How History Made the Mind:
The Cultural Origins of Objective Thinking
David Martel Johnson, Open Court, 2003.
The argument of
Johnson's book is that the human mind is not simply a biological system and
cannot be understood that way, but has been culturally formed during the course
of history, and thus has changed and developed over time and is not the same for
all people.1 To me his book somewhat
recalls Kathleen Lennon's book Explaining Human Action, which argues
that it is legitimate to speak of "the mind" as a different object of analysis
than "the brain"; both Johnson and Lennon are arguing against the extreme
biological-reductionist metaphysic represented by the Churchlands.2
Johnson and Lennon
are the good guys in this story, but the glimpse that their books gives us of
the present state of "philosophy of mind" and the adjacent areas of psychology
is a frightening one. It is a world full of minds which are not persons or
people, within which humankind is described exclusively in terms of those of its
components which can be scientifically explained or successfully modelled by AI
or by robotics. While one may readily grant that these sciences have made
extraordinary progress during recent decades, it is impossible to imagine that
the scientists with whom Johnson is debating could ever produce a recognizable
description of an actual human being. (Johnson's argumentative style marks it
as a book of philosophy; the book seems more to be a book of arguments about
claims that have been made about the mind than it is a book about the mind
itself. Yes, there is a difference.)
If the scientists
and philosophers were genuinely modest, as they sometimes pretend to be, there
would really be no problem. But it is clear enough that the authors Johnson is
writing about firmly believe that they are the ones who really understand the
mind and humanity itself, and that scholars in other disciplines which speak of
people differently are prescientific "folk psychologists" whose ideas ultimately
will prove to have no merit. But "folk psychologists" are at least capable of
describing actual people, whereas Johnson's antagonists (and to a degree,
Johnson himself) recognize people only insofar as they fit within their research
program and metaphysic -- as if a cardiologist, knowing that his science is much
more advanced than endocrinology, might sneer at endocrinologists as witch
doctors and fools (and indeed, as if these cardiologists were to make hostile
remarks about the liver and pancreas themselves.)
Johnson and the
others define the mind by rationality. The fact that few people today are
"rational", as philosophers of mind define the word, and that in past history
even fewer were, and that nobody is rational all of the time, is unimportant.3
For these philosophers rationality is normality, and all other human ways of
behaving can be defined simply as common defects or as failures to attain
rationality, like deformations. What this especially leaves out is all forms of
human interrelationship except the most practical: "the mind" perceives and
calculates, but it apparently lacks emotions. Johnson writes: "[H]umans now are
able to employ a set of tools that draw a clear intellectual line between
entirely rational thought, and relatively irrational, dramatic, emotional – for
instance religious – thinking."4
Philosophy of mind
and psychology try to be savagely objective and to purge their discipline of all
sentimental and moralizing language; yet it is apparent that their object of
study is not the human mind (in all its variety), but the modernist,
rationalist, reformist attempt to produce the best human and most rational mind.5They describe the mind as modernist reformers think it should become, and
in fact, exactly as they have strenuously trained themselves to become:
unemotional, decontexted, and objective, carefully reaching conclusions only on
the basis of reason and observation. The severe objectivity of the
psychologist's presentation of results is thus vitiated by the raging
normativity governing the selection of the object of study.6
This rather recalls the humorist James Thurber's story of the science student
looking through a microscope who had misadjusted the settings so that he was
actually looking at, and trying to draw, a reflection of his own eye.
A second criticism
of Johnson's book is that his history is extremely thin. His argument is that
in about 40,000 B.C. the human brain evolved to a higher form,7
but not until about 1000 B.C. were the social preconditions for rationality
attained (in Homeric Greece.) He does make good arguments that something can be
ontologically real even if it emerges late in history, and even if it is
culturally coded rather than genetically coded, but this is not earthshaking
stuff for anyone with any acquaintance with process philosophy or any of the
social sciences.8
In Johnson's
argument Egypt stands in for the whole pre-rational state of mankind, and while
he admits to ignorance of the rest of the pre-modern human race, that doesn't
keep him from confident generalizations.9 Some of his examples of Egyptian
irrationality (versus the Greeks) are completely unconvincing.10 The
untranslatability of certain hieroglyphic fragments certainly does not prove the
strangeness of the Egyptian mind; the
supposed inferiority of Egyptian compared to Greek arithmetic rests on an
erroneous tacit comparison with Arabic numerals, which did not reach the West
until the Renaissance;11 and what Johnson
says about the irrationality of Egyptian religious symbolism can be matched by
any number of examples from western trinitarian theology and Christology.12
Johnson's
mentalistic, rationalistic definition of "the mind" also causes him to miss the
real story behind Greek and paleolithic progress, since he ignores personhood,
personal relationships, and most social forms. The historical changes he
discusses were fundamentally changes in social forms, and the changes in ways of
thinking (in the direction of rationality) which he describes were made possible
by these social changes. In the paleolithic case, the development of language
made cooperative group activities and the sharing of learned experience
possible. But these cooperative groups (which indeed did have practical,
intellectual capacities that prelinguistic human groups did not) were organized
around exactly the kinds of "irrational, emotional, dramatic, religious" ways of
thinking which Johnson excludes from the "center of the mind"13:
devotion, dependency, deference, awe, loyalty, etc. In other words, what
Johnson calls irrationality was historically a progressive advance.
