Evaluating the philosophy to this point, I tend to agree with Unger (2014) that philosophy without science is largely “empty ideas.” Speculations on the nature of human knowledge, reasoning, emotions, or cognition in some general sense without science lead nowhere. The great philosophers that precede us cannot be blamed for failing to use knowledge that was not available to them. But, now, possessing more knowledge, we can no longer continue to accept their writings as authoritative (or even informative in many cases).
Moving on in the Platonic tradition to other influential concepts of innate tacit knowledge, we come to ever-bolder theories. One of the most explicit and influential proposals mentioned already was that of Adolf Bastian (1826–1905), who claimed that there was universally shared tacit knowledge that formed the “psychic unity of mankind.” Bastian’s psychic unity thesis is in fact a set of hypotheses based on the idea that human cultures and consciousness derive from species-wide physiological mechanisms. Anticipating to some degree modern researchers in embodied cognition (Gibson 1966, 1979; Lakoff and Johnson 1980; Lakoff and Nuñez 2001; Shapiro 2010; Gibbs 2005; Skipper et al. 2009; etc.), Bastian argued that from our basic physiology emerges a set of “elementary ideas.” If so, then all Homo sapiens’ minds are constrained by the same inborn ideas, producing what some might call “human nature.” These elementary ideas are shaped by local contexts and cultures, leading to culture-based “folk ideas” from the innate, universal, elementary ideas.
For these hypotheses, Bastian became an important historical figure in debates on human nature. His nineteenth-century proposals on this “psychic unity” emerged from his years of travel, from the mid- to late nineteenth century. During these travels and beyond, Bastian studied ethnology, culminating in a six-volume study, The People of East Asia, published in 1861. From collections made during his travels, Bastian made generous contributions to several museums in Germany. In addition, he cofounded the Ethnological Society of Berlin, one of the first in the world. The Berlin Museum of Folk Art was based largely on Bastian’s own collections. While serving as curator of the latter museum, one of his assistants was the young Franz Boas, who was to become a founder of American anthropology.
Bastian’s thesis of the psychic unity of mankind was influential in several domains. According to this hypothesis, the individual mind is embedded in a larger “social mind” or “social soul.” Bastian argued therefore that to apprehend the psychic essence of Homo sapiens, we need to first analyze the local folk ideas in order to achieve an understanding of the elementary ideas from which these folk ideas emerge. According to Bastian, this deconstruction of folk ideas into elementary ideas required five analytical steps:
The first step is what Bastian labeled “fieldwork.” His claim is the salutary one, that understanding human beings requires empirical research. It is not a matter for mere philosophical reflection. Cross-cultural ethnographic field research is crucial to assessing and fleshing out the psychic unity thesis.
The second step is to deduce from our fieldwork the “collective representations” of a given people. Field research in conjunction with the theory of elementary ideas provides the information we need to perform the deduction of these ideas in a given society from their collective representations. These representations—modifications from the universal elementary ideas—are the local manifestation of elementary ideas. They are what come to be represented as “folk ideas.”
The third step in the understanding of elementary ideas is the analysis of the folk ideas arrived at from the first two steps. This is done by studying how collective representations break down into their constituent folk ideas. “Idea circles” are delineated when similar patterns of folk ideas are found in contiguous or proximate geographical areas (a concept somewhat similar to what linguists refer to as linguistic areas).
Following this, the fourth step is the deduction of elementary ideas, accomplished via the identification of similarities between individual folk ideas and patterns of folk ideas across regions that indicate underlying elementary ideas.
Finally, we come to Bastian’s step five, the application of a “scientific psychology.” This follows straightforwardly from the studies outlined above, as they us lead to an understanding of the psychic unity of our species, rooted in our underlying psychophysiological structure, leading to a scientific, cross-culturally grounded psychology.
