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. 

Are Darwinian Explanations Ugly?

At this blog I have argued persistently and I hope convincingly that Darwinian thought can be neither reductionist nor materialist.  The same is true, I suppose, for specifically biosocial thought.  One of the advantages of the latter, espec

ially when combined with classical philosophy, is that it not only confirms what I just submitted but helps explain the rhetorical force of the contrary claim.  Critics of biosocial explanations on both the left and the right deploy the reductionist and materialist interpretations of Darwinism in order to make the latter appear as ugly as possible.  It is this claim, that Darwinian social/political thought is ugly, that I intend to explore and refute here. 

Before we can decide whether Darwinism is ugly or why reductionism and materialism are ugly, we need to have an account of beauty and ugliness.  These concepts are frequently assumed to be entirely cultural in origin or socially constructed, which assumption turns out to be self-contradictory.  For example, if my people say that dark eyes are beautiful and your people say that blue eyes are beautiful, this would count as a distinction between our two cultures only if we have some common notion of beauty to disagree about.  To employ an analogy, we can whether it is right to feed a cold and starve a fever or vice verse only if we agree that the point is to relieve the one and the other. 

Disagreements about where beauty and ugliness are found, like disagreements over medical cures, take place in the context of universal agreements about what we are looking for.  As is usually the case, the Socratic philosophers laid out the basic logical structure of the business with both precision and depth.  In Plato’s Gorgias, the orator Polus concedes that getting away with murder is an ugly thing (or shameful in the context) but insists, nonetheless, that it is a very good thing.  Socrates points out that something that is ugly is so for one of two reasons.  Either it is unpleasant or it is harmful.  Since getting away with murder is not unpleasant, it therefore must be harmful. 

Socrates’ distinction seems to me to be both accurate and exhaustive.  According to his students Plato and Xenophon, Socrates was rather ugly in one sense but not the other.  He was painful to look at, but did you a lot of good if you hung around him long enough.  Other lovers, by contrast, can be very pleasing to eye but ruinous to the heart.  Perhaps a better example, and one beloved by evolutionary psychologists, is the black widow spider.  This creature can be intensely ugly, I can attest, if you find one crawling on your arm.  Yet it is not painful to look at.  On the contrary, it is a shiny jet black, with a beautiful red hour glass on its tear-shaped abdomen.  There is nothing ugly about any of that.  Its ugliness, when it does emerge, is a result of our inherited recognition.  We recognize it as venomous. 

This kind of ugliness holds for a wide range of creatures, from yellow jackets to rattlesnakes, which display warning colors.  These creatures are the opposite of unpleasant to look at if you can view them in safety.  In other contexts they are intensely ugly, so much so that human beings develop phobias about such things.  It is one of the remarkable observations of evolutionary psychology that we have phobias about spiders and snakes but not about automobiles or tobacco.  The reason is that the former killed our ancestors over very long periods of time whereas the latter kill us, but only very recently. 

Our capacity for distinguishing the beautiful from the ugly and the two senses of each from one another, depends on a set of evolved psychological mechanisms.  The same orange that is alarming on a snake is inviting on the skin of a piece of fruit, even the one held by the child in Van Gogh’s painting. 

Just as beautiful colors can be transformed into ugly warnings, they can also be employed as lures.  One kind of firefly uses its fire to attract males of another species looking for mates.  The unlucky suitors are devoured.  Likewise, human cooperators looking for honest partners can be fooled by conmen who have the knack of appearing honest.  Most human beings are bad liars.  We give ourselves away all too easily.  That makes us good cooperators.  Some human beings are very good liars.  Accordingly, most of us have built in bullshit detectors.  We instinctively look for signs of genuine virtue and deceit.  We esteem those who help without demanding a reward over those who always look for a payoff. 

I submit that the interpretation of Darwinian Theory (and especially Darwinian biosocial theory) as reductionist and materialist is rhetorically powerful because it arouses our fraud detection mechanisms.  If a woman nurtures her infant because such behavior was selected for over evolutionary history, that looks to a lot of us like an ulterior motive.  She doesn’t really love her baby; she really loves her selfish genes.  Reductionism and materialism arouse our suspicion all the apparently beautiful sentiments are mere pretenses.  My parents were only serving their genetic interests.  Darwinism is ugly because it paints all of us as devious con artists, painting ourselves in morally fraudulent colors. 

The interpretation of Darwinian moral/political thought as ugly gets the cart before the horse.  Conmen are effective because most of us are basically honest and that can only be because honesty was selected for.  Cooperation is beautiful because it is good.  It makes for a better life for all of us.  The fact that effective cooperative communities flourished whereas less effective cooperators did not underwrites the evolution of human language, morality, and indeed all higher culture.  Those who are good fathers, mothers, friends and citizens, out of genuine inclination made better cooperators than those who merely pretended to be so.  Indeed, the conmen could only come later, as parasites on the successful superorganism.  Before you can have free riders, you have to have something to free ride upon. 

What is ugly is either unpleasant to look at and/or harmful.  What is beautiful is either pleasant to look at and/or beneficial.  Darwinian Theory recognizes these distinctions.  It is therefore Socratic in its logical structure.  It is not ugly, unless it is wrong. 

