Neo-Existentialism

by Markus Gabriel

  Unfortunately, in her reply she does not tell me what she takes to be the general flaw in any such additive conception, and it is not clear to me where to locate the potential for a substantial disagreement between the Neo-Existentialist and the Aristotelian. For, on one interpretation, the Neo-Existentialist is an Aristotelian after all. What I have in mind is this: if we call the whole which has animal and geistig parts the human life form, all parties in dialogue here are entitled to subscribe to Kern’s view that

  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. (p. 71)

  But that does not entail any substantial problem for the anti-naturalist Neo-Existentialist unless Kern shows that “human life” in her sense is a natural kind in my sense. For, then, she might be on the verge of vindicating a naturalistic position on Neo-Existentialist grounds, which would mean that Neo-Existentialism’s claim to anti-naturalism is not fully warranted.

  Generally, my preferred take on the “mind–body problem” is that mind and body are not related to each other in any of the ways standardly considered (identity of any sort, substance dualism, supervenience, grounding, etc.). The model for their relationship that I offer can be labeled conditionalism. Conditionalism is the view that any event that counts as an exercise of the human being’s capacity to conceive of itself in light of a notion of the human being involves both mental and non-mental conditions. The non-mental, natural processes that are part of human life are not independent strata but, rather, elements in a field of sense accessible to natural-scientific knowledge acquisition about natural kinds. Hence, the geistig dimensions of our life are not somehow added on to a non-mental reality. They are themselves a kind of reality such that elements from non-mental reality (but not all of non-mental reality) are a part of them. Geist is a whole which in the case of a human being has a body as its part.

  To sum up, I am not convinced that my position is really

  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. (p. 72)

  It is not correct that a human being cannot think of herself as a kind of animal. Yet, if I think of myself as a kind of animal, I think of my body as having a certain constitution consisting of an arrangement of natural kinds best understood by natural science. Biology knows better what an animal actually is than any armchair reasoning about the human life form. All I have been saying is that the human being, or human being for short, is not a kind of animal but an instance of Geist, where “Geist” does not pick out a natural kind and is, hence, a whole that cannot be subjected entirely to natural-scientific research.

  It is also not correct that, if someone thinks of herself as a kind of animal, she is “incapable of ever knowing that she is a human being.” All I have been saying is that someone who thinks of herself as a kind of animal in the sense of “animality” brought out by modern natural science makes a mistake on the existential level. She is wrong not merely about a natural kind, but about herself, as she thinks of herself in terms of a vocabulary designed to pick out natural kinds. There are various degrees of deception that can flow from this.

  Having said that, I do not believe that Kern’s Aristotelian thinks of herself as an animal in the sense of an overall biochemical autopoietic emergent whole, or whatever is exactly the right take on the notion of life that best captures the spirit of contemporary biology on that matter.13 Rather, the Aristotelian introduces a notion of human life that makes it hard to see how a human being can be an animal. At the end of the day, the anti-naturalist and the Aristotelian might converge on the issue of human animality once the meaning of “animality” is settled in the context of the semantic framework I assume in my account of “scientifically established facts.” It seems to me that Kern’s notion of human life is incompatible with the thought that our animality is best described by the contemporary life sciences. She might then agree with me after all that human beings can think of themselves without conceiving of their humanity in terms of the (alleged) fact that we are a certain kind of animal. For this is exactly what Kern proposes under the heading of Aristotelianism.

  Notes

  1 See Tononi and Koch (2015). I thank Giulio Tononi for intensive discussion of these issues during the Congreso Futuro organized by the Chilean government in January 2018. Fortunately, the Chilean senator Guido Girardi and his team thought that, intellectually, Giulio and I would enjoy traveling together through Chile (including a trip to Antarctica and Patagonia), which gave us some time to exchange thoughts on consciousness and mindedness. Two other scientists have shaped my understanding of the brain part of the mind–brain problem: Armin Cremers, a brilliant computer scientist from my home institution, the University of Bonn, and Robert Nitsch, neuroscientist and director of the University of Münster’s hospital. I thank them for destroying my illusion that we are entitled to assume that there is a unified organ within our skull that we successfully refer to with the word “the brain.”

