Naturalization: Muddyingthe Pool

(1) We begin with the image of a translucent pool in which the contents of the conscious mind are infinitely visible to their owner. Schismatic situations, deriving from the logical structure of self-consciousness, from its double and almost duplicituous character, constitute a first blemish in this perfect picture. But they do not muddy the pool, else the factor of responsibility would be simply inexistent. However, certain other properties of the mind threaten to do just that. In particular, those which emerged in the course of the naturalization of the mind that followed upon the advent of Physics: a process which accelerated rapidly with the romantic movement, and continues to this day—now in a quite different and altogether non-romantic spirit. These naturalistic developments threaten self-consciousness with an almost ignominious expulsion from the original Eden-like epistemological paradise, the lucidity clouded as a result of the assimilation into the theory of mind of certain natural features of the human condition. In particular, the two main determinants of this alteration in the earlier picture of the human mind seem to have been the attempt to come to terms, first with man's vitality, second with his sheer physicality.

(2) Consider the first of these. The Darwinian ape which haunted Victorians appeared in mental form in the shape of the mental processes of ‘Mr Hyde’, locked up raging in the (primitive) basement-cellar of the mind—rather than the (more schizoid) ‘east wing’ of Jane Eyre (also raging!)—both outcasts manifestations of the violence done to human mental nature by the ‘high-mindedness’ of that era: their very rage understood as the torments of the (justifiably) damned! More precisely, I am thinking of the introduction into the theory of mind not just of the phenomenon of instinct, but of an instinctual substratum which was posited as its very foundation. Schopenhauerian Will and Freudian Life-Instinct are mental representatives of the continuing need of life for the fuel, both physical and psychological in type, which drives its essentially occurrent processive way of being. Each of these theories conceives of instinct as the foundation of the mind (‘at a certain point in time the will kindled a light for itself’ (Schopenhauer), ‘where id was ego shall be’ (Freud)), and by implication posited it as its actual essence. And such a theoretical position is consistent with the radically developmentalist character of the doctrines.

These theories are probably closer to the facts than predecessor doctrines, corresponding to an enlarged and more realistic conception of the human mind. Nevertheless, they have their attendant risks. Apart from the ever-present danger of a destructive Reductionism, they show a tendency to split the mind. And this is what

one should expect from theories which found intellectual and executive function upon a developmentally prior instinctual base. For this is a view which implies that the latter might in principle exist in the complete absence of the former.

Such a concept, of a psychological force operating without representation of any kind, strikes me as suspect, and we shall see that it carries with it certain significant and to my mind implausible epistemological implications.

Schopenhauer attempted to demonstrate that the will had no absolute need of knowledge, indeed ultimately no need as such of the intellect, in an argument based upon the nature of instinctual behaviour. The example chosen was the nest-building behaviour of birds, who he assumed had no conception of the nests for which they laboured. However, his argument was certainly invalid. Thus in it he illicitly transferred the teleological goal (i.e. a nest) of many intentional acts (say, of many acts of twig-moving) into the content of some supposed single willing (of a nest) expressed in and presumably also uniting those multiple separate acts. But the only conceivable justification for positing a willing with such unitary content would be the presence and efficacy of a comprehensive desire and intention, and that would necessitate belief-in and awareness-of that final goal, which contradicts his thesis. Freud made comparable claims.

Thus, he assumed that, just as the superego must have developed out of the ego, so the ego in turn must have developed out of the id (1923); and at an earlier point in his career proposed an hydraulic model for the ‘libido’: a claim which finds a precise echo in Schopenhauer's assertion that the will always wills the same thing, viz. life. Freud argued with some cogency for the hydraulic model, largely on the grounds of what he described as ‘the mobility of the libido’, the tendency for sexual impulse to rapidly switch its objects; while Schopenhauer supported his claim with the similar observation that, no sooner have our most cherished and long-term desires found their ultimate fulfilment, than new desires rapidly spring up to take their place.

Thus, both men believed in the existence of mental forces which were only secondarily directed to the objects discovered in the world through cognitive intellectual powers. They believed in drives which were in essence directed without cognitive assistance, and presumably also without use of representational function, towards a unitary primal goal. And it was in such a force, so conceived, that the mind was said to discover its essence: a proposition which is explicitly affirmed in Schopenhauer's account of the Noumenal Character, whose content is exclusively made up of a set of postures of the will (e.g. generosity, love of failure, concupiscence, etc.); and, at least by implication, in the Freudian stratified theory of mental development. Accordingly, on these interpretations man's essence must lie in non-rational mental forces. At bottom man emerges as non-non-rational in character.

