Our states of mind have intentionality and therefore depend upon the ways in which we conceptualize the world. Furthermore, we cannot assume that our emotions will remain unaffected when we learn to conceptualize their objects in some new and allegedly “scientific” way. Just as indignation at a villain is undermined by the description of him or her as an automaton obedient to impulses in the central nervous system, so does erotic love retreat when its object is described in the pseudo-scientific jargon of sexology. (Scruton 2017: 58–9)
The notion that human beings qua members of the animal realm are fundamentally or essentially biological machines whose goals are just the goals of any life form we know of is a wild overgeneralization on the basis of poor data. It only looks plausible if we ignore our historically and sociologically mediated knowledge of the actual indefinitely large variety of human self-conceptions. Human beings essentially depend on their self-conceptions, for they act in light of who they take themselves to be.
Someone might wonder whether Neo-Existentialism is not a metaphysically extravagant view, maybe even an unwilling heir of Cartesian dualism, a creeping suspicion which typically kicks in if a philosopher opposes naturalism. In order to get a sense of why my view should not provoke this reaction, think of the relation between a bicycle and the activity of cycling. This relation offers a toy model of the ontology of Neo-Existentialism. Bicycles are clearly necessary and material conditions for cycling. No one could cycle without a bicycle (unless of course they had a tricycle …). Now, this is hardly a profound metaphysical insight – or so I hope. Also, the physical features of the bicycle determine a range of cycling behaviors. No one could win the Tour de France with the bicycle I use to ride to my office. Yet, the relation between a bicycle and the range of cycling behaviors cannot be modeled along the lines of traditional concepts governing our understanding of the mind–brain relation. Bicycles do not cause cycling; they are not identical to cycling; cycling cannot be theoretically or ontologically reduced to bicycles; certainly, cycling cannot be eliminated by claiming that there really are only bicycles. At most, cycling supervenes on bicycles, where this just means that no cycling can take place without events materially realized at the level of bicycles. But this is not very informative, as it merely repeats the claim that bicycles are necessary conditions for cycling.
My claim is that the relation between mind and brain, in all the cases which really motivate the question of how something mental fits into the natural order, is like the relation between cycling and bicycles. The relevant tertium comparationis is a conditional model: the relation between mind and brain, just like that between cycling and bicycles, boils down to an arrangement of necessary and jointly sufficient conditions. There are necessary conditions for the warranted application of mentalistic terms, from talking about mere vigilance and non-conscious sensory registration to geistig activities such as arguing for Neo-Existentialism, thinking about the implications of monotheism for political theology, interpreting Pina Bausch’s Arien, running for president, and so on.
Nothing that can possibly take place within the range of my organism, let alone in my brain or nervous system, could ever be sufficient for any of these activities. In fact, not even adult conscious perception falls into the category of natural kinds given its essential relation to external objects and our conceptualization of them. This does not mean that the relation between the various conditions into which we can analyze a full-blown mental situation is somehow causal. Causation only makes sense on some levels of that analysis; it does not run through all levels. Conditions for certain activities, such as exercising one’s conceptual activities acquired to judge aptly that a certain wine counts as “modern” or “a smoky Washington pinot noir,” include a variety of factors involving natural kinds, such as taste buds and a healthy organism. But this does not mean that my taste buds trigger the judgment that the wine I am tasting is a smoky Washington pinot noir. My taste buds stand in various causal relations (including relations with pretty much the observable universe as a whole), but this does not make it the case that their role as conditions in a network of conditions turns them into causal agents within the hierarchy of conditions.
Neo-Existentialism recommends a conditional model of mind and brain. It claims that the relationship between mind and brain is actually a relationship between conditions that we can bring to the fore only on the basis of an analysis of a given situation into its necessary and jointly sufficient conditions. This involves commitment to an indispensability thesis.37 Our access to natural kinds works via a situation in which action explanation matters. And any such situation relies on Geist as an indispensable and irreducible feature.
This does not at all imply that we cannot access non-mental reality as it is in itself. Yet, it is the case that we cannot have access to both non-mental reality as it is in itself and our access conditions to it without at some point referring to real elements and processes that simply do not fall into the category of natural kinds. To know that something is the case in non-mental reality differs categorically from knowing something about this very knowledge. There are different forms of knowledge with different kinds of objectivity springing from them. To be sure, there is a general form of objectivity present everywhere where we can in principle distinguish between taking something to be true and its being true.38 However, our concepts divide into subdomains that ideally latch onto the senses that constitute a field of sense. Different forms of knowledge require different objectivity conditions (a rule book) specified by the senses/concepts attached to a given field of sense.
Having a suitable brain is a necessary condition for participating in the explanatory structure of Geist. There are no immaterial souls, if this means that there are agents which interfere with the causal order studied by the natural sciences without leaving a material-energetic trace. There is no chance that I will survive my own death in any interesting sense of the term. Only some properties of me will survive my own death, such as someone’s memory of me or a YouTube clip of a talk of mine. But, as Woody Allen has pithily remarked, I would rather be immortal in my apartment than in the memory of my descendants.
