According to Pausanias, inscribed above the temple to Apollo at Delphi were the wise words Know Thyself. This injunction has been referenced by everyone from Plato to the oracle in the Matrix trilogy. As philosopher Derek Parfit has argued, one can read the history of Western moral philosophy as an ongoing story about why care for the self is what ultimately matters. Think of Grecian arguments about the need to develop a beautiful soul, the Christian demand that we make ourselves into a pure individual worthy of salvation, the Romantic veneration of self-expression, and our postmodern fixation on identity. However, what exactly is the self? If you believe that each individual human is fundamentally a self in some essential sense, then to ask that is to question what we are. There are many ways to answer this. One popular approach is literary and psychological. Great literature from The Iliad through to the works of Tolstoy and Virginia Woolf has asked how our sense of self evolves. The richest works illuminate this theme by highlighting the universal aspects of a single individual’s development over time.
There are five main competing philosophical conceptions of the self. The first four view the self as located in the soul, the body, the brain and the mind respectively; the last contends that we have no real self at all. The moral and political arguments associated with each position may help clarify some of the fierce current disputes about identity and the purpose of life in postmodernity.
The Self Is the Soul
It has been proven to us unequivocally that if we are ever going to gain clear knowledge of something, we must separate ourselves from our body and examine with our soul only, each thing on its own. It seems then that it will only be possible for us to attain that which we desire and love the most, which is wisdom, after we die because, obviously, as this enquiry proves to us that we cannot attain it while we are alive. Because if it is not possible to learn anything clearly when we are attached to the body, we must say that only one of two things is possible: either it is impossible to learn anything clearly anywhere at all or else, it is only possible after we die, since then the soul will be free of the body unlike before, when we were alive.—Socrates, in Plato’s Phaedo
Perhaps the single most influential theory of the self in western philosophy and the monotheistic traditions is that we are fundamentally souls. While body and mind are fungible features of our existence, changing over time, the soul is an eternal center that determines what we are. Associated with this conception of selfhood is a dualistic model of temporality, wherein our experience of time as succession is really just the moving image of eternity. Our temporal existence, which includes bodily and mental change and decay, is less real than what persists eternally, including the soul. The political and moral implications of this are well known. Our time on this earth is finite and less real than the eternal realm. This means that we should be far less attentive to our worldly needs, since these are ultimately ephemeral. Instead, our moral and political energies should be directed towards connecting with the eternal within us and within existence generally. This means improving the quality of our soul by apprehending objects such as the Platonic forms of justice or God.
Beyond the psychological appeal of eternal life, the soul theory of the self has many virtues. It offers an economical explanation of the feeling of being a persistent self over time: while our thoughts and body can change dramatically, it is difficult to escape the sense that we remain inexorably the same entity over the course of life. Plato argues that our eternal nature also explains how we can apprehend abstract entities such as number, which don’t have any clear empirical correlates. But the soul theory has many problems. The argument for the soul is almost always inserted as a way of explaining something we do not fully understand: our capacity to comprehend numbers, for example. But just because we cannot understand some feature of ourselves doesn’t justify any speculative answer we may put forward. The argument that we have a soul is also subject to Nietzschian criticisms: it shields the weak from the troubles of the world and causes them to regret life. Perhaps life is tragic and finite and we should simply steel ourselves to make the best of it.
The Self Is the Body
Some argue that Plato and his descendants are fundamentally wrong. There is no soul: we are just bodies. French phenomenologist Maurice Merleau-Ponty has claimed that much of western thinking has been a concerted effort to avoid considering the body. But, with the advent of scientific modernity, we have gradually moved towards a more materialistic perspective, reflected in contemporary injunctions to embrace body positivity and to lavish incessant care on the body. The problem with this perspective has been highlighted by Shelly Kagan. When we claim the body is the self, we do not mean the entire body. As we age, the cells in our body die and are replaced, but we would not say that our self dies and is replaced by a copy. We may even replace entire organs through transplants. This suggests that some parts of the body take priority over others when it comes to selfhood.
The Self Is the Brain
The argument that the self is the brain is more persuasive than the argument that it is the entire body. If a person’s brain were removed and destroyed, but medical technology kept the remainder of the body alive, we would probably not say that the self that was located in that body still existed, since its material locus had been eradicated. By contrast, it is plausible to think that, should we manage to successfully transplant a living brain into another body, the person who woke up from the operation would be the individual carried within that brain’s grey matter. This materialist conception prompts a more materialist politics. It suggests that we are, contra Plato, finite beings composed of matter that exists within time. We may be remarkably sophisticated relative to simpler forms of matter, but there is no ontological difference between ourselves and the physical elements which make up both the world and our brains. This suggests that the point of life is happiness in the here and now, which is probably why people espousing this view tend to emphasize utility maximization and wellbeing as central moral goals.
There is a lot going for the brain view of the self. It meshes with our scientific outlook, and can grow in complexity and richness as our empirical understanding of the brain increases. But it is not without serious limitations—the brain theory of the self and consciousness cannot account for qualia. Frank Jackson’s thought experiment involving Mary the color scientist is helpful in this regard. Imagine a woman named Mary, blind from birth, who grows up to be a neuroscientist specialising in the mechanics of color vision. Mary would still not know what it was like to see the color blue—despite knowing how the brain apprehends colors. This suggests a qualitative aspect to selfhood and experience, which is not captured by the materialist outlook. As Saul Kripke argues in Naming and Necessity, the material facts associated with a brain’s experience of pain tell us little about what it is actually like for a self to experience pain. Or consider the more grotesque scenario presented by Derek Parfit. We discover that both hemispheres of the brain carry all that is required for selfhood, independently. We then halve the brain of a single individual and put each half into a separate body. Despite having effectively the same brain, it would be difficult to claim that each individual had the same self, since each would go on to have her own unique memories and experiences.
