Animal life is formally different. Animals instantiate their life form through perception. This modifies the logical relation in which an animal stands to its life form. A subject that instantiates its life form through perception constitutes itself as a unity that is logically different from the unity of the life form that it instantiates. It constitutes itself as a particular unity and thereby distinguishes itself from the general unity that constitutes its life form. It is for this reason that Aristotle thinks that it is only within animal life – i.e., perceptual life – that the category of a living being can be applied. Animal life is the life of living beings. Take a lion as an example. A lion sees a particular antelope and, because of his perception of this particular antelope, this particular lion does what lions in general do when they see an antelope: the lion tries to catch it and eat it. Its life activities are particular manifestations of the lion form of life in virtue of being grounded in perceptions of particular things of that form of life.
Human life is not animal life. Human life differs from animal life in that it is rational. And, just as it is wrong to think of animal life as vegetative life plus some further powers that are added to this kind of life, it would be equally wrong to think of rational life as animal life plus some further powers added to this kind of life. Rather, rational life is a formally distinct kind of life. Bearers of a rational form of life instantiate their form of life through “intellect.”6 This, once again, modifies the logical relation in which a human being stands to its life form compared to the logical relation of a non-human animal. A subject that instantiates its life form through “intellect” constitutes itself as a unity that is both logically different from the unity of the form of life that it instantiates and identical to it. This is so because the power of the intellect is distinguished from the power of perception in that the content of this power is not something particular that manifests the life form, as in perception, but something general, namely the life form itself, or, as we might say, its concept. Thus, the bearer of a rational life form constitutes herself as something particular in virtue of having a conception of her life form that she takes herself to manifest. The meaning of the concept of life thus undergoes a further shift.
A subject who actualizes her life form through a conception of it constitutes herself as a unity that she takes to be a particular manifestation of something general. In this sense she constitutes herself as a subject that is both logically general and particular, and hence is both identical with the life form as well as different from it. A rational form of life is thus one that is, qua life form, bound up with forms of consciousness that represent the life form as something that is manifested in the life of its bearers. It is a life form that would not exist in the first place if its bearers did not manifest forms of consciousness which represented themselves as manifestations of it.
The fundamental meaning of the concept “human,” according to this line of thought, is to designate such a rational form of life. It designates a rational form of life because there are forms of employment of the concept “human” that reflect, in various ways, such forms of consciousness.
5
The Aristotelian conception of “Geist” has no room for the above dilemma that, I think, should worry Gabriel. Gabriel thinks he can make use of the idea of a human being in order to account for what it is to be a “concept-dependent fact.” This makes his position vulnerable to the dilemma that a human being can only be conscious of herself as a human being if she denies that a human being is, in whatever sense, a kind of animal. If a human being, by contrast, thinks of herself as a kind of animal, then she who thinks this thought is incapable of ever knowing that she is a human being. Aristotelianism does not object to the idea of a “concept-dependent fact”; rather, it employs it in its account of the “form” of a distinctive form of life. The human life has a distinctive form in that its existence and identity is dependent upon forms of consciousness whose bearers represent themselves as manifestations of the human form of life.
“Geist” is, indeed, an “explanatory structure” (p. 39), as Gabriel puts it. Yet, it is one that has its home in a wider explanatory structure: the one that is contained in the concept of life. It specifies the determinate shape that this “explanatory structure” takes when the life form is conceived not as something whose existence and identity is a given fact for those who manifest it, as it is in the case of plant life or animal life, but as something that is what it is in virtue of being known by those who manifest it. There is thus no room for being troubled by the question of how a human being can possibly know that she is a kind of animal. A human being knows what she is (and what she is not) in virtue of being what she is.
Notes
1 See, for example, Hegel’s critique of Kant in his early writing in Hegel (1988).
2 Kant (1902–), AA3, B 404 (my translation, with reference to the B-edition).
3 Ibid., AA3, B 72.
4 See Hegel (1976: Ch. 5).
5 This does not mean that there are no properties that are shared by all forms of life. Clearly there are such properties. For example, as a matter of empirical fact, DNA molecules play a crucial role in the reproduction of all terrestrial forms of life, both plants and animals. However, we can recognize that DNA plays this role in any given case only by comprehending what it does through a principle that places it in the activity that constitutes a certain life form. That this principle bears a different form in animals from the one it does in plants does not mean that it cannot make use of the same kind of molecule. Nothing can be comprehended as having a function in the reproduction of animal life other than in the context of a self-sustaining activity whose form is defined by sensory consciousness and, specifically, desire. This holds not only for reproduction and its organs (DNA is an organ of reproduction in the broad sense) but equally for digestion or perception. This needs to be articulated further (see, for example, the essays in Kern and Kietzmann (2017), including my “Kant über selbstbewusste Sinnlichkeit und die Idee menschlicher Entwicklung”). It is not my objective here to develop the Aristotelian account of formally distinct principles of life but to remind us of its existence and point out that it is immune to the dilemma to which, as I argue above, Gabriel falls victim.