Yet, the fact that a brain or, rather, an entire organism, which is an instance of a species that is a link in a complicated evolutionary chain, is a necessary condition for my participation in the explanatory, historically open structure of Geist does not motivate the notion that Geist could find a place in the natural order. It is simply misguided to try to fit all phenomena into a single framework that is supposed to settle questions of existence, or reality for that matter. Many things are real, but this does not entail that there is a single thing, reality, of which all real things are proper parts.
Notes
1 Earlier versions of this piece were presented at Mainz (to Robert Nitsch’s research group in neuroscience), the New School for Social Research, Utrecht University, Paris 1-Panthéon Sorbonne, and as a “Grande conférence de la Chaire La philosophie dans le monde actuel” at Laval University in Quebec. Many thanks to the organizers and audience for helpful comments and discussion points, in particular to Jocelyn Benoist, Paul Kottman, Jocelyn Maclure, Robert Nitsch, and Herman Philipse. I also thank my team (James Bahoh, Marin Geier, Jens Pier, and Jens Rometsch) at my Chair in Epistemology, Modern, and Contemporary Philosophy for reading the manuscript, discussing many of the thoughts expressed here in great detail, and for editing the text. Special thanks to Jocelyn Maclure for his suggestion to publish an extended version of the original paper in the form of a discussion volume and to John Thompson at Polity for his continued support of my work.
2 This very formulation already raises many problems. What is it for an individual to be introduced? If the thought is that an individual is introduced by being referred to or mentioned for the first time in human linguistic history, then far too many objects would have to count as fictional and, therefore, non-existent. Imagine that in the future astronomers were to formulate their theories in the form of novels,
such that every new astronomical object discovered was first introduced in a novel. Or think of the actual fact that a lot of clearly existing objects (including natural kinds, such as water or celestial bodies) were first introduced in fiction (mythology and so forth).
3 See, for instance, Azzouni (2010: 14): I claim that we (collectively) subscribe to a particular criterion for what exists. This is that anything exists if and only if it’s mind- and language-independent. Dream figures, fictional characters that authors have made up, and hallucinated objects are all, in the sense meant, mind- and language-dependent. Dinosaurs, protons, microbes, other people, chairs, buildings, stars, and so on are (purported) examples of mind- and language-independent objects. … In my sense of “mind-independent” and “language-independent,” no one can dictate such an object into existence by (merely) thinking it or symbolizing it as so.
I disagree. For details on existence, see Gabriel (2015a).
4 Here is how Price (2011: 187) puts it: If all reality is ultimately natural reality, how are we to “place” moral facts, mathematical facts, meaning facts, and so on? How are we to locate topics of these kinds within a naturalistic framework, thus conceived? In cases of this kind, we seemed to be faced with a choice between forcing the topic concerned into a category which for one reason or another seems ill-shaped to contain it, or regarding it at best second-rate – not a genuine area of fact or knowledge.
5 For an introduction to this view, see Gabriel (2015b).
6 As a side note: I wholeheartedly reject the idea that there really are such things as “analytic” and “continental” philosophy. See Gabriel (2015a: xii–xiii).
7 See the famous paragraph on the meaning of “substance” in the Principles of Philosophy, book 1, §51 (AT VIII 24), where Descartes claims that, strictly speaking, there is only one substance.
8 For more on this, see Gabriel (2017).
9 On this, see Tetens (2015), who argues that naturalism either turns out to be a strong metaphysical claim about absolutely everything or has to remain incomplete so that there will forever be room for non-natural objects in a more complete account of what there is. If naturalism is a strong metaphysical claim, however, there is a conceptual gap between any finding of the natural sciences and naturalism. That would mean that no progress in the natural sciences should ever convince anyone of the truth of naturalism. See also the account of the relationship between science and metaphysics in Chakravartty (2017).
10 For a careful proposal along those lines, see Hofweber (2016). Hofweber convincingly argues that there is ultimately no route to unrestricted nominalism in the sense of “the view that all there is are objects in spacetime, or all there is is concrete” (2016: 289). The primary reason he invokes for this is that “There is no list of terms in our language such that if none of these terms refer, then we can conclude that there are no abstract objects” (ibid.: 290).
11 Ed Dellian, the German translator of Galileo and Newton, has pointed out to me in correspondence just how erroneous it is to think of these two scientists as precursors of contemporary naturalism. See his account and defense of the non-reductive philosophies of nature he finds in Galileo and Newton in Dellian (2007). However, this creates the new worry that consciousness is too smoothly integrated in this kind of philosophy of nature so that we wind up with a different kind of naturalism still incompatible with Neo-Existentialism as laid out here. If we think of consciousness as built into the fabric of the universe, we still conceive of it as an entity “out there” in a way the Neo-Existentialist finds objectionable on conceptual grounds.
