Category: Reading

Fitting theism in the natural frame

Reading | Theology

Joshua Farris, Rev., PhD, CSM, CSPO | 2023-03-05

I’ve recently attended a summer study and conference on the topic of “Naturalism and the Religious Worldview” in Croatia, put on by the Humane Philosophy Project. As you might imagine if you are familiar with debates in science and religion, these are often framed as incompatible partners. But not only is there ongoing interest in exploring the relationship between the two, in fact there is a recent movement afoot that attempts to take a step further by reconciling the two perceptibly incompatible worldviews. The picture that comes to mind is of my wife’s Boxer dog trying to fit in the doggie door (intended for small dogs); it just doesn’t seem to work. Let’s consider the development of Naturalism and Religion.

 

Theology

Theology you might take to be the study of God’s nature and, especially, his acts in creation. In a classical understanding, the study of God boils down to the study of primary and secondary nature. All things are related to God as the primary referent of study, and his creation is a study of that which is a secondary act, which only analogously tells us something about the divine nature (his characteristics; or in an Eastern understanding, his ‘energies’). But this is strikingly distinct from the purported object of study as conceived in Naturalism.

Granted, anyone familiar with the study of Naturalism—and my students will attest to this fact—knows that in contemporary studies it—Naturalism—is notoriously hard to define. And it is not hard in the way that all philosophical concepts are difficult to define, but it is uniquely so because the boundaries have been so expanded that the term has become rather porous.

 

A survey of naturalism

In the early twentieth century, American analytic philosophers defined it as a thesis committed to the natural world of biological organisms, particularly Darwinian evolution, often with a commitment to the exclusion of any ‘spooky’ entities like God, spirits, angels, and things like ghosts. Ancillarily to this, there is often a commitment to what is called the “scientific method”—perceived as it is to be the rigorous process of empirical testing of phenomena. One might describe the view as falling under three broad types. The first is Metaphysical Naturalism, the second Epistemological Naturalism, and the third Methodological Naturalism—i.e., the scientific method.

In short, Metaphysical Naturalism is “the view that everything is or is grounded in the kind of entities studied by fundamental physics.” Epistemological Naturalism is “the investigative practice of studying the natural world by prizing the a-posteriori approach”^[1] [Editor’s note: a-posteriori knowledge is knowledge that can only be gathered through empirical experience, and not logically deduced a priori.]. Methodological Naturalism is the study of the objects of physics and biological organisms.

Metaphysical Naturalism is standardly defined as affirming that: only nature exists; nature has always existed or simply popped into existence; nature is deterministic at one level; nature is purely physical (the natural entailment from its physical basis in particles); and finally, nature is a self-explanatory system. Correspondingly, Evolutionary Naturalism is defined as that which is physical and explained by physical causes and effects through adaptation, genetic drift, and other evolutionary mechanisms. Theism, in this definition, is immediately ruled out as misfit. It just doesn’t fit, like the boxer trying to fit in a small doggy door.

But then, there is Epistemic Naturalism, a practice guided by a set of methodological principles that takes it that the surest way of knowing is funneling everything through the rigorous empirical method (Francis Bacon often comes to mind as the earliest proponent of such a view). In such a view, not only is the a-posteriori method prized, but the a-priori method is suspect.

One way of defining Naturalism, generally, comes from the famous philosopher Thomas Nagel. He defines it along similar lines as Evolutionary Naturalism, given above, particularly highlighting the non-teleological nature of Nature. He states:

The profoundly nonteleological character of this modern form of naturalism is concealed by the functional explanations that fill evolutionary accounts of the characteristics of living organisms. But any reference to the function or survival value of an organ or other feature is shorthand for a long story of purposeless mutations followed, because of environmental contingencies, by differential reproductive fitness—survival of offspring or other relatives with the same genetic material. It is in the most straightforward sense false that we have eyes in order to see and a heart to pump the blood. Darwinian natural selection could be compatible with teleology if the existence of DNA had the purpose of permitting successive generations of organisms to adapt through natural selection to changes in the environment—but that, of course, is not the naturalistic conception. That conception, far from offering us a sense of who we are, dissolves any sense of purpose or true nature that we may have begun with. The meaning of organic life vanishes in the meaninglessness of physics, of which it is one peculiar consequence. It is widely thought that, without knowing the details, we now have every reason to believe that life arose from a lifeless universe, in virtue of the basic laws of particle physics or string theory or something of the kind, which did not have life or us “in mind.” If this is the case, then it is difficult, nigh impossible, to see how God could fit into this picture.^[2]

However, not so fast! Some naturalists have expanded its boundaries so much that it fails to fit so neatly into the definitions given already. Lynne Rudder Baker describes an expansive, non-reductionist Naturalism she calls Liberal Naturalism, which loosely impacts epistemic access: “I suggest that liberal naturalists not locate their naturalism in entities lacking causal powers but rather espouse naturalism only in the sense of ‘pertaining to the natural realm.’ In that way, they could be more liberal than nonreductivists like Kornblith and still be naturalistic.”^[3] The question with which Baker leaves the reader in her fascinating book, Naturalism and the First-Person Perspective, is whether Naturalism is disenchanted or optimistic.

There are myriad sets of interrelated problems with Naturalism, generally, like the problem of definition. But there is a more fundamental problem with it: namely, what some have called the intuitive problem of folk psychology.

 

The intuitive problem with the naturalist attitude

The common problem with Naturalism, or the naturalistic attitude as I call it, is that it fails to account for that which is most obvious to us in our experience of the world. This is what some will call the intentional attitude, consciousness, or simply experience of what it is like to be in relation to the world. Instead, it either eliminates the intentional attitude or it eschews it to such an extent that it becomes irrelevant to knowledge and no longer holds the primacy of place in how we come to know the world.

The intuitive problem is, simply put, a problem of reconciling the natural or scientific attitude giving primacy of place to the empirical method with that which is most apparent to consciousness. Consciousness is a term for what it is to be aware of. It is inclusive of properties of what it is like to experience in general. In other words, it is the difference made between that which constitutes the green grass in my yard (e.g., the properties of particle physics and ecology that come to comprise the grass and all that include it; namely, the dirt, the roots, and the blades themselves) and the experience of that grass, often described by what it is like to see the shape, the color, and all that surrounds it. Thomas Nagel calls this “subjective appearances.” The reality of our subjective appearances is so undeniable that it takes primacy of place over the constituent parts that undergird the physical reality studied by science.

David Chalmers deems these “subjective appearances” irreducible to physics or biology, a problem he refers to as the “hard problem of consciousness.”^[4] In this way, consciousness is a phenomenon that biology and physics are unable to capture. We need more than physics and biology to capture it.

Thankfully, we are beginning to see this turn in science where consciousness (i.e., the intuitive move or the folk turn) is taking up space, once again, in the literature. Ironically, the naturalist attitude is re-presenting itself, but whether it can make sense of the “intentional attitude” is again up for debate in a fresh new way.

 

The theological turn in science

The theological turn in science is characterized by this move to reconsider not only the “intentional stance” often characterized by consciousness, but more than that, the openness to theology itself as a paradigm shift toward God as having, once again, an explanatory role in our understanding of the world. Some in the theological turn are attempting to re-envision the naturalist attitude in a way that gives credence to the natural world, the study of the objects of physics, and the empirical (i.e., a-posteriori) method as primary. They are now expanding the boundaries of Naturalism to include God and consciousness. Are they successful? That is yet to be seen. But I have serious reservations, since this privileges the following:

1. The scientific method (i.e., Methodological Naturalism).
2. Natural law.
3. Biological generation as an originative explanation for all organisms.

This also means not privileging the mind, intentionality, the first-person perspective, or consciousness.

In fact, some of the main proponents of this new endeavor are clear that the common privileging of the mind, consciousness, the first-person perspective, etc., in philosophy and theology needs re-envisioning because this characteristic is often what has created insuperable problems for progressing the discussion between science and religion. These proponents include most notably Sarah Lane Ritchie, Christopher Knight, and others. They believe that what underlies the challenges for integrative science and religion projects follows from the dubious ‘intuition’ that the mind and brain are dualistic entities. In other words, the supposed hard problem of consciousness stands underneath the tension between science and religion as reflected so clearly in the recent accounts to find God acting at the joints between consciousness and the natural world (i.e., causal joint theories). By bringing God and nature closer together, they suppose we can construct newer theories that avoid God’s messing about ‘unnaturally’ in nature’s regular law-like way. These rely on the unnecessary assumption of some sort of non-physicalism regarding God, the mind, and action.

Without offering a full-blown critique of these projects, it is worth advancing some concerns. First, the challenge of intuitions calls into question the veridicality of intuition itself. Ironically, the affirmation that the scientific method (i.e., Methodological Naturalism) should be privileged in some way concerning knowledge depends on intuition. Second, by not privileging the mind, consciousness, and the first-person perspective, the leaders of Theological Naturalism not only import intuitive ideas of God, humans, and actions that, on the surface, appear inconsistent with their projects, but these rather important terms become insufficient designations for which we have little to say. Third, with all the problems customarily associated with Naturalism, as suggested above, it’s hard to conceive of theology being fitted to a Naturalism frame. Once again, my wife’s boxer trying to fit into a small doggy door just will not work. But is that what we are left with? I don’t think so, and I certainly hope not.

 

A better way

Surely, there is a better way than fitting a square peg in a circular opening. Science construed along naturalist lines, according to the naturalist attitude, obscures that which is central to the world. Minds are central and deserve not only a place at the scientific table but must be brought into our engagements with scientific endeavors. This requires, however, an expansion not of the boundaries of nature so as to capture mind, agency, and God, but to understand nature in light of the mind, agency, and God.

Some in recent science and religion literature have argued that, at best, Methodological Naturalism could be operational with a small set of data studied in a lab (what you might think of as operational science), but even the findings here would be quite limited in its explanatory value.

An alternative approach advanced by Benedikt Paul Gocke is that we should expand our understanding of science in such a way that both philosophy and theology fall under a broader definition of science, which takes into account all aspects of proper rational principles and values in the process of systematically making sense of the world. This, of course, affirms that minds are central and the often-disregarded a-priori method must be re-employed as we consider the natural world because, after all, mind is fundamental to nature.^[5]

 

For a new project pursuing this sort of reflection, see here: https://designtheology.org/conference-registration

 

Notes

^[1] These working descriptions are common in the literature. For further explanation, see the helpful article: Papineau, David, “Naturalism”, The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Summer 2021 Edition), Edward N. Zalta (ed.), https://plato.stanford.edu/archives/sum2021/entries/naturalism/.

^[2] Thomas Nagel, Secular Philosophy and the Religious Temperament (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010), 15, 16. Also see: Papineau, David, “Naturalism”, The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Summer 2021 Edition), Edward N. Zalta (ed.), https://plato.stanford.edu/archives/sum2021/entries/naturalism/. [accessed on August 10, 2022].

^[3] Lynne Rudder Baker, Naturalism and the First-Person Perspective (Oxford: Oxford Uinversity Press, 2013), 17. She generally agrees with De Caro and Voltolini’s ( 1 ) the claim that no entities can violate the laws of nature, and (2) the clam that “ontology should be shaped by natural science alone.” To not allow entities that violate the laws of nature is to not allow entities with causal powers without coming from the natural science. See also De Caro, Mario and Alberto Voltolini, “Is Liberal Naturalism Possible?” in Naturalism and Normativity ed. by Mario De Caro and David Macarthur (New York: Columbia University Press, 2010), 76. Of course, also see David Papineau in his Stanford Article on “Naturalism”. Also see the following select key figures: Pereboom, Quine, Steven Pinker, Galen Strawson. This is a long and fascinating discussion here. In more recent mainstream literature Ray Kurzweil and Novel Harrari develop optimistic accounts through the lens of transhumanism. Meghan O’Gieblyn develops a somewhat agnostic view with a disenchanted outlook that pervades most of the writing in God, Human, Animal, Machine (New York: Doubleday, 2021).

^[4] David Chalmers, ‘Facing up to the Problem of Consciousness’ in J. Shear, ed., Explaining Consciousness: The Hard Problem (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1997), 18-19. Josh Weisberg, “The Hard Problem of Consciousness,” Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy. https://iep.utm.edu/hard-problem-of-conciousness/ [accessed on Friday October 7, 2022].

^[5] Thanks to the Humane Philosophy Project for inspiring this short article and to the Alexander Von Humboldt Foundation and Göcke, the Chair of Philosophy of Science and Philosophy of Religion for the time and space to work on this.

Spinoza was an Idealist

Reading | Philosophy

Michael Asher, BA, FRSL | 2023-02-05

“History,” wrote Norwegian philosopher Arne Naess, “is littered with the remains of cultures that lost the equilibrium” [1]. Naess, mountaineer and father of the Deep Ecology Movement, based his philosophy, Ecosophy T, on Spinoza’s work, the Ethics, published in 1677. Having become fascinated by Spinoza at the age of seventeen, he would carry the book with him on climbing expeditions to be read over and pondered in quiet moments. A mathematician, and, in his early career, a Behaviorist, Naess admired the geometrical precision of the Ethics, and regarded Spinoza as the proper philosopher for the culture of the post-industrial age. He believed Deep Ecology was the harbinger of that age. “… even if we cannot … imitate (indigenous) cultures,” he wrote, “we shall have to establish post-industrial societies in equilibrium. Spinoza may be an important source of inspiration in this quest” [2].

It was, above all, Spinoza’s dictum Deus sive Natura—God or Nature, in Part 5 of the Ethics—that inspired Naess: he was convinced that Spinoza’s work was compatible with what he referred to as field ecology, that is, ecological science. “No great philosopher,” he wrote, “has so much to offer in the way of clarification and articulation of basic ecological attitudes as … Spinoza” [3].

He added that while, in his view, there had been three previous traditions about Spinoza’s work—as atheist, romantic, and what he called substance philosopher—he placed himself firmly in the fourth or twentieth century tradition: the idea that God is immanent; that every living thing partakes of God. “God is constantly creating the world,” he wrote, “by being the creative force in Nature … I am inclined to accept such a concept of God as a single creative force” [4]. Only by understanding particular things as manifestations of God or Nature, he claimed, could the realization of union with the whole of nature be accomplished [5].

In theological terms, Naess regarded Spinoza as a Pantheist, the label still most frequently assigned to him in current thought. The idea that God is nature and nature God—that “no new qualities are attributed to nature other than the known qualities of nature itself” [6]—is arguably a non-religious discourse, since God appears to be just another name for the material universe.

