Neo-Existentialism

by Markus Gabriel

  Neo-Existentialism supplies a framework for rethinking the foundations of the philosophy of mind. Once in place, it is bound to deliver verdicts on more specific problems. It draws on ontological pluralism. Hence, there cannot be an overall mind–brain problem. If anything, there are many different such problems that need not even have the same shape.

  Yet, there is a sense in which Neo-Existentialism as formulated in my contributions to this book offers slightly more than merely a framework for clarifying issues that arise elsewhere (at the intersection of the special sciences and the frontiers of scientific knowledge acquisition). For Neo-Existentialism is a thoroughly non-naturalist and non-reductive position with respect to Geist. According to this position, it is impossible in principle to put a halt to the open-ended proliferation of ways in which we can be human. Human mindedness is actualized in many ways and in such a manner that we cannot identify a privileged substantial vocabulary that would be the silver bullet for the mind–brain, mind–body, or mind–matter problem. There just is no single such problem.

  Let me conclude my reflections on Maclure’s introductory remarks with a short comment on “existentialism.” There are many elements Neo-Existentialism borrows from prominent existentialist thinking about human subjectivity, or réalité humaine, as Sartre put it. The two main components that structure the view as sketched in this volume are

  the claim that the human being is an existence without an essence; and

  the thought that the human being determines itself by changing its status in light of its self-understanding.

  The aim of my present contributions to the development of Neo-Existentialism as an option for the coming post-naturalistic era of philosophical theorizing has been to work out some consequences of these existentialist slogans for the philosophy of mind. The plan is to reframe the central problems of philosophy of mind, which is urgently needed given the deadlocks and pathologies of the naturalist world-view still widespread among philosophers.3

  Having said that, I surmise that the spirit of the project is perfectly compatible with a reasonable naturalism in the sense of the desire to live a modern life – i.e., a life not avoiding acceptance both of our scientific knowledge of the vastness of the universe and of our impressive ignorance of the very same universe, despite the almost equally impressive progress in scientific knowledge we have witnessed over the last two hundred years in the wake of the Enlightenment.

  II Reply to Taylor

  As far as I can tell from his present contribution and from my knowledge of his impressive oeuvre, there is no significant overall disagreement over the matter at hand between Charles Taylor and me. I generally agree with the thrust of his summary of the line of thought laid out in my chapter. Nevertheless, he phrases some of my claims in such a way that prompts me to clarify them. I will use this occasion to do so in response to Taylor’s reflections about them.

  Taylor’s entry point in my Neo-Existentialist account of Geist is an emphasis on the role of significance in human life. Significance arises in human society on the basis of our mutual (mis)understanding of the purposes of each other’s actions. We interpret what others do in light of a vocabulary that is available to us as actors, and we do this on the basis of a structured account of what we take to be the best (kind of) action or range of actions in a given situation or context.

  Significance is tied to language use and language use has a history. This history is not shared across all speakers of a given natural language, since every speaker is always properly trained only in the use of some subset or other of all linguistic activities realizable in a community at a given stage of its historical development. Language is constitutively bound up with division of labor on various levels, as speakers respond to different situations, stimuli, and psychologically significant events with verbal behavior which leads to both a diachronic and a synchronic differentiation of a mentalistic vocabulary.

  This basic hermeneutic insight can be spelled out in different ways. Taylor briefly mentions Sartre’s decisionism, Merleau-Ponty’s rejoinder, Heidegger’s notion of the world, and Hegel’s advanced account of Geist. These are all elements in a tradition I summarize under the broad heading of “Neo-Existentialism.” Neo-Existentialism is an innovation to the extent to which it claims to apply the common denominator of the existentialist tradition to fundamental issues in contemporary metaphysics and philosophy of mind. This common denominator, in my view, is the thought, as Taylor puts it, that “we are inescapably self-determining animals.” He is right to add: “But this doesn’t settle the question of the place of truth in our self-interpretations” (p. 51). This addition is precisely what separates Neo-Existentialism from Sartrean projectivism, according to which self-determination is never subject to any norm of truth external to the one immediately available to the self-constituting agent.

  To be self-determining is to lead a life in light of a vocabulary designed to make it intelligible to us how and why we do not merely blend in with inanimate nature or with the rest of the animal kingdom. This is my interpretation or rational reconstruction of Sartre’s adage that we are condemned to be free.4 In addition to this bidirectional anthropological difference, some (religious) agents are committed to a further distinction between the human being and God or the Gods (depending on the details of one’s religion). Be that as it may, every human actor bases her self-determination at some point or other in her life and her psychological architecture on a more or less elaborate account of herself as minimally standing out from both anonymous nature (the universe) and other life forms.

