Consciousness from Descartes to Ayer 303080920X, 9783030809201

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Consciousness from Descartes to Ayer

David Berman

Consciousness from Descartes to Ayer

David Berman

Consciousness from Descartes to Ayer

David Berman Trinity College Dublin Dublin, Ireland

ISBN 978-3-030-80920-1    ISBN 978-3-030-80921-8 (eBook) https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-80921-8 © The Author(s), under exclusive licence to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 This work is subject to copyright. All rights are solely and exclusively licensed by the Publisher, whether the whole or part of the material is concerned, specifically the rights of translation, reprinting, reuse of illustrations, recitation, broadcasting, reproduction on microfilms or in any other physical way, and transmission or information storage and retrieval, electronic adaptation, computer software, or by similar or dissimilar methodology now known or hereafter developed. The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc. in this publication does not imply, even in the absence of a specific statement, that such names are exempt from the relevant protective laws and regulations and therefore free for general use. The publisher, the authors and the editors are safe to assume that the advice and information in this book are believed to be true and accurate at the date of publication. Neither the publisher nor the authors or the editors give a warranty, expressed or implied, with respect to the material contained herein or for any errors or omissions that may have been made. The publisher remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations. This Palgrave Macmillan imprint is published by the registered company Springer Nature Switzerland AG. The registered company address is: Gewerbestrasse 11, 6330 Cham, Switzerland

Preface

My aim in this Preface is to give an overview of the whole work, which consists of this Preface, followed by four chapters and an Epilogue. My main thesis, which is put forward in Chap. 1, is that all humans have one of two basic forms of consciousness, one that is monistic, the other is dualistic. And yet it is universally believed that all humans have one basic and natural form of consciousness. This is what I call the Assumption, which I take to be profoundly untrue. Yet I do accept that all humans have a mode of consciousness that has arisen through nurture and is a mixture of the monistic and dualistic in the way that green is a mixture of yellow and blue. The greenish mode of consciousness is what I call socio-linguistic, because it is constituted by language and required for living in society. And it is this socio-linguistic mode of consciousness that has largely occluded the monistic and dualistic. Chapter 1 is foundational, and the following three chapters build on its foundation. However, Chap. 2 especially, but also three, four and the Epilogue can be read, to a great extent, on their own. Chapter 2, entitled ‘Irish Philosophy: Past and Future’, begins with an account of the one period when Ireland was at the cutting edge of world philosophy. This was the golden age, which was born with John Toland’s Christianity not Mysterious (1696), grew with the answers to his challenge by Peter Browne, William King and Edward Synge, and culminated in the work of Francis Hutcheson, Edmund Burke and especially George Berkeley, v

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and then came to a close in the late 1750s. The main thesis of this chapter is that Ireland might once again be at the cutting edge if it follows the lead of its two greatest thinkers, Toland, the great monist, and Berkeley, the great dualist. Chapter 3 is on David Hume, another great monist, and his use of what I call the Art of theological lying, as found most clearly in his celebrated account of miracles. However my more important and controversial thesis, which is the main focus of this chapter, is that Hume also uses the Art in his alleged retraction of his monistic theory of personal identity, according to which theory a person is only a bundle of perceptions with no perceiver of these perceptions. In short, what I try to show is that Hume’s alleged retraction of his monistic theory in the Appendix to his Treatise was not sincere but Artful and strategic lying. And this is both explained and supported by my account of monism and dualism in Chap. 1. However if my main claim in Chap. 3 is accepted—which I think it should be, since powerfully supported by the available evidence—then that would show the explanatory power of Chap. 1. Chapter 4 is chiefly on A.J. Ayer, who, like Hume, was a monist. But while Ayer followed Hume in many ways, what I try to show is that he can be considered a clearer and more complete monist than Hume. Another aim of this chapter is to show how much tangle and confusion there is in twentieth century philosophy, but how the tangle can be untangled once we see the importance of the dualist and monist dichotomy as described in Chap. 1. The work concludes with an Epilogue in which I step back and connect the main theory of this work with recent developments in genetics and anthropology, according to which there was successful mating between Homo sapiens and Neanderthals about 50,000 years ago. What I try to do, in short, is bring my account of the monist and dualist types together with the account of these two species, which we now know were sub-species, and show how the two accounts can throw light on each other. * * *

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What is perhaps most distinctive of this book is the way it uses the history of philosophy to do substantive philosophy. Hence unlike most present-day works of substantive philosophy it does not draw its content from either ordinary language or logic or from the results of science. But it does draw content or data from a second source, apart from the history of philosophy. This is the direct and immediate experience of the investigator, in this case myself, and my one-to-one discussions with other individuals. More specifically, my distinctive approach is to focus on the history of the great philosophers, first trying to understand their philosophies in the usual, scholarly way, but then using that to understand their types of minds, which are then seen as exemplary. Of course, to say that this is MY approach is not really correct, since this approach can be seen as going back to Plato, for example to his account in the Sophist, 146–149, of the two parties, one favouring the gods and the Forms, the other the giants and materialism. But the approach is clearest in William James’s book on Pragmatism, 1907, Lecture one, where James sets out the two basic kinds of temperaments, the tender-minded and the tough-minded, as shown in the history of philosophy. In this work, I follow James’s approach, but I go further. For I try to show that not only does this approach give me a clear understanding of the two opposing types of minds, the monistic and dualistic, but also the best metaphysics. However, while one should accept both types as true, one must live in accord with only one type, the one which fits one’s nature. * * * I am grateful to the following for reading, commenting or discussing with me various parts of this work: Mr Brian Barrington, Prof James Hill, Prof David McConnell, Dr Sarah Otten, Prof Jean-Paul Pittion, Prof Vasilis Politis, Prof George Sevastopulo, Dr Brian Torode and Mr John Williams. Dublin, Ireland

David Berman

Contents

1 The Theory of 2 Consciousnesses 1 1 Introduction and Summary  1 2 The Assumption and the 2CT  3 3 Understanding the History of Philosophy  6 4 Being Clearer About Dualism and Monism  8 5 Two Exemplary Oppositions 11 6 The Typical Mind Fallacy 17 7 The Social Self and Social Consciousness: How Yellow (Dualistic Consciousness) and Blue (Monistic Consciousness) Becomes Green (Socio-Linguistic Consciousness)20 8 Identifying the Dualist Through 8 Questions 22 9 Problems with Question 1: Two Cases 24 10 The Dualist Experience 26 2 Berkeley and Toland: Irish Philosophy, Past and Future29 1 Introduction 29 2 Esotericism in Toland and Berkeley 31 3 Brain and Consciousness 34 4 Toland and Berkeley on History 36 5 Final Philosophy: Life after Death 38 ix

x Contents

3 Hume’s Artful Lying, Monistic Naturalism and Retraction on Personal Identity47 1 Introduction and Summary 47 2 Hume’s Artful Lying 49 3 The Monist and Dualist Types 54 4 Hume’s Apparent Retraction 56 4 A. J. Ayer: The Complete Monist63 1 Introduction 63 Epilogue: Species and Types: Bringing Things Together73 Index83

Abbreviations

2CT Two Consciousnesses Theory cde core dualistic experience LTL Ayer’s Language, Truth and Logic s-d sense data TMF Typical Mind Fallacy

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Introduction and Summary

Two persons looking into a field can each say ‘I see the brown cow’ and be conscious of the cow they see. And as there is one thing they see and are talking about, namely the cow, it is assumed that their respective consciousness is also the same. This, very briefly, is what I call the Assumption: that there is one basic kind of consciousness which all human beings have. It is this Assumption which I reject. For the truth, I argue, is that there are two basic kinds of human consciousness, one which is monistic, the other dualistic. I call this the 2 Consciousnesses Theory- or, for short, 2CT. My aim in this chapter is to make clear both the Assumption and the 2CT, and to explain why the former should be rejected and the latter accepted. To do this, I move in different sections between the Assumption and the 2CT, going deeper and deeper into each, providing more and more detail about each and why one is false and the other is true. Here I might begin by observing that the Assumption can also be expressed by saying that there is one basic kind of thinking or experience or awareness or subjectivity or mentation, which all human beings have. © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 D. Berman, Consciousness from Descartes to Ayer, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-80921-8_1

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For there are many terms which are and have been used to refer to what is now generally called consciousness. And there are also various reasons and causes why the Assumption has been accepted- why it has been taken to be evidently true. Some of these are presented in Sect. 2, followed by my primary reason for holding that the Assumption is false and the 2CT is true. This is that the 2CT is shown to be true by the history of philosophy. Thus looking at the history of seventeenth and eighteenth century philosophy, we find Descartes, Leibnitz and Berkeley confidently presenting consciousness as taking a dualistic form; whereas Hobbes, Spinoza and Hume confidently presenting consciousness as monistic. And this is also what we find in ancient philosophy, where the dualistic is asserted by Anaxagoras and especially Plato, and the monistic by Democritus and Epicurus, among others. And the opposition is also to be found in more recent philosophy, with monists, such as Bradley and Ryle, and dualists such McTaggart and Moore. * * * However, there is a form of consciousness, which, unlike the monistic and dualistic, all human beings do have in common. But it is neither basic nor natural. Rather, it is an understanding or awareness in language, which human beings are taught, and which is the sine qua non for living in society. Hence it seems right to describe it as socio-linguistic. So all human beings can say, either aloud or silently: ‘I see the brown cow’, or ‘I feel tired’ or ‘I have a toothache’. But this socio-linguistic mode of consciousness is not either natural or basic, as are the monist and dualist forms of consciousness. For language is acquired through nurture, as is clearly shown in the development of babies, who, from being pre-­ linguistic learn language, and so become socio-linguistic persons. And this acquired mode of consciousness can be lost, as is shown in extreme dementia. But while pre-linguistic babies, and those suffering from extreme dementia, do not have it, they do always have, according to the 2CT, either the monistic or dualistic forms of consciousness. Thus if the pre-linguistic infant Descartes experienced painful thirst, his experience

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would be of two distinct things: (1) himself in thirsty pain and (2) an object which would be his painful thirst. Whereas for a monist, like Hume, his pre-linguistic, infant experience would be of only one kind of thing, what Hume called perceptions, so only painful thirst perceptions, with no distinct perceiver of those perceptions. Before passing on to Sect. 2, I should also observe that, according to our main theory, there is a close connection between consciousness and self. So just as I hold there are two basic forms of consciousness, I also hold there are two basic types of self- the monistic and dualistic- which underlie the two forms of consciousness. Hence there are really two Assumptions, one relating to the self, the other to consciousness. However, for simplicity, I have in this chapter focused on the Assumption relating to consciousness.

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The Assumption and the 2CT

Why has the Assumption been accepted by everyone, including all scientists, psychologists and philosophers? One main reason is because human beings are known to be basically the same physically. Hence it is assumed that they are basically the same inwardly or mentally, in their consciousness. There is also the principle of economy which rightly directs us not bring in more than one element if one is sufficient. And the Assumption has seemed sufficient, as is shown in the fact that it has not hitherto been seriously questioned. Supposing that there is just one human form of consciousness also makes sense of our human ability for cooperative action, which we don’t have with other species to the same extent. These, then, are some of the reasons or causes which have made the Assumption appear so evident. To be sure, it is generally accepted that we cannot be certain that the way each of us is conscious is the same as even one other person. For it is generally agreed that no one can directly experience the consciousness of another human being. Why not? Because we cannot get directly into the mind of another person to know what his or her consciousness is like and whether it is like our own. But we can, with great assurance, infer what it is like. How? By listening to what other people say about their

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consciousness. And doesn’t everything we hear and read confirm that there is only one form of consciousness, and so that the Assumption is true? No, not everything! For there is one important area where we find disagreement. This is the history of philosophy, where, as mentioned above, we encounter some philosophers holding that consciousness is basically monistic and others that it is dualistic. To be sure, at any one time there has usually been a consensus on what it is. And the present consensus, which has been gaining ground since the late nineteenth century, is that consciousness is monistic, that it is a complex form of matter. So it is now generally agreed that consciousnesswhat all humans have- is monistic. But what the history of philosophy shows is that the consensus has not always been in favour of monism, for in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries the consensus was in favour of dualism. And it is important to note that even the dualists, who dissent from the present consensus, still accept the Assumption, only believing that the present consensus is mistaken. From this alone it should be clear that in attacking the Assumption I am attacking a position that is accepted universally. Yet the history of philosophy goes directly against the Assumption. And here I should add that up to the nineteenth century, before psychology split from philosophy, the history of philosophy included the history of psychology. So what this large history shows is that, as against the present consensus in favour of materialistic monism, many philosophers have believed that consciousness is dualistic, according to which it consists in two basic things, namely an immaterial mind experiencing material objects. This was the position inaugurated by Descartes in his Meditations, published in 1641, which remained the consensus until the early nineteenth century. Although I should mention that it was quickly challenged by Hobbes and Gassendi, then later by Spinoza, then questioned by Locke later in the seventeenth century, when the dualistic consensus began to wane somewhat, as it did increasingly in the eighteenth century under the influence of other monists, most importantly Hume, but even more under the influence of Kant’s innovative philosophy, and other philosophers following his lead in the nineteenth century, such as Hegel and Schopenhauer.

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So it is specifically through the discipline of the history of philosophywhich I take to be a sub-division of philosophy in much the same way as metaphysics, epistemology, ethics- that the 2CT can be supported and the Assumption called into question. For the history of philosophy clearly shows that both dualism and monism are taken with equal seriousness by philosophers. So neither one nor the other can be given primacy over the other by a serious historian of philosophy, for then his history would not be regarded as objective history of philosophy but as being tendentiously committed to one or the other position- so really a work of substantive metaphysics or epistemology, although written in the historical mode. To be sure, the history of philosophy differs from the other sub-­ divisions of philosophy in having a more factual basis. And it is because of this, no doubt, that there is far more agreement in it than in the other sub-disciplines, such as metaphysics or epistemology. And what we find in the history of philosophy is that there are fundamental oppositions, not only on the nature of consciousness, but on other basic issues, such as free will vs determinism, naturalism vs non-naturalism in ethics, etc. To be sure, many historians of philosophy hope that at least some of the perennial oppositions will end and that their own metaphysical or ethical view will be shown to be indisputably true. It is the history of philosophy where philosophers of very different schools or orientations are able to meet on common ground, which is not found other areas of philosophy. For can any philosopher honestly doubt the vast amount of disagreement not only between different schools, but also within metaphysics, epistemology, ethics and the other sub-disciplines of philosophy? More specifically, is there even one thing which is accepted by all or even most metaphysicians, epistemologists, etc.? I do not think so. Whereas there is huge agreement amongst historians of philosophy, and among philosophers when they discuss the history of philosophy. Thus it is hard to imagine a philosopher, let alone an historian of philosophy, who would not agree that in any account of early modern philosophy all the following texts would have to be included: Descartes’s Meditations, Hobbes’s Leviathan, Spinoza’s Ethics, Leibnitz’s Monodology, Locke’s Essay, Berkeley’s Principles, Hume’s Treatise, and Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason.

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Now, supposing this is granted, I think my principal claim in this work should now be clear and accepted, which is that the history of philosophy goes against the Assumption and supports the 2CT.  But since this is crucial, I think it is worthwhile elaborating on it, which I do in the following section.

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Understanding the History of Philosophy

I think it is agreed that a historian of philosophy who does his or her job properly displays a certain period of the history of philosophy, or the philosophy of a particular philosopher, in a scholarly, objective way. What does that mean? That the historian understands the texts of philosophers, and presents an account of their philosophies in accord with their texts. Hence the historian should not be partisan by bringing in his own substantive philosophical views. So, in the present case, he should not favour either monism or dualism. But his non-partisanship needs to go even deeper. For example, suppose he is writing the history of early modern philosophy, which begins with Descartes and includes Leibnitz and Berkeley. Now while all of them are dualists, it is clear that they do not develop their dualism in the same way. Thus while Descartes believes there are two substances, one that is mental, whereas the other material, Berkeley believes that material substance is a fiction. And yet it should be clear that Berkeley is a dualist. For this comes out straightaway in his Principles of Human Knowledge, 1710, sects. 1 and 2, where he states that there are two basic kinds of beings, which are entirely distinct, i.e. minds or perceivers and objects or what is perceived by minds. So Berkeley is a dualist, but not a substance dualist.1 Therefore it would be wrong for an historian to take up the position that, say, Descartes’s dualism is more dualistic than Berkeley’s, because genuine dualism must bring in material substance. For then he would cease being an objective historian and would himself be doing substantive metaphysics or epistemology. Similarly, if an historian of the American Civil War, in the midst of describing the war, were to argue that Lincoln was right to have issued the Emancipation Proclamation or to have resisted the secession of the Southern States, he would cease being an historian, and would be doing normative

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moral and political philosophy. Put in another way, he would cease being impartial, objective and scientific. So he would be like a biologist, who, while describing the predatory ability of lions and the defensive ability of the zebras, began to bemoan that Nature had not made the zebras somewhat stronger and the lions somewhat weaker. For then he would be a moralist, rather than a scientist. * * * I think Hegel was probably the first great historian of philosophy. Yet Hegel can be criticized for falling short of impartiality and objectivity on such a large scale that it has not been clearly noticed. As is well known, Hegel was able to see that much of the history of philosophy presents itself in the form of oppositions- now usually called theses and antitheses. So ancient Greek philosophy began with the Pre-Socratic philosopher, Thales, who held that the world is made of one thing, water. It then continued with other prominent monists such as Parmenides and Democritus. But against that monistic trend there emerged Anaxagoras, apparently the first dualist, who was followed by Plato. So here we have the opposition- of monism as thesis and dualism as antithesis. That is historical fact. So far so good. But Hegel believed that this fundamental opposition cannot be allowed to stand, that it must lead to a reconciliation or synthesis, where the opposition is preserved but reconciled in a new and superior truth. But then it follows that, according to Hegel, this one, mediating truth is by its nature superior to the two prior oppositions. But in holding this, Hegel has gone beyond the scientific history of philosophy and is himself doing metaphysics. For he is favouring monism as against dualism. Now there is no reason why Hegel or any philosopher should not do this. But then, I maintain, he should not consider that what he is then doing is history of philosophy. Of course, if an opposition did lead a philosopher to see a way of reconciling them- as it might be said it did lead Aristotle- then it would be appropriate for the historian to include that philosopher’s reconciliation in his history. For that would be fact. But Hegel and others who followed him- most importantly Marxists- have not been satisfied with this. They have seen it as a necessary requirement that there must be superior

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reconciliations, and a final superior reconciliation, which would be THE truth- which in the case of Marxism would be the class-less society of Communism. But in doing so, they ceased being impartial, scientific historians. Like Hegel, they have cast their lot with the monists, although in their case not with the idealists, but with the materialistic ones, such as Democritus. Of course, there is nothing to stop a philosopher from writing a book that mixes the history of philosophy and what he takes to be the truth in a certain area of philosophy, so in metaphysics or ethics or aesthetics. And I think this is what we find in most philosophy books. For most philosophy books include a certain amount of history, which is usually presented to provide a context for what follows. And usually, it is clear that the history is a way of introducing the philosopher’s real purpose, which is to show that one position is true. But I think it is likely to be confusing in works that have in their title ‘The History of…’, unless the writer distinguishes the two activities, and indicates which his book is a work of- history or a certain position in philosophy. How do we judge what is factual? By observation. And in the case of philosophies, it seems that observation is understanding the philosopher’s texts. So a history of Descartes’s philosophy is superior where the account of Descartes is more in accord with Descartes’s texts. Where this can get complicated is that there can be- and surely aredisagreements between historians of Descartes’s philosophy. How, then, are they to be dealt with? Not I think by a history of histories of Descartes’s philosophy, but by historians of Descartes’s philosophy being critical of each other’s works.