Naess, who had rejected Christianity as a youth and declared himself an unbeliever, said that he was uncomfortable using the word God [7] due to its invocation of preconceived ideas [8]. He was adamant that there was nothing in Spinoza’s work that suggested an asymmetry between God and nature. “Spinoza’s concept of Nature and its manifestations,” he wrote, “lacks the features which make nature … something inferior to spirit, or to God” [9]. Referring to what he saw as the “tendency to look on the body as something more crude than spirit,” he pointed out that “both field ecologists and Spinoza oppose most forms of Idealism, Spiritism, and, of course, Moralism” [10].

Naess seems to have intended this statement as a bolster for his contention that Spinoza’s metaphysics was non-religious, and that Spinoza was indeed the key philosopher for post-industrial culture. His relegation of Idealism to the same category as Spiritism, with its suggestion of mediums and Ouija boards, and Moralism—concerned in most people’s minds with prurient sexuality—reflects the low esteem in which Idealism was held in his milieu. But, intellectual fashions aside, was Naess correct in saying that Spinoza opposed Idealism? Was he right in maintaining that the Ethics is essentially a non-religious discourse?

In 1896, the Scottish philosopher J. Clark Murray published a paper entitled The Idealism of Spinoza, in the Philosophical Review. Though the paper presents a solid case for Spinoza as Idealist, Naess was either unaware of it or ignored it. Clark Murray’s work may have been swept under the carpet, but the time may now be right for its resurrection. In 2021, the English philosopher Clare Carlisle published Spinoza’s Religion – A New Reading of the Ethics, a re-assessment of the religious nature of Spinoza’s metaphysics that may well mark a turning-point, perhaps even the start of what Naess might have called the fifth or twenty-first century tradition of Spinoza.

Most of those who have seen Spinoza as a Pantheist—a champion of immanence—have, like Naess, taken the phrase Deus sive Natura—God or Nature—as the key to his work. It was Clark Murray, though, who noted in his 1896 paper that “a philosophical system must be interpreted, not by comparatively brief passages in its exposition, but by the essential drift of the exposition as a whole” [11].

Tracking this essential drift, Carlisle has shown that the process of reading the Ethics “follows a looping line, halting and circling back again and again to revisit elements of the text as directed by Spinoza’s demonstrations” [12]. Her conclusion is that the structure of the Ethics rests on twenty-six super propositions, some of which are repeated many times. By measuring the frequency of such propositions, one might “create a map of the Ethics that would resemble the constellations of the night sky, with some stars—the most intensive propositions—burning brighter than the others” [13].

The brightest star of the Ethics, Carlisle concludes, is the proposition she refers to as Being-in-God, which appears in Part 1, and is entitled Of God:

“Whatever is, is in God, and nothing can be, or be conceived without God.”

This proposition gives quite a different sense to Spinoza’s essential drift from Deus sive Natura. Yet, as Carlisle points out, Being-in-God bears more weight than any other proposition in the text. Following Spinoza’s looping lines of reference, she observes, “If a reader were to trace … every single proposition back to its first foundations, she would revisit Being-in-God a total of 228 times always starting from a different starting point” [14].

This is considerably more than Deus sive Natura, which occurs in only two passages in the Ethics, and not at all in Part 1, Of God, where it might have been expected, had Spinoza intended to give it the importance accorded to it by Naess and others. It is hard to resist Carlisle’s conclusion that it is not God or Nature but Being-in-God that is “the fundamental tenet of Spinoza’s thought” [15].

At first sight Being-in-God seems a clear statement of Idealism, but some scholars have pointed out that much depends on what Spinoza intended by the word in. The philosopher Roger Scruton, for example, in his book Spinoza—A Very Short Introduction, has gone so far as to claim that Spinoza’s ‘in’ does not mean here what it normally means in English (or in Latin, the original language of the Ethics), but that Spinoza’s usage, as Scruton puts it, “conflicts with the language of man” [16].

Scruton uses the example of a club and its members to illustrate his point. The activities that are said to be those of a club, he writes, are actually the activities of its individual members, and only notionally of an independent entity called a club. The club is, in fact, dependent for its existence and nature on the activities of its members. “In Spinoza’s idiom,” declares Scruton, “the club is in its members. We, of course, would say that the members are in the club” [17].

Unpacking this critique requires a closer look at the elements of Spinoza’s metaphysics. According to Spinoza, nothing exists besides substance (God) and modes (modifications, finite forms). While he says that substance is that which is in itself (“in se”), a mode is that which is in another (“in alio”). Spinoza mentions a third element, attributes—ways of perceiving and expressing substance—which we may consider later. In Scruton’s example, the club members seem to represent modes, while the club itself is substance. Scruton construes Spinoza as saying that the activities of substance—God—are actually the activities of its modes—God’s manifestations—suggesting that Spinoza is proposing that substance is in its modes.

As Carlyle has pointed out, this is not the case. “Being-in-God is an ontological relation of dependency,” she writes, “which involves being caused by God and being conceived by God.” Spinoza’s very first proposition is that whatever is, is in itself or in another. “Since there is only one substance, namely God, everything that is, is in God. This includes God. God is substance, therefore God is in se” [18].

Scruton, like Naess, seems to have understood Spinoza’s God as the God of Deus sive Natura: a synonym for nature, immanent in all that exists, but not transcending it. As we have seen, Naess’s reading of Spinoza rejects any idea of asymmetry between God and Nature. Undoubtedly, for Naess, a transcendent God meant a remote God standing outside the universe: the Blind Watchmaker of 19^th century mechanism. “For Spinoza,” he wrote, “God, Deus, is immanent, not something outside our world” [19]. Naess, who scarcely refers to Being-in-God at all in his writing, does not seem to have countenanced the idea that in a mental—as opposed to a physical—universe, God could be, and in fact must be, both immanent and transcendent.

Curiously, though, while he appears to underscore the immanence in Spinoza’s metaphysics, Naess also admits the presence of transcendence, albeit in a left-handed way, as if Spinoza had not quite understood his own argument. “I suspect,” he writes, “… that (Spinoza) never completely gave up … the transcendent God he loved in his youth. As a result he may not have managed to develop a system in which God clearly and consistently occurs as immanent … The transcendent God of religion (my italics) seems to appear from time to time (in the Ethics) … and threatens the consistently philosophical thinking and articulation” [20].

These observations seem to fly in the face of Naess’s laudatory remarks about Spinoza as an inspiration for the post-industrial culture. The fact that he seems to be accusing Spinoza of failing to produce an immanent God and his apparent alarm that a transcendent God appears from time to time in the Ethics, amount to a critique.

As Carlisle suggests, both immanence and transcendence are implicit in Spinoza’s Being-in-God proposition, the first Axiom in the Ethics. Since nothing can be conceived without God, God must also be the means by which everything is conceived. As Spinoza says, this indicates that God must exist of necessity. To deny God’s existence would be to deny that anything at all exists, even the idea of God’s non-existence.

Both Scruton and Naess seem to concur that, as Naess wrote, “Nature or God (substance) is nothing apart from the manifestations (modes)” [21]. To examine what this means, it is perhaps worth providing what I think—following Carlisle’s discourse—is a more effective image of Being-in-God than Scruton’s club analogy. Idealist philosopher Bernardo Kastrup’s notable whirlpool metaphor seems suitable for this purpose.

Water flowing along the length of a stream is not localized, but a whirlpool in the stream is a visible localization of the stream’s substance: there is nothing in the whirlpool that is not water. The whirlpool has identifiable boundaries, but no stand-alone existence: it cannot be removed from the stream. It is clearly different from the stream, but not separate from it. While the whirlpool depends on the stream for its being, the stream without the whirlpool would still be the stream: it is logically and ontologically prior to the whirlpool. We can safely say that the whirlpool is in the stream without being accused of abusing the vernacular [22].

In the same way, Spinoza’s modes are distinct and identifiable images of the localization of substance. There is nothing in the modes that is not substance. Modes have no stand-alone existence and cannot be removed from substance. Substance is logically and ontologically prior to modes: they are different, but not separate. To maintain, as Naess and Scruton have, that God is nothing but the manifestations—that substance is no more than its modes—would be like saying that the stream is no more than its whirlpools.

If Being-in-God is the fundamental tenet of Spinoza’s thought, as Carlisle tells us, then it is also worth returning to the word conceive, which is almost as crucial to Spinoza’s metaphysics as the word in; especially to an Idealist reading. Conception brings us to the idea of attributes, which is Spinoza’s way of approaching the mind-body problem.

Unlike modes, which are the manifestation of substance in alio, attributes are substance, perceived and expressed in a certain way. Substance has infinite attributes, but humans only participate in two of them: thought (mind or consciousness) and extension (body or matter). “Spinoza defines the human mind as the idea of the body,” Carlisle writes, “in other words, consciousness of the body. A human mind perceives only two attributes, its own way of being which is thought or consciousness, and the way of being of the body which is its object. This means that the fullness of God’s being eludes us” [23].

Although the invoking of two attributes has brought Spinoza accusations of dualism, there seems to be a hidden assumption in the Ethics. While the attributes of thought and extension appear at first to be in symmetrical relation, in fact they are different, and the distinction comes down to the word conceived. Since extension (body, matter) only exists in as much as it is conceived by God (substance), and since thought is the attribute of substance through which it is conceived, then thought (or consciousness) is primary. This applies to all the other infinite attributes of substance in which humans do not participate, and whose nature is unknown.

In proposing that the human mind is the idea of the body, then, Spinoza is telling us that the body and the human mind are not separate, but modes of substance seen through the attribute of infinite consciousness; or, put another way, ideas in the mind of God, which is one thing, not two. If we need proof of Spinoza’s Idealism, we surely have no need to look further than this.

In theological terms, indeed, Spinoza’s metaphysics is not Pantheist, as Naess and others suggest, but Panentheist: the view that whatever is, is in God. Panentheism is a “way of expressing God’s transcendence,” [24] as Carlisle says, and this transcendence is articulated in Spinoza’s use of the phrase natura naturans (lit. nature naturing) for the divine creator, as opposed to natura naturata (lit. nature natured) for created beings. The two terms do not connote distinct entities, but neither are they different names for the same reality. Natura naturans is the stream, while Natura naturata signifies the finite localizations of the stream’s flow—the whirlpool. The stream is not the transitive creator of the whirlpool, in the sense of creating it as a separate entity; and just as the whirlpool is in the stream, so “Natura naturata (the created) is in Natura naturans (the creator) and dependent on it” [25]. Like stream and whirlpool, “the relationship of Being-in expresses both difference and identity” [26].

Returning to the phrase that so attracted Naess and many others—Deus sive Natura, God or Nature—it is clear, as Carlisle suggests, that Spinoza intended Natura here to mean Natura naturans, rather than Natura naturata. That Naess interpreted Deus sive Natura as defining God’s immanence seems at first curious, since he saw God or Nature as “constantly creating the world by being the creative force in nature.” On closer examination, though, it appears that Naess is not referring to the ontological primacy of the creator, but to the creative force as perpetuated by the “living creatures (which) are involved in creation” [27]; in other words, transitive creation through finite entities or modes.

In his reading of Spinoza, Naess seems almost to have indulged in confirmation bias, sifting the evidence and overlooking the obvious importance of Being-in-God to the essential drift of the discourse. It is as if he was determined not to find anything truly religious—that is, beyond Pantheism—in Spinoza’s work. This is interesting because it appears to be an instance of how the prevailing zeitgeist can influence even the most erudite and articulate scholars into what might be called a biased reading of a metaphysics. From the beginning, it seems, Spinoza’s work has been either rejected for failing to reflect the dominant worldview, or honoured falsely for allegedly extolling it, as in Naess’s case.

Ironically, perhaps, Carlisle’s Spinoza would have been more suited to Naess’s Ecosophy T than his own secular reading, since one of the main implications of Being-in-God is that humans are not separate from nature. In his final book, Life’s Philosophy (2002), Naess admitted that, while he preferred not to talk about religious feeling, people often called him religious or spiritual, “because I believe that living creatures have an intrinsic worth of their own, and also that there are fundamental intuitions about what is unjust” [28]. It would take one of a new generation of deep ecologists, physicist Frijof Capra, to openly declare that “(Deep) ecology and spirituality are fundamentally connected because deep ecological awareness is, ultimately, spiritual awareness” [29].

In the same way, Carlisle has pointed out, had the seventeenth century churches been receptive to Spinoza, rather than condemning him as an atheist, his work might have “insulated Christianity from the ravages of secularism to come” [30]. The idea of Spinoza as atheist, she has written, precludes an understanding of his essential tenet, Being-in-God, and renders much of Part 5 of the Ethics irrelevant. “If we assume that Deus sive Natura simply reduces God to a familiar modern notion of nature, stripped of any theological meaning,” she has written, “then we lose the conception of God (or Natura naturans) as ontological ground which is so integral to Spinoza’s metaphysics” [31].

With regard to Spinoza as Idealist, then, though Carlisle does not specifically mention Idealism in relation to Being-in-God, she does suggest that “concepts such as non-duality can gesture to (its) meaning” [32]. Non-duality—Advaita Vedanta—is, of course, synonymous with Analytic Idealism. Indeed, while Carlisle prefers the name God because of its long history and cultural associations, she also explains that a name can do no more than point to “a plenitude of being that eludes us—although we cannot exist or conceive ourselves apart from it” [33]. In this light, one might add, the word consciousness could be substituted for God—as is customary in Analytic Idealism—without any loss of coherence. “Whatever is, is in consciousness, and nothing can be, or be conceived, without consciousness.”

Finally, to return to where we started, was Naess right to suggest that Spinoza was the proper philosopher for the post-industrial era? I think he was, but for the wrong reasons. I believe that Carlisle’s book Spinoza’s Religion has opened the way for a reading of Spinoza that is most appropriate for the new culture, because it has shown us a religious, Idealist Spinoza, and the culture of the post-industrial age cannot but be both Idealist and religious.

