Neo-Existentialism

by Markus Gabriel

  26 Dieter Henrich (2007: 47) pithily sums up the weakness of this move in the context of an attempt to solve the placement problem by locating the mind in a hitherto hidden meshwork of material forces: It is not unreasonable to conclude for oneself that the subjective has to be grounded in something of the sort that at the end of the day cannot be distinguished from matter. Yet, this conclusion is a step beyond the realm of scientific research into material processes. In this way, one does not prove anything, but rather sketches and accepts a conception such that one is in a position to know that it cannot achieve the status of a demonstrable explanation. (My translation)

  27 The view that rational intelligibility is at the root of the natural order makes me, in a broad sense, an idealist – not a subjective idealist, since it doesn’t amount to the claim that all reality is ultimately appearance – but an objective idealist in the tradition of Plato and perhaps of certain post-Kantians, such as Schelling and Hegel, who are usually called absolute idealists. I suspect that there must be a strain of this kind of idealism in every theoretical scientist: pure empiricism is not enough. The intelligibility of the world is no accident. Mind, in this view, is doubly related to the natural order. Nature is such as to give rise to conscious beings with minds; and it is such as to be comprehensible to such beings. Ultimately, therefore, such beings should be comprehensible to themselves. And these are fundamental features of the universe, not by products of contingent developments whose true explanation is given in terms that do not make reference to mind. (Nagel 2012: 17)

  28 On this concept of idealism, see Gabriel (2016a). For a recent defense of a combination of what he calls “conceptual idealism” with a relevant denial of ineffable traits of reality, see Hofweber (2016: 248–73).

  29 See Nagel (2012), for example pp. 124, 106.

  30 Recently, Görnitz and Görnitz (2016) have argued that quantum theory after all is not metaphysically crazy and that it is exactly the kind of futuristic science Nagel envisions. They present a case to the effect that the right kind of metaphysics of information easily bridges the semantic gap. However, the cost of their view is that it threatens to dissolve the material-energetic realm into structures too closely resembling mental items. In other words, they tend to solve the placement issue by postulating an all-encompassing domain of information which incorporates both mind and matter as two forms that information can take. Their view, which is based on actual physics, comes uncannily close to an updated version of Schelling’s objective idealism.

  31 For more on this translation problem, see Gabriel (2017: 1–4).

  32 See Dennett (1992). For a similar conception, see Gabriel (2017: 166–9). The difference is that I connect the phenomenon of the center of narrative gravity with the Freudian notion that the function of the game of giving and asking for reasons is to justify our emotional stances with respect to others. In this way, I avoid the various traps of a narrative account of personal identity familiar from Ricoeur (1992).

  33 In his Locke Lectures, Dennett defines dualism as “the idea that minds (unlike brains) are composed of stuff that is exempt from the laws of physical nature,” and without any counter-argument ridicules it as “a desperate vision which richly deserves its current disfavor” (Dennett 1984: 28). For one thing, which genuine dualist ever claimed that mind was made of any stuff? And even if Plato and Descartes, say, had believed that mental substances were composed of immaterial stuff (which they did not), why would anyone have to add that this additional stuff has to be entirely “exempt from the laws of physical nature”? Dennett’s rejection of dualism falls prey to the procedures of a very primitive intuition pump in his own sense of the term. His anti-dualistic intuition pump is particularly weak in that it consists in setting up an evidently ridiculous straw man. That there is an intuition pump rather than an argument in the background here is revealed if one takes into account just how conceptually different Dennett’s two definitions of dualism are. What is doing the work, the claim that there are not two kinds of stuff or the claim that there is no stuff that is exempt from the laws of physical nature? Dennett presents a maximally simplified version of “dualism” and then rightly claims that it should be avoided, without pausing to make any respectable case to the effect that genuine dualists never even came close to his “dualism.” To use one of his phrases against him: “This is a clear case of a misused intuition pump, where simplicity is doing all the work” (ibid.: 32). Another example of this tendency is Dennett’s claim that Descartes adhered to the view of the mind “as an indivisible and perfectly self-communicating whole” (ibid.: 40). As usual in the genre of ascribing n’importe quoi to Descartes, Dennett does not provide a reference for this claim, and it is unlikely that he will find one, because Descartes did not hold the views Dennett calls “dualism” and “naïve perfectionism” respectively.

