Who Am I? Who Is She?: A Naturalistic, Holistic, Somatic Approach to Personal Identity 9783110320305, 9783110320046

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Gerard P. Montague Who Am I? Who Is She? A Naturalistic, Holistic Somatic, Approach to Personal Identity

Gerard P. Montague

Who Am I? Who Is She? A Naturalistic, Holistic, Somatic Approach to Personal Identity

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Contents

1

Quintessence, Aims and Structure …………………………. 1.1 General Introduction …………………………………… 1.2 Working Definitions ………………………………….. 1.3 Who Am I? Who Is She? ……………………………….. 1.4 Methodological Considerations …….………………….. 1.5 Structure of the Argument …………….………………. 1.6 Note on Orthography and Typography ………………… 1.7 Building Arches ………………………………………...

7 7 9 10 14 18 20 21

2

Self and Identity in Historical Context ………………..…. …. 2.1 Origins of Mind, Soul, Self and Identity ……………….. 2.2 Pre-History to Plato ……………………………….......... 2.3 Early Christian Dualism ………………………………… 2.4 The Middle Age and the Soul …………………………… 2.5 Renaissance and Reason: Descartes to Locke …..……… 2.6 Science Intervenes: Darwin to Freud …………………… 2.7 The Story so Far ………………………………………… 2.8 General Historical Inferences …………………………..

23 23 25 35 41 45 57 66 68

3

Dualism, Monism and the End of the Debate ……………… 3.1 Death of the Soul? …..………………………………….. 3.2 Predicate Dualism ………………………………………. 3.3 Property Dualism and the Mind-Body Problem ……….. 3.4 The Zombic Debate …………………………………….. 3.5 Two Classes of Dualism? And Monism? ………………. 3.6 Perspectives for Mind and Personal Identity ……………

73 73 79 81 84 99 101

4

Body, Brain and Mind ……………………………………...... 4.1 Embodiment …………………………………………….. 4.2 What the Mind Cannot Be …………………………….. 4.3 Things, Functions and Processes ……………………. … 4.4 Body, Mind and World …………………………………

103 103 109 118 123

4.5 4.6 4.7 4.8

What Do We Need the Body to Do? …………………… The Making of the Mind ……………………………….. Conscious and Unconscious Mind ……………………... ‘My’ Philosophy of Mind ……………………………….

132 139 153 158

Aspects of Personal Identity …………………………………. 5.1 Dimensions of the Debate ………………………………. 5.2 Conditions of Personhood – Dimension( A) …………… 5.3 Unity of Person – Dimension (B) ………………………. 5.4 The Meaning of Identity ………………………………… 5.5 Persistence of Person – Dimension (C) ………………… 5.6 Structure of Personality – Dimension (D) …………....... 5.7 The Body in Philosophy ………………………………… 5.8 Summing up on Personal Identity ……………………….

161 161 162 175 181 185 193 195 200

6

Some Reductionist Approaches ……………………………… 6.1 Aspects of Reductionism ……………………………….. 6.2 Psychological Continuity and Replication ……………… 6.3 Body Transplant and the Somatic Aspect ………………. 6.4 Further Reductionist Discussions ………………………. 6.5 Frankenstein’s Monster ………………………………… 6.6 Reflections on Reductionist Debate …………………….

203 203 206 217 223 225 226

7

Qualitative Aspects of Self and Identity…………………….. 7.1 Introductory Remark ……………………………………. 7.2 Constitution of the Self ……...………………………….. 7.3 Cultural Aspect of Identity ….………………………….. 7.4 Relating Self to Other …………………………………… 7.5 Memory, Continuity and Identity ……………………..... 7.6 Broader Aspects of Memory …………………………… 7.7 Additional Aspects of Continuity ………………………. 7.8 Phenomena of Identity ……………………………….....

233 233 234 238 241 243 250 252 253

5

8

The Narrative Approach ……………………………………… 8.1 Living a Life and Narrating a Life ………………………. 8.2 Narratives as Stories or Plots ……………………………. 8.3 Analytic Reconstruction of Narrative …………………… 8.4 Narrative Approach as Resolution and Solution ….…….. 8.5 Beginning and End of Personal Narrative ………………. 8.6 From a Narrative Approach to an Ethical Aspect……….. 8.7 Questioning Narrativity …………………………………. 8.8 From Narrativity to Meaning ……………………………. 8.9 Conclusions on Narrative ……………………………….

255 255 258 266 274 277 279 281 289 293

9

Holistic Identity in a Naturalistic World …………………… 9.1 Naturalistic, Holistic, Somatic Identity …………………. 9.2 The Core of Personal Identity …….……………………..

295 295 299

Appendix I: On Method ………………………………………………

301

Appendix II: The Problem of Philosophical Intuition ……………..

315

Bibliography ……………………………………………………………

325

Acknowledgements A Neo-Scholastic worldview was a commonplace in late 1950s Ireland, the Catholic island of my childhood. In that atmosphere, the most significant influence in my early intellectual development was that of my late uncle, Isaac Pimley; it was he who engaged me in Socratic dialogue, taught me the fundamentals of critical reflection and encouraged me not to be overimpressed by authorities in general, an attitude I maintain to this day. I owe him an immeasurable debt. After initial studies in science, there followed years spent in a philosophical wilderness, working in industry where practical ideas were in demand and unpractical ideas deplored; but of course I was learning all the time, for instance from many excellent colleagues, mostly chemists and engineers. With their rigorously scientific-empirical attitudes, they taught me a specific kind of scepticism. More fundamental doubts about things never ceased, however. Inspired by Wilfrid Sellars’ maxim that it is ‘the eye on the whole which distinguishes the philosophical enterprise,’ I ended my guest appearance in industry when I had the opportunity to do so and began full-time studies of philosophy and literature in Konstanz. My first significant teacher there was Professor Gereon Wolters, who initiated us into the skills of logical and semantic argumentation. I have never since overlooked the difference between the premise and the argument: too many philosophical arguments excel in their technical quality but fail to take into account that an argument from unsound premises comes to unsound conclusions. Right from the first semester of my formal studies, Professor Wolfgang Spohn expedited the necessary process of opening my mind to new ideas. To him is owed the necessary stimulation to question my own set of beliefs and to continue my philosophical studies right to the end. He has greatly contributed towards the development of this manuscript.

Courses and discussions with Professor of English Literature Aleida Assmann and members of her research team opened my eyes to a different approach towards philosophy in general, which shows that philosophy is not confined to the department of that name. Returning to the department, it was Dr. Michael Kühler who encouraged me to further develop the topic of personal identity. Dina Emundts delivered many helpful comments on the first version of this text, for which I am grateful. Apart from the representative few named, all of my teachers and fellow students, as well as a large number of students I have been teaching over the years, institutions, greatly contributed to the development of ideas and insights. ‘It’s not far from the bog that you were born’, is a favourite saying in my Irish homeland, an attitude to life and to the grounding of personal identity in the actual world which is echoed in my current Heimat in the Allgäu mountains of southern Germany. My gratitude is extended to family, friends and neighbours, who instruct me daily in the unwritten works of philosophy. In particular, my children Roland, Anna and Martin have shown me much that is significant in self and personal identity. And finally I thank my wife, Christine Montague. Her skills as a clinical psychologist have deeply informed and influenced my thinking in matters of self and identity. She took on the tedious task of correcting errors and the more obvious inconsistencies in this text and puts in an occasional personal appearance as my ‘in-house psychologist’. This work is warmly dedicated to Christine. In writing this text, it has been my intention to keep in view any informed but not necessarily expert scholar who is interested in the subject matter. He, or she, is my ideal reader, the person with whom I wish to share my views on self and personal identity.

7

Chapter One

Quintessence, Aims and Structure Holism is a convergence of various hypotheses, theories, beliefs, truths: even when one focuses on any one of these, the others have to help. W.V.O. Quine

1.1 General Introduction This Alpine hamlet where I live is not a good place to have doubts about personal identity. Many who live here were born in the village, as were their parents or grandparents before them. It is not infrequent that their children live here too, so that most of the villagers are securely enmeshed in a social network of family, neighbours and friends. Even if they were to have doubts, their trans-temporal identity could be confirmed by others who have seen them on every day of their lives, more or less; personal identity is not a matter of introspection only. To go to the village inn is to be instantly recognized as part of a community which embraces all the inhabitants of the village, in which each and every person has a specific role to play, sometimes self-assumed, frequently assigned to that person by others. The villagers interact with those of similar neighbouring villages, of course, as well as the great wide world outside. There are those who leave the village permanently, but most of those who have grown up in such a village still maintain the feeling of being grounded in one place, of having firm roots; they are less likely than others to have existential doubts on such matters as self and other.

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Who Am I? Who Is She?

Within that network of intersubjective or interpersonal relationships in the village, there is even a way in which you survive death: the villagers will maintain a concept of you in their minds and in their conversations, frequently for 20 or 30 years or more. Graves are cared for as long as is feasible and significant anniversaries of the deceased are celebrated, certainly within the family but mostly with neighbours too. This is not the way that many of us pass our lives in the 21st century. We tend to live in a mode of fluidity, an increasing mobility which involves multiple transgressions of boundaries, even during childhood. One set of grandparents live in the north, a second set is divorced, uncles and aunts are scattered east and west. Boundary transgressions relate not only to the kind of frontiers we draw on maps: whether we stay at home, travel or migrate, we are likely in our time to be confronted with an array of unfamiliar ideas, principles and values, religious and other beliefs which are strange to us. Such confrontations can lead to issues of choice, decision and identification seldom faced by our forefathers. It is largely through encounter with strange cultures that we gain conscious awareness of our own. To live in that virtual place which is the ‘global village’ is to be confronted with identity issues in a way that is specific to our time. The early 21st century has been characterized by masses of individuals worldwide, clamouring for attention via interactive media such as blogs, tubes, tweets, Facebook entries, homepages and the like, in a seemingly desperate urge to share their most intimate selves with persons they do not know. In consequence, identity has become a central topic, at least for the intellectually minded and mobile sections of the global community; it is impossible to open a newspaper nowadays without finding some reference to the theme. Personal identity has become a significant issue in sociology, politics, psychology, history, anthropology, literary and cultural studies and even in medicine. The main approach in this work will clearly be a philosophical one, an attempt to clarify central issues, concepts and terms related to identity, seen holistically. The aim is to define and describe what we are talking about when we refer to personhood and identity and to bring the various strands of the debate together. Given the volume of early 21st century discussion on the issue, no more than an essay-like approach can be

9 attempted in a single work. The agenda is largely theoretical in nature: it refers to what it means to be a person but not to the ethical side of the debate, the oughts of the matter, i.e. questions related to what it means to live a good or flourishing life. That side of the issue will require a second book.

1.2 Working Definitions Before commencing, it is necessary to give some preliminary working definitions, so that central terms can be used straight away. In speaking of ‘person’, the reference here is straightforwardly to a human individual, an approach in accord with ordinary usage. This brief definition will be extended and justified later, like many of the key terms in use here. The term ‘self’ is a more complex one, as it already encompasses the issue of personal identity: a person’s essential being that distinguishes them from others, especially considered as the object of introspection or reflexive action. (Oxford Dictionary of English, hereafter ODE). The working definition of ‘mind’ is also drawn from the same source: the element of a person that enables them to be aware of the world and their experiences, to think and to feel. In talking of ‘soul’ it is not always clear what we are talking about but the ODE distinguishes between two major usages. Primarily in a metaphysical context, in talking of ‘soul’ we are referring to the spiritual or immaterial part of human being or animal, regarded as immortal (ODE). In other contexts, we are more likely to be referring to a person’s moral or emotional nature or sense of identity (ODE). As the terms ‘person’ ‘self’, ‘mind’ and ‘soul’ are very much in general usage, their precise extension is never clear and some fuzziness will be unavoidable – or on occasion particularly desirable. ‘Identity’ is a term which will merit a section of its own: it will suffice here to distinguish between ‘qualitative identity’, in the sense that two teacups are the same in all of their qualities; and ‘numerical identity’, in the sense that this is the self-same cup I drank out of yesterday. The title of this book reflects the actual contents so that in discussing the aims it is useful to look at the individual aspects of the sub-title.

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Who Am I? Who Is She?

1.3 Who Am I? Who Is She? Who am I? Who is she? And what qualities do we implement? Formulating a theory of personal identity in the 21st century requires an inclusive attitude which incorporates the lives of persons of all nationalities and cultures, encompassing a time span over all seven ages of man from the new-born child to the aged and infirm and leaves no walk of life out of its considerations: butchers, bakers, hedonist millionaires and ascetic nuns are of equal significance. This point is made because much of the discussion on this issue – as well as on related topics – tends to be dominated by those who are the most erudite: they occasionally fall into the trap of extrapolating from men and women of their own kind to all of humanity, one result of which has been that mentalistic aspects of identity tend to be grossly over-emphasised at the expense of physicalistic aspects. And it must also be said that this extrapolation is mostly done by men: the vast majority of canonical philosophers are male. There is a further justification for this aspect of the title. One widespread approach to the topic of personal identity is to feature the psychological continuity of the person but, in taking this approach, one is frequently addressing the issue from a first-person perspective only. This seems to me to be too restricted an approach: after all, our identities are generally mirrored by the world around us and the matter of identity cannot just be one of privileged access for the individual alone. Identity has a third person perspective too, as will be argued in the course of this work. A Naturalistic Approach To define the term ‘metaphysics’ is to try to hit a moving target: the term is in a constant process of metamorphosis. It has changed its meaning over time, but also changes according to context. For some, the term refers simply to ‘first philosophy’, the principles or abstract concepts that we have about things. For others, the term ‘metaphysical’ refers to something we can characterize as the science of the world beyond nature, or in other words the immaterial world. But what do we term ‘immaterial’? Two ontologically different aspects come to mind. On the one hand there is the world of ideas and concepts: ideas are immaterial, to be sure, as are

11 mathematical formulae and the like. On the other hand, in its metaphysical speculations humankind has also conceived of another kind of immaterial world, the one inhabited by gods, daemons, immortal souls and other immaterial spirits, and this kind of immaterial world belongs to the very oldest of our beliefs, as will be shown in the historical section. The term ‘metaphysical’ (‘beyond nature’) has in the past also been used to refer to this kind of immaterial or supernatural world. In using the term ‘naturalistic’, the reference here is to the empirical world as we know it, as well as to the sum total of the ideas of the world that we have, ultimately the laws and formulae of physics. It excludes such metaphysical ideas and concepts as immortal souls, or a Cartesian res cogitans; after a brief exploration of the boundary conditions, in particular in the historical section, my scope of enquiry is in that sense limited to the physical or natural world, plus our ideas of that natural world. Holistic View Philosophers, not just Analytic philosophers, have a natural propensity to analyse, to structure their thoughts and concepts in relatively straightforward terms, and to relate them in as far as possible to a limited number of criteria or aspects. It follows that many positions on the topic of identity have been developed along reductionist lines. Personal identity is a matter of the X-aspect or to the Y-aspect of a person, it is frequently argued. It is my intention to show that such a reductionist approach to the topic is to be rejected: the identity of a person is only to be assessed in relation to all aspects of the person, seen holistically. To argue the point by analogy: the ‘self’ or ‘identity’ of a great work of art such as Leonardo’s Last Supper cannot be straightforwardly related to the actual pigments used, or to the plaster it is painted on, or to the picture’s composition, or to the scene depicted, or to the intention of the painter or to any other individual aspect. Although it is a perfectly valid procedure for experts to look at its various aspects in detail, it is the image as a whole which impacts on us. At the moment at which the mural is taken in, we don’t perceive the plaster or the pigments; instead, we take in the totality of the image, including its historical, spatial and other contexts. In the same way,