[Editor’s note: it is curious that, to this day, many scholars continue to argue that, for Spinoza, God and physical nature were one and the same thing; for Spinoza himself categorically refuted this claim in a letter to his friend Henry Oldenburg, written towards the end of 1675. Here is the relevant passage: “I maintain that God is the immanent cause, as the phrase is, of all things, and not the transitive cause. All things, I say with Paul, are in God and move in God. … However, as to the view of certain people that [my book] the Tractatus Theologico-Politicus rests on the identification of God with Nature (by the latter of which they understand a kind of mass or corporeal matter) they are quite mistaken.” How could the man have been less ambiguous? Here is the same passage in the original Latin: “Deum enim rerum omnium causam immanentem, ut ajunt, non verò transeuntem statuo. Omnia, inquam, in Deo esse, & in Deo moveri cum Paulo affirmo … Attamen quòd quidam putant, Tractatum Theologico-Politicum eo niti, quòd Deus, & Natura (per quam massam quandam, sive materiam corpoream intelligunt) unum, & idem sint, totâ errant viâ” (See: Epistolae doctorum quorundam virorum ad B.d.S. et auctoris responsiones, Benedictus de Spinoza, 1677 (postumus), Epistola LXXIII). Clearly, Spinoza identified natura naturans (nature begetting, i.e. the underlying, dynamic, creative but hidden side of nature, or nature as it is in itself) with God, but not natura naturata (nature begotten, the material, physical, measurable side of nature). To think that Spinoza identified God with the physical world as it presents itself to us is a rather trivial error. Spinoza identified God with what underlies the physical world; i.e. with that which appears to us as the physical world, but whose essential nature remains hidden from direct observation. For Spinoza, physical nature is but an appearance, an image—what Schoppenhauer called a ‘representation’ or “Vorstellung”—of God, but not the being-in-itself of God.]

 

Notes

1. Arne Naess Spinoza & Ecology P45
2. Ibid
3. Ibid P50
4. Arne Naess Life’s Philosophy P8
5. Arne Naess Spinoza & Ecology P50
6. https://www.bernardokastrup.com 2018
7. Arne Naess Life’s Philosophy P8
8. Ibid
9. Arne Naess Spinoza & Ecology P51
10. Ibid P47
11. Clark Murray The Idealism of Spinoza P473
12. Clare Carlisle Spinoza’s Religion P36
13. Ibid 47
14. Ibid
15. Ibid P56
16. Roger Scruton Spinoza – a Very Short Introduction P40
17. Ibid
18. Carlisle P36
19. Arne Naess Life’s Philosophy P8
20. Arne Naess The Ecology of Wisdom P256
21. Arnea Naess Spinoza & Ecology P50
22. Benardo Kastrup Why Materialism is Baloney P91
23. Carlisle P69
24. Carlisle P64
25. Ibid
26. Arne Naess Life’s Philosophy P8
27. Ibid P8
28. Arne Naess Life’s Philosophy P8
29. Frijof Capra: com/fritjof-capra-quotes. Updated 2022
30. Carlisle P60
31. Carlisle P186
32. Carlisle P36
33. Carlisle P186

 

Bibliography

Carlisle, Clare           Spinoza’s Religion – A New Reading of the Ethics 2021

Deleuze, Gilles         Spinoza – Practical Philosophy 1988

Garret, Don              Spinoza’s Ontological Argument – The Philosophical Review LXXXVII No.2 1979

Kastrup, Bernardo   Why Materialism is Baloney 2014

Koistinen, Olli          Cambridge Companion to Spinoza’s Ethics 2010

Lord, Beth                 Spinoza’s Ethics 2010

Murray, J.Clark        The Idealism of Spinoza. Philosophical Review Vol 5 No5 1896

Naess, Arne              Spinoza & Ecology – undated paper, University of Oslo Ecology, Community & Lifestyle – Outline of an Ecosophy. Trans D. Rothenberg 1989

                                        Life’s Philosophy – Reason & Feeling in a Deeper World Trans R. Huntford 2002

                                        The Ecology of Wisdom – Writings of Arne Naess 2008

Nadler, Steven         Think Least of Death – Spinoza on How to Live and How to Die 2020

Scruton, Roger         Spinoza – A Very Short Introduction 1986, 2002

Spinoza, Benedict    The Ethics Trans R.H.M Elwes 2001

Idealists all over the world

Reading | Metaphysics

Prof. James Tartaglia, PhD | 2023-01-01

Idealism, Rorty and Kissinger

“Metaphysical idealism,” said American pragmatist philosopher Richard Rorty, in one of his characteristically bold and revisionary histories of philosophy, “was a momentary, though important, stage in the emergence of romanticism” (1982: 153). According to Rorty, idealism enjoyed its brief day in the sun when it emerged in late 18^th-century Germany to safeguard religion and traditional morality from what was perceived as the threat posed by modern science. And although Rorty was keen to stress that this “specifically philosophical form of romanticism” (Ibid.: 143) had only “momentary” impact—part of his wider agenda to play down the cultural significance of philosophy—he nevertheless attributed lasting significance to romanticism. This is because it fostered a literary culture that is unafraid to “assert its spiritual superiority to science, to claim to embody what is most important for human beings” (Ibid.: 149). Rorty’s hopes for a better future were invested in this kind of culture—one of socially aware novels, cultural criticism, and the kind of philosophy typically designated “postmodern.” It is a culture, as he saw it, which never stops experimenting with new vocabularies for understanding and improving the human condition, thereby fighting off the threat of cultural stagnation from scientism, the mindset which privileges scientific vocabularies for their supposed proximity to the truth.

For Rorty, then, idealism was the beginning of a key episode in European intellectual history, but it is now obsolete, and obviously no longer represents a credible candidate for belief. For someone like myself, who thinks the core idealist claim that we occupy an experiential reality is probably true (Tartaglia 2020), it is natural to regard this appraisal as negative. But when you bear in mind Rorty’s total scepticism about metaphysics, akin to other American philosophers of his generation, such as Hilary Putnam, then it is the positive part of the assessment which stands out: idealism, a metaphysical worldview, is being credited with an important cultural influence! Rorty always had a soft spot for idealism, I think. He was immersed in it during his postgraduate studies, with both his supervisors being ex-students of A. N. Whitehead, and the extent of this debt is revealed when he refers to “Berkeley’s ingenuous remark that ‘nothing can be like an idea except an idea,’” which he glosses as a “misleading” way of saying that “we shall not see reality plain, unmasked, naked to our gaze” (154). In saying this, Rorty is effectively crediting Berkeley as the originator of his own trademark claim that there is no “Way the World Is” for our theories to “mirror” (Rorty 1979).

I was recently surprised to find Rorty’s distinctive thesis that romanticism begat postmodernism being espoused by Henry Kissinger (aged 99), Eric Schmidt (CEO of Google from 2001-2011) and Daniel Huttenlocher (leading AI researcher), in their book about artificial intelligence entitled, The Age of AI: and Our Human Future (2021):

The Romantics asserted that human emotion was a valid and indeed important source of information. A subjective experience, they argued, was itself a form of truth. The post-moderns took the Romantics’ logic a step further, questioning the very possibility of discerning an objective reality through the filter of subjective experience. (Ibid.: 210)

And AI, as they go on to argue, will take the next step by exploiting objective truths that human beings will not be able to understand, but which will nevertheless allow the AIs to accomplish our goals for us, such as discovering new medicines and weapons. However, they will also spread disinformation, which will hinder our efforts to form human consensuses about objective truths, so “human reason will find itself both augmented and diminished,” as Kissinger et. al. conclude.

If you put the Rorty and Kissinger stories together, it looks as if idealism played a monumental, and arguably disastrous, role in our intellectual history. Firstly, idealism offered a vision of reality which saw more metaphysical significance in the creative mind than the objective truths of science, thereby inspiring the romantic movement. Secondly, the romantics showed us, through their philosophical art and literature, that there is more to life than the objective truths of science. Thirdly, the postmoderns denied that there are any objective truths for science to discover. And fourthly, we invented a non-human intelligence, superior to our own, which looks set to turn human understanding of objective truth—or what we once mistook as such—into a thing of the past. This is a Geistesgeschichte [Editor’s note: history of ideas] worthy of Nietzsche: it ought to end “incipit Zarathustra,” or better still, “incipit HAL 9000” [Editor’s note: Zarathustra was philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche’s prophetic, all-knowing alter ego in his 1883 book, Thus Spoke Zarathustra. HAL 9000 was the fictional AI computer in Stanley Kubrick’s acclaimed 1968 science fiction film, 2001: A Space Odyssey].

If nothing else, this story provides a rare example of a fully formed “idealism is obsolete” objection. Suspicion of obsolescence is one of the main obstacles to a contemporary renaissance of idealism, but usually rests on little more than a vague suspicion that “nobody believes that anymore”—despite intellectual fashion being no great guide to the ultimate nature of reality. It is nice, then, to have a proper version of the objection to consider, even if it does fail. For the significance of idealism cannot be understood in terms of European history alone; not when idealism is an ancient, worldwide, and so—in all likelihood—essentially human phenomenon. Idealist philosophies have sprung up all over the world.

 

Universal Ideal

The uncontroversial part of Rorty’s history is that German idealism launched the romantic movement, and that both were influenced by concerns about science undermining religion. Kant’s revolutionary “transcendental” idealism of the 1780s showed how to “deny knowledge, in order to make room for faith,” as he put it (Kant 1787), portraying the ultimate reality as something we cannot know, due to limitations of the human intellect, although we can still have rational faith that God resides there. This had the important consequence that the reality described by science could not be the ultimate reality, thus relegating scientific understanding to metaphysical second place and removing its potential to undermine religion.

Kant’s successor, J. G. Fichte—“the true father of romanticism” as Isaiah Berlin saw it (1983: 58)—continued to prioritize God’s moral order over the natural one, while taking idealism in a radical new direction, one which invested great metaphysical significance in the power of imagination. This idea appealed to a talented new generation of creative writers who were emerging at the time, so when Fichte was appointed to a lectureship in Jena in 1794, this tiny town of 4000 residents became a magnet for the originators of romanticism, the “Jena Romantics”—a restless group of poets, novelists, translators, dramatists, philosophers and mystics, which centred on the Schlegel brothers, August and Friedrich, and their wives, Caroline and Dorothea. Their adventures are recounted in two recent popular books (Wulf 2022; Neumann 2022).

The controversial parts of Rorty’s history concern what happened before Kant and after Fichte.

Rorty’s narrative begins with Berkeley in the early 18^th century, when “idealism becomes something very different from the tradition which starts with Anaxagoras and runs through Plato and various forms of Platonism” (1982: 144)—prior to that, he says only that idealism was concerned with “other-worldliness.” What changed with Berkeley was that idealism came to be seen “as a solution to an outstanding scientific difficulty,” namely that of subjective experience providing insufficient evidence for scientific claims about an objective, physical world. Rorty thinks this familiar philosophical problem of the “Veil of Perception” was originally seen as a scientific problem about “psychophysiological mechanisms,” to which idealism provided Berkeley with a novel answer, namely that awareness of objects and awareness of ideas are one and the same. This made idealism seem relevant to science, rather than just “other-worldliness,” thus inspiring Kant’s idea of idealism as a reflective super-science with the authority to relegate empirical science to metaphysical second place.

Immediately after Fichte and the beginning of romanticism, according to Rorty’s narrative, came “the beginning of the end for both idealism and philosophy” (Ibid.: 147), namely the advent of Hegel. This is because Hegel abandoned Kant’s and Fichte’s aspirations for idealism to be a provable doctrine and instead invented a new “literary genre” lacking “any trace of argumentation,” one which told of civilization passing through a succession of vocabularies, each collapsing to be replaced by the next, as the universal spirit evolves. This grand vision left “Kant’s ideal of philosophy-as-science a shambles” (Ibid.: 148), and so idealism stopped being taken seriously by anyone except philosophy professors, thereafter rapidly fading into the obscurity in which it languishes today.

And so there, in a nutshell, is Rorty’s historical account of idealism’s cultural significance. But what about its metaphysical significance? Should we not try to understand it on its own terms, rather than just looking for the cultural forces which shaped it, such as threats to religion or otherworldly longings? Rorty opted for the cultural approach because he was a post-truth thinker who denied there is a “Way the World Is,” and yet it seems obvious enough that not all beliefs can be explained this way. For example, an exclusively cultural explanation of belief in rivers would be radically misguided, since we can safely assume that people believe in rivers because rivers exist, or, at least, because we have exceptionally good reasons to think they do. The question we need to ask, then, is whether idealist beliefs should be explained culturally, or whether they are best explained by their having seemed to be true. And given that different cultures have independently developed idealist beliefs, just as they have independently developed beliefs about rivers, the answer seems clear: idealism is better explained by how reality has appeared to people, than by a worldwide coincidence of cultural purpose.

In the Upanishads of the Sacred Hindu Vedas, probably composed between 800 and 400 BCE, we find an idealist metaphysic repeatedly pressed home as the highest revelation of the wise. For instance, in the Chandogya Upanishad, which is one of the oldest, we are told that, “All this universe is in truth Brahman” and that Brahman is “the Spirit that is in my heart, smaller than a grain of rice” (Mascaró 1965: 114), the idea being that a person’s inner self is the same as the universal consciousness, as can be revealed in a transformative but ineffable experience in which the duality of experiencing-subject and experienced-object is transcended. In this state of oneness with the universe, as explained in Brihad-Aranyaka Upanishad, another of the oldest ones, we can paradoxically both see and not see; we see because “How could the Spirit not see if he is the All?”, but we do not see because “there is no duality there, nothing apart for him to see” (Ibid.: 136).

Here, then, is a form of metaphysical idealism that long predates not only Plato, but also Anaxagoras (whose unforgettable nickname was “Mr. Mind”) and even Parmenides, supposing that Parmenides’ strong monism is best interpreted as a form of idealism (see Dunham, Hamilton Grant and Watson 2011: 13-8). Like Plato’s idealism, the idealism of the Upanishads inspired one of the world’s great philosophical traditions; as P. T. Raju has put it, “Whitehead said that Western Philosophy is a series of footnotes to Plato… Similarly, Indian philosophy can be considered to be a series of footnotes to the Upaniṣhads” (1971: 15). One of these footnotes was the Consciousness-Only School of Buddhist philosophy, which spread from India to China and beyond, and which remains probably the best-known form of non-Western idealism.

Another good candidate for a culturally independent emergence of idealism is within African philosophy. Akan philosophy is a traditional African philosophy that has generated considerable interest due to its unique tripartite conception of personhood, a conception that combines soul, spirit and body. According to one of its principal expositors, Kwame Gyekye, it is a philosophy in which “ontological primacy (…) is given to the invisible,” where “invisible” is glossed as “immaterial, unperceivable, spiritual” (1987: 166); whether this means Akan metaphysics is best interpreted as a form of idealism (Tartaglia, forthcoming) or panpsychism (Agada 2017) is a matter for debate.