The Self Is the Mind
These problems with the materialist outlook go back a long way and this is why many remain attracted to Cartesian style solutions, which posit that selfhood is located in some feature of the mind. For Descartes, a mysterious ego inhabits the body and gives it life. For the empiricist Locke, it is our memories that generate selfhood. The fact that I can recall being a child who went to school, while being an adult working at a job, shows that I have remained the same self over time. Some claim that personality determines selfhood: I am Matthew McManus not just because I have memories of always having been so, but because I identify as such and have ambitions and desires unique to myself, which are projected into the future. For Kant, we have an outer self, which exists in the phenomenal world of physical things and perceives them, and an inner self, which includes our rational intellect and will to act. This inner self is far more crucial, since it forms the basis of our dignity and freedom. To a materialist, such arguments seem far fetched and reminiscent of Platonic speculations. Critics like Daniel Dennett insist that the mind and thus our sense of self is produced by processes in the brain. But some philosophers, like David Chalmers, call upon science to broaden its understanding to incorporate non-physical features like consciousness.
The idea that the mind is the basis of the self is appealing—indeed, this is the view I myself subscribe to. It seems capable of incorporating elements of the world, such as our experience of qualia, which a purely materialist view cannot explain. It also explains why possessing the same brain is not the same as being the same self, as Parfit’s thought experiment demonstrates. The argument that the self is not merely the brain also has moral appeal. It suggests that, although we are physical objects, elements of our selfhood cannot be explained exclusively in those terms—such elements might include human freedom and creativity, which may be inexplicable to deterministic materialism. But the position also shares many of the problems of Platonism: the fact that materialism cannot firmly explain qualia doesn’t justify positing speculative entities, like a non-material mind. In Reasons and Persons, Parfit also raises another objection: even the mind may not provide a firm basis for selfhood. Consider this thought experiment: I enter a Star Trek-style transporter, with the intention of beaming down to Mars. I discover that, although the machine has cloned my mind and body and created a copy on Mars, the originals on my spaceship will swiftly be destroyed. For a brief moment, though, there are two people with the same body, brain and mind. Parfit points out that it would be little consolation to the original to know that someone with his mind—in particular, with his memories—was going to continue. The original would still feel that he was dying and that his self was being destroyed and replaced by a mere duplicate.
There Is No Self
For my part, when I enter most intimately into what I call myself, I always stumble on some particular perception or other, of heat or cold, light or shade, love or hatred, pain or pleasure. I never can catch myself at any time without a perception, and never can observe any thing but the perception. When my perceptions are remov’d for any time, as by sound sleep; so long am I insensible of myself, and may truly be said not to exist. And were all my perceptions remov’d by death, and cou’d I neither think, nor feel, nor see, nor love, nor hate after the dissolution of my body, I shou’d be entirely annihilated, nor do I conceive what is farther requisite to make me a perfect non-entity. If any one upon serious and unprejudic’d reflexion, thinks he has a different notion of himself, I must confess I can reason no longer with him. All I can allow him is, that he may be in the right as well as I, and that we are essentially different in this particular.—David Hume, A Treatise Concerning Human Nature
The most radical position is that there ultimately is no self: that the self is an illusion or a cultural conceit. This is often presented as the position of the Buddha, in his insistence that we seek a selflessness that will free us from illusion. It is also the position of the great empiricist David Hume, who pointed out how ephemeral the idea of selfhood is. We are never able to identify what the self is in the world. Even when looking inward, we can only apprehend the different perceptions we have experienced over time: at one moment eating, at another writing, touching a table and so on. Nowhere amid these perceptions do we find the self. Derek Parfit also claims that we should move away from thinking that we have a fixed self. This has moral consequences, Parfit argues, since, once we realize that the self is ephemeral, we have few reasons to prioritize it. It is far more important to become more selfless and giving. Rather than prioritizing our own needs, to placate a self that has a thin existence at best, we should donate significant resources to trying to improve the world. Richard Rorty makes a similar comment when he enjoins us to stop thinking of ourselves as having Cartesian minds, and denies scientific materialism’s ability to explain all human workings by appealing to the brain.
This position resolves the problems with selfhood by dissolving them. Arguing about selfhood, in this view, is like arguing about what a unicorn really is. The question cannot be answered because there is no self to analyze. It also enjoins us to embrace a more impartial moral outlook, by recognizing that we as individuals are unimportant and should therefore stop being self-centered. However this sidesteps the qualitative problems highlighted above: experiences like color and pain and emotions like love and hate seem irrevocably attached to a self who cares about what is happening. This has moral implications, since it is impossible to push impartiality so far that it becomes mere indifference. Morality has an irrevocably practical aspect, as Kant observed. I wish to act morally because I feel it is important for me, as someone who cares about his actions and the impact they have on others. If there were no selves, it would be difficult to locate a source of action or suggest that what occurs in the world matters. As Shakespeare puts it, “There is nothing good or evil, but thinking makes it so.” Thinking makes it so because what happens is relevant to us, and we weigh it accordingly.
