Modern Mind: An Intellectual History of the 20th Century

by Peter Watson

  While Ryle was developing his ideas in Oxford, Ludwig Wittgenstein was pursuing a more or less parallel course in Cambridge. After he had published Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus in 1921, Wittgenstein abandoned philosophy for a decade, but he returned in 1929 to Cambridge, where at first he proceeded to dismantle the philosophy of the Tractatus, influential though that had been, and replace it with a view that was in some respects diametrically opposite. Throughout the 1930s and the 1940s he published nothing, feeling ‘estranged’ from contemporary Western civilisation, preferring to exert his influence through teaching (the ‘deck-chair’ seminars that Turing had attended).11 Wittgenstein’s second masterpiece, Philosophical Investigations, was published in 1953, after his death from cancer in 1951, aged sixty-two.12 His new view took Ryle’s ideas much further. Essentially, Wittgenstein thought that many philosophical problems are false problems, mainly because we are misled by language. All around us, says P. M. S. Hacker, who wrote a four-volume commentary on Philosophical Investigations, are grammatical similarities that mask profound logical differences. ‘philosophical questions are frequently not so much questions in search of an answer as questions in search of a sense. “Philosophy is a struggle against the bewitchment of our understanding by means of language.” ‘For example, ‘the verb “to exist” looks no different from such verbs as “to eat” or “to drink” but while it makes sense to ask how many people in College don’t eat meat or drink wine, it makes no sense to ask how many people in College don’t exist.13

  This is not just a language game.14 Wittgenstein’s fundamental idea was that philosophy exists not to solve problems but to make the problems disappear, just as a knot in a piece of string disappears when it is unravelled. Put another way, ‘Problems are solved, not by giving new information, but by [re]arranging what we have always known.15 The way forward, for Wittgenstein, was to rearrange the entire language.16 No man could do that on his own, and Wittgenstein started by concentrating, as Ryle had done, on the mind-body duality. He went further in linking with it what he called the brain-body duality. Both dualities, he said, were misconceptions. Consciousness was misconceived, he said, when it was ‘compared with a self-scanning mechanism in the brain.17 He took as his example pain. To begin with, he explains that one does not ‘have’ a pain in the sense that one has a penny. ‘A pain cannot go round the world, like a penny can, independent of anyone owning it.’ Equally, we do not look to see whether we are groaning before reporting that we have a pain – in that sense, the groan is part of the pain.18 Wittgenstein next argued that the ‘inner’ life, ‘introspection,’ and the privacy of experience have also been misconceived. The pain that one person has is the same that another person has, just as two books can have covers coloured in the same red. Red does not exist in the abstract, and neither does pain.19 On inspection, Wittgenstein is saying, all the so-called mental things we do, do not need ‘mind’: ‘To make up one’s mind is to decide, and to be in two minds about something is to be undecided…. There is such a thing as introspection but it is not a form of inner perception … it is the calling up of memories; of imagined possible situations, and of the feelings that one would have if…’20 ‘I want to win’ is not a description of a state of mind but a manifestation of it.21 Talk of ‘inner’ and ‘outer’ in regard to ‘mental’ life is, for Wittgenstein, only metaphor. We may say that toothache is physical pain and that grief is mental. But grief is not painful in the sense that toothache is; it does not ‘hurt’ as toothache hurts.22 For Wittgenstein, we do not need the concept of mind, and we need to be very careful about the way we think about ‘brain.’ It is the person who feels pain, hope, disappointment, not his brain.

  Philosophical Investigations was more successful in some areas than in others. But by Wittgenstein’s own criteria, it made some problems disappear, the problem of mind being one of them. His was one of the books that helped move attention toward consciousness, which Wittgenstein did not successfully explain, and which dominated the attentions of philosophers and scientists at the end of the century.

