The Living and the Dead

I have been lecturing on the mind/body problem in my Philosophy 100 course and I took time to describe Hans Jonas’ account of the history of human thinking about life and death.  Jonas was far ahead of his time on these questions, and should be better known and read. 

According to Jonas, substance dualism was a midway between two poles: animism and materialism.  Substance dualists hold that the human being consists of two distinct kinds of substance.  A substance (see Aristotle) is something that can remain the same while it undergoes (hence: substance) change.  So an iron bar can be heated from cold and black to red hot while remaining iron all the while.  Likewise, bricks and boards can be shaped into a church or a bank while remaining bricks and boards.  Substance dualists explain the existence of human consciousness by supposing that the body consists of material substance and the mind (or soul) consists of immaterial substance.  The former is shaped into bones and organs; the latter, into sensations, emotions, and ideas. 

Substance dualism is nothing recent.  The Roman philosopher Lucretius (perhaps the only genuine Roman philosopher, with the possible exception of Cicero) thought that the soul was a subtle kind of material enclosed in the body that escaped when the body was cut open.  Death is like a collapsing balloon.  René Descartes, however, is the philosopher most associated with this theory. 

Jonas argued that the most common view, when human beings first began to think about nature, was animism.  Animists suppose that everything in the Kosmos is alive.  Not just human beings, other animals, and plants, but rocks, mountains, and the heavenly lights.  After all, the moon waxes and wanes just as the crops flourish and wither with the seasons.  Ice crystals grow, don’t they?  Mountains sometimes have inner, molten cores, just like spouses. 

This view is common sense and accords with everyday observations but it confronted one big problem, a scandal as Jonas put it.  The problem was death.  Living things die.  How is the animist to understand a corpse?  This problem never goes away and confronting it led in time to a distinction between body and soul.  That led in much more time to dualism. 

Dualism turned out to be incoherent.  If the soul is immaterial, how does it interact with material substance?  Surely the mind can move the body, as any notes who reaches for a glass of beer.  Just as surely, the body can influence the mind, as anyone knows who drank too much beer.  Material interacts with material.  That is essential to its definition.  Billiard balls collide with billiard balls.  If the soul were immaterial substance, then it could not interact with material substance.  If a ghost can walk through walls because it is composed of immaterial ectoplasm, then how can it push against the floor to walk at all? 

Descartes’ substance dualism gave way in short order to materialism.  Everything in the Kosmos is dead.  Dead particles collide with other dead particles.  Biological organisms appear to be alive, but this is only a pretense.  They are puppets, the strings of which are pulled by their molecular constituents.

If the scandal for animism was death, which it tried furiously to deny, the scandal for materialism is life.  Living things do not merely move, they move with agendas.  A rock doesn’t care whether it remains intact or shatters, but a spider moving across a kitchen floor is up to something.  It will succeed or fail, and that is not something that materialism can allow. 

Jonas argued, paradoxically but correctly, that Darwinian Theory refutes rather than confirms materialism.  If living organisms with agendas and consciousness are indeed material things that emerged by mechanical processes, then the dead material in a prebiotic earth was potentially alive.  The potential for soul was present in the primordial soup. 

I think that the pendulum is swinging back toward animism.  No, crystals are not alive in the same sense that we are, but neither are plants.  Yet the subtle growth of crystals is not unrelated to the growth of a child.  Both the one and the other are growing.  Growth in all cases involves the exploitation of the potential already present in material substance.  This, at any rate, is what I have learned. 

Hans Jonas

Several students and faculty members have formed mini-academy at Northern.  We have been reading and discussing an essay a week.  Last week we read Leo Strauss’ essay on liberal education.  Our meeting was an example of what Strauss was talking about. 

Next week we will discuss an essay chosen by yours truly: “Life, Death, and the Body in the Theory of Being,” by Hans Jonas.  You can read it for free online at the link above and, if your library has Jstore, you can download it.  It’s magnificent.  I first read it in a collection of essays by Jonas‑The Phenomenon of Life: Toward a Philosophical Biology.  If I were to judge a book not only by its precision, clarity, purity, and depth, but also by its timeliness, it might be the best book I have ever read. 

In the essay, Jonas gives us a history of human thought that encompasses the most pressing matter for both philosophers and for all human beings.  He divides the history of thought into three eras. 

In the first and longest, human beings thought that everything was alive: not only people, pad feet, and plants, but also rocks, streams, and the heavenly objects.  As the oak flourishes and withers, so the moon waxes and wanes. 

In the third, human beings (or at least, the tribe of scientists and philosophers) largely agree that everything is dead.  The kosmos is full of matter in motion, colliding and transforming in purely mechanical ways.  Even living organisms are composed of molecules, which are as dead as boiling porridge. 

Between these two eras, dualism was dominant.  Jonas finds its origins in Gnosticism specifically and Christianity more generally.  In this view, body and soul are distinct substances.  The material world is dead while all genuinely living things are possessed of an immaterial soul.  It reaches its clearest expression in the work of Rene Descartes, who substituted mind for soul. 