Johnson's second,
Greek, development was also initially a change of social forms, rather than
simply a new way of thinking. In Athens, for example, a complex series of
constitutional changes by Drakon, Solon, and others broke the power of the clans
over their members while also liberating the lesser clans from the greater and
ending the cycle of feud and blood-guilt which had trapped Athens in the tragic
or heroic age. Within the new republic thus formed (which was, as Johnson does
say, a highly commercialized society), the newly-freed citizens could behave
and think as individuals, which allowed them to be as rational as they were able
to as long as they obeyed the laws. But this transition was not simply a change
in the mind, but a social change involving new obligations, new loyalties and
the new passions – the new Greeks may have been more rational than any earlier
people, but their warlike polis also was depended on strong emotional, dramatic,
and religious commitments on the part of its citizens.14
In the world of
psychology and philosophy of mind, Johnson is absolutely one of the good guys.
Yet the thinness of his historical argument makes you suspect that no one else
in the field has any historical or cultural knowledge at all, and that his cause
is essentially hopeless. Based on a reading of Johnson’s book, these fields
would seem to be impoverished, obsessive, fanatically normative and reformist,
haunted by archaic metaphysical arguments about determinism and mind-and-matter
(and quite possibility by rejected Christian dualist theology), and ultimately
unable to say much of anything about actual human beings, but only to discuss
component behaviors (e.g.. the ability to sort three-dimensional colored
objects, or to form grammatically-valid sentences). When talking about this
kind of thing, it's normal to ask, for example, whether artificial intelligences
are able to love or invent a joke, but the intelligences produced (or described)
so far don't seem to be capable of running a business, supervising an employee,
responding to an everyday emergency, or even negotiating a family trip to the
movies.
It would seem that
before constructing a theory of the human mind one would begin by making an
inventory of the normal, successful, functional things that humans do, and then
try to describe and explain all of them – what I would call topic-oriented
research. What has happened instead is that a standard of reductionist science
has been set up, and psychology and philosophy of mind have confined themselves
to saying what can be said within that rigid standard, regardless of how much
they have to leave out. Beyond that, they have picked up the habit of referring
to all other ways of thinking as “folk psychology”, and they even refer to
“emotion” and “religious belief” as irrational, rather as if a physiologist were
to insult the endocrine system or some other aspect of physiology that he just
plain didn’t like.
Researchers trying
to understand human behavior in its entirety have put together a body of work in
history, sociology, anthropology, philosophy, and even some areas of
psychology. ( I have listed a few titles below.) These do not require ignoring
or rejecting the insights of philosophies of mind or of physiological
psychology, but they do require paying attention to history, to social behavior,
and to socially-originated, non-universal symbolic systems of which
psychologists and philosophers of mind seem to be completely ignorant. It seems
that it will be a long time before the two approaches to studying human behavior
will be able to communicate with one another.15
|
November 21, 2004
APPENDIX: WHY?
How did psychology
get to be so narrow? I have a couple of theories.
First, the
employment opportunities of workers in these fields overwhelmingly come,
directly or indirectly, from two specific areas: mental-health attempts to make
people behave "rationally" instead of "irrationally", and AI attempts to produce
intelligences which can do the things that people can do, but which do not have
the messy aspects of people and are not persons. And both these
enterprises come from the modernist attempt (described by Toulmin) to define
human nature in terms of an aggressively reformist description of what humans
should be like.
