Descartes is a canonical figure in the philosophy curriculum of the West. Yet his
writings embody a kind of paradox or contradiction, a paradox which infects both
philosophical research and the teaching of philosophy to this day. Briefly stated, after
exhorting us to "wake up" from our mentally low level of
"daydreaming", after exhorting us to break with that kind of mental process and
to think at the higher level of episteme, then it seems that all the contents delivered by
operating at the new, higher level are characterized by continuity, by linearity. The
originating feature of discontinuity falls victim to a kind of doctrinal amnesia.
Paradoxes or contradictions can be heuristic and beneficial. Plato certainly went out
of his way to elicit them and focus on them because of this conviction. In the case of
Descartes, and so much of what follows in his aftermath, the contradiction in question is
consigned to forgetfulness.
This is not merely an issue in the history of philosophy. I shall argue that Descartes'
deficiency on this point has infected philosophical research to this day. What is more, in
much contemporary pedagogy suffers from the same influence. Professors standardly ask
beginning students to revolutionize their mental modus operandi, to make a leap from the
level of associating images to that of rigorously tracing connections from concept to
concept. But then, typically, the message which is communicated is that having mounted to
this level the hard work has been accomplished, one has basically arrived; all that
remains is to continue being conceptual and logical, to continue to add to the string of
inferences. Once this piece of hard work is accomplished we tend to present — in both
content and process — the subject as though hierarchies of mental and other realities
did not exist.
An important claim of this paper is that recognition of discontinuous processes is
essential to gain a deep grasp on reality — that Descartes' first recognition is
better and deeper than his ensuing answers. This implies that reductivism (notably, in the
present context, about mind and brain) is a defective attitude. It also implies that Post
Modernism which both tends to deny the existence of hierarchies and to defer serious
treatments of differences is also defective. (What is more, given these times in which
historical processes are collapsing social and political paradigms around the planet, the
issue of denying or deferring a hierarchy of different regimens of reality is of great
practical importance. For, as we see, populations have been tending to revert to old, bad
paradigm rather than generate new, better, "Third Way" paradigms.)
Let us return to the Cartesian paradox and state it in more detail. Early in the
Meditations Descartes exhorts us to "wake up" from our low level of mentation,
which he likens to dreaming (Plato called it "opinion," Hegel was to call it
"picture thinking," the empiricists were to call it "association of
ideas") and to think at a different, higher level, at a level of conceptualization.
That is, a precondition for attaining truths and knowledge is supposed to be a successful,
discontinuous leap from the ordinary level of consciousness to a higher level. In this
Descartes is echoing Republic 534c. However, this feature (of mentation or of existence
more widely) is functionally dropped from the remainder of his philosophy.
The bulk of his doctrine then tends to be committed to simple continuity and linearity.
In the most obvious case, material being is said to be simply continuous (something
Leibniz, for example, later denied). But even mind — when operating at the conceptual
level Descartesencouraged in the Second Meditation — gets treated as an activity
which most basically notices new simples and relates them to the simples already mentally
accumulated. The model is not unlike that of one repetitive kind of process: identifying a
new pearl and adding it to a pearl string, or data gathering and data processing. It is
quite unlike the activity of revolutionizing scientific paradigms or even changing from
the level of imaging or picture thinking to that of conceptualization we were urged to do
earlier in that work.
Can it be that the discontinuous mental process called for in order to initiate the
divulgences of reality at a deep level is merely a lone procedure no with ontological
significance or similarity elsewhere in reality? Can it be that as human beings elevate
themselves to relate cognitively to the universe, the action which seriously inaugurates
that achievement is not to be integrated into the knowledge of the universe? Or is it that
the principles of cognition which determine the principles of science, of episteme require
recognition in any ontology or cosmology which presents itself as worthy of belief?
When we look at the histories of ideas we find that such discontinuities do not, in
fact, cease in the discipline of philosophy (or in any other lively, rigorous discipline).
As Kuhn brought to the profession's attention once again in the latter part of the
Twentieth Century, major advances in thought take place by casting aside old
"paradigms" and creating new ones.
The pattern of revolutions in modes of thinking (and behaving) is repeated even at the
purely cognitive level and is not confined merely to the elevation of mental operation
from association of ideas to logical conceptualization.
Moreover, as Descartes exhorted in the case of one mental revolution (and many teachers
of philosophy today also do) these discontinuities in mental operations are sometimes done
intentionally, deliberately, as a project to be fulfilled. What is further wondrous is
that we sometimes evaluate two or more of these processes and their contents and judge
that some are to be abandoned in favor of one. Which means that we take these Many to be
objects to be assessed and seem to be able to stand as a One supervising them.
