SPINOZA WAS RIGHT!
The human
body is a body that thinks, a thinking body (Spinoza). Bodies do not have thought in the sense of owning a
possession, any more than bodies have walking
rather than doing walking. Human
bodies act by thinking (amongst other things) which in fact they do all the
time, even in sleep. Certain drugs may alter this activity just as an excess of
alcohol will alter the action of walking. Human bodies are thinking ones just
as they are walking ones, sitting-down ones and manually-using ones. Thinking
indeed animates and accompanies all these, together with reflexes which involve
the brain but function also to varying degrees below the consciousness of
thinking.
This consciousness of thinking,
incorporating self-awareness, is a natural and social development out of a
lengthy evolution. But there is no rigid or sharp division here between humans
and the rest of the animal kingdom. Higher animals have memories and can reason
beyond pure instincts, often learning by specific imitation, though they
function largely by instinct, specialising in their reciprocations with their
environments. Wild animals are tied to their natural habitats, a chief
distinction from humans, who have learned to live in virtually all environments
partly by altering them though some animals have – in some cases for millennia –
thrived in big cities – one thinks immediately of various rodents, plus foxes
and birds of prey, for example. But it was humans who built the cities in the
first place and have largely altered countrysides by industrial means. Humans are
not sufficiently biologically specialised to survive without making up societies
developed through labour, commencing with the freeing-up of the hands through an
upright posture and bipedalism. And so over a lengthy evolution (though in one
phase not so lengthy: farming is only 10,000 years old) we have developed elaborated
thinking, reasoning, imagining and all through necessary social co-operation
and thought-sharing in speech, work, dance, ritual, art, writing and electronic
communication – in the service of the reproduction of human social life.
Just as there is no rigid division
between humans and animals, so there is no such thing as ‘thought’ per se.
There is always thought about something.
‘Thought’ is not a spiritual ‘implant’
inside a corporeal human body. There is no division of an existential kind
between a corporeal human body and his/her thoughts, for the thoughts as such
are an activity of that body: something the body does rather than has.
‘Thought’ in isolation is
non-existent, an abstraction or reification. It is impossible to think
‘thought’ as such because as a mythical entity in isolation, thought does not
exist and by itself is unimaginable. Only thinking exists, as a bodily
extension.
Thoughts are Nature thinking about
itself. That is, because human beings are natural beings, a development of
Nature itself through humanoid biological-social evolution. In our terms
evolution in Nature tends to be slow, though with ‘qualitative leaps’.
Biologically we are pretty much the same as our homo sapiens Stone Age ancestors. It is via
a further tool-using sociality that we have developed far beyond them. And
because all creatures and plants reciprocate with environments, more especially
with humans thinking – being a social action and indeed storing social images
when not directly socialising – mental activity is manifested ‘out there’ as much as ‘in here’. Human
beings as social beings are consciously purpose-driven, we live our lives by
intending to get to work (and coming home again), by working out how to build a
house (or reading the instructions), by deciding to sit in this chair rather
than that one, by deciding to have children, or at any rate to deal with that
situation whether intended or not. As classes emerge in human societies, or in
the relations of production and reproduction of human life, so class-struggle
is grounded in the natural needs of humans as natural beings, in a struggle
over wherewithal in terms of shelter, food and other needs. Thus it is a
perpetuation of Nature but in the human socio-political context of the
inequalities that deprive the many and over-fulfil the few who rule over them.
Class struggles have been endemic in societies of slavery, despotism, feudalism
and capitalism. Categorising actions strictly in terms of whether they stem
from emotions or from intellect or instincts is unhelpful because purpose towards something is the
activity-driven impetus, even if it comes from no more than to relieve oneself
of pain or the burden of excrement. The whole natural body is purpose-driven by
means some of which are physiologically beyond our immediate control – hunger,
contractions, infections, scabbing and so on; but in humans thinking is in
overall charge, aided by the more advanced thinking of, say, medical
practitioners, not to speak of chefs.
Mental health has profound
implications for thinking bodies, and mental illness is if anything more
painful and terrifying for a thinking body than physical illness, something the
mass of us even now are only just beginning to realise.