Biology is Not a Materialistic Science

In the two essays by Evelyn Fox Keller and John Dupré that I commented on in my last post, both authors describe themselves as materialists.  Keller says that she is an “unambivalent materialist” and Dupré says

Like Keller, I am a materialist.  That is to say, I do not believe that there is any kind of stuff in the world other than the stuff described by physics and chemistry.  There are no immaterial minds, vital forces, or extra-temporal deities.

It is hard not to read these statements as other than prophylactic confessions. They are nervous that any distance from a reductionist position might be taken for a belief in magic. 

I would argue that neither of them are in fact materialists because any materialism worthy of that name is untenable.  I suggest that the promiscuous use of the term arouses unnecessary opposition to science and especially to Darwinian biology and worse, it is misleading.  Materialism means nothing if it does not mean an account of something that reduces that thing to the properties of its material constituents.  So what does it mean when two philosophers of biology feel obliged to profess materialism and then deny that such reductionism is possible? 

To understand what materialism might mean it is best to begin with a simple materialist explanation.  Consider an iron bar.  It has color, weight, solidity, and other properties such as magnetism and electrical conductivity.  The bar is made out of small bits of iron, which we may then see as its material.  The properties of the whole result from the addition of the properties of the uniform parts and thus the one is explained by and therefore reducible to the other. 

Now suppose that we heat the bar.  What explains the new properties of the object‑its capacity to warm, turn red, and liquefy?  One explanation is that by heating it we have added new material to the existing material‑particles of heat to particles of iron.  The new material we may call caloric or phlogiston.  As water softens soil and makes it flow, so caloric softens iron and, additionally, makes it red hot.  It’s not an implausible suggestion at first glance.  It explains why the hot iron will warm a surface that it rests on.  The caloric is leaking out into the surface, just as water leaks from a sponge into a table cloth.  The caloric theory of heat is what a genuinely materialist explanation looks like. 

By contrast, the molecular theory of heat denies that heat is something material.  It is instead the energy with which the molecules of a substance collide against each other.  Heating the iron bar does not, as such, introduce a new material into the object.  Instead, it changes the state of the same material.  That is a non-materialist explanation precisely because it does not require belief in “any other kind of stuff” than the stuff of iron. 

Genuinely materialist explanations must work like the caloric theory of heat.  Any property of something would have to be explained by reference to the properties of its material constituents alone and any change in properties would have to be explained by the addition or subtraction of material constituents.  A genuine materialism would have to restrict itself to materialist explanations.  It is not as if such a materialism has not be attempted.  Anaxagoras may have been one of the few genuine materialists in the history of philosophy.  Aristotle made short work of him. 

I return to Dupré.  When he says that “there are no immaterial minds, vital forces, or extra-temporal deities”, in addition to confessing atheism he is in fact rejecting materialist explanations for biological phenomena.  The reference to “vital forces” indicates the idea that there is some kind of stuff in living things that animates them.  That explanation of life was, at least originally, a thoroughly materialist doctrine.  According to the ancient atomists (Lucretius being a good example) the soul was a kind of substance present in living bodies.  When a living body was cut open (say, by a sword) the soul particles leaked out, causing death.  That is what a materialist biology would look like!

Much the same is true of “immaterial minds”.  The reference here, I presume, is to substance dualism.  While dualists attempted to explain consciousness by the supposition of an “immaterial substance”, they are, almost always, positing a division in the kinds of material.  Physical substance forms physical things while mental substance forms ideas, impressions, etc.  This is why conman spiritualists in the 19^th century had themselves photographed covered with cotton candy like “ectoplasm”. 

What is wrong with vitalism in biology and dualism in philosophy of mind is the same thing that wrong with the caloric theory of heat: they posit material substances that do not exist and propose materialistic explanations for phenomena which cannot be explained in material terms. 

To see that modern biology cannot be a materialistic science, one only has to compare it with Aristotle’s biology.  Aristotle believed in spontaneous generation.  Under certain conditions of heat, moisture, etc., material constituents spontaneously generate simple living organisms.  This happens, as Aristotle thought, frequently in swamps and perhaps dead bodies.  If that were true, then biology would be a much reductionist science that it is.  Aristotle was one of the most vociferous opponents of reductionism and, while he certainly incorporated materialist explanations in his biology, he was no materialist.  Yet he was more materialist than modern biologists.  The latter hold that all living organisms are the offspring of pre-existing organisms. 

Spontaneous generation must have happened at the very beginning of life on earth, but what was added to existing materials was not some new material but form‑a certain primitive structure and the process of self-generation and autonomous action.  Like the molecular theory of heat, any viable understanding of living organisms is non-materialistic.  Magical explanations are to be rejected precisely because they invent mythical materials and rely on inappropriately materialistic devices. 

As Aristotle recognized, materialist explanations are often appropriate in science.  Red paint is red because somebody added red powder to water.  Snowflakes take their amazing shapes because water molecules crystalize in certain patterns.  A baby comes to be because it comes to be out of something.  A materialistic biology is impossible because babies come to be something and come to be towards something and come to be because a process of ontogeny is pushing it out of its original state, to survey Aristotle’s four causes.  It is high time that philosophers and scientists stop calling themselves materialists when they are nothing of the sort.