And a final candidate I shall mention for an independent emergence of metaphysical idealism is the Nahua philosophy of the Aztecs, according to which the ultimate reality is teotl, an all-encompassing spiritual process from which everything else, including the physical world, ultimately derives (Maffie 2014).

In the absence of a worldwide account of the cultural origins of metaphysical beliefs—which sounds like something only Mr. Casaubon from Middlemarch would attempt [Editor’s note: Reverend Edward Casaubon was a pedantic scholar in the 1871 fictional novel Middlemarch, by English author Mary Anne Evans. In the novel, Casaubon writes an implausibly ambitious book conceitedly titled The Key to All Mythologies.]—we cannot check whether the ancient Hindus, Aztecs and Akan were all inspired by the same cultural needs as Plato. As such, I suggest we return to the infinitely more straightforward view that idealist beliefs arose because they seemed to be true.

But why did they seem to be true? Because physical things appear within our conscious experience, and yet so do dreams and illusions, as well as feelings, imaginings and thoughts. The common factor is consciousness, so reflective people in different times, places and cultures have entertained the possibility that we live in an experiential reality. Once you also factor in the inspiration of mystical experiences of oneness with the universe, of the kind associated with the meditative practices of both the Vedic and Platonist traditions—experiences that make it practically impossible to maintain a naïve metaphysical attitude to the physical world—then it is hardly surprising that idealism exists, along with its cognates such as panpsychism.

 

Materialism: thank you and goodnight

Is idealism responsible for our decline into a post-truth world, via an intellectual sequence that passed through romanticism and postmodernism, and which will probably culminate with HAL 9000 and his colleagues banning us from even talking about truth? Surely not, for 20^th-century anti-truth trends among a radical, high-brow elite must be understood within the much wider story of the success of science and technology in the 19^th and 20^th centuries. This success created a worldwide surge of trust in science to discover objective truths. And even were we to grant that romanticism begat postmodernism, the sequence must surely end there, because the roles imagined for postmodernism by both Rorty and Kissinger are utterly fantastical. Postmodern literary culture safeguards us from scientism, says Rorty, but scientism is rife in our world, with “naturalism” a badge of honour among today’s philosophers, and disdain for philosophy widespread among today’s scientists (see Tartaglia 2020: introduction). And it is among the most aggressively scientistic that contempt for Rorty’s brand of post-truth literary culture is most conspicuous; Rorty’s old friend Daniel Dennett provided a perfect example when he said that “what the postmodernists did was truly evil” (2017).

As for the Kissinger view of a transition from postmodernism to AI, the idea clearly cannot be that reading Derrida [Editor’s note: French deconstructionist philosopher Jacques Derrida] inspired the USA and China to invest billions in their current weaponized AI race. It must instead be the Hegelian idea of a societal intellectual evolution that only becomes clear after the event. But if that is the kind of story we are telling, we need to bring in another metaphysic of which the first recorded appearance is from ancient India, namely materialism.

Materialism, unlike postmodernism, is a powerful force in our world, because it is routinely conflated with science, atheism and rationality. Postmodernism may say that philosophy is dead and that there is no truth, but few listen, even when the statements are comprehensible enough for the unpretentious to be able to listen. Materialism, on the other hand, is a philosophy that encourages people to forget that there is such a thing as philosophy and to leave the discovery of truth to science. It is from the perspective of this deferential, results-based attitude that the receding of objective truth makes most sense, for if only specialists can understand the objective truth about reality anyway, it makes little difference if we transition to a situation where nobody can at all, so long as we can still use AI to bend reality to our wills.

Rorty said, in the early 1980s, that philosophers have “lost the conviction that they can tell one about the ultimate nature of reality,” and “will not regain their old position unless they can once again offer a view about the ultimate nature of reality to compete with that of science” (1982: 148). Since he thought idealism was “the only interesting suggestion along these lines they have come up with,” he concluded that “only if they can resurrect idealism will the rest of culture take their pretensions seriously”—adding, sardonically, that the ”one event seems as unlikely as the other” (Ibid.: 148). I think he was essentially right, but a return of idealism is now beginning to look rather less unlikely than it once did. Cultural developments can make metaphysical stances look attractive, as Rorty saw clearly, and since we now spend so much time in virtual environments, immersed in artificially produced experience, an idealist metaphysics may soon start to seem far more relevant to our lives than materialism’s focus on the physical guts that merely facilitate the experiences. Against the backdrop of the manifest failings of materialism, which has now gravitated to the absurd position that experience does not exist, I think the time is ripe for a resurrection of idealism—and philosophy with it. Then we might learn what it is like for people all over the world to treat the truth of idealism as a matter of common knowledge. What would such a world be like? Primitive materialist instinct has hitherto prevented us from finding out.

 

References

Agada, A. (2017) The apparent conflict of transcendentalism and immanentism in Kwame Gyekye and Kwasi Wiredu’s interpretation of the Akan concept of God. Filosofia Theoretica: Journal of African Philosophy, Culture and Religions, vol. 6: 23-38.

Berlin, I. (1983 / 1991) Giambattista Vico and Cultural History. In Berlin’s The Crooked Timber of Humanity, ed. H. Hardy (pp. 51-72). London: Fontana Press.

Dennett, D. (2017) Interview with Carole Cadwalladr: I begrudge every hour I have to spend worrying about politics. In The Observer [UK newspaper]; online at: https://www.theguardian.com/science/2017/feb/12/daniel-dennett-politics-bacteria-bach-back-dawkins-trump-interview

Dunham, J., Hamilton Grant, I. and Watson, S. (2011 / 2014) Idealism: The History of a Philosophy. London: Routledge.

Gyekye, K. (1987 / 1995) An Essay on African Philosophical Thought: The Akan Conceptual Scheme. Philadelphia: Temple University Press.

Kant, I. (1787 / 1933) Critique of Pure Reason, trans. N. Kemp Smith. London: Macmillan.

Kissinger, H., Schmidt, E. and Huttenlocher, D. (2021) The Age of AI: and Our Human Future. New York: Little, Brown and Company.

Maffie, J. (2014) Aztec Philosophy: Understanding a World in Motion. Boulder: University Press of Colorado

Mascaró, J. (trans.) (1965) The Upanishads. London: Penguin.

Neumann, P. (2022) Jena 1800: The Republic of Free Spirits, translated by S. Frisch. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux.

Raju, P.T. (1971) The Philosophical Traditions of India. London: Routledge.

Rorty, R. (1979) Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature. Princeton: Princeton University Press.

Rorty, R. (1982) Nineteenth-Century Idealism and Twentieth-Century Textualism. In Rorty’s Consequences of Pragmatism (pp. 139-159). Brighton, UK: Harvester Press.

Tartaglia, J. (2020) Philosophy in a Technological World: GODS AND TITANS. London: Bloomsbury.

Tartaglia, J. (forthcoming) Gyekye and Contemporary Idealism. In A. Attoe, S. Segun, V. Nweke and J-B Umezurike (eds.) Conversations on African Philosophy of Mind, Consciousness and AI, New York: Springer.

Wulf, A. (2022) Magnificent Rebels: The First Romantics and the Invention of the Self. New York: Alfred A. Knopf.

The dark side of therapy

Reading | Psychiatry | 2022-12-18

Jhean Paul Varela Carrero, JDMikaela Marinis, BS

Nowadays, ‘go to therapy’ has become the progressive phrase in our society to deal with any issue that anyone has. If you are feeling sad, you are told to go to therapy, maybe even in place of some condolences. If you are feeling nothing and empty, of course that’s where you should go. Even if you are feeling too happy, anything shorter than going to therapy will be met with ‘Why aren’t you going to therapy?’

Many people presuppose psychology and psychiatry are scientifically objective, special bodies of truth tailored to help you succeed in life. Why wouldn’t you trust them? However, their history might reveal that they’re not best cataloged as branches of science, but a branch of law.

Imagine the following thought experiment. There is a Medieval slave working in the fields. Everyday, if he doesn’t accomplish the unreasonable goals set by his master, he’ll be harshly whipped. One might expect the slave to become upset and work less over time. The master, analyzing the situation, decides to send his slave to the town therapist. In the middle of the session, as the slave lays on the couch, he begins to cry his heart out and explain his deeply rooted traumas. While his therapist adjusts his glasses, he uses the latest Logotherapy techniques to get the slave to heal emotionally. The slave, after experiencing profound relief, says thank you to the therapist, goes back to his field, and is now able to meet the demands of his master with a smile on his face.

In the Medieval Ages, kings were anointed by God himself. Subsequently, the order established by the king was of a divine nature, or the truth itself. But with scientific discourse gaining traction during the Enlightenment, the exertion of power could no longer be justified using God. Needing a new way to validate the law, religion was left behind, and criminology, psychiatry, psychology, and sociology were born to take its place [1].

Law only works if people follow it. An easy way to correct dissension from the law is to statistically prove that those who do not follow it are ‘abnormal.’ Therefore, in this new paradigm, we can see the act of measuring increasingly affecting the lives of the citizens. It became more common to collect information about individuals, in different institutions such as schools, banks, factories, hospitals, the army, and others. Those who conformed to the rules were rewarded, and those who did not were punished [1]. If you were a statistical anomaly, you might be labeled as ‘mentally ill.’

The Soviet Union used this technique to justify punishing those who spoke out against their political system. The subversive people were labeled “Sluggish Schizophrenics,” and the purported symptoms included: “perseverance,” “struggling for the truth,” and “delusions of political reform” [3]. These ‘patients’ were forcibly sent to correctional facilities, and were treated with strong doses of antipsychotic medication [6]. China had its own equivalent to stop political dissenters, preferring the terms “paranoia” or “paranoid schizophrenia.” Chinese citizens who were deemed “politically harmful for society” for similar reasons as the Soviets could face abuse, torture, and strong doses of neuroleptics [2]. China continuously uses this technique to keep its social order running [7]. Additionally, psychiatry was used to justify the American slave trade. In 1851, the physician Samuel Cartwrite decided a slave must be mentally insane to want to run away from the “pleasant life” of captivity. He called it “Drapetomania,” and recommended treatment by intense whipping and cutting off the slaves’ toes to make it physically harder to run away [4].

Nowadays, many people think of mental illnesses as something completely inside themselves. We might only point to our neurobiology for our depression, anxiety, or ADHD, referencing “chemical imbalances” or thinking of the neurons as somehow “misfiring” in a vacuum. However, adopting this reductionist viewpoint could lead us to ignore the social influences in every aspect of our lives. If you were to look at the brains of “Sluggish Schizophrenics,” you would probably find a difference from others in the population. Does that necessarily mean that they’re ill? In order to get a clearer sight of the situation, we would need to look at all of the factors at our disposal, and break down the epistemology that is leading us to our conclusions.

It is no measure of health to be well adjusted to a profoundly sick society.
Jiddu Krishnamurti. [8]

Some academics seem to be pushing towards renaming “mental illness” as “brain disease.” This implies to some degree that we should be putting all of our efforts in the individual ‘brains’ that hold these problems, again adopting a reductionist stance [5].

According to Dr. Laurence J. Kirmayer, different cultures create different “valid” manifestations of discontent, which are perceived as legitimate in their societies. For example, in Nigeria, depression is more likely to be reported as “a peppery feeling in [the] head” than in India, where depression is experienced as “semen loss or a sinking heart or feeling hot.” In Korea, depression might be defined as “fire illness” due to a burning sensation in the gut, while it might be marked as “tightness in the chest” in Iran.

These differences are not inconsequential, and are associated with examples of social maladies more than neurological maladies. In the US, depression is characterized by certain particular symptoms, such as isolation. For a Korean, depression is associated with “a collective experience of injustice” [9].

Today, precarious social conditions might lead us to a certain angst that pushes us to find a label for it, something to identify ourselves with. Psychiatry and psychology seem to provide this. However, we might be sustaining the very conditions that gave birth to this pain in the first place. We might find that many of those conditions would be of a political and/or legal nature. Psychiatry and psychology could be driving forces to create positive changes in society, but instead they seem to frequently be a way to create individualized guilt and conform to the laws that keep the systematic problems in place.

 

Citations

[1] Foucault, Michel. (2020). La Verdad y las formas juridicas. GEDISA EDITORIAL.

[2] Google. (n.d.). On dissidents and madness. Google Books. Retrieved March 13, 2022, from https://books.google.com/books?id=tyDIKu8XsgcC&pg=PA242#v=onepage&q=paranoid&f=false 

[3] Graber, M. G., Weiner, A., & Mason, D. (n.d.). Sluggish schizophrenia in the Soviet Union: A diagnosis for political dissenters. in SearchWorks catalog. Retrieved March 13, 2022, from https://searchworks.stanford.edu/view/cj200yf2075 

[4] Haley, A. (n.d.). Trauma of Slavery: A Critical Study of the Roots. cloudfront.net. Retrieved March 13, 2022.

[5] JD;, B. (n.d.). Mental illness and brain disease. Folia medica. Retrieved March 13, 2022, from https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/26444362/ 

[6] States., U. (n.d.). Psychiatric abuse of political prisoners in the Soviet Union : Testimony by Leonid Plyushch : Hearing before the Subcommittee on International Organizations … HathiTrust. Retrieved March 13, 2022, from https://babel.hathitrust.org/cgi/pt?id=pur1.32754076920721&view=1up&seq=1&q1=treatment 

[7] van Voren, R. (2010, January). Political abuse of psychiatry—an historical overview. Schizophrenia bulletin. Retrieved March 13, 2022, from https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2800147/ 

[8] Vonnegut, M. (n.d.). The Eden Express. Google Books. Retrieved March 13, 2022, from https://books.google.com/books?id=o89v2m2ybCEC&q=%22well-adjusted%2Bto%2Ba%2Bprofoundly%2Bsick%2Bsociety%22 

[9] Watters, E. (2011). Crazy like us: The globalization of the American psyche. Free Press.

A cure to all mental illnesses?

Reading | Psychiatry | 2022-12-04

Mikaela Marinis, BSJhean Paul Varela Carrero, JD

When you are dealing with mental illness, you might defer to a psychologist or psychiatrist to help you figure out what precise illness you have. You may imagine that the mental illness represents a lack of a certain neurotransmitter, or even that you are about to finish a personality test, and find a new group of people just like you. Maybe you hope you don’t get ‘misdiagnosed’ and the psychologist or psychiatrist gives you the wrong treatment. But what if most of the diagnoses were pretty much, semi-secretly, the same?