  The consequences of Philosophical Investigations for Freudian psychoanalysis have never been worked through, but Wittgenstein’s idea of ‘inner’ and ‘outer’ as merely metaphor to a large extent vitiates Freud’s central ideas. The attack on Freud was growing anyway in the late 1950s and has been chronicled by Martin Gross. Although the interwar years had been the high point of the Freudian age, the first statistical doubts over the efficacy of psychoanalytic treatment occurred as early as the 1920s, when a study of 472 patients from the clinic of the Berlin Psychoanalytic Institute revealed that only 40 percent could be regarded as cured. Subsequent studies in the 1940s at the London Clinic, the Chicago Institute for Psychoanalysis, and the Menninger Clinic in Kansas likewise revealed an average ‘cure rate’ of 44 percent. A series of studies throughout the 1950s showed with some consistency that ‘a patient has approximately a 50–50 chance of getting off the couch in somewhat better mental condition than when he first lay down on it.’23 Most damaging of ad, however, was the study carried out in the mid-1950s by the Central Fact-Gathering Committee of the American Psychoanalytic Association (the APsaA), chaired by Dr Harry Weinstock. His committee collected evidence on 1,269 psychoanalytic cases treated by members of the APsaA. The report, on the largest sample to date, was eagerly awaited, but in December 1957 the association decided against publication, noting that the ‘controversial publicity on such material cannot be of benefit in any way.’24 Mimeographed copies of the report then began to circulate confidentially in the therapeutic community, and gossip about the results preoccupied the psychiatric profession until the APsaA finally consented to release the findings – a decade later. Then the reason for the delay became clear. The ‘controversial material’ showed that, of those originally accepted for treatment, barely one in six were cured. This was damning enough, being the profession’s own report; but it wasn’t just the effectiveness of psychoanalysis that came under threat; so did Freud’s basic theories. His idea that we are all a little bisexual was challenged, and so was the very existence of the Oedipus complex and infantile sexuality. For example, penile erection in infants had been regarded by psychoanalysts as firm evidence of infantile sexuality, but H. M. Halverson observed nine infants for ten days each – and found that seven of them had an erection at least once a day.25 ‘Rather than being a sign of pleasure, the erections tended to show that the child was uncomfortable. In 85 percent of cases, the erection was accompanied by crying, restlessness, or the stiff stretching of legs. Only when the erection subsided did the children become relaxed.’ Halverson concluded that the erection was the result of abdominal pressure on the bladder, ‘serving a simple bodily, rather than a Freudian, need.’ Likewise, sleep research shows that the forgetting of dreams – which according to psychoanalysis are repressed – can be explained more simply. We dream at a certain stage of sleep, now known as REM sleep, for the rapid eye movements that occur at this time. If the patient is woken during REM sleep, he or she can easily remember dreams, but grows very irritated if woken too often, indicating that REM sleep is necessary for well-being. After REM sleep, however, later in the sleep cycle, if that person is wakened, remembrance of dreams is much harder, and there is much less irritation. Dreams are naturally evanescent.26 Finally, there was the growth in the 1950s of anti-Freudian anthropological evidence. According to Freudian theory, the breast-feeding of infants is important, helping to establish the basic psychological bond between mother and child, which is of course itself part of the infant’s psychosexual development. In 1956, however, the anthropologist Ralph Linton reported on the women of the Marquesas Islands, ‘who seldom nurse their babies because of the importance of breasts in their culture.’ The Marquesan infant is simply laid on a stone and casually fed a mixture of coconut milk and breadfruit.27 Nonetheless, the Marquesan children grew up without any special problems, their relationships with their mothers unimpaired.

  Beginning in the 1950s, Freud
and Jung came in for increasingly severe criticism, for being unscientific, and for using evidence only when it suited them.

  Not that other forms of psychology were immune to criticism. In the same year that Wittgenstein’s posthumous Philosophical Investigations appeared, Burrhus F. Skinner, professor of psychology at Harvard University, published the first of his controversial works. Raised in the small Pennsylvania town of Susquehanna, Fred Skinner at first wanted to be a writer and studied English at Hamilton College, where Robert Frost told him that he was capable of ‘real niceties of observation.’ Skinner never developed as a writer, however, because ‘he found he had nothing to say.’ And he gave up the saxophone because it seemed to him to be ‘the wrong instrument for a psychologist.’28 Abandoning his plan to be a writer, he studied psychology at Harvard, so successfully that in 1945 he became a professor.