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 eing Clearer About Dualism B and Monism

Thus far, I hope it is reasonably clear what is meant here by monism and dualism. This is that according to monism there is no basic or fundamental differentiation in consciousness, that it is all of one kind. Whereas according to dualism there is a basic differentiation, that our consciousness is composed of two things, one of which is active and not material, and

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what we are, the other what we perceive, namely objects. However, I now want further by way of clarification. I also want to be more specific, and so more clearly differentiate the two types of consciousness and the two types themselves. Here I focus on dualism, and one reason I do so is that I, DB, the writer of this work, am a dualist. To begin, then, there are two reasons why one might call oneself a dualist. One reason is based on argument, the other on experience. According to my understanding, as developed in this work, it is experience that is all important. It is because someone experiences himself as an immaterial, simple, active being, different from the objects he perceives that makes him a dualist in my sense. And here, strictly for the sake of simplicity, I shall continue to describe the dualist as ‘he’ and the monist as ‘she’. What then is the experience or experiences that the dualist has? While it is not easy to express this in a clear, unambiguous way, one experience is that when he is aware of an object, say an apple, he can be simultaneously aware of himself observing the apple, and be aware that he is wholly different from such objects. What is also crucial is that whenever the dualist has these experiences, that he is aware of himself as always being the same. He is also aware of himself as having minimal content, indeed being simple, in the way that an atom is simple, except that the dualist experiences his simplicity as an immaterial or mental atom. Now all or at least most of these ways the dualist experience are, I believe, to be found in most of the writings of the great dualists, even though they are unlikely be formulated in just the way I have formulated them. Nor is there a way of definitively and un-mistakenly formulating the dualistic experience. But the ones I have just described I believe are crucial in identifying or pointing to what I call the ‘core dualistic experience’, or cde. To be sure, dualists can differ in describing the core dualistic experience without these differences calling into question that there is a core dualistic experience. Thus I have already indicated that while Descartes’s is substance dualism, Berkeley rejects substance dualism. Berkeley also develops his dualism mainly in an epistemic way; whereas Descartes develops his dualism mainly in an ontological way. I also need to observe that there are similar differences in the case of the great monists. Thus while Hobbes, Spinoza and Hume are all monists, Hobbes and Spinoza generally express their

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monism ontologically, whereas Hume expresses his monism epistemically. So for Hobbes the one thing that exists is matter in motion; for Spinoza, it is ‘Deus sive Natura’, God or Nature; whereas for Hume, it is perceptions. What all monists have in common is that their experience is of one kind. This point needs to be emphasized: that experience goes deeper than the epistemic or ontological mode of expression. Thus monists, like Spinoza and Hume, do not have the cde, which dualists, like Descartes and Berkeley have. However, Berkeley and Hume can look alike, because both philosophers work in the area of epistemology, which shows itself in their terminology, and also somewhat in their style of writing. But that is superficial compared with the fact that for Berkeley, unlike Hume, there are not just perceptions, but also perceivers, which are fundamentally different from their perceptions. However, there are also differences between dualists which are more problematic. Thus some great dualists hold that they are always aware of themselves as being different from objects they perceive. Whereas others, including myself, think this is mistaken, hence that the cde is intermittent; which I discuss below in Sect. 10. I also need to mention that it is not always clear what a philosopher means when he says that something is a feature of his dualistic experience. Nor should this surprise us given the ambiguity of language. One important example is activity. I think it is a feature of my cde. Yet for me it is not like activity which involves effort or exertion, as for example in lifting a heavy object or (more significantly) moving certain parts of my body or producing mental images. Yet Berkeley, who in his Principles, sect. 2, is clear that his dualistic experience involves activity, holds, in De Motu, 1721, sect. 21 and Siris, 1744, sect. 291, that dualistic activity is shown specifically in the moving parts of one’s body, which can surely involve effort. Also problematic for me is that it is not clear that all great philosophers can be confidently described as monists or dualists. Here probably the two most important philosophers of early modern philosophy who do not seem to be clearly either dualists or monists are Locke and Kant. However, on balance, I think that Locke is probably a monist and that Kant is probably a dualist; but I concede that a good deal of scholarly

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work would have to be done to justify even this modest judgment; for the textual evidence is complicated. Yet despite this, I think my principal claim stands. For I think almost all the great philosophers from Descartes to Ayer can be shown to be either monists or dualists; which shows that the Assumption is mistaken and the 2CT is correct. Nor, as mentioned above, is it just modern philosophy that goes against the Assumption. For moving to the even bigger canvas of world philosophy and theology, what we again find is the same opposition between monists and dualists: with monism being generally defended in the East, especially in Hinduism in India and Buddhism in China; whereas dualism is generally defended in the West, in Europe and the Middle East, through Christianity and Islam. This is the big picture, but it is made up of an enormous number of smaller, detailed pictures. Thus while Bradley and McTaggart are both seen as major Hegelian idealists, McTaggart defends dualism and attacks Bradley’s monism in his essay on ‘Personality’, in Hasting’s Encyclopedia of Religion and Ethics, 1917. And while Russell, Moore, Ryle and Ayer are all seen as philosophers working in the Analytic philosophy, Moore was always a strong dualist, whereas Ryle and Ayer always strong monists. Russell, however, stands on his own, or, with Locke and Kant, as more problematic. And yet I think he, too, fits into the big historical picture. For while early Russell followed Moore and supported dualism in his Problems of Philosophy, 1912, he then attacked dualism in his later Analysis of Mind, 1921, which was reviewed by Moore in an anonymous review in the Times Literary Supplement, 29 September 1921, where he reflects on Russell’s volte face.

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Two Exemplary Oppositions

Having sketched the big picture and one smaller picture, I now move from the sketchy to the more concrete and quote a specific nineteenth century exemplary opposition. On the dualist side is Sir William Hamilton, on the monist side is William James and Auguste Comte. In his Lectures on Metaphysics, 6th ed, 1877, vol 1, Hamilton writes:

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We are immediately conscious in perception of an ego and a non-ego, known together, and known in contrast to each other. This is the fact of the Duality of Consciousness. It is clear and manifest. When I concentrate my attention in the simplest act of perception, I return from my observation with the most irresistible conviction of two facts, or rather two branches of the same fact; that I am, and that something different from me exists. In this act I am conscious of myself as the perceiving subject, and of an external reality as the object perceived; and I am conscious of both existences in the same indivisible moment of intuition.

Hamilton could hardly be clearer or more confident of his dualistic experience. But as against that we find in James’s Text Book of Psychology, 1892, p. 467, the following: Everyone assumes that we have direct introspective acquaintance with our thinking activity as such, with our consciousness as something inward contrasted with the outer objects which it knows. Yet I must confess that for my part I cannot feel sure of this conclusion. Whenever I try to become sensible of my thinking activity as such, what I catch is some bodily fact, an impression coming from my brow, or head, or throat, or nose. It seems as if consciousness as an inner activity were rather a postulate than a sensibly given fact.

James is somewhat tentative here in his opposition to dualism; but he is much more certain in his 1904 essay, ‘Does Consciousness exist’, which I quote below in Chap. 4. However, I would also like to quote here what James himself quotes in his Principles of Psychology, 1890, chap. 7, and which he describes as the ‘classical’ statement of anti-dualism. This is Auguste Comte’s statement that The thinker cannot divide himself into two, of whom one reasons whilst the other observes him reason. [For] The organ observed and the organ observing [are] in this case identical, [so] how could observation take place?

What Comte says here can, I think, be expressed in more present-day terms by saying that consciousness cannot be split; so one can only at one

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time be conscious of an object, and not at that time be conscious of oneself being conscious of it. Of course, that is exactly what dualists, such as Hamilton, say is their experience. * * * I now want to look in even more detail at another exemplary opposition, in this case of the eighteenth century, between Berkeley and Hume. One reason I do so is that Hume and Berkeley both state their positions clearly and concisely. Hume expresses his monist position most famously in his Treatise of Human Nature, 1739, Part IV, sect. vi, where he writes: [1] For my part, when I enter most intimately into what I call myself, I always stumble on some particular perception or other, of heat or cold, light or shade, love or hatred, pain or pleasure. I never can catch myself at any time without a perception, and never can observe anything but a perception…. [2] If any one on serious and unprejudiced reflection, thinks he has a different notion of himself, I must confess I can reason no longer with him. All I can allow him is, that he may be in the right as well as I, and that we are essentially different in this particular. He may, perhaps, perceive something simple and continued, which he calls himself; though I am certain there is no such principle in me… [3] But setting aside some metaphysicians of this kind, I may venture to affirm of the rest of mankind, that they are nothing but a bundle or collection of different perceptions, which succeed each other with an incredible rapidity, and are in perpetual flux and movement.

I have divided Hume’s famous statement into three parts, parts [1] and [3] now concern us. I shall come back to [2] shortly. According to Hume, all his experience, and all the experience of other human beings, is of perceptions. More specifically, Hume is clear that he does not experience himself as a perceiver, i.e. as a simple something distinct from perceptions. Whereas Berkeley, while he is certain that he has perceptions, is also certain that he is a perceiver, who is distinct from his perceptions. Berkeley sets out his account of these two kinds of things in sects. 1 and 2 of his Principles. Section 1 is about perceptions, which he calls ideas or objects.

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These are things such as apples or books, and their elementary constituents, such as colours, tastes, and tactual qualities. In sect. 2 he brings in perceivers. Here he writes: But besides all that endless variety of ideas or objects of knowledge, there is likewise something which knows or perceives them, and exercises divers operations, as willing, imagining, remembering about them. This perceiving, active being is what I call mind, spirit, soul or my self. By which words I do not denote any one of my ideas, but a thing entirely distinct from them…

What should be evident from this quotation, and from that of Hume, is that Hume’s understanding of consciousness, as expressed in [1] and [3], is in direct opposition to Berkeley’s dualistic position. But what makes this somewhat less evident is that Berkeley does not use the term ‘perception’; instead he uses ‘object’ or ‘idea’. But it is clear that what he means by ‘object’ or ‘idea’ is the same as ‘perception’. Berkeley also does not use the term perceiver; instead he uses four other terms which, again, all have the same meaning. This can be confusing, yet, sadly, it is what we find in most philosophical texts. In short, in philosophy there are too many words or terms for the same things. And that, I believe, is a factor that has stood in the way of accepting the 2CT. Thus, as I mentioned above, in Sect. 1, there are many alternative terms for consciousness, as for example, thinking, mentation or the mental, the psychic, or the subjective, or awareness, etc. But having criticized Berkeley and Hume, I now want to pay tribute to them for anticipating, or at least coming close, to the 2CT. Thus in his first Enquiry concerning Human Understanding, 1748, sect. viii, Hume states that if ‘the faculties of the mind [were not] naturally alike in every individual… [then] nothing could be more fruitless than [for human beings] to reason or dispute together…’. Of course, like nearly all philosophers, Hume assumes that our faculties are alike. But he at least was able to see what would be the result if this was not the case- namely that there would be endless and fruitless reasoning and disputing. Moreover, in the passage I quoted above from his Treatise, which I labeled [2], Hume himself presents the 2CT in a positive way. For there he speaks

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of someone who perceives himself as a ‘continued and simple’ principle, who would, Hume says, be ‘essentially different in this particular’ from himself. For Hume then adds: ‘I am certain there is no such principle in me.’ However, while Hume has here stated the 2CT, it is clear that he did believe it was true. So he was ironic when he spoke of metaphysicians who experience themselves to be simple continued selves. And yet Hume was undoubtedly aware that the consensus of philosophers at the time was dualistic, that all humans do perceive ‘something simple and continued’, which they believe themselves to be. And he was also almost certainly aware that he was the first to suggest that humans ‘are nothing but a bundle or collection of different perceptions’. Hence Hume’s suggestion that there could be two types of humans and two kinds of consciousness, which is the 2CT, was ironic. But, then, how was Hume able to anticipate the 2CT, even if only ironically? I think it was precisely because he was a strong-minded and confident monist at a period when dualism was the consensus. So it was for that very reason that he saw at least the possibility that the Assumption could be mistaken, that there could be more than one basic type of consciousness and human being, who would each be ‘essentially different’, with a different form of consciousness. For as a strong-minded and confident monist, Hume took his own monistic experience seriously. But he recognized that he would be (and was) considered to be odd and eccentric, which he ironically suggests the dualist should be considered- and which dualists at present are considered. The accepted view at the time, as Hume well knew, was that held by Francis Hutcheson- an important influence on Hume- that ‘everyone has an immediate simple perception of self; to which his other perceptions are some way connected…’.2 And this was also Berkeley’s view, as is clear from what I quoted above from his Principles, Sect. 2, and also from what he states in section 141, that what we are is ‘an active, simple, uncompounded substance’, which ‘is indivisible, incorporeal, unextended, and is consequently incorruptible’. Now I want to call attention to what I think is a remarkable coincidence, which is that Berkeley, like Hume, also anticipated the 2CT, and also presents it in the same ironic way. This is to be found in Berkeley’s little-­known 1713 Guardian essay, number 130, where he suggests that there are some individuals who are of a different basic type from him, in being entirely material. He writes:

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…I now come to treat of the [human] machines, a sort of beings that have the outside or appearance of men, without being really such. The free-­ thinkers have often declared to the world that they are not actuated by any incorporeal being or spirit, but that all the operations they exert proceed from the collision of certain corpuscles, endued with proper figures and motions. It is now a considerable time that I have been their proselyte in this point… The same point is likewise evident from their own assertion, it being plain that no one could mistake thought for motion, who knew what thought was. …[Hence, Berkeley concludes, that these free-thinkers] are to be considered as automata…

So, Berkeley suggests, some humans are basically and essentially different, in being just physical machines. These are monists who lack any thought or immaterial element. Thus, he suggests, there are two basic human types, each having its own form of consciousness. This is the 2CT, but in the vice versa way put forward by Hume, although in the same ironic mode. Following on this, I can then sum up my own contribution in this work by saying that I am putting forward the 2CT in total seriousness, supported by the evidence presented here. And one way I can make my position clear, even crudely clear, is to be more specific about the 2CT. This is that if a strong monist, like Hobbes or Gassendi, was able to get directly into the mind of strong dualists, like Descartes, when Descartes’s consciousness was in the dualist mode, then the experience that Hobbes or Gassendi would be as altered as that arising from taking a strong hallucinatory drug. And here it also seems appropriate to mention that well before Berkeley and Hume got close to the 2CT, as I have tried to show above, we find a similar anticipation in the encounter between Descartes and Hobbes, and even more clearly between Descartes and Gassendi; although, as in the case of Berkeley and Hume, expressed in an ironic way. But what Descartes and Gassendi say has the advantage of being in one text- the Objections and Replies, published in 1641, so at the beginning of modern philosophy. On the other hand, that text is a long one, so my aim here is to point to probably its most telling moment. This is when Descartes accuses Gassendi of being unable to appreciate his main claim that he is a thinking thing. Hence he calls Gassendi ‘Flesh’. And in return, Gassendi

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calls Descartes ‘Soul’ or ‘Mind’. Descartes’s suggestion is that Gassendi is not just putting forward a materialistic theory, but that he IS a purely material or fleshy human being. So in his eighth reply, Descartes says that Gassendi does not seem to have any distinct perceptions, which would fit with his being just flesh and body. Of course, Gassendi’s suggestion is that Descartes thinking is so distinct that he IS just a soul or mind. The ‘Objections and Replies’, of Gassendi and Descartes, contains a huge amount of detailed and ingenious argumentation. But virtually all of it, I want to suggest, is irrelevant; for it is like a discussion between a man and woman, the man arguing that not only is he a man, but the person he is addressing must be one, and indeed all human beings must be a man as well. And the woman arguing for the vice versa position. But the fact is that neither knows its own sex by argument. Each knows it directly by experience. Similarly, it is experience, not argument, which identifies the two types.