Before the Enlightenment in Europe, judges lacked standardized procedures and legislation that would enable them to create uniform sentences. If two people committed the same crime in different geographical areas of the same State, judges would come up with completely different punishments, at a time when monarchies kept unlimited power.

Meanwhile, merciless tortures were an integral part of the judicial process. Foucault [1] described the hardships that some individuals went through, and made a special emphasis on the case of Damiens, a man punished for regicide in 1757:

The flesh will be torn from his breasts, arms, thighs and calves with red-hot pincers, his right hand, holding the knife with which he committed the said parricide, burnt with sulfur, and, on those places where the flesh will be torn away, poured molten lead, boiling oil, burning resin, wax and sulfur melted together and then his body drawn and quartered by four horses and his limbs and body consumed by fire, reduced to ashes and his ashes thrown to the winds.

Facing these severe conditions, one of the most influential thinkers of the Enlightenment, Cesare Beccaria, attempted to design a new judicial system. Among other objectives, the State would be prevented from abusing its powers and torture would be eliminated. This new system relied on standardized laws that were simply and clearly written in order to limit the interpretations of judges. According to Beccaria, syllogisms would make laws more precise and restrict possible abuses of power. An example of a legal syllogism could be, “Whoever murders goes to prison for 15 years. Patrick murdered. Thus, Patrick goes to prison for 15 years.”

These laws wouldn’t focus on the individual and his thoughts and feelings; the judges wouldn’t care about Patrick’s reasons behind committing the crime. They’d focus instead on the fact that a murder had taken place, and the laws were there to punish the prohibited behavior. This placed a lot of weight on the abstract constructions of the law, as opposed to an analysis of the psyche of the individual. There were two reasons for this approach according to Beccaria [2]:

1. It’s impossible to know the vast amount of internal states behind why individuals commit crimes, as “this will depend on the actual impression of objects on the senses, and on the previous disposition of the mind; both of which will vary in different persons, and even in the same person at different times…”
2. Even if it were possible to know the internal states, this would still require an immense amount of laws that simply couldn’t be dealt with, and the legal codes would be infinite; it would require “not only a particular code for every individual, but a new penal law for every crime.”

Beccaria published his seminal book An Essay on Crimes and Punishments in 1764, and justified his system through the concept of “moral responsibility.” Moral responsibility proposes that, since people have freewill, they’re all equally responsible for the decisions they make and the crimes they commit. Thus, all punishments should be dealt out the same to everyone. With the collapse of the authoritarian monarchies in Europe, many of the ideas that were proposed in Beccaria’s work were adopted worldwide, and continue to be used in contemporary times.

However, during the 19th century, a new school of thought would attempt to challenge these ideas. The Positive School of Italian Penal Law [3], inspired by the developments of science, argued that humans are completely subject to cause and effect and there is no freewill. The legal system, according to the proponents of this school, shouldn’t focus primarily on legal abstractions, but should concentrate on scrutinizing the criminal and his psyche. In that way, the root cause of the crime would be addressed.

The Positive School wanted to base its new ideas on recent developments from the fields of psychiatry and psychology, where ‘madness’ was no longer understood as a demonic possession or a decision by the crazy person themselves. Instead, it was seen as an illness. For the proponents of the Positive School, every criminal is different, so every crime is different. For this reason, there shouldn’t be standardized punishments for the same crime. Instead, this school proposed an individualized approach: a person would get out of prison once he was ‘cured,’ or ‘rehabilitated into society,’ based on scientific methodologies.

However, Beccaria was right that the Positive School’s ideas complicate our legal system. During the 20th century, the jurist Hans Kelsen [4] would go in favor of Beccaria’s system and argue that we shouldn’t focus on individual causes regarding criminal behavior:

Each concrete cause is simultaneously the effect of another cause and each effect the cause of another effect. There are, then, by definition, infinite chains of causes and effects, and each event is the point of intersection of an infinite number of causal chains.
Hans Kelsen, legal philosopher.

This debate escapes the confines of law and the arguments of both schools are, in contemporary times, more relevant than ever.

Where are psychiatry and psychology leaning towards nowadays? The options are: clean general categorization that doesn’t fit a causal model following the classical legal approach, or an insurmountable amount of causes that can’t be processed, and that resist categorization. If the scale was leaning towards an abstract model that has little to do with scientific causes and more to do with law, we’d expect the categories used to diagnose mental illnesses to collapse in the face of scientific scrutiny. And that is exactly what happens.

The DSM, or Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, is the modern bible for diagnosing different mental illnesses. But it’s a known secret that today’s academic psychologists acknowledge “the clinical reality that no clear divisions are empirically supported between most mental disorders and normality or, oftentimes, even between neighboring disorders,” [5] to the point where Dr. Steven Hyman, former director of the National Institute of Mental Health, called the DSM “an absolute scientific nightmare” [6].

For example, today, if someone goes to a psychiatrist to receive a mental illness diagnosis, chances are uncomfortably high the doctor next door would give them a different diagnosis. In trials for the DSM-5, 40% of mental illnesses did not meet “even a relaxed cutoff” for inter-rater [Editor’s note: between observers or, in this case, between psychiatrists] diagnostic reliability [7]. In one study in Canada, “misdiagnosis” of psychiatric labels was found to be 65.9% for major depressive disorder, 92.7% for bipolar disorder, 85.8% for panic disorder, 71.0% for generalized anxiety disorder, and 97.8% for social anxiety disorder [8].

In addition, mental illness categories have poor stability over time periods, with the diagnostic status of patients frequently changing over short intervals, and with vagrancies in symptom severity [9].

Aside from that, patients diagnosed with many mental illnesses are, more frequently than not, diagnosable for a second mental illness [10][11][12][13]. This is called comorbidity in the field of psychiatry. It is continuously found that different mental illness labels once perceived as unrelated are actually frequently comorbid with one another, or frequently can be diagnosed within the same individual [14][15].

Historically, scientists used to think of mental illnesses as discrete: either someone had schizophrenia, or they did not [16]. However, overtime, that view has been forced to change. Now the more accepted view is that mental illness is a spectrum across the human population [17]. Since scientists are yet to find even a single mental disorder that is a discrete categorical entity [18][19], it’s hard to be expected to provide concrete and objective diagnoses. However, even if a disorder is recognized as a spectrum across the human population, it still doesn’t tell us anything about the cause of that disorder within individuals.

If the lines between mental illnesses break down, it follows that the lines between treatment for mental illnesses would also break down. It has been hypothesized that psychiatric drugs work by correcting deficiencies in certain neurotransmitters. For example, an SSRI (Selective Serotonin Reuptake Inhibitor) drug supposedly fixes the lack of serotonin in the depressed brain, and treats it. But this has recently been disproven. Instead, the available evidence shows that psychiatric drugs are best conceptualized as enacting a particular psychological state that is not directly related to the diagnosis at hand, but instead could give anyone taking it similar results. Dr. Sami Timimi at Lincoln University argues: “As a psychoactive substance, SSRIs would appear to do ‘something’ to the mental state, but that something is not diagnosis-specific. Like alcohol, which will produce inebriation in a person with schizophrenia, obsessive compulsive disorder, depression or someone with no psychiatric diagnosis, SSRIs will also impact individuals in ways that are not specific to diagnosis” [20].

In fact, SSRIs are used for the treatment of Borderline Personality Disorder, Depression, Anxiety, OCD, anorexia nervosa, bulimia, panic disorder, social phobias, and more [20]. However, is there a general cure to all mental illnesses?

The NY Times journalists Pam Belluck and Benedict Carey lament that “the mechanisms of the field’s most commonly used drugs […] have revealed nothing about the causes of those disorders” [6]. But why would they? As Beccaria understood, the causes of behavioral and personality categories are unique to the individual, while categorization adopts an abstract form that is disconnected from causality. When people are diagnosed with mental illnesses, causality is largely thrown away, and they might as well be imputed using a legal code. Since each mental illness represents an unlimited number of possible causes, each mental illness must cover an overwhelming tent. Mathematicians have calculated that thousands of possible symptom combinations make up different mental illnesses, such as over 600,000 unique combinations qualifying a diagnosis for PTSD [21].

These diagnostic categories are actively creating generations of people who believe themselves to be mentally ill, from a scientific perspective. It’s undeniable that there are people in the world who are suffering from substantial impairments, or emotional distress. However, our explanatory models are, in many cases, insufficient. Often, the lines that divide legal codes and mental illness diagnostic codes are blurry. In the meantime, likely modeled after the Beccarian system itself, mental illness categories serve largely as legal heuristics.

Such heuristics end up granting prerogatives in front of the State, and deciding who deserves certain work, education, access to certain drugs, financial benefits or a shorter or longer punishment in the criminal system.

Scientists appear to be confused as to why its systems for studying mental illnesses aren’t working, and assume that aimlessly throwing data at the wall will eventually lead them to a cause for their models. But taking a step back to understand the immense social, philosophical, and political web that mental illness represents might shed some light on the problem.

 

Citations

[1] Foucault, M. (2019). Discipline and punish: The birth of the prison. Penguin Books Ltd.

[2] Beccaria, C. (1872). An Essay on Crimes and Punishments. Albany: W.C. Little & Co.

[3] Molina, C. M. (1999). Introducción a la Criminología. Bogotá: Leyer.

[4] Kelsen, H. (2009). Teoría Pura del Derecho. Buenos Aires: Eudeba.

[5] Ruggero CJ, Kotov R, Hopwood CJ, First M, Clark LA, Skodol AE, Mullins-Sweatt SN, Patrick CJ, Bach B, Cicero DC, Docherty A, Simms LJ, Bagby RM, Krueger RF, Callahan JL, Chmielewski M, Conway CC, De Clercq B, Dornbach-Bender A, Eaton NR, Forbes MK, Forbush KT, Haltigan JD, Miller JD, Morey LC, Patalay P, Regier DA, Reininghaus U, Shackman AJ, Waszczuk MA, Watson D, Wright AGC, Zimmermann J. Integrating the Hierarchical Taxonomy of Psychopathology (HiTOP) into clinical practice. J Consult Clin Psychol. 2019 Dec;87(12):1069-1084. doi: 10.1037/ccp0000452. PMID: 31724426; PMCID: PMC6859953.

[6] Belluck, P., & Carey, B. (2013, May 7). Psychiatry’s Guide is out of touch with science, experts say. The New York Times. Retrieved November 21, 2022, from https://www.nytimes.com/2013/05/07/health/psychiatrys-new-guide-falls-short-experts-say.html 

[7] Waszczuk, M. and others (2020). Redefining Phenotypes to Advance Psychiatric Genetics: Implications from Hierarchical Taxonomy of Psychopathology. J Abnorm Psychol, 129(2), 143–161. https://doi.org/10.1037/abn0000486

[8] Vermani, M., Marcus, M., & Katzman, M. A. (2011). Rates of detection of mood and anxiety disorders in primary care. The Primary Care Companion For CNS Disorders. https://doi.org/10.4088/pcc.10m01013 

[9]Baca-Garcia, E., Perez-Rodriguez, M. M., Basurte-Villamor, I., Fernandez Del Moral, A. L., Jimenez-Arriero, M. A., Gonzalez De Rivera, J. L., Saiz-Ruiz, J., & Oquendo, M. A. (2007). Diagnostic stability of psychiatric disorders in clinical practice. British Journal of Psychiatry, 190(3), 210–216. https://doi.org/10.1192/bjp.bp.106.024026 

[10] Katzman, M. A., Bilkey, T. S., Chokka, P. R., Fallu, A., & Klassen, L. J. (2017). Adult ADHD and comorbid disorders: Clinical implications of a dimensional approach. BMC Psychiatry, 17(1). https://doi.org/10.1186/s12888-017-1463-3 

[11] The Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia. (2017, June 14). Autism’s clinical companions: Frequent comorbidities with ASD. Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia. Retrieved November 21, 2022, from https://www.chop.edu/news/autism-s-clinical-companions-frequent-comorbidities-asd 

[12] Munoli, R. N., Praharaj, S. K., & Sharma, P. S. V. N. (2014, July). Co-morbidity in bipolar disorder: A retrospective study. Indian journal of psychological medicine. Retrieved November 21, 2022, from https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4100412/ 

[13] Steffen, A., Nübel, J., Jacobi, F., Bätzing, J., & Holstiege, J. (2020). Mental and somatic comorbidity of depression: A comprehensive cross-sectional analysis of 202 diagnosis groups using German nationwide ambulatory claims data. BMC Psychiatry, 20(1). https://doi.org/10.1186/s12888-020-02546-8 

[14] Plana-Ripoll O;Pedersen CB;Holtz Y;Benros ME;Dalsgaard S;de Jonge P;Fan CC;Degenhardt L;Ganna A;Greve AN;Gunn J;Iburg KM;Kessing LV;Lee BK;Lim CCW;Mors O;Nordentoft M;Prior A;Roest AM;Saha S;Schork A;Scott JG;Scott KM;Stedman T;Sørensen HJ;Werge T;Whitefo. (n.d.). Exploring comorbidity within mental disorders among a Danish national population. JAMA psychiatry. Retrieved November 21, 2022, from https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/30649197/ 

[15] Caspi, A., Houts, R. M., Belsky, D. W., Goldman-Mellor, S. J., Harrington, H. L., Israel, S., Meier, M. H., Ramrakha, S., Shalev, I., Poulton, R., & Moffitt, T. E. (2014, March). The P factor: One general psychopathology factor in the structure of psychiatric disorders? Clinical psychological science : a journal of the Association for Psychological Science. Retrieved November 21, 2022, from https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4209412/ 

[16] Grinker, R. R. (2022). Nobody’s normal: How culture created the stigma of mental illness. W.W. Norton & Company.

