Anyone who has struggled to navigate the challenges that evolutionary and other natural sciences pose to a rich religious sense of the importance of human dignity will enjoy reading this book. Alan L. Mittleman gives the reader more than a robust understanding of the sciences; he also probes carefully their philosophical premises and makes a case for why a detailed engagement with Jewish sources in particular allows one to construct a reasonable and intellectually satisfying alternative to a purely naturalistic account based on the sciences. In the course of his investigation Mittleman deals skillfully with popular scientific motifs that were in the air half a century ago and that remain remarkably persistent today, such as the reductionist view, stemming from well-known writers like Desmond Morris, that humans are little more than naked apes; even at the height of Morris's popularity that view clashed with other philosophical perspectives that were equally prevalent and that stressed the existential alienation of human beings in the world.

Sorting out puzzles regarding the status of a purely scientific account of humanity in relation to Jewish faith has occupied Mittleman for a lifetime of inquiry and, as he freely admits, has led to a proclivity to pepper the pages of his book with diverse sources. A specialist reader might find that irritating. I did not, and I welcomed both his intellectual generosity in taking seriously views that were not necessarily his own and at the same time his efforts at building a robust argument for the value of persons, an argument that is extremely relevant to an age when overattention to purely scientific analyses of what it means to be human can easily undercut a sense of why people matter. And that, as the history of Judaism so strikingly attests, has serious social and political consequences.

It is clear that the primary step in Mittleman's project is philosophical acuity. So, it is to Wittgenstein that he turns to make the case that secular philosophy cannot do away with ancient religious traditions. In seeking a “lively dialogue” between science and religion, Mittleman argues cogently and resolutely for the value of human persons while still giving alternatives due consideration. He also, along the way, provides a defense of what Judaism might add to the discussion about human beings and why they matter. Is he successful in this task? To a great extent, I believe he does capture something crucially important that will be of interest not just to Jewish scholars or philosophers, but also to anthropologists and adherents of other religious traditions who are interested in questions about what it means to be human.

It is fitting, then, that he begins the book by engaging debates about human nature and exploring why the “blank slate” model gained traction against the backdrop of essentialist views that were wrapped up in a history of abuses against particular races. With the more recent swing of the pendulum towards sociobiology, encompassing evolution and genetics on the one hand as well as behavior on the other, the naturalistic basis for perceiving humans seems to be back. According to behavioral genetics, “much of what we find distinctive about ourselves is written into our alleles, so to speak” (4). Neuroscience adds further ammunition to the view that souls are illusory, and it “seems to have banged the last nail into the coffin of philosophical dualism: the hoary dichotomy between mind and body” (4). Leading science writer Steven Pinker is explicit in claiming that human behavior, even in its most sophisticated expressions, emerges from a universal, biologically crafted human nature. The worry that arises in the face of this array of scientific evidence, as Mittleman articulates it, is that such arguments undercut the special dignity of humans. Even if human nature is now back, it is back in terms that seem, ironically, to undermine the belief that there is anything special about our species.

Of course, Mittleman is quite right to be concerned about the ways such arguments have proliferated in the popular scientific literature, given their trajectories. What he does not discuss is the fact that evolutionary biology is itself undergoing something of a further paradigm shift away from notions of genetic essentialism and towards a far more complex position, sometimes termed the “extended evolutionary synthesis.” This view, that evolution is not simply tied to genetic blueprints but involves active agency or niche construction, points to a rather different dynamic in evolutionary, genetic, and neurobiological terms about human becoming. The focus now is on a complex system, rather than on isolating this or that genetic trait.Footnote ¹ Now, this might loosen a sense of genetic or neurological determinism, but does it, like its predecessors, still undercut human distinctiveness? The answer, I suggest, is that in the model now ascendant that distinctiveness is far less undercut, since human beings are agents in a way that is particular to human beings; it is not so much the universal characteristics across human cultures that are stressed as it is the creation of diversity in a way that allows for cultural as well as biological evolution—a model of “nature/cultures.”Footnote ² In this model the puzzle still remains as to why, among all the other hominin species, Homo sapiens alone was successful. It is this new way of perceiving evolutionary anthropology, which recognizes human distinctiveness, that potentially opens the door for serious consideration of Jewish or other religious sources on the perennial question of what it means to be human. So, although Mittleman's view that “science, as it develops accounts of human nature, embeds human beings, apparently without remainder, in the natural world” (6) is true to a large extent, there are indications that currently some serious philosophical scholars are moving away from reductionist naturalism and towards taking account of the transcendent.Footnote ³

