Ideas

by Peter Watson

  The romantics in particular show very clearly the evolution of the idea of the soul. As J. W. Burrow has observed, the essence of romanticism, and one might say of all the other ‘turnings in’ throughout history, is the notion Homo duplex, of a ‘second self’, a different–and very often a higher or better–self, whom one is trying to discover, or release. Arnold Hauser put it another way: ‘We live on two different levels, in two different spheres…these regions of being penetrate one another so thoroughly that the one can neither be subordinated to nor set against the other as its antithesis. The dualism of being is certainly no new conception, and the idea of the coincidentia oppositorum is quite familiar to us…but the double meaning and duplicity of existence…had never been experienced so intensively as now [i.e., in romantic times].’15

  Romanticism, and its sense of a ‘second self’ was–as we have seen–one of the factors which Henri Ellenberger included in The Discovery of the Unconscious, his massive work on the royal road that led to depth psychology and culminated with the ideas of Sigmund Freud, Alfred Adler and Carl Jung. The unconscious is the last great turning in, an attempt, as discussed in the previous chapter, to be scientific about our inner life. But the fact that it failed is important in a wider sense than its inadequacy as treatment, as we shall now see.

  Romanticism, the will, Bildung, Weber’s sense of vocation, the Volkgeist, the discovery of the unconscious, Innerlichkeit…the theme of the inner life, the second, inner, or as Kant called it the higher self, runs as strongly through nineteenth-century thought as it does throughout history, if not more strongly. A predominantly German concern with the irrational, it has been seen by some as forming the ‘deep background’ to the horrors of Nazism in the twentieth century (with the creation of the superior human being–the individual who has overcome his limitations by the exercise of will–as the goal of human history). That is not a trivial matter but it is not the main concern here. Instead, we are more interested in what this helps us conclude about the history of ideas. It surely confirms the pattern discussed above, of man’s recurring attempts to look deep inside himself in search of…God, fulfilment, catharsis, his ‘true’ motives, his ‘real’ self.

  Alfred North Whitehead famously once remarked that the history of Western thought consisted of a series of footnotes to Plato. At the end of our long journey, we can now see that, whether Whitehead was being rhetorical or ironical, he was at best half right. In the realm of ideas, history has consisted of two main streams (I am oversimplifying here, but this is the Conclusion). There has been the history of ‘out there’, of the world outside man, the Aristotelian world of observation, exploration, travel, discovery, measurement, experiment and manipulation of the environment, in short the materialistic world of what we now call science. While this adventure has hardly been a straight line, and advances have been piecemeal at times, and even held up or hindered for centuries on end, mainly by fundamentalist religions, this adventure must be counted a success overall. Few would doubt that the material progress of the world, or much of it, is there for all to see. This advance continued, in accelerated mode, in the twentieth century.

  The other main stream in the history of ideas has been the exploration of man’s inner life, his soul and/or second self, what we might label (with Whitehead) Platonic–as opposed to Aristotelian–concerns. This stream may itself be divided into two. In the first place, there has been the story of man’s moral life, his social and political life, his development of ways to live together, and this must be counted a qualified success, or at least as having a predominantly positive outcome. The broad transition in history from autocratic monarchies, whether temporal or papal, through feudalism, to democracy, and from theocratic to secular circumstances, has certainly brought greater freedoms and greater fulfilment to greater numbers of people (generally speaking, of course–there are always exceptions). The various stages in this unfolding process have been described in the pages above. Although political and legal arrangements vary around the world, all peoples have a politics and a legal system. They have concepts of justice that extend well beyond what we may call for simplicity’s sake the law of the jungle. In an institution such as the competitive examination, for example, we see the concept of justice extending beyond the purely criminal/legal area, to education. Even the development of statistics, a form of mathematics, was at times spurred by the interests of justice, as we saw in Chapter32. Though the achievements of the formal social sciences have been limited in comparison with those of physics, astronomy, chemistry or medicine, say, their very evolution was intended as a more just improvement on the partisan nature of politics. All this must be accounted a (perhaps qualified) success.

  The final theme–man’s understanding of himself, of his inner life–has proved the most disappointing. Some, perhaps many, will take issue with this, arguing that the better part of the history of art and creation is the history of man’s inner life. While this is undoubtedly true in a sense, it is also true that the arts don’t explain the self. Often enough, they attempt to describe the self or, more accurately, a myriad selves under a myriad different circumstances. But the very popularity in the contemporary world of Freudianism and other ‘depth’ psychologies, concerned mainly with the ‘inner self’ and self-esteem (and however misguidedly), surely confirms this assessment. If the arts were truly successful, would there be a need for these psychologies, these new ways of looking-in?