  34 I will not even delve into the fact that the term “the brain” is equally problematic. For one thing, there is no single organ rightly called “the brain.” Currently, no one has any idea how all the systems we group under “the nervous system” actually hang together, since these systems together turn out to be too complex for any actual scientifically respectable overall claim concerning “the brain.” All of this is aggravated by the individuality of our nervous systems and their diachronic plasticity. The idea of “the human brain” happens to be an ideal type or construct regulating research and nothing out there in reality. Thanks to the neuroscientist Robert Nitsch for pointing this out to me and for showing me in detail how a good deal of the mind–brain problem in mainstream philosophy of mind is drawing on fantasies about the brain rather than on actual neuroscience. For Nitsch’s philosophical views on this issue, see Nitsch (2012).

  35 On this, see also Roger Scruton’s recent defense of the basic approach to action explanation found in Kant, Fichte, and Hegel (Scruton 2017).

  36 My version actually denies that there is such a thing as a largest possible ontological or epistemological frame. See Gabriel (2015a, 2015b).

  37 For more on this, see Gabriel (2017: 98–9).

  38 I have argued for this in detail in Gabriel (2014). An English translation of this is in preparation for Polity Press.

  2

  Gabriel’s Refutation

  Charles Taylor

  Markus Gabriel has devised a very elegant argument to puncture the hegemony of natural science-type reductive accounts of human life, thought and action – something that I’ve been struggling to do myself for a few decades. In gratitude to him for this, I would like to embroider a bit around his insight.

  The basic idea which excites me in Gabriel’s complex many-stranded paper concerns the appearance/reality distinction (p. 34). We think of natural-scientific natural kinds as having a given nature well before we learn this or can even understand it. Water was H2O in Thales’ time, even if he saw it as (in a mysterious way) a much more widespread substance. Our knowing better hasn’t changed this fact. Put another way, our learning about water doesn’t change its nature.

  But human experience doesn’t work that way. Take our feelings, motives, reactions; we can see these as our awareness, in the mode of feeling, of the significances things and situations have for us. I love X, I fear Y, I regret Z. The fillers for X, Y, and Z are what we call intentional objects. Feelings here constitute our mode of awareness of these objects.

  But this mode of awareness may undergo alteration. Take the following story: we are colleagues in a department (of philosophy, say). I tend to have a low opinion of you and find your interventions in seminars and department meetings jejune, rather flat, and unoriginal; these seem to reflect stereotypical thinking. I’d rather be elsewhere when you speak. But then I read a novel, or speak to a wise friend, or come to an understanding about some third person that she is deceiving herself. And it dawns on me that that’s what I am doing. Really I envy you and can’t bear that you are better than me in some significant way, so I’m always seeing what you do in an unfairly negative light
.

  Now this entity, my significance-drenched perception of you, is quite different from water; it doesn’t stay the same regardless of how it is understood. On the contrary, it changes, it becomes other; both the significance-reading and the actual felt experience changes. It becomes something different.

  We understand water better than Thales (no self-congratulation is in order; we stand on the shoulders of giants), but it’s the same. In the case of my story, I understand better my feelings about you and our predicament of rivalry, but that in itself wreaks change. Before and after there are different feelings – different in an obvious sense, that they will probably bring about different action. If a third colleague asks a fourth: “Why has Taylor become less crazy? He behaves so differently when Jones is around,” the other can reply: “I don’t know, but he’s been going to a shrink for the last six months. It must have something to do with that.”