[17] Kotov, R., Krueger, R. F., Watson, D., Achenbach, T. M., Althoff, R. R., Bagby, R. M.,…Zimmerman, M. (2017). The Hierarchical Taxonomy of Psychopathology (HiTOP): A dimensional alternative to traditional nosologies. Journal of Abnormal Psychology, 126(4), 454–477. http://dx.doi.org/10.1037/abn0000258

[18] Haslam, N., Holland, E., & Kuppens, P. (2011). Categories versus dimensions in personality and psychopathology: A quantitative review of taxometric research. Psychological Medicine, 42(5), 903–920. https://doi.org/10.1017/s0033291711001966 

[19] Adam, D. (2013). Mental health: On the spectrum. Nature, 496(7446), 416–418. https://doi.org/10.1038/496416a 

[20] Timimi, S. (2014). No more psychiatric labels: Why Formal Psychiatric Diagnostic Systems should be abolished. International Journal of Clinical and Health Psychology, 14(3), 208–215. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.ijchp.2014.03.004 

[21] Galatzer-Levy IR, Bryant RA. 636,120 Ways to Have Posttraumatic Stress Disorder. Perspect Psychol Sci. 2013 Nov;8(6):651-62. doi: 10.1177/1745691613504115. PMID: 26173229.

Experience requires no personal self

Reading | Phenomenology

Dr. Graham Stew, DPhil. | 2022-10-16

What is experience?

Phenomenology—the Western approach to the direct, objective study of subjectivity—seeks to understand ‘lived experience.’ But what does that really mean? Put simply, our experience consists of sensations, thoughts and feelings, which result from sensory perceptions and mental activity.

Simple perceptions, such as the taste of an orange, the smell of coffee, or the color blue, are known to philosophers as qualia (Blackmore, 2005). These building blocks of experience might be regarded as the raw ‘givens’ of perception prior to interpretation. Are these essential structures the ‘things themselves’? Do we see, hear, taste, touch and smell objects as they appear in consciousness, or as consciousness? If they are regarded as ‘external’ objects, there is an assumption of a subject who is experiencing them in time and space [Editor’s note: the author uses the term ‘subject’ in the sense of an individual subject, or ego, not as impersonal subjectivity itself]. This is the conventional view of human sentience: the first-person account of our inner experience. But how does it stand up to critical examination?

What can be said about mental phenomena such as thoughts, emotions, memories, ideas and images? They appear in awareness, spontaneously and uninvited, but we usually claim ownership and responsibility for them (my thoughts, feelings, etc.). Descriptive phenomenologists aim to capture the ‘pre-reflective’ nature of our experience, before the layers of thoughts, theory and judgment obscure our perception. Can these be immaculate perceptions, a form of choiceless awareness before the movement of thought? Many contemplative traditions (in both the East and West) would contend that it is possible to reach such an open and empty state of receptivity (Krishnamurti, 2010). Indeed, they would question the assumption of an ‘experiencer’ who experiences, a subject who perceives objects. We will visit this perspective later.

For now, let us now recap. Experience comprises mental events and sensory information, which seem to produce an inner world of subjective experience. Upon further investigation, it can be argued that the concepts of time and space, and indeed of a separate self, are also produced by the interpreted construction of experience. The world and our assumed identity are understood and conceptualized through this ever-changing flow of phenomena: the ‘stream of consciousness’ first described by William James (1890).

All experience requires conscious awareness to be experienced. Mind, which appears in consciousness, is necessary for the world to exist [Editor’s note: the author uses the word ‘mind’ not as a synonym of consciousness, as in much of the Western philosophical tradition, but instead as a subset of the activity of consciousness]. Quantum physicists are recognizing the fundamental nature of consciousness (see Bohm, 1980; Herbert, 1985; Tiller, 1997; Capra, 2010), insofar as quantum theory cannot be completely defined without introducing features of consciousness. This view of the primacy of consciousness is gathering increasing support in the scientific community, and seems likely to sweep away the obsolete but still dominant paradigm of reductive materialism (Kastrup, 2014).

In this new paradigm consciousness is fundamental. It enables experience to create meaning and understanding, and it is the one thing we cannot deny. So experiences appear in consciousness (which is outside time and space, without any characteristics and not locatable) and assume the being-ness of presence. There are no separate phenomena but simply appearances in and as consciousness. Objects exist in the abstract world of thought and are concepts rather than actual entities.

Is there an enduring self or ego that is aware of experience? As already discussed, experience can be regarded as a series of interconnected events and mental states (thoughts, feelings and sensations). The assumption of the continued existence of an ego (or subject who experiences) is challenged not only by Buddhist thought, but other theorists, such as Derek Parfit (1986) and his ‘bundle’ theory of self. Drawing upon the ideas of David Hume (1711-1776), Parfit claims that all experiences and mental events are causally related and can be likened to a ‘bundle’ tied up with string. One can examine experiences seeking for a ‘self’ who experiences, but all that is found are the experiences. What I may regard as ‘my life’ is a series of perceptions and impressions that are tied together by memory and give rise to the idea of an enduring identity. There is no person apart from the series of connected events, and what we call an individual is merely a convention of language.

Such a theory seems counterintuitive, and entails abandoning any belief that you are a person who has free will and lives a life in your particular body. Because of the difficulties in otherwise defining the self, it is a perspective that at least deserves attention. Standing apart from other major religions, which support the concept of an ego or soul, Buddhism maintains that there is no substantial or enduring entity that can be regarded as a self, a basic principle (anatman) recognized as one of the marks of existence. The Buddha could therefore be viewed as the first bundle theorist. This is not stating that some form of subjectivity does not exist, but that the concept of a persisting and separate self/ego is an illusion. Viewing the ego as a defined persona or social role, one can see that it consists of an arbitrary selection of experiences with which we have been taught to identify. Why, for example, do we say “I think” but not “I am beating my heart”? (Watts, 2017).

Although denying the ultimate existence of an enduring self, Buddhism admits an impermanent form of subjectivity or sentience, the awareness of being present. So can there be an impersonal awareness, similar to the transcendental consciousness of Husserl (1970) or the ‘witness-consciousness’ of Advaita Vedanta? Anticipating Husserl, the 7^th century Indian Buddhist thinker Dharmakirti (Dreyfus & Thompson, 2007) argued that conscious states are immanently self-reflexive, and therefore phenomenal. Their ‘givenness’ provides experiences with their ‘seeming’ quality; such as how the taste of honey, or the memory of a place, seems ‘to be like’ something (Nagel, 1974).

We need not assume that a series of experiences requires an independent ‘experiencer.’ Awareness itself can be regarded as non-dual (having neither subject nor object), and being one with the noumenon, which is the source of all phenomena. It is the movement of thought (which is mind) that disturbs awareness by perceiving, defining and judging apparent objects and states. It follows that, situated within the constructs of time and space, the story of a self can be created (Stew, 2016).

This sense of self is very real (as ‘you’ are no doubt aware), and it is this quality of personal subjectivity that makes the whole question of consciousness so puzzling and intriguing. The idea of ‘me,’ with a personal history and identity, is apparently convincing, but to infer that subjective experience proves the existence of a stable, historical person could be a mistake.

The self [Editor’s note: the personal self, that is] is a narrative construction as far as Daniel Dennett (1991:246) is concerned: “Our tales are spun, but for the most part we don’t spin them; they spin us. Our human consciousness, and our narrative selfhood, is their product, not source.” The reification of self is the result of assuming that the transient stream of experience necessarily indicates the existence of a substantive or permanent self or ego.

Can there be a ‘subjectivity’ of experience—the phenomenological focus—without reifying a person who is permanent and invariant? There are definite similarities here between Zahavi’s (2005) concept of a ‘minimal self,’ the transcendental ego of Husserl, and the witness-consciousness of Vedanta. Could it be this neutral pre-reflective awareness that simply knows the background hum of presence, of simply being? Is there a need for an intermediate ‘self,’ which would simply be another phenomenal object?

Buddhism views all objects, including apparent persons, as inherently empty (shunya) and impermanent (anicca), their existence being illusory. The analogy of a burning candle is often used to explain this position: the light from the candle appears persistent, as the stream of hot flowing gases suggests permanence, but the reality is far from stable and static. Any notion of ‘self’ is an attempt to capture and halt the flow of life itself. Mind is needed for the world to exist; and consciousness is necessary for the mind to appear. Consciousness is viewed as the noumenal ground of being by non-dualists, as it is self-illuminating and reveals itself by its very occurrence (Mackenzie, 2007).

These ideas may seem challenging for readers who are steeped in familiar Cartesian dualism and feel comfortable with their realist ontology. However, let me summarize this position as concisely as possible. It is suggested that experience is not produced by the mind, but is in consciousness. All experience is mind: it does not appear in the mind. Mind comprises thoughts, sensations and perceptions, and they all appear in consciousness. All that is experienced is in consciousness and it is consciousness that is experiencing it. There is thinking, feeling and sensing and all these are suffused with consciousness. Consciousness is first-person experience; the knowing element in every experience (Spira, 2017).

We can now move to explore the nature of awareness, but if your brain is hurting too much you may need to take a break!

 

What is awareness?

If phenomenology is the study of the contents of conscious awareness, who or what is aware?

Does awareness require a self to ‘have’ awareness? Could it be that, at source, we are nothing more than conscious awareness? Can consciousness become aware of itself through the appearance of phenomena? Vedantins and Buddhists feel that consciousness is analogous to light, which, in revealing other things, shines in itself (MacKenzie, 2007). Rupert Spira (2017) suggests that awareness knows itself simply by being itself, just as the sun illuminates itself simply by being itself.

Any experience requires the presence of consciousness; but the screen of awareness does not depend on experience. All there is to any experience is sensation and perception. All there is to a sensation or perception is the experience of sensing and perceiving; and the only substance present in sensing and perceiving is awareness.

As nervous systems develop, conditioned by educational and sociocultural influences, apparent objects are recognized from memory and automatically identified when perceived. Familiar objects in the ‘developed’ world, such as a mobile phone, are instantly labelled; although the same object might mean nothing to a member of a remote Amazonian tribe. Meaning is attached to words and concepts, and these interpretations are subjective and unique. The mind therefore constructs our ‘personal’ world, and the mind is made out of consciousness, which is all there is.

This is not solipsism, as it is not suggested that the individual mind is all that can be known to exist. Nor is it panpsychism, which is still essentially dualistic in viewing everything in the physical world to be imbued with consciousness. We in the West have tended to equate consciousness with subjectivity, which we associate with the mind as a reflection of the body and world. Eastern philosophy, however, distinguishes mind from consciousness, with mind defined as the content of consciousness.

As a sensation or thought is perceived, attention is directed towards it (‘intentionality’) and the mind (a collection of memories and concepts) is engaged in creating meaning. Attention is simply focused awareness, which is itself empty and without any qualities. Attention directed outwards towards sensations and thoughts (experience) forms the basis of phenomena (objectification). It is the input from our senses and the resulting mental activity that constitutes our lived experience, and this all occurs within conscious awareness. For any object—a thought, feeling, sensation or perception—to come into the field of experience, consciousness must focus and thus limit its awareness in the form of attention. Attention thus brings form into existence out of the formless field of infinite consciousness. Attention directed inwards to awareness itself (noumenon) is true meditation.

Paying conscious and non-judgmental attention to our moment-to-moment experience is the essence of mindfulness. Through cultivating this practice, it becomes possible to observe the transient nature of thoughts, feeling and sensations as they arise and pass away in our awareness. Whatever is recognized as an object of one’s attention cannot be what one truly is. Mindfulness, as a form of conscious and active reflexivity, probably deserves wider recognition and debate.

Quantum theory has something to contribute to the debate on attention. One of the most significant conclusions reached by quantum physicists in recent times is the fact that no object exists unless it is observed (Schrödinger, 2009; Heisenberg, 2000). There is an interdependent and intimate relationship between the observer and the observed; both are needed for any observation to occur. When there is only observing, the observer becomes the observed (Krishnamurti, 2010). In other words, there is a collapse of both subject and object, from duality to the non-dual; and from the phenomenal to the noumenal.

 

Applications to the research process

Phenomenological researchers may be reading this essay and wondering what conclusions to draw from the preceding discussion. Of what relevance do these complex and confusing philosophical ideas have to the practical business of doing research?

As phenomenologists, we are interested in the experiences and ‘lifeworlds’ of our participants. Whether our aim is the description of ‘essential structures’ of a phenomenon of interest, or its interpretation in its existential context, we will hold certain assumptions about the nature of consciousness and experience. These presuppositions may well be unconscious and unquestioned, but the purpose of this essay has been to bring these issues into the open for critical examination.

Researchers are normally encouraged to make explicit their ontological and epistemological stances, and to explain their philosophical position regarding what constitutes reality and knowledge. In my experience, this expectation seems to apply more to qualitative studies than to positivist research.

For phenomenological inquiries, however, there is arguably a need to go further and to consider and justify how the specific approach chosen is consistent with its foundational philosophy.

Certain questions need to be addressed: How is consciousness viewed? Does it arise from matter and is a function of the brain? Is there an external, independent world that is given to consciousness? Does experience happen to an individual? Alternatively: Does consciousness give rise to the brain, the world and all phenomena? Does experience create the individual? Can there be description without interpretation? Is the self/ego a construction? Does experience have inherent meaning? This essay has not provided any conclusive answers to these questions, but has endeavored to expand the debate on these issues beyond the usual occidental worldview. For example, the Indian concept of witness-consciousness relates to Husserl’s transcendental ego and deserves further investigation.

Perhaps in his search for ‘pure consciousness’ Husserl chose not to venture too far into spiritual traditions, fearing the negative reactions of a positivist world, skeptical of any metaphysics. Would this be seen as a neo-Kantian form of transcendental idealism, too close to ‘unknowable spirituality’ to be accepted by his conservative academic colleagues? Clinging to forms, he thus developed the empirical and transcendental egos, and the concepts of noesis and noema: ways of knowing the ‘intersubjective natural world-about-me.’

Heidegger sought to move phenomenology to a more existential focus on being-in-the-world (Dasein), with a rejection of pure ‘mentalism.’ He retained the term ‘human being,’ which suggests that he had shifted from the earlier consciousness-centered phenomenology to the ontic dimension of anthropology.

Debate continues among philosophers and researchers on the concepts of epoché and reduction, and whether prior understanding, judgements and assumptions can be identified, suspended and transcended, or whether our perceptions are inevitably interpreted and meaning is already present. The subtleties of this debate have not been addressed here, as it has been suggested that phenomena have no inherent or independent existence, dependent as they are on conscious awareness and subject to socio-cultural conditioning. Description always requires interpretation, as we seek to make sense of our experience. Caution is therefore necessary in claiming any type of veracity or wider application for phenomenological findings.