6

The Typical Mind Fallacy

Having presented a number of exemplary oppositions from the history of philosophy which support the 2CT, I now want to go more deeply into the Assumption. This is that it is one manifestation of a deep-rooted error, which was first brought to light by Francis Galton through his study of mental imaging. Briefly, up until the 1870s psychologists and philosophers found nothing especially problematic about mental imaging. But that was before Galton’s Inquiries into the Human Faculty, 1883, which, as William James put it, ‘made an era in descriptive Psychology’. For, as James goes on to say in his Principles of Psychology, 1890, chap. 18, until Galton’s pioneering work … it was supposed by all philosophers that there was a typical human mind which all individual minds were like, and that propositions of universal validity could be laid down about such faculties as ‘the Imagination’. Lately, however, a mass of revelations have poured in, which make us see how false a view this is. There are imaginations, not ‘the Imagination’, and they must be studied in detail.

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The false view, that there is a typical human mind, is what I call the Typical Mind Fallacy, or TMF. Galton himself also calls attention to it his Inquires, topic 10, where he asserts that It will be seen how greatly metaphysicians and psychologists err, who assume their own mental operations, instincts, and axioms to be identical with those of the rest of mankind…The differences between men are profound, and we can only be saved from living in blind unconsciousness of our own mental peculiarities by the habit of informing ourselves as well as we can of those of others.

In this chapter I have been applying Galton’s insight, that the differences between human beings are profound, to the question of consciousness. And one important way that Galton came to the conclusion that there is no typical human mind was by devising a questionnaire, apparently the first such in psychology. And here, too, I have followed Galton, and have devised a similar questionnaire concerning consciousness- which is printed below in Sect. 8. It has enabled me to understand with greater clarity and distinctness the dualist type of consciousness and the way it differs from the monist. This is that dualists have, and monists do not have the capacity to be aware of an object and simultaneously be aware that one is aware of it. This is close to what Leibnitz called apperception, the perceiving that one is perceiving. However, where I differ from Leibnitz is that while he held that all human beings have this dualistic or apperceptive capacity, I am confident that some human beings, i.e. monists, like Spinoza, Hume and James, do not have it. For I believe what these great monists say about themselves is true, that they do not have the cde. And I also have a further reason for believing this. For, apart from the history of philosophy, I have (as mentioned above) a second source of data and evidence of the 2CT, which is my own first-hand experience, which I then extend to discussions with other persons, especially in one-to-one discussions, either in person or through email. And here I have been able to confirm that while some people, like myself, have the dualistic

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experience, the cde, there are others, who do not have it. And through this second source of data, I have also been able to sharpen my findings from the history of philosophy, which, in turn, have enabled me to have a more nuanced understanding of my own experience and that of others. However, it is the history of philosophy, and especially the history of the great philosophers, that is my primary justification for the 2CT. Both the dualists and monists fall into the TMF. The way the dualists fall into it is that they think that everyone has the cde, and that those who deny this are either not attentive enough, or are blinded by monistic ideology. Monists, on the other hand, believe that no one has the cde, that it is a fiction, which is desired and fabricated by dualists, mainly for religious purposes. And the leading monists have an argument which they believe decisively proves that the cde is fiction. The argument goes back at least to Hobbes and Spinoza, but is also famously used in recent times by Ryle, among others. Briefly, the argument is that everyone is conscious, but no one does or can execute an additional act of being conscious that he is conscious. For if he did, then a further act would be required for him to be conscious of the previous act, and so on in an infinite regress. Now the first part of this argument, aimed at showing the impossibility of the cde, is correct. As a dualist, I am conscious of things in the way that all human beings are. The argument is also correct in stating that there an additional act that I must execute in order to be conscious that I am conscious. And with this I am then, and for that time, having the cde. But the monistic argument is mistaken that there is a further, additional act. There is none, nor has there ever been one in my experience. So the monistic argument is like the famous argument of Zeno the Eleatic that if Achilles was having a race with a tortoise, who started out a few feet in front of him that he would never overtake the tortoise. The argument is ingenious, but it is disproven by experience. And it is experience, rather than conceptual argument, that has primacy according our position.

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 he Social Self and Social Consciousness: T How Yellow (Dualistic Consciousness) and Blue (Monistic Consciousness) Becomes Green (Socio-Linguistic Consciousness)

But why, it might be asked, should there be two kinds of consciousnesses? My response is to ask: Why should there be two kinds of human beings, males and females, men and women? And of course we know why: because the two are needed for reproduction. Similarly, I suggest that the monist and dualist forms of consciousness can explain, not the physical continuance of the species, but the mental unity and cohesion of human beings. In short, the mixing of the two basic forms of consciousness produces the socio-linguistic form of consciousness and self in the way that the primary colours of yellow and blue produce, when mixed, a green colour. And according to my account in the Epilogue, this greenish linguistic mode of consciousness was absent from Homo sapiens until about 50,000 years ago. Moreover, the development of the greenish social mode of consciousness was crucial in enabling Homo sapiens to move from being an undistinguished species, which they had been for over 300,000 years, to becoming the one and only humanoid species and eventually the undisputed masters of the earth. And in the Epilogue, I try to explain how this happened by drawing on the 2CT. In what way is human consciousness a mixture of the monist and dualist forms of consciousness? Very briefly, all humans have something of the dualist contribution in being and feeling themselves to be individuals, at least to the extent of being distinct from other humans, which is shown in their having their own names. Yet we humans also feel part of the human species, so in that sense part of one whole. So in our common socio-linguistic consciousness, we combine yet dilute the two pure forms of monism and dualism. The combination makes for solidarity and our capacity for coordinated large group action. But it has a negative side; for it stands in the way of each type attaining its highest good or final goal, which, according to Spinoza, is being in accord with the mind of God or Nature, and according to Plato becoming perfect individuals or demigods.

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The mixed, greenish consciousness and sense of self is what all humans have and must have to be sane, commonsense social selves or persons, able to live in society. And what constitutes this consciousness, what made and makes us human is having language, which is very probably the main factor in our being able to operate in huge social units. Unlike other animals, we have language, or more exactly a kind of language that even those species close to us, like apes, do not have and cannot learn. And, again, unlike them, we are able to live in communities vastly larger than the ones in which they live. But the commonsense, social mode consciousness, while it is necessary for living in society, is not natural, as are the dualist and monist forms of consciousness. We all learn to be individual social selves or persons, which usually begins with our learning the name we have been given by our parents. However, some of us, the dualists, are able to experience themselves in another way, i.e. through the cde. Nor is there is any evidence that this is learned in the way we learn to be social selves. But, then, in what way is the monist form of consciousness basic and natural? This is a complicated question, and it is possible that the monist form of consciousness is only basic in not having the cde. However, I think there is evidence from Hume and James, among others, that the monist does have its own positive form of consciousness, but that it is not evident as that of the dualist. And one reason for this is that most monist philosophers describe their experience by way of explaining how it differs from that of the dualists, especially Descartes. Another difficulty in my describing the positive experience of the monist is that I am not a monist, hence I do not have the basic monist experience. So in this respect I am like a deaf person trying to understand what those with hearing experience. The best I can do is to read what the great monists have written and question the living ones, listening empathically and carefully to what they say, i.e. to their descriptions of their experience. My conclusion is that monists, such as Hume and James, do have a basic experience of ‘themselves’, before the social self or person is formed, as a succession of distinct impressions or sensations. Whereas I think the dualist does not have this experience, probably because of his having the cde which either blocks that experience or makes it unnecessary. However, I say more about this in the following three chapters. Now I want to

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conclude my discussion of the commonsense, social self and mode of consciousness, which all humans have, and which is acquired from nurture and is constituted by the human form language. And one question is whether this social sense of self and consciousness is really a theory. While it might seem so, I doubt if it is. For one thing, it is not questionable or debatable, as all theories are. For to question or debate it, one needs to have it. One needs to have language; which, as I have suggested, is a necessary prerequisite for living and operating in society.

8

Identifying the Dualist Through 8 Questions

In this section, I want to be more specific about how the dualist form of consciousness differs from the monist, and how it can be identified. And I think the best way I can do this is by drawing on my questionnaire, as mentioned in Sect. 6. Here it is, as I have sent it to many people over the years: (1) Can you be aware of an object and simultaneously be aware that you are aware of it? Yes No (2) Supposing you answer Yes to question (1), does this experience enable you to be aware of your self as a simple, unitary being? Yes No (3) If you answered Yes to question (2), can you also say that this experience gives you your best understanding of your (deep, true) self? Yes No (4) Also that what you experience as your self is always the same whenever you experience it? (5) Supposing that you answer Yes to questions (3) and (4), are you nonetheless aware that your experience of your self has minimal content- less than any object, even a particle of dust? Yes No (6) Does your experience of yourself, as in questions (1)–(4), also give you your best experience of consciousness, so that you seem to know what consciousness is in-itself? Yes No (7) Supposing you answer Yes to question (6), then do you think the reason for this is that you seem to experience consciousness directly and immediately; whereas most of the time, when you are awake

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and doing purposeful things, you only (or at least usually) know you were conscious later on, when you remember or infer that you have done purposeful things? Yes No (8) Can you then confirm that you don’t constantly experience your self and are not self-conscious all the time, because you know there are many times when you are awake and do intelligent, purposeful things without being aware of your self doing them at that time? Yes No NB: I encourage anyone doing this questionnaire to comment on any of the questions or elaborate on their answers to them- even if they answer No. Now the first thing I should say is that even with the questionnaire, I do not believe that total certainty is possible in identifying the dualist. Why? Because of the intrinsic ambiguity of language. Thus I must admit that even I am not 100% certain that I am a dualist. But I think it is 98% probable that I am, so very highly probable. For I would answer Yes to all eight questions. And anyone who does the same I would say is very probably a dualist. On the other hand, anyone who answers No to all eight questions is very probably not a dualist and is a monist. After that, those who answer Yes to most questions, I would judge to be probably a dualist, and those who answer No to most questions I would judge to be probably a monist. Yet with this lower degree of probability, further work needs to be done, ideally in one-to-one discussions either in person or through email, as I explain in some detail below. * * * Question 1 was extremely important for me in identifying the dualist type, especially in the early stages of my work. For I then thought a positive answer to that question was decisive evidence that the respondent was a dualist, and a negative answer that he or she was a monist. And while I still think that question 1 could be the most important, I no longer believe it is decisive or sufficient for identifying the dualistic type. This became clearer and clearer to me as I questioned more and more persons, which made me see more complexity, which encouraged me to

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ask more questions, which finally became the eight questions of my questionnaire. For what emerged when I sent my questionnaire to a number of persons was that there was an ambiguity in question 1, indeed more than one ambiguity. And this came out most importantly in responses I got to my questionnaire from two individuals, which I describe in the following section.

9

Problems with Question 1: Two Cases

I have elsewhere written a detailed account of these two cases. My aim here is to condense and summarize these accounts. I should first note that both individuals- who I shall call A and B- are very engaged in philosophy. That A answered Yes to question 1 did not initially surprise me, since from a number of discussions I had with him over the previous year or two, I believed he was a dualist, and especially because he always answered Yes, when I asked him question 1. Hence I was very surprised when I gave him the Questionnaire, and while he answered Yes to question 1, he answered No to most of the other questions. So following this, I arranged a one-to-one meeting with him, during which I asked him to explain his positive answer to question 1. What he said to me was this: ‘I am now thinking about myself as a data analyst, but I can step back and simultaneously be more encompassing, so be aware of myself as a philosophical investigator; or I can step to one side, and observe my philosophical investigator-self from another persona and perspective; and this regressiveness or successiveness or shifting from one perspectival self to another, can go on indefinitely.’ When A told me this, I began to realize that at no stage was his experience of simultaneity the same as I experience in the cde, in which I always experience myself as the same whenever I have the experience. Moreover, the fact that A’s experience can become more and more encompassing points to its being closer to the monist type. For one can imagine that if it was pushed hard enough it might even issue in the ultimate monistic experience, of being at one with the whole world, or as the world understands itself. So I came to see that A is very probably a monist.

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I now come to B, whose case is somewhat more complicated. For one thing, B answered Yes to more questions than A, and his answers especially to 6 and 8 were what I would have expected from a strong dualist. Although, it turned out that in answering Yes to question 1 B tended to think he was being asked if he could detach himself from his normal experience and, at the same time, be aware of himself from a different perspective. And this is something which he can do, especially when meditating, where his experience is of two selves in two locations of space. However, the simultaneity of the genuine dualist, in the cde, is of one self, which might be pictured as a snake that is able to bend around in such a way as to see itself, or at least its tail. This then led me to think that B could, like A, be a monist, but for different reasons. But while that is possible, I think it is more probable that he is a dualist. For from one-to-­ one discussions I had with B, I (and we) think that he does have the genuine cde. To summarize, then, what the two cases presented here show are two ways that question 1 can be misunderstood, where someone can give a positive answer where it is wrong to think that it shows that the respondent is a dualist. With A the self is not one thing, but a self in different modes of awareness, developed over time. So someone can focus on one aspect of himself being aware of another aspect of himself. With B, there is simultaneity, as in the cde, but the self could be the self having an out of body experience, so looking on at its (unconscious) body. And from the increasing number of responses I got to my Questionnaire, I found that there are also other ways that question 1 can be (mis) construed, which would point, wrongly, to the respondent having the cde and being a dualist. Probably the most important other way, which might be called the Brentano way, is that someone might take the simultaneity to be about the awareness of any mental action or phenomenon, as for example perceiving an object, rather than, as with the cde, being only about being aware of the (dualistic) self. One way of expressing this, using the conventions of print, is as follows: In the Brentano way, I can be aware that I am seeing my computer, for example, and also be simultaneously aware that I am seeing it, i.e. having an experience of it. Whereas, in the cde, I am aware that I am seeing my computer, and in this case what I am

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simultaneously aware of is that I am seeing it. Here the simultaneity is with my self, whereas in the Brentano way the focus of the simultaneity is on some or any mental object or phenomenon, so about seeing, hearing, judging, imagining, loving etc. And it is that simultaneity that makes all of these mental things- all appearances- certain. I think all human beingsso both dualists and monists- can have this Brentano kind of simultaneity, but only dualists can have the simultaneity of the cde. What is important about the Brentano kind of simultaneity, according to Brentano, is that it makes for the certainty and superiority of psychology. It does so because it does not claim a correspondence between the mental and the physical. So, according to Brentano, we can only have certainty about mental phenomena. Hence even physics has the disadvantage of not having that kind of certainty. But then physics deals with physical world, the world outside us, which psychology does not.3

10

The Dualist Experience

What the previous section has, I hope, shown is that even though question 1 is extremely important for identifying the dualist and the dualist form of consciousness, i.e. the cde, it is by no means decisive. Language is too ambiguous for that. Hence the need for more questions, and supplementary discussion, which enables the investigator to be more confident of correctly identifying the dualist or monist. So, in the genuine dualist form of consciousness there is only one self, which can be described as ‘unitary’ (as in question 2) or, in Hume’s term, ‘simple’; and that the self is experienced as always the same, as in question 4, or ‘continued’, as Hume puts it. However, whereas Hume says that, according to dualists, it always continues without any interruption, my questions 7 and 8 aim to make clear that the dualist experience is intermittent. In that respect, my understanding of the dualist experience diverges, as mentioned above, from that of the classic dualists, such as Descartes and Berkeley, who Hume was probably basing his understanding of the (for him putative) dualist type. For Descartes and Berkeley did believe that the self they experienced always continued. And that was one of the reasons why they believed they were immortal. But I think they

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were mistaken. For I find it hard to accept that any human being can be continuously aware of himself or herself in the cde. And yet, having said that, I need to be careful of not myself falling into the TMF. And I also believe that some very advanced individuals can transcend their human-­ beingness and become something higher. This can be as a perfect individual or demigod, as suggested by Plato, or as a mind in accord with God or Nature, as suggested by Spinoza, both of whom have gotten off the wheel of reincarnations and has become eternal. * * * Is it possible to get more deeply into the dualist experience? And is there, for example, any evidence about when it first emerges? Here it might be mentioned that some individuals, most notably Carl Jung (but also myself ) believe they can date what seems to be their first dualistic experience. From the available evidence, it seems that this occurs from about 7 to 12, and that it arises un-expectably in an ordinary, mundane way of life, yet that it is unforgettable.4 Historically, of course, the first clear published statement of the dualistic experience can be confidently dated to the second of Descartes’s Meditations, 1641, although some trace it to St Augustine’s City of God, IX; but I think it is more clearly expressed in Plato’s Phaedo, 76–82. Can we go more deeply into what it is like being a dualist and especially how it is distinct from being a social self? I believe it is, but I think it is best if, in trying to do so, I go to my own intimate experience. Now as a social self, as DB, I know a huge amount about myself. Thus I know that I attended such a such a secondary school, where I had a girl friend called Joyce, and so on. So my social self has a huge amount of content. And as a social self, as DB, I feel and know myself to be a human being and at the same level as other human beings. Whereas, when I am having the cde, so am experiencing myself as a dualist, I feel myself to be something more profound than being just human. Then I see DB, the social self, as having little substance. But when I then reflect on this, as a sane, commonsense social self or person, not only can I not justify that judgment, but it seems bordering on the megalomaniacal. And this is something that has long

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puzzled and troubled me, even before I began studying philosophy or began working on monism and dualism. But I think my work in this area has provided me with a solution to my puzzlement. This is that what I truly am, what I am basically and by nature, is my being a dualist, which is what I experience in the cde. But most of the time, when my consciousness is in the social mode, I realize that I am not any more important or substantial than anyone else. So my puzzlement came from not distinguishing myself as a dualist from my being a social self, and the kind of content that each has. My consciousness of myself as a dualist has little if any specific content, yet I feel it is more profound than the huge content of myself as DB. I think the monist can also have a comparable experience of his true or deep self, as distinguished from his social self; but for him the profound experience is not being an individual, which it is for the dualist, but knowing that she is one with the whole world.

Notes 1. See my The Essential Berkeley and Neo-Berkeley, forthcoming from Bloomsbury. 2. See my ‘Berkeley on Hutcheson and the Molyneux problem’, Proceedings of the Royal Irish Academy, 1974, vol 74, sect C. 3. For a helpful presentation of Brentano’s position on this matter, see William James, Selected Writings, 1995, edited by G. Bird, p. 236. 4. See John Horgan’s article in the Scientific American on this subject, at: https://blogs.scientificamerican.com/cross-­c heck/the-­d awn-­o f-­s elf-­ consciousness/.