6 The Aristotelian position does not deny that it is possible to apply mental concepts such as “knowledge” or “memory” to non-human animals. Consideration of so-called animal minds provides no refutation of the Aristotelian view. Rather, the view holds that the meaning of these concepts in application to animal life is different from the one that they have in application to human life. The generality that they nonetheless also possess is explained precisely by the sequence in which Aristotle places the different forms of life-principles.
5
Replies to Jocelyn Maclure, Charles Taylor, Jocelyn Benoist, and Andrea Kern
Markus Gabriel
I Reply to Maclure
In his introduction to the present volume, Jocelyn Maclure raises different questions concerning the shape of Neo-Existentialism’s take on the mind–brain problem. In this context, he emphasizes the similarity of my remarks on this topic to families of views he calls “externalist” (such as enactivism, extended mind, etc.). At the same time, he diagnoses a prima facie compatibility of my views on that matter with “non-reductive physicalism,” “property dualism,” and “emergentism” (p. 5). For reasons he hints at in his introduction, he himself generally prefers a “reasonable naturalism” to an all-out rejection of the naturalistic program.
In my reply to Kern, I will elaborate on the claim that the mind–brain (or mind–body) relationship, if anything, has the form of what I call “conditionalism.” As far as we currently know, it seems to be an empirical fact that many of the activities we subsume under the heading of the mental – including (phenomenal) consciousness – are correlated with some parts of the brain. Notice that it is an empirical fact too that it is not the brain as whole which supports mental activity as c
haracterized by most accounts of the mark of the mental having to do with consciousness.1 Only some parts of our brain and only a subset of their activity are significantly correlated with mental activity at all. It is important to bear in mind here that it is far from clear if there actually is a neural correlate of consciousness, say. There are many reasons why there is a problem here.
One major issue is that the term “consciousness” has many usages. We first need to figure out which of them is philosophically coherent enough to be correlated with anything in the reality of our brains. And, even to the extent to which we are actually in possession of a clarified concept of consciousness, there is no unanimously accepted answer to the question of what, if anything, the neural correlate of consciousness would be – not to mention the additional problem that our brain is only one species of nervous system that might support consciousness in the animal kingdom.
Let us imagine for the sake of the argument that something like Tononi and Koch’s IIT (Integrated Information Theory) is the road to a consciousness meter – i.e., to a scientifically rigorous way of identifying the neural correlate of consciousness. I have no overall conceptual reservations concerning the possibility of finding a neural correlate of what Tononi calls “consciousness,” which is a kind of mental state in which we find ourselves both when awake and when dreaming. Figuring out the philosophical details of Tononi’s notion of consciousness is an exercise worthy of attention. Neo-Existentialism in this context gives us some clues, but it does not immediately predict the right account. Evidently, there is much more work to do when it comes to spelling out a theory of consciousness in line with the Neo-Existentialist proposal.
There are other terms, such as “perception,” that cannot have a neural correlate even in principle. At most, conscious perception necessarily involves the neural correlate of consciousness as identified by the best empirical theory (IIT, global workspace theory, or what have you). Clearly, some tokens of types we pick out with our mentalistic vocabulary are such that they have a neural correlate. Tononi and Koch use the term “support” here, which is even more neutral than “correlate.” Some events that count as geistig by Neo-Existentalist lights are clearly such that they are supported by some neural events.
I happen to subscribe to the view that the human being is necessarily incarnated. Every human being, among other things, is an animal. The best explanation of our animality in my view is natural science. What it is to be an animal of a certain kind is a function of where we are located on our branch of the evolution of species. This is an element of naturalism. Neo-Existentialism (like good old existentialism) has no sympathy for vitalism, let alone for an immortal soul keeping our bodies alive for the time being.
Generally, I agree with Maclure’s reasonable naturalism that we philosophers should not fumble around with scientific knowledge. Concerning scientific knowledge (which is not limited to the natural sciences), the experts count. To be sure, the frontiers of science and metaphysics are not so easily drawn. Science often makes tacit metaphysical and conceptual assumptions. This is why we cannot merely outsource the question of the human being to the natural sciences plus the humanities. The issue as to what extent human mindedness is necessarily incarnated depends on the notion of mindedness at play.
