The philosophy of Arthur Schopenhauer, which we’ve been
discussing for the last two weeks, has a feature that reliably irritates most
people when they encounter it for the first time: it doesn’t divide up the
world the way people in modern western societies habitually do. To say, as
Schopenhauer does, that the world we experience is a world of subjective
representations, and that we encounter the reality behind those representations
in will, is to map out the world in a way so unfamiliar that it grates on the
nerves. Thus it came as no surprise that last week’s post fielded a flurry of
responses trying to push the discussion back onto the more familiar ground of
mind and matter.
That was inevitable. Every society has what I suppose could
be called its folk metaphysics, a set of beliefs about the basic nature of
existence that are taken for granted by most people in that society, and the
habit of dividing the world of our experience into mind and matter is among the
core elements of the folk metaphysics of the modern western world. Most of us
think of it, on those occasions when we think of it at all, as simply the way
the world is. It rarely occurs to most of us that there’s any other way to
think of things—and when one shows up, a great many of us back away from it as
fast as possible.
Yet dividing the world into mind and matter is really rather
problematic, all things considered. The most obvious difficulty is the relation
between the two sides of the division. This is usually called the mind-body
problem, after the place where each of us encounters that difficulty most
directly. Grant for the sake of argument that each of us really does consist of
a mind contained in a material body, how do these two connect? It’s far from easy
to come up with an answer that works.
Several approaches have been tried in the attempt to solve
the mind-body problem. There’s dualism, which is the claim that there are two
entirely different and independent kinds of things in the world—minds and bodies—and requires proponents to comes up with various ways to justify the connection between them. First
place for philosophical brashness in this connection goes to Rene Descartes,
who argued that the link was directly and miraculously caused by the will of
God. Plenty of less blatant methods of handwaving have been used to accomplish
the same trick, but all of them require question-begging maneuvers of various
kinds, and none has yet managed to present any kind of convincing evidence for
itself.
Then there are the reductionistic monisms, which attempt to
account for the relationship of mind and matter by reducing one of them to the
other. The most popular reductionistic monism these days is reductionistic
materialism, which claims that what we call “mind” is simply the electrochemical
activity of those lumps of matter we call human brains. Though it’s a good deal
less popular these days, there’s also reductionistic idealism, which claims
that what we call “matter” is the brought into being by the activity of minds,
or of Mind.
Further out still, you get the eliminative monisms, which
deal with the relationship between mind and matter by insisting that one of
them doesn’t exist. There are eliminative materialists, for example, who insist
that mental experiences don’t exist, and our conviction that we think, feel,
experience pain and pleasure, etc. is an “introspective illusion.” (I’ve often
thought that one good response to such a claim would be to ask, “Do you really
think so?” The consistent eliminative materialist would have to answer “No.”)
There are also eliminative idealists, who insist that matter doesn’t exist and
that all is mind.
There’s probably been as much effort expended in attempting
to solve the mind-body problem as any other single philosophical issue has gotten
in modern times, and yet it remains the focus of endless debates even today.
That sort of intellectual merry-go-round is usually a pretty good sign that the
basic assumptions at the root of the question have some kind of lethal flaw.
That’s particularly true when this sort of ongoing donnybrook isn’t the only
persistent difficulty surrounding the same set of ideas—and that’s very much
the case here.
After all, there’s a far more personal sense in which the
phrase “mind-body problem” can be taken. To speak in the terms usual for our
culture, this thing we’re calling “mind” includes only a certain portion of
what we think of as our inner lives. What, after all, counts as “mind”? In the
folk metaphysics of our culture, and in most of the more formal systems of
thought based on it, “mind” is consciousness plus the thinking and reasoning
functions, perhaps with intuition (however defined) tied on like a
squirrel’s tail to the antenna of an
old-fashioned jalopy. The emotions aren’t part of mind, and neither are such
very active parts of our lives as sexual desire and the other passions; it
sounds absurd, in fact, to talk about “the emotion-body problem” or the
“passion-body problem.” Why does it sound absurd? Because, consciously or
unconsciously, we assign the emotions and the passions to the category of
“body,” along with the senses.
This is where we get the second form of the mind-body
problem, which is that we’re taught implicitly and explicitly that the mind
governs the body, and yet the functions we label “body” show a distinct lack of
interest in obeying the functions we call “mind.” Sexual desire is of course
the most obvious example. What people actually desire and what they think they
ought to desire are quite often two very different things, and when the “mind”
tries to bully the “body” into desiring what the “mind” thinks it ought to
desire, the results are predictably bad. Add enough moral panic to the mix, in
fact, and you end up with sexual hysteria of the classic Victorian type, in
which the body ends up being experienced as a sinister Other responding solely
to its own evil propensities, the seductive wiles of other persons, or the
machinations of Satan himself despite all the efforts of the mind to rein it
in.
Notice the implicit hierarchy woven into the folk
metaphysics just sketched out, too. Mind is supposed to rule matter, not the
other way around; mind is active, while matter is passive or, at most, subject
to purely mechanical pressures that make it lurch around in predictable ways. When
things don’t behave that way, you tend to see people melt down in one way or
another—and the universe being what it is, things don’t actually behave that
way very often, so the meltdowns come at regular intervals.