Mittleman also raises the related issue of whether soul talk is still meaningful in a scientific age. Of course, given the suggestions above, I think that a rather stronger case than that advanced by Mittleman could be made for speaking of the soul, especially in the light of recent philosophical works that do claim that such retrieval is possible.Footnote ⁴ Instead, Mittleman opts for the language of a first-person perspective, congruent with the fact that we are ineluctably beings who gain our stature through our sense of ourselves as persons. Mittleman deals with the threat of neuroscience against such a position by arguing that the self is a story that the brain tells. For him, then, a clear fissure opens up between biology and personhood, and where personhood is forgotten, the result is a diminishment of human dignity. Yet how far do notions of personhood really protect specific accounts of unique human dignity in the way Mittleman assumes? For a long time serious scholars of other animals, especially our primate cousins, have claimed that a good case can be made that other animals are also persons.Footnote ⁵ Personhood need not necessarily have emerged once and once only in the lineage Homo. Those who argue that at least some other animals can be perceived as having personhood in their own right—analogous to human personhood—often extend their argument to make the claim for the moral worth or dignity of those animals, hence elevating or perhaps humanizing those creatures. The extension of personhood and even dignity to (other) animals is not necessarily threatening to human dignity, but it is threatening to any strong account of human exceptionalism. My own view is that some other animals can be perceived as having personal lives, as long as it is admitted that their self-perceptions are not the same as the sophisticated self-consciousness that is characteristic of humans. Humans are persons, but persons in a particular way.

The author argues next that ancient Jewish religious texts fill out concepts of personhood. He is also aware that many secular texts are equally influenced by the sense of the transcendent or a yearning for redemption. Religious texts, however, make these yearnings explicit and probe their deepest meanings. Mittleman is right, therefore, to insist that religious texts be taken seriously, not least for the role they play in social and moral life. Just as moral or social norms such as democracy cannot be “proved” in the same way as the laws of physics, such a standard should not be applied to religious texts by religions’ cultured despisers. He also sensitively objects to more conservative religious proponents who want to insulate revealed texts from any outside criticism. Hermeneutical generosity is therefore required. For Mittleman this amounts to “interpretative charity.”

It is therefore not surprising that before turning to classical Jewish sources, Mittleman engages with highly influential philosophers who stress the existential dimension: Martin Buber, Abraham Heschel, and Wilfrid Sellars. For Sellars, what is fundamental is the irreducibility of the person occasioned by reflection on the impossibility of deriving the familiar moral claim that one “ought to” do something from an “is.” He also believes that the failure of the human mind ever to be able to get outside thought strengthens the case for the retrieval of personhood. And personhood and a Kantian notion of moral agency are closely aligned, which may be one reason that Sellars does not touch the literature that attempts to broaden the meaning of personhood (or moral agency for that matter) beyond the human, a practice that is becoming increasingly fashionable. For Mittleman, attempts at reducing the human to evolutionary explanations effectively debunk morality or the richness of personhood. But he seems to assume that the alternatives are stark: either a reductionistic, scientific, objectivist account of the human, or a subjective, rich, thick description of personhood.

Evolutionary anthropologists would disagree, and it is a pity that some space was not dedicated to engaging with this scholarship, since it has the ability to think both from a base in the humanities and one in the sciences. It is the case that insomuch as his is a sharp critique of scientism, Mittleman's argument is flawless. But I wonder how many thoughtful scientists actually fall into this camp. Although Mittleman's portrayal is an accurate account of the popular perception of science, the very best scientists are usually rather more nuanced, at least insofar as they are capable of recognizing the limits of their claims. Unfortunately, some of the most influential in the public domain also tend to make absolutist claims, including Richard Dawkins and Steven Pinker, to name just two. The point is that the narrative they tell is not the only narrative worth telling.