2 Berkeley and Toland: Irish Philosophy, Past and Future

1

Introduction

I can indicate the main aims of this chapter by explaining its title. By ‘Irish Philosophy, Past’, I understand that period when Ireland was at the cutting edge of world philosophy. This was the golden age, which was born with John Toland’s Christianity not Mysterious (1696), grew with the answers to his challenge by Peter Browne, William King and Edward Synge, and culminated in the work of Hutcheson, Burke and especially Berkeley, and then came to a close in the late 1750s. In a number of articles, reprinted in Berkeley and Irish Philosophy, 2009, I tried to explain how this unique flowering of Irish philosophy resulted from the clash or interaction of two tendencies, those of the enlightenment and the counter-enlightenment, or, as I also describe them, left-wing and right-wing Lockeanism

An early version of this essay was read at the opening of the TCD Berkeley Conference, at the Royal Irish Academy, in 2014. An even earlier version was read as the keynote lecture at a conference on Irish philosophy at Maynooth. © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 D. Berman, Consciousness from Descartes to Ayer, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-80921-8_2

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My present thesis is that underlying the two opposing tendencies was something deeper, which comes out in the two great thinkers of Irish philosophy, namely, Toland’s monism and Berkeley’s dualism. However, before getting into this, I should mention that in calling this chapter, ‘Irish Philosophy: Past and Future’, I deliberately meant to exclude the present, since, for one thing, I don’t claim to have a clear picture of the present state of philosophy in Ireland. However, from my limited experience I would say that it is pretty heterogeneous and largely derivative-from Continental and Analytic philosophy. Where I think it is and has been more original and valuable is in its scholarly work on the history of philosophy. Whether this has continued in the present century, I am not sure. But I think it is an expertise and tradition that should be encouraged. For, as I say in Chap. 1, the history of philosophy forms the solid empirical basis of philosophy, also an ecumenical basis where philosophers of different schools can meet and argue in a productive way because on common ground. Now I need to say something of the work of Toland and Berkeley. And in the case of Berkeley, not just about his early immaterialist works, of 1709–1713, for which he is best known, but also his later works, especially his Siris, 1744, which, I believe, contains revisions of his earlier works. And similarly with Toland, we need to look not only at his best-­ known work, Christianity not Mysterious, but at his later Pantheisticon, 1720 (English translation, 1751), where his earlier exoteric deism is replaced by his esoteric pantheism. After briefly characterizing their two philosophies, I then go on to look at the way they deal with three issues: (1) the brain and its relation to consciousness, (2) history and (3) life after death. What emerges, as I try to show, is how profoundly opposed Toland and Berkeley are on these topics, like thesis and antithesis. But my ultimate conclusion is not to suggest that one is right and the other wrong, or that the truth lies in some kind of middle way, or synthesis or reconciliation of them, which would be the Hegelian way, as mentioned in Chap. 1. Rather, I hold that we should allow their two positions to be as far apart and contrary as they are- like the two primary colours, yellow and blue, and not allow them to merge into green- so that they can each become clear and distinct beacons or guides for the future of philosophy and religion in Ireland (and also elsewhere).

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Esotericism in Toland and Berkeley

Although Toland presented his pantheism most clearly in his Pantheisticon, it is most clearly argued for in his Letters to Serena, 1704, where he draws on Spinoza’s rationalism, determinism and monism, but gives Spinoza’s neutral monism a more materialist spin. Hence I think the best name for Toland’s metaphysical position is pantheistic materialism or, even better, materialistic pantheism. The problem with using Toland’s Letters to Serena is that it is not a straightforward work. Thus Toland often presents himself as a defender of Christian revelation and even a critic of Spinoza, e.g. of Spinoza’s account of motion. But there can be little doubt that Toland was actually the champion and vindicator of pantheism against Christianity and also Deism. Toland was a deep esotericist- or what in Chap. 3, I call a ‘theological liar’. Toland was also, apparently, the first to publish a work on the esoteric and exoteric distinction. This is his ‘Clidophorus’, which forms part of his Tetradymus, 1720. He also discusses the distinction in his Pantheisticon, where he comes out into the open about his pantheism- a term which he introduced into English- and says that the pantheists are obliged to disguise their views by various strategies for fear of persecution and prosecution. Berkeley was also an esotericist, but his esotericism is more complicated, but also more superficial than Toland’s. In his early philosophy, he uses it to help his radical ideas gain acceptance by being presented gradually, in stages. Thus in his Principles of Human Knowledge, 1710, he does not initially say that he is denying the existence of matter, for he does not want his immaterialism to shock the reader. So by presenting it gradually, he hoped, as he says elsewhere, that it might ‘steal unawares on the reader’, as he puts it in a private letter to his friend, Percival.1 And yet I think Berkeley is like Toland in having two philosophies, but not, as in Toland’s case, simultaneously- one esoteric, the other exotericbut rather one that evolved from the early into the later one and is different from it in important respects. That there was both similarity and difference between Berkeley’s early and later dualistic positions can be seen straightaway by comparing his Principles, sect. 2 with Siris sect. 290. Thus in sect. 2, Berkeley says that minds or spirits and its objects are ‘entirely distinct’. However in Siris, sect. 290 he writes:

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Body is opposite to spirit. We have a notion of spirit from thought and action. We have a notion of body from resistance.

For the later Berkeley, our normal experience of ourselves as mind is as ‘embodied, that is, clogged by weight, and hindered by resistance.’ Prima facie, this might seem like a weakening of his 1710 dualism. But in Siris, sects. 297, then 337, 340, 341, 346 and 347, Berkeley suggests an even more radical understanding of spirit, where it has more essence than being just distinct from objects. However, he also points out that this experience is not easily attainable. Why? Because, in accord with Plato’s allegory of the Cave, it requires that one detach oneself from involvement with sensory objects and worldly appetites and desires, and that is extremely difficult. But if it is attained, one perceives one’s true self in the realm of Forms. But this perfect condition, Berkeley says, is experienced only momentarily and in glimpses, and only by those few individuals who are able for the asceticism it requires. According to the later form of Berkeley’s dualism, while one’s experience of sensory things is always changing, one’s experience of one’s own mind is always the same. And it is by focusing on this reflective awareness of one’s own mind, which Leibnitz described as apperception, that someone is able to grasp at least one thing that has true unity and permanence. In short, this experience offers a way out of the Cave, to the Forms, each of which is also only one and permanently exists. That this was Berkeley’s final, considered view, and opposed to his earlier position, he makes clear in Siris, sect. 347: ‘On mature reflection the person or mind of all created beings seemeth alone to be indivisible, and to partake most of unity.’ For in his early philosophy, objects were also unitary things. And there were two kinds of such unitary objects. One kind is described in Principles, sect. 1, according to which when several sensations from the different senses are observed to accompany each other, they come to be marked by one name, and so to be reputed as one thing. Thus, for example, a certain colour, taste, smell, figure and consistence having been observed to go together, are accounted one distinct thing, signified by the name apple.

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And in his early philosophy, Berkeley also thought that the sensations themselves, so particular patches of colour, sensations of taste and smell, etc. were unitary things. But now in Siris, he realizes that both kinds of objects are always changing or flowing or in flux. Hence neither are one thing or things. Now in Siris he holds that to get to what is truly unitary, one must turn away from such sensory experiences and thereby release oneself from the chains that tie one to the Cave. Then by focusing on one’s experience or notion of oneself, one has the best experience, according to Berkeley, of the unitary and indivisible, or at least the closest thing in what is created. Furthermore, one can use that unitary experience as a model whereby to perceive the perfect Forms, which are also each unitary. In short, Berkeley has not ceased being a dualist in Siris. In fact, his dualism has become more radical than previously. For now, he has a glimpse of what it is like to be a perfect soul in Heaven, perceiving the Forms which are in God’s mind, or largely constitute God’s nature, according to Siris. Is Berkeley being esoteric in the later sections of Siris? I think he is, but not in the way he was earlier in the Principles. There he was perfectly clear about the position which he truly held, and which he expresses clearly after the initial strategic accommodation to his readers. In Siris, however, he is no longer confident that the truth can be presented clearly in language. So here too he is following Plato, in this case Plato’s Phaedrus and Seventh letter. Thus in Siris, he says that what he is doing is only giving ‘hints’ (sect. 350), which might be of use to some readers- which is Plato’s view in the Phaedrus and the Seventh letter. And in the final section of Siris, I believe Berkeley is saying that he has gone further than he did in his three earlier and now most studied works, the New Theory of Vision (1709), Principles (1710) and Three Dialogues (1713), all of which he published when he was between 24 and 28 years old. He writes: Truth is the cry of all, but the game of a few. Certainly where it is the chief passion, it does not give way to vulgar cares and views, nor is it contented with a little ardour in the early time of life, active perhaps to pursue, but not so fit to weight and revise. He that would make a real progress in

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knowledge, must dedicate his youth as well as age, the later growth as well as the first fruits, at the altar of truth.

And here it is worth pointing out that Toland, too, was a precocious philosopher, publishing his most famous work, Christianity not Mysterious, when he was 27. Having said something of Toland’s and Berkeley’s philosophy, I now want to show how each deals with the three topics I mentioned. I begin with the brain and consciousness.

3

Brain and Consciousness

Toland’s account of the relationship between the brain and thought is in sect. vi of his Pantheisticon, which he begins by asserting that ‘Thought…is a peculiar motion of the brain…’. He then goes on to spell out how the brain ‘performs the motion of both of thought and sensation’ by introducing the idea of a very refined kind of fire which permeates all things and by means of which the brain operates through its ‘cords and ligaments of the nerves’. Toland then says: ‘Now by what means imaginations are excited, or ideas formed in the brain (which organ, as it is corporeal and very complex, it can produce nothing but what is corporeal) we made to appear in our second book of Esoterics, where [he says] we demonstrated that all ideas are corporeal.’ (p. 24). However, he then does go on to expand on this allusive assertion by quoting at length from the Treatise on the falling sickness, where Hippocrates, ‘or rather Democritus’, as Toland says, shows in more detail how the brain is responsible for all our sense experience, emotions and understanding. Toland then concludes his account by saying that ‘The tongue is not more the organ or taste than the brain is that of thought…’- which seems to suggest that he feels his thoughts arising in his brain in the way that most of us feel tastes on our tongues. Now Toland is not, of course, the first to describe the mind and consciousness materialistically, which he himself sees as going back at least to Democritus- and a similar materialistic account of mind can be found in the 1707–1708 pamphlets of Toland’s fellow pantheistic materialist,

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Anthony Collins.2 But Toland’s account is extremely direct and uncompromising. The point is that his materialism is so monistic or reductionistic, that all thought or consciousness must be a form of matter. And I think it is Berkeley who can help us to appreciate how radical this position is, or could be. Here we need to go to Berkeley’s 1713 Guardian essay, number 130, which I partly quoted in Chap. 1, Sect. 5. In this essay, Berkeley discusses three kinds of human beings. It is the third type which is most relevant and which Berkeley introduces as follows: Having hitherto considered the human species as distinguished into gentlemen and mechanics, I come now to treat of machines, a sort of beings that have the outside or appearance of men, without being really such. The free-thinkers [such as Toland and Collins] have often declared to the world, that they are not actuated by any incorporeal being or spirit, but that all the operations they exert proceed from the collision of certain corpuscles, endued with proper figures and motions. It is now a considerable time that I have been their proselyte in this point.

For as Berkeley says, it is ‘evident from their own assertions, [for] it being plain that no one could mistake thought for motion, who knew what thought was.’ So Berkeley accepts that these freethinkers are materialists in their very nature, and have no non-material thought- so no consciousness- for which reason he says that henceforth, we should ‘speak of [them] in the neuter gender, using the term ‘it’ for ‘him’. [So] they are to be considered as automata, made up of bones and muscles, nerves, arteries and animal spirits… [but] destitute of thought…’. What Berkeley is saying is that the materialist is right about himself and his type, that he IS a materialist, a monist, not only in theory but in reality, since he has no experience of thought or consciousness. Yet if that is so, then by implication, the dualist, would also be right, but only about his type, not about the other materialist type; so both are mistaken when they universalize their condition. The truth, then, is that there are two basic types of humans and two kinds of consciousness; which is what in Chap. 1 I call the 2CT.

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Although I think that Berkeley is being ironic in Guardian 130, I do think that he has managed to get into the minds of radical materialists, like Toland, by a remarkable effort of empathy, which he recognized he had a particular talent for. So, in short, he saw that the extreme reductive materialism of freethinkers, such as Toland and Collins, was more than a theory but also stemmed from their distinctive type of experience. Of course, Toland himself believed that in talking about thought as material motion he was describing not just himself or his type, but all humans; but that most people were not astute or courageous enough to accept this because they had been indoctrinated and mystified by the prevailing power of dualism in religion. But in this I think he was falling into the typical mind fallacy, the TMF.

4

Toland and Berkeley on History

I now move to my second topic, namely history, and here I think it is true to say that in his concern with history, Toland was much more typically Irish than Berkeley. For history pervades virtually all of Toland’s philosophical work; and one way this comes out is that he identifies an historical antecedent for both his exoteric deism, as presented in Christianity not Mysterious, and for his pantheism, as presented esoterically in his Letters to Serena, and openly in his Pantheisticon. The antecedent of the first was, as he argues in his Nazarenus, 1718, the Gaelic religious life in Ireland before it was corrupted in the tenth century by the brand of Christianity exported from Rome and introduced into Ireland by the English. For before that, he says, the ‘Irish denied all communion with the [Roman] Church’; their ‘faith consisted in a right notion of God, and the constant practice of virtue’. The forerunners of his pantheistic philosophy, he maintains, were the Druids, who were believers in reincarnation, and are the subject of his ‘History on the Druids’, published in 1726. Berkeley’s interest in history is much slighter. But even here there is an instructive clash between Berkeley and Toland in their attitude to PreSocratic philosophy, and especially to Anaxagoras. In his De Motu, 1721, Berkeley describes Anaxagoras as the wisest of men; whereas Toland

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regards him as the least intelligent Greek philosopher. But there is an even deeper clash between them on how far naturalistic history can go in giving an adequate account of the origins of important truths in philosophy and religion. And here again the relevant text is Siris, where Berkeley shows the most interest in history, especially that of ancient Greek philosophy. But though he goes into considerable detail in examining Greek philosophy, I think it is fair to say that Berkeley is anti-historical. For he suggests that we cannot account for how the Greeks managed to come to some of their best metaphysical and cosmological insights, if they were working only from normal or natural experience and reason. In short, he thinks that these insights must have been obtained either by their drawing on earlier supernatural revelations or by innate knowledge or by some combination of the two. His idea is set out in sects. 298–302 and 338–339 of Siris, where he makes a number of suggestions and gives various hints, rather than providing any fully developed account. More specifically, he suggests that Pythagoras might have consulted Moses’s successors in Sidon, and that the similarities between Plato’s account of the origin of the world and that in Genesis, points to Genesis being a primordial revelation which Plato indirectly drew on. But more feasibly, Berkeley says that the key religious truths could also be explained, not only by this primordial revealed ‘tradition’ being passed on, but by elements of it being originally or innately implanted by God in the minds of humans, which could then be brought to consciousness by those able to overcome their attachment to the sensory world. The key thing is that the important truths were not and are not obtainable by natural experience alone and so cannot be understood by natural historywhich is the opposite of what Toland accepts. Thus for Toland, unlike Berkeley, there is only one level of historical reality, the naturalistic or materialistic, which is not interrupted or does not come from a non-­ natural domain. And in his second letter to Serena, Toland specifically considers the view, adverted to by Berkeley, that the ancient Greeks and others might have gotten some of their ideas, especially about immortality, from the Jews and the Jewish revelation. But he rejects that, and tries to show their naturalistic origins and developments. So Toland SAYS that the belief in immortality has a natural history, and yet he also SAYS that its truth arose

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directly and abruptly from Jesus as described in the New Testament. So he contradicts himself, and I think he knew he did and aimed to do so. For in his 1720 essay on the esoteric and exoteric, mentioned above, he takes that to be the mark or sign that a writer could be writing esoterically. My over-all conclusion, then, is that Toland was a naturalistic historian (and in line with modern history writing), whereas Berkeley was a dualistic or two-world theorist. My own position on naturalistic history is in accord with Toland, not Berkeley, as I believe I make clear in Chap. 1, where I use the history of philosophy to call in question the Assumption and defend the 2CT. But I also think that history needs to be set within a very broad and deep psychology, which I think has been best captured by William James’s Radical Empiricism, which, if consistently applied, allows for materialistic as well as dualistic ways of experiencing as the two basic kinds of experience. And this, as I mentioned earlier, is what Toland and Berkeley are each pointing to in their accounts of the brain and consciousness. So each can be seen as outstanding representatives of the two basic types of mind (although I accept that it sounds odd to speak of Toland as having a certain type of mind, if that type is purely materialistic).

5

Final Philosophy: Life after Death

I now want to look in most detail at their final philosophies, which is that part of philosophy which deal with death, which was crucial in ancient philosophy, but not so much in modern philosophy and especially not in recent philosophy. However it is crucial for Toland and Berkeley, and is useful in getting directly to their metaphysics, since it is easier to see fruits rather than roots. It is also where I think we find Toland’s most brilliant historical work, that is, his second Letter to Serena, entitled on the ‘History of the Soul’. It has a number of strands, where he tries to show by a genetic analysis how what he takes to be the false and pathological belief in personal immortality came about, which he does initially by examining its philosophical history. Here he shows how it stemmed from Anaxagoras’s

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introduction of dualism, which was then used most importantly by Plato in his Phaedo as a basis for what Toland thinks are Plato’s weak arguments for immortality. Toland then goes back even further historically and traces the anthropological developments of immortality, starting with the Egyptian burial rites. Here he points out that underlying the two developments, the philosophical and anthropological, was the desire humans have to live beyond the grave, which was reinforced by politicians, because it was so useful for their political purposes. But apart from this essentially negative genetic analysis, which is aimed at undermining and curing the belief in personal immortality, there is also Toland’s positive account, based on his materialistic pantheism, which replaces the belief in personal immortality, with impersonal reincarnation. Toland’s positive account is most fully developed in his Pantheisticon but most tersely stated in his philosophical poem, ‘Clito’, 1700 where Toland sets out the truth for those able to accept it, in the following lines: Parts the creatures are, and God the whole From whence all beings their existence have, And into which resolv’d they find a grave; How nothing’s lost, though all things change their form, As that’s a fly which was but now a worm; [So] death is only to begin to be Some other thing, which endless change shall see; (Then why should men to die have so great fear? Though nought’s immortal, all eternal [be].)

