The Thought at the Back of the Mind: Five Explorations of the Human in the Age of the Natural Sciences

The Thought at the Back of the Mind is a plea for the centrality of the humanities as a vehicle of knowledge about ourselves and about the reality around us. It illustrates the interpretative arts through Aronowicz’s close reading of Charles Péguy, Don DeLillo, Bernard d’Espagnat, Wysława Szymborska, and Marilynne Robinson. Each author exhibits a complex relationship to the narratives emanating from the sciences—wonder, terror, appreciation, resistance. All, in different ways, point to a dimension of the human that cannot be captured through “the scientific method.” For the most part, they make their points not through abstract argument but through an exploration of daily life. Each writer gives pride of place to metaphor, humor, and/or intuition as indispensable conduits to the reality within and without us. The Thought at the Back of the Mind explores the religious dimension embedded in the narratives emanating from the natural sciences as well as in the quest to formulate what eludes them. These two contrary dimensions of our relation to the sciences, in their various configurations, reveal us to ourselves in our historical moment.

Annette Aronowicz is professor emerita of religious studies at Franklin & Marshall College. She is the author of Jews and Christians on Time and Eternity: Charles Peguy's Portrait of Bernard Lazare (1998); Nine Talmudic Readings by Emmanuel Levinas, translated and introduced by Annette Aronowicz (2019); and Self-Portrait, with Parents and Footnotes: In and Out of a Postwar Jewish Childhood (2021). She has also written a number of articles on the Yiddish-language playwright Haim Sloves.