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So much navel-gazing. I’ve got an idea. Let’s contemplate the unknowable…. Nope. Glad I’m not an intellectual; and thanks for reminding me. A small boy lifting and gazing under a rotten log has more intellectual curiosity than anything I’ve read here.
I noted the other day that while the “blank slate” or “tabula rasa” concept of the mind was first formulated and popularized in its modern form by the 17th century English philosopher John Locke (1632-1704), it was anticipated by ancient and mediaeval thinkers like Aristotle, the Stoics, Avicenna, Ibn Tufail, and St. Thomas Aquinas. A few days earlier, I had also noted that the 18th century Enlightenment philosopher David Hume (1711-1776) may possibly have derived his view of the “self” as merely a “bundle of perceptions” from Buddhist thought–during his youthful 1735-1737 sojourn in La Flèche, France, he may have learned about Buddhist beliefs from Jesuit missionaries to the Far East at La Flèche’s Royal College.
From further research the past few days, I’ve found that the 12th century Islamic philosopher Ibn Tufail has been frequently described as a significant influence on Locke’s “tabula rasa” psychology and epistemology in “An Essay Concerning Human Understanding” (1690). Abu Bakr Muhammad ibn Abd al-Malik ibn Tufail (1105-1185), a Muslim Arab physician, astronomer, philosopher, theologian, vizier, and court official of al-Andalus (Arab-ruled mediaeval Spain), formulated a “blank slate” view of the mind in his philosophical novel “Hayy ibn Yaqzan” (“Alive, Son of Awake”). He depicted a feral child on a deserted island in the Indian Ocean, raised by a she-gazelle with no human contact until very late on life, who acquires an accurate scientific conception of the natural world simply by careful observation, and deduces the existence of God and a spiritual realm by pure reasoning. “Hayy ibn Yaqzan” was translated into Latin in 1671 as “Philosophus Autodidactus” (“The Self-Taught Philosopher”) by the English Orientalist and Bible scholar Edward Pococke (1604-1691), and into English by Simon Ockley in 1708 as “The Improvement of Human Reason, Exhibited in the Life of Hai ebn Yodkhan.” Pococke’s 1671 “Philosophus Autodidactus” version of “Hayy ibn Yaqzan” has often been cited as a significant influence on Locke’s “Essay Concerning Human Understanding.” Ibn Tufail’s novelistic depiction of the creatively self-reliant flourishing of an isolated man on a desert island has also often been considered a possible inspiration of Daniel Defoe’s “Robinson Crusoe.”
David Hume’s possible debt to Buddhist philosophy encountered during his 1735-1737 La Flèche sojourn from Jesuit missionaries to the Far East has been most notably argued, as I noted a few days ago, by University of California (Berkeley) psychologist and philosopher Alison Gopnik in a 2009 “Hume Studies” article. If Gopnik is correct, I noted, this suggests that an important strand of modern Western philosophical and psychological thinking may have an ultimate Asian, origin. This in turn could be seen, I argued, as a point of factual historical evidence against the currently fashionable postcolonial–critical race–postmodernist attack on Enlightenment thinking as thoroughly imbued with racist, imperialist, and colonialist Western dismissal and denigration of non-European peoples and cultures! Ibn Tufail’s possible influence both on John Locke and Daniel Defoe, I’d now add, would suggest a similar point of evidence against sweeping condemnations of a supposed fundamentally racist, colonialist, and imperialist Enlightenment!
I’m rather fond of the self as brain, and am unconvinced by any of the arguments against it referenced above. The whole qualia argument stinks of misdirection to me (‘Yeah, but zooberzabs!’ or whatever new hurdle you wish to add to move the goalposts), and the one about cutting a brain in half seems more germane, it relies on the assumption that halving a brain and putting it in two bodies is a viable proposition, which doesn’t seem to be obviously true.
I don’t see why in the Mary example she couldn’t devise some way of stimulating the brain to approximate looking at colour a la simulations like ‘The Matrix’.
Fantastical postulations of fictional scenarios are susceptible to additions of other fantastical conditions, leading us nowhere.
The solution of ‘hey, there’s no self’ doesn’t seem to be particularly valuable, and the division of the ideas of self into five categories seems to ignore the obvious attempt at synthesizing soul, body, brain, and mind (mind you, body-brain-mind might be a more easily linked trio).
I am not sure what the arguments why each conception matters really are in any meaningful way. What ARE you trying to say, Mr. M?
The other day, I compared Matt McManus’ successive historical conceptions of the self as the soul, the body, the brain, and as unreal to my own schema of successively “Theospheric” or religious, “Physiospheric” or scientific-naturalist, and “Sociospheric” modes of thinking about human nature and Humanity’s place in the world. I described Western thinkers in the past few centuries as being largely preoccupied first with what I call the “Theosphere” of religious beliefs and concepts, then with the “Physiosphere” of basically materialistic natural laws and forces, and next with the “Sociosphere” of social, cultural, and interpersonal relationships, attitudes, beliefs, and feelings. Human beings are mainly seen first as children of God afflicted with sin (or at least with troublesome moral fallibility) and in need of redemption, next as natural beings in a natural world largely driven by biological needs and instincts though also possessing a modicum of reason, and then as social beings, products of their society and culture, with their personalities, temperaments, behavior, and capacities largely determined by family dynamics, social conditions, and cultural influences. Theospheric, Physiospheric, and Sociospheric thinkers see human behavior, personality, and character as largely or even entirely determined respectively by free will (and/or by the Christian theological concept of Original Sin), by biology and especially by heredity (“nature” in the “nature vs. nurture” dichotomy), and by environment, education, and family dynamics (“nurture”). Metaphysically or ontologically, Theospheric thinkers generally lean toward mind/matter, body/soul, or flesh/spirit dualism and Physiospheric thinkers toward an at least tacit if not always explicit materialism–while Sociospheric thinkers tend to be neutral or totally indifferent to the mind/matter ot Idealism/Materialism philosophical question.