  Skinner’s Science and Human Behavior overlapped more than a little with Ryle and Wittgenstein.29 Like them, Skinner regarded ‘mind’ as a metaphysical anachronism and concentrated on behavior as the object of the scientist’s attention. And like them he regarded language as an at-times-misleading representation of reality, it being the scientist’s job, as well as the philosopher’s, to clarify its usage. In Skinner’s case he took as his starting point a series of experiments, mainly on pigeons and rats, which showed that if their environment was strictly controlled, especially in regard to the administration of rewards and punishments, their behavior could be altered considerably and in predictable ways. This demonstration of rapid learning, Skinner thought, was both philosophically and socially important. He accepted that instinct accounted for a sizeable proportion of human conduct but his aim, in Science and Human Behavior, was to offer a simple, rational explanation for the rest of the behavioral repertoire, which he believed could be done, using the principles of reinforcement. In essence Skinner sought to show that the vast majority of behaviors, including beliefs, certain mental illnesses, and even ‘love’ in some circumstances, could be understood in terms of an individual’s history, the extent to which his or her behavior had been rewarded or punished in the past. For example, ‘You ought to take an umbrella’ may be taken to mean: ‘You will be reinforced for taking an umbrella.’ ‘A more explicit translation would contain at least three statements: (I) Keeping dry is reinforcing to you; (2) carrying an umbrella keeps you dry in the rain; and (3) it is going to rain…. The “ought” is aversive, and the individual addressed may feel guilty if he does not then take an umbreda.’30 On this reading of behavior, Skinner saw alcoholism, for example, as a bad habit acquired because an individual may have found the effects of alcohol rewarding, in that it relaxed him in social situations where otherwise he may have been ill at ease. He objected to Freud because he thought psychoanalysis’s concern with ‘depth’ psychology was wrongheaded; its self-declared aim was to discover ‘inner and otherwise unobservable conflicts, repressions, and springs of action. The behavior of the organism was often regarded as a relatively unimportant by-product of a furious struggle taking place beneath the surface of the mind.’31 Whereas for Freud neurotic behavior was the symptom of the root cause, for Skinner neurotic behavior was the object of the inquiry – stamp out the neurotic behavior, and by definition the neurosis has gone. One case that Skinner considers in detail is that of two brothers who compete for the affection of their parents. As a result one brother behaves aggressively toward his sibling and is punished, either by the brother or the parents. Assume this happens repeatedly, to the point where the anxiety associated with such an event generates guilt in the ‘aggressive’ brother, leading to self-control. In this sense, says Skinner, the brother ‘represses’ his aggression. ‘The repression is successful if the behavior is so effectively displaced that it seldom reaches the incipient state at which it generates anxiety. It is unsuccessful if anxiety is frequently generated.’ He then goes on to consider other possible consequences and their psychoanalytic explanations. As a result of reaction formation the brother may engage in social work, or some expression of ‘brotherly love’; he may sublimate his aggression by, say, joining the army or working in an abattoir; he may displace his aggression by ‘accidentally’ injuring someone else; he may identify with prizefighters. For Skinner, however, we do not need to invent deep-seated neuroses to explain these behaviors. ‘The dynamisms are not the clever machinations of an aggressive impulse struggling to escape from the restraining censorship of the individual or of society, but the resolution of complex sets of variables. Therapy does not consist of releasing a trouble-making impulse but of introducing variables which compensate for or correct a history which has produced objectionable behavior. Pent-up emotion is not the cause of disordered behavior; it is part of it. Not being able to recall an early memory does not produce neurotic symptoms; it is itself an example of ineffective behavior.’32 In this first book, Skinner’s aim was to explain behavior, and he ended by considering the many controlling institutions in modern society – governments and laws, organised religion, schools, psychotherapy, economics and money – his point being that many systems of rewards and punishments are already in place and, more or less, working. Later on, in the 1960s and 1970s, his theories enjoyed a vogue, and in many clinics ‘behavior therapy’ was adopted. In these establishments, symptoms were treated without recourse to any so-called underlying problem. For example, a man who felt he was dirty and suffered from a compulsive desire to collect towels was no longer treated for his inner belief that he was ‘dirty’ and so needed to wash a great deal, but simply rewarded (with food) on those days when he didn’t collect towels. Skinner’s theories were also followed in the development of teaching machines, later incorporated into computer-aided instruction, whereby pupils follow their own course of instruction, at their own pace, depending on rewards given for correct answers.

