This is a very rough sketch of my explanation of how it is possible that a philosophical lecture was taking place at that moment in the past when I was the speaker. In addition to the aforementioned facts, there are evidently further socio-historical conditions for this event, such as the fact that belly dancing is not to be expected from the average philosopher during his talk. In the contemporary scientific climate, outrageously artistic performances, such as reading aphorisms instead of presenting thoughts in a more explicitly linear way, are also no longer to be expected from philosophers.
What I have just depicted is an explanation from the intentional stance, to borrow Dennett’s famous term: I am giving an account of what was happening that does not mention the information processing in brains, the transformation of acoustic waves into bits of information which travel in brains through various channels. Nor did I mention gravity or any laws of nature, which are further necessary conditions for events such as philosophy lectures, as we know them.
We can now draw a preliminary distinction between mind and nature that will put us on the right track towards locating the gap that separates mind and nature without succumbing to the naturalistic pressure of locating that gap within nature. When we account for a natural kind, such as a particular hydrophobic molecule, we are warranted in believing that the natural kind might be utterly different from any specific characterization or description attached to the use of the term designed to pick it out in ordinary language. If a poet describes water pearls on the surface of a lush meadow, he is not thereby necessarily thinking of the hydrophobic properties that explain why it looks to human and other animal observers as if there were little pearls running down a surface. The phenomenon – little pearls on a surface – is very well – if not actually best – explained in terms of a natural interaction between various natural kinds. This is reflected in the notion that natural-kind terms have a potentially hidden semantic element – that is, a meaning not necessarily transparent in a competent usage of the relevant terms by ordinary speakers. The poet is not making a mistake when he describes the phenomenon; he is just not getting at the essence of the natural kind. In the poetical context, this does not constitute any sort of failure, just as the absence of poetical language in a scientific paper is rightly not perceived as a mistake.
In the case of the mind, many have pointed out that the appearance/reality distinction, the distinction between a competent surface use of a term and its essential reference, which might be hidden to the ordinary speaker, breaks down at some point. Even self-confessed materialists, such as Dennett, present their own version of the breakdown of the appearance/reality distinction for consciousness. On some level or another, in the case of consciousness, the appearance is the reality.
I propose to locate the semantic action not in a natural gap between inanimate and animate matter of a certain complexity but between natural kinds and Geist as an explanatory structure. To distance my account from the anti-materialist stances in standard philosophy of mind, I use the word “Geist” to designate the phenomena I want to characterize and to get in touch with a venerable tradition of thinking of ourselves as intelligent agents. English does not have an exact equivalent of “Geist,” as neither mind nor spirit will really do, which is why I will stick to the German word and ask the reader to see it as a piece of technical vocabulary.31
The relevant distinction between natural kinds and Geist becomes transparent if we distinguish the following two cases of error. Imagine that I have a false belief about some natural kind. Maybe I confuse gauge and scalar bosons, since I do not really know how exactly these two types of bosons differ from each other. This does not change their essence. Gauge and scalar bosons have their individuating properties regardless of my false beliefs about them. Now imagine that I erroneously believe myself to be a leading squash player. I might have played squash with a couple of friends and observed that we were constantly getting better at the game, so I decide I will win the world championship. As I lose every single match in the tournament, I cling to my erroneous self-conception as a major squash player and explain the events as mere luck on the side of my opponent. Maybe because of some psychological feature in myself, my erroneous belief that I am a brilliant squash player evolves into a full-blown self-delusion and determines a good deal of my life.
My error about the bosons does not change the bosons. Yet, my self-delusion changes me, and in many cases self-delusion can change people to such an extent that we hardly recognize them. As a matter of fact, we build our entire lives on various forms of biased self-representation, as we all experience ourselves as centers of interest and find a location for everything we perceive or think about in various often narratively mediated accounts of who we are.32 It is in fact impossible to account for human behavior as we know it without the dimension of our various capacities to engage in fictional story-telling. The entire socio-historical and political realm is built on our fictional capacities, which have been placed center stage in the tradition of a philosophy of Geist originating in the eighteenth century with Kant’s “Dreams of a spirit seer” (Kant 1992). The idea in this tradition, which included Hegel, Marx, and Nietzsche and continues in a materialist disguise in philosophers such as Dennett, is that Geist is precisely not a natural kind because our relation to the phenomena we subsume under our mentalistic vocabulary differs significantly from our relation to natural phenomena.
Remarkably, Dennett draws a distinction between natural phenomena such as diseases and earthquakes and “phenomena that depend on their concepts”: “On the view of consciousness I will develop in this book, it turns out that consciousness, like love and money, is a phenomenon that does indeed depend to a surprising extent on its associated concepts” (Dennett 1991: 24). Unfortunately, Dennett does not clarify to what extent consciousness depends on its associated concepts and how that differs from love and money.