  2 See recently Ellis (2016). For a helpful overview over the philosophical views and publications by Einstein, Schrödinger, Heisenberg, and others, see Scheibe (2012).

  3 For more on this, see Gabriel (2017).

  4 On the notion of freedom in my Neo-Existentialist framework, see ibid., Ch. 5.

  5 This formal structure of humanity is not (yet) implemented institutionally despite the fact that ever since the dawn of modernity, and specifically ever since the French Revolution, there has been the hope among thinkers who embrace humanity that socio-political history tends towards a unification of all humans under the supreme formal norm of their capacity of self-constitution. It would lead too far afield to argue that we could derive positive socio-political content from our self-constitution, as this was not my intention in the work under discussion here.

  6 This is a formulation of Charles Travis’s from a book manuscript on Frege which he presented and discussed at a joint seminar at the International Centre for Philosophy at the University of Bonn in the summer semester 2017.

  7 On one such story, see Assmann (2009, 1998).

  8 To be subject to a norm, even if it is a rational norm (such as an inference pattern), need not involve consciousness of that fact on the part of the agent. See Burge (2013: 166ff.). Normativity, thus, is not sufficient for our grasp of our mindedness. Rather, specific forms of normativity, such as the activity of self-consciously aiming at the truth about our mindedness, exhibit the form that is required to draw a norm/nature distinction that does the job Benoist assigns to it. For the sake of the argument, I assume that the details of a relevant account of the specific normativity of the mental are filled in. In any event, some norms are natural kinds in my sense of the term, so that normativity cannot be the mark of the mental to the extent to which we distinguish it at all from the natural or physical.

  9 On this, see the recent defense of a narrative ontology of the self in Hutter (2017).

  10 This aspect of my ontology of fictional objects draws on Kablitz (2012). For more on this, see Gabriel (2016b).

  11 This is how I read the cataphoric reference of “this fact” in Kern’s text.

  12 For an interesting non-reductionist account of the causal web correlated to consciousness, see Tononi and Koch (2015).

  13 For an overview of the most recent development of non-mechanistic accounts of life in natural science, see Capra and Luisi (2017).

  References

  Assmann, J. (1998) Moses the Egyptian: The Memory of Egypt in Western Monotheism. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

  Assma
nn, J. (2009) The Prize of Monotheism. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press.

  Azzouni, J. (2010) Talking about Nothing: Numbers, Hallucinations, and Fictions. New York: Oxford University Press.

  Benoist, J. (2001) Représentations sans objet: aux origines de la phénoménologie et de la philosophie analytique. Paris: PUF.

  Bishop, R. and Atmanspacher, A. (2011) The causal closure of physics and free will, in R. Kane (ed.), Oxford Handbook of Free Will. Oxford: Oxford University Press, pp. 101–11.

  Blumenberg, H. (1985) The Legitimacy of the Modern Age. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.

  Brock, S. and Everett, A. (eds) (2015) Fictional Objects. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

  Burge, T. (2013) Cognition through Understanding: Self-Knowledge, Interlocution, Reasoning, Reflection, Philosophical Essays, Vol. 3. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

  Capra F. and Luisi, P. L. (2017) The Systems View of Life: A Unifying Vision. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

  Cavell, S. (1999) The Claim of Reason: Wittgenstein, Skepticism, Morality, and Tragedy. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

  Chakravartty, A. (2017) Scientific Ontology: Integrating Naturalized Metaphysics and Voluntarist Epistemology. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

  Chalmers, D. (1996) The Conscious Mind: In Search of a Fundamental Theory. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

  Chalmers, D. (2006a) The foundations of two-dimensional semantics, in M. García-Carpintero and J. Macià (eds), Two-Dimensional Semantics: Foundations and Applications. Oxford: Oxford University Press, pp. 55–140.

  Chalmers, D. (2006b) Two-dimensional semantics, in E. Lepore and B. Smith (eds), The Oxford Handbook of Philosophy of Language. Oxford: Oxford University Press, pp. 575–606.

  Chalmers, D. (2009) The two-dimensional argument against materialism, in B. P. McLaughlin, A. Beckermann and S. Walter (eds), The Oxford Handbook of Philosophy of Mind. Oxford: Oxford University Press, pp. 313–35.