Let us put this in terms of the being, the ontology, of such thought processes. At some
arbitrarily specified time the mental content, the items within the process, are of one
general variety and are connected one to another in a specifically typical kind of way:
either by some customary association of ideas or by the formal and non-formal rules of a
discipline as it subscribes to a particular paradigm. At some later time, when a mental
revolution has been accomplished, the content is different and the pattern of connection
of the items of content is of a different type. For illustration: once upon a time human
beings organized the experiences of the night sky in patterns which imaginatively
corresponded to stories such as myths and the connections amongst the stars were
imaginative and followed the aesthetic organization of the myth. Later on, we tried to
find the connections inherent in the stars themselves, thought not only about stars but
also planets with epicyles. (This illustrates a revolution from association of ideas to
astronomical science.) Still later, we gave up all geocentric paradigms, denied there were
epicycles and instead acknowledged the necessary difference of sensuous appearances and
scientific reality, and so on. (This illustrates a revolution within astronomical
science.) That is to say, at one time there is one kind of content and accompanying
connecting process and at another time there is another kind of content and process
joining the items.
Now, using "mind" and "mental" in a very generic way — without
a commitment to any specific theory of mind — most philosophers would allow that a
specific mind is identified and re-identified by its content or characteristic operation
or process. But this is typically also the way one identifies a substance, to use an
old-fashioned term; one identifies some unity of content and operation. But in the issue
under consideration we have been treating a mind as one which has discontinuities, quantum
leaps, revolutions to it. So, if we were to continue to use this terminology of substance
(again, without any strict definition or commitment to a specific variety of theory
thereof), it would not be inappropriate, when the mental processes and contents are
systematically changed, to say (in a non-blasphemous sense) that what has taken place is a
transubstantiation.
And more than this: it is often an intended and deliberatively effected
transubstantiation. It is a self-effected transubstantiation. Therefore, human minds (on
this account) are not substances; they are unities which transcend but unify a series of
"substances." They might be called meta-substances.
This could be one more consideration against the use of the concept of substance, a
concept which in disfavor today as we all know. But I shall not explore this issue except
to say that certainly mind cannot be substantival in the old sense, it cannot be
thing-like, it cannot be a "nugget" of being.
But neither can mind be brain — nor any other physical thing — precisely
because of this feature of its being a Unity over a Many kinds of processes and content
which are mutually discontinuous. For not only is this at odds with the classical notion
of "Man, A Machine" in any recognizable sense of machine; it is also
unrecognizable in any paradigmatic, seriously materialist model of a material thing. It is
a tortuous procedure — like putting a person in an iron maiden — to try to fir
some essential features of human mind into the paradigm of material thing. But this, most
strongly, does not mean that it must therefore be fit into the box of some non-material
thing. Materialism has gotten away with too much by offering itself as the only plausible
alternative to dualism — basic problems of which have not been solved and seem
unlikely ever to be solved. It has seemed to proclaim: "Their position is bad,
therefore one has to accept my position."
But there are more relations in the philosophical toolbox than "is nothing
but" and "is separate from." An old one (Plato made much use of it) is:
"is not other than."
The stress in this paper so far is that different kind of mental processes with
different kinds of contents are bound together under a governing Unity. That is to say,
this Unity or mind is not other than its many kinds of contents but is neither reducible
to them nor separate from them.
Perhaps the kind of relationship is the one which holds between mind and body. But what
is crucial to stress is this transinvariant Unity, a Unity at a higher level of power than
deducing in accordance with a given set of concept and axioms or associating images in a
habituated way. It is this Unity across the discontinuities, a Unity which is not
reducible, which remains so little explored.
Hegel pointed out just this pattern of discontinuity for the subject matter of shapes
of consciousness but failed to treat in any satisfactory way the transinvariant. Karl Marx
was much interested in such patterns at the level of social life and thought he had to
leave the discipline of philosophy to made any headway on the topic. However, given a
small weakness for reductivism aggravated by Engels' promptings, he, too (with a bit of an
exception to be acknowledged below) failed to handle the issue cogently and treated
revolutions by oscillating between reductivism and vague fideism.
However, outside the discipline of philosophy altogether but paying close attention to
it, some of the great German mathematicians of the nineteenth century were taking on just
this task. Riemann, with notes on Kant's antinomies, worked out procedures for handling
multiple geometries and nested spaces and figures such as spheres and hyperspheres. Later
in the century, Cantor showed how to distinguish "bad infinities" from
"good infinities," that there were a multiplicity of good infinities, and that
these infinites could be ordered. The series, according to Cantor, is a discontinuous
series of powers of sets. Cantor also advised the Vatican (apparently
non-too-successfully) on the ontology of God as Infinite. However, the mathematics
profession seems satisfied (at least in lip service, the teaching process tends to betray
the insight by passing on only crystallized propositions together with a suggestion of the
appropriateness of iteration!) that for the formal sciences Cantor (and Riemann) had
solved a cutting edge problem.
