Neo-Existentialism

by Markus Gabriel

  Let me conclude by slightly correcting one of Taylor’s adoptions of my vocabulary in his helpful commentary. By denying that the world exists, I do not intend to embrace a Heideggerian account of the world, such as the one laid out in Being and Time, §§14–24. The human world or lifeworld, in my view, is also not unified or unifiable. What makes us human is a formal affair, namely the fact that we are agents of a certain kind: those agents that have to lead their lives in light of an account that distinguishes them from other animal agents and from non-agential nature. Humans draw very different conclusions from their self-constitution. Yet, at the end of the day we are all bound by this formal structure.5

  III Reply to Benoist

  If I see it correctly, Jocelyn Benoist raises two overall worries. His first worry clusters around my way of drawing a nature/mind distinction. His second worry is related to the issues of self-deception and self-consciousness.

  The first issue arises in the context of my rejection of a global placement problem for the mind. Benoist rightly maintains that my “global purpose is to reject that formulation of the problem according to which we should find some place for mind within an essentially mindless world. We can agree on that. I still wonder whether, in his view, something doesn’t remain of this problem” (p. 53). As a matter of fact, there is a series of questions Benoist raises with respect to his suspicion that the Neo-Existentialist account of mind I offer might still be overly impressed by the placement problem, as it were. Let me divide his first worry into three sub-problems that I shall address consecutively.

  The first sub-problem is the problem of negation. Benoist puts it thus: “However, the mental still remains something that has to be posited in contrast to the physical. Now, I am not sure that it is the best way to capture the mental. The risk, constitutive of what modernity has called ‘the philosophy of mind,’ seems then to build a mere negative philosophy of mind” (p. 54). He goes on to clarify why exactly he takes this to be a risk. The reason he offers is that one should not conceive of mind in contrast to the physical “within a genus. Then, mind would be supposedly be simply another kind of being than the merely physical kind” (p. 54). He claims that I probably agree with him on this point on the basis of a passage in my paper in which I reject the thought that the semantical difference between our naturalistic and our mentalistic vocabulary lies “in a natural gap between inanimate and animate matter of a certain complexity” (p. 34). Indeed, the nature/mind distinction should not be drawn within the genus “nature,” which is what I basically say in the passage. More generally, I rebut any kind of dualism which draws a distinction within the genus of being or substance in such a way that there are (at least) two kinds of beings or substances, the mental and the non-mental kind.

  Yet, the reason for this rebuttal might not be the one that Benoist himself prefers for his similar views concerning the irreducibility of the mental. Let me clarify some conceptual resources on which I draw. “Geist” is my term for the non-physical formal whole which we ontologically commit to with our mentalistic vocabulary. It is non-physical in that it has formal parts that cannot be picked out by a vocabulary whose reference conditions essentially invoke the idea of natural kinds as specified in my chapter. It is formal in that Geist is an object of thought that cannot be unearthed by investigating the universe. By contrast, a whole – such as an atom, a molecule, or a quasar – is substantial (non-formal) if it can be discovered only by empirical research into the material-energetic composition of the universe. Geist is an object in the formal sense of something that can be referred to with a truth-apt thought. It is not an object in the substantial sense of, say, “an obstacle to free passage.”6 Geist cannot be unearthed by natural science without its already being known to exist beforehand. Again, this does not mean that we are infallible with respect to the details of our Geistigkeit (the feature of being geistig, endowed with Geist).

  One of the reasons why we are, after all, fallible with respect to Geist is that it is a whole which has physical or biological parts. My body is part of my Geist. As I write these lines, I engage in an activity that is essentially that of Geist, namely figuring out how to draw the line between the inanimate, the animate, and the human being. This activity involves the universe, as I could not encode information without material-energetic resources. I could also not write these lines without an appropriate brain that sustains my mental life and does not make me fall asleep right now, and so forth. Some parts of Geist have been taken by our ancestors not to be physical despite the fact that they were, and vice versa. I take it to be a conceptual, a priori truth that Geist cannot be entirely physical. However, the rest is open. Which elements of our mentalistic vocabulary are related to which bits of the universe and in what precise way is open to empirical research and conceptual clarification.

  “Mind,” “consciousness,” and many other mentalistic terms are umbrella terms that refer to many things of different categories at the same time. Whatever they happen to refer to under specified conditions is going to be part of the formal whole of Geist. The criterion by which I distinguish between Geist and nature at the end of the day boils down to the thought that nature’s composition is not a function of our beliefs about it, whereas Geist’s composition is. In this context, this means that how we draw the line within our mentalistic vocabulary between the bits that are grounded in the universe and those that are not is not merely a function of how the universe is. It never suffices to inspect the universe when trying to figure out whether something that plays an important role in our self-understanding as human thinkers is physical or not.

