The Modern Mind

by Peter Watson

  Nagel does not have an alternative explanation to, say, evolutionary theory, but he says he doesn’t need one to cast doubt on the grand claims that are being made for evolution. That is Nagel’s charm and, maybe, his force: he is not afraid to tell us what he doesn’t know, or even that some of his views may be absurd. His aim is to use language, and reason, to think in ways that haven’t been done before. In his view, his intuition (as well as his powers of observation) tell him that the world is a big, complex place. Any one solution is extremely likely to be wrong, and it is intellectually lazy not to explore all possibilities. ‘The capacity to imagine new forms of hidden order, and to understand new conceptions created by others, seems to be innate. Just as matter can be arranged to embody a conscious, thinking organism, so some of these organisms can rearrange themselves to embody more and more thorough and objective mental representations of the world that contains them, and this possibility too must exist in advance.’24 Nagel describes this view as rational but anti-empiricist.25 Since agreement is only possible to us through language, Nagel says, echoing Wittgenstein, there may well be things about our world – in fact, there probably are – that we cannot conceive. We are almost certainly limited by our biological capacity in this respect. In time that may change, but this also should change our view of what objectivity and reality are. ‘Realism is most compelling when we are forced to recognise the existence of something which we cannot describe or know fully, because it lies beyond the reach of language, proof, evidence, or empirical understanding.’26 So for Nagel we may some day be able to conceive what things were like before the Big Bang.27

  For Nagel, ethics are just as objective as anything science has to offer, and the subjective experience of the world easily the most fascinating ‘problem,’ which science is nowhere near answering. The objective fact of our subjective lives is a conundrum that we don’t even have the language or the right approach for. Empirical science as we know it is nowhere near an answer. Nagel’s books are difficult, in the sense that one feels he is on the edge of language all the time, questioning our assumptions, throwing up new possibilities, rearranging (as Wittgenstein counselled) the familiar in new and exciting ways. One is reminded of Lionel Trilling’s hope for fiction, that it would/should seek to remain outside any consensus and continually suggest new – and hitherto unimaginable – possibilities. And so Nagel is difficult, but exhilarating.

  Clifford Geertz, at the Institute for Advanced Study, in Princeton, New Jersey, shares very firmly with other postmodernists like Lyotard the view that the world is ‘a various place’ and that we must confront this uncomfortable truth if we are to have any hope of understanding the ‘conditions’ by which we live. In two books, The Interpretation of Cultures (1973) and, even more, Local Knowledge (1983), he detailed his view that subjectivity is the phenomenon for anthropologists (and others in the human sciences) to tackle.28 ‘The basic unity of mankind,’ according to Geertz, is an empty phrase if we do not take on board that drawing a ‘line between what is natural, universal, and constant in man and what is conventional, local and variable [is] extraordinarily difficult. In fact, it suggests that to draw such a line is to falsify the human situation, or at least to misrender it seriously.’29 The hunt for universals began with the Enlightenment, says Geertz, and that aim directed most Western thought, and has been a paradigm of Western science, and the Western notion of ‘truth,’ ever since. Pursuing fieldwork in Java, Bali, and Morocco, Geertz has dedicated his entire career to changing that view, to distinguishing between the ‘thin’ and ‘thick’ interpretations of cultures around the world, where ‘thick’ means to try to understand the signs and symbols and customs of another culture in its own terms, by assuming not, as Lévi-Strauss did, that all human experience across the globe can be reduced to structures, but instead that other cultures are just as ‘deep’ as our own, just as well thought out and rich in meaning, but perhaps ‘strange,’ not easily fitted into our own way of thinking.30

  Geertz’s starting point is palaeontology. It is wrong in his view to assume that the brain of Homo sapiens evolved biologically and that cultural evolution followed. Surely, he argues, there would have been a period of overlap. As man developed fire and tools, his brain would have still been evolving – and have evolved to take into account fire and tools. This evolution may well have been slightly different in different parts of the world, so that to talk of one human nature, even biologically speaking, may be misleading. Geertz’s own anthropology therefore involves the meticulous description of certain alien practices among non-Western peoples, where the examples are chosen precisely because they appear strange to ‘us.’ He chooses, for example, a Balinese cockfight (where people gamble with their status in a way literally unthinkable in the West); the way the Balinese give names to people; Renaissance painters in Italy (a sort of historical anthropology, this); and certain aspects of North African law, tribal practices overlaid with Islam.31 In each case his aim is not to show that these processes can be understood as ‘primitive’ versions of customs and practices that exist in the West, but as practices rich in themselves, with no exact counterpart in the West. The Balinese, for example, have five different ways of naming people; some of these are rarely used, but among those that are, are names that convey, all at the same time, the region one is from, the respect one is held in, and one’s relation to certain significant others. In another example, he shows how a Balinese man, whose wife has left him, tries to take (Balinese) law into his own hands, but ends up in a near-psychotic state since his actions cause him to be rejected by his society.32 These matters cannot be compared to their Western equivalents, says Geertz, because there are no Western equivalents. That is the point.