  Chang, H. (2012) Is Water H2O? Evidence, Realism and Pluralism. Dordrecht: Springer.

  Chomsky, N. (1975). Reflections on Language. New York: Pantheon Books.

  Chomsky, N. (1988) Language and Problems of Knowledge: The Managua Lectures. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.

  Clark, A., and Chalmers, D. (1998) The extended mind, Analysis, 58(1): 7–19.

  Dellian, E. (2007) Die Rehabilitierung des Galileo Galilei oder die Kritik der Kantischen Vernunft. Sankt Augustin: Academia.

  Dennett, D. (1984) Elbow Room: The Varieties of Free Will Worth Wanting. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.

  Dennett, D. (1991) Consciousness Explained. Boston: Back Bay Books.

  Dennett, D. (1992) The self as the center of narrative gravity, in F. S. Kessel, P. M. Cole, and D. L. Johnson (eds), Self and Consciousness: Multiple Perspectives. Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum, pp. 103–15.

  Dennett, D. (2017) From Bacteria to Bach and Back: The Evolution of Minds. New York: W. W. Norton.

  Ellis, G. F. R. (2016) How Can Physics Underlie the Mind? Top-Down Causation in the Human Context. Berlin: Springer.

  Gabriel, M. (2014) An den Grenzen der Erkenntnistheorie: Die notwendige Endlichkeit des objektiven Wissens als Lektion des Skeptizismus. 2nd edn, Freiburg: Karl Alber.

  Gabriel, M. (2015a) Fields of Sense: A New Realist Ontology. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press.

  Gabriel, M. (2015b) Why the World Does Not Exist. Cambridge: Polity.

  Gabriel, M. (2016a) What kind of an idealist (if any) is Hegel?, Hegel Bulletin, 37(2): 181–208.

  Gabriel, M. (2016b) Repliken auf Diehl/Rosefeldt, Hübner, Rödl und Stekeler-Weithofer, in T. Buchheim (ed.), Jahrbuch-Kontroversen 2: Markus Gabriel: Neutraler Realismus. Freiburg: Karl Alber, pp. 165–222.

  Gabriel, M. (2017) I am Not a Brain: Philosophy of Mind for the Twenty-First Century. Cambridge: Polity.

  Gabriel, M. and Žižek, S. (2009) Mythology, Madness and Laughter: Subjectivity in German Idealism. London: Continuum.

  Görnitz, T. and Görnitz, B. (2016) Von der Quantenphysik zum Bewusstsein: Kosmos, Geist und Materie. Berlin: Springer.

  Hegel, G. W. F. (1976) The Phenomenology of Spirit, trans. A. V. Miller. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

  Hegel, G. W. F. (1988) Faith and Knowledge, ed. and trans. W. Cerf and H. S. Harris. New York: State University of New York Press.

  Hegel, G. W. F. (2010) Philosophy of Mind, trans. W. Wallace and A. V. Miller, rev. M. Inwood. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

  Henrich, D. (2007) Denken und Selbstsein: Vorlesungen über Subjektivität. Berlin: Suhrkamp.

  Hofweber, T. (2016) Ontology and the Ambitions of Metaphysics. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

  Husserl, E. (1970) The Crisis of European Sciences and Transcendental Phenomenology. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press.

  Hutter, A. (2017) Narrative Ontologie. Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck.

  Jackson, F. (1986) What Mary didn’t know, Journal of Philosophy, 83(5): 291–5.

  Jackson, F. (1998) From Metaphysics to Ethics: A Defense of a Conceptual Analysis. Oxford: Clarendon Press.

  Kablitz, A. (2012) Kunst des Möglichen: Theorie der Literatur. Freiburg im Breisgau: Rombach.

  Kant, I. (1902–). Kants gesammelte Schriften, ed. Deutschen (Königlich Preußischen) Akademie der Wissenschaften, 29 vols. Berlin: Walter de Gruyter.

  Kant, I. (1992) Dreams of a spirit seer elucidated by dreams of metaphysics, in Immanuel Kant: Theoretical philosophy, 1755–1770, ed. and trans. D. Walford. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, pp. 301–59.

