The left hand of the Enlightenment: truth,error, and integrity in Bayle and Kant*

Taking its cue from Hannah Arendt’s comment that ‘truth gets lost in the Enlightenment’ and Lessing’s parable of God’s ‘left hand’, this paper traces a historical shift in moral and religious thought: roughly from truth to sincerity. From traditional conceptions of conscience as conditional on the objective truth of its content, the paper moves on, via the Reformation and seventeenth-century Augustinian turn, to early modern debates on toleration and the ‘erring conscience’. It is argued that Pierre Bayle’s Commentaire Philosophique of 1686 can be read as a crucial catalogue for understanding the substitution of truth with sincerity (and error): so that not truth but truthfulness is considered to be essential for moral and religious justification. Moving from Bayle to Immanuel Kant, the paper then shows how many of the same questions rise in Kant’s late essay on theodicy, which is also an essay on sincerity or integrity, via the Book of Job. Through these two thinkers, various themes are connected: from conscience and sincerity to the problem of the conscientious persecutor. Finally, these themes of truth, error and integrity are linked to the modern debate on authenticity, and a framework is proposed for conceptualising these various shifts.     

Book reviews

THE FRAGILE BLOSSOM: CRISIS AND CHANGE IN JAPAN. Zbigniew Brzezinski. New York, Harper and Row, 1972. 06–010468–6. xii, 153 pp. $US5.95.

THE SOUTHERN EXPANSION OF THE CHINESE PEOPLE: ‘SOUTHERN FIELDS AND SOUTHERN OCEAN’. C. P. FitzGerald. Australian National University Press, Canberra, 1972. 07081–0220–4. xxi, 230 pp. $7.50.

IN SEARCH OF SOUTHEAST ASIA. David Joel Steinberg (ed.). Praeger, New York, 1971. 522 pp. $820 paper.

SUPER POWERS AND WORLD ORDER. Carsten Holbraad (ed.). Australian National University Press, 1971. 0–7081–0264–6. ix, 161 pp. $6.95.

INTERNATIONAL SECURITY: REFLECTIONS ON SURVIVAL AND STABILITY. Kenneth J. Twitchett (ed.). Oxford University Press, London, 1971. 148 pp. $3.40 paper.

THE MASS MEDIA IN AUSTRALIA: USE AND EVALUATION. J S. Western and Colin A. Hughes. University of Queensland Press, St. Lucia, 1971. 0–7022–0720–9. 178 pp. $6.50.

WE TOOK THEIR ORDERS AND ARE DEAD. Shirley Cass, Ros Cheney, David Malouf and Michael Wilding (eds.). Ure Smith, Sydney, 1971. 0–7254–0070–6. 256 pp. $1.75.

AUSTRALIAN FOREIGN MINISTER: THE DIARIES OF R. G. CASEY 1951–60. T. B. Millar (ed.). Collins, Sydney, 1972. 0–00–211001–6. 352 pp. $7.95.

AUSTRALIA AND THE UNITED STATES. Norman Harper (ed.). Nelson, Sydney, 1971. 17–004929–9. 274 pp. $5.95 hard cover, $3.25 paper.

PACIFIC POLITIES. I F. Nicholson and Colin A. Hughes (eds.). Pitman Pacific Books, Carlton, 1972. 0–85896–072–9. 286 pp. $8 hard cover, $4.50 paper.

SIR WILLIAM MACGREGOR. Roger Joyce. Oxford University Press. Melbourne, 1971. pp. XVI, 484. $15.00.

COLONIAL ISSUES IN BRITISH POLITICS 1945–61. David Goldsworthy. Oxford, Clarendon Press, 1971. 425 pp. $14.00.

ECONOMIC REGULATION OF THE WORLD'S AIRLINES: A POLITICAL ANALYSIS. William E. O'Connor. Praeger, New York, 1971. xii, 189 pp. $US 15.00.

TOWARD FULL EMPLOYMENT: A PROGRAMME FOR COLOMBIA. International Labour Office, Geneva, 1970. 471 pp. US$4.00, 16 SwFr, $1.60 paper.     

Hiding to eat: the role of carnivores in the early Middle Pleistocene from the TD8 level of Gran Dolina (Sierra de Atapuerca,Burgos, Spain)

Damage generated by large and small carnivores is common in many Middle Pleistocene sites. However, identifying the predator that produces the faunal accumulations is often a difficult task. In order to recognize the main type of carnivore that acts on a faunal assemblage, a combination of several characteristics should be taken into account: taxonomic and skeletal element representation, age profiles, carnivore damage (location, frequencies and dimensions of tooth-marks, bone breakage and digested bones), degree of fragmentation and frequencies of coprolites. But, adding environmental characteristics and the ethology of non-human predators/scavengers is also important. All these aspects are applied to the faunal assemblage from the TD8 level of the Gran Dolina site (Sierra de Atapuerca, Burgos, Spain). Paleomagnetic data combined with ESR and U-series place the TD8 level at the beginning of the Middle Pleistocene, specifically circa 700 kyr ago. The TD8 level contains a large faunal accumulation primarily composed of ungulate skeletal elements, and to a lesser extent carnivore remains. This assemblage is characterized by an overrepresentation of fallow deer (Dama vallonetensis), a skeletal profile biased towards cranial remains and limb bones, diversity of ages at death, a high proportion of carnivore damage and tooth-marks of large size, and an absence of human activity. According to these data, the accumulation seems to have been produced primarily by large carnivores, possibly hyenas. This observation does not rule out the possible occasional activity by other carnivores. Nevertheless, the characteristics of the TD8 assemblage do not correlate entirely with those traditionally used to define carnivore dens. In TD8, there are (1) no immature carnivore remains (remains of just one young Mosbach wolf); (2) scarce traces related to the end stages of consumption and some anatomical connexions; (3) few coprolites; (4) high proportion of adult ungulates and; (5) high quantities of whole bones and epiphyses. From this perspective, the TD8 faunal assemblage seems to correspond to a succession of carnivore occupations that allows the development of a suite of features to identify the activities of several species of predators that may have used the cave in different ways and durations. This study aims to emphasize the importance of these analyzes in order to know the behaviour of different non-human predators/scavengers in the European Middle Pleistocene sites.