While Theospheric thinking is mainly associated with traditional religious belief or with a more or less Platonist metaphysics, secular Western philosophers, social scientists, and public intellectuals in the past couple of centuries have largely been divided between basically Physiospheric and basically Sociospheric thinkers, a division with 17th and 18th century roots but increasingly salient in the 19th and even more so the 20th and 21st centuries. As I’ve already noted, the crux of the division is based on a preference for emphasizing biology or culture, heredity or environment, “nature” or “nurture” as the most important shapers of human capacity, personality, and character, with the Physiospherists stressing biology, heredity, and “nature” and the Sociospherists emphasizing culture, environment, and “nurture.” As I’ve also noted, the division also reflects differing emphasis on two distinct if often intertwined strands or themes of Enlightenment and post-Enlightenment thought: the “Naturalist” view of humans as natural creatures in a natural world and subject to inexorable natural laws, versus the “Rationalist” view of humans as rational beings in a rationally comprehensible world capable of using their reason to improve their individual and collective lot in life. Physiospherists stress the Naturalist theme, while Sociospherists tend to lean rather toward the Rationalist theme. With their emphasis on culture, environment, and “nurture” over biology, heredity, and “nature,” Sociospheric thinkers generally espouse a “blank slate” (Latin “tabula rasa”) theory of the human mind and personality–which Physiospherists mostly reject.
The “blank slate” view of the mind and its empiricist theory of knowledge were anticipated by Greek, Scholastic, and Islamic thinkers like Aristotle, the Stoics, St. Thomas Aquinas, Avicenna, and Ibn Tufail. However, they were formulated and popularized in their modern form by 17th and 18th century philosophers like John Locke (1632-1704), Étienne Bonnot de Condillac (1714-1780), Claude-Adrien Helvétius (1715-1771), and the Marquis de Condorcet (1743-1794), followed in the 19th century by John Stuart Mill (1806-1873). Locke, Condillac, Helvétius, Condorcet, and Mill saw the mind as a “blank slate” written on exclusively by personal experience, education, and social and cultural conditioning, with no innate, hereditary, or instinctive properties. Enlightenment thinkers influenced by Locke, Condillac, and their followers saw human beings as governed, if not wholly by reason, then at least by self-interest–and interests could be beneficially harnessed and harmonized in a peaceful, orderly, rational bourgeois society. The “Blank Slate” view of the mind coexisted somewhat uneasily in Enlightenment thought with the “Ghost in the Machine” (in 20th century British analytic philosopher Gilbert Ryle’s sarcastic term) concept of the mind as a purely immaterial “thinking substance” (“res extensa”) mysteriously linked to the body (in the brain? In the pineal gland?) formulated in the 17th century by René Descartes (1596-1650). It also coexisted in at least implicit tension with the hard-shell Physiospheric materialism of 18th century “philosophes” like Julien Offray de La Mettrie (1709-1751), the Baron d’Holbach (1723-1789), and Pierre Cabanis (1757-1808). Cabanis, we may recall, argued that just as the stomach receives and digests food so the brain receives and digests sensory impressions and secretes ideas.
In the 19th century, as suggested, e.g., by Harvard historian H. Stuart Hughes in “Consciousness and Society” (1958), the 18th century intellectual heritage hardened into a “positivism” (as it was now called) stressing the Enlightenment legacy’s “naturalist” side over its “rationalist” theme. Under Darwinist influence it became what Hughes called “a kind of scientific fatalism,” with a “Hobbesian state of nature (now called ‘struggle for existence’)” as its “characteristic view of the relation between man and man.” Hughes considered it as the “antithesis” of what he saw as the “buoyantly optimistic attitude” of the ‘philosophes.’” After Auguste Comte (1798-1857) in France, who coined the name “positivism,” and his English disciple Herbert Spencer (1820-1903), “the second of the high priests of positivism after Comte himself,” the leading positivists were Roberto Ardigò (1828-1920) in Italy, Emil Du Bois-Reymond (1818-1896) in Germany, and the critic and historian Hippolyte Taine (1828-1893) and the Orientalist, philosopher, and historian Ernest Renan (1823-1892) in France. Ardigò and Du Bois-Reymond preached a crude, dogmatic materialistic scientism, while Taine and Renan preached “a dedicated search for precise chains of causation and an ethic of dignified, urbane resignation.” Taine, thus, was celebrated for his definition of “virtue and vice” as “products like sugar and vitriol,” and “genius” as “a resultant of race, milieu, and the [proper] moment.” Cabanis’ comparison of the brain and thought to the stomach and digestion was echoed by 19th century scientific popularizers like Karl Vogt (1817-1895), Jacob Moleschott (1822-1893), and Ludwig Büchner (1824-1899) as the popular materialist slogan that the brain secretes thought just as the liver secretes bile and the kidneys secrete urine. In the mid and late 19th century, the spread of Darwinian evolutionary ideas led 19th century “positivists” to develop the fashionable “scientific” socio-political ideologies of “Social Darwinism,” racism, and eugenics.