Putting this another way: just as Toland wrote Christianity not mysterious, so he might have written a work entitled ‘Immortalism not supernatural’, using basically the same strategy: that X is true but in a naturalistic not in a supernatural way, which in fact undermines what the supernaturalist adherents in X believe. In short, because reincarnation, which follows from pantheism is true, there is no annihilation only transformation. So we shouldn’t fear death. That sounds good, but for Toland (and for Spinoza) transformation involves the loss of personal identity, which is what the Christian hopes will continue after bodily death. Yet there can

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be something deeper than personal identity, according to Spinoza and Toland, namely identity of (what can be called) character, where there is something individual retained through reincarnations, even perhaps at the end of reincarnations, when the human mind at its best becomes most fully in accord with the mind of God or Nature, i.e. the whole world. This, in brief, is Toland’s strategy in outline. Now I need to fill in some of the main highlights and details in his historical therapy. Toland’s therapeutic analysis begins with the Pre-Socratics, and the philosophical development which he traces to Anaximander whose philosophical thinking he sees as naturalistic and materialistic and monistic, but interrupted by Anaxagoras, who introduced mind as on the same level, or at an even a higher level than material reality. So Toland is not new in seeing Anaxagoras as an innovator, whose dualism inspired the Platonic and Cartesian accounts of mind as immaterial and immortal. But Toland IS new and daring in his attitude to Anaxagoras, focusing as he does on the reasons for thinking that Anaxagoras’s innovation was a mistake or bad departure in the history of philosophy. For Toland believes that Anaxagoras was greatly inferior to the natural philosophers, like Anaximander and Democritus, who preceded Anaxagoras. As Toland puts it, ‘Anaxagoras introduced mind because he ‘did not understand the corpuscular philosophy, and…to save himself the labour of understanding mechanics, of making long deductions and accurate observations…’. Apart from his history of pre-Socratic philosophy, which provides a structure for his more detailed anthropological history, Toland also sets out very briefly six philosophical arguments in support of the immortality of the soul. That might seem to contradict what I have been saying above. But I believe these arguments are cursory and intentionally weak, although not quite as obviously so as his much clearer, indeed resounding endorsement of Christian theism and revelation. These (insincere) endorsements appear again and again, but most emphatically at the beginning and end of an essay. Thus on the first page of his Letters to Serena, Toland says to Serena, who was Sophia, the Prussian Queen: ‘You have no doubts, I’m certain, about the Soul’s immortality, and Christianity affords the best, the clearest demonstration for it, even the Revelation of God himself.’ And later

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he says that unlike those living before the Gospel, who had to rely on subtle philosophical conjectures about the soul, we Christians ‘have not the same right to examine this matter as the Antients, but ought humbly to acquiesce in the Authority of our Savior JESUS CHRIST, who brought Life and Immortality to Light.’. Similarly, in the Preface, Toland says that, as against the ‘precarious suppositions’ in Plato’s arguments for immortality in the Phaedo, the ‘Divine Authority [is] the surest Anchor of Hope, and the best if not only demonstration of the Soul’s Immortality.’ Toland is absolutely clear in these statements that the Revelation of immortality by Jesus in the Gospels takes precedence over all the philosophy in the world; that it alone is the only safe ground for believing in life after death. Yet while Toland’s assertions are 100% clear, it is also 98% clear that he does not believe what he is saying, and so he is engaged in what I call the Art of Theological Lying, which was necessary if Toland was not to be punished for blasphemy.3 My main point is that if Toland did believe what he clearly asserts again and again, then he would not be a Deist or a pantheist, but a pious Christian- indeed, a fideistic and fundamentalist one. But no serious scholar believes that. Therefore Toland was a theological liar. The question is how deep and subtle was his theological lying. I think it was very deep. But I do not think that Toland was a complete atheist and naturalist. For my present view is that, like Spinoza, there is a spiritual dimension to his pantheism which comes out in his account of reincarnation, which I summarized above. Toland then moves to his more detailed anthropological genealogy, which he spends more time on, since it is more likely to free people from what he thinks is the pathological belief in personal life after death. This is similar to the way psychoanalysts operate, who are clear that there is no point in telling someone suffering from a spider phobia, for example, that his fear of spiders is irrational. So what Toland is trying to do is naturalize the belief in an afterlife by showing in detail its natural origins, i.e. how people (humanity) actually came to believe it, which is very similar, I believe, to what Freud does in his anthropological works, Totem and Taboo and Future of an Illusion. Briefly, then, what Toland says is that the belief in immortality came primarily from the Egyptians who he sees as the source and origin of the belief, with their interest in preserving bodies, where their funeral rites,

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he thinks were misunderstood as involving actual immortality or life after death. From the Egyptians, he thinks the idea was passed on to the Chaldeans and others in the Eastern part of the world, and then to the Greeks and Romans. And all the while, what helped to secure the belief in personal life after death was that it was useful for rulers, because it was a way of frightening people into being submissive or lawful by the threat of otherworldly punishments. But even deeper, as Toland says, was that it ‘flattered men with the hopes of what they wish above all things whatever, namely to continue their existence beyond the grave; there being but few that can bear the thought of ever ceasing to live, and most people commonly chusing to be miserable, rather than not to be at all.’ This is crucial, and I need to return to it, but first I want to follow Toland as he takes up his suggestion that there were some ‘few’ who were able to accept the idea of not personally surviving their bodily death, and among this select group was Seneca; but the most important Roman writer, who Toland quotes at length, is Pliny the elder, whose Natural History contains probably the most forceful attack on the belief in immortality before Toland and Hume, and which Hume drew on for his own, much better known critique in his essay ‘Of Immortality’. The passage in Pliny is too long for me to quote in full, but I need to mention its main point, where Pliny says: what ‘a prodigious madness is it, to think that life can be renewed by death.’ For, he asks, ‘what repose can mortals ever enjoy, if the soul be alive…[after death]? [For] this credulity destroys the usefulness of death, which is the principal good of nature…’. After quoting Pliny’s powerful critique, with his own translation into English, Toland then proceeds to abuse it. ‘Such [he writes] are the reasonings of men who talk all the while of they know not what, having false notions of the soul…which leads them to doubt of its separate existence, and so to deny its immortality…’. But once again it is 98% clear that Toland is really, i.e. esoterically, agreeing with Pliny and is exoterically lying theologically when he suggests that he believes in the separate existence of the soul or its immortality. For from his Pantheisticon and ‘Clito’, we know he was one of those FEW individuals who was able to accept his personal mortality and so did not have the (pathological) fear of death.

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Toland then combines his earlier exoteric endorsement of the Christian belief in life after death with his present abuse of Pliny’s mortalism when he says that ‘however men [like Pliny] left to themselves may mistake, tis impossible that God should lie…’ In fact, it is TOLAND that is lying and in a subtle way. For, as he goes on to say: ‘And in this consists no small advantage of [Christian] believers, that though they may be equally ignorant with others about the nature of a thing, yet they may have the greatest conviction of its existence…’. I say this is subtle lying, because, he is SHOWING, but not saying, that Christian immortality is an unintelligible and groundless mystery, as groundless and unintelligible as the alleged mysteries he attacked in his Christianity not Mysterious. * * * I now move to Berkeley, who has three main arguments for immortality, his clearest and official one is in the Principles, sect. 141, which is like those used by Plato and Descartes, according to which the mind because it is not extended is therefore not divisible, and so as indivisible it cannot be destroyed in any natural way; hence it is immortal. But in his early philosophical notebooks, Berkeley also develops a proof based on his unusual theory of time, and in his 1713 Guardian essay 89, and elsewhere, he also uses an argument based on the natural desire or appetite humans have to survive their deaths, which I want to focus on given its similarity with Toland’s account. For Berkeley, however, the fact that we have this natural appetite, becomes a positive premise supporting belief in immortality, rather than, as in Toland, a reason against it. For since, as Berkeley says, a good God would not have given this appetite to us, if it could not be satisfied, we can be reasonably confident that we are immortal. Clearly this argument, as it stands, is not likely to impress many philosophers nowadays. But there are at least two reasons for taking it more seriously. The first is what Berkeley says about innateness in Siris, especially sects. 308–309 and 313–316, where he draws on Plato and brushes aside ‘modern attacks on innate ideas, such as Locke’s. Also important is Berkeley’s last extant Sermon of 1751, where he discusses innateness and describes the fear of

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death as innate. The second reason, which reinforces the first, is that while Berkeley is clear that the attacks on innateness, such as Locke’s, do not refute the Platonic account of innateness he is endorsing, he still accepts two Lockean premises, that for X to be innate it needs to be in all humans, also that it has been implanted by a God. Berkeley himself recognized that he had a problem with the first premise, since he concedes that there are some unnamed gloomy individuals, who don’t seem to desire immortality. But he can avoid this embarrassment, I suggest, if he draws on his account in the Guardian, described above, of freethinkers as purely material beings. For their disbelief is just what we would expect from such non-dualistic, totally material human beings. Hence the fact that many humans do not desire personal survival- and have no innate desire for it- should not call in question that there is another type which do, and these two types- to cut to the chase- are shown, prima facie, in the two great religious traditions, the monistic tradition of Hinduism and Buddhism and dualistic one of Christianity and Islam- the latter desiring, the other hoping to avoid, personal life after death. My main point is that here again we can see how Toland and Berkeley are in essential opposition, that the desire for personal survival which Toland takes to be not only false but also pathological, Berkeley takes to be true and salutary. And while the temptation is to conclude that one of them must be right and the other wrong, or that a compromise might be found which could reconcile their opposition, I think that both can and should be accepted as absolutely true, although ultimately each person must choose one or the other truth based on whether his or her nature, experience and desire is in accord with Toland or Berkeley, so monistic or dualistic. To conclude, then, while it is unlikely, probably impossible, that great Irish philosophy should arise again as it did 300 years ago, my suggestion is that something like it might, if its two great philosophers and their philosophies could be brought into a new configuration, where, instead of turning against each other, they turned their opposition against the attempts at reconciling them, which typically favour one but really dilutes both.

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Notes 1. I discuss Berkeley’s esotericism in some detail in my George Berkeley: Idealism and the Man, 1994, chap. two. 2. See my History of Atheism in Britain: from Hobbes to Russell, 1988, chap. 3. 3. For more details on the Art of Theological Lying, see Chap 3.

3 Hume’s Artful Lying, Monistic Naturalism and Retraction on Personal Identity

1

Introduction and Summary

As indicated in my title, this chapter is about two topics. The first focuses on Hume’s essay ‘Of Miracles’, which in what follows I shall refer to as the ‘essay’. The second topic focusses on Hume’s account of personal identity in his Treatise of Human Nature, Book one, pt iv, sect. vi, and its apparent retraction in the Appendix to the Treatise, Book three. The first topic is largely exegetical, where I try to show how, as I see it, Hume wanted his essay on miracles to be read. My main thesis is that in his essay Hume ingeniously uses what I call the Art of Theological Lying in a deliberately ambiguous way. The ambiguity I have in mind is shown in the ambiguous figure, the duck-rabbit, made famous by Wittgenstein in his Philosophical Investigations. So Hume presents a religious duck for innocent readers, also for intelligent Fundamentalists or Fideists, but an irreligious rabbit, for fellow freethinkers and for those capable of reasoning themselves into that position.

This chapter is based on a key-note talk I gave at the annual Hume workshop at Henry Brooks University, Oxford, in Nov. 2016. © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 D. Berman, Consciousness from Descartes to Ayer, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-80921-8_3

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In the second part of this chapter, I look at what I take to be Hume’s monism and its connection with his argument or arguments against miracles. In this part I am drawing on the theory I have presented in Chap. 1 of this work, that there are two basic types, one dualist, the other monistic. The essential difference is that the monistic type—which includes Hume, but also Hobbes, Gassendi, Spinoza, Bradley, James and A.J. Ayer—lacks the dualistic experience of himself as one simple, non-­ natural being, which is different from the objects he perceives. This is the experience of dualists, most notably Descartes, Leibnitz, Berkeley, Hamilton, McTaggart and G. E. Moore, the experience I call the cde, which is close to what Leibnitz called apperception and Berkeley called ‘inward feeling’ or ‘consciousness’ of oneself. Having set this out, I then go on to draw my most controversial thesis. This is that the way to explain Hume’s apparent retraction of his theory of personal identity in the Appendix of the Treatise is that he was engaged in the Art of theological-philosophical lying; hence he never really wavered from his monism. In short, Hume was always a monist. Putting this very bluntly: Hume was lying in his account of personal identity in the Appendix. So I don’t make the assumption, made by all the many Hume commentators who have tried to explain the apparent retraction, namely that Hume meant what he said in the Appendix, in short, that he was sincere. These commentators either forget or do not know that Hume was often prepared to lie artfully if the situation required it, as is shown most clearly in his essay on miracles, as well as his other writings. I now set the scene by listing in chronological order the following key dates and works. Circa 1735: While working on his Treatise at La Fleche, in France, Hume conceives his argument for miracles in conversation with a Jesuit priest, and, as he wrote a correspondent, he lied, or at least dissembled, about it on that occasion. See his letter to George Campbell, 7 June 1762. Note, too, that Hume had originally planned to include his argument in the Treatise, but decided against it on grounds of prudence.

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1739, publication of Treatise, Books 1 and 2. March 1740, publication of the Abstract of the Treatise. Oct or Nov 1740, publication of Treatise, Book 3, which contains the Appendix and the supposed retraction. 1745, A Letter to a Gentleman…containing some Observations on A Specimen of the Principles concerning Religion and Morality in …. A Treatise on Human Nature. This is Hume’s reply to an anonymous pamphlet, apparently by William Wishart, which contains excerpts from the Treatise, attacking its author as irreligious and skeptical, and so unfit to be appointed Professor of Moral Philosophy at the University of Edinburgh, a position Hume was hoping to obtain. For this purpose Hume reprints Wishart’s pamphlet in his 1745 Letter. 1748: Publication of ‘Of Miracles’ in section X in the Enquiry concerning Human Understanding. 1750: 2nd edition of the above, and the first appearance of the long endnote on the miracles of the Abbe Paris.

2

Hume’s Artful Lying

I think I was the first to speak of the Art of Theological Lying, which I modeled on Swift’s 1710 work called The Art of Political Lying.1 However, as theological lying shades into philosophical lying, in what follows I usually speak simply of the Art. My thesis is that in the essay on miracles Hume is presenting two fully-­ coherent and plausible pictures, like the famous duck-rabbit: a religious, pro-miracle duck and a rationalist, anti-miracle rabbit. Probably the best way of seeing the two is in the following, where the religious duck is presented on the left column; the irreligious rabbit on the right.

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I am the better pleased with the method of reasoning here delivered, as I think it may serve to confound those dangerous friends or disguised enemies to the Christian Religion, who have undertaken to defend it by the principles of human reason. Our most holy religion is founded on Faith, not on reason; and it is a sure method of exposing it to put it to such a trial as it is by no means fitted to endure. … What we have said of miracles may be applied, without any variation, to prophecies; and indeed, all prophecies are real miracles, and as such only can be admitted as proofs of any revelation. If it did not exceed the capacity of human nature to foretell future events, it would be absurd to employ any prophecy as an argument for a divine mission or authority from heaven. So that, upon the whole, [my emphasis] we may conclude, that the Christian Religion not only was at first attended with miracles, but even at this day cannot be believed by any reasonable person without one. Mere reason is insufficient to convince us of its veracity: And whoever is moved by Faith to assent to it, is conscious of a continued miracle in his own person, which subverts all the principles of his understanding, and gives him a determination to believe what is most contrary to custom and experience.

Upon the whole, [my emphasis] then, it appears, that no testimony for any kind of miracle has ever amounted to a probability, much less to a proof; and that, even supposing it amounted to a proof, it would be opposed by another proof; derived from the very nature of the fact, which it would endeavour to establish. It is experience only, which gives authority to human testimony; and it is the same experience, which assures us of the laws of nature. When, therefore, these two kinds of experience are contrary, we have nothing to do but subtract the one from the other, and embrace an opinion, either on one side or the other, with that assurance which arises from the remainder. But according to the principle here explained, this subtraction, with regard to all popular religions, amounts to an entire annihilation; and therefore we may establish it as a maxim, that no human testimony can have such force as to prove a miracle, and make it a just foundation for any such system of religion.