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personal identity is a matter of perceiving the person or the self as a whole, and not of some aspect of the person or self. Somatic Aspect For most of our ancestors, our true self was our soul; but it is now more than sixty years since Gilbert Ryle ridiculed the ‘ghost-in-the-machine’ anthropological concept. So all that is left is our bodies and it is with our bodies that we think, act, speak and generally perform in the world. Nevertheless, discussions with others on aspects of this book have shown that the uncompromisingly somatic hypothesis is the hardest aspect to get across, an interesting meta-philosophical insight in itself. In reading 20th century (Analytic) philosophy, even post-Ryle, one gets an inkling as to why this is so: there is still a tendency to refer to mind and body as if they were entities which can be in some sense seen separately, or even separated. But how could they be, within a substance-monistic paradigm? There is no thing in the naturalistic world, apart from our biological selves. There is nothing to be separated off. Many who have on the surface accepted the demise of the substancedualistic concept still tend to maintain some kind of what is vaguely termed ‘non-Cartesian’ body-mind dualism. If they do so explicitly, they at least have a defined position, but there are many who seem to do so implicitly, indicating perhaps that they have failed to make the kind of gestalt switch which is required to transgress on from one paradigm to another – this point will be argued extensively later. I will be arguing that the mind transcends our mere physical natures; that is a position that is fully in accord with the naturalistic position given above, i.e. that the world is the totality not just of things but of ideas. To infer from this that ‘the mind’ can in any sense be separated from ‘the body’ is to talk nonsense: the mind can no more be separated from the body than ‘the greenness’ can be separated from ‘the grass’. ‘Greenness’ cannot exist independently of green things, and specific minds cannot exist independently of their specific bodies. The term ‘psychosomatic,’ currently popular in medical science, can be used to further illustrate this point. There is a common fallacy of breaking the term down into its constituent parts, i.e. to speak of the

13 influence of the mind on the body or the body on the mind. Conceptually, this is precisely the error: the term ‘psychosomatic’ is not to be broken down into two constituents. ‘Psychosomatic’ means exactly what it implies, one term, one concept, and not the combination of ‘psycho’ plus ‘somatic.’ This is not to claim, as some philosophers have done, that ‘mental states’ do not exist, or that they can in some straightforward way be reduced to ‘brain states’. Nevertheless, when brain states are absent, there are no mind states. The somatic approach here means that we are speaking of just one thing, the body. How it can come about that mental states can transcend mere body or brain states will be explicated in general terms of emergence. No precise theory of emergence will be offered however; on the one hand, that is beyond the scope of this work and on the other, it would be premature to do so. There is considerable work-inprogress on the matter. Nor is personhood and personal identity to be related to one part of the body. Some philosophers have merrily discussed ‘brain transplants’ – and in doing so, they imagine that they are discussing ‘mind transplants’. They are committing an over-obvious category error: ‘brains’ are not ‘minds’ and what they are discussing is the transplantation of body parts, nothing more, nothing less. A brain transplant participates in the paradigm of transplant surgery: in the same context we can talk about heart transplants, or kidney transplants. In transplanting our main neurological organ (fortunately just on paper) such philosophers will be grievously affecting the minds of the persons thus manipulated but they will not be transplanting the mind. The mind, being outside of materialistic space-time coordinates in any straightforward sense, as will be argued, cannot be ‘transplanted’ by the mere transfer of specific organs which contribute to mind processes. The somatic approach in this book has a further aspect: once we settle firmly on the hypothesis that we are embodied entities in a naturalistic world, the body takes on an importance in itself, one it didn’t have in a metaphysical concept of a ‘supernatural’ soul which mainly encompassed our personhood. We need our bodies to do all of the things which we do, be it eating, sleeping, playing football, digging the garden, or reading and writing philosophy. People sometimes dance without any ulterior purpose but just for the sake of dancing, of experiencing the joy of embodiment in

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the material world. If all else failed, there might be a few, very few, who would be happy to live on in the form of a disembodied brain. But, for most of us, life without a body would be a poor outlook, one that we would prefer not to experience. In a monistic world, we cannot separate off bodies from souls: our memories are embodied, in a very literal sense, and not just in our brains as such, as will be shown. Although it has been conceptually attempted, it will be shown that it is meaningless to think of one’s self embodied in another’s body. Because we are one, body and mind constitute one human entity. It is neither the case that the mind has its body nor that the body has its mind. Having dealt with such issues, largely in an Analytic vein, there will be a shift of focus to some phenomenological aspects, in particular the selfreflective aspects of personhood and the way in which we both live our narratives and reflect on our narratives. That is the core concept of self and identity in this work, the one that brings all the other aspects of self and identity together. It is the unitary person, continuous in time, which is the central aspect of personal identity. This adequately defines the agenda. It is now time to take a look at methodological considerations.

1.4 Methodological Considerations There’s meaning in method, which is why the methodological approach is outlined here. A more detailed account of some methodological aspects is given in appendices I-II. Generally speaking, the approach will be pragmatic and eclectic, taking into account as many aspects of issues related to personhood and personal identity as possible. With regret do I leave aside approaches in Eastern philosophies: taking a more holistic approach to such themes, they might offer many helpful ideas but one must be wary of dealing superficially with schools of philosophy one is not familiar with. The tenor throughout will be that of Analytic philosophy, which is, so to speak, my home base. Nevertheless, texts and insights of the Continental approach will be also be availed of from time to time. Self and identity are vague notions that do not always allow of a precise, formal

15 and analytic approach and there is much to be gained by looking over the fence and into the fields of contrasting schools of philosophy. Philosophy is not empirical science, to be sure, but there have been significant empirical discoveries in the past 150 years or more which must be taken into consideration in this largely pragmatic approach to self and identity: Evolutionary theory for instance, or the Freudian theory of the subconscious, or more general developments in empirical psychology and sociology, two sciences which have only relatively recently departed from the fold of philosophy. One must be cautious about discussing neurological or other empirical scientific matters in a dilettante way. Eric Turkheimer makes a very useful distinction between what he describes as weak biologism, i.e. the straightforward philosophical awareness that we are biological entities, the position of substance monism; and what he calls strong biologism, i.e. the explication in detail of higher level phenomena in terms of the lower level biological processes, which is a matter for the biosciences and beyond the disciplinary scope of philosophy1. Fallacies of Reductionism In this context, it is necessary to address the issue of reductionism. There is a natural tendency among Analytic philosophers to analyse and to reduce, and frequently to reduce to the max. There are philosophers who conceptually reduce mentalistic states to the mere ‘firing of neurons’, for instance. But there are at least two reasons as to why the reductionist process can be taken too far. The first is that an inappropriate level of reduction can lead to the loss of two aspects which are increasingly a matter of attention in the empirical sciences: those of scalar problems and of emergence. Properties which might emerge from systems when seen as a whole frequently fail to manifest themselves when the system is broken down into its individual components. The second reason is best given by example. The systems analyst, faced with a programming error, will not start to figure out what is going on between the millions of transistors in

1

Turkheimer, Eric. “Heritability and Biological Explanation.” Psychological Review 1998, vol. 105, No.4, 782-791.

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the microprocessor, a procedure which would be entirely unhelpful to her. Instead, she will apply her corrections to the higher level programme. Scientists reduce to whatever level of reduction is appropriate and meaningful in their own particular field. And that is what philosophers should do too. I will be arguing on the basis that ‘mind’ and ‘personal identity’ are ultimately irreducible concepts; they cannot be reduced to something else without loss of reference and meaning. Within the framework of Analytic philosophy, I have considerable sympathy with ordinary language philosophy, following Wittgenstein’s general dictum that “the meaning of a word is its use in the language.” (Wittgenstein, PU 43). In order to steer as close as possible to ordinary language usage, the primary source for definitions is the Oxford Dictionary of English, revised edition 2010. Dictionary quotations are given in italics. This work reflects current English usage as the editors avail of the Oxford English Corpus, a database of two billion words which mirrors 21st century English as an international language. In maintaining this database, practically all sources of language usage, from the most trivial to the most erudite, are taken into account. This dictionary is also normative for current usage, as most writers in British English have a copy on their desks. From time to time, cross-reference will be made to the online version of Webster, the American standard. Mostly, there is little difference between the two sources. Primacy of Text Asked for an interpretation of his novel Anna Karenina, Tolstoy famously replied that in order to give such an interpretation, he would have to write the same novel all over again. There are truths to be expressed about the lives of men and women that cannot be summarized in straightforward terms of rational causes, effects and probabilities. In contrast to those who argue for the precision of logic or other formal languages, I am arguing here that the text per se does matter. There are many instances in which fuzziness is an advantage: the law of the excluded third in classical logic makes it difficult to deal with complex truths and the more modern forms of logic negotiate an uneasy pathway around such complexities.

17 Aspects of methodology of particular relevance in the identity debate are the thorny and related issues of intuition and thought experiments. Intuition and ‘Thought Experiments’ It is a frequent line of argument, a methodology which we can trace back to Socratic dialogue, to set up so-called ‘thought experiments’ and then appeal to our ‘intuitions’ in interpreting those thought experiments. Appendix II will deal with the matter of intuition in greater detail and it will suffice to say here that the epistemic status of intuitions is controversial. For some, an intuition is some kind of direct access to ‘deeper’ truths; for others, ‘intuition’ is just another word for ‘opinion’. Our intuitions are not incorrigible, nor are they analytically sound premises for argumentation: their argumentative power is weak. As pragmatic tools, they can be of value in discussing and understanding the nature of things and in many cases we simply have no option but to avail of our intuitions – the “argument from need”. For Daniel Dennett, ‘thought experiments’ are ‘intuition pumps’: they are stories which pump an intuition, rather than arguments which argue a conclusion. Scientists model experiments in their minds’ eyes before carrying them through, much as armchair philosophers might work their way systematically through a problem, while keeping an actual empirical situation in mind. And such scientific modelling is of considerable value, for instance in excluding unlikely outcomes without carrying out the entire range of conceivable empirical experiments. But the modelling of an experiment is not the experiment per se. And in fact ‘thought experiments’ do not fulfil the conditions for being experiments at all, as the essential empirical step is missing. They are allegories, analogies or models of experiments. Some empirical experiments, frequently the most significant ones, have outcomes which are entirely unexpected and would not have been conceived of by the experimenter on the basis of his (erroneous or incomplete) hypothesis alone; the empirical world can behave quite differently than our theories of the world lead us to expect. Such experiments show up errors in current theory and open possibilities of

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developing a new theoretical basis. A ‘thought experiment’ cannot lead to such empirical surprises. Particularly problematic is the combination of science fiction ‘thought experiments’ with appeals to intuition as a method of argument, or even proof. Within the earthly sphere my intuitions might work well enough but when I am teletransported to Mars, I find myself in regions in which my intuitions are highly confused; ultimately, anything goes. In dealing with a thought experiment, I will follow the advice given by Dennett and his coauthor Douglas Hofstadter: “vary it, turn it over, examine it from all angles, and different settings and conditions, just to make sure you are not taken in by illusions of causation.”2 I will also carry out some ‘thought experiments’ myself. I prefer to call them ‘mindgames’, however. ‘Game’ is a perfectly respectable term which is seriously used in many disciplinary fields, for learning or modelling processes. Before closing this introduction, the structure of the argument will be broadly outlined.

1.5 Structure of the Argument Apart this introduction and my conclusions at the end, this book is divided into eight main thematic chapters. Chapter two is an extensive one on concepts of self and identity in history. History is always important, in my view, but in this particular context it is even more relevant than usual because many of the central concepts are products of a long historical and cultural development. Most of our ideas on self and identity can be traced back to religious sources, a side of the debate that we should be consciously aware of. Preliminary to modifying our ideas, or shifting our paradigms, it is necessary to know how they came about in the first place. The historical section will show how the substance dualistic paradigm arose and how it has tended to permeate the debate in an endurable way right into our own times. History also shows us significant recent shifts in our anthropological knowledge base, in particular the revolutions initiated

2

Quoted in: Dennett, Daniel C. Sweet Dreams. Philosophical Obstacles to a Science of Consciousness. Cambridge Mass. MIT Press, 2006. 104.

19 by Darwin and Freud. No theory of personal identity can ignore such shifts. Chapter three is a pivotal one in which it is argued that we should finally end the monism-dualism debate, which seems to have survived various onslaughts yet still has a kind of residual existence, mostly in considerably less precise form than that devised by Descartes. Coming down firmly on the side of monism, or naturalism, is a gestalt switch or paradigmatic shift which is a key premise for the further development of the position to be developed here: without such a shift, the debate on personhood and identity is oriented towards historical positions rather than towards a view which is in accord with current anthropology. Having done that preliminary work, Chapter four will be devoted to the clarification of some central terms in the debate, in particular the terms body, brain and mind, the relationships between the underlying concepts and what it means in general to be embodied in the world. This is in a sense a further development of the monistic position. The topics of self and personhood will be more directly addressed in Chapter five. This chapter clarifies the central issues of this work: the aspects of personhood to be dealt with, the nature of personhood as such and the relevant parameters for a meaningful discussion of identity and personal identity. Chapter six is a critical review of some common positions and discussions within Analytic philosophy, largely the extensive reductionist neo-Lockean debate initiated by Derek Parfit and others on the matter of personal identity. It will be argued that there are fatal weaknesses in this debate. In following Locke, Parfit fails to differentiate between qualitative and numerical identity; furthermore, the theory of memory which underlies his position is far from adequate. Dealing with the canonical neo-Lockean debate will clear the way for more convincing positions on identity and memory. The following Chapter seven negotiates a transition towards a more descriptive approach to the central themes of this work: reductionist and analytic approaches to personal identity are ultimately unfruitful and therefore a different kind of debate is called for, one that addresses the person as a moral entity and as a living being in the sense of sameness, which always stands in relation to other persons. This chapter also encompasses a more thorough discourse

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on concepts of memory and psychological continuity than is frequently found in the philosophical literature, showing that, against the background knowledge of our time, the issue of psychological continuity embraces considerably more dimensions than those addressed in the neo-Lockean tradition. This is followed by the penultimate Chapter eight on narrative identity, a core chapter which brings together all aspects of self and identity in a holistic way and resolves the paradoxes of identity previously encountered. Narrative is a significant or even essential aspect of identity, but not to be seen as a theory of personal identity per se. The final Chapter nine is a summary of inferences and conclusions, a drawing together of the various aspects of my holistic approach to personal identity. There will be a brief outlook of themes for further investigation. Of the two appendices, the first addresses general methodological issues in a more detailed way and the second tries to clarify the vexing issue of ‘philosophical intuition’.

1.6 Note on Orthography and Typography There are few universally accepted conventions in English so I have had to choose from the various palates offered. My spelling is (mostly) English standard usage. When referring to a unique and specific thing or concept such as ‘Analytic philosophy’, capitalization will be used as shown but not when referring to the procedure of being ‘analytic’ in general. The same goes for ‘Utilitarian’ as a system of ethics, which is capitalized, but not ‘utilitarian’ as a principle. When East or West (or Eastern or Western) are named or contrasted as traditions, they are capitalized, but not when used as geographical terms. Some ambiguity is inevitable: ‘Eastern’ refers in some contexts to Asia, as in ‘Eastern philosophy’. In others it refers to the heritage of the Eastern and Western (Roman) Empires, as in ‘Eastern churches’. The Christian Church, when seen as one, is ‘the Church’, other churches are just ‘churches’. Heaven is ‘Heaven’ when the specific Christian version is referred to, our other heavens are just ‘heavens’. Following recommended convention, when familiar imported terms such as ‘zeitgeist’ are used, they will not be italicized. Unfamiliar imported

21 terms or phrases such as ‘Vernunft’ will be italicized, at least when they are first used. Effort will be made to avoid gender bias. That is not just a matter of politeness but also an application of the philosophical principle pursued here of being inclusive and holistic. Citations are generally in accord with the Chicago Manual of Style. The default rule is that texts should be clearly identifiable. I usually note the date of the issue actually referred to, which might of course be long past the date of first publication. The device of indenting and writing in italics is used not for quotations but for self-composed texts, stories and the like whether veridical or fictional, examples which are used for purposes of demonstration. They are not an integral part of the actual philosophical text but instead play a role similar to that of illustrations in books. Before moving on, there will be one final word on the generally holistic approach being taken here.

1.7 Building Arches This work is constructed as an arch. Arches are such that they only maintain their stability when complete, when no element is missing. This point is explicitly made because I am writing in the tradition of Analytic philosophy, where there is an understandable tendency is to analyse, to reduce to the parts, to turn over each stone, one at a time and examine it individually. That process is inevitable and each stone in turn should be able to withstand critical examination. Nevertheless, the argument as a whole only stands up when taken in holistically. The central guiding principle of this paper will be a maxim of Wilfrid Sellars: The aim of philosophy, abstractly formulated, is to understand how things in the broadest possible sense of the term hang together in the broadest possible sense of the term. Under ‘things in the broadest possible sense’ I include such radically different items as not only ‘cabbages and kings’, but numbers and duties, possibilities and finger snaps, aesthetic experience and death. To achieve success in philosophy would be, to use a contemporary turn of phrase, to ‘know one’s way around’ with respect to all these things, not in that unreflective way in which the centipede of the story knew its way around before it faced the question, ‘how do I walk?’, but in that reflective way which means that no intellectual holds are

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barred… it is therefore ‘the eye on the whole’ which distinguishes the philosophical enterprise. [My italics]3

All knowledge is one. Within this vast field of study, the aim is to create a detailed map which shows us the structure and outline of a theory of selfhood and personal identity which is adequate to our times, rather than examining every tree in the terrain. Maps are not the terrain itself of course, but maps present their own specific advantages, giving us an overview not always available when standing in the forest. That said, the next chapter will begin the argument proper and will deal with self, soul and personal identity in history.