The Kantian moral world is the one that Mittleman finds the most appealing, not least because it allows him to argue that persons should never be treated as having instrumental value. He recognizes in Kant the source of inspiration for many politically and socially significant ideas, such as that of human dignity and human rights. But Mittleman here is extraordinarily perceptive, since he claims that the Kantian case for such rights is itself premised on a long history of assigning value to the human that Kant fails to acknowledge, and it thus amounts to an unacknowledged religious argument for why human beings deserve respect. So, “stringently secular projects such as Kant's work off the normative capital of generations of biblically informed moral imagination, piety, and commitment” (37). Rather than assume the Kantian argument, Mittleman insists that we need to face up to its roots and explore its premises. As a religious believer myself, I find Mittleman's argument about Kant convincing and interesting. But there is a problem: How many scientists will necessarily take their ethical stances from Kantian frameworks? Evolutionary ethics is a dominant naturalistic ethic among many philosophers, even if a Kantian voice has not died out altogether. Mittleman may be correct, nonetheless, in using Kant as a bridge to an alternative, theological ethic, insofar as Kantian ethics is often rather more amenable to the public sphere than a religious ethic.

Mittleman's incorporation of the position of Rabbi Joseph B. Soloveitchik (d. 1993), however, offers a way through the dilemma in that it stresses the continuity of human beings with the creaturely world but also gives a new interpretation of human beings as created in the image of God, rather than adhering to the cruder idea that immortal souls possess a “divine spark.” For Soloveitchik, such an integrative view of humans, who become “personalities” through the “experiences of loneliness, shame, intimacy, and joy,” provides an opportunity for humans to “rise from animals” (42). But the measure of such a conviction depends on prior assumptions about the minds and cultures of at least some other social animals. Yes, as Mittleman affirms, Soloveitchik avoids the retreat into scientism or theological dogmatics, but to what degree does such a position ring true to biologists of animal behavior? The trend towards using anthropological sciences in order to study the behavior of some allied social animals, including, for example, elephants, dolphins, or other primates, at least betrays recognition that the social, personal world of humans has resonances with the lives of other animals, even if the distinctive marks are undeniable. No other primate can draw up sophisticated rules for ethical behavior, or deliberate on the future, or use its imagination to consider the transcendent in the way that human beings can. This material would strengthen the case Mittleman makes for a modified version of naturalism that depends on the particular responsiveness of the human person to particular ethical imperatives. It is the response to divine commands that marks out such an ethical life. But here is a quandary. On the one hand, if God is transcendent, then any dualism between the material and the immaterial is parsed through divine command and human, creaturely response. But on the other hand, Soloveitchik wants to embed human beings firmly in the natural world, even when talking about the divine image. Mittleman therefore follows Soloveitchik in resisting the idea of the image of God in terms of a separated, human soul, a position that I am sympathetic to, but the notion of transcendence as such is not compromised. For Mittleman, therefore, ultimately the Genesis stories are about humanity's relationship with God and each other, and they generate a narrative that helps to explain how human beings fit into the natural world and their ethical place in it. In this sense such stories are not in competition with scientific narratives, a view that I share, even though Mittleman agrees that it is important to find a “middle way” between science and perspectives from the Torah.

I warm in particular to the idea of the creation of humankind in the image of God as a story primarily about moral obligations. I might venture to add, though, that a nascent memory about religious and moral emergence in the human community might also be at work here. It is therefore only in a weak sense that the Genesis narratives might be compared with scientific stories, but the comparison may carry rather more traction than Mittleman allows for here. In other words, we can suppose that the cultural history expressed through the Genesis texts might also convey some distant memory of what happened in deep history without forcing the Genesis story into the naturalistic account. Even the scientific account is a narrative about human origins that depends on speculative and imaginative faculties, even if they are bounded by archaeological evidence.

And it is here that the clash between the naturalistic view and that of Judaism and other Abrahamic faiths becomes most evident, for in the biblical text human beings are always purposeful creations of God. Mittleman is correct to flag briefly the debates about the role of purpose in evolutionary theory, but these debates are often about a functional sense of purpose, rather than an overarching or grand narrative about ultimate purposes. The language of the ultimate, if it is used at all, more often than not collapses back into forms of genetic essentialism. But Mittleman is also insistent that humans do not just appear, as in a moment of emergence from other animals, but that their appearance reflects a deliberative act of God, so that “what is unmistakably clear is that God takes a moment for deliberation. He does not just command. He considers.” The result is that “the human being is a product of reflection and choice” (49). Rather than working out how such a view might cohere with evolutionary perspectives, Mittleman sees Gen 1.26 as pointing to something significant about ourselves: “Recursive thought is distinctly human” (49).