They also arrive in an impressive range of contexts, because
the way of thinking about things that divides them into mind and matter is
remarkably pervasive in western societies, and pops up in the most
extraordinary places. Think of the way
that our mainstream religions portray God as the divine Mind ruling
omnipotently over a universe of passive matter; that’s the ideal toward which
our notions of mind and body strive, and predictably never reach. Think of the
way that our entertainment media can always evoke a shudder of horror by imagining
something we assign to the category of lifeless matter—a corpse in the case of
zombie flicks, a machine in such tales as Stephen King’s Christine, or
what have you—suddenly starts acting as though it possesses a mind.
For that matter, listen to the more frantic end of the
rhetoric on the American left following the recent presidential election and
you’ll hear the same theme echoing off the hills. The left likes to think of
itself as the smart people, the educated people, the sensitive and thoughtful and
reasonable people—in effect, the people of Mind. The hate speech that many of
them direct toward their political opponents leans just as heavily on the
notion that these latter are stupid, uneducated, insensitive, irrational, and
so on—that is to say, the people of Matter. Part of the hysteria that followed
Trump’s election, in turn, might best be described as the political equivalent
of the instinctive reaction to a zombie flick: the walking dead have suddenly
lurched out of their graves and stalked toward the ballot box, the body politic
has rebelled against its self-proclaimed mind!
Let’s go deeper, though. The habit of dividing the universe
of human experience into mind and matter isn’t hardwired into the world, or for
that matter into human consciousness; there have been, and are still, societies
in which people simply don’t experience themselves and the world that way. The
mind-body problem and the habits of thought that give rise to it have a
history, and it’s by understanding that history that it becomes possible to see
past the problem toward a solution.
That history takes its rise from an interesting disparity
among the world’s great philosophical traditions. The three that arose
independently—the Chinese, the Indian, and the Greek—focused on different
aspects of humanity’s existence in the world. Chinese philosophy from earliest
times directed its efforts to understanding the relationship between the
individual and society; that’s why the Confucian mainstream of Chinese
philosophy is resolutely political and social in its focus, exploring ways that
the individual can find a viable place within society, and the alternative
Taoist tradition in its oldest forms (before it absorbed mysticism from Indian
sources) focused on ways that the individual can find a viable place outside
society. Indian philosophy, by contrast, directed its efforts to understanding
the nature of individual existence itself; that’s why the great Indian
philosophical schools all got deeply into epistemology and ended up with a strong
mystical bent.
The Greek philosophical tradition, in turn, went to work on
a different set of problems. Greek philosophy, once it got past its initial
fumblings, fixed its attention on the world of thought. That’s what led Greek
thinkers to transform mathematics from a unsorted heap of practical techniques
to the kind of ordered system of axioms and theorems best exemplified by
Euclid’s Elements of Geometry, and it’s also what led Greek thinkers in
the same generation as Euclid to create logic, one of the half dozen or so
greatest creations of the human mind. Yet it also led to something considerably
more problematic: the breathtaking leap of faith by which some of the greatest
intellects of the ancient world convinced themselves that the structure of their thoughts was the true structure of the universe, and that thoughts about things
were therefore more real than the things themselves.
The roots of that conviction go back all the way to the
beginnings of Greek philosophy, but it really came into its own with
Parmenides, an important philosopher of the generation immediately before Plato.
Parmenides argued that there were two ways of understanding the world, the way
of truth and the way of opinion; the way of opinion consisted of understanding
the world as it appears to the senses, which according to Parmenides means it’s
false, while the way of truth consisted of understanding the world the way that
reason proved it had to be, even when this contradicted the testimony of the
senses. To be sure, there are times and places where the testimony of the
senses does indeed need to be corrected by logic, but it’s at least
questionable whether this should be taken anything like as far as Parmenides
took it—he argued, for example, that motion was logically impossible, and so
nothing ever actually moves, even though it seems that way to our deceiving
senses.
The idea that thoughts about things are more real than
things settled into what would be its classic form in the writings of Plato,
who took Parmenides’ distinction and set to work to explain the relationship
between the worlds of truth and opinion. To Plato, the world of truth became a
world of forms or ideas, on which everything in the world of sensory experience
is modeled. The chair we see, in other words, is a projection or reflection
downwards into the world of matter of the timeless, pure, and perfect form or
idea of chair-ness. The senses show us the projections or reflections; the
reasoning mind shows us the eternal form from which they descend.
That was the promise of classic Platonism—that the mind
could know the truth about the universe directly, without the intervention of
the senses, the same way it could know the truth of a mathematical
demonstration. The difficulty with this enticing claim, though, was that when
people tried to find the truth about the universe by examining their thinking processes, no two of them
discovered exactly the same truth, and the wider the cultural and intellectual
differences between them, the more different the truths turned out to be. It
was for this reason among others that Aristotle, whose life’s work was basically that of
cleaning up the mess that Plato and his predecessors left behind, made such a
point of claiming that nothing enters the mind except through the medium of the
senses. It’s also why the Academy, the school founded by Plato, in the
generations immediately after his time took a hard skeptical turn, and focused
relentlessly on the limits of human knowledge and reasoning.