It might seem (and does seem so to most modern readers) that it is blazingly obvious that Hume’s purpose in the essay was to attack miracles, as should be clear from what he says in the bulk of the essay as summarized in the quotation on the right column; all of which presents a clear picture of

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him as one of the great critics of religion. But in fact, this picture of him as a champion of the irreligious rabbit can be absorbed into the religious duck, as spelled out in the final paragraphs of the essay, quoted on the left column. And this is pre-figured in the first paragraph of the essay, which I quote below. Furthermore, Hume could reasonably expect that many of his contemporary readers would or could see it that way. Why then do modern readers see and take seriously only the irreligious rabbit? Partly because they are unaware that the religious duck was the view not only of naive religious readers, but also of such serious Fundamentalists and/or fideists, such as Isaac Newton, Henry Layton, William Coward and Henry Dodwell the elder, among others. So in dismissing the religious duck as mere superficial irony, modern readers are reading Hume’s essay anachronistically as well as missing how an open-­minded, intelligent reader at the time could be brought, by the use of his reason, from the position of the religious duck to the irreligious rabbit by seeing the inner logical conflicts Hume presents in his text. In short, we have become vulgar readers who miss the deep, dynamic possibilities of Hume’s Artful essay, which I believe Hume intended and which is most clearly shown in the long note he added in the 1750 edition. However, probably the best way of seeing Hume’s seriousness in his presentation of the religious duck is that part of his Letter to a Gentleman (which I quote below), where he counters the claim that he is an enemy of religion in the Treatise. This he does by urging that in the Treatise he is arguing against those who base religion on human reason, for they are the real enemies of true religion. Hume writes: In reality, whence come all the various tribes of heretics, the Arians, Socinians and Deists, but from too much confidence in mere human reason, which they regard as the standard of every thing, and which they will not submit to the superior light of revelation. And can one do a more essential service to piety, than by showing them that this boasted reason of theirs, so far from accounting for the mysteries of the Trinity and Incarnation, is not able fully to satisfy itself with regard to its own operations, and must in some measure fall into a kind of implicit faith even in the most obvious and familiar principles. (Letter, p. 22)

So Hume is indeed lying, but seriously, cogently and Artfully. And this is precisely how he was to argue overall three years later, in 1748, in the essay on miracles. Here I need to emphasize again that those who accepted

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the religious duck were, up to Hume’s death in 1776, a numerous and broad Church which included the religious learned, such as Newton, and those who regarded the Bible as a higher authority than reason. The irreligious rabbit on the other hand was in that period a very small constituency, which included, most notably, Charles Blount, John Toland and Anthony Collins. But this situation changed first with the American then the French Revolutions, then with the many developments in the nineteenth century, especially Darwin’s theory of evolution; so that by the twentieth century the religious duck, which had been a vast and varied constituency, became very much contracted, especially amongst those with a philosophical and/ or scientific education; whereas the irreligious rabbit has became the clear and wide consensus. I believe Hume could never have predicted this radical change, which has made his Artful lying in the essay and other similar works, such as his posthumous Dialogues, so hard to read as he intended. Indeed, in paragraph two of the essay Hume suggests that because there is always going to be more superstition than reason and sense there is always going to be a need for the Art. More specifically, he says that his new and decisive argument against miracles ‘will, with the learned and wise, be an everlasting check to all kinds of superstitious delusion, and consequently, will be useful as long as the world endures.’ In the opening paragraph of the essay, which I print below, I think Hume also gives us an Artful overview of the essay by presenting Archbishop Tillotson’s argument against the real presence. This argument is based on a mild form of rationalism (combining reason and experience) against superstitious religion—with just a glance at the end of the paragraph at ‘true’ religion, which is found in faith and the Bible—so fideism and Fundamentalism. Hence, even within this first paragraph, we can get a glimpse of the two opposing pictures, the religious duck and irreligious rabbit, as presented in the two columns above. There is [writes Hume], in Dr. Tillotson’s writings, an argument against the real presence, which is as concise, and elegant, and strong as any argument can possibly be supposed against a doctrine, so little worthy of a serious refutation. It is acknowledged on all hands, says that learned prelate, that the authority, either of the scripture or of tradition, is founded merely in the testimony of the apostles, who were eye-witnesses to those miracles of our

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Saviour, by which he proved his divine mission. Our evidence, then, for the truth of the Christian religion is less than the evidence for the truth of our senses; because, even in the first authors of our religion, it was no greater; and it is evident it must diminish in passing from them to their disciples; nor can any one rest such confidence in their testimony, as in the immediate object of his senses. But a weaker evidence can never destroy a stronger; and therefore, were the doctrine of the real presence ever so clearly revealed in scripture, it were directly contrary to the rules of just reasoning to give our assent to it. It contradicts sense, though both the scripture and tradition, on which it is supposed to be built, carry not such evidence with them as sense; when they are considered merely as external evidences, and are not brought home to every one’s breast, by the immediate operation of the Holy Spirit.

As a great Artist of theological-philosophical lying in the essay, but also, I believe, in the Appendix to the Treatise, Hume is drawing on three key principles, all articulated by John Toland in his essay, ‘Clidophorus’, 1720, but almost certainly generally known by freethinkers. The first principle presented by Toland is ‘…that the same men do not always seem to say the same things on the same subjects…can only be solved by the distinction between external [i.e. exoteric or lying] and Internal [i.e. esoteric or true] Doctrine. (‘Clidophorus’, p. 85). And this has a subsidiary principle, that ‘When a man maintains what is commonly believed, or professes what is publicly enjoined, it is not always a sure rule that he speaks what he thinks: but when he seriously maintains the contrary of what is by law established, and openly declares for what most others oppose, then there is a strong presumption that he utters his mind.’ (p. 96). The other, third, principle is to use ‘the bouncing compliment … [at the end of a work]… that saves all’, (p.  68), which is evident especially in Hume’s essay. In the background there is also Hume’s statement in his letter to Edmonstone, 1764, that ‘It is putting too great a respect on the vulgar, and on their superstition, to pique oneself on sincerity to them. Did ever one make a point of honour to speak truth to children or madmen?’ Now I come to the long note added to the 1750 edition of the essay, which, I think, is strategically and structurally similar to the essay itself. The main differences are that it is less subtle and more direct; also that the second paragraph has all the Art and very little religious duck. Indeed the thrust of this paragraph is anti-religious, and looks back to Hume’s

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conversation with the Jesuit at La Fleche, when, as he says, he got the ‘first hint’ of his argument, when the Jesuit was ‘urging some nonsensical miracle performed in his convent, when I was tempted to dispute against him; and as my head was full of the topics of my Treatise…, which I was at the time composing, this argument immediately occurred to me, and I thought graveled my companion; but at last he observed it operated equally against the Gospel as the Catholic miracles;—which observation I thought proper to admit as a sufficient answer.’ Here I also need to note that the anti-religious bulk of the essay now appears in the long 1750 note as the scholarly and pro-Jansenist account of their miracles, which Hume clearly shows, but of course does not say, are far more credible than those of the Gospel. I now quote the relevant part of the second paragraph from the 1750 edition, which should remind the reader of Toland’s fideistic statements in the Letters to Serena, as quoted in Chap. 2. After mentioning the three-­ volume Collection which gives an account of many of the Abbe Paris miracles, Hume then writes: But through all of these [volumes] there runs a ridiculous comparison between the miracles of our Saviour and those of the Abbé, with the assertion that the evidence for the latter is equal to the evidence for the former—as if the testimony of men could ever be put in the balance with that of God himself who directed the pen of the inspired writers of the Bible. If the Biblical writers were to be considered merely as human testimony, the French author would count as very moderate in his comparison of the two sets of miracles, for he could make a case for claiming that the Jansenist miracles [were] supported by much stronger evidence and authority than the Biblical ones.

3

The Monist and Dualist Types

I now move to the second topic of this chapter and to my main philosophical point, which—putting this very directly—is that because Hume was a MONIST, and not only in theory but by nature, he did not have the non-natural dualistic experience, the cde, which dualists, such as

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Leibnitz, Berkeley and Moore had, and I have. So as a monist type Hume would find it difficult or impossible to understand what a non-natural event such as a miracle would be like. He can appear to get close to it, in the way that the man without sight tried, in Locke’s famous example (in Essay II.iv.11), to understand what the colour scarlet was like by comparing it to the sound of a trumpet. But any sound the man could come up with would still be qualitatively different from a colour—so the best idea that Hume can form of a miracle produced by an invisible spirit would be inadequate, because he has no understanding of the action of an invisible spirit. Whereas since a dualist has the experience of the cde, he does have an experience and so an understanding of something different from natural objects. Tailoring Hume’s own example, we can also say that he and other monists are like the Indian prince, who had no experience of frozen water. They are also like someone trying to understand mental images, who has no experience of them—a condition which was only recognized as a result of Francis Galton’s work on images, as mentioned in Chap. 1, Sect. 5. That Hume was that kind of monistic mind is most clearly shown in his account of personal identity in the Treatise, Book one, and especially his famous passage I quoted in Chap. 1, according to which all that he experiences and can therefore know to exist, are perceptions, which are primarily impressions, i.e. sense-data, also feelings such as pleasure and pain also emotions. Yet, as Hume explains, these perceptions can, through the principles of association, come to appear as the familiar physical objects of our commonsense world that can appear to act on each other causally. And the perceptions can also be transformed into the commonsense selves which we believe we are, again through the principles of association. In short, as I tried to explain in Chap. 1, there is a submerged deficit in the human population which is like the non-imaging deficit; but, unlike non-imaging, which is very rare, being limited to only about 2% of the population, those without the dualistic experience, the cde, have a deficit which is much more common, as probably present in about half the population; so that humans are probably evenly divided between dualists and monists.

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Hume’s Apparent Retraction

There have been many suggestions about how to read Hume’s apparent retraction on personal identity in the Appendix to the Treatise.2 My account differs from all of them in being extremely simple, namely that Hume didn’t retract, that he was lying philosophically. That he was capable of such lying, I hope is abundantly clear from what I have said and quoted above, especially from the long note he added to the 1750 edition of the essay. But while my account is simple, the evidence and justification for it requires more space and has different dimensions. I begin with the biographical background. In his 1776 ‘Memoir’, Hume stresses that because he was cheerful by nature he was not depressed by the initial failures of his two philosophical works, the Treatise, 1739, and Enquiry, 1748, to make an impact. So, as he says, the Treatise ‘fell dead-born from the press’, and the Enquiry was ignored even by the zealots, because of the publication of Conyers Middleton’s controversial work on miracles, which got all the attention. And I think it is clear that Hume was hoping his provocative essay on miracles would attract attention, since while he left out its main argument (‘castrated’ it, as he says) from the Treatise for prudential reasons, he included it in the Enquiry. What he does not say in his 1776 Memoir is that in both cases he persisted in trying to make these two works successful despite their initial failure. Thus he tried to retrieve the failure of the Treatise with his Abstract of 1740. And he tried to retrieve the failure of the essay to make an impact in 1748 with the long and daring additional note he added in 1750 about the miracles of the Abbe Paris. What both showed was not just Hume’s persistence, but his willingness to be creative and try desperate measures. Thus I think his persistence with the Treatise is shown not only in his publication of the 1740 Abstract, but also—as I hope to show—the Appendix in Book 3 of Treatise, in his apparent retraction or revision of his account of personal identity. With respect to the Enquiry, it is shown in how far he was prepared to go in radical and provocative lying especially in the second paragraph of the long note in the 1750 edition of the essay, quoted above. Thus in the beginning of the note Hume speaks of the ‘ridiculous

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comparison’ between the alleged miracles of the Abbe Paris (of his relics) and the miracles of Jesus. But in the rest of the long note Hume shows in a careful historical way that the Abbe’s miracles were really far more credible than those of Jesus as recounted in the Gospels. Hume assumes that his British readers, and even most of his French readers, would not accept the Jansenist miracles. But if not, then the clear implication for a reasonable and open-minded reader is that they should not accept those of Jesus in the Gospels, which, with the prophecies, were generally regarded as providing THE support for the Christian revelation. From this it logically follows that the Christian religion is groundless—the assertion of which was would be punishable for blasphemy in Hume’s time. So Hume was going very far in 1750. But so, too, I hold, was he in the 1740 Appendix, but not so clearly. However I believe that both showed him to be desperate to make an impact—although even more so in the 1740 Appendix. And this fits with what he says in his Memoir, that his ruling passion was literary fame. Now, as mentioned above, probably the clearest textual support for my claim that Hume was lying seriously in his presentation of the religious duck in the essay is the evidence from his Letter to a Gentleman, especially that on p. 22, which I quoted above, which supports my claim that the theological lying of the fideistic duck was intended to be taken seriously, and not merely ironically or for show. And my best and easiest-to-appreciate evidence for this controversial claim, that he was lying in his apparent retraction on personal identity, also comes from the Letter. But in this case it is not what Hume says, but what he does NOT say that supports my claim that he was lying seriously in the Appendix. My reason for holding this is that Hume does not question Wishart’s quotation of his famous anti-dualistic account of personal identity in the Treatise, Bk 1, pt iv, sect. vi. But Hume does question other things that Wishart says, for example about his being irreligious and a sceptic. But, then, why does Hume not question his radical anti-­ dualistic account which Wishart prints, especially if he had retracted it five years before, in the 1740 Appendix? I say more about this below, but what I first want to emphasize is that we need to keep in mind the big biographical picture, when, circa Sept 1740, Hume added the Appendix to Book three. He was a young and

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virtually unknown man of 27 or 28, desiring literary fame or at least attention for his great work, which at the time must have seemed very doubtful. But while he was disappointed that the publication of the Treatise did not bring him the degree of attention which he thought was justified by his great work, it did not sap his natural cheerfulness and energy, and so he tried to redress the failure by the March 1740 Abstract. But that too did not work, at least not by late 1740. So, I suggest, he tried a different way, not the Abstract way, but a more desperate ploy to call attention to another distinctive contribution of the Treatise. The Abstract dealt with causality, so now he turns to personal identity, which in the Abstract he mentions as one of three distinctive theories of the Treatise. But rather than putting the theory forward as true, as in the Abstract way, he now presents it as having major difficulties. But according to my interpretation, he was lying about this, but he hoped it would attract attention. And it would also serve another function, namely counter criticisms in the early 1739–1740 reviews that his Treatise was dogmatic and pretentious. So, as I see it, Hume felt he needed to go further than the Abstract, just as he realized he needed to go further in the essay on miracles because of its failure to attract attention as a result of Middleton’s work on miracles getting the limelight. And he did go further in both. He is creative and does find Artful ways to meet the challenge. Similarly, I think he found a way being creative in respect of the challenge posed by the failure of the Treatise to make the impact he desired. His way also fits with the sign of Artful lying as mentioned by Toland; for Hume contradicts his original monistic claim about personality, although not quite in the duck-rabbit way in ‘Of Miracles’, where he wants his attentive, rational readers to see the contradiction. For in the Appendix he points out the apparent contradiction himself. Yet I think that the reasons he gives against his original theory are weak, and he knew they were weak. For, as against what he SAYS in the Appendix, he does have an account of why we (wrongly) think we have a simple self, namely his associative account. Note too that in the Abstract, Hume not only restates his phenomenalist, i.e. monist view of personal identity, but refines it, moving from the bundle model to that of chemical composition, and describes it as one of his most

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distinctive philosophical theories. My point is that by March 1740 there is no indication of doubtfulness or lack of interest in the theory—indeed quite the opposite. And in the Appendix he continues the improved use of the more acute chemical model. He also seems pleased to note that ‘As philosophers begin to be reconcil’d to the principle that we have no idea of external substance, distinct from the ideas of particular qualities [so] This must pave the way for a like principle with regard to the mind, that we have no notion of it distinct from the particular perceptions.’ But it is in the Letter to a Gentleman, as mentioned above, that I think I also have strong justification for my thesis that Hume was lying. For here in his Letter Hume emphasizes that his attack on reason is in line with the truly religious position based on faith and the Bible. And, as mentioned above, he does NOT give the slightest hint that he retracts or doubts his theory on personal identity, although Wishart quotes at length (p. 8), and sometime a little crudely, Hume’s famous anti-dualistic passage. But Hume is entirely silent on this subject. Here it is important to realize that it would have been entirely appropriate and natural for Hume to have mentioned his doubts about his theory of personal identity, or to have mentioned his apparent retraction, as stated in the Appendix. So he could easily have gone into offended mode (which Hume does in the Letter on p. 20, in respect to his attitude to skepticism (also see p. 24). That he doesn’t comment at all is, I think, strong evidence that he was not sincere in his apparent retraction. * * * Going further, I think my overall account can help to explain why Hume didn’t bring personal identity into the 1748 Enquiry. This was because he had got himself into a tangle, from which he would not find it easy to extricate himself. For supposing he still held the monistic account as set out in the Treatise—which I believe he did—he would be faced with explaining his apparent retraction in the Appendix. And he could hardly say: ‘I did wrong and lied for attention, but now I want to set the record right.’ * * *

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In looking at a possible Artful or esoteric work, we need to see, as Richard Blackmore urges in his The Creation, 1712, where the justificatory force lies and where the mere assertive force lies.3 For it is the former which the philosopher actually believes and wants his reasonable readers to believe. To take a famous case: ‘I come to bury Caesar not to praise him.’ But by the end of Marc Antony’s speech we know where he truly stands. Knowing Hume’s willingness for Artful lying, we should be able to know where he stands in the Appendix, despite what he SAYS. And where he stands, I have argued, is that he continues to believe in his monistic account of personal identity; and that he has not retracted it. Now I want to go through Hume’s discussion of personal identity in the Appendix. And I do so paragraph by paragraph, calling attention to what Hume SAYS and where the justificatory force actually lies. 11 He SAYS that on a further reflection, i.e. a ‘strict review’, he has found serious difficulties with his account of personal identity. Note that he also takes the opportunity of this confession to counter early reviews that he is a dogmatic sceptic, for his present doubts show him to be ‘diffident and modest’. 12 He presents again his distinctive positions (so like his account of causality in the Abstract). More specifically he states his arguments against the identity and simplicity of self, beginning with his main one, that as he has no impression of a simple self, therefore has no idea of it. 13–15 Then he puts forward another argument for his monistic position. This is that all perceptions can exist on their own, or without inhering in something else, i.e. an immaterial substance. 16 Clear assertion of the famous passage that all his experience is of perceptions and not of a perceiver of those of perceptions. 17 A thought experiment, supporting his distinctive position, using the term ‘notion’, which Berkeley formally introduced in 1734 in his revisions of his Principles and Three Dialogues. 18 Elaboration, clearly spelling out of his distinctive position. 19 The term ‘notion’ also used in an argument here, although I find the argument hard to understand. 20 Seems happy with growing acceptance of phenomenalism/monism with respect to the object world as paving the way for his application to mind. So again he is positive about his distinctive position.