Mittleman is not arguing for a strong account of human exceptionalism, since he claims that “human beings are at best contingently not categorically superior to other beings” (49). The combination of human nobility with humanity's pathetic or even base qualities often leads to ambivalence about the human. Mittleman then makes the somewhat surprising claim that image also means literal physical resemblance, functioning as God's presence, in the same way that Adam passes on his likeness and image to his son Seth. Humans become cocreators with God through procreation. But some rabbinic interpretation of this text holds that the form that Adam shares with God is “energetic and radiant” rather than concrete or palpable, and it is this that is passed down through the generations (53). The common ancestor assures the moral equity of all humans. After Adam's sin, physically resembling God is no longer possible; what remains in the image is acting like God, imitating the divine, which implies the exercise of responsibility. And such responsibility includes procreation and taking responsibility for the next generation.

Mittleman includes this and other rabbinic reflections on the moral ambiguities of human nature, some of which even argue that, given the human propensity for evil, it might have been better if humanity had not been created. And more fascinating still is the idea that the evil impulse (yetzer ha-ra) or inclination is a “divinely created force” (58) that can be overcome by study of the Torah. Such a demonic force is viewed as “animallike desire” (60) that needs to be overcome. If humans are worthy, then they will rule over the animals like God; if not, they become a “middling species among them” (60). Human rule over the animals is therefore a God-given mandate. Cain mixed up the command and thought that humans were the same as animals; he failed to appreciate that killing a human was more serious than killing an animal, which then led to the murder of his brother. The serpent's motivation in the midrash of the story of Adam and Eve is even more curious; the seduction is understood as an attempt by an animal, the serpent, to seduce Eve. The temptation is quite literally a seduction (63). In this case, it is not so much Adam and Eve imitating animals in their sexuality, but the other way round. Jewish thought parsed by the rabbis of the Talmud “all present[s] animals as cognitively diminished versions of human beings” (63), rather than presenting humans as cognitively enhanced animals, as in evolutionary accounts. Given that animals in this account seek to become like humans, animal liability—the construal of animals as moral agents—is therefore a common theme in the Talmud. So, in Jewish law, “The ox in Exodus 21:28 who kills a human is sentenced to capital punishment by stoning—a mode of execution otherwise applied only to humans” (63). But most importantly, the tendency to do wrong comes from our human nature, rather than from our hybridity with animals.

The Jewish tradition thus cuts to some extent both ways. On the one hand, humans are encouraged to rule the natural world, but in a manner that reflects God's rule; on the other hand, the evil that they do is their own responsibility, rather than stemming from their animalistic tendencies. Mittleman carefully navigates his way through these sources by pointing to the ambiguities in the literature about human beings, especially those relating to the soul and the self, the formation of Adam as a living creature, and both soul and body as fragile and fleeting. Yet while the soul is not “trapped” in the body, there is room for a notion of a temporarily separated soul at death, a soul whose final destiny is with a restored body. It is the late medieval Jewish philosopher Joseph Albo's view that is perhaps the most interesting. For Albo (d. 1444) the most distinctive capacity of the human soul is not pure intellection but loving service of God (77).

Mittleman then shifts the focus of his argument to consider the self, a rather less problematic term in contemporary discourse than the soul. He views the self through the lens of relation. But it is the practical aspects of the Jewish tradition of personhood that come through most strongly in his discussion, such as the struggle of Maimonides (d. 1204) with the intellectual and moral aspects of human perfection. And as Mittleman moves into a discussion of consciousness and the ambiguities it brings, he opens up a path towards a further chapter, one that concentrates on the central dilemma that arises in a scientific account, namely the possibility of human freedom. The premise of this discussion is that scientific explanations cannot make prescriptive moral claims (101). And while the best scientists would refrain from making such a move, Mittleman is correct to identify this as a trend in the popular scientific literature.