  The specifics of our various accounts of how to draw the line(s) between human and non-human being have consequences for the value system of the particular agent, as she draws socio-political conclusions from her understanding of herself in the widest possible context of thought and action available to her. We all have views about the set-up of human society as we know it that entice us to suggest or even impose concrete norms of behavior (maxims) onto ourselves and our fellow human beings. A human life inevitably has the shape of a recommendation concerning how to live well. For we think of ourselves as subject to some values or others, regardless of how often we actually act according to the values to which we believe we have subjected ourselves.

  This is why the question of the truth of our beliefs concerning our mentalistic architecture does not settle the issue of who we want to be. We want to be a certain kind of person and thereby turn into that person. What we turn ourselves into, however, is not only a function of what we take to be true about ourselves. It is neither settled merely by our decisions nor by how we really are. Even though self-determination is not always bound by actual truth, it can always be assessed in view of, say, natural matters of fact or an enhanced understanding of the vocabulary we employ in the establishment and maintenance of our self-constitution.

  Think of our relation to purely natural diseases. We are currently a long way from knowing everything about the human body, its conditions of health and illness, and so forth. The human body is and will probably forever remain partially mysterious to us on account of the complexity of its internal arrangements – not to mention the additional element of complexity that derives from the fact that human bodies are essentially part of an ecological system whose complexity is far beyond any mechanistic or transparently causally complete description.

  This is part of why we can relate to bodily diseases in various ways. We can try to accept them as an intrusion of nature into the realm of Geist, which can turn into a heroic attitude or an acceptance of the contingencies that befall us as inhabitants of a universe disinterested in our existence. But we can also cook up all sorts of alternative explanations – ranging from the hope that we can somehow control our body top-down from our mind, to full-blown religious beliefs about the teleological nature of disease as punishment for sin, or whatever.

  This is different from the case in which we set out to appropriate a certain fashionable vocabulary in order to adapt
our psychological economy to newly created circumstances. Imagine someone who decides to become a dandy in the nineteenth century compared to Jerry Seinfeld’s character in Seinfeld, who unsuccessfully tries over and over again to become a dandy. The way in which we think about a dandy is essentially part of what a dandy is. What a dandy is changes over time, because part and parcel of being a dandy is that the concept is surrounded by a complex web of expectations and intentions that defy any fully specific grasp of it. Similar things apply to other terms of human outlook that change with fashion.

  There is no neutral ground from which we could reboot humanity so as to build a vocabulary from scratch that hooks us up with entities the nature of which does not depend on diachronic and synchronic variation.

  This undermines the very intelligibility of attempts of the logical form of eliminative materialism and its ilk. These stories only make sense against the background of the value judgment that we ought to conceive of ourselves exclusively in consideration of the best available natural-scientific vocabulary – for some reason or other that often remains tacit in discussions of drastically reductive accounts of human mindedness.

  The wish to integrate the human being once and for all into domains of thought where we are not constitutively present is just another mode of being human. As Stanley Cavell famously put it: “Nothing is more human than the wish to deny one’s own humanity” (Cavell 1999: 109). Being human is an inescapable task for human beings. It is a task and not just a given because we cannot be human without a whole range of decisions we have to make on our path of becoming grown-ups. A human life consists of an indefinite number of stages we cannot characterize in a general theory (such as that of Kierkegaardian stages). There is no typical or overall course of human life. Too many social, historical, personal, natural, cultural, economic, etc., factors play a role in the contexts in which we can exercise the power of self-determination.

  This power is in itself void of specific content. Yet, we constantly enrich it with content. The modes of the human being are a function of the context in which we actually think of the role of a human being. In actual contexts a human being can only be someone if she makes up her mind about what would count as a human achievement in a set of situations brought under concepts of contexts.

  In this respect, I embrace Taylor’s suggestion to classify my proposal in terms of a distinction between the bounded and the unbounded. However, I do not mean to imply that nature is merely a domain of “bounded realities” (p. 49). This is why I resort to a more neutral understanding of “nature” or, rather, “natural kinds.” The thought in the Neo-Existentialism chapter is that “the universe” designates the domain(s) under investigation by the ensemble of our best established natural sciences. A natural science is a science whose objects are natural kinds. A natural kind is an object that does not change its properties by being thought of in a different way. Natural kinds are real patterns we find as we carve nature at its joints. The best way to do this is what we call “natural science.” Natural science figures out what electric charge is, how far away the next galaxy is, how many types of elementary particles there are, what the ratio between baryonic matter and dark matter is, what role ions play in synaptic transmission, and what have you. Whatever natural science actually discovers cannot be integrated seamlessly into our self-understanding as minded, conscious, and self-conscious creatures. There is always going to be an additional step.