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21 Only now, after nine paragraphs, does he turn to the difficulties with his distinctive theory; but really I think he is only restating his distinctive theory, and indeed improving on it, e.g. using chemical rather than bundle model, and expressing his theory more lucidly. But in the last sentence, he does again SAY, as in the opening paragraph, that there are difficulties with his theory. 22 Sets out the problem or dilemma facing him as ‘two positions’ which he SAYS he can’t reconcile, so SAYS that he feels compelled to accept both. But in fact he has, I believe, strengthened his own position in clearly restating it, while offering nothing new that makes the competing position seem formidable. So as in Blackmore’s principle, he ‘saves the name but subverts the thing’. Hume is LYING philosophically. For on the difficulties side he gives two reasons, but I think that given what he says in Book one of the Treatise that both are BAD or WEAK reasons, for he HAS explained by association how and why we (mistakenly) believe there is a connection between perceptions and why we are inclined to feel that we are one simple self. So the rhetoric is strong on the difficulties side, but the arguments are strong that there is no real problem with his theory. Hume then concludes by indicating again what a MODEST sceptic he is, so another counter to the early reviews. My conclusion is that there is overwhelming evidence that Hume was Artfully lying in his alleged retraction on personal identity. But this is not to say that this is certain. For with the Art there has to be an element of doubt, even for reasonable readers and fellow freethinkers, since otherwise there is no Art. Perhaps the main reason for thinking Hume isn’t lying is that it would be a case of a philosopher lying not just to the vulgar or to theologians but to fellow philosophers. But against this I have argued that in late 1740 Hume was desperate, and he could have thought that at least the astute philosophers would realize that he was lying artfully. Finally I suggest that his desperate and unsuccessful ploy was another reason why Hume turned against the Treatise in his famous renunciation of it in the Advertisement which appeared in the 1777 edition of his Essays and Treatises. For it added a dimension of confusion to the Treatise, which it would otherwise not have had.4

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Notes 1. I discuss this in a number of essays, beginning with ‘Deism, Immortality and the Art of Theological Lying’, in Deism, Masonry, and the Enlightenment (1987) ed. by J.  A. Leo Lemay (1987); also in ‘Disclaimers as Offence Mechanisms in Charles Blount and John Toland’, in Atheism from the Reformation to the Enlightenment, edited by Hunter and Wooten, 1992; also in articles in Thoemmes’s Dictionary of Eighteenth-Century Philosophy, especially my article on Henry Dodwell the younger, whose one publication, Christianity not Founded on Argument, 1741, presents a duck/rabbit, very like Hume’s. And it is still not clear which picture Dodwell accepted. 2. See David Pears, ‘Hume on personal identity’, in Hume Studies, Nov. 1993. Pears begins his article by observing that there have been many reasons given for Hume’s retraction in the Appendix. He suggests that the reason it has been answered in so many ways is that there is so little relevant evidence. I think there is a good deal of available evidence, but it has not been looked for in the right places, especially in Hume’s account of his motivation in his Memoir. 3. For details, see my History of Atheism, Chap. 4, sect. 3. 4. Here it might be useful if I say a word about how my account of the Art theological-philosophical lying differs from that of Leo Strauss, who is surely the best-known modern commentator on the Art, or what he calls esotericism. As I understand him, Strauss believes that the genuine philosopher has, through reason, come to accept the truth of monism, naturalism and atheism; hence he must use the Art or esotericism to disguise his subversive beliefs; although it is Spinoza, not Hume, who is exemplary for Strauss. Perhaps this is because while Hume is a strong naturalist and monist, and also, I believe, an atheist, Hume recognized that he and others work from passion, not just reason. And his ruling passion is his passion for literary fame, as he says more than once in his 1776 Memoir. Also while Hume is a monist, his monism is based mainly on experience and is epistemic, whereas Spinoza’s is metaphysical and deductive. In short, I think Strauss is limited and narrow in his account of the esotericist or Artful liar. Furthermore, I believe Strauss is deeply mistaken in not seeing that there are genuine philosophers, who have followed reason and found the truth in dualism. My great examplars here are Plato, Descartes and also Berkeley, who, as I point out in Chap. 2, was himself an esotericist.

4 A. J. Ayer: The Complete Monist

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Introduction

My aim in this chapter is to look closely at A. J. Ayer, the philosopher who is the terminus of this work; then to use my understanding of him to point to a number of tangles in twentieth century philosophy and the way they can be untangled. However, first it is necessary to be clear about Ayer’s philosophical position. Nor is this an easy matter, for Ayer wrote many philosophical books and articles after his first and most celebrated work, Language, Truth and Logic [= LTL] was published in 1936, when he was twenty-six. Yet I think his position remained essentially the same even to his last essay, entitled a ‘Defense of Empiricism’, published in 1989, the year of his death. Perhaps the best way of identifying this philosophical position, as he himself suggests in that last essay, is to see what it was not, i.e. the positions which Ayer did not accept, even though he recognized they were held by respected philosophers. One such position was Berkeley’s idealism, which Ayer thought was wrong for, among the reasons, its subjectivist tendency to solipsism. Another position which Ayer thought was mistaken was representationalism, which Ayer rejects for Berkeleian reasons- in short because it supposes © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 D. Berman, Consciousness from Descartes to Ayer, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-80921-8_4

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that what exists is in a non-perceptual realm. But if we do not perceive or experience this realm or the things in it, then how can we know anything about them, or even that that they exist? Hence Ayer sees this positionwhich was accepted for a time by Russell, who Ayer had enormous respect for- as mistaken. The position to which I think Ayer always adhered was between idealism and representationalism. This was phenomenalism, broadly understood. It was certainly the position Ayer explicitly accepted in LTL in 1936. And though he expressed misgivings about it in later works, such as his ‘Defense of Empiricism’, where he describes his final position as ‘Constructivism’, I think Ayer always remained a phenomenalist, in the broad sense, in that he always thought there was a given and that it was perceptible, even if it had become for him qualia or sense-data [=s-d] distinct from any particular mind, and so not as directly apprehended as in LTL. What is surprising and notable, I think, is that he should adhere to this position about the given and s-d, even when they had became unfashionable by the 1950s and 1960s, largely under the influence of the later Wittgenstein, J. L. Austin, Wilfred Sellars and Ryle, among others. Where, however, Ayer did not differ from these philosophers was that, like them, there was another position that he regarded as most deeply mistaken. This was dualism. Why was Ayer so sure that dualism was mistaken? Partly, no doubt, because he was always influenced by the scientific consensus, according to which there is one thing which exists and that is matter. But Ayer was an independent-minded philosopher, as is shown in the fact that in LTL he criticizes both Hume and the Logical Positivists, the philosophers, as he says, to whom he was closest. The deeper reason why he could not consider dualism as a serious option was because Ayer was by nature a monist, that he did not have access to what dualists have, i.e. any experience of mental activity, of the cde, that is, of himself as something mental and distinct from objects or s-d, which is aware of itself. And this deficit comes across not only in his philosophical work, but also in his life. So not only did Ayer not have the experience of producing mental images, which Berkeley, in his Principles, sect. 28, says is crucial for understanding mental agency, but Ayer did not even have mental images themselves. So the evidence is that Ayer was in

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that 1 or 2% of the population, who, according to psychologists, have never experienced the slightest mental image of colour or shape in their waking life. And there is also evidence that Ayer had no visual images even in his dreams, at least not before his Near Death Experience in 1988. In short, Ayer seems to have been the complete monist, hence an appropriate philosopher to be the terminus of this work, being as far from Descartes the dualist, as a monist could be. However, there are two mental elements which, I think, Ayer did not lack. One is s-d which are perceived and are perceptibile. But that is surely the most minimal and thinnest kind of mentation. The other element is auditory images. For it seems that Ayer probably did have dreams in which he heard imaginary sounds and words, in which stories were told. Hence in that attenuated way, he did dream. Now the philosopher who Ayer regarded himself as closest to was Hume. As he says in his article on his Near Death Experience in the Sunday Telegraph, 28 August 1988, Hume was his ‘favorite’ philosopher. And in his essay, ‘Philosophy’, originally published in 1975, Ayer says that he had a Humean view of the world as made up of ‘discrete observable episodes’. But, as I have been suggesting, Ayer was actually more a Humean monist than Hume himself. For Hume had mental images and some voluntary control over them; and he also had visual dreams, whereas the evidence is that Ayer lacked all these things. One reason that Ayer regarded Hume as so important was that Ayer accepted the interpretation of the history of philosophy, according to which Hume decisively defeated Berkeley’s idealistic account of spirit or mind and hence his dualism. And the way Hume brought about this defeat was, as Ayer observes in his LTL, by applying Berkeley’s own critique of matter to mind, and so eliminating what was distinctive in Berkeley’s philosophy, the result of which was that all that exists are phenomena.1 This is the interpretation that goes back at least to Thomas Reid’s Enquiry of 1762, and which is still largely accepted. For while philosophy has moved beyond Humean phenomenalism, Hume’s phenomenalist critique of Berkeley is still widely accepted as decisively defeating Berkeley’s dualism and dualism in general. Of course, it is this that I have questioned in Chaps. 1 and 2, and which I now want to question from another angle. Here my aim is to show how Ayer’s

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understanding- really misunderstanding- of Berkeley’s philosophy enables us to see a variety of tangles in twentieth century philosophy and the way to disentangle them. The way to disentangle them is by seeing that the reason Ayer did not, and could not, understand Berkeley’s dualism was because Ayer was by nature a monist. To begin, then, in LTL Ayer insists that minds and mental acts are completely inaccessible to observation- by which he means that they cannot be experienced because they do not exist, they are fictions. Here, however, the philosopher who Ayer specifically criticizes is not Berkeley but G. E. Moore. Ayer’s critique has two components or stages. He first gives a linguistic reason why Moore wrongly believed in mental acts, then he offers a psychological account which he thinks explains what Moore was actually experiencing when he thought he was experiencing mental acts. I shall come to Ayer’s two-component account below, but first I need to note that the work which Ayer has in view in his criticism of Moore is Moore’s famous ‘Refutation of Idealism’, published in 1903.2 Now this is bound to be confusing for a number of reasons. One is that Moore’s ‘Refutation’ is specifically leveled against Berkeley’s idealism. But then why is Ayer criticizing Moore rather than Berkeley? And why is Moore apparently defending that part of Berkeley’s idealism, its spiritistic part, which Hume had defeated, according to the generally accepted account of eighteenth century philosophy? But the confusion goes even further than that. For at the same time that Ayer is criticizing what is generally thought to be the most difficult part of Berkeley’s idealism to defend, i.e. mental acts, Ayer is indeed defending Berkeley’s immaterialism, i.e. the negative side of his idealism, which Moore is attacking as a realist. And the way Moore does this is based on the act-object distinction. So here we are well into the tangle. Yet we get further tangled when Ayer tells us that realists such as Moore reproach Berkeley for having ignored the act-object distinction. Yet it is clear from Berkeley’s Principles, sect. 2, that this distinction was crucial for Berkeley. In fact, there is no evidence in Moore’s 1903 text that Moore does reproach Berkeley. But neither does Moore indicate that Berkeley had the act-object distinction. Having pointed to these tangles, I now want to suggest how they can be untangled. The first step, I suggest, is that we need to be clear about how Berkeley’s idealism is composed of two elements, one negative and

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one positive. The negative is his immaterialism; the positive is his account of mind or spirit as that which fills the gap left by his rejection of matter. And for Berkeley, there are two kinds of minds or spirits: there is the Infinite Mind of God, and the finite minds of human beings. Ayer believes that both are fictions. Moore agrees with Ayer that the Infinite Mind, God, is a fiction, but is positive about finite human minds, and especially about their capacity for mental acts. What Moore is critical of in Berkeley’s idealism is immaterialism. I think this goes some way towards untangling the tangle, but what also needs to be recognized is that idealism can take two forms: monistic and dualistic. What I think should be clear is that, given his commitment to the act-object distinction, Berkeley was not a monistic idealist, as Bradley was. (And this should also be clear from our Chap. 2.) But then there is a question whether Moore’s criticisms in his ‘Refutation’ are telling against Berkeley. However, if Berkeley’s dualism was idealistic, then, in that respect, it would be a fitting target for Moore’s ‘Refutation’. Yet if Berkeley’s idealism was dualistic, based on the act-object distinction, then that would bring his position close to realism, which was Moore’s position. However, since we are now trying to disentangle, let us put that question to one side. For what I think is far more important is how Ayer could hold, as he does, that Berkeley’s dictum, ‘Esse est percipi’ is true with regard to what Berkeley calls ideas or objects, indeed necessarily true. And the answer is that Ayer thinks that Berkeley was right to regard ‘ideas’ as the contents rather than the objects of sensation- the latter being Moore’s viewbecause, for Ayer, as for other monists, like Spinoza and James, there are no objects of sensations, for there are no distinct mental acts whereby objects are experienced. Therefore Ayer holds that Berkeley was justified in asserting that a ‘sensible quality’ could not conceivably exist unsensed. I think Ayer is wrong here, wrong in his interpretation of Berkeley, but right in his substantive claim, and that his claim needs to be understood in a phenomenalistic way, which is famously formalized and generalized, as Ayer notes, by J.S.  Mill, in his formula that a material thing is ‘a permanent possibility of sensation’. For Berkeley, however, it is inconceivable that a sensible quality or idea can exist unsensed. Why? Because it must be sensed by a mind distinct from the idea. That is his idealism. But for Ayer, there are no such minds.

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For Ayer it is analytically inconceivable that there could be unsensed objects in the way that it is inconceivable that it might turn out that a certain bachelor actually had a wife. That is analytically inconceivable, impossible by definition. The inconceivability for Berkeley is not analytic, at least not in the strong Ayer way. But it is not easy to express this difference clearly. I think we might say that for Berkeley it is necessary for an idea or object to be perceived, but it is not analytic. There is an experiential element in it which I think comes from his dualism. And in this matter I think Ayer, the phenomenalist, is right and Berkeley, the dualist, is wrong. For while I think that for an object to exist it must (as Ayer holds) be perceivable, I do not think it must be perceived by a mind, which is Berkeley (idealist) view. So it can be perceived by a mind, which it is in the cde, but it needn’t be. Hence, as Ayer then goes on to say, according to the phenomenalism people can exist in the same way as material things. But while I agree with Ayer that people can exist in the same way as material objects, Ayer is wrong that all people always exist in that way. For while monists always exist in that way, dualists, like Berkeley, Moore and I do sometimes exist as minds distinct from the objects they perceive in their intermittent experiences of the cde. Monists, like Hume and Ayer, exist only like material things or, as Hume says, bundles of perceptions. And that shows that Berkeley is mistaken in his so-called master argument for idealism, as set out in his Principles, sects. 22–23. For since at least some people (i.e. monists) can exist as just bundles of perceptions without a distinct mind or mental acts perceiving the perceptions or ideas, then material things can exist as bundles of perceptions or ideas without a distinct mind perceiving them. That refutes Berkeley’s challenge in the master argument, where, as he puts it in sect. 22: ‘… I am content to put the whole upon this issue; if you can but conceive it possible for one extended moveable substance, or in general, for any one idea or any thing like an idea, to exist otherwise than in a mind perceiving it, I shall readily give up the cause.’ For this is precisely what phenomenalists, like Hume and Ayer, have no difficulty conceiving, since that is how they always experience themselves, i.e. as only bundles of objects or ideas or perceptions. Hence Berkeley’s idealism is defeated. But it by no means follows that his dualism is defeated, which

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we think is his most valuable philosophical contribution and is essential to his philosophy.3 Nor is his immaterialism defeated, if it is understood in the phenomenalist way, as Ayer understands it, which I think is the way it should be understood, although that was not the way Berkeley himself, i.e. Berkeley the idealist, understood it. Having now I hope disentangled the confusion around idealism by drawing on my understanding of monism and dualism, I now want to return to Ayer’s two-component critique of Moore’s defense of mental acts and dualism. Why, then, does Ayer think that there are no mental acts? Basically for the same reason that Hume did and which Hume puts forward in his discussion of personal identity in the Treatise, Bk one. However, more clearly than Hume, Ayer thinks that it is grammar that has misled dualists like Moore into believing they have mental acts. Thus according to Ayer, our use of transitive verbs such as perceiving, imagining, loving, etc., make us think that we are a mental subject from which arise mental acts. But in this we are deceived by grammar, Ayer holds, for there is no evidence, no experiential data, to justify it. Ayer then goes on to look at Moore’s description of his mental activity and especially of its being ‘diaphaneous’, as Moore puts. Here, in this component of his argument, Ayer argues that Moore has been misled, not by grammar, but by confusing the transparency or diaphaneous nature of empty physical space, so the space between me and my computer- which is real- with mental action, which is a fiction. But it is clear to a dualist like myself, that the transparency or diaphaneity that Moore had in mind when he tried to explain his dualistic experience of mental activity is metaphorical. For conscious acts are not literally transparent or diaphaneous in the way that the depth or distance between me and my computer is. But Ayer could not appreciate this because as a monist he did not have the dualist experience of activity, i.e. he did not have the cde. Now I want to go on and show that what Ayer says here, though it misunderstands Moore’s account of mental acts, is a helpful way of understanding the (otherwise) puzzling statements James makes at the end of his 1904 essay in the Journal of Philosophy, ‘Does consciousness exist?’. For like the monist Ayer, the monist James, too, has no experience

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of mental acts or what he calls consciousness. But James is all too aware, as he makes clear in the first section of his influential essay, that there are many notable philosophers and psychologists who have confidently claimed to believe in consciousness, so in the basic duality of mental acts and object, because they claim to experience such mental acts. So the question is: what are they experiencing? And here James, the gifted psychologist, goes to his own experience to work out what it could be that these philosophers are experiencing, which has misled them into believing they are experiencing consciousness in the dualistic way. So here James, like Ayer, is like the deaf person trying to understand what people mean when they say they hear sounds. And the feature which James focuses on in his 1904 essay, which he found in Moore’s 1903 ‘Refutation’, namely diaphaneity, now comes to the fore. But it is not the diaphaneity of empty space and depth, which Ayer focused on- but the diaphaneity of breath and breathing. Thus James writes that he is as confident as I am of anything that, in myself, the stream of thinking (which I recognize emphatically as a phenomenon) is only a careless name for what, when scrutinized, reveals itself to consist chiefly of the stream of my breathing…. [that] breath moving outwards, between the glottis and the nostrils, is, I am persuaded, the essence out of which philosophers have constructed the entity known to them as consciousness. That entity is fictitious, while thoughts in the concrete are fully real. But thoughts in the concrete are made of the same stuff as things are.