By general consensus, Bastian succeeded in spite of himself. He was not thought of as a great writer. Additionally, many of his proposals were vague, and in spite of his aspirations to be taken as a serious scientist, his ideas were not always regarded as testable or clear enough to serve science. Nevertheless, they inspired subsequent researchers and intellectuals, and that is perhaps even better than generating merely testable ideas. His psychic unity theory became a touchstone.
One of those subsequent researchers was Sigmund Freud (1856–1939). As just about anyone will know, the “unconscious” was a central, novel, and crucial part of Freud’s theory and clinical work in psychoanalysis. The unconscious mind—including tacit knowledge—arose partially in response to the phenomenon Freud referred to as “repression.” As we experience certain negative events, states, or entities, according to Freud, we may “repress” these—that is, avoid conscious memory or reflection on them—rendering our psyche healthier in some respects. But the events of this negativity are always present in our minds, pushed “down” from consciousness to the unconscious portion of our minds. Freud argued that repressed, tacit memories could be recalled through hypnosis and, when so recalled, could enable a patient to be cured of the negative effects of this toxic tacit knowledge. These clinical aspirations were hailed as Freud’s great contribution.
According to Freud the effects of repression and apperceptions on human psychology developed into more full-blown tacit ideas—for example, the “Oedipus complex” (for anyone needing a refresher, this is a purported, innate, universal desire by males to sexually possess their mother and destroy their father). Further developing his inventory of tacit knowledge and categories, Freud proposed to explain the hidden or unconscious and innate concepts, drives, and functioning of the human mind by proposing a tripartite division of the mind into id, ego, and superego. Id represents the completely unconscious portion of the mind, the source of all impulses and drives, seeking quick fixes to emotional needs, especially pleasure and gratification. In this sense, the id contains tacit, ranked values—that is, a mini-culture of its own. The superego labels that portion of the mind hypothesized by Freud as the “angel” to the id’s “demon,” as our morally absolutist enforcer of our conscience’s sense of right without exception—another set of tacit, ranked values; another mini-culture. Finally, Freud proposed the ego—the rational component of the brain that manages and negotiates between the Id and the superego, the constructed self (chap. 10). Freud claimed that if we could bring the unconscious, repressed memories of our past to consciousness, then these repressed memories could be explicitly reconciled with our tripartite unconscious and our psychological health restored. Thus Freud’s concept of ego in my terms is also dark matter, in the form of a set of values, cultural knowledge, and rules.
This brief glimpse of some of the basic tenets of psychoanalysis shows the fundamental importance of Bastian’s psychic unity of mankind concept to Freud’s work. Without this unity, a universal human psychic core, psychotherapy as conceived by Freud could not work. Freud was almost certainly aware of and influenced by Bastian’s proposals. In the intervening years, Freud’s own theory has been famously criticized by Grunbaum (1985) and Webster (1996), among others. There have even been suggestions that Freud invented some of the crucial data from nonexistent, “confidential” clinical cases (Webster 1996). Still, his theory remains one of the most influential in the history of the study of the mind. Perhaps no earlier theory made more lively use of the notion of innate, a priori dark matter. Together, Freud and Bastian also greatly influenced the work and theory of Freud�
�s student Carl Jung, whose fame and importance came to rival those of his teacher.
Jung (1875–1961), another of the leading dark matter theorists in the Platonic tradition, was the founder of “analytical psychology” (Jung [1916] 2003). Fundamental to this form of therapy and the theory behind it was, again, Bastian’s elementary ideas, which Jung reconceived as the “collective unconscious,” that is, innate tacit information common to all humans. Like Freud, Jung saw the ability to come to grips with and manage our tacit knowledge, our various unconscious states, as crucial to the development of healthy psyches. He referred to this management or reconciliation of the two forms of unconscious states/levels as “individuation.” Jung and Freud, along with Bastian, aspired to develop a science of the mind. Certainly, the two of them generated a number of intriguing hypotheses based on tacit experience and knowledge, which in turn have produced decades of research from around the world. Still, the lack of falsifiability of their claims, the imprecision of their terms, and the lack of cohesiveness between their theories and the rest of science were and are serious deficiencies. As we move to other researchers heavily influenced by Bastian, though, we come closer to science.