3

Sellars, Wilfrid. “Philosophy and the Scientific Image of Man”, in: Colodny, Robert. Frontiers of Science and Philosophy. Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1962.

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Chapter Two

Self and Identity in Historical Context Those who cannot remember the past are doomed to repeat it. George Santayana History is more or less bunk. Henry Ford

2.1 Origins of Mind, Soul, Self and Identity What is ‘mind’? The meaning of this term is vague, so much so that the German language doesn’t even offer an equivalent. One must take one’s pick of a range of semi-synonyms, the most appropriate of which are Geist, Seele or Psyche. But none of these terms is in all contexts synonymous. We have already seen the dictionary definition of mind as the element of a person that enables them to be aware of the world and their experiences, to think, and to feel; the faculty of consciousness and thought. And that is not all, as further related definitions follow. The German term for the mindbody problem is Leib-Seele Problem: this is confusing because in some contexts Seele translates into mind, but in others more appropriately into soul. But ‘mind’ and ‘soul’ are not always comfortable synonyms. Extensionally, there have been many versions of what a soul might be: is it a res cogitans, somehow attached to the body? In that context, it might be seen as synonymous with ‘mind’. Or is it a pure spirit created by God, perhaps existing neither in time nor space? In that sense, it is nonsynonymous with mind. Or is it something more banal: just the emotional

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part or function of our brain? All of these solutions have been offered. Nor do we have an unequivocal intensional concept of soul: the English soul has a meaning in a religious context which is different from the meaning of the German Seele in a philosophical context, although Seele is also used in a religious context. In short, these terms are potential and actual sources of confusion. There are similar problems in relation to such terms as ‘self’ (Das Ich? – but not to be confused with the Freudian Ich) or ‘personal identity’, which, historically speaking, are closely related to mind-body concepts. Is the ‘self’ attached to the body, or is it attached to the soul? And does ‘personal identity’ relate to body, or soul, or mind, or some combination of these? There are no straightforward answers to such crucial issues of definition. The first aim in this historical review is to show how the terms evolved in history, and what they might have meant in those historical contexts; historical developments arguably still influence or even dominate our understanding of these terms today. A second and related aim will be to show how the dualistic mind-body paradigm has deeply infused our history of soul and self and is therefore a paradigm which is difficult to step out of. And the third main goal is to show the role that cultural developments have played in the development of modern humankind. In speaking of ‘culture’ my reference is not to the arts as such; the term is used in accord with the second dictionary definition of culture as the ideas, customs and social behaviour of a particular people or society (ODE).4 Following a precedent set by Bertrand Russell and others, this historical review will be interpretative in nature and never merely an account. Some of the generalizations will be too sweeping to be true in any narrow sense; it is the broad historical patterns that will be developed here, preparatory to dealing with self and identity more directly. Rather than attempting a continuous narrative, five significant historic epochs will be highlighted and subjected to critical review and interpretation: • Pre-history to Plato 4

Usage of the term ‘Kultur’ in German is significantly different from that of its linguistic false friend, the English term ‘culture’. While the English concept may refer to economics, technology, sports, politics and so on, the German concept of Kultur refers more specifically to intellectual, artistic and religious facts. The term is used here in the English sense. (Watson 2010.)

25 • Early Christian dualism • The Middle Age and the soul • Renaissance and reason: Descartes and Locke • Science intervenes: Darwin to Freud The chapter will close with a brief introduction to twentieth century thinking on the matter. Philosophising per se is older than any disciplinary tradition of philosophy and it is at the very earliest stages of human development that the review commences. Given the dearth of hard evidence, it will be necessary to approach the pre-historical period in a spirit of mythos.

2.2 Pre-History to Plato How old is humankind? Paleo-anthropological findings suggest that our immediate ancestors were walking the planet considerably more than one million years ago and that anatomically modern man (Homo sapiens sapiens) has existed for around 200,000 years or so – the precise figure is less significant in this context than the order of magnitude. At the very latest, men and women who were in all salient aspects anatomically identical to ourselves were hunting the savannah around 100,000 years ago. The evidence is that the development of culturally and behaviourally modern man was not synchronous with the evolution of anatomically modern man, however. Even if we have remained somatically largely unchanged over a period of around 100 millennia, research suggests that early exemplars of humankind were not au fait with language as we understand the term today; the kind of language which forms the basis for abstract reasoning and the use of symbolism in memory and cultural expression. If anatomical and cultural development had been perfectly in accord with one another, it would be hard to explain why an early man or woman had not invented the radio ninety nine thousand years ago, or walked the Moon soon after that. After all, their brains were structurally identical to our own and, once the necessary thought processes have been initiated, it doesn't take tens of thousands of years of cognitive effort to develop rocket science. What was lacking, it is argued here, was the necessary cultural background, or heritage of ideas and concepts. In short,

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there is ample reason for believing that cultural evolution is out of synchronisation with biological anatomical evolution.5 Such an idea of a cultural evolution was captured in the words of noted biologist Peter Medawar in 1977: Human beings owe their biological supremacy to the possession of a form of inheritance quite unlike that of other animals: exogenetic or exosomatic heredity. In that form of heredity information is transmitted from one generation to the next through non-genetic channels – by word of mouth, for example, and by other forms of indoctrination; in general, by the entire apparatus of culture.6

Medawar’s is a significant idea which coincides, from a scientific point of view, with much of what cultural theorists have been exploring. Some, including Richard Dawkins and Daniel Dennett, have used the idea expressed by Medawar to sketch out a theory of ‘memes’, items of information which self-propagate in a way roughly analogous to the propagation of genes. The meme theory is controversial and will not be further developed here but some form of cultural evolution, not linearly linked to anatomical or somatic evolution, is consonant with evolutionary theory in general. Cultural adaptation differs in significant ways from biological adaptation, which is innate and irreversible except over long periods of time. Cultural adaptation can be freely transferred from adult to adult, in the form of the passing on of knowledge and experience. An example is given by the wheel, the discovery of which is generally dated to around 3000 BC in Europe. This technology expanded contagiously in Europe and Asia and its use was soon standard all over the Eurasian continent; but the wheel was not discovered in the generally highly developed but noncontiguous populations of the Americas until around 4,000 years later, and then not in its full functionality of wheel and axle (Bronowski 1973). Cultural adaptation enables a short-term response to changing

5

Biological evolution might be seen to encompass cultural evolution, if culture is in some way a product of our biological existence. Hence the use of the term ‘anatomical’ evolution, which is more specific. 6 Quoted in: Dennett, Daniel C. Darwin’s Dangerous Idea. Evolution and the Meaning of Life. London: Penguin, 1996. 342.

27 environmental factors such as climate or food supply, whereas biological adaptation requires a long-term process of adaptation. In case of climate change, for instance, it takes many generations for a species to develop protection against cold but humankind can learn instantly from a neighbouring population to slay animals and make use of their fur. The effect is such that, once the process commences, cultural development tends to grow exponentially. Which phases of prehistoric human development were culturally the most significant? Earliest findings suggest that ritual burial is around 100,000 years old. That is evidence for the incipience of the cultish behaviour which is uniquely human; some animals fashion tools but we know of no animal which indulges in ritualistic behaviour. There was no significant developmental step that we can discern over a period of millennia after that, although reservations must be made due to our limited possibilities of reconstructing the past: in contrast to somatic evolution, behaviour per se leaves no direct fossilised evidence. Cultural matters seem to have been gestating, however, culminating in what seems to have been a leap forward in cultural development around 50,000 years ago. This explosion in the scope of human thought and behaviour over a short period is not explicable in purely biological terms but it is likely to have occurred in some interactive or iterative relationship to changes in the physical environment, in particular the climate. Perhaps it this period which is to be seen as the conception phase of behaviourally or culturally modern humankind, tens of millennia after the somatic evolution of Homo sapiens sapiens. Earliest cave paintings are dated to considerably later, around 30,000 years ago, suggesting a very slow development process. In terms of the final developmental stages in the evolution of culture and behaviour, it is estimated that the transition from a nomadic to an agricultural way of life took place about 12,000 years ago, leading to a fundamental shift in the way that humans structured their lives, made use of language, and in consequence organised their thinking. This occurred synchronously with the technological developments of the Neolithic age, leading to the invention and use of the more sophisticated tools which were instrumental in ensuring everyday survival for larger population

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concentrations.7 Progression from a largely agricultural to an urban-centred culture was but an instant on the anatomical-evolutionary timescale but an extended process on the much shorter cultural time scale; the first urban cultures emerged around 5000 BC and a few further millennia saw the progression from those cultures to our own age of science, technology and space travel. Like most of our predecessors, we have a tendency to see our own age as the end of time but of course evolutionary processes are on-going, both anatomically and culturally. Our descendants’ perception of our current culture will likely be quite different to our own. The Emergence of ‘Mind’ and the Birth of Dualism Given that pre-history suggests a bifurcation between anatomical evolution and cultural evolution: if we see the mind as a complex concept, a straightforward equation along the lines that ‘mind’ and ‘brain’ are equivalent, and evolved in ways which are identical or at least parallel, just won’t do – although such inferences have frequently been made, and are still being made in our own time. We have already seen that human culture and therefore thinking evolved in a way which was not synchronous with the development of the brain as such. (In the later section on evolution, we will see how the biologist and philosopher Alfred R. Wallace expressed this idea). It seems likely that the birth of culturally modern humankind was the historical moment at which not just mind itself, but some vague theory or concept of the existence of a ‘mind-aspect’ began to emerge, tens of thousands of years later than the anatomical emergence of the modern brain.8 In conjunction with the emergence of a proto-concept of mind, there is evidence for speculation among our early ancestors concerning the 7

An essential contributory factor was the emergence of wheat in its pre-modern form, as a product of the spontaneous hybridization of grasses in the Fertile Crescent of western Asia and elsewhere (Bronowski 1973). 8 The term ‘theory of mind’, as used by psychologists, relates to an ability to realize that there are other minds; i.e., the realization that other persons might hold a different view of the world than one’s own. It is a significant concept and developmental step which will be discussed in detail in Chapter four.

29 separability of mind and body; perhaps one should historically better refer to soul and body.9 A theory of substance dualism does not necessarily follow out of a concept of mind: the mind might be seen as function of complex body processes, for instance. But ancient humankind had no notion of such complex and ‘invisible’ body processes. The archaeological and early historical evidence suggests that our ancestors did indeed infer some theory of ‘substance dualism’. The term is used here anachronistically but substance dualism as such belongs to the oldest of all our cultural beliefs. Is there specific evidence for this claim? Ritual burial was frequently in the form of burying the dead together with valuables, weapons and foodstuffs, we assume for the journey ahead. Such customs cannot be dismissed as ‘mere mythology’: from the standpoint of our earliest ancestors, ‘truth’ was not just a matter of logos, but also of muthos, or mythos, to use the terminology of the Greeks. We can associate the Greek term logos with the idea of words and rationality, whereas mythos stood for the allegorical or imaginative access to things which were otherwise epistemically inaccessible. For the early Greeks at least, logos and mythos stood side-by-side in their quest for knowledge. Thousands of years ago, the decay of the body after death must have been as obvious to our ancestors as it is to us today but they did not dispose of the dead unceremoniously, at least not in the case of high-status individuals. As time went on, burial rights became more and more elaborate, reflecting the transition from a nomadic to a settled way of life. The most plausible inference is that they held some kind of a belief in postmortem continuation of personhood. Given that the body decays to dust, this invokes the concept of an invisible something, a self, or entity, or soul, which becomes separated from the decaying body at or around the moment of death. Once it had originated, the concept of ‘soul’, as a contrastive term to ‘body’ and separable from the body, was to have a long history ahead of it. Moving on from necessarily vague archaeological evidence, such concepts find expression in some of the earliest known texts which reflect our cultural ancestry, for instance the survival of bodily death as expressed 9

I will attempt to use the terms in ways they might have been used contemporaneously and appeal to the reader to accept a degree of ambiguity.

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in the works of Homer, tentatively dated to around the 9th century BC. In contrast to the Christian concepts of soul and self we will encounter later, the ancient tradition saw the self as centred in the body rather than in the soul: A human soul, or psyche, survived after death, but this survival was not an attractive one. For the Homeric heroes, the true ‘self’ was the body and the good life was closely tied with it. What good was survival in a form that could not enjoy feasting, combat, human love, sex, comradeship? Death was separation from these, leaving the soul in a weak, witless state – a shadow, a dream, smoke, a twittering bat. Only the gods had a better sort of immortality but not in the sense that they survived death, for they never died.10

This concept is echoed in our current usage of the English word ‘shade’ to signify a ghost, or disembodied entity. If one supposes the existence of some non-physical thing which survives death, it is plausible to infer that there must be some kind of alternative world, or underworld, inhabited by the spirits or souls of the dead. After all, the post-mortem journey had to be to some place, whether actual or metaphysical. It follows that some form of ‘soul-body dualism’ was associated with the proto-religious visions and beliefs of our pre-historic and earliest historic ancestors, at least in the Western cultural tradition. An example of this is given by Odysseus’ encounter with the spirit of his mother: And I, my mind in turmoil, how I longed To embrace my mother’s spirit, dead as she was! Three times I rushed toward her, desperate to hold her, Three times she fluttered through my fingers, sifting away Like a shadow, dissolving like a dream and each time The grief cut to the heart…11

In this instance, the ‘spirit’ of Odysseus’ mother appears to be immaterial but that is not necessarily the case: in pre-Classical Greece and also in some Eastern traditions, theories were developed of coarse matter and fine matter which were capable of interacting in limited ways. Bodies consisted 10

Ferguson, Kitty. Pythagoras. His Lives and the Legacy of a Rational Universe. London: Icon, 2010. 49. 11 Homer, trans. Robert Fagles. The Odyssey. London: Penguin, 1996. 256.

31 of coarse matter, and souls, or spirits, consisted of fine matter invisible to most of us, but capable in principle of interacting with coarse matter. A coarse matter/fine matter paradigm is a substance-dualistic model which differs in its realization but not in its core principle from alternative substance-dualistic concepts. The theory of coarse and fine matter has a significant advantage: other theories of substance dualism face the problem of how interaction occurs between matter and non-matter, but this problem does not arise within a coarse matter/fine matter paradigm, which allows of a limited degree of interaction between the two varieties of matter.12 An Alternative Concept: the Emergence of Body It is not easy to reconstruct the thoughts of our most ancient intellectual ancestors; one of those who have gone to great efforts to do so is Brooke Holmes. His approach is mainly to analyse the use of language in ancient Greece and see what we can infer about their thinking. Mirroring my interpretation of the emergence of mind, Holmes argues the other way around: that it was the idea of the physical body which emerged from a more general concept of personhood: The idea that “the body” might not be given may seem strange. After all, the body would seem to have a good claim on always just being there. This, anyway, has long been the contention of those sceptical of Bruno Snell’s striking claim that Homer does not have a concept of the unified, living body … (somă, on the few occasions that it does appear, is reserved for corpses). Others, however, have thought that Snell is on to something important. When we speak of “the body”, we imply that there is something of us that is not body: the person, the soul, or the mind. That we are not simply our bodies is a point that Socrates makes in Alcibiades I, probably one of Plato’s earliest works, when he gets Alcibiades to agree that, because the somă cannot use or rule itself, it must have a user and a ruler. Socrates calls this user and ruler psukhē and equates it with the person (130a1-c6). In the Homeric poems, though, we find no such duality. It is true that 12

Many sources, primarily: Martin, Raymond and John Barresi. The Rise and Fall of Soul and Self. An Intellectual History of Personal Identity. New York: Columbia University Press, 2006. Theories of fine matter were discussed and rejected by the early Christian Church and they have gone out of fashion in Western philosophy. Such theories still abound in the world of esotericism, as well as in many Eastern religions – see the bookshelves in the relevant section of any large bookshop.