Mittleman is justified, therefore, in dedicating a whole chapter to questions about human freedom, and specifically to the debunking of the possibility of freedom by much neuroscientific literature. Such views threaten the case he has built for a strong sense of moral personhood and responsibility, and he wants to face them squarely and with honesty. But it is to popular science that he turns to make his case, through the lens of influential figures in the field. Compatibilists insist that a sense of freedom is genuine in spite of constraints. But such a view cannot be sustained with the neuroscientific claim that free will is illusory. Mittleman grasps the nettle: “With the very concepts of selfhood and agency being pulled out from under us by neuroscience, the answers are unclear. How are we to recognize ourselves as human persons once free will has been translated into a filtering mechanism functioning ex post facto to modulate preconscious brain activity?” (115). As he wryly points out, those neuroscientists who deny free will, and the philosophers who support them, still have to go home and live out their lives with others: it is impossible to act on the assumption that free will is an illusion. And Mittleman is also sharply critical of those such as Patricia Churchland who compare primate behavior in a direct way to that of humans. But the issue he does not note is that such comparisons are weak as evolutionary biology. Primate behavior reflects learned culture rather than simple genetic programming in the way he implies. A direct comparison between apes and humans in order to draw robust evolutionary conclusions is weak science, given the millions of years’ time span from a common ancestor of humans and our closest primate cousins. Neither humans nor other primates are simply playing out a genetically predetermined script. Other moves to locate responsibility in the social brain fail for the same reason: personhood is reduced and rendered vacuous.

Mittleman then turns to a comparative account of the biblical and rabbinic sources and finds in them a similar paradox between determinism and voluntarism, though the determinism now is the result of God's agency rather than naturalistic forces. He suggests this reflects a human sense of being caught up in systems that we cannot fully understand or control. But true freedom from a Jewish perspective arises from a combination of reason guided by divine grace. So, “in the face of the contingency of our situation and accidental nature of some aspects of our personhood, we need to form the right desires and incorporate them as motives into our self-conception” (124). He also treats a number of different Jewish figures who combine voluntarism on a day-to-day level with an overarching belief in metaphysical determinism understood theistically: God is the ultimate sovereign over all.

Some of the detailed discussion of philosophers such as Maimonides on this point gets a little labored in places, but Mittleman succeeds in pointing to some original aspects of their thought that are worth considering. For example, Hasdai Crescas (d. 1410/1411) is a determinist but only by allowing free will to be contingent, in the realm of possibility: the subject does not feel or sense deterministic forces at work, even in that experience of free will. Of course, the kinds of causes that these medieval Jewish philosophers identified are very different from the causal narrative of modern science. For this reason it becomes somewhat difficult to discern the purpose Mittleman has in returning to the works of these scholars, except perhaps to show that the contemporary problem is a perennial one, though now cast in different terms. In the end Mittleman wavers a little here. He is prepared at least to consider the possibility that free will is an illusion, but if it is, “it is a deep and peculiar one” (143). His analogy of free will as something like the illusion of a unified visual field is helpful here: our eyes move around with great rapidity, but our experience is far more unified. Thus, “our experience of the seamless finished product veils the multiple, discontinuous steps leading up to it” (143). But Mittleman never comes down on one side or the other on whether he is prepared to endorse a belief in God's agency or purpose in the workings of the cosmos, a belief that is clearly at odds with scientific understandings of causation. It is presupposed insofar as he admits to a personal adherence to a Jewish outlook, but he never works out how to hold together apparently conflicting statements, that is, antinomy.

His final main chapter, on “Persons Together,” takes a closer look at the importance of human relationships in human nature, including their social and political aspects. By weaving in stories from rabbinic sayings he lightens up the narrative and provides a break from the somewhat difficult philosophical analysis in the previous chapter. In contrast to the primacy of politics in Greek thought, influenced by Aristotelian ideas, the Jewish tradition places a primacy on fidelity to God and the pursuit of justice and righteousness. Within this set of commitments there are right ways of expressing political life, and they are premised on the idea of covenantal relationships rather than coercion or force. Mittleman only alludes to a politics governed by social contract by suggesting that it draws its inspiration from covenant (159), but he does not spell out distinctions. Certainly, contract implies mutual benefit, and both presuppose consent, but covenant applies even where relationships are unequal. The early theocracy that governed the Jewish nation eventually gave way to monarchical rule, but it was qualified by reference to the divine. Mittleman then traces the rise of international law back to the covenant with Noah in Gen 9 and the seven Noahide commandments that the talmudic rabbis derived from it—to refrain from blasphemy, idolatry, adultery, bloodshed, robbery, and eating the flesh of any living animal, and to set up courts of justice (155). And it is these, Mittleman suggests, that “articulate the universal moral norms requisite to the dignity, protection, and worth of persons” (156). Mittleman argues convincingly that such laws seek to mediate between the lawlessness of a direct theocracy, where political institutions are underdeveloped, and the excessive control characteristic of Babel. But ultimately he is ambiguous about political order because, along with consent, political stability requires “force, habit, need, inertia, and other factors that do not have the moral value implicit in consent” (160). A Jewish vision of politics is necessarily bound up with social justice and the common good (ṭovat ha-klal), providing the social conditions under which persons can live out a godly life.

