Essays on Hegel's Philosophy of Subjective Spirit

The Relation of Mind to Nature

The Relation of Mind to Nature Two Paradigms Philip T. Grier The two paradigms that I propose to explore here are, somewhat loosely, the Hegelian, and a certain strand of the 20th-century analytic tradition. By “paradigm” I mean either a theoretical framework to govern empirical investigations of a problem, or, alternatively, a distinctive conceptual analysis or formulation of some problem. More generally, one might refer simply to alternative philosophical “traditions.” Characterizing actual philosophical traditions requires attention to the historical, the rhetorical, as well as the philosophical aspects of an intellectual practice, sometimes in equal measure. All of these will figure in the essay that follows. Despite the significant elements of history involved, the ultimate motivation for this inquiry was a curiosity about the contemporary configurations of these two traditions, the extent to which they could be viewed as commensurate or incommensurate, and consequently, the profitability (or unprofitability) of a prospective dialogue between them. Introduction The first of the two paradigms for the investigation of mind’s relation to nature might be thought of as the Comprehensive one, as it designates the broadest conception of the problem, the outlines of which can be originally 223 224 / Philip T. Grier discerned in the texts of Plato and Aristotle.1 In the modern period that same general conception is clearly framed as a central problem in the German idealist tradition, culminating in Hegel’s highly complex attempted resolution of it, which was one of the principal aims of his system. The comprehensive paradigm of the relation of mind to nature involves two distinct but interconnected branches of argument: the first attempts to explain how mind can be understood to have arisen in the context of the natural world, while the second attempts to show how that world can be comprehended as such by the mind depicted in the first branch of the argument. More simply put, what is required is both an account of the constitution of mind from the standpoint of nature, as well as an account of the constitution of nature from the standpoint of mind. One of the most succinct formulations of this problem was supplied by T. H. Green 125 years ago, in the opening sentence of his Prolegomena to Ethics: “Can the knowledge of nature be itself a part or product of nature?”2 Fifty-four years ago, Errol Harris adumbrated the position in terms of an epigram: “The mind is in the world and the world is in the mind.”3 In referring to this first paradigm as the “Comprehensive” conception of the problem, I mean simply to indicate that it requires that both branches of the problem be pursued to satisfactory solutions and that the two solutions must turn out to be mutually consistent aspects of a single overarching conception of the nature of the real. By the second, or Narrow, paradigm I intend to refer to theories of the so-called “mind-body problem,” in contemporary parlance, which construe the issue much more narrowly as simply the question of how a mental event can be related to a brain event, where the latter is construed as physical. At first glance one might suppose that this “Narrow” problem is just the first branch of the “Comprehensive” problem taken by itself without reference to the second branch. If so, one might presume that the energies being invested in debate and research on this Narrow paradigm might in the long run make some sort of contribution to a solution of at least half of the Comprehensive problem. I submit that this would not be philosophically or historically accurate, because the two paradigms stem from radically distinct philosophical traditions, do not share truly convergent aims, and conceive basic terms of the problem such as “mind” in ultimately incompatible ways. Finally, one project, the Comprehensive one, is grounded in systematic philosophy; the other is grounded as much in empirical psychology as philosophy. Historically speaking, once the second branch of the Comprehensive problem had been effectively dropped from the agenda by philosophers The Relation of Mind to Nature / 225 such as Moore and Russell around the beginning of the twentieth century , the remaining first branch, now reconceived in a quite different and simplified form as the “mind-body problem” could then be referred back comfortably and naturally into the 17th-century Cartesian context, and its outlines then easily traced through the early modern British empiricists , and thence into...