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at the moment of death the hero splits into a corpse and a psukhē. Even then, however, the psukhē is merely a wraith that disappears to Hades, while the heroes themselves are said to remain on the battlefield.13

Any reconstruction of ancient thinking must remain tentative; to discuss such matters in detail would be to open up a debate which is not directly relevant here.14 In the given context, the concept of body emerging is complementary to the idea of soul emerging so that there is no conceptual dispute to be resolved between the two approaches. Whether it is the soul that emerges or the body that emerges, what comes about in both cases is the concept of dualism. So far, my deliberations have been highly speculative; in a sense I have been giving my own mythos-interpretation of mythological ideas in pre-history. From now on, some harder evidence can be offered. Formalisation of Myths and Beliefs - Plato In ancient Greece, the era of mythological ideas of body and soul gave way to the formalized thinking of the classical era from around 500 BC onwards and dualism became the most widely held position within Western philosophy, right from its very inception. The Platonic version is first seen in the above reference to Alcibiades and is summarized by Martin and Barresi as follows: In Plato’s view, the soul is what a person essentially is. Its simplicity ensures both personal survival of bodily death and each person’s ‘pre-existence’ prior to incarnation into a body. In the Meno, Plato claimed that this pre-existence explains one's ability to acquire knowledge, as in mathematics, that is not derived from sense experience. One’s seemingly discovering such knowledge is actually a form of remembering what one saw intellectually prior to birth. The soul’s simplicity and its being what a person essentially is also ensure personal survival of changes undergone while one is alive and embodied. Since cessation is due 13

Holmes, Brooke. The Symptom and the Subject. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2010. 5-6. 14 For psukhē I will generally use the alternative spelling psyche, and for somă the spelling soma. From classical Greece onwards, the terms psyche and soma were used roughly in the way we use the terms ‘body’ and ‘soul’ and this will be my usage here. Psukhē, psyche, is the Biblical term for ‘soul’.

33 only to decomposition, whatever is ultimately simple has to persist through changes – forever! Because the soul is simple, it is immortal.15

Plato was influenced by earlier theories, probably by the religious traditions of the Pythagoreans, and his view is a shift from the Homeric one. If the (mythical?) soul is what a person is, then personal identity is prima facie a function of the soul. It does not necessarily follow that Plato saw the soul as an immaterial thing, but that is the way in which his thinking was interpreted by most of his followers in the coming centuries. Before moving on, there must be reference to Plato’s tripartite theory of soul, an influential one in Western philosophy. Plato’s Tripartite Theory By dividing the soul into parts, Plato set the precedent in Western philosophy for a rationalistically based approach to human nature. According to this theory, the soul consists of three parts: the appetitive, the rational, and the spirited. The appetitive part reflects fundamental desires within the soul. It is here that one finds the natural cravings such as hunger, thirst and sexual desire. The rational part is the philosophical part of the soul, craving for knowledge and understanding. It is the rational soul which should be in control of the other two parts. The spirited soul is the source of the desire for honour and victory. In the soul which has achieved a sense of justice, the spirited soul is the enforcer of the rational soul, ensuring that the path of reason is followed. Ever since then, the primacy of rationality has dominated our concepts of self and personal identity in the Western world and rationality has been seen as the primary constituent feature of human nature. Plato’s theory separates off the ‘appetitive’ parts of the soul and postulates that they must be suppressed, or kept at bay. The concept is reflected in part in the long historical debate on free will, one aspect of which has been this very struggle for supremacy between the rational self and the appetites. When we come to Freud, we will see a different tripartite model of the mind, although the two theories, in spite of certain similarities, are fundamentally

15

Martin and Barresi (2006). 15.

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incommensurable. Freud will seriously undermine the Western concept of the human person as primarily an animal rationale. There is a further aspect of the Platonic model worth referring to here: in showing the importance of the three parts of the soul acting in unison, Plato was establishing the concept of unity of personhood, or self. Speaking of the sphere of a person’s inner unity, the ‘just person’ ensures that the appropriate mental constituent of himself is in control in any given situation: Once he has stopped his mental constituents doing any job which is not their own or intruding on one another’s, work; once he has set his own house in order, which is what he really should be concerned with; one he is his own ruler, and is well regulated, and has internal concord; once he has treated the three factors as if they were literally the three defining notes of an octave – low, high, and middle – and has created a harmony out of them and how many notes there may be in between; once he has bound all the factors together and made himself a perfect units instead of plurality, self-disciplined and internally attuned: then and only then does he act – if he acts – to acquire property or look after his body or play a role in government or do some private business.16

My interpretation of this is that the unity of personhood is given by unity of agency, by the requirement to act as a unitary self, or person. This point remains significantly relevant in our time, as will be seen in the penultimate chapter of this work. Immortal Soul The Republic ends with a mythical account of the after-life, given by Er who had returned from the dead. The account requires a premise of reincarnation and in the closing words of this work, Socrates (Plato) is seen to argue in favour of the immortality of the soul, again in Robin Waterfield’s translation: Anyway, my recommendation would be for us to regard the soul as immortal and as capable of surviving a great deal of suffering, just as it survives all the good times. We should always keep to the upward path, and we should use every means at our disposal to act morally and with intelligence, so that we may gain 16

Plato: Republic 443 d-e. Translation Robin Waterfield.

35 our own and the gods’ approval, not only during our stay here on earth, but also when we collect the prizes our morality has earned us, which will be just as extensive as the rewards victorious athletes receive from all quarters. And then both here and during the thousand year journey of our story, all will be well with us.17

This position on the immortal soul and on the eternal reward for morally correct behaviour is not radically different from that represented by mainline Christian churches to this day. Plato’s classical theory, in particular his theory of body and soul, has been hugely influential in the history of ideas, firstly because of its direct influence on our thinking but even more because of its indirect influence through our religious and cultural heritage. That concludes the review of that long period in human history leading into the formalized thinking of Plato and his followers. There were of course alternative ideas and models in classical thought, notably those of Aristotle, who favoured a purely materialistic paradigm. But Aristotle’s writings were lost to us for a period of a thousand years or more, until the rediscovery of Aristotle in the late Middle Ages, notably by Thomas Aquinas. So it was Platonic philosophy which initially ruled, not just directly, but indirectly: even though most of his dialogues were not accessible in the original in the non-Arab world for hundreds of years, his philosophy was kept alive in the tradition of Neoplatonism. His significant legacy in this context was the idea of a soul which is separable from the body. By the time that Aristotle was rediscovered, Plato had effectively been canonized in the Christian catalogue of beliefs, as will be seen. We now move forward to early Christian times.

2.3 Early Christian Dualism In Christian mythology, it was Christ who founded Christianity. From a factual-historical point of view, however, the significant founding figures of Christianity were on the one hand the authors of the New Testament (writing around 50-100 years after the birth of Christ); and on the other a group of men collectively known as the Apologists, or at a later period the 17

Ibid. 621c-d.

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Church Fathers. These were influential philosopher-theologians writing over a foundational era from around the second until roughly the fifth century AD. It was they, in particular St. Jerome, who were responsible for editing, translating into Latin and interpreting The New Testament. Those scriptural texts which became canonical, including the four gospels we are familiar with, were selected to the exclusion of a number of possible alternatives previously in circulation. Nowadays, we only have access to fragments of those texts not deemed canonical. It is immanently relevant to our theme of personhood and identity to consider the cultural and historical framework within which the early Christian Church developed. In the West, received Church history presents early Christianity as monolithic, Western and Latin, the suggestion being that Rome dominated from early times right through to the Reformation. The Latin hypothesis is implausible, however, as most of the early thinkers lived in the Hellenistic sphere and wrote in Greek, as did the Evangelists. Nor was the early Church monolithic: the various Christian communities, spread all over the eastern Mediterranean and North Africa and isolated from one another by the logistics of the time, were by no means in agreement even on such central issues as the divinity of Christ (Freeman 2005). The Byzantine influence in doctrinal matters became more explicit after the division of the Roman Empire in AD 285, in particular when Emperor Constantine gave Christianity the status of a state religion. The four significant ecumenical councils called to decide on central issues of doctrine were all in the East: Nicaea in 325, Constantinople in 381, Ephesus in 431 and Chalcedon in 451. The language and culture of these councils was Greek, with some Judaic influence. The pagan religions of the time had a tradition of tolerance towards alternative gods and divergent positions but within the monotheistic context, it seemed that such toleration must be supressed. Several emperors, starting with Constantine, were involved in laying down which positions were to be treated as ‘orthodox’ or proper opinion, as opposed to alternative positions or interpretations which were then declared to be ‘heretical’, or contrary belief. Given the severe sanctions to which heretics were subjected – Augustine of Hippo counted 80 significant beliefs which he deemed to be worthy of denunciation as heresies – it is not surprising that Christian belief largely became unitary (Freeman 2005).

37 The Western Church was still subjected to political harassment and it was only later, through Pope Gregory in the late 6th century, that the bishop of Rome began to effectively assert supremacy over the Christian faith as a whole. Most of the doctrinal positions which interest us here had been established by then. The Church Fathers, including Augustine of Hippo, had developed their theories not just on the evidence of the gospels, but against the background of the prevailing Hellenic philosophical culture. Plato came close to retrospective ecclesiastical recognition as a protoChristian or quasi-Christian prophet (Martin & Barresi 2006). One of the central issues discussed in the early church was the actual nature of Christ: for some, he was a man, for others, he was a deity; and there were intermediate positions which proposed the dualistic concept of a Christ both divine and human. Linked with the nature of Christ was the nature of man, including matters of soul, self and personal identity. Before sketching out the development process of those early Christian positions, it is useful to refer to relevant Christian dogmas of today, specifically those of the Roman Catholic Church, which are largely congruent with early doctrinal positions.18 Christian Doctrines of Body and Soul The received position in relevant Catholic belief is as follows: a person consists of a body, which comes into existence through biologicalreproductive processes, and a soul, which is individually created by God at the moment of conception, and not by the earthly progenitors. After this ensoulment, body and soul are in some sense one. At the end of our lives on earth, body and soul part company. The body dies and a process of decay sets in but the soul survives and leaves the body to go to another place: either it ascends into Heaven, where it remains eternally if we have passed the tests imposed on us in this life, or it is condemned to an everlasting life in Hell if we have individually deserved such punishment. At the second coming of Christ, i.e. at some unknown time in the future, our bodies will be raised from the dead and will be reunited with the soul. 18

Some Christian churches represent fundamentally differing dogma but such details are not a part of this philosophical text.

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There will be a final judgement, and body and soul will subsequently exist in their united form forever in Heaven – or in Hell, as the case may be. This interpretation is substantiated by the catechism, the official exposition of the teachings of the Roman Catholic Church. The relevant articles instruct that: 365. The unity of soul and body is so profound that one has to consider the soul to be the “form” of the body: i.e., it is because of its spiritual soul that the body made of matter becomes a living, human body; spirit and matter, in man, are not two natures united, but rather their union forms a single nature. 366 The Church teaches that every spiritual soul is created immediately by God it is not “produced” by the parents - and also that it is immortal: it does not perish when it separates from the body at death, and it will be reunited with the body at the final Resurrection.19

The stated position is a substance-dualistic concept, albeit one that is equivocally stated and not to be understood except as a mysterium fidei, a term which is used by theologians to explain apparent inconsistencies in doctrinal positions. Soul and body must be separate entities, as they are separately created, and can subsequently be separated and then reunited; as the soul will survive when the body decays, the soul must be of a different stuff than the body; and yet, the union of body of soul forms a single nature, the catechism instructs us, suggesting one substance. Further interpretations must be left to theologians and do not concern us here.20 What is relevant is that such positions were the only acceptable doctrines from early Christian times onwards. Who will arise? Article 998 of the catechism instructs the believer that “All the dead will rise, those who have done good, to the resurrection of life, and those who have done evil, to the resurrection of judgment.” That is a break with pagan beliefs, which associated immortality with godliness, a state reserved for the few.21 On the how of resurrection, Church teaching is non-specific. Article 1000 tells 19

Catechism of the Catholic Church. http://www.vatican.va. Accessed January 2011. For theologians, reason is in the service of faith so that, in cases of conflict, one will follow the scriptural or doctrinal position rather than that dictated by reason. 21 “Among the Greeks … he who says immortal says god. The conceptions are interchangeable.” Von Hügel as quoted in: Lewis, C.S. The Discarded Image. Cambridge: CUP, 1964/1994. 27. 20

39 us: “This ‘how’ exceeds our imagination and understanding; it is accessible only to faith.”22 Dualism as Condition for Immortality What is the origin of such teachings? The current Catholic catechism dates back to Counter-Reformation times but is based on traditions going back to the apologists and Church fathers. Martin and Barresi suggest that: “The discussion among the church fathers of the resurrection of people is the real beginning of the philosophical debate over personal identity.”23 The survival of bodily death by individuals, as well as their subsequent accountability, became a central dogma of Christianity and this took personal identity to the forefront of discussion. Martin and Barresi suggest that “the promulgation and ultimate widespread acceptance of these doctrines contributed importantly to the emergence of Western individualism.”24 Most early Christians seem to have been confident that they would personally experience the second coming of Christ. Immortality would then be a matter of continuation of life, rather than resurrection from the dead. As the years went by and many of the faithful had died before the second coming, it was Paul who offered as a solution the idea that the faithful would be raised from the dead, as Christ had been (Sanders 2001). Theological niceties concerning the best interpretation of Paul need not concern us here. Whatever the details might be, the idea of bodily resurrection, while transcending the normal laws of nature, posed no fundamental conceptual problem because the second coming of Christ was expected within a few years at the latest. It is not inconceivable that a body, carefully anointed and buried, could be ideally reconstituted and then 22

Faith is a complex term. In speaking of faith, or belief, the Church is referring to what might loosely be called irrational belief, generally based on divine revelation as interpreted by the Church, and not generally open to revision. This contrasts with what secular philosophers generally mean by the term, i.e. belief that justified by some process of evidence and ratiocination, and therefore open to revision. 23 Martin and Barresi (2006). 56. This account also relies on several other sources. such as Russell (1972), Tarnas (1996), Höffe (2001) and MacIntyre (2002). 24 Ibid. 56.

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raised into heaven. In that sense, body-and-soul dualism was not a necessary concept and materialistic notions of the nature of personhood and identity were discussed alongside substance dualistic concepts. But as the timeframe between the first coming and the expected second coming of Christ got longer and longer, problems arose due to the total bodily decay of the individual. How could a totally decomposed body be resurrected? Various notions were discussed among early Christian philosopher-theologians and what ultimately emerged was the idea of body-and-soul substance dualism; which offered what seemed ultimately to be the most viable solution to the issues raised by the dogma of bodily resurrection. If the soul separates from the body and then goes through some sort of disembodied existence before reunification, there is no loss of personal continuity, no matter how long it might be before the second coming. And if the soul is the ‘form’ of the body, then one can make use of this ‘form’ to re-create the body, analogous to how one might use the form of a bronze statue to re-create the statue. Although the groundwork had been by the third century, this discussion by no means ended there. Many prominent thinkers were to comment on and further refine this model from a philosophical point of view, notably Augustine in the fourth century. For Augustine, mind-body dualism already seemed so self-evident as to be hardly worth arguing; Charles Taylor describes the Augustinian position as being “protoCartesian” (Taylor 1989). It was substance dualism per se which had achieved doctrinal status at the end of that period dominated by the Church fathers, a position which, as we have seen from the catechism, has survived in Catholic doctrine until this day – and largely in secular Western philosophy too, until well into the 20th century. The Debate Is Closed – and Dogma Rules For Simon Blackburn, “religion is just a fossilized philosophy – a philosophy with the questioning spirit suppressed.”25 This is a harsh generalization that I would not subscribe to; nevertheless, it is specifically applicable in this instance of self, soul and the related issue of personal 25

Blackburn, Simon. Plato’s Republic. London: Atlantic, 2007. 1.

41 identity. The doctrinal entrenchment of substance dualism in the early Church effectively stifled alternative thinking on concepts of body and soul in Western philosophy until around the 17th century or even later. One has to go outside of Europe to find monistic or holistic philosophical positions, for instance in Buddhism. Tellingly, in his extensive work on “the making of modern identity” (which is a history of collective Western identity and not of personal identity), Charles Taylor leaps over the 1300 years from Augustine to Descartes with scarcely a mention of the period in-between, thus effectively fading out roughly half of the entire history of Western philosophy. Little changed. It was not until Modern times, and the phasing out of the tradition that religious orthodoxies could be imposed by both Church and state, that there was any possibility of re-opening the debate. Nevertheless, Taylor’s precedent of ignoring the period will not be followed here because the Middle Ages are too long and too significant an epoch in our thinking to be excluded.