The end of the 19th century and the beginning of the 20th, however, saw the beginnings of a widespread intellectual revolt against this basically Physiospheric “positivism,” and also against its even more emphatically Physiospheric offshoots like Social Darwinism, and eugenics. Though he did not himself use the terms “Physiosphere” and “Sociosphere,” H. Stuart Hughes described this basically Sociospheric anti-“positivist” revolt in “Consciousness and Society.” His book portrayed a galaxy of late 19th and early 20th century European thinkers like Freud, Nietzsche, Max Weber, Émile Durkheim, Vilfredo Pareto, Henri Bergson, Georges Sorel, Benedetto Croce, Antonio Gramsci, Ludwig Wittgenstein, and Karl Mannheim, along with William James’ as their main contemporary American “fellow-traveler.” He showed them introducing and emphasizing a kind of “middle zone” of social and interpersonal attitudes, feelings, beliefs, and relationships in-between biological need, impulse, and instinct on the one hand and purely rational assessment of external reality on the other.
This late 19th/early 20th century “tabula rasa” revival was particularly influential in Sigmund Freud’s psychoanalysis. Freud described personality traits as being formed by family dynamics, such as his famous or notorious “Oedipus complex.”. Freud’s theories implied that humans lack free will, but also that genetic influences on human personality are minimal–in contrast to the prevailing 19th century psychological and psychiatric “medical materialism” (as William James scornfully called it in “The Varieties of Religious Experience”) stressing the overwhelming importance of biological, physiological, and hereditary factors. In Freudian psychoanalysis, one’s personality and character are largely determined by one’s upbringing.
This revived “tabula rasa” concept also became increasingly popular in the social sciences–in sociology, anthropology, sexology, criminology, and educational psychology–in the 20th century, in large part due at least originally to the influence of H. Stuart Hughes’ “Consciousness and Society” protagonists and their own disciples and followers. Eugenic ideas popular in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, strongly correlating human intelligence with social class, were increasingly rejected, especially after the 1920’s and 1930’s, and the idea that genes (or “blood”) determined a person’s character became condemned as racist. In the early and mid 20th century United States, this culturalist, anti-hereditarian outlook was pioneered above all by the anthropologists Franz Boas (1858-1948), Ruth Benedict (1887-1948), Margaret Mead (1901-1978), and Ashley Montagu (1905-1999) crusading against what they considered the racism and eugenics implicit in Social Darwinism. By the 1970s, scientists like John Money were understanding gender identity as socially constructed, rather than as rooted in genetics. Anthropologist John Tooby and evolutionary psychologist Leda Cosmides called this strongly culturalist, anti-hereditarian, and anti-biological Sociospheric outlook the SSSM (“Standard Social Science Model”) in 1992.
In the last few decades, however, there has been a retreat from at least the more extreme or dogmatic varieties of “tabula rasa” thinking in psychology, psychiatry, and the social sciences. There has also been a bit of a “backlash” among some social scientists against “blank slateism” and the SSSM as in their view more ideology and “political correctness” than science. Since the 1960’s, 1970’s, and 1980’s, researchers have found what they consider Important evidence against the “blank slate” model of the mind in behavioral genetics, especially in twin and adoption studies. They have interpreted this evidence as showing strong genetic influences on such personal characteristics as IQ, alcoholism, gender identity, sexual orientation, introversion versus extroversion, and other traits. Increasing evidence–or what has generally been interpreted as strong evidence–for genetic, neurological, and biochemical factors in schizophrenia and autism has likewise been reported by researchers in recent decades, with Bruno Bettelheim’s famous (or infamous) “refrigerator mother” theory of autism now almost universally being seen as discredited. Multivariate studies have been reported as showing that the distinct faculties of the mind, such as memory and reason, fractionate along genetic boundaries. Cultural universals like emotion also have been reported by researchers as indicating basic biological mechanisms in the mind.
Harvard University biologist, philosopher of science, and pioneering “sociobiologist” Edward O. Wilson attacked “blank slate” thinking, the SSSM, and the denial of biological influences on human behavior as unscientific, ideology-driven wishful thinking in “Consilience: The Unity of Knowledge” (1998). A few years later, Wilson was followed by Harvard University cognitive biologist, linguist, and evolutionary psychology advocate Steven Pinker in “The Blank Slate: The Modern Denial of Human Nature” (2002). Like Wilson, Pinker denounced “blank slateism” and the SSSM as largely just unscientific, “politically correct” ideology. He saw the SSSM and the “tabula rasa” concept as perpetuating what he considered three 17th and 18th century “myths”: John Locke’s “Blank Slate,” Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s “Noble Savage,” and René Descartes’ “Ghost in the Machine”–all of them in his view rooted in a dogmatic, unscientific denial of humankind’s overwhelmingly demonstrated and confirmed biological nature.