  Of course, between before and after the change, there is continuity. In all likelihood, I still envy you. But the envy is now (a) consciously recognized and also (b) surrounded with an aura of shame and self-condemnation. As a felt experience, it is very different.

  We can get to the point by another route. Take another case where I discover something new about myself: I’ve been feeling low and tired for weeks. It’s getting me down. I try relaxing, reading murder mysteries, but nothing works. Then a medical friend tells me I have a bacterial infection. I get a prescription, take the antibiotics, and feel better. Here, as with water, discovering its nature doesn’t change the underlying condition – here, the infection. I do behave differently than before: I intervene by technological means to alter this condition. But this comes after, as a consequence of my understanding what’s really going on. Whereas, in the envy case, the discovery itself alters the reality I now understand better.

  More generally, our understanding of the significance of things, situations, other people, the state of society – all the things we care about – plays a crucial role in what we do. You can’t understand politics, culture, history, the crazy and destructive things people do, as well as the moments of insight, transformation, and increased humanity that occur, without coming to grasp the significance that all these events and situations have for the actors. Think of the catastrophic events in this new millennium which have sprung from such inadequate understanding of others.

  Now this kind of phenomenon, the significance of reality R for person P, has much less definite and porous boundaries than things such as water, or conditions such as infection of the throat. How I feel about a given happening, say Trump being president, will be inflected by my sense of the significance of many other things: how I feel about the US (since I’m not a citizen of that country), how much I sympathize with my American friends, how important this setback to equal, non-discriminatory democracy will be in the world; and then, more widely, how important politics is to me, as against other things – sport, art, literature, music, travel, nature; and then my reaction will be different, if I take for granted that humanity is on a path towards more democratic equal and solidary societies, as against holding a rather low view of humans’ capacities to rise above our chequered history of exploitation, domination, and massacre. And so on. (Full disclosure: I thought of myself as the reverse of naïve, with no illusions about our capacity to wreck our best achievements, but the depths of my desolation at this election gives me pause.)

  Any alterations of my feelings or judgments in any of these domains, and many others which I haven’t mentioned and couldn’t definitively enumerate, will affect how I feel about this event. There are no phenomena of this kind which are accepted into the ontology of post-Galilean natural science. An indefinite number of other bounded phenomena could put an end to the bounded phenomenon of water – have perhaps in past time done away with this on other planets. And this kind of banishing of one by another can also happen in the domain of feelings – as when fear at a hair-raising menace utterly banishes my enjoyment of these flowers. But what I’m talking about here: how the significance for me of reality R1 can be inflected by the significance of R2, R3, and so on, through an indefinite list – this exists only in the domain which Gabriel calls Geist. A science focusing on bounded realities can’t come to grips with this.

  Of course, all this will probably not faze true believers in reductive natural-science accounts of human life. They are looking for an explanatory reduction – the kind of thing we find in natural science, exemplified by the relation between felt heat and the mean kinetic energy of the constituent molecules. All these phenomena of experience, including the transformation of an experience’s meaning through fresh insight, stands on the (as it were) felt heat side of the relationship and is explained on a deeper (kinetic energy) level through, say, changing patterns of neural firing.

  To bring about a reductive account of this kind takes us far beyond our discovery that, for instance, contemplating a certain action (or observing this action in another) is accompanied by a given pattern of firing in a certain part of the brain. What we have to do to account for a transformation of experienced meaning as in my case above is to align the phenomenal change onto a neural one, and in each case explain it in part by the internal dynamic in the person (organism).

  Now the dynamics at the various levels are very different, and at first blush even incompatible. The natural science account of the brain must eschew any reference to purpose or teleology. That is a condition of its being a natural science account. But any account of my transformed outlook in the above story has to invoke factors of the range of meaning, purpose, value. My radical shift in my view of you will have been triggered by something external, say, reading a novel about a person like me who was deceiving himself in similar fashion. But it is also powered by shame, by a sense of truth, and the value of truth, by some perhaps inchoate idea that I am now a better person for facing my cowardly illusions. The field in which I am changed is ethically drenched.