2.4 The Middle Age and the Soul … how build, unbuild, contrive, To save the appearances; Milton In Middle Age Christian Europe, men and women were more concerned with saving their souls for eternity than with investigating the mysteries of this actual world, where life was likely to be short and brutal. Most commonly, the term refers to a period from roughly the fifth until roughly the 15th century, a period characterized by “physical immobility, social immobility, intellectual immobility”.26 The age has its champions too, specialists who find that there are intellectual and other treasures to be discovered, but our theme is the more specific one of philosophical developments, in particular in matters of self and identity. And in that respect, the Middle Ages were indeed a time of little change.

26

Davies, Norman. Europe, a History. London: Pimlico, 1997. 291.

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It would be anachronistic to impute to thinkers of that age the strict separation between the physical and the metaphysical which might seem self-evident to us. Medieval scholar C.S. Lewis gives us a memorable image of the differences in perception between modern and medieval men and women: Hence to look out on the night sky with modern eyes is like looking out over a sea that fades away into mist, or looking about one in a trackless forest – trees forever and no horizon. To look up at the towering medieval universe is much more like looking at a great building. [My emphasis]27

This is an image of the City of God, as postulated by Augustine, seen from the perspective of the City of Man. The Blessed Trinity, three persons in one God, lived on the top floor of that building, in direct contact only with the very loftiest of angelic beings, the Seraphim, Cherubim and Thrones. Spiralling downwards, one is descending through three times three hierarchical levels of pure angelic spirits and down to the lowly ‘Angels’ as such, the only category which could normally come into contact with humankind. All of these angelic creatures were immortal. Furthermore, there were daemons (frequently the ‘descendants’ of the pagan gods) or fallen spirits similarly arranged into hierarchies, as well as various types of creatures called longaevi, inhabiting an undefined sphere between heaven and earth. And finally, there was the lowest world of human beings, and all of the things of the world created by God for man’s use and benefit, including the animals. All of this was one: the supernatural or metaphysical aspect of the world, extracted from the scriptures and traditions of the Church with deductive, truth-preserving precision, must count as a monument to human ingenuity. It is all the more admirable for the fact that there is little or no actual evidence for any of it. Souls, Spirits and the Tertium Quid The perceived nature of those metaphysical entities is a matter of some speculation but it would be an anachronistic fallacy to see such ‘pure spirits’ in terms of allegory or myth, as we might do today (Lewis 1994). 27

Lewis, C.S. The Discarded Image. Cambridge: CUP, 1964/1994. 99.

43 Following the author known as pseudo-Dionysus, angels were “pure minds (mentes), unembodied.” It is impossible to ‘visualize’ a pure spirit except in a metaphorical way. Heaven appears to be a realm of pure minds and yet, at the time of the second coming, complete humans, body and soul, would enter into that same realm, raising issues of compatibility and interaction – as has already be seen in the quote from Homer on Odysseus’ meeting with his mother. The sub-lunary City of Man is an easier concept to grasp, being empirically accessible. It was a static and immutable world as it had been directly created by God, populated by humans on the one hand and by animals on the other, all of them immutable species. Humans were categorically different from the entities above, as they consisted of both body and soul. Animals consisted of body only. How did body and soul interact? By means of a special substance, the tertium quid, which was sufficiently material to act on the body, while at the same time being of such an attenuated nature that it could be acted upon by the immaterial soul (Lewis 1994). This speculative postulation offers a solution to that perennial problem of substance dualism: how can a material self and an immaterial self interact? Perhaps no more plausible answer than the tertium quid has ever been proposed, unless one counts the similar coarse matter/fine matter hypothesis previously encountered. Legacy of Scholastic Era In medieval Europe, philosophy was in the hands of scholars who were priests and theologians and who lived and worked within the enclosures of monasteries or in the cathedral schools which were the forerunners of our universities. There were some noted thinkers of course such as Thomas Aquinas, who in rediscovering Aristotle, contributed to the reintroduction of a more rational and empirical approach to knowledge than most of his fellow scholars availed of. In general, philosophy was seen as the handmaiden of strictly orthodox theology, the doctrinal imposition of which was a matter for both Church and state. The methodology focussed on the high art of deductive logic, the source of the premises being the scriptures and the traditions of the Church. The empirical sciences virtually came to a standstill: the highly influential Augustine and others had

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warned against “the disease of curiosity… which drives us to try and discover the secrets of nature, those secrets which … can avail us nothing and which we should not wish to learn.”28 In so far as it was pursued at all, natural philosophy was not considered a matter of truth; it was a matter of “saving the appearances,” in the phrase of Milton. Truth as such was seen as a different matter; it was the orthodox theologians who had a monopoly of truth, leading to the following hypothesis of C.S. Lewis: The real reason why Copernicus raised no ripple and Galileo raised a storm, may well be that whereas the one offered a new supposal about celestial motions, the other insisted on treating this proposal as fact. If so, the real revolution consisted not in a new theory of the heavens but in ‘a new theory of the nature of theory’.29

It was in the Middle Age that a fundamentally classical substance-dualistic concept of self and soul, and of personal identity, was cemented into our Western way of thinking. And then came the Renaissance and a fundamental shift in the way that we think and do philosophy. A process of reconsideration commenced, but the substance dualistic paradigm, in modernised form, would prove resilient, as will now be seen.

28 29

Quoted in Freeman (2005). Lewis (1964/1994). 16.

45

2.5 Renaissance and Reason: Descartes to Locke Know thyself, presume not God to scan; The proper study of Mankind is Man. Alexander Pope Not everything was bad in the Middle Ages, we are nowadays told, just as not everything was good in the Renaissance. And that differentiated view is of course justified. Nevertheless, the paradigmatic shift from medieval to modern thinking has if anything been underestimated. The very term ‘Renaissance’ is a misnomer, as it implies the re-birth of means and ideas of the past: there was an element of that in Renaissance thought, of course, a re-engagement with classical texts for instance, but far more significant was the look ahead, leading to new insights and ideas in all fields of the arts and sciences and in philosophy. There emerged a radically new way of perceiving our selves and the world we live in. The few educated men and women of the time began to consider themselves as participants in a multi-dimensional world, rather than as observers of a flattish world; and these developments created a new background for studies of soul and self. We now move on in time to meet two near contemporaries who took alternative paths in the discussion: the rationalist René Descartes from Catholic France, who in developing a ‘modernised’ version of substance dualism was contributing towards reinforcing the status quo; and the empiricist John Locke, who as an English Protestant was less fettered by orthodoxy but still not entirely free in his thinking. Descartes and Cartesian Dualism In philosophical discourse, the idea of substance dualism is most frequently attributed to René Descartes; this is a curiosity in the light of the long history of the concept. It is true that Descartes is responsible for the most precise expression of that position in the modern era but it would be

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disingenuous to ignore the previous 1500 years or so of conceptual development in the matter – the lessons of history must be taken in. How far does Cartesian dualism signify a radical break with medieval thinking? In contrast to the philosophical universals of classical and medieval times, the particulars took on a new significance in the early modern age in a reflection of both religious and secular developments in thinking. Individuality is a matter of particulars and with his legendary cogito ergo sum, René Descartes made a major contribution to what has become an age of the individual in our Western Culture. Nevertheless, the Neo-Scholastic influence is unmistakable and his conclusions, in spite of some controversial discussion at the time, were broadly compatible with Catholic orthodoxy. Nor was his approach free of an explicitly religious agenda: the full original title of the work in which his theory of substance dualism is set out is: Meditationes de prima philosophia, in qua Dei existentia et animæ immortalitas demonstratur. 30 Apart from his metaphysical or ‘first philosophy’, Descartes was a notable mathematician and scientist; just as Galileo directed his telescope towards distant objects, Descartes focussed his microscope on that what was closer at hand, the nature of human and animal bodies. He engaged in the dissection of both animal and human bodies, a process which had to be done in secret, paying particular attention to the human brain. It was natural that Descartes drew analogies from the mechanistic nature of the non-living world which was being investigated by Kepler, Galileo and others. In his series of meditations, Descartes called into doubt even our most fundamental beliefs, finally arriving at what is the most frequently quoted philosophical aphorism of all time: cogito ergo sum. In doing so, Descartes was taking a rationalistic stance and in effect affirming the Platonic and Aristotelian idea of the primacy of rationality in human nature. In postulating an ‘evil demon’ which might be deceiving us about our empirical perceptions, Descartes shows us that he was not free of 30

The condemnation and near execution of Galileo in 1633 was not conducive to liberal thinking in Catholic countries, so Descartes was circumspective in the expression of his views. Descartes’ Meditations was first published in 1641.

47 metaphysical medieval beliefs. The conclusion that he ultimately leads us to is that the body is a material thing (res extensa) which is extended in time and space, which moves and works like a machine. As such, the body follows the laws of the physical world; in our bodies, we are no different from the animals. So how do we think? We do so by means of the mind (mens), or soul (âme, in the approved French translation, Méditations Metaphysiques), which is a nonmaterial thing and therefore lacks extension and motion. Nor does it follow the laws of physics. This is the Cartesian res cogitans. Animals possess bodies just as we do. But only humans possess minds, spirits or souls. Descartes was the first to use the Latin term mens rather than anima (Martin & Barresi 2006), but it seems to me that he used it not as a radical alternative but one which denotes loosely the same concept, as is suggested by the French translation. Cartesian dualism is a theory of two ontologically distinct substances.31 He initially suggested that the interaction between mind and body takes place in the pineal gland. His reasons for this suggestion were highly speculative, based largely on the central position of the pineal gland and on the fact that this gland, in contrast so some other units of the brain, appeared to Descartes to be a homogeneous organ. Descartes later retracted the suggestion. Cartesian interaction between mind and body is presented to us as conceptually mechanical in nature, and it is a two-way interaction. The mind controls the body, but the passions arise in the body and can therefore interfere with the thoughts of the otherwise rational mind. ‘Soul’ as a Metaphysical Entity In his rational exposition of substance dualism, Descartes was restating and sharpening the metaphysical concept of mind, or soul, thus taking it out of reach of rationalist or empiricist investigation. That had consequences for the body too; without its soul, the body was seen to be an entirely ‘mechanical’ entity. If we leave aside the term ‘soul’, we might attribute to Descartes the formulation of a clearly delineated theory of what ‘mind’ is, and this is a merit of his theory. And of particular relevance is the fact that the Cartesian ‘mind’ is without extension. In taking this position he was 31

This will be explained further in section 3.1.

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thinking more sharply than some 20th century philosophers who have assumed a kind of extensional congruence between ‘mind’ and ‘brain’. That makes Cartesian theory in part still valid today, as will later be argued. But Descartes was also nolens-volens highlighting the severest problem connected with dualism: the ancient bugbear of how interaction was to take place between the res extensa and the res cogitans. How can two fundamentally separate realms, the natural, material world and the non-natural or supernatural world, come together in such a way as to enable mutual interaction? How can a mental cause have a physical effect, or vice versa? Interaction via the pineal gland didn't offer a solution; it only suggested a location for the interaction. We have already seen the Scholastic suggestion of a tertium quid as the medium of interaction but we have no evidence for the existence of such a thing, which in fact only complicates matters, as it leads to a third substance (or fourth substance, if you count God as the third substance, as Descartes did.) Descartes’ near contemporary Spinoza was dismissive of substance dualism, for this and other reasons. Spinoza took a naturalistic or materialist approach to the nature of mind but he was considered to be an atheist, as his philosophy questioned the existence of a personal god. He was also a Jew and subject to persecution on that count as well, so that his work could only be circulated in secret and was not actively discussed by his largely Christian peers (Stewart 2005). Instead of discussing monism, as proposed by Spinoza, most thinkers of the time tried to solve the dualistic problem. The solutions offered at the time all presupposed the existence of God, however. And, in a sense, what followed from Cartesian dualism was that a third substance was necessary, the substance that is God. Without God, there appeared to be no way for Cartesian dualism to function. In this theological context, Malebranche suggested the mechanism of occasionalism. This ancient theory (still prominent in Islam) is the notion that God is ultimately the prime cause of all things. Whatever God wills becomes necessary. In this instance, it is necessary for both the res cogitans and for the res extensa. Each individual act is willed by God and this makes interaction between body and soul superfluous. Apart from the requirement to believe in a specific version of God, i.e. a deity who

49 directly intervenes in human affairs on an everyday basis, it is difficult to see how one might then rescue the doctrine of free will. An alternative solution was offered by Leibniz, that of pre-established harmony. Like occasionalism, this is a general theory of causation (Stewart 2005). According to this theory, all things find themselves in a state of harmony from their moment of inception. In other words, they have been programmed by God to behave exactly as they do, over all of time. So that body and soul of an individual, like all other things, are in perfect synchronization, which dispenses for the need for any interaction between them. This theory made the occasional intervention of God in individual instances superfluous. Although pre-established harmony now looks like little more than a historical curiosity, it was a standard point of discussion in philosophical circles for more than 100 years and only finally laid to rest by Kant. This was perhaps the case because the theory was compatible with Calvinistic and other theories of pre-destination of the soul which were widespread at the time. Again, free will seems to go by the board, and the theory can in any case only be of interest to those who subscribe to theistic belief. It is an odd sort of a world in which everything runs like clockwork. There is a somewhat similar concept in our own time, albeit one that is not ultimately dependent on the existence of God: the doctrine of determinism. Reflection on the Reception of Descartes The strict separation between the physical, mechanical res extensa and the more ephemeral res cogitans has been of significant influence in modern Western thinking because it is the reaffirmation of a position which has led us firmly away from a holistic approach to the person as such – and it seems to be difficult to get back to a more straightforward holistic position. As an example of this influence, one can compare and contrast Western and Eastern approaches in medicine: in the West, medicine has largely followed a Cartesian-mechanistic approach, with its focus on illness and the interpretation of the body as a ‘machine’ which, when broken, needs to be mended. In contrast, Eastern traditions such as Traditional Chinese Medicine (TCM) or the Indian Ayurveda approach have developed along holistic lines. The whole person is seen as a unity, and not some

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‘agglomerate’ of body and soul. And it is to the whole person that treatments must be applied, not to either the body or the soul. In spite of the considerable successes of the purely somatic approach, there is current awareness in Western medicine of problematic consequences of dualism, which neglects the psychic aspect of illness. The reverse movement has been towards the holistic approach of what is now called psychosomatic medicine. But the entrenched paradigm runs so deep in our culture that the psychosomatic approach is frequently misinterpreted as being a matter of treating the psyche on the one hand, and the soma on the other, a point which has previously been made. For those in the Western world, the Gestalt switch from dualism to holism is a difficult one to negotiate – just as it is difficult for the TCM therapist to switch to our dualistic paradigm. That said, what more general critical inferences from the Cartesian position can be made? Cartesian Dualism in ‘Scientific’ Context A retrospective evaluation of the Cartesian position suggests the following. Descartes did in one sense follow and respond to the major paradigmatic shift initiated by Galileo and others, the transition from scholastic thinking in the Middle Ages to the evidence-based empirical and rationalist science of the modern era. He aimed to formulate a mechanistic idea of animate objects which corresponded to the mechanistic nature of the inanimate world. In turning his microscope inwards, it was not possible observe any physical thing which could answer for something like human consciousness, or human cognition. But, instead of accepting that failure and deferring its solution to some future epoch, Descartes hypothesized a res cogitans, an occult thing about which he knew nothing, except that it was precisely designed to fill the explanatory gap he perceived between the soulless and mortal animal as a kind of automaton, and the cognitive, ensouled and immortal human being which was a dogmatic concept not open to discussion among Christians. In doing so, Descartes offended against the hypotheses non fingo precept of another great thinker of the time, Isaac Newton, who was born shortly before Descartes died. Faced with a similar explanatory gap, that of

51 action at a distance in his theory of gravity, Newton responded quite differently, explaining himself in an appendix to the second edition of his Principia Mathematica in 1713: I have not as yet been able to discover the reason for these properties of gravity from phenomena, and I frame no hypotheses. For whatever is not deduced from the phenomena must be called a hypothesis; and hypotheses, whether metaphysical or physical, or based on occult qualities, or mechanical, have no place in experimental philosophy. In this philosophy particular propositions are inferred from the phenomena, and afterwards rendered general by induction.32

In my view it was Newton, who in refusing to ‘feign’ or invent an occult hypothesis was completing the philosophical innovation which originated with Descartes: the transition from Scholastic metaphysical speculation to our modern concept of a naturalized physical world which follows rational laws and which can be empirically tested. It was ultimately Einstein who took up the Newtonian challenge and resolved the hypothetical issue of action at a distance. Cartesian dualism has proven to be a more stubborn hypothesis to dispose of, as will be seen in the next chapter. Up to now, the subject matter has been largely one of self, or personhood. John Locke is one of those who are credited with opening a more specific debate on the issue of personal identity. But his thinking went further than that. Locke and the Empiricist Approach Expressed romantically: while the rationalist relied on the cogito ergo sum, the empiricist verified his existence by means of the wind in his hair and the rain on his face. John Locke initiated an empirical and memory-based debate on personal identity which still features in actual discussion. Born in 1632, 36 years after René Descartes, Locke developed his philosophy in the empiricist vein which was in some fundamental ways opposed to the rationalist approach of Descartes et al. He generally appears to support the

32

Newton, Isaac. Sourced in: The Newton Project Canada. URL = http://www.isaacnewton.ca/gen_scholium/General_Scholium_Motte_1729_4pg.pdf. Accessed Feb. 23 2012.