  This is why the human being is profoundly and irreplaceably historical. Our self-understanding always shifts to some extent or other, regardless of how the universe actually is. Therefore, entire civilizations can create cultural symbolic orders that rest on false beliefs about the universe and that nevertheless have consequences for who and how they are.

  Let us assume for the sake of the argument that a person we might call “Paul” does not have an immortal soul. However, Paul thinks that he has an immortal soul, and he takes the fact that he is a human thinker capable of many wonders of human thought to be evidence of an immortal soul in his region of presence. Maybe Paul is such a charismatic writer and knows so many people in cities spread around his natural environment that he convinces lots of people that they have immortal souls so that they erect a religion on this belief. Later, in the hands of an emperor, this might even turn into a full-blown nation-state, and so on. Of course, things like that have happened and are likely to be repeated, as humanity does not simply progress into its future by accepting natural-scientific truths about the neurobiology of consciousness into their self-understanding as humans.7

  The Geist/nature distinction is formal. It does not carve nature or anything else at its joints. It shifts according to people’s beliefs about who and what they are. Yet, it has an invariable core. This invariant is our activity of making sense of the fact that we do not merely blend in with what there is regardless of our self-understanding. However, we cannot identify any natural fact with our estrangement in the face of the vastness of a mindless universe. In that sense, there is a remainder of the placement problem in my view – or, rather, an echo of its motivation. I take it that its motivation is an expression of the human predicament that we are subject to normative demands that we cannot ground in anything ultimately non-human. For that reason, even God and the Gods in mythology and religion are interested in the human being and even assume human-like shape (be it in the form of an avatar in Hinduism or Buddhism, or in the shape of Jesus, the son of God, and so forth). The human being exists in the face of a question that can never be answered by digging our heels into nature.

  This leads me to Benoist’s second sub-problem, namely that of normativity. His preferred version of the irreducibility of the mental draws on the nature/norm distinction, which he takes to be “a categorial negation, which marks a categorial difference between two kin
ds of terms – a difference of grammar, so to speak. The grammar of mind is not the same as the grammar of nature” (p. 55). The mind is not distinguished from nature within any specific domain or being but, rather, differs from nature in category.

  As Benoist maps the mind/nature distinction onto a norm/nature distinction, I understand him as committing to something along the following lines. For a suitable agent to be subject to a norm is for her behavior to be evaluable with respect to correct or incorrect, good or bad performance.8 If an agent ought to φ, but she χs instead, she makes a mistake. What we observe is that she χs. This observation does not tell us anything about whether she ought to φ despite the fact that she is actually χ-ing. In contrast to this much invoked case of actions subject to normative assessment, the equally much discussed case of processes subject to natural laws is one in which all that matters is what happens. If a group of particles is entangled in a quantum state, their properties have to be characterized in a certain way. The particles are φ, and there is no sense in which they ought to be anything else.

  An example of the normativity of the mental is the role of truth in our lives. If I wrongly believe that p, I make a mistake. But the fact that p is false is not itself a mistake. In order to wrongly believe that p, it takes more than the falsity of the proposition that p. Making a mistake cannot be reduced to a proposition’s being false. We have to mistake something false for something that is true. Yet, that is also not sufficient for interesting actual cases of epistemic blameworthiness. If I make a mere guess concerning the whereabouts of Boris Johnson (say, I locate him in Oxford while he is actually in Mombasa), I do not make the same kind of mistake that I would make if it mattered to my interlocutors and me where he actually is. The truth and falsity of propositions take on a life of their own in the context of our discursive practices of ascribing epistemic states and of thereby aiming at the truth. Part of why Geist is not a natural kind, then, has indeed something to do with the normative dimension of human life.

  Yet, however precise one makes this line of thought, it does not change the fact that mind, or rather Geist, exists. Normativity exists as much as fermions, galaxies, and earthquakes. Nevertheless, this specifically does not mean that there is a genus (existence) of which there are different kinds or modes, as I have argued elsewhere in detail (Gabriel 2015a: 135–56). We cannot place all there is in one big domain, for no such domain can possibly exist. Thus, ontologically speaking, it is correct “that mind is no kind at all” (Benoist, p. 54).

  Benoist gives this thought an additional twist with which I wholeheartedly agree. He writes:

  One might, however, endorse another interpretation of the so-called natural kinds: what makes them “natural” is not their belonging to a nature in a preconceived sense of the term but, rather, some semantic property such as their referential rigidity. A “natural kind” is a kind that can and should constitutively be picked out by deixis, if you want to refer to it at all. In this sense, mind could still be a natural kind without belonging to nature in the preconceived sense of the totality of what is material.