The mental-epistemological significance of these theories is this. Since they posit the existence of mental forces which can operate independently of knowledge and intellect, they allow for primitive mental phenomena which of their nature lie outside the scope of immediate first-person awareness or ‘insight’. At one point Schopenhauer writes: ‘The intellect gets to know the conclusions of the will only a

posteriori and empirically. Accordingly, when a choice is presented to it, it has no datum as to how the will is going to decide’, and a little later adds ‘This distinct unfolding of the motives on both sides is all that the intellect can do in connection with the choice. It awaits the real decision just as passively and with the same excited curiosity as it would that of a foreign will.’⁹And in Freud's The Ego and the Id (1923) the topology of the mind is such that, whereas parts of the ego and superego are said to be conscious and other parts not, the id in its entirety is as such and necessarily deemed to be unconscious. The clear Cartesian waters of the mind seem irremediably to be muddied in these doctrines which seek to assimilate instinct into the theory of mind. In my view, the fault in these theories lay not in the project of assimilation, but in the extremity of the variety of developmentalism through which it was accomplished. Their basic fault was a neglect of the unity (‘holism’) of the mind.

(3) Thus, the vitality and animality of the human mind find representation in the science and philosophy of mind in these doctrines which seek to accord due weight to instinctive forces in the life of the mind. Here we have a major project of naturalization. But the other (more latter-day) project of naturalization is even more comprehensive. It tries to come to terms with the fact that man is not merely a part of the ‘animal kingdom’, but a part of physical nature, a part of the physical world. It hopes to draw out the full implications for the mind of the fact that these self-conscious beings are physical systems like the rest of the vital world. Then the relatively recent arise of such sciences as neuropsychology, cognitive science, etc., pose in more or less concrete form the problems which we must consider.

Once again certain dangers attend the project. For example, not so much the abomination ‘Mental Physics’ as the abominable ‘Eliminationism’. And a variety of other aberrations, at least as I see it, threaten us and common good sense. Theory-laden and as yet unwarranted terminology, such as the expression ‘folk psychology’, are hoist upon us without serious argument. And so on. However, these matters are not my concern here—which at the present point is no more than mental epistemology. More exactly, it is the extent of the range of, or the scope of Cartesian

‘translucence’.

(4) A phenomenon like visual experience is instructive in this regard. The meaningfulness of this phenomenon suggests that its causal conditions must be at least partly psychological in kind, and such as in some way to utilize the intellect. Then it is a notable fact about perceptual experience, not merely that we have no immediate insight into its origins, but that insight is as such inconceivable. It looks therefore as if cognitive factors might be playing a part in causal transactions which forever lie outside the range of the kind of ‘translucent’ insight emphasized by Descartes.

Now the formation of the visual experience is precisely the type of phenomenon investigated by neuropsychologists and cognitive scientists. Cases of this kind raise the possibility that purely cerebral investigations might bring to light causal

9 The World as Will and Representation, i. bk. 4: 55, trans. by E. F. J. Payne, Dover, 1969 .

transactions going on between mental phenomena which are not even in principle accessible to insight. It suggests the existence of a whole mental domain in which it might be so, and thus the possibility of an even more radical corrective to the Cartesian epistemological position than was provided by the Freudian ‘unconscious’: a domain which in this regard is on a footing with Schopenhauerian Will and the Freudian Id.

How much ground should Cartesian ‘translucence’ yield in the face of these developments? Ought one to abandon all hope of the mind's being moulded in the Divine Image from the point of view of mental epistemology? So one might naturally believe. However, the fundamentality of the link between mentality and conscious experience, the deformations in waking consciousness attendant upon certain major failures of insight, and the unacceptability of the Schopenhauer–Freud thesis of primal mental forces which developmentally precede the acquisition of intellectual-representational function—these considerations should cause us to treat the theory of the necessarily unconscious cognitive sector of the mind with caution. It seems to me that we need to look more closely at what goes on when insight occurs generally, and the kinds of the phenomena for which it is a norm. But to accomplish this we need in the first place to sort mental phenomena into a few fundamental categories. Since this classification is applicable both within and without the mind, it is advisable that we begin this second part of the discussion by considering physical phenomena in these terms.