My suggestion is that philosophy try to catch up. It is past time to defer treating
differences (which the Post Modernists, it seems, do not really — except
grammatically-even make a subject but only a predicate in an old-fashioned way with new
vocabulary.) The quantum jump, the power which makes that possible and actual is not only
an appropriate subject for our attention but an urgent one given present historical
momentous changes in the offing.
Material has also had a pragmatic claim to its superiority: it can control things on
the basis of its axioms better than any other position. But that warrant is overblown both
internally and comparatively. There is at least as much warrant for saying that we have
much practical control over our lives, thought, patterns of thought by taking thought in
various way, including, most pointedly, by revolutionizing our world views. In fact I
shall make a quick case for the existence of human brains and bodies as a partial effect
of thought. And now I shall come to the modest positive contribution which this paper will
offer. Here is the case made briefly. It shall be made in terms of historical
philosophical anthropology. (And some readers will notice an indebtedness to a passage in
Part I of The German Ideology.)
A quick survey of human history reveals that we have found ourselves in a series of
truly different social orders: from "caveman" hunter-gatherers, to primitive
agriculturalists, to more sophisticated agriculturalists, to builders of rudimentary
cities, to Moon walkers. The following question is pressed: why haven't we found ourselves
in one fixed, settled order — living one kind of life in (fixed) "harmony with
nature"? It is a question analogous to that of the history and philosophy of science:
why didn't we (preferably long, long ago-close to the time of Adam and Eve) hit upon the
correct axiomatics or paradigm and simply crank out a succession of truths such that we
are asymptotically approaching complete knowledge of reality? Then we could have a pattern
of simple extension in social practice and theoretical discoveries.
My suggestion is that such a simple and fixed view of the world is wrongheaded and not
just that it is at odds with the historical facts. Crucial is that it leaves out
creativity which is precisely contrary to the "flattening" of reality today
whether by materialist reductivists or idealist Post Modernists. The big picture shows us
as a species generally increasing our numbers and our talents (with some intersprinkling
of Dark Ages and other collapses). That is, the density of the manifold of human existence
has increased as the forms of our existence have developed over time. We have not simply
extrapolated ourselves and our thoughts on the axiomatics base of our distant ancestors.
Rather, humanity has organized itself into a series of social formations over time. Each
of these — were it "fixed" and closed — would collapse and bring about
the collapse in its membership. But on the whole, each of these systems is
"opened" by the creation of another social system — another repertoire of
behaviors, whose population parameters are higher than previous the one and whose average
talent level is also higher. Thus the "law of entropy" is not what we observe in
human existence as the ultimate law; it is subsumed under a higher law (and necessity for)
creativity. This pattern — a lawful form of existence replaced through creative
thought and its materialization by a more powerful, more intelligent life-demanding and
life-supporting form of existence is the pattern, the species-characteristic life of
humanity.
Postulating the existence somehow of human beings hundreds of thousands of years ago,
there would today be no human living bodies much less brains presently in existence were
it not for the fact of deliberate rational creativity putting into practice what it
essentially knows beforehand and not by trial and error will allow for the continuation of
the human species.
This has great pragmatic warrant. In the Modern Era the Council of Florence and Louis
XI of France knew this was called for, and did it with great practical success. Benjamin
Franklin and colleagues did likewise 300 years later.
To be sure, a huge amount of work would have to be done on the project of getting under
deliberative control the generation of new paradigms and evaluation of them.
But several points seem supported by this line of investigation: there have been a
multiplicity of different concrete shapes of consciousness, that these tend to go together
with different social formations, that different social formations seems to be repeatedly
necessary for survival, that sometimes at least more powerful social formations are
effected by intelligent and deliberate projects set forth and then executed by some, that
therefore the existence of the large number of human bodies (and therefore brains)
presently existing is a partial effect of appreciating and invoking the creative power of
reason which can produce a new world view — mentally and in our lived, social bodies
as well.
This paper has no crisp exploration of this transfinite power. Rather, it exhorts the
profession to turn some of its attention in this direction. But it does offer a criterion
of evaluation of world views, thought and lived. It is a criterion in line with those
nineteenth century figures Cantor and Marx: a world view is better than another world view
just in case the human population density potential is greater with it than with the
other(s).
Accordingly, the model would be that a human person is a multi-level being in which
there is a kind of ultra-powerful transcendental unity of both apprehension and life and
that body is a real but lower appearance and effect of Unity. That Unity used to be called
"soul".
Included in this redirected effort would be an educational process which both
underscored more the leaps that we make and we ask our students to make, and practiced
more in engaging in them. Plato has many good exercises for this.
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