  Now, the most interesting side of Gabriel’s criticism of any naturalistic conception of mind, in my view, is that he seems to reject not only the claim that mind should be a natural kind in the first sense of the term, but that it is one in the second sense as well. You cannot pick out mind in this way because it is certainly no kind. (pp. 54–5)

  In this passage, Benoist rightly generalizes on the basis of my argument in the chapter for an objection to the very idea of a naturalistic account of mind. The historical openness of mind makes it impossible for us to pick out and to rigidify our mentalistic vocabulary in an attempt to close the shifting semantic gap that separates us from the non-human regions of what there is.

  In a sense relevant in this connection, Neo-Existentialism is committed to a bundle theory of mind. The mind is a bundle of faculties and activities we unify in the context of action and thought explanation. We want to figure out who we are as human beings and how we ought to project ourselves into the future in the face of phylo- and ontogenetic existential threats. In this context, we make sense of our own contributions to what there is by creating a historically open-ended proliferation of terms and inference rules that connect them.

  The third and easiest of Benoist’s sub-problems is related to the very idea of an ontology of mind or Geist. According to Benoist, there is a threat in “ontologizing” (p. 58) the mental. He insists that the “particular way that we have of ‘being’” consists in the fact that we exist “under a norm, which is not the same as mere ‘existence’” (p. 59). My answer to this is straightforward: if we exist under a norm, this evidently does not mean that we do not exist. Geist, and, as a consequence, the mental, is itself something which there is. It exists just like other formal objects exist. There is nothing special about its very existence. Therefore, I see no overall problem in “ontologizing” the mind.

  The second set of problems Benoist formulates draws on my claim that self-consciousness and self-deception essentially hang together. To be a self-conscious agent constituted by one’s self-understanding is a fallible stance. When we get ourselves or others wrong, when misunderstandings occur, we are liable to change our status as agents so that we become self-deluded.

  To be sure, self-delusion is not the only form of existential pathology. In my chapter it serves as a paradigmatic case designed to illustrate that each of us is the kind of object that changes if we have false beliefs about it in virtue of the fact that we have false beliefs about it. Here I agree with Benoist that this presupposes that “normativity as such” is already in play: “This means that what Geist adds to nature as such is not a strange kind of thing that has the equally strange property of being able to determine what it is independently of any norm but, on the contrary, normativity as such” (p. 59). Self-deception is, by these lights, thus an abuse of norms. It is a case of failure which presupposes that there are norms to which we are subject insofar as we aim at being human in light of our conception of the human being. But then, again, this does not cancel out an ontology of the mental. Geist really exists. One way in which it manifests itself is the medium of fiction. We essentially tell stories about how we became who we take ourselves to be. Human agents constitutively have autobiographies. These autobiographies are designed to make sense of the fact that we do not merely belong to nature as the domain we find in place; rather, the scene we enter is that of making sense of our lives.

  What is fictional is not opposed to what exists. Fictional objects, such as autobiographical selves, exist and have real impact in our conscious lives. In this respect, to be a fictional object is essentially to be related to a mode of conceiving of that very same object in a narrative mode.9 The difference between fictional and non-fictional objects hangs on this essential dependence. One way of summarizing my take on the ontology of fictional objects would be to say that fictional objects essentially exist in the context of an interpretation. Fictional objects depend for their existence on an interpretation of them. Without interpretation, they would have no determinate properties at all.

  Think here of the notorious problem of the indeterminacy of fictional objects such as Macbeth. Does he have long hair? Does he have pets? How many pairs of shoes does he own? We regard non-fictional objects as complete regardless of how anyone thinks about them. Whatever I take to be true about the exact number of cells in a determinate region of my left elbow, there is an exact number. Yet, what about the molecular composition of Macbeth?

  My reply to this problem is that Macbeth’s properties can be fixed according to any interpretation that is compatible with the basic facts about him. One of the basic facts about Macbeth on any acceptable interpretation is that he is a human being. Now we know that human beings typically have many trillion cells that make up their bodies. We are, thus, entitled to interpret the play in any way compatible with the fact that Macbeth is not an indeterminate object but precisely a human being ti
ed to an animal body.10 We have no reason to assume that Macbeth is objectively indeterminate, even more so given that the play is supposed to be staged. The fact that Macbeth is played by an actor usually solves the indeterminacy problem by the actor’s very presence on the stage. One of the many differences between Macbeth and me is that my physical properties do not vary from legitimate interpretation to legitimate interpretation. There is just one set of facts about my body that does not vary across a range of admissible imaginary variations.

  Geist partakes in the fictional domain. As human agents, some of our formal parts are fictional. To be a dancer, a husband, a traveler, a friendly customer, a gourmet, or what have you, depends essentially on an interpretation. For this reason, there is a history of dance, marriage, tourism, gastronomy, and so forth. This history consists of a series of interpretations that justifiably count as admissible in their time and place. The fictional, therefore, does not contrast with the real or the existent. Rather, it is part of what there is. The fictional field of sense (which is actually not unified into one kind of field of sense, but thereby hangs a tale …) is as real as the universe.