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orthodox substance dualistic notion but then makes the surprising suggestion, in his Essay Concerning Human Understanding, that matter might be able to think: We have the Ideas of Matter and Thinking, but possibly shall never be able to know, whether any mere material Being thinks or no; it being impossible for us, by the contemplation of our own Ideas, without revelation, to discover, whether Omnipotency has not given to some Systems of Matter fitly disposed, a power to perceive and think, or else joined and fixed to Matter so disposed, a thinking immaterial substance: It being, in respect of our Notions, not much more remote from our Comprehension to conceive, that GOD can, if he pleases, superadd to Matter a Faculty of Thinking, than that he should superadd to it another Substance, with a Faculty of Thinking; since we know not wherein Thinking consists, nor to what sort of Substances the Almighty has been pleased to give that Power, which cannot be in any created Being, but merely by the good pleasure and Bounty of the Creator. For I see no contradiction in it, that the first eternal thinking Being should, if he pleased, give to certain Systems of created sensless matter, put together as he thinks fit, some degrees of sense, perception and thought…33

In this text, Locke juxtaposes two contrasting positions: on the one hand the substance-monistic idea of thinking matter and on the other, the substance-dualistic idea of a second, thinking-substance attached to ‘nonthinking’ matter which had been the standard position for so long (Locke is using the term ‘sensless’ not in its modern connotation of a capacity to feel, but in the original connotation of an ability to think). Both ideas are equally intransparent to us, according to Locke. In stating that “possibly we shall never to be able to know” whether a mere material being can think, he was anticipating the ‘philosophical zombie’ debate of the 20th century which will be discussed later. At the same time, Locke’s idea of a ‘thinking’ material echoes the idea mooted by early Christians of a ‘material soul’ – and is in general terms in accord with theories developed by his contemporary Spinoza. But whatever the case might be, Locke was maintaining a fundamentally dualistic position, even if he equivocated as to whether it was substance-dualistic or not.

33

Locke, John. Essay Concerning Human Understanding( ECHU). IV.III.§6.

53 His emphasis on God, or the Omnipotency, might have been disingenuous and designed to protect himself from censure from within religious circles but in this he was not successful. He was in fact subjected to a storm of criticism by his Christian contemporaries for expressing such a heretical thought: it wasn’t only in Catholic countries that perceived ‘heresies’ were problematic (Martin and Barresi 2006). If matter can think, the counter-argument went, then the soul would be dispensable. But that would be unthinkable as it would necessitate the revision of positions on immortality and resurrection which had been central Christian doctrines for more than 1,000 years.34 The above conceptualization by Locke of ordinary matter which can think seems to have been little regarded in the philosophical debate ever since, perhaps because the English philosopher otherwise represented an anthropology which was dualistic. In the same work, Locke formulated his influential theory of personal identity as follows: §19. This may shew us wherein personal Identity consists, not in the Identity of Substance, but, as I have said, in the Identity of consciousness, wherein, if Socrates and the present Mayor of Quinborough agree, they are the same Person: If the same Socrates waking and sleeping do not partake of the same consciousness, Socrates waking and sleeping is not the same Person. And to punish Socrates waking, for what sleeping Socrates thought, and waking Socrates was never conscious of, would be no more of Right, than to punish one Twin for what his Brother-Twin did, whereof he knew nothing, because their outsides were so like, that they could not be distinguished; for such Twins have been seen.35

There is an important debate on what Locke actually meant by ‘consciousness’: we have our ideas today on what consciousness is and the subject will be developed later, but traditionally it has been largely assumed that what Locke meant was identity of memory. This was the 18th century interpretation and is also the interpretation which is generally 34

Church domination in higher education continued well into the Modern Age. Universities such as Oxford and Cambridge were firmly in clerical hands. The secularization of higher education would not occur until the 19th century in most countries; in many instances not until later. 35 Locke, John. ECHU, Book II.

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applied in the neo-Lockean debate which is still buoyant. The memory interpretation raises a number of problems which led to severe criticism even in Locke’s own time. Some of them can be dealt with summarily, others less so. Taken at face value, it is impossible to consider a suggestion of ‘identity’ between Socrates and the present Mayor of Quinborough, unless one posits a theory of metempsychosis, an unlikely position for the empiricist philosopher to take. One way to read this passage is to turn it upside down: since the present mayor cannot share any memories with Socrates, the two figures cannot be identical. But now the argument is shown to be circular, a criticism already made by Locke’s contemporaries. Leaving the improbable instantiation of Socrates aside, we would probably accept that, if John Smith and the Mayor of Quinborough had identical memories, then it must be the case that John Smith had been elected Mayor of Quinborough. Conversely, if John Smith were to be elected Mayor of Quinborough, then the Mayor would have the same memories as Smith. But that is circular and in any case the same would apply if the Mayor had the same visage or the same fingerprints as John Smith. So that does not distinguish memory as the criterion of continuity in personal identity. Furthermore, the idea that Socrates sleeping is non-identical to Socrates awake must be dismissed in the context of the identity debate. No concept of personal identity that I know of works on the basis of us going through such a transformation of identity twice daily (or more often for those who take an afternoon nap). Rather than rejecting the Lockean position directly, Martin and Barresi offer an alternative interpretation which they argue is more plausible than the commonly followed memory interpretation of the constitution of personhood: In his account of personal identity over time, he may not have been trying to present a noncircular analysis but to do something entirely different – to give a constructive account of the origins of self-constitution. That is, he may not have been trying to say what’s meant by personal identity but to explain how our selves arise. And, even if he was trying to present a noncircular analysis of personal identity, one cannot on this memory interpretation explain something that is central to his view, namely, that consciousness, which is reflexive, plays a

55 dual role in self-constitution, unifying persons both over time and also at a time. Memory has to do only with the unification of persons over time.36

In addition to the points made by Martin and Barresi, there is a further objection on my part to the memory interpretation of Locke: continuity in identity refers not just to the past and to the present, but also to the future. But we have no ‘memory’ of the future. So memory alone cannot be a sufficient criterion for continuity in identity. Locke’s position, in its standard interpretation of memory constituting identity, will be further discussed in section 5.2. Overall, if the interpretation of Martin and Barresi is correct, and Locke was discussing how our selves arise, then one can see a possible connection between Locke’s position and the 20th century theory of narrativity which will later be discussed as a constitutive element in personal identity. And that is not open to the same kind of objections as the memory interpretation. It is likely that Locke’s vociferous opponents wanted to defeat the memory hypothesis in order to defend the view that personal identity depends on the persistence of the soul, a central Christian doctrine. The dispute then reduces to one of physics versus metaphysics. Locke was claiming that while one can establish empirically whether someone retains the same consciousness over time, one cannot say anything about the persistence or otherwise of an immaterial soul. In other words, he was instituting an empiricist theory of self and personal identity, in contrast to a metaphysical one. In doing so, he was breaking with the ancient body-andsoul paradigm, and replacing it with a paradigm of body-and-mind. This is a distinction not so clearly made by Descartes. The interpretation of Locke in this historical context makes sense, whereas the memory interpretation leads us into difficulties, as will be shown; especially when it is taken out of its historical context and discussed in our own time. Philosophers generally attempt to interpret the world in the context of their own era, and this is what Locke was doing. Such interpretations are not always portable over the centuries. There is no doubting Locke’s fundamentally dualistic anthropology, which in a sense separates ‘personhood’ from the physical thing which is the human being. 36

Martin & Barresi (2006). 143.

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For it being the same consciousness that makes a Man be himself to himself, personal Identity depends on that only, whether it be annexed only to one individual Substance, or can be continued in a succession of several Substances.37

This particular thought echoes the first quote given from Locke and it is an idea which was surprisingly influential in 20th century philosophy, i.e. the idea that the identity of the person can be separated from the actual human being, or biological entity, which is merely the contingent incorporation or carrier of that identity. Such a position cannot be upheld within the monistic paradigm which will be argued here later. Locke’s anthropology is problematic, and perhaps even inconsistent: After all we have his speculation, quoted above, that matter might be able to think. To separate the ‘person’ from its ‘thinking matter’ looks to me to be an implausible notion. But maybe Locke was indulging in many-faceted speculation. It is unwise to treat his speculations as if they were doctrines, a common fate for the positions of canonical philosophers. In summary, it was Locke’s achievement to have opened up an empirical and fundamentally modern debate on soul, self and personal identity, albeit one not free of contradictions and still with traces of metaphysical baggage. He was arguing a distinctly dualistic model, one that implies that it is continuity in consciousness and memory which makes a person a person over time. But he also speculates on the potentiality of matter to think, which would appear to me a monistically oriented position. We should always keep in mind that Locke was writing an essay: i.e. he was not attempting to expound ‘truths’ about human nature but discussing various aspects of the matter. We will re-encounter Lockean concepts again in the 20th century identity debate. We now leap forward 200 years, ignoring many intermediate developments, and come face to face with some of the more scientifically based fundamentals of self and personhood relevant in our own time. We encounter two figures that are not generally seen as standards in the philosophers’ canon but their thinking is too significant to be sidestepped.

37

Locke. ECHU. II. XXVII. §10.

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2.6 Science Intervenes: Darwin to Freud Ever since Copernicus, the Western mind has been engaged in an ongoing process of ‘naturalization’ of phenomena, an agenda which had been vigorously pursued by Aristotle but had largely been interrupted for around 1500 years. The Modern era has also been one of gradual secularization in Western philosophy, culminating in the philosophy of such thinkers as David Hume (explicitly an atheist), Immanuel Kant (not explicitly an atheist) and Nietzsche, whose views on God are well enough known. During this period, the empirical sciences were making themselves felt in matters which had previously been the exclusive domain of ‘first philosophy’, or metaphysics. Physics was the first empirical science to develop and, soon after, the exact empirical science of chemistry displaced the esoteric philosophy known as alchemy. The process didn’t stop at inanimate things: it was in the 19th century that the biological sciences were coming to the fore, with far-reaching consequences for our view of living entities. It was being postulated that the brain was the ‘organ of thought’, a matter which appeared to be confirmed in the middle of the 19th century when Broca (and independently Wernicke) found scientific evidence for a correlation between certain language defects and localized damage to that organ. Such developments were of significant influence in all matters related to self, personhood and identity. In his 18th introductory lecture to psychoanalysis, Sigmund Freud spoke of the two great insults or outrages suffered by humanity: first of all the Copernican revolution, which displaced humankind as masters of the physical world.38 The second great insult was that of Darwin, which displaced humankind as masters of creation, depriving them of that axiomatic uniqueness through special creation which Evolutionary theory had effectively demolished. And Freud, with his theory of the unconscious, was in the process of perpetrating a third outrage, displacing man as master in his own house. The Copernican Revolution has been mentioned previously en passant and is of only general relevance to the subject matter here. Revolutions or 38

Sourced at Projekt Guttenberg. URL= http://gutenberg.spiegel.de. Accessed Jan 2011.

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paradigmatic shifts initiated by Darwin and Freud are more directly germane. Darwin’s Dangerous Revolution When published in 1859, Darwin's Origin of the Species was born a sprightly child off the presses – to parody Hume. The first printing was sold out within twenty four hours. The evolutionary idea had been in the making for some time and precursors of the concept had been in circulation for at least a hundred years previously. Other natural philosophers, as scientists were still called at the time, were in the process of drawing similar conclusions so that Darwin’s book came as no great surprise to the well-informed. Nevertheless, the text marks an abrupt discontinuation with the past and the particular value of Darwin’s work was the considerable body of systematic empirical evidence that he offered in support of his theory, taking it far beyond the realm of conjecture and speculation. For the scientifically minded, it became clear that the prevailing doctrine of immutability of the species was unsustainable. Exactly the opposite is the case: Darwin meticulously described the process of minute incremental modifications of species over time, in adaptation to environmental factors, a dynamic process which was ongoing. And the process did not stop with the higher animals: although he initially refrained from explicitly referring to the human species, Darwin was effectively naturalizing human nature and questioning the status of human exceptionalism. The generally held Weltbild, the creation of species by God in a form which was immutable for all time, the powerful myth of the species being preserved two by two in Noah’s Ark and the supremacy of humankind over all other species, was undermined. Apart from the fact that the biological sciences would have to be rewritten, the shock was religious and philosophical. Worst for some was the implication that humankind had more in common with apes than with angels, a reversal of medieval metaphysical perceptions. A new anthropology was born.

59 The Best Single Idea? According to Daniel Dennett: “The Darwinian revolution is both a scientific and a philosophical revolution, and neither revolution could have occurred without the other.” He goes on to award Darwin’s theory the accolade of being “the single best idea that anyone has ever had.”39 Evolutionary theory is another example of a paradigmatic shift as Kuhn describes the process, including the extreme difficulty of accepting a new paradigm that is incommensurable with the old. Many misinterpretations of his theory have been offered, not only by malicious critics but by wellmeaning but misguided followers.40 That goes some way towards explaining why the implications of Darwin's theory, at the time of writing more than 150 years old, have not yet been universally accepted. Not all philosophers seem to be aware of the sense in which Darwin signals a breach with the past, a development which has many philosophical implications. Here the focus will be on its implications for theories of persons: in a secular context, it is impossible to cling to ancient anthropological paradigms, specifically to positions on such matters as soul, self, free will and personal identity, which do not take the Darwinian idea on board. That is not to suggest a simplistic reductionist approach along the lines that we are ‘nothing but’ highly developed apes, although many have made that premature assumption. That point can be summarily dismissed: we humans have theories about the nature of apes but no great theories come about when the monkeys get at the typewriters, not even poorly formulated ones, so there still remains a category difference between 39

Dennett (1995). 21. Both sides of the ‘creationist’ debate excel in the poor quality of their arguments. To the ‘atheistic’ side of the debate let it be said that Darwin’s theory tells us much about the origin of the species, but nothing at all about the origin of life. Dennett (1995) explores the various inconclusive speculations on the matter. To the ‘creationist’ side of the debate must be said that religiously minded philosophers and theologians dating back to Augustine have always warned of the dangers of interpreting the Bible in the logos mode of scientific facticity rather than in the mythos mode of truth through faith. In my view, Darwin’s theory contributes nothing one way or the other to the theistic/atheistic debate. It is a theory of mechanisms.

40

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animals and humans. Even if we generally suppose that an ape has a mind of sorts, it does not implement the powers of speech and abstract thinking that the human mind does. There are some senses in which the significance of speech is exaggerated, as will later be seen, but in others the powers of speech are gravely underestimated, for instance in the functioning of our memories. We could not recall the specific events of a specific day without the reference to such elementary linguistic concepts as time, date, place and so on; nor could we make any exact arrangements for the future. To give an example of such an over-simplistic inference of men and women being ‘human animals’: it was around twenty-five years after Darwin’s publication that Thomas Huxley, an ardent follower of Evolutionary theory, formulated the idea (and probably coined the term) of epiphenomenalism, which, according to interpretation, might have older antecedents.41 This is the hypothesis that our conscious mental processes are nothing but ‘side-effects’ or epiphenomena of our physical states. Huxley used as a metaphor the idea of a train whistle blowing as the train leaves the station. The actions coincide but the whistle is merely incidental and has no causal efficacy in the movement of the train. This takes the straightforward notion that we are ‘thinking apes’ a stage further: we may be capable of thoughts, or be possesses of consciousness, the theory suggests, but our thought processes are irrelevant to what we actually do. If that argument is taken to its logical conclusion, it is not only the other animals which are Cartesian automata, ‘human animals’ are much the same, except that, to stick to Huxley’s metaphor, they possess a ‘whistle’ which explains what they would be doing anyway. Equating human language with a whistle is an implausible hypothesis, in the light of the fact that humans have significant cultural and cognitive faculties not shared by any animal. Nevertheless, we will meet with echoes of Huxley’s idea in current philosophical debate, for instance in section 3.4.

41 A review of the literature shows that this term is also one which is open to numerous and vague interpretations. Some see in epiphenomenalism a form of dualism, an argument which I cannot follow.