Whichever approach is adopted, the purpose of phenomenology is to gain insight into, and understanding of, individuals’ experiences. Awareness, empathy and sensitivity towards a human situation, without claiming generalizability to wider populations, are regarded as being intrinsically worthwhile and valuable outcomes. In health care settings, phenomenological research aims to inform practice and sensitize practitioners. No recommendations or theoretical models are produced, as it is up to readers to interpret the findings, and if these resonate with their own experience the research is likely to have an impact. The researcher’s responsibility is to demonstrate reflexivity, authenticity and trustworthiness.

Allow me to propose again that all experience arises within awareness and that the ‘reality’ we believe we know is actually produced by conceptual thought. We perceive a common world by agreeing on the way we describe it. That is, by labelling objects arising in consciousness, we produce a standardized model of the world using language. Objects and the thoughts that define them seem to arise simultaneously in awareness. We are trapped by language, which is inevitably limited, subjective and dualistic. This mental division of subject and object fractures reality, the true nature of which is non-dual. The belief that objects exist independently of awareness is just that: a belief without any foundation of evidence.

To use the familiar metaphor of waves and ocean: the waves (the objects) are the phenomena that we witness with our senses, but their real essence is the ocean (the Subject/Consciousness). The ocean is of course the essence of our true being, but we cannot grasp this with our rational mind. However, when the illusion of being a separate individual is seen through, the identification with the waves disappears and ‘ocean-consciousness’ comes to the fore. We recognize that both wave and ocean are essentially water, and that everything in the world is interconnected. It is one universal Energy; what Tibetan Buddhists refer to as ‘One Taste.’

I am suggesting that being and consciousness are one and the same. There is no such thing as ‘objective’ being without consciousness; all being is subjective and occurs in and as consciousness. Consciousness is not a ‘thing’; it is a capacity to perceive, an openness which is both empty and full. Concepts are objects appearing in awareness, and all experience exists within, and is made of, this conscious awareness.

As phenomenology is the study of experience, perhaps it is wise to consider that no ‘thing’ exists outside consciousness, which is the true nature of our apparent selves and the world. In the light of this understanding, all conceptual debates about description and interpretation pale into insignificance. Husserl’s warning is still valid: subjectivity cannot be known by any objective science.

We continue to pay attention to the transitory images on the screen, but not to the screen of awareness itself. It would seem more useful to explore the nature of conscious awareness, without which nothing can be known, or indeed exist. Without an appreciation of the ground of our being, noumenal awareness, there can only be limited understanding of what we call phenomena. As William Blake (2000) said, “If the doors of perception were cleansed everything would appear as it is, Infinite.”

Arguably, research will always be a dualistic activity, as it sets up a subject to investigate objects. No matter how relativist or constructivist our ontological stance may be, there will inevitably be the division between the researcher and the researched. Whatever theoretical perspective may be adopted—existentialism, post-modernism, post-structuralism, post-humanism, or any other ’ism’—it will remain simply a conceptual framework through which experiences assume meaning, and which is contained within consciousness. We may make our choice between styles of phenomenology, but need to ensure that our philosophical foundations are sound, defensible and consistent with our aims and outcomes.

We can attempt to restrain prior understanding through consciously adopting a phenomenological attitude, but in reality all experience is one seamless substance. The division between the internal self and the external object is never actually experienced. It is always imagined by thought.

If consciousness is all there is, and all phenomena are simply the contents of consciousness, then what is phenomenological research for? We may explore experience, but any resulting description and interpretation will occur within conscious awareness, which is beyond all analysis and definition. By all means let us study experience, but do not claim it is a science of consciousness, for what will be studied will be doing the studying, and the eye cannot see itself!

 

Conclusions

So let me summarize and return to phenomenology for the last time; to the researcher asking questions of others about their experience and what it means; to the researcher writing a story about the participants’ stories; and the readers of the research taking away their own interpreted stories: what does it all mean?

We explore—we seek meaning in life—in our own and others’ lives. We do not accept what we find as absolute truth, because we accept that no such thing exists. We understand more; we appreciate others’ experiences more deeply, more sensitively, and we take those insights into our own lives. These insights may change the way we work and relate to others and ourselves; or they may not. Does it matter? Have we increased our store of ‘knowledge’ as a result of these efforts? Perhaps. Will this knowledge change the world? Probably not.

But human curiosity is indomitable and will not be denied. We ask questions and demand answers. Phenomenology seeks to satisfy our curiosity about what it means to be human and have experiences. We have little idea what experience is, or where it comes from. We have even less idea about what it means to be conscious, but the thirst for understanding drives us on.

Perhaps we can simply agree that:

The world is known by the senses
The senses are known by the mind
The mind is known by Consciousness
And Consciousness is known by itself.
When we search deep inside Consciousness
Consciousness searches deep inside us.

 

References

Baars, B. J. (1988) A Cognitive Theory of Consciousness. New York: Cambridge University Press.

Blake, W. (2000) The Marriage of Heaven and Hell. In The Selected Works of William Blake. Ed. Bruce Woodcock. Hertfordshire: Wordsworth Editions,195-206.

Blackmore, S. (2005) Consciousness: A Very Short Introduction, Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Blackmore, S. (2011) Consciousness: An Introduction, (2^nd Edition), New York, Oxford University Press.

Bohm, D. (1980) Wholeness and the Implicate Order. London: Routledge.

Brentano, F. (1973) Psychology from an Empirical Standpoint. London: Routledge. (Original work published 1874)

Capra, F. (2010) The Tao of Physics: An Exploration of the Parallels Between Modern Physics and Eastern Mysticism. (5^th edition) Boston: Shambhala Publications.

Chalmers, D. J. (1995) Facing up to the problem of consciousness Journal of Consciousness Studies. 2(3), 200–219

Chalmers, D.J. (1995b) The puzzle of conscious experience. Scientific American, Dec. 1995, 62–68

Chalmers, D. J. (1996). The conscious mind: in search of a fundamental theory. New York, Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Crick, F. H. (1994) The Astonishing Hypothesis: The Scientific Search for the Soul. New York: Scribners.

Dennett, D. C. (1991) Consciousness Explained. Boston: Little, Brown & Co.

Dreyfus, G., & Thompson, E. (2007) Asian perspectives. Indian theories of mind. In P. D. Zelazo, M. Moscovitch, & E. Thompson (Eds.) The Cambridge handbook of consciousness (pp. 89–114). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Eddington, A. (1928) The Nature of the Physical World. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Fasching, W. (2008) Consciousness, self-consciousness, and meditation. Phenomenology and the Cognitive Sciences, Volume 7, Issue 4, pp 463–483.

Freud, S. (2000) The Unconscious. London: Penguin Classics. (Original work published 1915)

Giorgi, A. (2009) The descriptive phenomenological method in psychology: A modified Husserlian approach. Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press.

Heidegger, M. (1962) Being and time (J. Macquarrie & E. Robinson, Trans.). New York: Harper & Row. (Original work published 1927).

Heisenberg, W. (2000) Physics and Philosophy: The Revolution in Modern Science. London: Penguin Classics. (Original work published 1962).

Herbert, N. (1985) Quantum Reality: Beyond the New Physics. New York: Doubleday

Husserl, E. (1970) The idea of phenomenology. The Hague, The Netherlands: Nijhoff.

Husserl, E. (1980). Phenomenology and the foundations of the sciences. Boston: Martinus Hijhoff Publishers. (Original work published 1952).

James, W. (1890) The Principles of Psychology. New York: Holt.

Kastrup, B. (2014) Why Materialism is Baloney. Hants: John Hunt Publishing.

Krishnamurti, J. (2010) The Book of Life. San Francisco: Harper One.

Loy, D. (1988)  Nonduality: a Study in Comparative Philosophy. New York: Humanity Books

Lycan, W. G. (1996) Consciousness and Experience. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press

MacKenzie, M. D. (2007). The illumination of consciousness: approaches to self-awareness in the Indian and Western traditions. Philosophy East and West, 57(1), 40–62.

Nagel, T. (1974) What Is It Like To Be a Bat? Philosophical Review 4: 435–50.

Parfit, D. (1986) Reasons and Persons. Oxford: Oxford University Press

Penrose, R. (1995) Shadows Of The Mind: A Search for the Missing Science of Consciousness. London: Vintage

Puligandla, R. (1970) Phenomenological reduction and yogic meditation. Philosophy East and West, 20(1), 19–33.

Rao, K. R. (2011) Cognitive anomalies, Consciousness and Yoga, vol. XVI, part 1 of History of Science, Philosophy and Culture in Indian Civilization, ed. D.P. Chattopadhyaya, New Delhi Centre for Studies in Civilizations / Matrix

Sartre, J-P. (1956) Being and nothingness. An essay on phenomenological ontology. New

Schrödinger, E. (2009) My View of the World. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Skinner, B. F. (1953) Science and Human Behavior. New York: MacMillan.

Smith, J.A, Flowers, P, Larkin, M. (2009) Interpretative Phenomenological Analysis: Theory, Method and Research. London: Sage.

Spira, R. (2017) The Nature of Consciousness: Essays on the Unity of Mind and Matter. Oakland, CA; New Harbinger Publications

Stew. G. (2016) Too Simple for Words – Reflections on Non-Duality. Hants: O Books: John Hunt Publishing.

Tiller, W.A. (1997) Science and Human Transformation: Subtle Energies, Intentionality and Consciousness. California: Pavior Publishing.

Timalsina, S. (2009) Consciousness in Indian Philosophy: the Advaita doctrine of ‘awareness only’. Abingdon: Routledge.

Titchener, E. (1901) An Outline of Psychology. New York: Macmillan.

van Manen, M. (2017) But Is It Phenomenology? Qualitative Health Research; 27 (6). 775-  779.

Waite, D. (2007) Back to the Truth; 5000 years of Advaita. Winchester, UK: O Books.

Wallace, B. A. (2000) The Taboo of Subjectivity: towards a new science of consciousness. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Watson, J. (1924) Behaviorism. New York: W. W. Norton.

Watts, A. (1976) Tao: The Watercourse Way. London: Jonathan Cape

Watts, A. (2017) In the Academy – essays and lectures. New York: SUNY Press

Wundt, W. (1897) Outlines of Psychology. Leipzig: W. Engleman.

Zahavi, D. (2005) Subjectivity and selfhood. Investigating the first-person perspective. Cambridge, London: MIT.

An objective science of subjective experience

Reading | Phenomenology

Dr. Graham Stew, DPhil. | 2022-10-09

Right now, as you read these words on this page, you are presumably having a conscious experience. If you stop and ask yourself: ‘Am I conscious now?’ the answer will naturally be ‘Yes.’ But how do you know? And what does being conscious mean? If we are honest, we cannot even begin to understand consciousness. It is the most obvious and intimate of things, but philosophers and scientists have failed to produce any convincing explanations, and it remains a total mystery.

Is it possible for the eye to see itself, or to know that which is knowing? The conclusion is that the subject of consciousness always eludes us, as it is its own object.

Social researchers, and in particular phenomenologists, seek to understand the inner world of our feelings, attitudes, sensations, and the meanings we attach to our experience. The resulting research ends up describing and interpreting (sometimes even explaining) our subjective experience and behavior, without considering the origin of these phenomena. It is like being fascinated by the images on a TV screen, whilst ignoring the electricity and broadcasting system that produce them.

This essay sets out to explore consciousness and experience, the fundamental aspects of being human. Using phenomenology—the study of the phenomenal [Editor’s note: that is, the experiential appearances]—as our focus, we shall address the noumenal, that which is the source of all appearances. Western science and eastern philosophy will be visited in our search, and a range of theories will be discussed. In so doing, I shall be challenging our Eurocentric views of consciousness, awareness and experience.

 

Phenomenology

Phenomenology is defined as the study of the objects of consciousness, as they appear to individual awareness. From the Greek phainomenon, meaning appearance, phenomena are the sensations, thoughts and perceptions that constitute the totality of our lived experience. The emphasis of phenomenology is on the world as lived by individuals—their ‘life-world’—not the world or reality as something separate from subjective experience. This approach to research asks ‘What is this experience like?’ as it attempts to explore meanings as they are lived in everyday life.

Phenomenology, as a branch of philosophy, has a long history originating in the work of Plato and his distinction between sensory and abstract experiences. The themes of phenomenology were explored by Kant, Schopenhauer, Berkeley and Hume, but became prominent at the end of the 19^th century as a result of the work of Franz Brentano (1973) and William James (1890). The inner subjective world, capable of exploration through introspection, became a focus of interest as a reaction against the objective materialism of science.

The founding figure of phenomenology, Edmund Husserl (1859-1938), sought to establish an equally rigorous science of subjective experience. The intention was to investigate methodically the essential structures of consciousness, whilst adopting the ‘phenomenological attitude’, where prior understanding and knowledge were deliberately suspended; the so-called ‘bracketing’ or epoché. This suspension of the ‘natural’ pre-reflective attitude was intended to open the researcher’s mind to broader possibilities of meaning. Objects of consciousness could therefore be described in terms of their essential and invariant features; those characteristics of a phenomenon without which it could not be regarded as such.

An epistemological emphasis was evident in the desire to formulate objective accounts of subjective phenomena, e.g. the experiences of loneliness or of becoming a parent. The emphasis is on the reduction of associations and meanings to a specific and pure description of such experiences, in order to increase our understanding and establish a science of consciousness. In not denying the existence of an external world, it could be argued that Husserl inadvertently re-instated the subject-object division that was then regarded as the flaw in logical positivism.

Later phenomenologists, such as Martin Heidegger (1889 -1976), developed a more ontological focus, with an interest in interpreting the socio-cultural and historical context of experience. There was an acceptance of researchers’ pre-understandings as a necessary and inevitable component of any inquiry, and any attempt at ‘bracketing’ prior assumptions was abandoned. For Heidegger, to be human is to be an interpreter of experience, and all understanding is an act of interpretation.

All phenomenologists claim to explore ‘lived experience’ and the phenomena that appear to consciousness. However, there are differences in the emphasis of this process, in that researchers will either attempt to describe or interpret individuals’ experience. They can ask: ‘What is this experience like?’ or ‘What is it like to be a person living with this experience/disease?’ There is a clear shift between an epistemological (knowing) and an ontological (being) focus: a subtle but significant distinction. Either there is a reductive focus on essential features of an experience, or an inclusive acceptance of contextual factors; either a bracketing out of prior understanding, or a mutual co-construction of meaning between researcher and participant.