  Cultural resources are, therefore, not so much accessory to thought as ‘ingredient’ to it. For Geertz, an analysis of a Balinese cockfight can be as rich and rewarding about Bali thought and society as, say, an analysis of King Lear or The Waste Land are about Western thought and society. For him, the old division between sociology and psychology – whereby the sociology of geographically remote societies differed, but the psychology stayed the same – has now broken down.33 Geertz’s own summing up of his work is that ‘every people has its own sort of depth.’34 ‘Thinking is a matter of the intentional manipulation of cultural forms, and outdoor activities like ploughing or peddling are as good examples of it as closet experiences like wishing or regretting,’35 he writes; and, ‘The hallmark of modern consciousness … is its enormous multiplicity. For our time and forward, the image of a general orientation, perspective, Weltanschauung, growing out of humanistic studies (or, for that matter, out of scientific ones) and shaping the direction of culture is a chimera…. Agreement on the foundations of scholarly authority, old books and older manners, has disappeared…. The concept of a “new humanism,” of forging some general “the best that is being thought and said” ideology and working it into the curriculum, [is] not merely implausible but Utopian altogether. Possibly, indeed, a bit worrisome.’36 Geertz does not see this as a recipe for anarchy; for him, once we accept the ‘depth of the differences’ between peoples and traditions, we can begin to study them and construct a vocabulary in which to publicly formulate them. Life will in future be made up of a variety of vivid vernaculars, rather than ‘forceless generalities.’ This is the way the ‘conversation of mankind’ will continue.37

  The main contribution of the philosopher Hilary Putnam, from Harvard, was an examination of the impact of science on our notions of reason and rationality. Putnam’s argument is that what we call ‘“truth” depends both on what there is (the way things are) and on the contribution of the thinker … there is a human contribution, a conceptual contribution, to what we call “truth.” Scientific theories are not simply dictated to us by the facts.’38 This view had important implications, in Putnam’s mind, for he felt that by now, the end of the twentieth century, the ‘scientific method’ had become a very ‘fuzzy’ thing, an idea that for him had peaked in
the seventeenth century and had been gradually dissolving since, making the logical positivists of the Vienna Circle anachronistic. By this he meant the idea that science, and therefore reason, could only apply to directly observable and neutral ‘facts,’ which led to easily falsifiable theories. Many modern scientific theories, he pointed out, were by no means easily falsifiable – evolution being a case in point.39 He therefore agreed with Rorty that ‘reason’ ought to mean what most of us mean by it, how a reasonable person behaves in his/her approach to the world. But Putnam went further in arguing that there is much less distinction between facts and values than traditional scientists, or philosophers of science, allow. He agreed with Kuhn and Polanyi that science often proceeds by some sort of intuitive or inductive logic, because not all possible experiments are ever tried, merely the most plausible, ‘plausible’ itself being derived from some ‘reasonable’ idea we have of what we should do next. Arising from this, Putnam argued that certain statements, traditionally taken to be values, or prejudices (in the widest sense), are also facts just as much as the facts produced by science. Two examples he gives are that Hitler was a bad man and that poetry is better than pushpin. In the case of pushpin, for example, Jeremy Bentham said in the eighteenth century that expressing a preference for poetry over the game is a mere prejudice, subjective – an argument much loved by the relativists, who believe that the subjective life of one person, and even more so of one culture, cannot be fruitfully or meaningfully compared to that of another. Putnam’s refutation was not anthropological but philosophical, because the argument gave credence to ‘prejudice’ as a mental entity while denying it to, say, ‘enlarged sensibilities,’ ‘enlarged repertoires of meaning and metaphor,’ ‘self-realization,’ and so on: ‘The idea that values are not part of the Furniture of the World and the idea that “value judgements” are expressions of “prejudice” are two sides of the same coin.’40 Value judgements, Putnam is saying, can be rationally supported, and it is time to get away once and for all from the idea that scientific facts are the only facts worthy of the name. ‘Even the distinction between “classical” physics and quantum mechanics, with their rival views of the world, is itself observer-dependent.’ ‘The harm that the old picture of science does is this: if there is a realm of absolute fact that scientists are gradually accumulating, then everything else appears as non-knowledge.’