61 Brain and Soul Part Company Considerably more perspicacious than Huxley’s was an idea expressed by Alfred R. Wallace, the lesser known of the two co-discoverers of Evolutionary theory, a few years previous to Huxley. He was reflecting on his encounters with isolated indigenous populations in South America: Natural selection could only have endowed savage man with a brain a few degrees superior to that of an ape, whereas he actually possesses one very little inferior to that of a philosopher. With our advent there had come into existence a being in whom that subtle force we term ‘mind’ became of far more importance than mere bodily structure.42

This is an idea of far-reaching significance because it suggests that, even within a naturalistic or materialist view of self and person, the mind possesses aspects and attributes which cannot simply be explicated in terms of the underlying brain. It reiterates the position argued in the opening of this chapter, i.e. that the developmental paths of ‘brain’ and ‘mind’ have diverged throughout our evolutionary history. His shrewd observation was made at a time when indigenous peoples were frequently seen to be mentally inferior to Europeans – current empirical findings confirm Wallace’s far reaching insight that they are not. Wallace anticipates – or should have anticipated – many irrelevant discussions which have come about in discussions on heredity, for instance the frequently asked question: can one inherit the intelligence of one’s ancestors? Wallace’s position is a direct argument in favour of the theory that the mind is a social and cultural construct. It is clear that we inherit our physical characteristics, including the structure of our brains, from our progenitors. That is not to say that our minds are products of biological genetic factors, even if the actual composition of the brain, as main ‘organ of thought’, is a function of heredity. Our minds, in contrast, are a function not just of our genetic inheritance but also of our ‘memes’, those units of exogenetic or exosomatic heredity that Peter Medawar and others have spoken of see section 2.2. And we can get our ‘memes’ from anywhere, not 42

Wallace, Alfred R. A Narrative of Travels on the Amazon and Rio Negro. New York: Haskell, 1969.

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just from our progenitors. This is another way of approaching the ‘nature’ versus ‘nurture’ debate which has played a significant role in psychological discussion. A large number of studies on twins has shown that such monozygotic twins, if they are separated at birth and grow up in differing environments, share a number of characteristics both with their birth-twin and with their adoptive siblings. ‘Nature’ and ‘nurture’ are of approximately equal significance in the formation of the self, the experts tell us.43 And we can roughly see ‘nature’ as the correlate of genetic makeup and ‘nurture’ as the correlate of exosomatic heredity; so that the point I am making should be clear. The issue will be addressed again in section 4.6. If one accepts this argument, then there are certain, non-precise versions of mind-body dualism which might survive Evolutionary theory, as will be discussed below. But, for the ancient theory of substance dualism, the consequences of Darwin’s revolution look to be fatal. Consequences of Evolution for Dualism What is the justification for the claim that substance dualism was made obsolete by Evolutionary theory? If the ‘stuff of thought’ is supposed to be something non-physical, then Evolutionary theory raises the following issue: at which moment in biological evolution did the res cogitans come about? For those of theistic belief, the answer is straightforward: the res cogitans is created by God in each individual instance, for humans only, in the form of a soul, as is for instance suggested in the previously quoted Catholic catechism. The ensoulment of the body at the moment of conception or at some other moment, depending on one’s doctrinal position, is a matter of faith, or irrational belief.44 And therefore, contrary to what many have argued, Evolutionary theory doesn’t necessarily deliver a knock-out blow to religious beliefs. Adherents of Christian and similar

43

Source: my in-house psychologist, who has researched monozygotic twins. Christian positions have by no means been consistent on this. The current Catholic position, as has been seen, is one of ensoulment at the moment of conception. But for Aquinas, the soul entered the body at the quickening, the first perceived movement of the child. Various other theories have been mooted from time to time.

44

63 doctrines can continue to believe in a res cogitans, which they can alternatively term ‘soul’.45 But non-theistically based substance dualism becomes post-Darwin a non-tenable position. How is the coming about of the res cogitans to be explained? Suddenly or gradually? In relation to what causal processes? Substance dualists have not to my knowledge addresses such questions adequately. Is the res cogitans also a product of some evolutionary process? But there is no evidence I know of to support such a notion. Is that evolution synchronous with the physical-biological evolution of the res extensa? If so, then why, or how? We know of no such mechanism. Do the apes have their own res cogitans? But if they do, it follows that the same must apply to the lower animals, right down the evolutionary tree to the humble fruit fly. After all, Darwin’s theory implies tiny incremental modifications rather than great leaps from species to species. So that the fruit fly must have some kind of res cogitans. Such questions, being of a speculative-metaphysical nature, are rationally or empirically indecidable or unanswerable and the entire substance-dualistic paradigm leaves us with a huge number of questions without answers. This alone is sufficient to undermine the theory of substance dualism. Contrary to philosophical lore it was Darwin, rather than Ryle, who rang the death knell of the ghost in the machine, a theory which is fundamentally incompatible with Evolutionary theory, but the bell was not widely heard at the time: if we follow Ryle, as will be seen later, substance dualism was to remain the standard position for another hundred years or so post-Darwin. Where is this leading us? Locke had already introduced the speculation that material things might be capable of thinking, as had Spinoza and others; and it is material things which evolve, opening up the possibility that thought mechanisms might also be a product of evolution. This is supported by the fact that some of our closest animal ancestors do share with us some elements of the way they behave and ‘think’. On the other hand, in discussing the origins of humankind, it was previously pointed out that cultural adaptation follows very different procedures than 45 And in fact the Catholic Church has never condemned Evolutionary theory, although it looks to be much more serious a threat to Christian orthodoxy than Galileo’s heliocentricity.

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somatic adaptation, suggesting that ‘mind’ and ‘brain’ follow different evolutionary trajectories. This argument in turn supports the basic idea of ‘non-Cartesian’ dualism; which however remains a vague concept and one better avoided, as will be argued later. We now move on from Darwin to the third great insult, that perpetrated by Freud himself. Freudian Unconscious We are rational animals, a tradition dating back to Plato and Aristotle claims, one confirmed by the Cartesian cogito ergo sum; but Freudian psychoanalysis signals a further paradigmatic shift, another radical break with received philosophical views on the self. We do have a rational faculty, Freud agrees, but our (conscious) rational faculty is by no means paramount in our actions and thoughts, rather the opposite is the case. The theory cannot be attributed to Freud alone: much like Darwin in his time, Freud was formulating a theory which had long been gestating. The dualistic position has frequently been interpreted in the following way, here expressed in simplified form: we consist of a rational soul, or mind, or spirit, which is in constant conflict with an irrational or morally ‘weak’ body, constantly striving for sensuous gratification. There is an extensive free will debate which relates to this postulated struggle between body and soul. The debate is a complex one, as it is not always a straightforward one of soul versus body: it can also be a conflict within the soul, as in Plato’s model of a tripartite soul. The agent who exercises free will was generally supposed to be the conscious self, which is synonymous with the res cogitans in the dualism which was still prevalent at the start of the 20th century, although the terms are by no means unambiguous. Freud’s paradigm is a different one altogether, and incommensurable with the traditional paradigm: it is not body versus mind, it is mind unconscious versus conscious mind. We might feel that we are in control of our selves by means of the conscious mind, but our unconscious mind reveals itself in many ways – and threatens to be the dominant influence in our behaviour. The mind is like an iceberg, in Freud’s legendary simile, the larger and more significant part of which is below the waterline, and therefore not directly accessible. If we follow Freud, the unconscious mind reveals itself

65 in indirect ways only: for instance in ‘Freudian’ slips of the tongue, when we consciously intend to say A, but inadvertently say B. It is revealed to us in our dreams, or in the obsessive and irrational behaviour patterns associated with our neuroses. Or it can be uncovered by a process of psychoanalysis. Freud postulated a tripartite structure of the mind, or person, consisting of the id, the ego and the superego. The id is the most primitive and instinctual part, the part that requires satisfaction of basic needs; and in Freudian theory, sexual aspects play a large role here. The superego is the part constituted by internalized, socially acquired control mechanisms, for instance the role models given by our parents and the moral education they and our teachers impart to us. And the ego is the conscious mind, which comes about by means of the dynamic interactions between superego and id. It is largely by means of the ego that we deal with external reality. Only the ego mind is conscious; the other parts remain unconscious, unless brought into consciousness by the techniques of psychoanalysis. And here a cycle in this historical chapter is completed: although the Freudian tripartite model is not compatible with the Platonic tripartite model, both Freud and Plato drew a similar broad conclusion: that psychological wellbeing or human flourishing comes about when the three parts of the mind or soul operate in harmony.46 There are plenty of justified criticisms of Freud. His empirical studies are tainted by a degree of manipulation and his methodology of psychoanalysis has proven to be less efficacious than claimed and has largely gone out of modern usage. The tripartite mind is now seen as an over-simplistic functional metaphor. In our time, Freud has gained more attention from cultural theorists than among empirically minded psychologists, as well as in some 20th century schools of philosophy such as the Frankfurter-Schule or the tradition associated with Jacques Lacan in France. This work will not take an explicitly Freudian approach to self and identity – that would be a different argument altogether. On the other hand, there is one specific conclusion which must be drawn: any theory of self or identity which ignores the aspect of the unconscious, as well as interaction 46

Many sources, but mainly Freud’s own Vorlesungen.

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between the conscious and unconscious, must be inadequate. Whatever role and scope one might grant to the unconscious, the Freudian idea is too well entrenched, and empirically substantiated, to be simply ignored. In many instances, our true identity might be better traced to our unconscious than to our conscious minds. It’s now time to take this historic review into the present and to summarize the lessons to be learned.

2.7 The Story so Far There were two great schisms in 20th century thinking: one is the split at the start of the century between the positivistic approach on the one hand, and what is loosely called ‘Continental philosophy’ on the other. The other great schism has been between what C. P. Snow called the two cultures, i.e. the world of empirical science on the one hand and of humanities on the other. Both schisms have left their marks in debates on self and personhood. The process of fragmentation continued throughout the 20th century, frequently with unexpected results: while modernism and postmodernism lay claim to be iconoclastic movements, processes of the ‘deconstructing’ of old ideologies, we have seen in the era the paradox formation of new ideologies which are even more dogmatically put forward than the old ones. Within this general context, the volume of philosophical debates on self, personhood and identity has exploded. One work, written in the analytic sub-category of ordinary language philosophy, seems to have transcended the various schools: With the Concept of Mind, Gilbert Ryle made his mark half way through the century by showing up the linguistic and conceptual errors inherent in Cartesian dualism.47 The impact of this work signifies to us that substance dualism was still a widely held position at the time. The first chapter, entitled Descartes’ Myth, opens as follows:

47

Ryle, Gilbert and Daniel C. Dennett (Intro). The Concept of Mind. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1949/2002. Ryle’s ordinary language approach has gone out of fashion, for reasons which seem to be of a technical nature. In my view, his is a work of great significance and acuity.

67 There is a doctrine about the nature and place of minds which is so prevalent among theorists and even among laymen that it deserves to be described as the official theory. Most philosophers, psychologists and religious teachers subscribe … to its main articles, although they admit to certain theoretical difficulties with it, they tend to assume that these can be overcome without serious modifications being made to the architecture of the theory. It will be argued here that the central principles of the doctrine are unsound and conflict with the whole body of what we know about minds when we are not speculating about them.48

Ryle later refers to the official theory “with deliberate abusiveness”, as the dogma of the Ghost in the machine. I have already staked a claim for Darwin as the thinker who initiated the final downfall of substance dualism; it was Ryle who hoped to finally lay that ghost, although the ghost has still not been so easily disposed of. As ghosts never exist in the first place, it tends to be difficult to kill them off. Even today, dualism lives on, in latent or explicit forms. Emeritus Regius Professor of Divinity Keith Ward has recently claimed the following: “Looking around my philosopher colleagues in Britain, virtually all of whom I know at least from their published work, I would say that very few of them are materialists.”49 Whether you agree with this opinion or not (and Daniel Dennett certainly doesn’t agree, as will be seen), the very fact that it could be expressed by a renowned scholar is indicative of the persistence of the ghost. What of that related topic, personal identity? In accord with the mood of the age, personal identity came more and more to be seen as a social construct: matters such as gender identity, national identity, racial identity, migrant identity, class identity, professional identity and so on have moved centre-stage and dominated a discussion which has become more and more fragmented. Thinking on the matter has moved some way from where a holistic and somatic approach to personal identity might lead us. It will be an aim of this work to return to a more holistic conceptualization. The concept of ‘self’ has suffered a worse fate than that of the more general term identity: it has become an almost standard position in our time that state that the ‘self’ is just a ‘myth’ or an ‘illusion’, a position ultimately traceable back to David Hume. Martin and Barresi formulate 48 49

Ryle (1949/2002). 11. Ward, Keith. Is Religion Dangerous? Oxford: Lion, 2006. 91.

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that position romantically, telling us that “today, without meaningful theoretical support from religion or science, the unified self stands naked and exposed, revealed for the first time for what it is: a misleading, albeit socially indispensable and incredibly useful fiction”. Gerhard Roth takes the matter even further, claiming that the denouement of the self amounts to the fourth great outrage, in line with the three we have seen from Freud.50 I summarily protest and will do so in some detail later: if the self is an illusion or a fiction, then so are many of the other concepts that we talk about – the mind, for instance, which also has no unequivocal correlate in science; or ‘society’, or ‘the state’, or the legendary German Bruttosozialprodukt, which also cannot be specified in physical terms. Or, in empirical-scientific terms, the centre of gravity, which doesn’t exist in any straightforward ontological sense but is of great significance in physics. The error lies in believing that the self must be theoretically supported by science or religion: my own view is that it is a conceptual issue which is primarily to be theoretically supported by philosophy. All in all, it would be a daunting task to try to give a summary of all 20th century discussions on ‘self’ and ‘identity’ but we will see a continuation of history throughout this book. Before moving on, it is worth reflecting on what history can teach us.

2.8 General Historical Inferences Thomas Kuhn has shown us how the history of scientific ideas has been a history of gestalt switches between old and new paradigms (Kuhn 1996) and this notion applies equally to the history of philosophical ideas. In this respect, there is one significant difference between science and philosophy: science avails by definition of empirical experiment and observation and scientists are frequently forced by the observed facts to revise theories which cannot be made compatible with empirical observations. In the 50

„Zuerst wird durch die Evolutionstheorie dem Menschen der Status als Krone der Schöpfung abgesprochen, dann wird der Geist vom göttlichen Funken zu etwas Natürlich-Irdischem gemacht, und schließlich wird das Ich als nützliches Konstrukt entlarvt.“ Quoted in Fuchs (2010). 17.

69 absence of empirical experimentation, no such constraints apply in philosophy. This frequently leads to philosophical ideas being discussed long past their sell-by date – unless philosophers chose to avail of the empirical observations made by others.51 This and other issues have been directly or indirectly addressed in this chapter. The review of particular phases and aspects in the history of ideas has firstly shown how such terms of self, soul and personhood have come about; secondly, the pre-history and history of substance dualism and the origins of its tenacious hold on our thinking have been recounted and thirdly, the cultural aspect of our evolution, as opposed to the purely anatomical aspect, has been demonstrated. The function of cultural heritage has been shown and a question raised at the start of this section can now be answered: why was the radio not invented ninety-nine thousand years ago? The answer lies in the non-synchronicity between somatic evolution and cultural evolution, in the fact that the mind coevolves along a different trajectory than that of the brain. To recall the long history of just one cultural idea in illustration of that process, our modern concept of gravity: it was the general Renaissance insight into perspective which led to the Copernican revolution in our perception of the world. This perception was a necessary precondition for Galileo’s insight into gravity and Kepler’s resultant laws of planetary motion a century later. It was a further century later that Newton processed the exact observations of the planets carried out by the Astronomer Royal and developed his theory of gravity, which encompasses and explains the Keplerian laws. Newton’s theory had its limitations too, problems that he himself was aware of but could not solve, as has been seen. So that two centuries later, Albert Einstein developed his Theory of General Relativity, explicitly acknowledging his debt to Newton, a theory which had in effect taken around 500 years to gestate but one that every advanced school student of physics understands today. And to take us into our own times, more than 100 years later, much of the technology we experience today could not have come about without Einsteinean relativity, such everyday matters as satellite navigation, for instance. In the historic revision of ideas,

51

A point developed in Appendix one.

