Resuming our series on the serious critics of Thomas Nagel’s Mind and Cosmos, let’s turn to Simon Blackburn’s review in New Statesman from a few months back. Blackburn’s review is negative, but it is not polemical; on the contrary, he allows that the book is “beautifully lucid, civilised, modest in tone and courageous in its scope” and even that there is “charm” to it. Despite the review’s now somewhat notorious closing paragraph (more on which below) I think Blackburn is trying to be fair to Nagel.
This post will be briefer than the earlier installments, since for the most part, Blackburn’s remarks are variations on points raised by other reviewers, to which I’ve already responded. However, there is a passage in Blackburn’s review that I think merits special comment. He writes:
In the case of consciousness and mind, [Nagel] has bought heavily into the so-called “hard problem”: first envisaging consciousness as a kind of purple haze or glassy add-on to our animal lives, he then finds its arrival, and its way of interacting with physical things, inexplicable. This was Descartes’s problem, but since Wittgenstein and Ryle we have tried to put it behind us. If consciousness is a purple haze over and above, and irreducible to, my animal nature, then perhaps you don’t have it, and perhaps I didn’t have it yesterday; for who is to say whether my apparent memory of “it” is reliable? Part of the problem here is the abstract noun. If we follow Ryle’s advice and replace it with an adverb (people doing things more or less consciously), Descartes’s problem begins to deflate.
End quote. Now, the “purple haze” stuff is an allusion not so much to Jimi Hendrix as to Joseph Levine’s (excellent) overview of the debate about consciousness in contemporary philosophy of mind, Purple Haze: The Puzzle of Consciousness. I’ve got no beef with the expression itself -- in fact I agree with Blackburn that it’s an appropriate metaphor giventhe way the notion of consciousness is typically understood in post-Cartesian philosophy.
The question is why it is understood the way it is -- as a kind of ethereal “add-on” to our corporeal attributes. Blackburn implies that it has something to do with a fallacy of reification. We say things like “I was not conscious of having done that,” “I was barely able to remain conscious while reading Feser’s book,” “That martini knocked me unconscious,” and so forth. Then (so Blackburn’s argument seems to go) we fallaciously infer that “consciousness” must be a kind of stuff that is present in some of these cases and absent in others; only, since it is not an observable kind of stuff, it must be some unobservable kind of stuff.
Of course, that is a tendentious account of the issue, as Blackburn knows. Nothing per se wrong with that -- he can’t be expected to consider, much less respond to, every alternative view in a short review. I even agree with Blackburn that the problem of consciousness arises from a kind of reification fallacy. However, I think the specific kind of reification involved is not the one Blackburn’s remarks imply that it is. It isn’t a matter of jumping from adverbial phrases to an abstract noun. Nor is it only the post-Cartesian notion of mindthat involves a questionable reification; the post-Cartesian notion of matter is equally suspect.
More to the present point, the reifications in question are ones whose origins are described by Nagel, and they are of a kind that poses a serious problem, not for dualism so much as for the materialism that is Nagel’s target in the book. Blackburn completely ignores this aspect of Nagel’s position, even though it is not only a key point in the new book, but has been central to Nagel’s work for nearly forty years, since his famous article “What Is It Like to Be a Bat?” I am referring, of course, to the point -- emphasized in several previous posts in this series -- that modern science works with a conception of the “physical” that redefines it in entirely quantitative terms, and therefore strips from the physical whatever smacks of the irreducibly qualitative and relocates it in the “mental” realm. Hence color, odor, sound, taste, heat, cold, and the like (as common sense understands them) are treated as mere projections of the mind, existing not in matter itself but only in our conscious experience of matter. As Nagel writes in Mind and Cosmos:
The modern mind-body problem arose out of the scientific revolution of the seventeenth century, as a direct result of the concept of objective physical reality that drove that revolution. Galileo and Descartes made the crucial conceptual division by proposing that physical science should provide a mathematically precise quantitative description of an external reality extended in space and time, a description limited to spatiotemporal primary qualities such as shape, size, and motion, and to laws governing the relations among them. Subjective appearances, on the other hand -- how this physical world appears to human perception -- were assigned to the mind, and the secondary qualities like color, sound, and smell were to be analyzed relationally, in terms of the power of physical things, acting on the senses, to produce those appearances in the minds of observers. It was essential to leave out or subtract subjective appearances and the human mind -- as well as human intentions and purposes -- from the physical world in order to permit this powerful but austere spatiotemporal conception of objective physical reality to develop.(pp. 35-36)
This is the origin of the so-called “hard problem of consciousness,” otherwise known as the “qualia problem.” From the concrete material objects of everyday life, Descartes and the moderns who have followed him derived two abstractions (as I discussed in an earlier post). First, they abstracted out those features that could be captured in exclusively quantitative terms, reified this abstraction, and called that reified abstraction “matter,” or “the physical,” or that which is “objective.” Second, they abstracted those qualitative features that would not fit the first, quantitative picture, reified that abstraction, and called it “the mental,” or that which is “subjective.” Once this move was made, there was never in principle going to be a way to get mind and matter together again, since they were in effect defined by contrast with one another.