In his February 3, 2020 AREO essay on “Five Competing Conceptions of the Self and Why They Matter,” Prof. McManus described the five historically successive views that the self is the soul, that the self is the body, that the self is the brain, that the self is the mind, and that there really is no self. He quoted from Socrates in Plato’s “Phaedo” to illustrate the “self as soul” conception, likewise illustrated the “there is no self” view with a quotation from Hume’s “A Treatise Concerning Human Nature,” and traced the “self as mind” view to René Descartes’ immaterial ego inhabiting and enlivening the body and to the empiricist John Locke’s argument that our memories generate selfhood.
I’ve already mentioned the other day that paranormal phenomena like telepathy, clairvoyance, PK, and hauntings have often been argued as having a significant bearing on the nature of the “self,’ “mind,” or “soul.” I listed Kant, Hegel, Schopenhauer, William James, Henri Bergson, Alfred North Whitehead, and C.D. Broad as prominent modern Western philosophers who have taken the possible reality of such phenomena seriously.
On David Hume’s reduction of the self to a bundle of particular “perceptions,” both philosophers and Buddhist scholars have long noted the similarities between Hume’s empiricism and Buddhist philosophy. In a 2009 “Hume Studies” (Vol. 33) article on “Could David Hume Have Known About Buddhism?,” University of California (Berkeley) psychologist and philosopher Alison Gopnik argued that Hume may well have had actual knowledge of Buddhist philosophical views. Hume’s link to Buddhism, according to Prof. Gopnik, came through Jesuit scholars at the Royal College of La Flèche. Charles François Dolu was a Jesuit missionary who lived at the Royal College from 1723 to 1740, overlapping with Hume’s stay there, and had extensive knowledge both of other religions and cultures and of scientific ideas. Dolu had studied Theravada Buddhism as part of the second French embassy to Siam (modern Thailand) in 1687–1688. He also had talked in 1727 with Ippolito Desideri, a Jesuit missionary who visited Tibet and made an extensive study of Tibetan Buddhism from 1716 to 1721. Thus, Gopnik considered it at least possible that Hume learned about Buddhist ideas through Dolu. If she is correct, this suggests that an important concept of post-Enlightenment Western philosophical and psychological thinking may have a Buddhist, in other words an Asian, origin. This in turn could be seen as a point against the Edward Said type “Orientalism” view of the Enlightenment as thoroughly imbued with racist, imperialist, and colonialist Western dismissal and denigration of non-European cultures!
Prof. McManus’ picture of successive views of the self as the soul, as the body, as the brain, and as illusory or unreal also reminds me of my own concept of what I have called the successive “Theospheric,” “Physiospheric,” and “Sociospheric” phases of Western thought in the past few centuries. In the Middle Ages and the 16th century Reformation and Counter-Reformation, I see educated Europeans as mostly concerned with what I call the “Theosphere” of religious and theological beliefs and concepts–with God, the soul, sin, salvation, Heaven, Hell, angels, demons, the nature of the Church, human beings as children of God in need of redemption. In the 17th and 18th centuries, the Scientific Revolution and the Enlightenment led to the “Theosphere” giving way to what I call the “Physiosphere” of naturalistic scientific concepts, as Western intellectuals turned their attention to the natural, physical world, and now increasingly saw human beings as natural creatures in a natural world. In the 19th and even more so the 20th centuries, the “Physiosphere” itself yielded to my “Sociosphere” of preoccupation with human social, cultural, interpersonal, and political relationships, beliefs, and atttitudes, with humans seen as social far more than physical beings. Linking my own “Theosphere”–“Physiosphere”–“Sociosphere” schema to McManus’ soul, body, brain, mind, and unreal conceptions of the self, I’d at least loosely link his “self as soul” with my “Theosphere,” his “self as body” and “self as brain” with my “Physiosphere,” and both his “self as mind” and “self as illusory” with my “Sociosphere.”
That this linking between Prof. McManus’ and my own schemas is a somewhat loose one may be illustrated by McManus’ own remark, at the beginning of his “The Self is the Mind” section, that “[f]or Descartes, a mysterious ego inhabits the body and gives it life,” while “[f]or the empiricist Locke, it is our memories that generate selfhood.” Both Descartes and Locke were 17th century thinkers living during the height of the “Scientific Revolution,” when the “Physiospheric” outlook was arising among European thinkers, and both had a strong influence on the thinking and outlook of the 18th century Enlightenment, which was even more strongly and clearly “Physiospheric” than the 17th century. Descartes was influenced by “Physiospheric” thinking in his view of both human animal bodies as strictly machines, strictly material objects characterized by what he saw as matter’s essential property of “Extension”–the human body, like a table, chair, rock, or tree, was a “res extensa.” However, he has also been regarded as continuing the old theological and metaphysical, Christian and Platonist, “soul” idea in considering the mind or self a strictly non-physical, non-material entity, a “res cogitans” (“thinking thing”) characterized by Thought rather than Extension. Locke, however, as an empiricist arguing that our knowledge of the world outside our own minds came exclusively through the senses, was much more ready and willing than Descartes to accept the human mind’s considerable dependence on the body. Finally, Hobbes and Spinoza were 17th century thinkers even more prepared than either Descartes or Locke to argue the mind’s complete dependence on or even identity with the body. We could thus see Hobbes and Spinoza as good early illustrations of McManus’ own observation in his “The Self is the Body” section that “with the advent of scientific modernity, we have gradually moved towards a more materialistic perspective” than the religious and Platonist “soul” concept.