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we see two processes in action: first of all the continuation which is implied by the fact that each (scientific) idea develops out of the science which went before and secondly, the paradigmatic shifts which come about from time to time to construct new theories to fit in with new facts. That is an example from the natural sciences of the development of ideas over time in a cultural sense; of the necessary paradigmatic shifts which have come about from time to time. But is there any more direct relevance to self and personhood? Self and Personhood in History We see in history that our anthropological ideas have developed over the centuries too, albeit in a less obvious way. Throughout all of our history, it was substance dualism which was the standard position, which has been one of the most venerable of all our beliefs. The history given here is a part of our heritage, engraved on the ‘memes’ we carry and it is difficult to escape from such a firmly embedded paradigm. Many of the very categories in which we think in relation to soul self, identity and personhood can be traced back to Plato, whose influence, both directly and indirectly, has been diachronically uninterrupted and is constitutive of the Western tradition in such matters. History also belies the account that philosophy had taken up positions independent of religion. In the words of Martin and Barresi: “Without the encouragement of Christianity, substance dualism might never have gotten its vicelike grip on the imagination of European thinkers.”52 History also shows us the necessity to move on. Substance dualism is a concept of religious or metaphysical origin; it cannot easily be argued in a secular context. It is a paradigm which has exceeded its useful lifetime. Scientifically, the theory was undermined by Darwin’s Evolutionary theory; for the many who hung on to the traditional paradigm, Ryle effectively showed up the conceptual confusions behind the theory and completed the demise of substance dualism from a philosophical point of view. That is not to say that there is no such thing as ‘mind’, being a concept (rather than a thing) separate and distinct from that of ‘brain’. 52

Martin & Barresi (2006). 303.

71 Clearly, there is a mind, that cognitive faculty we possess, which avails of various bodily functions (not just brain functions) but also encompasses non-material things such as our cultural heritage, our personal and collective memories and all the other elements of knowledge that we possess, whether by our own activities or through learning. In a substance dualistic paradigm, there are various, metaphysically inclined solutions to issues of self, personhood and personal identity, as has historically been shown. In the monistic paradigm, personal identity must in some sense recur with the body and becomes a naturalistic issue, rather than a metaphysical one. It seems to me that this is the only tenable position to take in the 21st century; nevertheless, some further argument will be offered in the following chapter to lay the ghost in the machine, in the face of the many attempts which have been made to rescue the concept of dualism, attempts which only add to the confusions, I will be arguing. This overview has established a number of important parameters for the paper and set the scene for the more actual discussion on topics of self and identity which now commences with a more detailed discussion of the monism-dualism debate.

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Chapter Three

Dualism, Monism and End of Debate The unity of soul and body is so profound that one has to consider the soul to be the “form” of the body. Catechism of the Catholic Church. You’re nothing but a pack of neurons. Francis Crick.

3.1 Death of the Soul? In the course of the 20th century, many secular philosophers appeared to lose their souls. Previously, the standard position in Western philosophy had been a Weltbild which encompassed both a material body and a supernatural or metaphysical ‘soul’. The soul was considered to be knowable, if at all, by purely rational means; for practitioners of religion, it was known by divine revelation. It has been shown in the previous chapter how substance dualism is perhaps the oldest of all our beliefs. But the historical chapter also referred to grave problems relating to substance dualism. The most significant problems highlighted were: firstly, the contemporaneous criticism against Descartes, related mainly to the difficulty of offering an explication for the interaction between a material body and an immaterial soul; secondly, the problems raised by Evolutionary theory, which pinpointed the issue of whether an immaterial soul could have evolved in a naturalistic world; and thirdly, the death knell

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rung by Ryle in 1950 with his scathing conceptual criticism of the ghostin-the-machine idea. It seemed to many that enough was enough. By the end of the century, the dualistic Weltbild had been allegedly rejected by the majority of Western academic philosophers in favour of a substance-monistic one, the idea that the ‘materialistic world’ is all that there is, or at least all that we can know about. According to Daniel Dennett (1992) “Materialism of one sort or another is now a received opinion approaching unanimity.” Nevertheless, there were many who refused to accept the paradigmatic shift which appeared to be the order of the day and instead fought back against unequivocal materialism, leading to various weaker conceptions of dualism. But an uncompromising version of materialism, or more precisely of physicalism or naturalism, will be argued here and will then become a premise of the rest of this work. Non-Cartesian ‘dualisms’ are façons de parler which only confuse the debate. It cannot be my aim to engage with the entire volume of literature relating to such issues: instead, just a narrow range of selected sources will be addressed on the pathway to developing a naturalistic version of self and personal identity, the central issue addressed in this book. Let’s first of all work towards clarity in three crucial terms. Materialism, Physicalism, or Naturalism? In reviewing the relevant literature, one notes that these terms are used by some philosophers in ways which are more or less synonymous. But to speak of the ‘materialistic world’ post-Einstein is problematic, as physicists now hold energy to be a concept which is more fundamental than matter. In most contexts, materialism is roughly the equivalent of physicalism but not in all: current theory in physics suggests that 95% of the universe consists of some stuff which is referred to as ‘dark energy’ or ‘dark matter’ – so that whatever materialistic theories we avail of appear to cover only 5% of the known universe. Empirically speaking, the ultimate reality in physics is better expressed in terms of equations, or laws, or information. In consequence, the term ‘physicalism’ or ‘physicalist world’, loosely defined as the realm of those things which obey the laws or equations of physics, is to be preferred to that of materialism. I take it to be

75 the case that the 95% of ‘dark energy’ will ultimately be shown to correspond to the rules of physics, although we do not yet know how. It is therefore erroneous to assume that the physicalist world and the materialist world are extensionally equivalent: the physicalist world encompasses not only energy but such emergent particles as phonons for instance (see section 3.3), which are not materialistic in nature. Similarly, it will ultimately be argued here that ideas, or mental states, are components of the physicalist world, but not of the materialist world. As no convincing argument has been given for suggesting that the ‘natural’ world is in some sense greater than the physical world, I will suggest at the end of this chapter that my version of physicalism is the equivalent of naturalism. In a text previously referred to, Eric Turkheimer takes the matter of materialism firmly into the mind-body sphere. (He ultimately means physicalism, perhaps, but in this instance the point remains the same). He points out that advances in the technology of the neurosciences have produced what he calls “an exponential increase in the ability to detect neurological and genetic correlates of complex behaviour” and goes on to state: In the most obvious sense, materialism requires one to recognize all mental and social phenomena as characteristics of the physical self, most notably the brain. This sense of the word biological, which I refer to as “weak biologism”, is strictly a matter of materialist philosophy. There is no need to conduct empirical science to locate thoughts, feelings, and beliefs in the body, and brain.53

He significantly differentiates between weak biologism, i.e. the philosophical kind, and what he terms strong biologism, which is “the assertion that certain psychological phenomena are biological as a matter of empirical science.” The differentiation is an important one, one that should be noted by philosophers with a tendency to reduce mental states to ‘firing neurons’. There is a weak sense in which that is true but, more explicitly, the firing of neurons is a matter for the empirical sciences; in order to defend weak biologism, i.e. the materialist hypothesis, it is not necessary to refer directly to aspects which are the proper subject matter of 53

Turkheimer, Eric. Heritability and Biological Explanation, in: Psychological Review 1998, vol. 105, No.4, 782-791.

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the empirical sciences. In his conclusion, Turkheimer aptly summarizes the debate: “Everything is biological; everything is genetic.” So is it the case that we can only talk about biological or materialist things? Not at all. Wittgenstein made this point right at the opening of his Tractatus: “Die Welt ist die Gesamtheit der Tatsachen, nicht der Dinge.”(TLP 1.1), i.e. that the world is the totality of facts, not of things. I interpret that to mean that there is a sense in which the totality of facts transcends the mere totality of things. To hold such a position is not to argue for the existence of a ‘supernatural’ realm. Many Faces of Dualism If one thinks in a materialist, or more precisely a physicalist paradigm: is there any residual justification for taking a dualist position in the mindbody debate? Substance dualism is seldom argued in our time but more common are rescue attempts in the form of vaguer expressions of the dualistic concept. In the course of the 20th century, ‘dualism’ has come to mean a large number of things to a great number of people and until one is sure what exactly is meant by the introductory question, one must be cautious about giving an answer. Outside of the mind-body context, the meaning of the term ‘dualism’ is straightforward enough. The ODE gives as primary definition: the division of something conceptually into two opposed or contrasted aspects, or the state of being so divided. But what do philosophers mean by dualism? The most precise philosophical theory of mind-body dualism in modern times is that formulated by René Descartes, as has already been described in the historical section. His theory of substance dualism was developed with unequivocal precision, thus opening up possibilities for debate in a coherent way. Whether we agree with Descartes or not, we all know what we are talking about. His theory answers to true, or false, which cannot be said of many quasi-dualistic positions which allow of no such precision and lead instead to answers of well, maybe perhaps, to some degree. Within the language game of Cartesian dualism, you are either a dualist, i.e. a believer in substance dualism; or a monist, i.e. a believer in

77 the theory that there is only one substance.54 Cartesian Dualism is the philosophical gold standard for such theories and that is a plausible reason why Descartes is still a widely read and discussed philosopher. What is meant by the term ‘substance’ within the Cartesian context? Apart from the third substance that Descartes refers to, viz. God, he avails of the terms ‘res extensa’ and ‘res cogitans’; the literal translations are approximately ‘extended thing’ (in time and space) and ‘thinking thing’, but the terms are generally translated into English – not quite appropriately – as ‘corporeal substance’ and ‘mental substance’. For substance, the ODE gives: a particular kind of matter with uniform properties; this is not a very enlightening definition in the given context, which leads me to refer back to Descartes himself and his own treatment of the terms. In the second Meditation, Descartes gives us a description of the res cogitans, here in the Latin original, which is explicit enough: “Sed quid igitur sum? Res cogitans. Quid est hoc? Nempe dubitans, intelligens, affirmans, negans, volens, nolens, imaginans quoque & sentiens.”55 There are some notable omissions in the Cartesian definition of the thinking thing, such as remembrance of the past or anticipation of the future, but we can take it that Descartes meant to include the entire gamut of everything we would nowadays call ‘mental’. This is not just a definition of the res cogitans (what am I?) but the unequivocal attribution of self and identity (Who am I?) to the mentalistic ‘substance’ of the dualistic model. To better characterise that other substance, the res extensa, Descartes uses the metaphor of a piece of beeswax.56 We might be tempted to think that its size, colour, shape, hardness, taste etc. are characteristic of that 54

There is no essential reason why non-dualism should imply monism. Alternatives to dualism could be theories proposing any number of substances: we already encountered the tertium quid in scholastic philosophy and the tertium quid is just as plausible a postulation as the equally invisible res cogitans. Nevertheless, the debate is generally restricted to one of ‘monism versus dualism’, presumably for historical reasons. 55 Descartes, R. (1641) Meditationes de Prima Philosophia. Stuttgart: Reclam, 1986. 86. literal translation: “What am I then? A thinking thing. What is that? a thing which is doubting, realizing, affirming, negating, wishing for, not wishing for, imagining and feeling.” 56 Ibid. 89-97.

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piece of wax and yet, when we melt the wax, the substance as such takes on a new form: it expands, becomes liquid, becomes hot, ceases to resonate and so on. So what is the actual substance? Fortassis illud erat quod nunc cogito: nempe ceram ipsam no quidem fuisse istam dulcedinem mellis, nec florum fragrantiam, nec istam albedinem, nec figuram, nec sonum, sed corpus quod mihi apparebat Paulo atie modis istis conspicuum, nunc diversis. Quid est autem hoc praecise quod sic imaginor? Attendamus, & remotis iis quae ad ceram non pertinent, videamus quid supersit: nempe nihil aliud quàm extensum quid, flexibile, mutabile.57

Apologies to those who never learnt Latin, but Latin is simply the most precise formulation of the Cartesian position. Most important is a literal translation of the final phrase: “It is nothing more than something which is extended, flexible, and changeable”. In that sense, the two ‘substances’ referred to by Descartes are in ontologically separate and incommensurable categories – here the thinking thing, specified functionally but with no reference to where and when, there the extended thing, specified spatially, i.e. a thing-in-the-world. It is relevant to note that Descartes specifies a mentalistic thing, and not just a function. And that thing has generally been seen as a thing which is compatible with the Christian notion of a ‘soul’; in the approved translation into French, the term used is ‘âme’. In Christian belief, the soul is a thing which is separately created by God, as described in section 2.3, and not merely a function of the physical body. Many philosophical writers still maintain their intuition that we are more than just skin and bones, or sophisticated animals. They believe that there is a further dimension to being a person, a spiritual dimension, something greater than a mere physical dimension. And surely there is, I would agree, a point which I will return to at the end of this chapter. This intuition doesn't imply that substance monism is a position to be rejected – but there is a contemporary debate which appears to do precisely that. If you think that substance dualistic positions are a thing of the past, then I refer you to the ‘zombie debate’ below, a very extensive debate indeed. My own intuition for what it’s worth, tells me the following: that reluctance to abandon the centuries-old dualistic paradigm have led to 57

Ibid. 91.

79 considerable efforts to keep the ancient debate going, rather than to accept what seems to be inevitable, i.e. the gestalt switch to a new paradigm in which we no longer speak of dualism at all, making the monism/dualism debate obsolete. Many half-way-house theories have been developed, particularly in the late 20th century, which contrive to maintain the concept of dualism while simultaneously rejecting the specifics of Cartesian dualism.58 Such positions have been described in turn as ‘predicate dualism’, or ‘property dualism’, or, simply ‘Non-Cartesian dualism’, hardly a term of overwhelming precision. But incautious use of terms contributes more to obfuscating the problem than to clarifying the issue. Language meets ontology, so to speak: if the extension of the terms used is not clear, then the language raises mud and ‘reality’ disappears behind the mud. In awareness of the danger of stirring the muddy waters still more, an attempt will be made here to clarify the terms and analyse the main streams in ‘non-Cartesian dualism’, preliminary to arguing in favour of ending the debate altogether. The concept of substance monism does not exclude a specific concept of ‘mind’ as something which transcends the primary physical properties of the body. But that idea will be developed in the subsequent main section. The first ‘modernised’ version of dualism to be addressed is predicate dualism, a position which accepts the physicalist premise, but still claims to be a dualism.

3.2 Predicate Dualism Howard Robinson characterises predicate dualism as follows: Predicate dualism is the theory that psychological or mentalistic predicates are (a) essential for a full description of the world and (b) are not reducible to physicalistic predicates. For a mental predicate to be reducible, there would be bridging laws connecting types of psychological states to types of physical ones in such a way that the use of the mental predicate carried no information that could not be expressed without it. An example of what we believe to be a true 58

This might be called ontological dualism but I am reluctant to open yet a further field of debate, viz the use of the term ‘ontology’, which is almost as variable in its interpretations as the term ‘metaphysics.’

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type reduction outside psychology is the case of water, where water is always H2O: something is water if and only if it is H2O. … But the terms in many of the special sciences (that is, any science except physics itself) are not reducible in this way. Not every hurricane or every infectious disease … has the same constitutive structure. These states are defined more by what they do than by their composition or structure. Their names are classified as functional terms rather than natural kind terms. It goes with this that such kinds of state are multiply realizable; that is, they may be constituted by different kinds of physical structures under different circumstances.59

To give a specific example: let’s suppose that John feels a severe pain which he locates in his left kidney. And suppose that the sophisticated brain imaging skills of today indicate a brain state which the neurologist can, by means of induction from previous experiments, relate specifically to the kidney pain. The neurologist speaks of ‘brain state Pk1,’ and the patient speaks of ‘kidney pain’. A week later, the patient reports exactly the same kidney pain, whereas the neurologist records a similar but nonidentical brain state Pk2. And then there is a further patient Jim, who reports very similar symptoms to John. His brain state is recorded as Pk3, again similar but non-identical. We now have three similar but nonidentical brain states, all leading to the same pain phenomenon.60 So it looks as if predicate dualism is true. There is no direct, pathway between the terms, especially as neither John nor Jim is a neurologist. So far so good. But it is hard to see the value of speaking about ‘predicate dualism’ in this way, because it doesn’t really tell us anything that is new, or significant. With what could ‘predicate dualism’ be contrasted with? ‘Predicate monism’? But predicate monism would imply that there is only one way of talking about a given state, whereas there is always more than one way of talking about virtually every conceivable state, unless we are talking about two things which are intensionally and extensionally identical. Where has all of this taken us? It seems that the argument has reached some state of aporia. Predicate dualism is true in the sense that in different contexts we express ourselves differently, although 59

Robinson, Howard, “Dualism”, The Stanford Encyclopaedia of Philosophy (Fall 2009 Edition) URL =