Thus, Cartesian dualism was not a reactionary resistanceto this central move of modern science and philosophy; it was a natural consequence of it. And the problem derives as much from the post-Cartesian notion of matter as it does from the post-Cartesian notion of mind. To follow Blackburn’s lead in citing Ryle, it isn’t just the ghost that is the problem, but the machine too. And that is why Mind and Cosmos speculates about possible alternative conceptions of matter -- neutral monism, panpsychism, neo-Aristotelian teleologism -- in passages that (contrary to what one would guess from some of the reviews) are much more crucial to understanding Nagel’s overall position than anything he says about Darwinian biology.
Hence, at least if Nagel’s critic is committed to the modern, materialist conception of matter -- which essentially keeps Descartes’ machine while chucking out the ghost -- it is no good to accuse him, as Blackburn does, of reifying abstractions. For Nagel’s point (though he doesn’t put it this way) is essentially that the materialist is reifying an abstraction, or at least that the materialist’s conception of matter is just as much a part of what generates the mind-body problem as the Cartesian dualist’s conception of mind. Purple haze? Sure. But purple haze conjoined to another bizarre invention, one the materialist uncritically accepts -- the body reconceived as insensate clockwork.
An analogy: Suppose you squeeze every last drop of juice out of an orange, and then, deciding you want to put it back in while at the same time keeping the dried-out husk you’ve created, puzzle over how to go about doing it. A Blackburn-like critic assures you that the problem is a pseudo-problem of your own making: “You’re illicitly moving from an adjective to an abstract noun. We say things like ‘This orange is juicy’ and ‘That orange is not so juicy.’ You fallaciously infer from that that there’s this stuff called ‘juice’ that exists over and above the husk of the orange. Resist the urge to do that and the problem begins to deflate.”
Well, the critic in this case is partly right; the problem is of your own making. But he does not see how deep the problem goes, and indeed seems deeply implicated in it himself. For the source of the difficulty is not a mere tendency to shift from adjective to noun. The source of the difficulty is that you have made of the juice a separate stuff precisely by squeezing it out of the orange, and you have created an insoluble problem of how to get it back into the orange precisely because you insist on doing so while at the same time keeping the orange a dry husk. You are stuck with a dualism of dry husk and juice, and will remain stuck with it unless you give up not only the aim of keeping the juice as a stuff separate from the orange, but also the aim of keeping the orange as a dry husk devoid of juice. The Blackburn-like critic, meanwhile, is in if anything an even odder position insofar as he regards the dried-out husk as somehow more real than the juice. The solution is to get the orange back -- juice and husk in their organic unity, as a single entity. The juice/husk dualist wants to make of an orange an aggregate of two stuffs; the Blackburn-like critic wants to chuck out the juice, keep the husk, and call that alone an “orange.” The second position is hardly better than the first.
The parallel with the mind-body problem is, I trust, obvious. The Cartesian dualist treats a human being as a slapped-together aggregate of Descartes’ desiccated “husk”-like quantitative conception of matter and his “juice”-like conception of mind as the repository of the qualitative features that don’t fit the quantitative description. The materialist regards a human being as the mere “husk” all by itself. What we need is to get the “orange” back -- that is to say, human beings (and other material substances too for that matter) in all their quantitative and qualitative richness. And that is precisely what Nagel is trying to accomplish in toying with various non-materialist conceptions of matter (neutral monist, panpsychist, Aristotelian).
Finally, about that closing paragraph. The now somewhat notorious bit reads as follows:
I regret the appearance of this book. It will only bring comfort to creationists and fans of “intelligent design”, who will not be too bothered about the difference between their divine architect and Nagel’s natural providence. It will give ammunition to those triumphalist scientists who pronounce that philosophy is best pensioned off. If there were a philosophical Vatican, the book would be a good candidate for going on to the Index.
End quote. Taken in isolation, that sounds pretty bad -- like the ranting of a humorless ideologue. But in context it has a different feel, or so it seems to me. It is in the immediately preceding sentence that Blackburn says: “There is charm to reading a philosopher who confesses to finding things bewildering.” And the passage comes at the end of a review that is not only substantive, but begins with the very kind words about the book quoted above. So, it seems to me that Blackburn’s final sentence is clearly just meant as a joke rather than a suggestion that Nagel’s book should be shunned -- and a joke justifiable from the point of view of someone who seriously thinks that the “Intelligent Design” movement is a threat to science.
But you don’t have to be a fan of ID (and I am not) to think much of the secularist reaction to it absurdly shrill, paranoid, and dogmatic. So I don’t think the joke is a very good one. And of course, were a non-materialist to make such a joke about a materialist book, you can be sure most secularists would not treat it as such.
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