  Skinner’s approach to behavior, his understanding of what man is, was looked upon by many as revolutionary at the time, and he was even equated to Darwin.33 His method linked Ryle and Wittgenstein to psychology. He maintained, for example, that consciousness is a ‘social product’ that emerges from the human interactions within a verbal community. But verbal behavior, or rather Verbal Behavior, published in 1957, was to be his undoing.34 Like Ryle and Wittgenstein, Skinner understood that if his theory about man was to be convincing, it needed to explain language, and this he set about doing in the 1957 book. His main point was that our social communities ‘select’ and fine-tune our verbal utterances, what we ‘choose’ to say, by a process of social reinforcement, and this system, over a lifetime, determines the form of speech we use. In turn this same system of reinforcement of our verbal behavior helps shape our other behaviors – our ‘character’ – and the way that we understand ourselves, our consciousness. Skinner argued that there are categories of speech acts that may be grouped according to their relationship to surrounding contingencies. For example, ‘mands’ are classes of speech behavior that are followed by characteristic consequences, whereas ‘tacts’ are speech acts socially reinforced when emitted in the presence of an object or event.35 Essentially, under this system, man is seen as the ‘host’ of behaviors affected by the outside, rather than as autonomous. This is very different from the Freudian view, or more traditional metaphysical versions of man, that something comes from within. Unfortunately, from Skinner’s point of view, his radical ideas suffered a withering attack in a celebrated – notorious – review of his book in the journal Language in 1959, by Noam Chomsky. Chomsky, thirty-one in 1959, was born in Pennsylvania, the son of a Hebrew scholar who interested his son in language. Chomsky’s own book, Syntactic Structures, was also published in 1957, the same year as Skinner’s, but it was the review in Language and in particular its vitriolic tone that drew attention to the young author and initiated what came to be called the Chomskyan revolution in psychology.36

  Chomsky, by then a professor at MIT, just two stops on the subway from Harvard, argued that there are inside the brain universal, innate, gramma
tical structures; in other words, that the ‘wiring’ of the brain somehow governs the grammar of languages. He based much of his view on studies of children in different countries that showed that whatever their form of upbringing, they tended to develop their language skills in the same order and at the same pace everywhere. His point was that young children learn to speak spontaneously without any real training, and that the language they learn is governed by where they grow up. Moreover, they are very creative with language, using at a young age sentences that are entirely new to them and that cannot have been related to experience. Such sentences cannot therefore have been learned in the way that Skinner and others said.37 Chomsky argued that there is a basic structure to language, that this structure has two levels, surface structure and deep structure, and that different languages are more similar in their deep structure than in their surface structure. For example, when we learn a foreign language, we are learning the surface structure. This learning is in fact only possible because the deep structure is much the same. German or Dutch speakers may put the verb at the end of a sentence, which English or French speakers do not, but German, Dutch, French, and English have verbs, which exist in all languages in equivalent relationship to nouns, adjectives, and so 0n.38 Chomsky’s arguments were revolutionary not only because they went against the behaviorist orthodoxy but because they appeared to suggest that there is some sort of structure in the brain that is inherited and that, moreover, the brain is prewired in some way that, at least in part, determines how humans experience the world.