There are, then, various ways that monists have tried to explain why and how intelligent philosophers, and otherwise sensible human beings, have believed in dualism. However, according to our general theory, the true reason they find it so hard to understand dualism is that they do have the basic form of consciousness which dualists have, i.e. they do not have the cde. Of course, dualists suffer from a similar, but vice versa inability, i.e. they cannot seriously believe that otherwise intelligent philosophers and normal human beings, should NOT have an experience which, as far as they are aware, they have always had, namely the cde. And they, too, have tried to explain this in various ways, e.g. that these philosophers are not attentive enough, that they are motivated by ideology. So each type is

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engaged in the same kind of mis-construing, but the vice versa of the other. How then can dualists and monists attain the truth of the 2CT, that there are two basic kinds of consciousness? I think they can read Galton which should go some way towards preventing them from falling into the TMF. They should also read carefully the great philosophers of the type contrary to their own; and they should also talk one-to-one to colleagues and friends of the other type, and listen empathically to what they are saying. What then are my other conclusions? One is that the history of philosophy, which goes back to Reid, and is still generally accepted, is mistaken. In short, Hume did not refute Berkeley’s dualistic account of the world, when properly understood. This is generally accepted because monist historians of philosophy presently rule, because monism is the consensus. Yet just as dualism has not been defeated by monism, so neither has dualism defeated monism. So the truth as shown in the history of philosophy is that both monism and dualism are both true. Therefore Kant’s innovative development or compromise, aimed at avoiding what he saw as the dire consequences of Hume’s philosophy, was unnecessary. * * * It might seem that what this work, which argues for the truth and perennial nature of the two opposing types, is only of theoretical or metaphysical interest. But this is not the case; for that would overlook the implication which is shown in a small way in my epiphany (mentioned at the end of Chap. 1) about being relatively insignificant as a human person but very significant as a dualist in my experience of the cde. For that gives me a glimpse of what I believe, following Plato, is my highest good and final goal, i.e. becoming a perfect and eternal individual. And similarly I think the monist can have a monistic counterpart to that, which is described by Spinoza as being at one with God or Nature or being intellectually in love with God. So the theory of two basic types and types of consciousness points to the two highest goods and final goals for human beings.

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Putting this another way: those who do not come to understand their basic type are like those who are lost in forest, sometimes going one way, then another way, and therefore remaining lost, at least until they recognize what type they are and so in what direction they must go.

Notes 1. See LTL, chap vii, section on ‘Realism and Idealism’. All references in this chapter are, unless otherwise stated, to this section of LTL. 2. Mind: A Quarterly of Psychology and Philosophy, 1903, issue 4. 3. See note 1, Chap. 1.

 Epilogue: Species and Types: Bringing Things Together

In this Epilogue I step back from the subject of this book—Consciousness from Descartes to Ayer—to consider a question which might seem a thousand miles away, namely how Homo sapiens, from being an undistinguished species for over 300,000 years, became the dominant as well as the only humanoid species on this planet. What I hope to show is that the two subjects are by no means far apart and that they cast important light on each another. * * * The natural place to begin is with the 2010 breakthrough in genetics and human origins, headed by Svante Paabo.1 It presented clear evidence that there is about 2% or 3% Neanderthal genes present in the human genome, and this, it seems generally agreed, almost certainly proves that there was, at some period, successful mating between Neanderthal and Homo sapiens. The qualifications, ‘generally agreed’ and ‘almost certainly’ need to be added because, for one thing, it is possible that the 2% or 3% Neanderthal genes might be explained as coming from an earlier common ancestor of both Neanderthal and Homo sapiens. © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 D. Berman, Consciousness from Descartes to Ayer, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-80921-8

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But qualifications of this kind must figure throughout this Epilogue, where I have to speak again and again of ‘roughly’, ‘approximately’, or ‘broadly’, with respect to time scale, and also to investigators being in ‘broad’ or ‘general’ agreement. The main reason why this and other similar qualifications are required is that the period examined is, roughly, between 70,000 and 30,000 years ago, with the consequence that the surviving fossil and archeological evidence is thin on the ground. Yet compensating for this are the profound implications of, and the excitement generated by, the 2010 breakthrough on the part of both professional investigators and the general public, as is evident from even a glance at the Net. * * * In the Preface, and especially Chap. 1, I described my method; so here it seems appropriate that I should say something of my method (such as it is) in this Epilogue. As I am not a geneticist, or in an archeologist or anthropologist, I am dependent on the workers in these fields. They study the equivalent of the philosophical texts which formed the solid basis of my judgments in the earlier parts of this work. But not withstanding this, I think I can be as clear and salient about the scientific story I tell here. I think I am also able to see the big picture or story, even better than many of the specialists. The story has two elements, but they share a common time frame. This, as mentioned, is roughly between 30,000 and 70,000 years ago- 30,000 indicating the time, it is generally agreed, that the Neanderthal became extinct; 70,000 being the time when some Homo sapiens, it is generally thought, began venturing outside their original habitat in Africa, and came in contact with Neanderthal in Asia and Europe, where the two successfully mated, as shown in the 2% or 3% of Neanderthal genes in present day Homo sapiens. And this account is also verified by another finding, no less striking, namely that Sub-Saharan Africans do not have the 2% or 3% Neanderthal genes, which is explained by their particular ancestors being the Homo sapiens who did not emigrate. (It is also worth noting that what has also emerged from genetic study is that about 20% of Neanderthal genes is to be found in the human population taken as whole.) * * *

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Now we move to the second element in the story, which comes from archeology and anthropology. This is that roughly within the same time-­ frame, between 70,000 to 30,000 years ago, there occurred probably the most important development of Homo sapiens, whereby they became, in time, not only the masters of the earth but also its only humanoid species. And how this happened, it is generally agreed, was by their acquiring two things: (1) language, and (2) the ability for cooperative activity in large numbers. Now it would not surprise me if some investigators have been struck by the coincidence that the two stories, coming from genetics and anthropology, both occur in the same time-frame. But, as far as I am aware, not much has been made of this. Of course, it is one thing to suggest that the way Homo sapiens changed from being the undistinguished species, which they had been for over 300,000 years, was somehow connected with their successful mating with Neanderthal outside Africa, whereas it is another to determine how this result was actually, concretely attained. However, it is just here that I think I am in a position to draw on something not available to geneticists, archeologists and anthropologists. This is my 2 Consciousnesses Theory, or 2CT, as presented in the early parts of this book. I think the best way I can explain what I have in mind is to use the following two archeological images. The first is of two teams of archeologists tunnelling into two different sides of a mountain and being, at first, unaware of the efforts of each other; but, as they get closer together, each starts to hear sounds of the other. And this is followed by the actual breaking through at one point, where they meet up and share the information they have each been gathering. The second image is of there being a fragment of an ancient painted vase in one museum and another fragment in another, and that it occurs to an archeologist who has visited both museums that the two fragments might fit. And they do fit and fitting them enables the scene painted on the vase to be seen much more fully. In short, I believe that the scientific story about the two sub-species and my philosophical story about the two types can fit together and illuminate each other in that both are about the same thing, i.e. the production of language or the linguistic mode of consciousness.

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But first a caveat is in order. This is that I do not claim that the two accounts, the scientific and my philosophical, fit perfectly together. Thus my philosophical account has two totally different basic types which mix to produce the non-basic socio-linguistic type. Whereas in the scientific story there are only two sub-species, whose coming together brings about language in one of them, namely the Homo sapiens, with the other, the Neanderthal becoming extinct. However, there is a way this apparent misfit might be remedied. For evidence has subsequently emerged that there was a third sub-species, the Denisovans, who successfully mated with both Neanderthal and Homo sapiens. But I think it is better if we keep things simple, keeping to just two sub-species, the Neanderthal and Homo sapiens. And there is a feasible way of doing this. For I think it is reasonable to suppose that there was a third kind of humanoid that emerged in the required time frame, which, while not either purely Neanderthal or purely Homo sapiens, shared attributes in common with each. As I have not found this explicitly described in the literature, I need to spell out what I mean. What I mean is that if there was successful mating between Neanderthal and Homo sapiens, then there must have been some offspring of the two species with features of both partners. I shall call these offspring of the two sub-species the ‘mixed folk’. To be sure, the mixed folk would have been small in numbers, for even the Homo sapiens and Neanderthal at the time were small in number. But I think there could have been enough mixed folk for some of them to interact and live in small groups. Furthermore, there would be reason for them to do so, namely that they would be perceived, and would perceive themselves, as different from the two pure sub-species, yet alike in their difference. So they might- to use prosaic analogy- have been perceived as Rudolf the red-nosed reindeer was initially perceived by Santa’s other reindeer- as different and alien. And this, I suggest, could have been consequential in the case of the mixed folk- as it was for Rudolf and the other reindeer- by the mixed folk developing something of great use- language. I also need to mention that if some of the mixed folk did once develop language and the ability to teach it to others, especially to Homo sapiens, then, following this their existence would no longer be necessary.

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For once language was developed and could be taught and learned, it would be a cultural acquisition, as it is now. This, in short, is my suggestion about how language developed. To be sure, so far I have not explained how, more specifically, these mixed folk managed to develop language; for while it might have been useful for them to do so, this does not show that they did it or how they did it. So to revert to and tailor my reindeer analogy, we need to explain how Rudolf came to have his useful red, shiny nose. Here I have a few suggestions, but they can only be suggestions since we know so little about what either the Homo sapiens and especially the Neanderthal were like circa 50,000 years ago, so what was then distinctive of them. For, as mentioned above, the archeological evidence is thin on the ground. But here I can draw on what other investigators cannoton my philosophical account, and in particular on what we know of the great dualists, Descartes, Leibnitz, Berkeley, Hamilton and Moore. In short, I suggest that we can connect the dualists with the Neanderthal. Although given the meagre evidence, I stop short of equating them precisely with the dualists. Nor, even more, would I equate the Homo sapiens with the monists. So my account here is looser than my account in Chap. 1. But it is still about how two types or species managed to give rise to human language. Now I turn to what anthropologists tell us about Homo sapiens and Neanderthal and what each would be able to contribute to the development of human language. According to many anthropologists there is good evidence that what Homo sapiens contributed was (and is) the capacity for producing a wide variety of articulate sounds. The basic idea is that we Homo sapiens have this capacity because of having a big voice box, or larnyx,which is located in our necks. Whereas, it seems reasonably clear from skeletal remains, that the Neanderthal had virtually no necks and so a less developed voice box or larnyx. But while the production of varied articulate sounds was necessary for human language, it was not sufficient. For if it was, then it would have been produced while the Homo sapiens were still in Africa and had not ventured into Europe and Asia. So the question is: What was the distinctive contribution of the Neanderthal side, which brought about the

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development of language? And here I think it is clear that there is little in the archeological evidence that can help us. And so it is here that my account of dualists must come in, according to which what is distinctive of the dualists is the core dualistic experience, or cde. But then the question is: What is there about the cde which, when added to the capacity for producing varied articulate sounds, would have brought about human language? My answer is that it is its ghostly quality which only the dualist can be aware of. In this respect it is close to a fiction, and it was thought to be a fiction by monists, such Gassendi, Hume and Ayer. Now I want to point out that the capacity for fictiveness was, according to one influential anthropologist, J. N. Harari, what was needed for the development human language.2 Another way of putting this is that while non-human animals had specific signs- especially for specific dangers- humans developed symbols which were more flexible, general and ghostly, so could refer to a range of things, rather than to specific things, as well as to no things- so to fictions- which is nicely shown in the story of the boy who cried wolf. The development of symbols, and hence human language, is what, according to another influential anthropologist, Ernst Cassirer, made and makes us human.3 But is there any solid evidence that the Neanderthal actually had that kind of fictive, ghostly capacity for symbolic thinking? Unfortunately, I do not think there is solid evidence; although it might be found in their burial practices. For some archeologists believe that the Neanderthal buried their dead, which suggests that they could have believed that they had a ghostly life which survived their bodily death. It would be nice to go further, but given the scanty archeological evidence I think this is as far as we can reasonably go. To review then: according to my account human language was developed by the mixed folk, because they had the need to produce something useful to enhance their strange, outsider position; and they had the necessary physical apparatus, inherited from their Homo Sapien parents for producing a variety of articulate sounds; and they also had the capacity for fictive, ghostly symbolic awareness, inherited from their Neanderthal parents.

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Of course, it needs to be recognized that there are numerous plausible theories about how language came into being. That is a bad sign, for what it shows is how meagre and undetermined the reliable evidence is. And that shows how hard it is to verify or falsify any one of these theories. So what it comes down to, I think, is not proving or verifying any theory, but only determining which theory provides the best explanation for the origins of language. Therefore, just as I do not think I have solved the problem of consciousness in the previous part of this work, but have only taken an important step towards it; so I do not think I have fully explained the origins of language, but have only taken an important step in the right direction. However, my account has the advantage, I believe, that it is clear, simple and specific, and so can be more easily falsified than those accounts which present the development of language as occurring in many unspecified stages over many thousands of years, and which understand language in a vague way, so not distinguishing human symbolic language from the kind of sign communication which higher mammals had and still only have. * * * The primary advantage of my account is that it explains the birth of human language as a cultural attainment, which did not need a continuing genetic basis. So not only is it consistent with the extinction of the Neanderthal, but also of the mixed folk. However, what is less satisfactory in my account is that it does not seem to explain how, with the extinction of the Neanderthal and mixed folk, there has continued a division between dualists and monists in Homo sapiens. Now one possibility is that the explanation lies in the 2 or 3 % Neanderthal DNA that has remained in Homo sapiens. But there is another, very different explanation, which I believe is more feasible. This is the operation of reincarnation, as understood by Plato and John McTaggart; which I examine in a work still in progress, although nearing completion.4

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Now the first thing which must be said is that this understanding of reincarnation needs to be distinguished from reincarnation as popularly understood, which concerns personality. What is reincarnated, according to Plato and McTaggart, is not personality, but is something at a much deeper level. It is what McTaggart calls ‘natural character’, which is shown in someone’s ruling passions and deep traits and capacities, as for example the tendency to selfishness or altruism; and this would include having the cde. The broad idea is that in matters of character, an individual’s previous life has a determining influence on his next life. This is the law of Karma. As one sows in one’s present life, so one shall reap in one’s next incarnation. But here the vehicle of transmission between one’s past life and one’s next incarnation is not physical genes, but what might be called, following McTaggart, character genes; which for him work together with physical genes. Applying this to our present discussion, there would be a character gene for dualism, which some of the mixed folk had (and others lacked), and that this has been passed on through reincarnation to some Homo sapiens, after the Neanderthal and mixed folk became extinct. To be sure, more should be said to make this theory of reincarnation not just credible but also fully clear. One important point is that while, according to the theory, that which is reincarnated is character, there are some cases where personality is also reincarnated, although these are very rare and are in fact the breakdown of genuine reincarnation. But while the breakdown of genuine reincarnation is unfortunate for those who experience it, i.e. remember their past lives, it provides evidence for reincarnation itself. For it shows that an individual’s bodily death does not entail the end of his identity. For if someone can live on being and remembering his previous personality, then he can certainly live on and be the character he was, even though he does not remember it, since character is not remembered; although Plato, as I understand him, holds that it can be ‘recollected’.

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Notes 1. S.  Paabo et  al., ‘A draft sequence of the Neanderthal genome’, Science, May 2010, vol. 328. 2. See J. N. Harari, Sapiens: A brief history, 2014. 3. Cassirer’s main work is his three-volume Philosophy of Symbolic Forms, 1923, 1925, 1929; English translation 1955 and 1957. But his position is also summarized in his later Essay on Man, 1944. 4. Plato’s main account of reincarnation is in his Republic 614–622; McTaggart’s is in chap. 2 of his Human Immortality and Pre-existence, 1915. I discuss their common theory in ‘A Handbook of After-death Existence’.

Index1

A

E

Appendix, vi, 47–49, 53, 56–60, 62n2 Ayer, A.J., vi, 11, 48, 63–73, 78

Esotericism, 31–34, 45n1, 62n4 G

B

Berkeley, George, v, vi, 2, 5, 6, 9, 10, 13–16, 26, 29–44, 48, 55, 60, 62n4, 63–69, 71, 77

Genome, 73 Golden age, v, 29 H

Consciousness, v, 1–28, 30, 34–38, 48, 69–71, 73, 75, 79

Homo sapiens, vi, 20, 73–80 Hume, David, vi, 2–5, 9, 10, 13–16, 18, 21, 26, 42, 47–61, 62n4, 64–66, 68, 69, 71, 78

D

I

Dualism, vi, 4–12, 15, 20, 28, 30, 32, 33, 36, 39, 40, 62n4, 64–71, 80

Idealism, 63, 64, 66–69 Irish philosophy, v, 29–44

C

 Note: Page numbers followed by ‘n’ refer to notes.

1

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 D. Berman, Consciousness from Descartes to Ayer, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-80921-8

83

84 Index L

Q

Language, v, vii, 2, 10, 21–23, 26, 33, 75–79

Questionnaire, 18, 22–25

M

Miracles, vi, 47–52, 54–58 Monism, vi, 4–11, 20, 28, 30, 31, 48, 60, 62n4, 69, 71 Moore, G. E., 2, 11, 48, 55, 66–70, 77

R

Retraction, vi, 47–61

S

Socio-linguistic, v, 2, 20, 76

N

Neanderthal, vi, 73–80 P

Phenomenalism, 60, 64, 65, 68

T

Theological lying, vi, 41, 49, 57 Toland, John, v, vi, 29–44, 52–54, 58, 62n1