Jonas argues that all three positions are inherently unstable, subject to a problematic.  The animism of the first period could not account for death.  It could only make an uncomfortable peace with it by the cult of the funeral and the tomb.  The dualism of the second period allowed materialism to expand its sway over all the kosmos outside the mind, just at the moment when our understanding of the kosmos was expanding across vast distances.  Sooner or later the prophylactic wall that dualism built around the mind was bound to be breached.  That led to the third period, which was enormously successful in modeling complex phenomena. 

However, the tables then turned.  As animism could not comfortably account for death, so materialism cannot comfortably account for life.  How is it possible that, in a dead world, there should be things that struggle and resist and care one way or another? 

Jonas thinks that two of the more important positions in ontology‑materialism and idealism‑are attempts at evasion.  Materialism simply pretends that life doesn’t exist while idealism pretends that there is nothing but mind.  Both the materialist and the idealist account of life are essentially lifeless.  They miss the most important phenomenon. 

Jonas thinks that a philosophical biology must revise our view of matter to show that it is potentially alive and our view of soul to show that it is actually material.  I am very certain that he is right. 

Cartesian long enough

Rene Descartes was, in many senses, the father of modern analytic philosophy.  While very few modern philosophers would imagine that they are dualists, almost all of them have confined themselves within the categories of Cartesian dualism.  Descartes saw the physical world as fundamentally dead: matter in motion.  Thus conscious mind could be accounted for only by supposing that it was ontologically independent of the physical body.  Physicalists and materialists have supposed that the mind was ontologically dependent on the physical body, as red paint is ontologically dependent on the stuff in the paint can.  Yet in doing so they maintain the Cartesian understanding of mind and matter as the phenomena to be explained or, in the former case, explained away.  Descartes’ mind remained something of a scandal for modern physicalist thought. 

This is one reason why Darwinism has been an open wound on the modern soul.  Apart from its supposed challenge to Biblical creation, Darwinism seemed to many to amount to an invasion of the realm of the mind by the physical sciences.  If mind is simply a Darwinian engine for survival and reproduction, then art, literature, music, are only so many scratches and cat calls produced by Cartesian machines.  This is why confirmed evolutionists like Stephen Jay Gould and Richard Lewontin went to war against the “ultra-Darwinists” like Richard Dawkins and Daniel Dennett.  Gould and Lewontin were trying to save a space for Cartesian mind to do beautiful things and care genuinely about each other.  I believe this is a dilemma easily escaped once one is liberated from the Cartesian dichotomy. 

The philosopher Hans Jonas saw early that Darwinism cuts both ways.  If it means that life is more dependent on physical processes than Descartes had supposed (and it is) it also means that physical processes are less dead than he supposed (and they are).  As mind and information are always embedded in some material, so the physical matter in the kosmos has within it the potential to produce mind.  Were it not for planet Earth, with its astonishing variety of living organisms, some ghostly visitor to this kosmos would never have guessed that stardust and light had such a potential. 

I submit that the thesis that autonomy is an essential element in the phenomenon of life is the means for finally liberating us from the Cartesian trap.  Here is a bit from the conclusion of the Kepa Ruiz-Mirazo and Alvaro Moreno paper I referenced in my last post:

If we understand the phenomenon of life as a complex network of processes that take shape and propagate both at an individual and a historical-collective dimension—in our terms, as the history of the proliferation of various forms of autonomous organization (from chemical to unicellular, multicellular, developmental, cognitive, and, only recently, to rational autonomy)—the radical Cartesian separation between nature and mind simply disappears. The capacity of a system to determine itself, to establish its own rules and norms of behavior, and to create meaningful environments no longer belongs exclusively to the realm of rationality. At the same time, the natural world cannot be regarded as a universe where blind forces, acting without any sense or purpose, operate: the study of the fundamental mechanisms underlying biological organization, with all their intricacies, has clearly refuted that possibility.

Once life begins on this world, it begins exploring.  Lineages extend across time but they also fork.  Organisms push into new niches as they create new niches.  Such niches are defined not only geographically, as creates crawl up the sand of the primordial beach; they are also defined in terms of complexity.  All organisms are autonomous‑resisting what is outside and other in order to preserve what is inside and the self.  As Mirazo and Moreno argue, life jumps to increasingly robust kinds of autonomy.  The eukaryotic cell, possessing a nucleus, can regulate itself in ways that prokaryotic cells cannot.  Multicellular organisms add further levels of self-regulation, including, eventually, conscious awareness. 

Human freedom and nobility are greater, I submit, than anything else in the visible kosmos.  They are greater by many magnitudes than the simple cells from which they arose.  Yet they are expressions of the potential already evident in the Ur organism.  The Cartesian dichotomy has blinded us to this for a long time.  It is time to drop it.