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Chapter 2 Body and Mind  T o sort out what we can learn from James about the important issues of human life such as whether we have free will, whether we can join with others in real community, whether we can hope for life after death, and whether we can believe in God, we need as clear a view as possible on the meaning that James attributed to the mind and its relation to the body. We can understand James best by situating his position in the context of Western philosophy and comparing his thoughts to those that other philosophers have attributed to the concept of a “soul.” The two most opposing ideas are the dualist notion that the soul constitutes the real self, which is immortal and temporarily housed in a body, compared to the notion that the soul is an illusion that can be explained away in terms of material neurons that make up the brain. Materialism versus Dualism Plato and Descartes exemplify dualism. Plato held that the soul preexists the body and survives after death. The task of philosophy is to liberate the soul from the limitations and impurities of bodily existence. In the dialogue Phaedo, when Socrates’ friends ask how they should bury him, he makes it clear that “Socrates” will be gone when they bury the body. Rene Descartes in the seventeenth century argued that the conscious ego is a thinking thing while the body is an extended thing. These are two different kinds of substance . The self has the capacity to think independently of the body or of bodily images. The opposite view appeared first in ancient Greece in the thought of Democritus and the school that came to be known as “atomism.” According  11  to this view, reality consists of indivisible particles—atoms—that move in space and form visible things by aggregations. The body and what we call the soul are nothing but collections and arrangements of atoms, and when the arrangement dissolves, the body and soul are gone. This view reappeared in the seventeenth century, and with the later development of modern chemistry , it became the basis of scientific materialism. It has had many advocates and perhaps the most articulate today is Francis Crick. In his book, The Astonishing Hypothesis, he argues that “You are nothing but the behavior of a vast assembly of nerve cells and their associated behavior.”1 The nerve cells and their behavior depend on the action of the molecules that compose them. In principle, we can explain all behavior and all consciousness in terms of the molecules. We do not need a hypothesis of “the soul”; free will and immortality are illusions. Crick unabashedly calls himself a reductionist and points out that the success of all modern science depends on reduction of the wholes to the parts. The scientists of one hundred years ago, including James, would probably not have been astonished by Crick’s hypothesis. Although Crick has much more information about molecular biology, he offers no surprises that would require a paradigm shift. Whether we look at materialism from the viewpoint of the crude atomism of Democritus or the sophisticated molecular science of Crick, the philosophical assumptions remain the same, namely, that to understand the material conditions of consciousness means to know consciousness. James dismissed the reductionists as those who believe that a Beethoven string quartet is nothing but the scraping of horse hairs on cat guts. We must now ask whether James successfully answered the challenge of the reductionists. Before looking at James’s approach to this issue, one more alternative should be mentioned although only briefly. Aristotle and St. Thomas held that the soul relates to the body as form to matter. A person consists of neither just a soul nor just a collection of material parts, but rather as composition of body and soul. The same self who understands the highest spiritual ideas is the very one who feels bodily pain and pleasure. This view is called hylomorphism from the Greek words hyle and morphe, which mean matter and form. From the materialist point of view, St. Thomas’s notion of the soul would seem to slip into dualism. For although the soul serves as the form of the body, it has an operation—reason—that subsists independently of matter, and at death, it can survive without the body. While the comparison and distinction between hylomorphism and dualism makes a fascinating philosophical question, it cannot be taken up here. From the...

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