of this fight, everything else is a matter of indifference: The ultimate question about the conditions of life has been posed here, and we confront the first attempt to answer this question by experiment. To what extent can truth endure incorporation? That is the question; that is the experiment.

Or, as Nietzsche wrote by letter to Overbeck:

We are making an experiment with the truth. Perhaps mankind will be destroyed by it! Fine!

–Kritische Gesamtausgabe, edited by G. Colli and M. Monitnari (Berlin, 1967 ff.) VII 2, p. 84.

Section 344 of GS:

[T]hose who are truthful in that audacious and ultimate sense that is presupposed by the faith in science thus affirm another world than the world of life, nature, and history; and insofar as they affirm this “other world” — look, must they not by the same token negate its counterpart, this world, our world? — But you will have gathered what I am driving at, namely, that it is still a metaphysical faith upon which our faith in science rests — that even we seekers after knowledge today, we godless anti-metaphysicians still take our fire, too, from the flame lit by a faith that is thousands of years old, that Christian faith which was also the faith of Plato, that God is the truth, that truth is divine. [That's speaks to your relgiousity, Will. Sorry, catnip or no, that's the issue here.]—But what if this should become more and more incredible, if nothing should prove to be divine any more unless it were error, blindness, the lie — if God himself should prove to be our most enduring lie?