To the Editor:
In his review of Konrad Lorenz’s On Aggression [February], Werner J. Dannhauser has done yeoman service in spotlighting the book’s most important issues. In my opinion, however, he has taken untenable positions on all but one or two of these issues. . . .
Konrad Lorenz’s deservedly stellar reputation is not . . . due to his discovery or explication of trivial, “cocktail-party” facts. In part it is due to those “ingenious experiments” which Mr. Dannhauser passes over so condescendingly. He should try to understand that to many minds such experiments are aesthetically pleasing; they are literally beautiful, and their beauty does not depend on their results, however curious. To appreciate this fact is to understand what a scientist means when he purports to love the process of science.
To a greater extent, Dr. Lorenz’s reputation is due to his seminal mind, his never-ending quest for a synthetic generalization. Engaged in this activity, Lorenz has made his greatest contributions to man’s knowledge. Yet it is precisely this kind activity which Mr. Dannhauser feels he could well do without. . . .
There is overwhelming evidence that Homo sapiens differs from other animals in a merely quantitative and not a qualitative way. Mr. Dannhauser lapses into a hoary Kantian error when he points out that people seek reasons for acts of aggression. What Lorenz has made the world understand (and what Kant did not understand) is that people will not act merely on grounds of reason—they must be motivated to act. They must have the drive to perform a deed, and then they will perform it for any random reason, good or bad. “Rationalization” is usually a better description of such thought than “reasoning.” Mr. Dannhauser is correct in pointing out that Lorenz’s maintaining the “superiority [of man] over the lower animals” is not consistent with the view that human aggression is animalistic. He is, however, fixed upon the wrong horn of the dilemma. . . .
But perhaps Mr. Dannhauser’s most serious error is to take Lorenz to task for limiting himself to evolutionary “what-fors.” . . . True teleology is the province of the philosopher and the theologian, . . . The only biologically relevant meaning of “good” is: that attribute of an organism which statistically improves its rate of leaving fertile, adult progeny. In other words, the good is the fit. Further, it does not beg the question to admit that no one has yet explained the reason for the evolution of this or that fact. Those who have discovered non-selective differences in the membership of a species have time and again been forced to retract their discoveries. . . .
Very few, if any, of the attributes of plants and animals are wholly good or bad. It commonly takes a man of the genius of Lorenz to explain the causes for one thing or another’s being an overall good. It is, in fact, a great intellectual challenge to a biologist to design tests or formulate theories which will predict or at least explain the evolution of life in all its marvelous complexity. I am sorry that Mr. Dannhauser does not appreciate this sort of endeavor. I am sorrier that he calls it crude functionalism. To me, a practicing traditional Jew and a practicing evolutionary biologist, such pursuits are really attempts to understand how God has wielded His chief tool of creation, natural selection. I assure you this is an immensely satisfying and an electrically exciting occupation.
Michael Rosenzweig
Department of Biology
Bucknell University
Lewisburg, Pennsylvania
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To the Editor:
I enjoyed Werner Dannhauser’s perceptive review, but cannot understand why or how he can object to Lorenz’s idea that men and animals are both aggressive by instinct. “The main trouble,” Mr. Dannhauser writes, “is that Lorenz views human aggression much as he views aggression in animals. . . . He sees it as an instinctively determined non-rational drive.” Isn’t the discovery of the laws of the non-rational element of personality precisely what Freud was all about? And isn’t man’s natural tendency toward aggression confirmed by Robert Ardrey’s findings in The Territorial Imperative?
One further expects that the government’s so-called “Iron Mountain Report,” though much talked-about, . . . has not yet seen publication precisely because it recognizes, with Hobbes, that man is not by instinct a loving or disarmed creature. To be aware that life is short, nasty, brutish, a war of all against all, is not to condone it; on the contrary, such understanding is imperative if this condition is to be changed.
Mary Case
New York City
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Mr. Dannhauser writes:
I did not deny the scientist’s love for the process of science, or even that the process is lovable; I merely pointed out that the process need not involve complicated instruments or abstruse statistical calculations, but can consist of painstaking observation by the naked eye.
Mr. Rosenzweig goes on to assert that there are merely quantitative, not qualitative, differences between man and the other animals, and he charges me with falling into the hoary Kantian error of supposing that people seek reasons for their acts. Well, they do. Animals do not reason, or even rationalize; doesn’t that constitute a significant qualitative difference from human beings? Moreover, I do not see how Mr. Rosenzweig, who describes himself as a “traditional Jew,” can deny the uniqueness of man with such evident ease.
Nor do I quite see how it is such a serious error to take Lorenz to task for omitting teleological considerations. If such considerations are biologically irrelevant—a dubious point, by the way—it merely means that the purely biological perspective of human problems is of very limited usefulness.
Miss Case errs in thinking that I object to Lorenz’s idea that men are aggressive by instinct; it is an idea that might have dawned on me even without having read Lorenz, Freud, or Hobbes. I object rather to taking oversimplified views of man which are no less inadequate for presenting themselves as hard-boiled and unpleasant.
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