And even if it is the case that elements of our mentalistic vocabulary are such that they are phenomena that depend on their concepts, we should not talk about “consciousness” here, since the umbrella term “consciousness” has uses where it actually picks out a natural kind, such as an animal’s state of being awake or of having vivid hallucinatory dreams. In order to have room for a naturalization of some aspects of our self-descriptions, I want to reserve the word “Geist” for the features of human mindedness that really are “phenomena that depend on their concepts,” as Dennett puts it in an unwitting Hegelian moment. For Hegel’s entire philosophy of Geist can be summed up in the slogan that Geist is the domain of phenomena that depend on their concepts. The point is that Geist is not a natural kind or complicated structure of natural kinds but precisely something that does not even exist independently of the specific descriptions used in order to point out geistig phenomena. Without your belief that this is a philosophy paper, that I consciously wrote down these words intended to communicate with you, that I have read works by Dennett and that I know that there are books and objections, there would be no philosophy paper. The very existence of philosophy is clearly tied to Geist. Philosophy is geistig.
Notice that Dennett unfortunately introduces the category of what I call Geist only in order to head for its “extinction”: “the postconscious period of human conceptualization” (Dennett 1991: 24). His brand of an eliminativist materialism, however, once again only makes sense against the backdrop of a materialist conception of the natural order, together with the assumption that human mindedness as we know it can only be integrated into the natural order or eliminated from the ontological realm of things which exist. “The idea of mind as distinct in this way from the brain, composed not of ordinary matter but of some other, special kind of stuff, is dualism, and it is deservedly in disrepute today” (ibid.: 33).
Sure, if Geist was some kind of extraordinary matter, it would deserve to be in disrepute today and should have been in disrepute at least since the dawn of philosophy. But my warranted assumptions that you are awake, that the Universi
ty of Bonn is an institution financially supported by the German taxpayer, etc., are not even candidates for things composed of any kind of matter, be it regular or special kind of stuff.33 The institution of taxes does not belong to the natural order, and we usually do not look for its integration into the natural order before we have convinced ourselves that materialism is the right kind of metaphysics and that we can only do justice to its conceptual pressures if we either eliminate or integrate into the natural order any phenomenon that does not wear its material-energetic nature on its sleeve.
It is essential to the concept of the natural order, as the term “the natural order” is used, that it is the order consisting of natural kinds. Natural kinds, in turn, are the kinds of things that would have been the way they are had no one ever evolved to figure out the way they are. Let us call any fact that would have obtained had no one ever evolved to figure it out a maximally modally robust fact. The notion of scientific objectivity from the third-person point of view is the notion of a position from which we are able to tell maximally modally robust facts from facts with a lesser degree of modal robustness. Precisely because we have at our disposal the concept of maximally modally robust facts, the very obtaining of different kinds of facts raises the question of whether and how these other kinds of facts might fit into the natural order. How can something that for its very existence depends on being thought of, conceived of, or experienced from a subjective point of view be part of the natural order?
The answer to this question, I suggest, is this: facts whose obtaining depends on our concepts of them as such just are not part of the natural order. However, this does not rule out that there are some relevant connections between the different kinds of facts whose obtaining we need to recognize. Yet, the relevant connections will not have any of the standard forms discussed in the philosophy of mind. Let me elaborate!
The question of how mind and brain are related to each other is utterly ill-framed. For one thing, the concept of “mind,” even more than the concept of “consciousness,” is a mongrel concept.34 It is used in indefinitely many senses and its meaning varies grossly both synchronically and diachronically, but also according to people’s beliefs about their own mindedness. This is not surprising, because “mind” and “consciousness,” as well as the affiliated family of mentalistic terms such as “thinking,” “cognition,” “will,” “emotion,” “affect,” “self-consciousness,” and “awareness,” are introduced in large-scale explanatory contexts. For all we know from the pictorial documents of our pre-historical ancestors, human beings, insofar as we can know anything about what they were up to, have been making sense of their actions in the largest possible context of the world as a whole for a very long time.
The pre-historical record is subject to wild mythological speculation. It is hard enough to make sense of the mentalistic self-portrait of Homer or the various Vedanta texts, let alone of cave paintings, which, for all we will ever know, might have served pretty much any function, from forms of religious veneration to hunting manuals. The constant of mentalistic variation is the fact that human beings are trying to make sense of their actions within a larger context, typically within the largest possible context they can imagine: the world as a whole or what they believe the world as a whole to be. The notion that mind has to fit into the natural order is nothing but the most recent mythology, the most recent attempt to fit all phenomena that are relevant to human action explanation into an all-encompassing structure. What has changed over the course of the modern development of our self-conception is the background world-view, and not for the better! Materialism or naturalism assumes that the world as a whole is identical with the universe or nature and that actually to exist is to be part of the world as a whole understood as nature. But this move unnecessarily glosses over the fact that the natural order in this context is invoked as an element of action explanation. You cannot eliminate the element of action explanation from a world-view designed to figure out how action fits into the world, as this just undermines the explanandum.35
The point about the explanandum is that it is essentially a moving target because of its constitutive concept-dependence. What we do is tied to how we conceive of it. Human action, as we as historically situated agents know it, is always integrated into non-natural contexts governed by institutions. There is no point in trying to clean out the semantic mess of our mentalistic vocabulary by providing a referent from the natural order for every single mentalistic term or otherwise eliminate the term from language. The result would be not an enlightened community of scientifically minded thinkers but a society without institutions and history.