Perhaps the greatest early step toward a science of dark matter was the work of one of Bastian’s early assistants. In the late 1800s as curator of Berlin’s Museum of Folk Art, Bastian hired a young Franz Boas (1858–1942). Although Boas’s research life eventually was dedicated to studying the richness and diversity of cultures around the world, the influence of Bastian is found in his belief that such studies would reveal “laws of cultural development,” based on the uniformity of the foundations of all human cultures. Boas ([1940] 1982) argued that although all humans have emotions these are locally determined, so that it makes sense to say that culture determines emotion (Panksepp and Biven’s [2012] research, on the other hand, seems to contradict Boas’s claim, unless we see the latter as a proposal about the interpretation or categorization of emotions. This does seem to vary cross-culturally). The crucial observation is that Boas believed that diversity among cultures of the world were all built on a universal base, reminiscent in some ways of Chomsky’s view of language. What separates Boas from Chomsky in this regard, however, was Boas’s contact with pragmatism, through his colleague at Columbia, John Dewey (1859–1952). Boas was inescapably influenced by Bastian’s notion of the “psychic unity of mankind.” At the same time, Boas’s pragmatism (in my interpretation) makes him a “straddler” of the border between nativism and nonnativism.
The final major figure influenced by Bastian who I want to discuss has been tremendously influential in the humanities, the social sciences, and in popular literature—namely, Joseph Campbell (1904–1987). This theorist and collector of myths from around the world also believed in the psychic unity of mankind, heavily influenced by Bastian. Joseph Campbell is another exemplar of the Platonic tradition. He also exemplified the stereotype of the “scholar” in Western culture. He loved books and ideas, the urbane urban life, and intellectual engagement, and he possessed an apparently encyclopedic knowledge of the major subjects of the humanities. He is rightly known and admired for his knowledge of and collection of myths from around the world. But his theory of myth, its place in the rationalist lineage, and its influence on the thinking of the general public is what draws our attention here.
Campbell’s principal idea was that of the “monomyth,” the idea that all human mythology derives from a single ur-story of our species. Campbell explicitly refers to Bastian in his writings and argues that the monomyth corresponds to Bastian’s elementary ideas, whereas the local variations of the monomyth correspond to Bastian’s folk ideas. One is tempted to quip that lots of stories can look similar if you edit out the dissimilarities—and this often seems to be what Campbell has done. On the other hand, Campbell is taken so seriously by so many worldwide that his ideas deserve more than such a dismissive assessment. For Campbell, just as with other legatees of Bastian and Plato, there was nothing vague about the idea of psychic unity. It was clear that it was the result of innate content, not merely innate abilities, as Locke, Hume, Berkeley, Sapir, and others would have it.
Campbell believed that myth functioned in the human psyche to enable humans to talk about the eternal source of life that existed before humans, before language, before culture. Thus most cultures have heroes, to enable them to talk of the eternal with less fear. These heroes undertake journeys to the netherworld, as Hercules to Hades and Jesus to hell. Like the rationalists in whose tradition he writes, Campbell preferred the dramatic hypothesis of a primordial species-wide myth to the idea that many people invent independently—the myth of beings who can do things we cannot, like Superman, Thor, vampires, and zombies (or ourselves in dreams). Unsurprisingly, the general public prefers Campbell’s and Bastian’s kind of dramatic, native-born ideas and mystery (regardless of scientific merit) to the less satisfying state of caution and silence, with their aggravating hedging of claims, deliberate vagueness, scientific disagreements, nonunanimity, and so on.