  Kant, I. (2015) Critique of Practical Reason, ed. and trans. M. Gregor. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

  Kern, A., and Kietzmann, C. (eds) (2017) Selbstbewusstes Leben: Texte zu einer transformativen Theorie der menschlichen Subjektivität. Berlin: Suhrkamp.

  Levine, J. (2004) Purple Haze: The Puzzle of Consciousness. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

  Lewens, T. (2015) Cultural Evolution: Conceptual Challenges. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

  McGinn, C. (1993) The Problem of Consciousness: Essays Towards Resolution. New York: Wiley.

  McGinn, C. (1999) The Mysterious Flame: Conscious Minds in a Material World. New York: Basic Books.

  Nagel, T. (1989) The View from Nowhere. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

  Nagel, T. (2012) Mind and Cosmos: Why the Materialist Neo-Darwinian Conception of Nature is Almost Certainly False. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

  Nitsch, R. (2012) Gehirn, Geist und Bedeutung: Zur Stellung der Neurowissenschaften in der Leib-Seele-Diskussion. Münster: Mentis.

  Noë, A. (2009) Out of Our Heads: Why You Are Not Your Brain, and Other Lessons from the Biology of Consciousness. New York: Hill & Wang.

  Pinker, S. (1997) How the Mind Works. New York: W. W. Norton.

  Popper, K., and Eccles, J. (1977) The Self and its Brain: An Argument for Interactionism. Berlin: Springer.

  Price, H. (2011) Naturalism without Mirrors. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

  Putnam, H. (1981) Reason, Truth, and History. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

  Putnam, H. (1992) Realism with a Human Face. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

  Putnam, H. (2012) Philosophy in an Age of Science: Physics, Mathematics, and Skepticism. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

  Quine, W. V. O. (1960) Word and Object. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.

  Rayo, A. (2013) The Construction of Logical Space. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

  Ricoeur, P. (1992) Oneself as Another. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

  Robinson, H. (2017) Dualism, in E. Zalta (ed.), The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, https://plato.stanford.edu/archives/fall2017/entries/dualism/.

  Scheibe, E. (2012) Die Philosophie der Physiker. Munich: Beck.

  Schelling, F. W. J. (2014) Zeitschrift für spekulative Physik, Vol. 2. Hamburg: Meiner.

  Schelling, F. W. J. (2017) Zeitschrift für spekulative Physik, Vol. 1. Hamburg: Meiner.

  Scruton, R. (2017) On Human Nat
ure. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.

  Searle, J. (2010) Making the Social World: The Structure of Human Civilization. New York: Oxford University Press.

  Sellars, W. (1963) Science, Perception and Reality. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul.

  Shear, J. (1997) Explaining Consciousness: The “Hard Problem”. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.

  Tallis, R. (2014) Aping Mankind: Neuromania, Darwinitis and the Misrepresentation of Humanity. London: Routledge.

  Taylor, C. (1964) The Explanation of Behaviour. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul.

  Taylor, C. (1985a) Philosophical Papers, Vol. 1: Human Agency and Language. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

  Taylor, C. (1985b) Philosophical Papers, Vol. 2: Philosophy and the Human Sciences. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

  Taylor, C. (2007) A Secular Age. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

  Tetens, H. (2015) Gott denken: Ein Versuch über rationale Theologie. Stuttgart: Reclam.

  Tononi, G. and Koch, C. (2015) Consciousness: here, there, and everywhere?, Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B, 370: 20140167.

  Varela, F., Thompson, E., and Rosch, E. (2016 [1991]). The Embodied Mind: Cognitive Science and Human Experience. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.

  Index

  action 38–9, 40, 44, 50, 56–7, 79

  Allen, Woody 44

  animal life 70–1, 75, 103, 114n.6 see also human versus non-human/animal

  anti-materialism 24, 30, 34, 40–1

  anti-naturalism 100, 102, 103, 104–5

  Aristotle 17, 19, 62, 68–72, 102–5 and Geist 68, 72

  and human versus animal 69–72, 94, 95, 96, 104–5, 114n.5, 114n.6

  and identity 69–70, 102–3