12 Most recently, Dennett has asked the question as to where the gap comes from in order to make it go away: “By reconceiving of the gap as a dynamic imagination-distorter that has arisen for good reasons, we can learn how to traverse it safely or – what may amount to the same thing – make it vanish” (Dennett 2017: 21). However, he forgets that the genealogy of the gap is at the same time a genealogy of the scientific world-view which gives rise both to the impression that there is a gap and to attempts, such as his, to close it or to make it vanish. For more balanced accounts of the genealogical difficulties this involves, see Blumenberg (1985) and Taylor (2007). See also Gabriel and Žižek (2009).
13 Huw Price (2011: 187, 199) distinguishes between “object naturalism” and “subject naturalism.” For him, object naturalism in the sense of a metaphysical claim is a failure resulting from ignoring the subject-naturalistic fact that “the contribution on our side” in knowing something about what there is “never goes to zero” (ibid.: 30). “Science is only one of the games we play with language. Each game privileges its own ontology, no doubt, but the privilege is merely perspectival. Science is privileged “by its own lights,” but to mistake this for an absolute ontological priority would be to mistake science for metaphysics, or first philosophy” (ibid.: 31). Yet, it is not clear to me why Price labels his own position “subject naturalism.” In what sense is his account of the uses of language and the claim that there is no metaphysically relevant universal quantifier “naturalistic”?
14 On this, see Gabriel (2017).
15 Here “naturalism” about the human mind contrasts with “supra-naturalism” about the human mind, which would be the view that some or all mental terms refer to a reality that would have existed had there been no brains and that will exist even after all brains have vanished from the universe.
16 See the much discussed new mysterianism of McGinn (1993, 1999). See also Pinker (1997). Both draw on Noam Chomsky’s claim (1975, 1988) that there are inherent limits to what we can even conceptualize on account of the structure of the human mind. Against the underlying assumption that there might be ineffable facts that we cannot even conceptualize in principle because of inherent representational limits of human language, see the conceptual idealism of Hofweber (2016: Ch. 10).
17 Remarkably, Dennett explicitly makes use of “a God’s-eye view of the universe” (Dennett 1984: 101). His compatibilist account of determinism (which he aptly distinguishes from fatalism) relies on a standpoint “sub specie aeternitatis” (ibid.: 124) and on a thought-experiment based on the possibility of surveying all of actuality (“the actual trajectory of the world” [ibid.: 126]) in one eternal glance. However, as I have argued (Gabriel 2015a, 2015b), there is no such thing as actuality in that sense. This is not just an epistemic fact stating our metaphysical ignorance, but an ontological fact restricting what can actually be the case.
18 A theist or classical metaphysician with ontotheological inclinations could argue that God’s eye view is conceivable under the condition that it does not occupy a literal point of view. The entire tradition of classical metaphysics, to the extent to which it has been sympathetic to this move, reserved a highly special observer status for a God’s eye view (it was supposed to be atemporal, outside of space and time as we know them, omniscient, etc.). Naturally, these are no options for the metaphysical naturalist.
19 “Meta-physicalism” in that sense is similar to what Agustín Rayo (2013: 5–12) calls “metaphysicalism.” Like Rayo’s metaphysicalist, the meta-physicalist believes that there is a metaphysically privileged structure which is the real target of reference. Unlike Rayo’s metaphysicalist, the meta-physicalist bases her claim on physics and not on armchair reasoning about the relation between truth, reference, and reality alone. However, the strategy of outsourcing conceptual problems to futuristic physics is certainly no better than metaphysicalism all by itself.
20 On concepts that “really are essentially labels,” see Levine (2004: 165).
21 For a more nuanced and historically adequate treatment of this alleged identity statement, see Chang (2012). For a convincing alternative to the other standard (and equally misguided) example of the alleged identity of temperature with mean molecular kinetic energy, see Bishop and Atmanspacher (2011). The latter paper also includes an alternative to the physicalistic notion of a causal closure of the physical universe under the heading of “contextual
emergence.” However, as will become clear in the main text, this account still counts as naturalistic by my lights, as the domains it countenances are all treated as given and located within the overarching domain of empirical research.
22 See, of course, Jackson (1986).
23 For an overview of the development of two-dimensional semantics and its application to the problem at hand, see Chalmers (2006a, 2006b, 2009). See also Jackson (1998). There are other strands and earlier precursors. The technical details will not matter here.
24 See the discussion in Shear (1997).
25 Chalmers (1996: 276–357). The strategy of reverting to quantum mechanics in order to bridge the semantic gap between the two dimensions of sense suspiciously resembles an obscurum per obscurius, of which Chalmers himself is aware, as he concludes his book with the admission “that all interpretations of quantum mechanics are to some extent crazy” (ibid.: 356).
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