It might have been better all round if
Descartes, back in the 17th century, had inaugurated modern
philosophy by saying: ‘I am, therefore I think’ rather than ‘I think, therefore
I am.’ Thinking was not prior to corporeal existence. But for Descartes the
dilemma would then be how to posit a basic ‘I am’ without some sort of Divine
postulate or intervention, outside a construction of rational thinking as such,
Darwin not having been around in the 17th century, pace Spinoza. Indeed Descartes resorted to
Divine intervention to explain the conundrum of mind-body separation or
dualism, (in humans only: dolphins, chimps and bonobos need not apply:
Descartes thought of animals as automatons; evidently he had never seen a
sleeping dog dreaming) which has bedevilled philosophy ever since. Thus dualism
holds that consciousness and physicality are separate domains, but no one has
figured out how the supposed corporeal domain and the incorporeal domain
interact. The only possible answer seems to have been that God made it so, and
you don’t go about questioning Him!
There is a downside. Because thinking
is so all-encompassing in human life it leads us to be the only creatures who
are aware of the imminence of their deaths. Animals instinctively know the fear
of danger but nothing of their own deaths, though higher animals will mourn the
losses of their kind, most poignantly elephants with their exceptional
memories. But we know that we ourselves are not exempt in a single instance
from personal extinction – danger notwithstanding – and this may be hard to
bear.
What is harder to bear is the sheer
nastiness, terror, pain and filth of much dying (not death itself) and the
yearly deaths of hundreds of thousands of children across the world: truly
shocking such that this essay is powerless to address it adequately. And then
the cutting down of the youthful, still in their early prime, tragically and
often violently. All this for me, and I
think most others – is much harder to bear than our personal extinction (at least
until we are brought to realize the latter’s actual oncoming). Ironically death
itself is easier to give thought to and respond to, and so it is this that we
will focus on here. Death is piffling compared to dying.
To meet this eventuality we have
developed down the ages a ‘cure’ that might be considered worse than the ‘disease’:
a belief in our individual immortality. Probably the majority of people even
outside the church believe in a personal immortality of some sort. The irony of
this is that it is the corporeal body that is ‘immortal’ (never mind souls)
since matter even as transmuted into energy is inextinguishable.
The living body is not a can of beans,
vacuum-sealed and sufficient unto itself. It is continuously nourished and
sustained by that which is outside it - including the air we breathe almost
every second of our lives or die. The foci and objects of our hopes and fears,
our plans, our images, our emotions and our actions – our minds, in short – are
‘out there’ not ‘in here’. Our brains are not the source but the instrument,
the two-way transmitter. We, and all living organisms, are as much ‘out there’
as ‘in here’, and for humans this includes their thinking minds. Without ‘out
there’, there would be no minds. Even purely mental, immaterial images – not viewable
in brain scans – and however internalised, are not wholly internal but a
response to the world we live in. And this includes the picturised, compulsive
thinking we know as dreams, which may lack everyday logic but not sense,
however ‘nonsensical’. Those who instinctively grasp our essential
being-in-the-world are, I believe, the more inclined to give back what they
take in, perhaps the more inclined to protest against air pollution because they
know that ‘air’ is ‘us’ – us as much as our arms and legs and incredibly more
vital. Those who are intent on emulating cans of beans will likely be
complaisant over killing their own and other peoples’ children on this account.
Meanwhile, I suggest, if I cannot prove, that those
who give freely of themselves will give freely of their lives when their time
comes. Death, this last act of rendering, giving up, can make sense to those
who have ‘given’ all their lives. Even solitary artists know the intensity of
giving, and the martyred saints of old gave up their lives not only for the
bliss to come but also because they had been giving for all or much of their
lives. But the need to give today does not require a fanaticism of the old
kind, only a realistic assessment of where we and the world are presently
heading if we continue to respond by feeding ourselves at the expense of
feeding and freeing others. The personal
immortality alternative is not justifiable on virtually any grounds. That is no more than a patchwork of
half-baked egoistic ideas needing ever more patching and mending to give (in
our time) cover to narcissistic capitalism, itself upholding – in reality – only
the immortality of money: the fetish twinned with idealised personal
immortality. So twinned, they shore each other up.
Far
from the older conservative values of a traditional and organic society, Tory
ideology today is focussed on the belief in the self-achieving individual whose
freedom is threatened by ‘collectivism’. We are all materially better-off (even
the poor) than we used to be, but better-off as separated individuals, not in
collective, environmental and social terms. Regardless of whether or not polar
bears are on the brink of extinction through our efforts to warm up the globe,
the higher and stouter the wall of protection around our house, large or small,
the better. Even transport must be insanely individualised with results in our death-dealing
pollution and five-mile tailbacks, not to speak of the material waste involved
in a world of depleting resources. Unless we can successfully complete this
individualist paradise with either an irrational dismissal of imminent personal
death or the clinging to the shreds of a faith – long since abandoned otherwise
– in a personal immortality, this solipsistic emphasis on extreme separated
individualism makes the thought of one’s
own death horrifying in its inconceivability. What can ‘nothing’ mean to one
who is ‘everything’ there is? The ‘cure’ of belief in a personal delivery
through an inner immortal soul is worse than the ailment if the religion
backing this up is not otherwise very robustly believed, and so contributes in
its fragile way towards a rubbing raw of the knowledge of death. (Strictly
speaking, the biblical Christian dogma is ‘the resurrection of the body’ on the
Day of Judgment: see e.g. 1 Corinthians 15:52. As for Buddhist reincarnation,
if there is no individuality in Buddhism, what is being ‘reincarnated’?)
