Lost Souls: The Philosophic Origins of a Cultural Dilemma

Introduction

Philosophy’s dominant trajectory, fixed long ago, is severely disrupted by evidence that mind is the activity of body. We see this effect in our ambivalent responses to an English local council. A retirement home sought compensation for burying dead residents. The council declined, advising the home to write off its costs as “business waste.”1 We hesitate. Why are dead bodies treated with so little respect? Because our worth derives from the virtues and powers of mind, not body. We have value as we live, not as cadavers. Why linger over them? Because bodies are sanctified by virtues their minds once expressed. We are different from used milk cartons. But are we? How shall we defend human dignity if mind’s singularity—including all its powers for thought and feeling—derive from the neural complexity of human bodies? Philosophers share this quandary with the moral community, though its severity eludes us. We regard dualism as a stubborn problem : how do neurons generate colors, tastes, sounds, and consciousness ? We ignore the historical developments that made dualism a postulate for established philosophic views about knowledge and value. This posture—half impatient of dualism, half dependent on it—is unstable. Engineers build machines that mimic thought and perception. Physiologists map these activities in the brain. There is little about mind that cannot be explained in physical terms. Nothing that is unexplained —principally the awareness of perceptual data—supports the exalted status ascribed to mind when its separability from body was confidently affirmed. Questions once avoided are suddenly urgent. How do knowledge and feeling emerge as we engage other people and things? What justifies human self-esteem as we tinker with the molecules and chips that may replace us? Plato, Descartes, and Kant are the principal points of reference for assumptions that are no longer viable. Whitehead directs us. He 1 Introduction 2 INTRODUCTION described philosophy’s trajectory as a series of footnotes to Plato. Wanting to avert the implication that Platonic tradition is scattershot, we alter the metaphor and imagine a Nevada highway. Apparently straight when observed from a height, it is visible only from ridge to ridge when seen from cars moving along it. Philosophy, too, has an occluded view of itself, because its Platonic origins are distorted by later interpretations. Descartes’ cogito incorporated and privatized Plato’s figure of the divided line. Later refinements, especially those of Kant, embellished mind’s self-sufficiency while making it the ground for being and intelligibility. Psychocentrism and subjective idealism were complementary results. Now, when our Platonism derives from Descartes and Kant, their mentalism is sabotaged by the physiology Descartes inspired. The cogito dissolves because of nearly comprehensive evidence that mind is the activity of body. Platonism endures— norms abide amidst the flux—but the road deviates. Cartesian, Kantian extensions are plowed over or abandoned. Nothing is lost: bodies think and feel, regulate themselves, cooperate, and create. Only our orientation is reversed: having previously located all of intelligibility and being within mind, we, like Aristotle, locate minds in the natural world. My historical narrative is brief. Chapters one and two discuss the principals of the story: Plato, Plotinus, Augustine, Proclus, and Descartes. Chapter three elaborates five issues that are fundamental to Descartes’ version of the line—including epistemic and ontological foundationalism, self-knowledge, intelligibility, the geometrical character of the physical world, and mind’s self-valorization. It also considers an array of ideas recast in the light of his foundationalism. Chapter four describes the reformulations of Descartes’ ideas by Kant, Nietzsche and Heidegger, Carnap and Quine. Should we prefer their aversion to metaphysics or their egregiously metaphysical psychocentrism ? Chapter five argues that Descartes’ reading of Plato is subverted by contemporary elaborations of his physiology. We often suppose that philosophic views are abandoned, never falsified. The developments recounted here challenge our complacency. The cogito cannot be the source of intelligibility and the ground for all being if working models of mental functions and empirically tested theories confirm that mind is the activity of a physical system. Chapter six considers the implications for several disputed questions. Only some are featured topics in philosophy journals—truth, for example. All are critical for the reorientation at hand. Disputes focused by these issues churn. Their irresolution is evidence of the deeper crisis they express: the demise of assumptions that directed us for three and a half centuries . Chapter seven weighs the costs. It considers Platonic and INTRODUCTION...