After Physicalism

Chapter 1: The Naturalness of Dualism

25 The Naturalness of Dualism Uwe Meixner In his famous biography of Samuel Johnson, James Boswell recounts the following anecdote (see, for example, Boswell 1986: 122): After we came out of the church, we stood talking for some time together of Bishop Berkeley’s ingenious sophistry to prove the nonexistence of matter, and that every thing in the universe is merely ideal. I observed, that though we are satisfied his doctrine is not true, it is impossible to refute it. I shall never forget the alacrity with which Johnson answered, striking his foot with mighty force against a large stone, till he rebounded from it, ‘I refute it thus.’ This anecdote can serve as a catalyst for various insights. In particular , it enables one to see the doctrine of psychophysical dualism in a new light. I hope that this will become apparent in this essay as it progresses. 1. The Nature of Philosophical Opinion Boswell’s text takes us back to a time (precisely speaking, it is the year 1763) when ontological idealism seemed irrefutable—though it 1 26  Uwe Meixner was perceived to be false—and even first-rate intellectuals did not manage to argue against it without helping themselves to wordless means of argument, exhibiting in doing so a certain amount of exasperation . Johnson’s eighteenth-century kick argument (it can be strengthened by any amount of knock, push, and pull arguments) against ontological idealism (and for the existence of an external and material world) is strikingly similar to G. E. Moore’s twentieth-­ century “proof ” for the existence of an external and material world (and against ontological idealism): Moore’s holding up his two hands and concluding that there are at least two external (and material) objects in the world.1 Both Moore’s argument and Johnson’s argument are of the same type: they both enact—by bodily activity—a commonsensical objection against ontological idealism. Both Moore’s argument and Johnson’s are, however, not entirely successful—for Bishop Berkeley (or any other reasonable ontological idealist, for that matter ) was of course far from denying that there are hands in the world (which one can lift) or large stones (against which one can strike one’s foot). Berkeley merely denied that there are such things as mind-independent (or external) material objects; according to Berkeley , hands and stones, properly conceived, exist all right, but are not mind-independent material objects.2 Much later in the history of ideas, Edmund Husserl—perhaps the most sophisticated ontological idealist of all time—held that hands, stones, and other cases of material objects are according to their essence the (intentional) correlates of (intentional) conscious states, that (therefore) the idea of these things existing independently of (or: external to) conscious states cannot be rationally defended and is indeed substantially (“sachlich”) absurd.3 Ontological idealism is still very much worthy of philosophical attention, though most philosophers nowadays are satisfied merely to consider some popular caricature of it. Deplorably, they take the caricature to be properly representative of the doctrine. The caricature indeed—not the doctrine—can be easily dismissed, whether it be by lifting hands or by striking stones, or by emphasizing (usually somewhat indignantly) that we cannot normally make the world be so-and-so simply by thinking it to be so-and-so. But the pervasive substituting of popular caricature for the real thing is symptomatic of the fact that the time of a philosophical doc- The Naturalness of Dualism   27 trine is over. The time of (the widespread belief of the philosophers in) ontological idealism is over (which does not mean that ontological idealism might not have a comeback someday). By and large, the doctrine is no longer taken seriously. Today, quite a different philosophical opinion rules among the philosophers: materialism, the very opposite of ontological idealism. It is illuminating to consider the similarities and dissimilarities between the hegemony of ontological idealism in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries and the hegemony of materialism in the latter part of the twentieth and at the beginning of the twenty-first century. Two Hegemonies Ontological idealism once was felt to be a tyrant who usurped the throne of truth. But it was also felt that this tyrant doctrine was quite unassailable in its act of usurpation, because of its philosophical reasonableness, the quality of philosophical argument in favor of it. See the above quotation from Johnson’s biography, where Boswell observes that “though we are satisfied [this] doctrine is not true, it...