Later on, Greek philosophy and its Roman foster-child headed
off in other directions—on the one hand, into ethics, and the question of how
to live the good life in a world where certainty isn’t available; on the other,
into mysticism, and the question of whether the human mind can experience the
truth of things directly through religious experience. A great deal of Plato’s
thinking, however, got absorbed by the Christian religion after the latter
clawed its way to respectability in the fourth century CE.
Augustine of Hippo, the theologian who basically set the
tone of Christianity in the west for the next fifteen centuries, had been a
Neoplatonist before he returned to his Christian roots, and he was far from the only Christian of that time to drink deeply from Plato's well. In his wake, Platonism
became the standard philosophy of the western church until it was displaced by
a modified version of Aristotle’s philosophy in the high Middle Ages. Thinkers
divided the human organism into two portions, body and soul, and began the
process by which such things as sexuality and the less angelic emotions got
exiled from the soul into the body.
Even after Thomas Aquinas made Aristotle popular again, the basic
Parmenidean-Platonic notion of truth had been so thoroughly bolted into
Christian theology that it rode right over any remaining worries about the
limitations of human reason. The soul trained in the use of reason could see
straight to the core of things, and recognize by its own operations such basic religious
doctrines as the existence of God: that
was the faith with which generations of scholars pursued the scholastic
philosophy of medieval times, and those who disagreed with them rarely
quarreled over their basic conception—rather, the point at issue was whether
the Fall had left the human mind so vulnerable to the machinations of Satan
that it couldn’t count on its own conclusions, and the extent to which divine
grace would override Satan’s malicious tinkerings anywhere this side of heaven.
If you happen to be a devout Christian, such questions make
sense, and they matter. It’s harder to see how they still made sense and
mattered as the western world began moving into its post-Christian era in the
eighteenth century, and yet the Parmenidean-Platonic faith in the omnipotence
of reason gained ground as Christianity ebbed among the educated classes.
People stopped talking about soul and body and started talking about mind and
body instead.
Since mind, mens in Latin, was already in common use
as a term for the faculty of the soul that handled its thinking and could be
trained to follow the rules of reason, that shift was of vast importance. It
marked the point at which the passions and the emotions were shoved out of the
basic self-concept of the individual in western culture, and exiled to the
body, that unruly and rebellious lump of matter in which the mind is somehow
caged.
That’s one of the core things that Schopenhauer rejected. As
he saw it, the mind isn’t the be-all and end-all of the self, stuck somehow
into the prison house of the body. Rather, the mind is a frail and unstable set
of functions that surface now and then on top of other functions that are much
older, stronger, and more enduring. What expresses itself through all these
functions, in turn, is will: at the most
basic primary level, as the will to exist; on a secondary level, as the will to
live, with all the instincts and drives that unfold from that will; on a
tertiary level, as the will to experience, with all the sensory and cognitive
apparatus that unfolds from that will; and on a quaternary level, as the will
to understand, with all the abstract concepts and relationships that unfold
from that will.
Notice that from this point of view, the structure of thought isn't the structure of the cosmos, just a set of convenient models, and thoughts about things
are emphatically not more real than the things themselves. The things themselves are wills, expressing
themselves through their several modes.
The things as we know them are representations, and our thoughts about
the things are abstract patterns we create out of memories of representations,
and thus at two removes from reality.
Notice also that from this point of view, the self is simply
a representation—the ur-representation, the first representation each of us
makes in infancy as it gradually sinks in that there’s a part of the
kaleidoscope of our experience that we can move at will, and a lot more that we
can’t, but still just a representation, not a reality. Of course that’s what we
see when we first try to pay attention to ourselves, just as we see the coffee
cup discussed in the first post in this series. It takes exacting logical
analysis, scientific experimentation, or prolonged introspection to get past
the representation of the self (or the coffee cup), realize that it’s a
subjective construct rather than an objective reality, and grasp the way that
it’s assembled out of disparate stimuli according to preexisting frameworks
that are partly hardwired into our species and partly assembled over the course
of our lives.
Notice, finally, that those functions we like to call
“mind”—in the folk metaphysics of our culture, again, these are consciousness
and the capacity to think, with a few other tag-ends of other functions
dangling here and there—aren’t the essence of who we are, the ghost in the
machine, the Mini-Me perched inside the skull that pushes and pulls levers to
control the passive mass of the body and gets distracted by the jabs and lurches of the emotions and passions. The functions we call “mind,” rather, are a set of delicate, tentative, and
fragile functions of will, less robust and stable than most of the others, and
with no inherent right to rule the other functions. The Schopenhauerian self is
an ecosystem rather than a hierarchy, and if what we call “mind” sits at the
top of the food chain like a fox in a meadow, that simply means that the fox
has to spend much of its time figuring out where mice like to go, and even more
of its time sleeping in its den, while the mice scamper busily about and the
grass goes quietly about turning sunlight, water and carbon dioxide into the
nutrients that support the whole system.
