The Golden Cord: A Short Book on the Secular and the Sacred

Chapter 2: Selves and Bodies

41 c h A p t e r 2 SELVES AND BODIES Bless to me my body . . . bless to me my soul —Gaelic song and blessing As we have seen in the opening chapter, there is some discord in contemporary philosophical work on consciousness and experience. I t is not at all easy to eliminate consciousness from our inquiries nor, once admitted, is it easy to place it in a thor oughgoing physical world. David Chalmers offers this succinct statement of the pr oblem: “You can’t have your materialist cake and eat your consciousness too.”1 In the first chapter, I suggested that the reality of consciousness and experience is more evident than the posits of contemporary science. Fortunately or unfortunately, the initial work to prepare for the main focus of this book is not over. A little more work is called for befor e we can establish a pr oper foothold to explor e Dante’s sense that the cosmos is upheld by love, or W.H. Auden’s experience of being caught up in the power of love, or the Cambridge Platonist notion of absolute life. 42 T H E G O L D E N C O R D The chair of my philosophy depar tment has a list that appears to be a credo taped to her office door. The list includes: Naturalism is true. And: There are no spooks. Naturalism is not easy to define. As Barry Stroud observed recently, “Naturalism” seems to me in this and other r espects rather like “World Peace.” Almost everyone swears allegiance to it, and is willing to mar ch under its banner. But disputes still break out about what it is appropriate or acceptable to do in the name of that slogan. And like world peace, once you start specifying concretely exactly what it involves and how to achieve it, it becomes increasingly difficult to reach and to sustain a consistent and exclusive “naturalism.”2 As hinted at in the intr oduction, naturalism comes in many forms, and it may or may not take the form of radical materialism. However, the essence of naturalism is the denial that G od exists—or even the denial of the possibility of God’s existence—and the denial that humans are immaterial or have or contain or are nonphysical souls. To posit God or the soul is far from Stroud’s “World Peace”; rather, it is too spooky for naturalists. This chapter addresses such naturalist concerns about the soul or the self. Is it plausible to think that some v ersion of dualism has a competitive edge in theories of human nature? John Searle, no dualist, comments that today materialism is so entr enched that it is like a r eligion—something Searle sees as a demerit: “There is a sense in which materialism is the r eligion of our time, at least among most of the pr ofessional experts in the fields of philosophy, psychology, cognitive science, and other disciplines that study the mind. Like more traditional religions, it is accepted without question and it provides the framework within which other questions can be posed, addressed, and answered.”3 I have some evidence that my colleague’s credo may treat naturalism as a religion, because at the end of her list of propositions is the word “Amen.” I suggest that we go directly to the mind-body relationship and consider why tout le monde thinks dualism is out of bounds. M any philosophers today blame the French philosopher René Descartes for introducing a hideous bifurcation or dualism in which the person (soul or mind) is Selves and Bodies 43 distinct from his or her body. When I was an undergraduate philosophy major, I was told that Descartes was responsible for almost all contemporary philosophical problems; in my first class I was informed that even the Vietnam War was somehow the fault of Descartes! Let’s look at some of the r easons why Descartes is considered the Prince of Darkness and then see if a somewhat qualified dualism—which may be called integrative dualism—has promise. I will fill out “integrative dualism” shortly, but for now I will describe it as the vie w that the self and body ar e profoundly integrated but not identical. To summarize what is to follo w: After sketching why so many philosophers r eject dualism, I argue in this chapter...