A radically materialist, thorough-goingly “Physiospheric” concept of human nature, viewing thought and consciousness simply as functions or by-products of the brain and its physiological processes, became widespread in the 18th century, aggressively promoted by Enlightenment “philosophes” like Julien Offray de La Mettrie (1709-1751), Denis Diderot (1713-1784), the Baron d’Holbach (1723-1789), and Pierre Cabanis (1757-1808). La Mettrie called “Man” a “machine” in his 1748 book “L’Homme machine.” Cabanis, a physician, wrote that just as the stomach receives and digests food so the brain receives and digests impressions from the outside world and secretes ideas–a comparison rephrased in the 19th century as the popular materialist slogan that the brain secretes thought just as the liver secretes bile and the kidneys secrete urine. This radical materialist view of human nature with its “the brain secretes thought just as the liver secretes bile” concept of the mind was echoed in the 19th century by scientific popularizers like Karl Vogt (1817-1895), Jacob Moleschott (1822-1893), and Ludwig Büchner (1824-1899). In the mid and late 19th century, with the popularization of Darwinian evolution from the 1850’s and 1860’s, this “Physiospheric” concept of a human personality created and shaped by physiologically conditioned brain and nervous-system physiology, now seen as scientifically confirmed by the latest biological findings, spawned the fashionable biologistic socio-political ideologies of “Social Darwinism,” racism, and eugenics. They also inspired as well as the 19th century “scientific” psychiatry attributing all mental illnesses and psychological problems to physical diseases of the brain and nervous system. William James criticized this narrowly physiological view of the human mind and personality as “medical materialism” in “The Varieties of Religious Experience” (1902), specifically attacking the typical late 19th century psychiatric dismissal of religious and mystical experience as simply reflections of physiological abnormality.
Beginning in the 19th century, however, and growing stronger and more influential after about 1890 and even more influential through the 20th century and now into the 21st, more and more Western thinkers have the essentially biological “Physiospheric” or “medical materialist” conception of human personality for a “Sociospheric” conception emphasizing social, cultural, and interpersonal relationships over brain anatomy, physiology, and biochemistry, culture over biology, environment and education over heredity, family dynamics and social circumstances over genetics, “nurture” over “nature.” In a sense, I think this shift has historical roots going back to the 18th century. The Enlightenment, I have long observed, in effect introduced two distinct if often intertwined themes into European thinking on human behavior and society: what I call the “Naturalist” theme of Man as a natural creature in a natural world, governed by natural laws, and the “Rationalist” theme of Man as a rational being able to use his reason to understand the world and himself. In a sense, I have argued, this “Naturalist”/”Rationalist” duality recapitulated René Descartes’ 17th century “ghost in the machine” (in 20th century British analytic philosopher Gilbert Ryle’s sarcastic term) bifurcation of the human person into a rational, immaterial, nonphysical mind or soul somehow linked (in the brain? in the pineal gland?) to a body seen as simply a complex machine.
The Enlightenment modification of the Cartesian “ghost in the machine,” still dominating much 19th century thinking, portrayed human beings as biological machines largely motivated and determined by biological needs, desires, and impulses, but at the same also endowed with intellects capable of rationally understanding, interpreting, and manipulating the external reality revealed by the senses. The predominant 19th century (“Victorian positivist”) version of the Cartesian and Enlightenment picture of human nature saw human behavior as very largely determined by raw biological instinct and emotion (hunger, thirst, anger, fear, sexual lust) on the one hand and by cool, sober, matter-of-fact conscious rationality (including social propriety) on the other. However, as classically described by Harvard historian H. Stuart Hughes in his 1958 book “Consciousness and Society: The Reorientation of European Social Thought, 1890-1930,” a galaxy of late 19th and early 20th century European thinkers like Freud, Nietzsche, Max Weber, Émile Durkheim, Vilfredo Pareto, Henri Bergson, Georges Sorel, Benedetto Croce, Antonio Gramsci, Ludwig Wittgenstein, and Karl Mannheim collectively introduced and emphasized what might be called a “middle zone” of social and interpersonal attitudes, feelings, beliefs, and relationships in-between biological need, impulse, and instinct on the one hand and purely rational assessment of external reality on the other. Psychoanalysis since Freud ,has always been above all a science, art, or discourse of this “middle zone” explored by H. Stuart Hughes’ *fin de siècle* “cluster of genius” (and by William James’ as their main contemporary American “fellow-traveler”).
Hughes’ *Consciousness and Society* thinkers may also be described as introducing what I call the “Sociosphere” into modern Western thought. As I wrote once wrote a friend in a letter on Freud’s cultural significance, I see psychoanalysis, with its emphasis on the shaping of human personalities by familial and social experiences, by memories, emotions, and personal histories, as reflecting a “Sociospheric” view of human nature, in contrast to psychopharmacology, William James’ “medical materialism,” and the Behaviorism of Ivan Pavlov, J.B. Watson, and B.F. Skinner as quintessentially “Physiospheric” psychologies. In reaction to 19th century French “positivist” Auguste Comte’s scheme of successive “Theological,” “Metaphysical,” and “Positive” (scientific) modes of thought, I myself see the Western intellectual and cultural history of the past few centuries as a succession of predominantly “Theospheric” (religious), “Physiospheric” (physical-scientific), and “Sociospheric” modes or styles of thinking, with the attention of most Western intellectuals focused in succession very largely first on the “Theosphere” of religious beliefs, ideas, and interests, then on the “Physiosphere” of the physical and natural sciences (astronomy, physics, chemistry, biology), and finally on the “Sociosphere” of human personal and social attitudes, feelings, relationships, and power dynamics. If we symbolize the “Theospheric” era with names of thinkers and writers like Thomas Aquinas, Dante, Luther, Calvin, Bellarmine, Loyola, St. Francis Xavier, John Knox, and Zwingli, and the “Physiospheric” period with the names of Copernicus, Kepler, Galileo, Newton, Boyle, Harvey, Huyghens, Leeuwenhoek, Maxwell, Faraday, Darwin, T.H. Huxley, and Pasteur, then some of the principal seminal “Sociospheric” thinkers would include Hegel, Marx, Freud, Nietzsche, Max Weber, Émile Durkheim, Vilfredo Pareto, William James, Carl Jung, Alfred Adler. Ludwig Wittgenstein, Georges Sorel, Henri Bergson, and Karl Mannheim (many of whom, as I’ve just noted, were discussed by H. Stuart Hughes in “Consciousness and Society”).