Geist is an explanatory structure invoked in the context of action explanation. Some of the things human agents do can be accounted for only with adequate reference to the fact that they do them in light of an historically variable conception of what it is for them to be human. Humans live their lives in light of a conception of what the human being is. This conception does not pick out a natural kind. One argument for this draws on the category distinction between different kinds of mistake: to be wrong about a natural kind (say fermions) does not change it. The spin of fermions is the way it is anyhow, regardless of our knowledge or error. However, if we are wrong about ourselves as agents and believe mistakenly that the human being is identical to a certain animal species to which we humans belong, this immediately changes our status as agents. Biological naturalism in the sense of an all-out identification of human being and human animal challenges our value system by suggesting a revision of our moral practices in light of its own norm. Its fundamental norm derives from the claim that to be human is to play a certain role in the animal kingdom, in the Earth zoo. This is an intrusion into the sphere of Geist and not a successful elimination (yet).
IV Neo-Existentialism and the Conditional Model of Mind and Brain
A proper subset of our mentalistic vocabulary comprises elements that do not refer to natural kinds. This does not rule out a priori that there is another proper subset of the same vocabulary that happens to pick out natural kinds. The state of being awake or various urges we consciously experience belong to this category. As things stand, our mentalistic vocabulary is differentiated both diachronically and synchronically over different natural languages and specialized idiolects. It is not unified in any specific way beyond the fact that we typically invoke it in contexts where what matters is action explanation, including activities such as predicting or regulating future behavior.
What is also important here is that our mentalistic vocabulary is not unified by constituting the body of a theory such as “folk psychology.” Folk psychology is a misguided posit of theories about the human mind driven by the metaphysics of naturalism. The mentalistic vocabulary inherited from the history of literature, religion, philosophy, science, law, practices of confession, politics, etc., has only a formal core. There is no unified folk psychology that characterizes human mindedness across all speakers and cultures.
Neo-Existentialism identifies this formal core as the activity of making sense of the human being by giving an account of which faculties and conceptual capacities distinguish it both from utterly non-organic, anonymous processes and from organic non-human life. This formal core distinguishes us from all other life forms insofar as we know and understand them.
The existentialist tradition contains thinkers such as Kant, Hegel, Nietzsche, Kierkegaard, Heidegger, and Sartre. What they all have in common as a minimal assumption is the belief that Geist, the specifically human mind, brings with it a capacity to create institutions in light of our socially mediated map of how our actions and their explanations fit into a larger context. The human being transcends its position in any given situation and constantly integrates it into a larger cartography of how things hang together. We live our lives under the assumption that other people live their lives under different assumptions. This is why we are essentially interested in how our fellow human beings view us and reality.
Unfortunately, the existentialist tradition does not usually explicitly address the issues correlated with the mind–brain problem but, rather, offers strategies for avoiding it in justified ways. Neo-Existentialism attempts to address the issue head-on while at the same time deflating it. It argues for an anti-materialist position, as it denies that the largest possible frame in which phenomena are supposed to take place is identical to the natural order.36 Neo-Existentialism argues that it is a misguided project to identify phenomena that essentially depend on our conceptualizations of them with phenomena unified by being phenotypes of natural kinds parsed in the terms of natural science. We should not expect that all phenomena which have been described from the intentional stance over the millennia, and for which we have some kind of record of documenting an inner life, could possibly be theoretically unified by finding an equivalent natural substratum for them.
Yet, this is arguably exactly the driving idea behind the ideology that in a recent polemical book (Gabriel 2017) I dubbed “neurocentricism.” Following the British geriatric physician Raymond Tallis, I claim there that “neurocentricism” (what he calls “neuromythology”) has two axes: neuromania and Darwinitis (Tallis 2014). Neuromania, as I understand it, is the attempt to identify the brain or, rather, its neural circuits as the natural kinds corresponding to a purified mentalistic vocabulary. Darwinitis is the associated attempt to explain all human behavior in terms of evolutionary biology or psychology. The concepts of “cultural evolution” and of “memes” belong to this category of mistake, since they suggest that history can be accounted for in the theoretical terms of actual evolutionary theory. While this makes for nice party jokes, I do not think that it actually leads anywhere towards explaining human mating behavior in terms of the unconscious intention hard-wired in our organisms to spread our genes, of whose existence we have become aware rather recently. As a matter of fact, integrating terms and material inferences that are valid in evolutionary theory into our mentalistic vocabulary can have the side-effect of changing us on the level of Geist. This is because it invites the false belief that some terminological elements that essentially do not pick out natural kinds refer to natural kinds. This is not an innocent mistake or cognitive error, for erroneous beliefs about the human mind change the status of the agent just like a clumsy squash player’s delusion of being a world-class squash player turns him into a self-deluded squash player. There is a substantial difference between the fact that someone is not a good squash player and the fact that he erroneously believes himself to be one, a difference that can become the source of pathological behavior. Roger Scruton makes a similar point with respect to what he calls “biological reductionism”:
Neo-Existentialism Page 5