  It is a remarkable conclusion to arrive at, that, despite the great growth in individuality, the vast corpus of art, the rise of the novel, the many ways that men and women have devised to express themselves, man’s study of himself is his biggest intellectual failure in history, his least successful area of inquiry. But it is undoubtedly true, as the constant ‘turnings-in’, over the centuries, have underlined. These ‘turnings-in’ do not build on one another, in a cumulative way, like science; they replace one another, as the previous variant runs down, or fails. Plato has misled us, and Whitehead was wrong: the great success stories in the history of ideas have been in the main the fulfilment of Aristotle’s legacy, not Plato’s. This is confirmed above all by the latest developments in historiography–which underline that the early modern period, as it is now called, has replaced the Renaissance as the most significant transition in history. As R. W. S. Southern has said, the period between 1050 and 1250, the rediscovery of Aristotle, was the greatest and most important transformation in human life, leading to modernity, and not the (Platonic) Renaissance of two centuries later.

  For many years–for hundreds of years–man had little doubt that he had a soul, that whether or not there was some ‘soul substance’ deep inside the body, this soul represented the essence of man, anessence that was immortal, indestructible. Ideas about the soul changed in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries and, as the loss of belief in God started to gather pace, other notions were conceived. Beginning with Hobbes and then Vico, talk about the self and the mind began to replace talk about the soul and this view triumphed in the nineteenth century, especially in Germany with its development of romanticism, of the human or social sciences, Innerlichkeit and the unconscious. The growth of mass society, of the new vast metropolises, played a part here too, provoking a sense of the loss of self.16

  Set against this background, the advent of Freud was a curious business. Coming after Schopenhauer, von Hartmann, Charcot, Janet, the dipsychism of Max Dessoir and the Urphänomene of von Schubert, or Bachofen’s Law of Mothers, Freud’s ideas were not as startlingly original as they are sometimes represented. Yet, after a shaky start, they became immensely influential, what Paul Robinson described in the mid-1990s as ‘the dominant intellectual presence of the [twentieth] century’.17 One reason for this was that Freud, as a doctor, thought of himself as a biologist, a scientist in the tradition of Copernicus and Darwin. The Freudian unconscious was therefore a sophisticated attempt to be scientific about the self. In this sense, it promised the greatest convergence of the two main stream
s in the history of ideas, what we might call an Aristotelian understanding of Platonic concerns. Had it worked, it would surely have comprised the greatest intellectual achievement in history, the greatest synthesis of ideas of all time.

  Today, many people remain convinced that Freud’s efforts succeeded, which is one reason why the whole area of ‘depth psychology’ is so popular. At the same time, among the psychiatric profession and in the wider world of science, Freud is more generally vilified, his ideas dismissed as fanciful and unscientific. In 1972 Sir Peter Medawar, a Nobel Prize-winning doctor, described psychoanalysis as ‘one of the saddest and strangest of all landmarks in the history of twentieth-century thought’.18* Many studies have been published which appear to show that psychoanalysis does not work as treatment, and several of Freud’s ideas in his other books (Totem and Taboo, for example, or Moses and Monotheism) have been thoroughly discredited, as misguided, using evidence that can no longer be substantiated. The recent scholarship, considered in the previous chapter, which has so discredited Freud, only underlines this and underlines it emphatically.

  But if most educated people accept now that psychoanalysis has failed, it also has to be said that the concept of consciousness, which is the word biologists and neurologists have coined to describe our contemporary sense of self, has not fared much better. If, by way of conclusion, we ‘fast-forward’ from the end of the nineteenth century to the end of the twentieth, we encounter the ‘Decade of the Brain’, which was adopted by the US Congress in 1990. During the ten-year period that followed, many books on consciousness were published, ‘consciousness studies’ proliferated as an academic discipline, and there were three international symposia on consciousness. The result? It depends who you talk to. John Maddox, a former editor of Nature which, with Science, is the foremost scientific journal in the world, wrote that ‘No amount of introspection can enable a person to discover just which set of neurons in which part of his or her head is executing some thought-process. Such information seems to be hidden from the human user.’ Colin McGinn, a British philosopher at Rutgers University, New Jersey, argues that consciousness is resistant to explanation, in principle and for all time.19 Other philosophers, such as Harvard’s Thomas Nagel and Hilary Putnam, argue that at present (and maybe for all time) science cannot account for ‘qualia’, the first-person phenomenal experience that we understand as consciousness, why, in Simon Blackburn’s words, the grey matter of the brain can provide us with the experience of, for example, yellow-ness. Benjamin Libet, in a series of controversial experiments, has claimed that it takes about half a second for consciousness itself to happen (‘Libet’s delay’). Whether this (if true) is an advance is not yet clear. John Gray, professor of European thought at the London School of Economics, is one of those who has identified such phenomena as the ‘hard problem’ in consciousness studies.20