  Willard van Orman Quine, another Harvard philosopher, took a very different line, while still retaining the importance of science, and the scientific method, for philosophy. In a series of books, From a Logical Point of View (1953), Word and Object (1960), Roots of Reference (1974), Theories and Things (1981), Quiddities (1987), and From Stimulus to Science (1995), Quine set out his view that philosophy is continuous with science, even part of science, and that there are essentially two aspects to reality: physical objects, which exist externally and independently of us, and abstract objects, notably mathematics. Quine is a dedicated materialist, holding that ‘there is no change without a change in the distribution of microphysical properties over space.’41 This approach, he says, enables him to eschew dualism, for ‘mental’ events are ‘manifested’ by behaviour. In other words, the understanding of mental events will ultimately be neurological, whether or not we ever reach such understanding. Mathematics, on Quine’s formulation, has a twofold importance.42 First, the existence and efficiency of numbers in helping describe and understand the universe is fundamental, the more so as numbers exist only as an abstract concept. Second, there is the idea of sets, the way some entities group together to form higher-order superentities, which imply similarity and difference. This, for Quine, relates number to words and words to sentences, the building blocks of experience. In zoology, for instance, living organisms have evolved into different genera and families – what does that mean philosophically? Are there genuine families and genera in nature, or are they a figment of our brains, based on our understanding of similarities, differences, and the relative importance of those similarities/differences? What goes on in the brain, at the microphysical level, when we think or talk about such matters? How closely do words, can words, correspond to what is ‘out there,’ and what does that mean for the microphysical processes in the brain?43 When words that mean similar (but not identical) things in different languages are translated, what does that involve for microphysical properties in the brain? Quine is an unusually difficult philosopher to paraphrase, because many of his writings are highly technical, using mathematical notation, but broadly speaking he may be seen in the tradition of Bertrand Russell, the logical positivists, and B. F. Skinner, in that for him philosophy is not a discipline as Rorty or Nagel would have it, beyond science, but is a part of science, an extension that, although it asks questions that scientists themselves might not ask, nevertheless talks about them in ways that scientists would recognise.

  Whose Justice? Which Rationality? (1988), by Alasdair Maclntyre, is perhaps the most subversive postmodern book yet, uniting as it does the work of Michel Foucault, Roland Barthes, Geertz, Rawls, and Dworkin in a most original fashion.44 Maclntyre looked at notions of reason, and rationality, and their effects on ideas of justice, in earlier societies – in classical Greece, classical Rome, Saint Thomas Aquinas’s teaching at the University of Paris in the thirteenth century, the Scottish enlightenment in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries – and in modern liberal times. He looked at their arguments, as developed in political, philosophical, legal, and literary works, but also at their language and how it did, or did not, conform to modern notions. Rhetoric in Athens, for example, was regarded as the high point of reason, and its aim was to spur to action; it was not thought proper, therefore, to refer to rival points of view, to weigh both sides of the argument before deciding. Reasoning, as we would understand it, was kept to a discussion of means toward an end, not about the end and the justice of that end, which was understood implicitly to be shared by all. Only people who possessed the virtues were felt to be capable of reason in Athens, says Maclntyre, and this concept was even given a special name, boulesis, ‘rational wish.’ In this context, the rational person in Athens acted ‘immediately and necessarily upon affirming his reasons for action … very much at odds with our characteristically modern ways of envisaging a rational agent.’45

  Saint Thomas Aquinas believed, along with all Christians, that everyone had the potentiality to act in a reasoned way, which would lead to a moral life, but that only education in a certain order – logic, mathematics, physics – could bring about full realisation of those potentialities. There was, for him, no difference between being rational and being moral. The Scottish enlightenment, on the other hand, turned back to an emphasis on the passions, David Hume distinguishing between the calm passions and the violent passions, which take priority over reason. ‘Truth in itself according to Hume … is not an object of desire. But how then are we to explain the pursuit of truth in philosophy? Hume’s answer is that the pleasure of philosophy and of intellectual inquiry more generally “consists chiefly in the action of the mind, and the exercise of the genius and understanding in the discovery or comprehension of any truth.” Philosophy, so it turns out, is like the hunting of woodcocks or plovers; in both activities the passion finds its satisfaction in the pleasures of the chase.’ For Hume, then, reason cannot motivate us.46 ‘And the passions, which do motivate us, are themselves neither reasonable nor unreasonable…. Passions are thus incapable of truth or falsity.’47 Hume himself said, ‘Reason is, and ought only to be, the slave of the passions and can never pretend to any other office than to serve and obey them.’48

  In the modern liberal society, on the other hand, Maclntyre tells us there is a rival concept of reason and of justice, based on different assumptions, namely that people are individuals and nothing more: ‘In Aristotelian practical reasoning it is the individual qua citizen who reasons; in Thomistic practical reasoning it is the individual qua enquirer into his or her good and the good of his or her community; in Humean pr
actical reasoning it is the individual qua propertied or unpropertied participant in a society of a particular kind of mutuality and reciprocity; but in the practical reasoning of liberal modernity it is the individual qua individual who reasons.’49 Maclntyre’s conclusion is that our concepts of reasoning (and justice) are just one tradition among several. He offers no concept of evolution in these matters, and neither Darwin nor Richard Dawkins is mentioned in his book. Instead, Maclntyre thinks we continue to deform our relationship with the past by coarse translations of the classics (even when done by some scholars), which do not treat ancient words to their ancient meanings but instead offer crude modern near-equivalents. Quoting Barthes, he says that to understand the past, we need to include all the signs and other semiological clues that the ancients themselves would have had, to arrive at what Clifford Geertz (who is referred to in Maclntyre’s book) would call a ‘thick description’ of their conceptions of reason and justice. The result of the liberal conception of reason, he says, has some consequences that might be seen as disappointing: ‘What the student is in consequence generally confronted with … is an apparent inconclusiveness in all argument outside the natural sciences, an inconclusiveness which seems to abandon him or her to his or her pre-rational preferences. So the student characteristically emerges from a liberal education with a set of skills, a set of preferences, and little else, someone whose education has been as much a process of deprivation as of enrichment.’50