This essay is not concerned with the internal arguments between phenomenologists, and so the detailed differences between the various schools of thought will not be discussed in depth here. Some aspects of both descriptive and interpretive approaches will be revisited later, where appropriate. To summarize, phenomenology is concerned with understanding the meaning, impact and significance of experience for individuals. It does not claim generalizability and does not seek to generate theory. Instead, phenomenologists argue that achieving deep and meaningful insights into how individuals perceive their experience (e.g. pain) will provide for more sensitive and aware responses (e.g. in health professionals).

Phenomenology, as a research methodology, is not well charted, as phenomenological philosophers tended not to undertake research, and left no models or ‘recipes’ for investigating conscious experience. We do, however, have some guidance from recent writers such as Giorgi (2009), as a descriptive phenomenologist, and Smith et al. (2009), who employ an interpretive approach in interpretative phenomenological analysis. We also have earnest debates over just what constitutes phenomenology (e.g. van Manen, 2017), and whether hermeneutics can be regarded as having a role within phenomenology. Other phenomenologists, such as Merleau-Ponty and Gadamer, have stressed the embodied nature of experience and the importance of language. Researchers therefore need to reflect on the fundamental purpose of their inquiries and adopt a methodology consistent with these aims.

What seems to be missing from much current debate is the nature of our inner subjective world. Just what is consciousness and what do we mean when we talk about experience? The following sections of the essay will take phenomenology’s central focus of consciousness and experience and explore what these concepts might mean. No conclusive answers will be revealed, as these matters remain a mystery to both philosophers and scientists. However, some general remarks on the implications for today’s researchers, and a few more questions, will be discussed.

 

What is consciousness?

Ask yourself again: ‘Am I conscious now?’ If the answer is ‘yes,’ what are you conscious of? Phenomenologists will assert that we are always conscious of something, be it a thought, sensation, or emotion. Whatever becomes the focus of our attention is an object of consciousness, an act of reference. This direction of attention toward a phenomenon appearing in consciousness was termed ‘intentionality’ by Franz Brentano (1838 – 1917). Thus, we are always conscious or aware of or about something, and Husserl’s phenomenology was based on this intentionality of consciousness. Not only is consciousness always directed towards an object, but every conscious experience exists as a noema. Husserl used this term to represent the object or content of a thought, judgement, or perception, but scholars are still unsure of its precise meaning in his work. Noesis is the apprehension or intellectual reasoning that perceives the object of consciousness (the noema).

Husserl (1980) also described pure foundational consciousness as a transcendental subjectivity that is achieved through the phenomenological reduction known as epoché. As previously described, this is the deliberate identification and suspension of the so-called pre-reflective or ‘natural’ attitude. This attitude consists of our prior understanding, assumptions and all theoretical knowledge related to the object in question. Through this ‘bracketing’ of fore-structures of understanding, Husserl argued that the pure and essential structures of an experience can be revealed and described. In this sense, he could be regarded as an idealist, asserting that subjective experience was the ground of absolute existence and that an apparent external world consisted only of consciousness (Puligandla, 1970).

But let us return to our central question: what does it mean to be conscious? We perceive an unconscious ‘material’ world and wonder where consciousness comes from. I am using the term ‘consciousness’ in this chapter to mean all the sensory and mental events of awareness. These include the sensations of colors, shapes, sounds, tastes, smells and touch, and all mental thoughts, feelings, memories and images. Thus, I am referring to the phenomenon of being conscious, rather than to the neurological processes that make these subjective experiences possible.

Right now, I am conscious of a Mozart symphony. I know that sound waves are reaching my ears and being converted into action potentials, which travel along the cochlear nerves to my auditory cortex. What happens to transform these electrical and chemical activities into the subjective experience of beautiful music? How can a few pounds of grey, wet tissue create the smell of coffee, the taste of a peach, and even images of non-existent objects, such as centaurs or unicorns? Why should several billion interacting neurons give rise to a subjective sense of presence of simply being here?

This is the ‘hard problem’ famously defined by David Chalmers: “The hard problem is the question of how physical processes in the brain give rise to subjective experience” (Chalmers: 1995b: 63).

The ‘easy’ problems of consciousness have been tackled over the last century and include cognition, attention, sleep, behavior, and memory. Functional MRI scans have told us much about neural activity within the brain, but the ‘explanatory gap’ between the objective material brain and the subjective world of experience remains unbridgeable. Some neuroscientists insist that once all the easy problems have been solved, the hard problem will disappear. Others are not so optimistic, suggesting that there is no way that science can explain consciousness, because consciousness is what knows science (Wallace, 2000). Let us look at some of the theories that have been proposed to explain the mystery of consciousness or, as Alan Watts (2017) put it, to ‘eff’ the ineffable.

 

Philosophical and psychological theories of consciousness

The first recorded accounts of human consciousness can be found in the Indian Upanishads and other Vedic scriptures, dating back to the 6^th century BCE, and predating the Greek philosophers who laid the foundations for Western philosophy. I shall be touching on the non-dual viewpoint of Advaita Vedanta later, but basically consciousness here is seen as the source of all experience, and that all experience appears within conscious awareness. Existence and awareness of existence are inseparable. Non-dual awareness contains subject and object, and there are no external physical objects.

Indian and Buddhist philosophy view self-luminous consciousness as revealing itself to itself. There is no self or ego separate from consciousness, but the story of the self is constructed through the conditioned interpretation of experience. Buddhism thus denies the existence of a persisting self, which is simply viewed as a series of transient perceptions giving the illusion of continuity.

A contemporary philosopher and consciousness researcher, K. Ramakrishna Rao (2011 : 335), states:

Consciousness in the Indian tradition is more than an experience of awareness. It is a fundamental principle which underlies all knowing and being … the cognitive structure does not generate consciousness; it simply reflects it; and in the process limits and embellishes it. In a fundamental sense, consciousness is the source of our awareness. In other words, consciousness is not merely awareness as manifest in different forms but it is also what makes awareness possible … It is the light which illuminates the things on which it shines.

 

Materialism and Idealism

We now come to the debates between materialists and idealists, and between dualists and monists. The arguments are complex and often hidden behind obscure and difficult concepts, so I shall attempt to keep things simple.

Monists argue that there is only one kind of stuff in the universe, whilst dualists claim that there are two kinds of stuff. Perhaps the best-known dualist theory is that of René Descartes (1596-1650), who theorized that there are two realms of existence, the physical and the non-physical spirit or soul (Cartesian dualism). He proposed that the brain and the mind were made of different substances; that the brain and body were physical and made of matter, whilst the mind and all mental activity were non-physical. The problem with this proposal is evident: how do the two interact? Descartes suggested that they met at the pineal gland, situated in the center of the brain, but provided no explanation of how the physical realm communicates with the mental. As Susan Blackmore (2005: 4) points out:

This problem of interaction bedevils any attempt to build a dualist theory, which is probably why most philosophers and scientists completely reject all forms of dualism in favour of some kind of monism; but the options are few and also problematic.

Monist theorists argue that either the mental world is foundational (idealism), or that all things consist of matter (materialism). A century after Descartes, the philosopher George Berkeley (1685 – 1753) claimed that all experience of the world arises from mental perception. Samuel Johnson famously rejected this theory by kicking a large stone and asserting, “I refute it thus!” This action merely dismissed Berkeley’s argument, rather than proving the existence of the stone was independent of its perception.

Idealism and monism have a long history as Indian and Buddhist thought embrace this perspective. Here the world and all objects are viewed as the products of consciousness and mental activity, and the idea of an external and independent world is rejected. Consciousness is the primary reality, the physical world being ultimately illusory (Watts, 1976; Loy, 1988; Waite, 2007; Timalsina, 2009).

Materialism is a monist position and maintains that primary reality is physical, the mind being the physical and functional properties of the brain, and having a scientific explanation. Consciousness has a physical basis and is an epiphenomenon in that it derives from brain activity. An objective world exists independently of the observer. This reductive materialism remains the dominant paradigm for the world’s scientific community and positivist research generally. Neuroscientists are seeking the neural correlates of consciousness and believe they will ultimately identify the physical source of mental experience. The frustrating anomaly for the current paradigm is consciousness itself; it cannot be doubted and yet it cannot be explained.

Our everyday experience suggests that somewhere inside our heads is a small person who is watching the outside world, making decisions and controlling our actions. This ‘I’ is sitting in what Daniel Dennett (1991) has termed a “Cartesian theatre,” and here we experience sensations, thoughts and feelings; the whole ‘show’ of life as a stream of consciousness. Dennett rejects this notion, as the brain simply does not work this way. Information is received by different centers and is distributed for purposes to many areas of the cerebral cortex. There is—as yet—no known place or process in the brain that could be responsible for producing conscious experience. There is no way in which all sensory input can be brought together in one ‘seat of consciousness,’ and there is no little person to experience and act upon the unfolding appearances. So perhaps the theatre has no audience, and we are participants rather than spectators?

The tool we use for wrestling with these questions is the human mind. A major challenge is that we cannot be certain anything exists outside the mind, because the mind is the main agent for exploring this question. Apparently, there is a German word that captures the problem: unhintergehbarkeit. The nearest translation is something like: ‘ungetbehindability’. We are stuck with our minds—which appear in consciousness—and there seems to be no way to get behind them; until they fall silent and then… maybe?

 

The development of psychology

William James (1842-1910), the father of modern psychology, advocated introspection to study the stream of consciousness; the continuous flow of sensations, images, thoughts and feelings that we experience. His approach was predominantly monist in that he rejected dualist concepts and placed consciousness at the heart of his psychology, viewed as the science of mental life. Introspection had been initially developed by Wilhelm Wundt (1897) and Edward Titchener (1901), who were keen to make systematic and reliable observations of inner experiences such as attention and sensation.

This interest in the inner life was developed further by Sigmund Freud (1915) with his theories of the unconscious and psychoanalysis. Elsewhere in Europe, the emerging concepts of existentialism and phenomenology were regarded as significant. As we have seen, Husserl’s (1970) seminal work in phenomenology sought to ‘get back to the things themselves,’ and develop a systematic approach to investigating conscious experience. This interest in establishing a transcendental science of consciousness is challenged by its very subjectivity: how can one decide between conflicting claims for private experience?

These problems led to the study of introspection being superseded by a movement in psychology that dominated most of the twentieth century: behaviorism. Behaviorists such as John B. Watson (1924) and B. F. Skinner (1953) dismissed introspection and consciousness as irrelevant to the objective and measurable science of psychology, whose goal was the prediction and control of human behavior. The dominant paradigm of scientific materialism has regarded subjectivity as something of a taboo (Wallace, 2000), and this view has restricted systematic inquiry into the nature and potential of consciousness.

The dominance of behaviorism continued until the 1980s. Mental states and attitudes, problem solving and cognitive processing were all investigated, but no true introspection into one’s inner life (as advocated by James) was undertaken seriously. The current metaparadigm of western science still asserts that the real world is the material world, and that space, time and energy are primarily by-products of insentient matter.

This unquestioned assumption of materialism, and other theories, were explored and challenged in the 1980s and 90s by a wide range of writers who have revived the science of consciousness (Baars, 1988; Dennett, 1991; Penrose, 1995; Crick, 1994; Lycan, 1996; Chalmers,1996). The new interest in the nature of consciousness has also resulted in a proliferation of published research and related journals (e.g. The Journal of Consciousness Studies, Consciousness and Cognition, Psyche), and also the creation of professional societies and conferences, e.g. the Association for the Scientific Study of Consciousness (ASSC).

Yet still: “Human consciousness is just about the last surviving mystery” (Dennett, 1991: 21). Centuries of philosophical and scientific inquiry have not produced any means by which consciousness can be detected, and we do not know what exactly is to be measured. As Wallace (2000) points out, at present there is no scientific evidence even for the existence of consciousness. We only have our own first-person accounts of what it means to be conscious.

We understand a great deal about perception, visual attention, reactions to stimuli, and various cognitive and behavioral functions. But why are they accompanied by subjective experience? Why should all these physical processes produce this sense of presence, this background hum of being, this inner life?

There may be no bigger question, but Western philosophers and scientists don’t have a clue what any answer would look like. For all its successes in explaining the working of the universe and improving human life, science has failed conspicuously to provide any convincing explanation of the very thing that conceived it: consciousness itself. As the famous astrophysicist Sir Arthur Eddington (1928) said: “Something unknown is doing we don’t know what!”

 

This essay was originally published in Critical Qualitative Health Research (2020), edited by Kay Aranda. London: Routledge. Chapter 7.

 

References

Baars, B. J. (1988) A Cognitive Theory of Consciousness. New York: Cambridge University Press.

Blake, W. (2000) The Marriage of Heaven and Hell. In The Selected Works of William Blake. Ed. Bruce Woodcock. Hertfordshire: Wordsworth Editions,195-206.

Blackmore, S. (2005) Consciousness: A Very Short Introduction, Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Blackmore, S. (2011) Consciousness: An Introduction, (2^nd Edition), New York, Oxford University Press.

Bohm, D. (1980) Wholeness and the Implicate Order. London: Routledge.

Brentano, F. (1973) Psychology from an Empirical Standpoint. London: Routledge. (Original work published 1874)

Capra, F. (2010) The Tao of Physics: An Exploration of the Parallels Between Modern Physics and Eastern Mysticism. (5^th edition) Boston: Shambhala Publications.

Chalmers, D. J. (1995) Facing up to the problem of consciousness Journal of Consciousness Studies. 2(3), 200–219

Chalmers, D.J. (1995b) The puzzle of conscious experience. Scientific American, Dec. 1995, 62–68

Chalmers, D. J. (1996). The conscious mind: in search of a fundamental theory. New York, Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Crick, F. H. (1994) The Astonishing Hypothesis: The Scientific Search for the Soul. New York: Scribners.

Dennett, D. C. (1991) Consciousness Explained. Boston: Little, Brown & Co.

Dreyfus, G., & Thompson, E. (2007) Asian perspectives. Indian theories of mind. In P. D. Zelazo, M. Moscovitch, & E. Thompson (Eds.) The Cambridge handbook of consciousness (pp. 89–114). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Eddington, A. (1928) The Nature of the Physical World. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Fasching, W. (2008) Consciousness, self-consciousness, and meditation. Phenomenology and the Cognitive Sciences, Volume 7, Issue 4, pp 463–483.

Freud, S. (2000) The Unconscious. London: Penguin Classics. (Original work published 1915)

Giorgi, A. (2009) The descriptive phenomenological method in psychology: A modified Husserlian approach. Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press.

Heidegger, M. (1962) Being and time (J. Macquarrie & E. Robinson, Trans.). New York: Harper & Row. (Original work published 1927).

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