To sum up. No neurologist has ever
detected ‘thoughts’ in the brain. Neural firings are not themselves thoughts:
the apprehended world (including other bodily functions) creates thoughts.
Because we are purpose-driven (common at various levels to all organisms –
even, so it seems, trees), our thinking applied to purpose (not found in other
organisms except for rudiments in the higher animals and birds), known as
‘mind’, is ‘out there’ rather than ‘in here’. However secret or fanciful or
mistaken thoughts may be, or in dreams during sleep, their existence is
predicated on the outside world of objects and purposes to do with objects
including other human objects, and our own body as an object. Remove all that,
remove all stimulus of content and purpose, and there is no ‘thought’ at all.
In that state one is either dead or deeply drugged or in a coma in which whole
physical systems are shut down.
In a new book The Spread Mind: Why
Consciousness and the World Are One (2017) psychologist Riccardo Manzotti of
the University of Milan (‘who has written 50 papers on the basis of
consciousness’) considers that our consciousness is of the same stuff
physically as the objects it encounters. I would go along with this inasmuch as
air and all the rest of the ‘outside’ are integral to us as individual bodies. It
is promising that Professor Manzotti mounts a comprehensive and vehement attack
on Cartesian mind-body dualism, but despite protestations he cannot ultimately
detach himself from the age-old materialist doctrine of physicalism, i.e. that
the only real world is the physical world, (a doctrine diametrically opposed,
like a fractious twin, to Bishop Berkeley’s theory that the world is
immaterially engendered in us by God). Oddly, Manzotti comes to at least
partially embrace his twin in the sense that his own doctrine appears to edge
towards the Bishop’s view when logically worked out.
Essentially this is because Manzotti’s
focus is on a consciousness passively observing objects (in his case a red
apple, so often cited throughout the text as to seem obsessional), just as with
virtually all the conventional materialist philosophers.
Here it is useful to bring in Marx and
Theses on Feuerbach, viz.:
‘The
chief defect of all previous materialism (including that of Feuerbach) is that
things, reality, the sensible world, are conceived only in the form of objects of observation, but not as human
sense activity, not as practical
activity, not subjectively….’ (I)
‘The
standpoint of the old type of materialism is civil society; the standpoint of
the new materialism is human society or social humanity.’ (IX)
Or this
from the 1844 Manuscripts:
‘Consciousness
can never be anything else than conscious existence, and the existence of men
is their actual life process.’
And this,
from the German Ideology:
‘We begin
with real, active men, and from their real life-process show the development of
the ideological reflexes and echoes of this life process. ..Life is not
determined from consciousness but consciousness by life.’
Deriving theses on consciousness from
the peaceful contemplation of apples or anything else means ultimately reaching
a dead end persisting in this frame of thinking.
Hence
my stress on the modality of purpose-driven thinking social beings as the
developers of consciousness as an actively-used tool, long ago commencing with
the freed-up hands. It is in this active sense that as aspects of our material
bodies, our minds are as much ‘out
there’ as ‘in here’. When we are released from purpose we will not think
anyhow, and so death is nothing to worry about when we no longer have the means
by which to worry. But if we have given out some
good, at least enough to be missed and remembered to whatever extent, our
‘out there’ will survive us. Buddhists and Hindus would call this our karma,
the sum total of all our actions when alive that survives us. I think this is
perfectly reasonable in a humanist-materialist sense, as outlined in this blog.
It is by this ‘karma’ that Mozart, Beethoven, Rembrandt, Jane Austen, Annie
Jones, Steve Wilkinson and that sharp-minded old chap down the pub survive. Or
if we’ve done more than our fair share of bad, our ‘out there’ will most likely
be shunned, despised and figuratively spat upon. Or perhaps more likely it will be a mixture of both. So: a heaven, a
hell and a purgatory exist after all, though you need not concern yourself with
them unless you want to! In this case it really is your survivors who agonise,
not you.