Mittleman finds in Jewish thought a combination of Aristotelian norms of sufficiency along with a Lockean view that human activity is ceaselessly concerned with improving and perfecting nature, so the more work the better. Work in the Jewish tradition is defined as “creative activity that transforms nature for the sake of human ends” (164). Inasmuch as it is creative, it imitates the Creator, but the Sabbath provides the opportunity for reinforcing human identity through the imitation of God. The Jewish approach to poverty is also illuminating: there is an obligation not to let oneself become poor. And beyond this there are moral rules: “The neediest have the greatest claim on charitable resources. The inhabitants of your own city take precedence over those people elsewhere, as do the inhabitants of Israel over those outside its borders” (169). This is a realistic ethic, that those closest to us deserve the most care and concern. What is particularly interesting here is a mutual responsibility between giver and receiver. This is particularly important in the work of nongovernment organizations in the poorest regions of the world. Charitable handouts have the effect of reducing a sense of human dignity in the receiver; right moral action requires even beneficiaries to be actively involved in decision making.

Before his concluding remarks, Mittleman ends his final chapter by arguing that Judaism provides a means to integrate both sociality and individuality in a satisfying way. His discussion of evolutionary ethics presents an alternative to such a view, but he, correctly in my view, argues that human behavior cannot simply be elided with that of other social primates. He is also correct to suggest that using a naturalistic explanation for behavior does not help moral decisions to be made; it is descriptive rather than evaluative. But it is surprising that he cites favorably George Kateb to the effect that “a chimpanzee is more like an earthworm than a human being” (175). This is not at all realistic. The social lives of other primates may say comparatively little about what human morality is like, but the closeness of the ties between human beings and other social mammals is still relevant to our understanding of the human. Yes, there is an existential rift, but that is still a mystery being worked out and does not cut human beings off from their earliest ancestors. As Jon Marks has suggested, humans are “ex-apes.”Footnote ⁶ In spite of that claim, Mittleman does acknowledge the importance of our biological ancestry and, drawing on Frans de Waal's work, admits that ethics is “both a product of evolution and cultural coevolution, which is driven by persons in their social togetherness and cultural creativity” (176). Yet other biologists challenge de Waal's supposed link between warfare and the development of moral cooperation. De Waal is now rather more inclined to argue in favor of altruism as primary, undercutting his earlier position. Mittleman ultimately rejects many of de Waal's claims, but for reasons other than that they are faulty science. For Mittleman the human task is ultimately a co-creative one, where humans elevate, improve, and sanctify the natural world around us.

And as if to anticipate criticism on this last point, Mittleman ends the book not so much with conclusions about his argument as with a few words on human hubris. The possibility of human enhancement and transhumanism is in the air, and this short section could have been more developed. Mittleman then concludes his book with something of a manifesto for why humans matter as persons “in a world understood as replete with intrinsic value. We matter because we have the potential to advance the good that already resides, from the start, in the manifold of nature” (183). So he is careful to locate human dignity in both our activity and our potential for personhood. This is the human vocation. As he puts it: “We have the dignity of doers, of persons who come to see their peculiarity and calling in a world otherwise composed of things” (183).

But are other animals really “things” in the way he insists? While he acknowledges humans are also from the “dust,” he never really considers the possibility that there are other subjects in the world, not sophisticated in the same way as humans, to be sure, but subjects nonetheless.

Yet, in spite of any limitations, this book is an exceptional tour de force in making a striking case for the importance of religion and Judaism in particular for debates on what it means to be human. Alan Mittleman has produced a treasure trove of ideas, and no reader can turn the final page without in some way having been transformed for the better.