For example, as Campbell said:
God is a metaphor for a mystery that absolutely transcends all human categories of thought, even the categories of being and nonbeing. Those are categories of thought. I mean it’s as simple as that. So it depends on how much you want to think about it . . . half the people in the world are religious people who think that their metaphors are facts. Those are what we call theists. The other half are people who know that the metaphors are not facts. And so, they’re lies. Those are the atheists. (2003, 135)
This statement is problematic in many places. But perhaps there is no better assessment of Campbell’s monomyth theory to my mind than Robert Ellwood’s (1999, x) comment that “a tendency to think in generic terms of people, races . . . is undoubtedly the profoundest flaw in mythological thinking.” In my field research on dozens of indigenous languages and cultures of South America, for example, I have never observed anything like Campbell’s monomyth or hero’s journey. However, there were myths that I could perhaps have bent into such shapes had I so wished.
Campbell’s views find resonance among many evangelical Christians. For example, missionary Don Richardson’s 1981 book, Eternity in Their Hearts, or Pascal’s “God-shaped vacuum” in the hearts of all men, are versions of the widespread Christian thesis that God has prepared every culture and every individual for the message of eternal life and salvation. Yet these “theories” and ideas, while colorful and obviously appealing to millions, are poorly supported by the facts. They seem more a reflection of their authors’ personal histories than the results of careful, replicable field research.
It may seem deeply strange that anyone would propose that all humans are born with the same outline of an elaborate proto-story carried in their genes, in a species that has fewer genes than corn (Messing 2001). And yet there are far more elaborate nativist hypotheses on the market. Perhaps the most elaborate and in many ways the most fantastic story of all is Chomsky’s universal grammar, or as we might refer to it in the present context, the monogrammar theory. We take up the “monogrammar” story again below, where it receives the longer discussion it deserves in the history of ideas on dark matter of the mind, in the context of understanding the nature of language. Right now, however, it is important to situate this work in the historical context.
Through Noam Chomsky (b1928), Platonic rationalism was revitalized and given a huge boost from the late 1950s. Chomsky has long supported the Platonic idea that we have access to knowledge without need for experience or sensory input. We can use reflection and intuition alone to “retrieve” truths from our minds because our minds are born with them (or born with access to them in some other plane, e.g., heaven or a previous existence, depending on the particular philosopher’s theology). As Plato did, Chomsky seems to believe that much if not all of the most important knowledge that we humans draw upon to distinguish our character and lives from those of other animals is based upon our possession of i
nborn dark matter. This matter may be the result of evolution, physics, God, or whatever, but it is taken to be the inheritance of all Homo sapiens.
Chomsky’s particular version of rationalism initially convinced so many across so many disciplines because it seemed to be richly supported empirically. Chomsky argued powerfully and brilliantly (see John Searle’s [1972] summary of “Chomsky’s revolution”) that several facts about language lead us to the inexorable conclusion that humans are born with a tacit knowledge of many intricate details of grammar, a hypothesis that eventually came to be known as universal grammar (UG). Historically, Chomsky’s work made the study of language central to epistemology, psychology, anthropology, philosophy of the mind, and computer science, among other fields. It is not an exaggeration to say that the fecundity of his ideas made him arguably the most important intellectual of his lifetime and one of the most influential intellectuals in history.
Chomsky’s work since the 1950s has made the case for a plethora of principles, rules, transformations, constraints, and grammatical operations that are tacit and innate, part of the human genotype (though, unfortunately, none has held up from one of his theories to another). His views on tacit knowledge, however, clearly fit in the rationalist tradition:
Linguistic competence is understood as concerned with the tacit knowledge of language structure, that is, knowledge that is commonly not conscious or available for spontaneous report, but necessarily implicit in what the (ideal) speaker-listener can say . . . It is in terms of such knowledge that one can produce and understand an infinite set of sentences, and that language can be spoke[n] of as ‘creative,’ as energeia. (Chomsky 1965, 19)
And also:
The system of knowledge that has somehow developed in our minds has certain consequences, not others, it relates sound and meaning and assigns structural properties to physical events in certain ways, not others. (Chomsky 1986, 12)
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