  This doesn’t by itself tell us that such a reductive account isn’t possible, but we’re obviously dealing with a much more formidable task than, say, correlating thoughts about X with certain firings. It is not that we cannot be deluded about our claims to act on moral considerations. My story is one such case. But to move to a level of explanation in which value considerations have no place at all is to make a much more ambitious claim. It is not entirely clear what it might look like – perhaps a radical reduction to a single amoral motivating force such as that proposed by Thrasymachus in the first book of the Republic (“justice is the interest of the stronger”)? In any case, this is a tall program, and one whose realization, in the best case, lies far in the future. I am tempted to judge it impossible: to give an account of telic beings, like ourselves and animals, in terms cleansed of all teleology. But since any delivery on a task such as this would be at best far in the future, the promise to bring it off one day can always be put forward and cannot be definitively laid to rest.

  I’m not sure I fully understand Gabriel’s use of the term “Neo-Existentialist” to describe his position. At one point he invokes Sartre and his (in)famous proposition that “existence is prior to essence.” But at other times he seems to be invoking a broader tradition, including among others Hegel, and it seems that he sees himself in a much broader tradition, of those that have a place for what he calls “Geist.”

  How to characterize this tradition? We might see it in terms of the point of Gabriel’s work that I picked on at the beginning of these remarks: we are made what we are partly through our attempts to understand ourselves, or the interpretations of ourselves under which we act. We don’t have a nature which is just there, prior to and independent of all interpretation, like water has in its being H2O.

  But this whole life-long process of making sense of ourselves (along with human life in general) partakes of two dimensions. On the one hand, it requires invention, perhaps the production of new categories, and maybe even unprecedented ones. Seeing us through these catego
ries changes us, as I moved in the above story, from being firmly entrenched in my immediate gut reactions to your philosophical remarks to a stance of suspicion of my own motives, from which stance my bad faith can show up. On the other hand, this self-transformation can be seen as a step towards truth, and in my story I do come to see it that way.

  We remake ourselves, but how much does this remaking take us towards, or away from, our true potential? The phrase “become who you are” seems to suggest (and demand) such a progress towards a genuine identity. Hegel’s notion of “truth,” where the truth of something is its fully developed form, seems to suppose some such valid terminal point.

  The tradition of Geist is one in which self-making and self-discovery can be intertwined. In this tradition, Sartre (at least early Sartre) is an outlier, in the sense that the dimension of discovery virtually disappears, and decision appears crucial. Merleau-Ponty criticizes this stance, elaborated in L’Étre et le néant, in his own Phénoménologie de la perception (Chapter III.3). Back in the 1940s, the term “existentialist” was applied to the whole group around Les Temps modernes, including both Sartre and Merleau-Ponty. In relation to this broader definition, “Neo-Existentialist” would relate us to a broader tradition and not confine us to Sartrean decisionism.

  I think this broader sense must be what Gabriel is invoking. If the “essence” of something is an inner nature which wholly determines it, as H2O is of water, then we are not dealing with a category which can help us understand human life. We are inescapably self-determining animals. But this doesn’t settle the question of the place of truth in our self-interpretations.

  But one thing seems clear. The search for an adequate self-interpretation is open-ended. In that sense the expression “the world does not exist,” expounded in another book of Gabriel’s, is well taken. The “world,” a term which for Gabriel is not synonymous with the “universe” (explored by natural science) but, rather, has overtones of Heidegger, knows no fixed limits. It is the ensemble of languages, practices, and institutions of a culture; it has a shape at any given moment (though it would take virtual omniscience to map it), but it is always being added to by new ways of understanding and living it, and, at the same time, some of its facets are falling into desuetude and forgetfulness.