  The reason for this, in my view, lies in the essence of natural science as empirical thought about the universe. Natural science cannot ever achieve closure. Even if we could know all the facts there are to know about the universe, we could not know that we know them all on the basis of natural science alone. In addition, we know by way of natural science that we will never know all the facts there are to know about the universe. We know from modern physics that there are limits to progress in physics that are set by the universe itself. To process information concerning the universe, the information has to reach us under the conditions discovered by physics, and these conditions turned out in the last century to be incompatible with futuristic omniscience. Physics will never come to an end at which it knows all physical facts. Even if, per impossible, physics actually reached the ideal limit of inquiry, it would not be in a position to take notice of this fact. Qua empirical science, it has to keep an open mind concerning the facts in its object domain, the universe. The universe can always teach us another lesson, which evidently does not mean that we should be open-minded when it comes to far-reaching revisions of what we already know. Empirical knowledge acquisition should not be open-minded about the epistemic standing of skeptical hypotheses or conspiracy theories.

  Against this background, my Neo-Existentialist account of the human mind is more ambitious than Taylor’s use of it, even though this difference does not really show up at this stage of human scientific and technological development. Taylor is happy to settle with a good enough argument against general reductive accounts of Geist. Let a general reductive account of Geist be any view according to which it is actually possible (in the near or, at least, not too distant future) to replace all items in our mentalistic vocabulary that apparently do not pick out natural kinds by items that do. Taylor argues that such a program is a tall order that differs in kind from modest achievements of the form of an explanation of the natural kinds that trigger an episode of mental disorder, such as a case of Cotard delusion, which might best be explained as a structural type of neural misfiring in certain brain areas. In order to generalize on the basis of such known cases of bottom-up causation of mental disorders, one has to have an account of human mindedness that allows us to classify all sorts of vocabularies in which we couch our self-determination along the lines of specific cases where we did actually achieve some such explanation. Yet, it is hard to see how one should actually perform such a general reduction on an empirical basis. There is, thus, an explanatory gap between our overall mentalistic vocabulary, with all its synchronic as well as diachronic variations, and our empirically based research on mental functions grounded in neurobiological vocabulary.

  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. (Taylor, pp. 49–50)

  At this point, the aim of my piece is more ambitious. I maintain that a general reductive account is impossible, even in principle. This is not merely an epistemological thesis but a claim about human mindedness as it really is. Human mindedness arises from the position of the intentional stance. But the intentional stance is nothing like an illusion or a delusion. Rather, it is part of reality.

  At this stage, my no-world-view (“the world does not exist”) enters the picture: the universe is not the whole of reality. Even though the universe is impressively large, it is not all there is (Gabriel 2015a, 2015b). Yet, this is not a metaphysical claim about reality as a whole, as there is simply no such thing. There is simply no domain that comprises absolutely everything. This puts conceptual pressure on any ontological reduction which claims that some phenomenon that we characterize in truth-apt statements actually belongs to a domain significantly different from where we originally located it.

  This is not a conservative principle per se. As we figured out that witches and sorcerers belong to the domain of figments of human imagination, we were thereby justified in extending this ontological reduction to other cases, including elves and unicorns. But this does not generalize to rainbows, let alone to pains or consciousness. The sense in which rainbows are not what one might have expected differs significantly from the case of witches, not to mention God, the soul, or whatever candidate for reduction/el
imination one might think of here.

  My contribution to ontology (in the shape of an ontology of fields of sense) entails that a metaphysical reduction of all phenomena to one fundamental domain of objects (be they physical, mental, concrete, abstract, or what have you) fails in principle. Therefore, we should not strive (not even in principle!) for a metaphysical reduction of human mindedness in all its facets to natural kinds. This leaves an opening at first glance to have recourse to empirical knowledge acquisition and to reduce the human mind step by step. Yet, this is also impossible, as it would require a complete overview of human mentalistic vocabulary and, thus, an effective abolishment of the division of (linguistic) labor. Yet, this requirement is incompatible with the operation of knowledge acquisition in the natural sciences, which rely heavily on the division of (linguistic and scientific) labor. It does not help to introduce futuristic science here, since this move is not vindicated by actual science. In sum, neither natural science itself nor metaphysics makes any significant way towards an actual general reductive account of human mindedness.

  This motivates the Neo-Existentialist to study the very attempts to work out such accounts in light of the existential projects involved. The Neo-Existentialist diagnoses any overall reductive or eliminativist philosophy of mind with a severe case of existential delusion. An existential delusion is any account of the human being that denies the fact that the bundle of mental faculties we generate by thinking of ourselves in a certain way is not a natural kind. There are different ways of naturalizing oneself in a delusional manner. The spectrum of delusions is very wide, ranging from rampant materialism to religious spiritualism. Rampant materialism basically claims that we are a pack of neurons or cells (if one wished to identify the human mind not with the human brain but, rather, with a larger natural structure that is part of a human body). Religious spiritualism is the belief that there are additional natural kinds in the universe hidden from the view of natural science, such as immortal souls that move our pineal gland or buzz around on the quantum scale somewhere in the microtubuli of nerve cells. Another kind of existential delusion is panpsychism or any other view which identifies human mindedness or one of its prominent features (such as consciousness) with extra forces in the universe on the same level as gravity or the electromagnetic force.