Second, perhaps the
anti-human bias comes from the need for shock. Candidates for criminal gangs or
terrorist organizations are required to commit gratuitous killings as part of
the initiation progress. This commits them to the group and puts them forever
outside the world of normality, but it also gives them glamour and prestige, as
we can see from contemporary pop culture. Academic disciplines are not so
murderous, but the counterintuitive believing of three impossible things before
breakfast is part of what makes you part of the professional ingroup, and also
gives you a glamorous distinctor for the poor slumps who still believe in
folk-psychology. Sci-fi brains in bottles probably do help sell the discipline
to freshmen. There are several reasons why "brains in bottles" can't be minds,
just as there are several reasons why self-replicating computer programs or robots shouldn't be regarded
as "life", but within a discipline these kinds of questions can be ignored.
And politically, the biological reductionism which Johnson argues against is
part of a convention-reinforcing naturalist revolt against the perceived "blank
slate" sociologism, "social constructionism", "social engineering", and
relativism of the social sciences, as well as helping form an alliance with
clinical psychology's battle against psychoanalysis, anti-psychiatry, and
patients' rights movements.
NOTES
1. Pp. 11, 112-3,
164-6, 193.
2. No biologist ever
has to argue that it's ontologically permissible to speak of systems rather
than organs, or tissues rather than molecules.
3. Amartya Sen has
shown some of the difficulties in defining the term "rationality".
4. P. 130. On p. 133 he
speaks of rationality as the mind's "center". See also pp. 76, 130, 168-70, 175,
206.
"Irrationality" can
be defined two different ways: first, as everything except a well-defined
concept of rationality; and second, as a catchphrase for all forms of harmful,
destructive, stupid, wrong behavior. As an illustration of my point,
"traditionalism" is not rational by any clear definition of rationality, but
often it is quite benign. (And all societies, even the most modern, have
traditional aspects, for example common law and constitutionalism in our
society). From Johnson's book it seems that he confuses rationality as a
specific way of behaving and thinking, and rationality as a catchall term for
non-harmful thinking and behaving.
6. Part of the anxiety
and weirdness of psychology comes from anxieties of self-reference -- my mind is
itself a mind, but it is also scientifically studying "the mind", or a
generalized version of itself. And I have to keep asking myself "Am I really
like the thing I'm describing?"
7. Pp. 14-16.
8. Pp. 139-171.
9. Pp. 38, 94.
10. Pp. 110-111.
11. Pp. 182-5.
12. Pp. 79-80.
13. P. 133.
14. I think that
Johnson misreads Bremmer and Snell when he places the Greek revolution in the
Homeric period. Greek rationality was an outcome of the political revolutions
which freed the individual and made personal responsibility possible. My own
paper discusses a somewhat comparable case in China, partly in the light of the
Greek experience. Glotz, Gagarin, and Woodhouse are also relevant, as are
(speaking comparatively) Doi on Japan and Dumont on India and the West. Dodds
discusses "The Greeks and the Irrational" in his book of that title.
15. Damasio, Bateson,
and Varela explain why minds must be embodied and involved in social networks of
other minds, and Damasio explains why emotions are necessary for the mind.
Mead, Harre, Shotter, and Gergen describe self-formation in a social and
cultural context. The papers in Rorty mostly consist of attempts to define
persons as describable physical objects. These ring very false. Perry's book,
which I've only glanced at, seems much like Rorty's. The Carrithers collection
is a group of much more useful attempts to say what a person is. When Johnson accuses
Lakoff of physiological determinism (pp. 4-5), I'm not sure that he wasn't just
leaping to conclusions, based on Lakoff's conviction that minds must be embodied
and socially contexted.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Bateson, Gregory,
Steps to an Ecology of Mind, Ballantine, 1972.
Bremmer, Jan, The
Early Greek Concept of the Soul, Priinceton. 1983.
Carrithers, Michael,
Sollins, Steven, Lukes, Steven, The Category of the Person, Cambridge,
1985:
Damasio, Antonio,
The Feeling of What Happens, Harcourt, 1999.
Damasio, Antonio,
Descartes' Error, Avon, 1994.
Dodds, E.R., The
Greeks and the Irrational, California, 1951.
Doi, Takeo, The
Anatomy of Self, Kodansha, 1986.
Dumont, Louis,
From Mandeville to Marx, Chicago, 1977/83.
Emerson, John, "Yang
Chu's Discovery of the Body”, Philosophy East and West, Volume 46-4,
October 1996, pp. 533-566.