Derek Parfit also claims that we should move away from thinking that we have a fixed self. This has moral consequences, Parfit argues, since, once we realize that the self is ephemeral, we have few reasons to prioritize it. It is far more important to become more selfless and giving. Rather than prioritizing our own needs, to placate a self that has a thin existence at best, we should donate significant resources to trying to improve the world.
You paused the no-self argument halfway through to draw the moral implication. If there’s no self, there are no other selves either. And if there are no other selves, there’s no good reason (and no practical way) to prioritize other non-selves over our own non-selves.
I feel that Hughes Mearns ditty coming on:
Yesterday upon the stair
I met a man who wasn’t there
He wasn’t there again today
I wish, I wish he’d go away
Like the man on the stair, wishing doesn’t make the self go away because one cannot argue selfness to be the figment of one’s imagination without admitting his existence to oneself.
Glenn Alexander Magee wrote in “Hegel and the Hermetic Tradition,” p. 7: In addition to Bacon’s use of Rosicrucian images, Descartes’ search for the Rosicrucians, Spinoza’s debts to Kabbalism, Leibniz’s fascination with Rosicrucianism, Kabbalah, and alchemy, and Newton’s fascination with millennialism and alchemy, there is also evidence that Kant was inrerested in the visions of Emanuel Swedenborg; Schelling was interested in Böhme, Swedenborg, and Mesmer; Schopenhauer was interested in Böhme, Swedenborg, and Lavater; William James was interested in Swedenborg, Fechner, Spiritualism, and ESP; C.S. Peirce was interested in Swedenborg and Böhme; C.D. Broad was interested in ESP; and, today, Michael Dummett is interested in tarot cards. [Michael Dummett, “The Visconti-Forza Tarot Cards” [New York: Braziller, 1968]
More on philosophers with paranormal interests: Glenn Alexander Magee devoted his “Hegel and the Hermetic Tradition” (Cornell University Press, 2001) to documenting and exploring Hegel’s deep, extensive Hermetic and paranormal interests, emphaszing that he shared these interests with many early-modern philosophers, e.g., Francis Bacon and René Descartes, as well as being strongly interested in early-modern mystics like Jakob Böhme. In a footnote on p. 7, Magee noted that:
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Besides his interest in Böhme, Swedenborg, and Lavater, we might add here that Schopenhauer was also fascinated by telepathy, clairvoyance, mesmerism, and spiritualist seances, while to William James’ and C.D. Broad’s interest in ESP we may add the similar interest of Henri Bergson and Alfred North Whitehead, with Bergson once even serving as a President of the [British] Society for Psychical Research. Aside from philosophers as such, we may also add here Freud’s well-known belief in telepathy. As I said earlier, all such paranormal interests or beliefs have a definite bearing on theories of the self.
The self we see from within is only half the picture. Much like the house as we see it from the inside is very different from what we see from the sidewalk or driveway. The idea that I know myself better than anyone else possibly can is comforting and affirming, but an outside observer may actually understand things about me that I can’t (or refuse to) fathom.
I suppose Prof. McManus himself might perhaps just dismiss it as superstitious pseudo-scientific occult woo-woo, but many writers and thinkers have argued that so-called “paranormal,” “parapsychological,” or “psychic” phenomena–telepathy, clairvoyance, precognition, psychokinesis (PK), hauntings, near-death and out-of-the-body experiences, seance communications, seeming past-life memories, etc.–might well have a significant bearing on the nature of the “self,” “mind,” or “soul.” Prominent modern Western philosophers who have taken the possible reality of such paranormal phenomena seriously have included Kant, Hegel, Schopenhauer, William James, Henri Bergson, Alfred North Whitehead, C.D. Broad, and H.H. Price–with current successors to this tradition notably including Claremont Geaduate University philosopher David Ray Griffin. I myself have published an article on “The Vienna Circle and the Paranormal” in the June 2019 issue (No. 38) of “EdgeScience,” a publication of the Society for Scientific Exploration, where I discussed the serious, open-minded interest in paranormal phenomena of such “Logical Posiyivist” or “Logical Empiricist” philosophers of the 1920’s and 1930’s “Vienna Circle” as Moritz Schlick, Rudolf Carnap, Hans Hahn, Herbert Feigl, Richard von Mises, and Kurt Godel, all of them thinkers noted for their zealous devotion to scientific method and the scientific outlook.