Evidently, the Neo-Existentialist account of an irreducible concept of Geist does not settle all versions of the mind–brain, mind–body, or mind–matter problem. In this regard, I propose conditionalism as a new candidate in the debate. According to conditionalism, any event that qualifies as mental is a whole that consists of conditions that form its parts. These conditions are necessary and jointly sufficient for the event to take place. As far as human mental activity is involved, some of the necessary conditions for any exercise of human mindedness can be identified with neural events. No brain, no mental activity. Yet, this does not support any identity theory of mind and brain; it supports only the identification of some necessary conditions of human mental activity with natural processes that are best thought of in terms of natural kinds.
However, that does not mean that the whole of a mental event is in each case best accounted for by breaking it down to a list of its necessary natural conditions. Mental events are not typically reducible in this way. Some are; some are not. This is why the issue of reductionism is ill-posed in a framework which assumes that there is one thing, “the mind,” on the one hand, and another thing, “the brain,” on the other, such that we can ask how they are related. In reality, there are events that we pick out with different vocabularies, including a mentalistic vocabulary. Neo-Existentialism makes claims about the roles this vocabulary plays and how naturalism is a misguided approach to some of the central roles of mentalistic vocabularies.
Most standard options spelled out in the mind–brain debate in the philosophy of mind turn out to be reifications of the participants’ preferred chunk of a given mentalistic idiolect (most often: some anglophone dialect or other). There are cases where a mental event consists wholly of natural kinds, despite the fact that it is embedded in a larger context of significance. Think of the manifold cultural practices surrounding human puberty in the past and present. Puberty is a form of hormone change that can best be explained by biology. However, its behavioral manifestations play a role in human history so that the natural kind “puberty” is integrated into a larger context of Geist. Other cases, such as perception or knowledge, are objectively existing relations between an animal, a (Fregean) sense, and a scene comprising facts and objects. Perception is, thus, no serious candidate for an identity theory of mind and brain, say. Perception cannot be identified with any kind of neural activity, as it essentially involves the objects it is about. Typically the objects of perception are not themselves neural events.
In my view, we are currently a long way from having a complete enough understanding of the universe (qua object domain of natural science). This is why physicalism and emergentism are mere speculations. Some philosophically minded scientists happen to argue against metaphysically naturalist interpretations of current scientific knowledge and have worked out views that are even sympathetic to modern forms of full-blown Platonism, Spinozism, monadology, or Hinduistic monism. Respecting science includes respecting scientists. The fact that some of the natural scientists who achieved most (including Einstein, Schrödinger, and Heisenberg) interpret the metaphysics of science in a way utterly incompatible with the physicalist or naturalist mainstream in current theoretical philosophy does not speak in favour of the latter.2
The upshot of these remarks, bluntly, is that there is no single mind–brain, mind–body, or mind–matter problem. One of the many mistakes which underlie substance dualism and its ilk is precisely the thought that reality consists of two halves: the mental and the material. The question as to how the two halves are related is as ill-posed as a meta-physics which divides the universe into two parts.
What is more, the ontology in the background of Neo-Existentialism breaks with the idea of the unity of reality and the subsequent placement problem for the mind. According to what I call “the no-world-view” there is no such thing as reality as a whole. The universe qua field of sense under investigation by our natural sciences is arguably not unified either. Yet, I grant the unity of science to the naturalist in order to strengthen her position before the attack. If correct, my argument(s) against naturalism are therefore stronger, since they are directed against a stronger enemy, one who presumably has figured out the overall structure of the Humean mosaic.
Neo-Existentialism is an attempt to address the issue of human mindedness in an ontologically post-naturalistic framework. As Maclure rightly emphasizes, this framework is thoroughly realist. According to the ontology of fields of sense, the incoherent concept of reality as a whole and the even worse identification of reality as a whole with the object domain of the natural sciences need to be replaced by a better theory of reality. The ontology of fields of sense which I have spelled out and defended elsewhere cl
aims to offer an enhanced understanding of reality as irreducibly manifold.
As a matter of fact, this anti-metaphysical maneuver is designed to lead to a stance I call “non-transcendental empiricism” (Gabriel 2015a: 245–6). This means that the metaphysical question concerning the furniture of reality or its architecture creates a pseudo-problem that leads us astray and away from an actual engagement with scientific knowledge acquisition in the real world. The rejection of naturalism associated with this project is, thus, intended to be a science-friendly stance, one designed to engage with philosophical problems that arise from within science. Naturally, these include problems currently dealt with in philosophy of mind, such as those surrounding the question as to whether there is a hard problem and similar riddles.
Neo-Existentialism Page 10