  On the other hand, John Searle, Mills Professor of philosophy at the University of California, Berkeley, says there is nothing much to explain, that consciousness is an ‘emergent property’ that automatically arises when you put ‘a bag of neurons’ together. He explains, or tries to, by analogy: the behaviour of H2O molecules ‘explains’ liquidity, but the individual molecules are not liquid–this is another emergent property.21 (Such arguments are reminiscent of the ‘pragmatic’ philosophy of William James and Charles Peirce, discussed in Chapter 34, where the sense of self emerges from behaviour, not the other way round.) Roger Penrose, a physicist from London University, believes that a new kind of dualism is needed, that in effect a whole new set of physical laws may apply inside the brain, which account for consciousness. Penrose’s particular contribution is to argue that quantum physics operates inside tiny structures, known as tubules, within the nerve cells of the brain to produce–in some as yet unspecified way–the phenomena we recognise as consciousness.22 Penrose actually thinks that we live in three worlds–the physical, the mental and the mathematical: ‘The physical world grounds the mental world, which in turn grounds the mathematical world and the mathematical world is the ground of the physical world and so on around the circle.’23 Many people, who find this tantalising, nonetheless don’t feel Penrose has proved anything. His speculation is enticing and original, but it is still speculation.

  Instead, it is two forms of reductionism that, in the present climate, attract most support. For people like Daniel Dennett, a biologically-inclined philosopher from Tufts University near Boston in Massachusetts, human consciousness and identity arise from the narrative of our lives, and this can be related to specific brain states. For example, there is growing evidence that the ability to ‘apply intentional predicates to other people is a human universal’ and is associated with a specific area of the brain (the orbitofrontal cortex), an ability which in certain states of autism is defective. There is also evidence that the blood supply to the orbitofrontal cortex increases when people ‘process’ intentional verbs as opposed to non-intentional ones and that damage to this area of the brain can lead to a failure to introspect. Other experiments have shown that activity in the area of the brain known as the amygdala is associated with the experience of fear, that the decisions of individual monkeys in certain games could be predicted by the firing patterns of individual neurons in the orbitofrontal-striatal circuits of the brain, that neurotransmitters known as propranolol and serotonin affect decision-making, and that the ventral putamen within the striatum is activated when people experience pleasure.24 Suggestive as this is, it is also the case that the micro-anatomy of the brain varies quite considerably from individual to individual, and that a particular phenomenal experience is represented at several different points in the brain, which clearly require integration. Any ‘deep’ patterns relating experience to brain activity have yet to be discovered, and seem to be a long way off, though this is still the most likely way forward.

  A related approach–and this is perhaps to be expected, given other developments in recent years–is to look at the brain and consciousness in a Darwinian light. In what sense is consciousness adaptive? This approach has produced two views–one, that the brain was in effect ‘jerry built’ in evolution to accomplish very many and very different tasks. On this account, the brain is at base three organs, a reptilian core (the seat of our basic drives), a palaeomammalian layer, which produces such things as affection for offspring, and a neomammalian brain, the seat of reasoning, language and other ‘higher functions’.25 The second approach is to argue that throughout evolution (and throughout our bodies) there have been emergent properties: for example, there is always a biochemical explanation underlying a physiological or medical phenomenon–sodium/potassium flux across a membrane can also be described as ‘nerve action potential’.26 In this sense, then, consciousness is nothing new in principle even if, for now, we don’t fully understand it.

  Studies of nerve action throughout the animal kingdom have also shown that nerves work by either ‘firing’ or not firing; intensity is represented by the rate of firing–the more intense the stimulation the faster the turning on and off of any particular nerve. This is of course very similar to the way computers work, in ‘bits’ of information, where everything is represented by a configuration of either 0s or 1s. The arrival of the concept of parallel processing in computing led Daniel Dennett to consider whether an analogous procedure might happen in the brain between different evolutionary levels, giving rise to consciousness. Again, though tantalising, such reasoning has not gone much further than preliminary exploration. At the moment, no one seems able to think of the next step.

  So, despite all the research into consciousness in recent years, and despite the probability that the ‘hard’ sciences still offer the most likely way forward, the self remains as elusive as ever. Science has proved an enormous success in regard to the world ‘out there’ but has so far failed in the one area that arguably interests us the most–ourselves. Despite the general view that the self arises in some way from brain activity–from the action of electrons and
the elements, if you will–it is hard to escape the conclusion that, after all these years, we still don’t know even how to talk about consciousness, about the self.