Marilynne Robinson - Absence of Mind - The Dispelling of Inwardness from the Modern Myth of the Self

Monads being for Leibniz the fundamental constituents of the cosmos, we are in his scheme a kind of monad whose special character it is to mirror the universe. Through its many variations, the idea of the microcosm asserted a profound kinship between humankind and the whole of being, which common sense must encourage us to believe does in fact exist. It would be more than miraculous, indeed an argument for something like a special creation, if we were in any sense set apart from being as a whole. Our energies can only derive from, and express, the larger phenomenon of energy. And there is that haunting compatibility of our means of knowing with the universe of things to be known. Yet, even as our capacity to describe the fabric of reality and the dimensions of it has undergone an astonishing deepening and expansion, we have turned away from the ancient intuition that we are a part of it all. What such a recognition might imply, if it were attempted on the basis of present knowledge, it is difficult to say, but the strange ways of quarks and photons might enlarge our sense of the mysterious nature of our own existence. The pull of reductionism might be balanced by a countervailing force.

The very truncated model of human being offered by writers in the tradition that has dominated the discussion from the beginning of the modern period is a clear consequence of the positivist rejection of metaphysics. It is true that philosophical speculation was the only means at hand for the old tradition that pondered such ideas as human-soul-as-microcosm. Nevertheless, the insight that we, along with the apes, participate in a reality vastly larger than the sublunary world of hunting and gathering, mating, territorialism, and so on is indisputable. Granting evolution, its materials can only have been the stuff in which a brilliant complexity would have inhered since long before the first generation of stars, to choose a date at random. It is not to be imagined that the character of matter would not profoundly affect the forms in which our reality has emerged.

It is historically accidental that the metaphysics that dealt with our being at this scale was theology or looked like it, and that religion was considered the adversary of true understanding. An attempt to re-integrate us into our cosmic setting might look like theology, or mysticism. If this should be the case, it would be in large part a consequence of the fact that the subject has been allowed to atrophy, and those who take it up again might well be driven back on an old vocabulary. This could be mildly embarrassing, after the long crusade of de-mythification. But such considerations ought not to determine the course of science.

There is another sense in which the modern conversation is truncated. If human nature is the subject that rises when our origins are at issue, then whatever we can know of our past is surely germane, and ill-founded generalizations are at best a distraction to be guarded against. That historical data, the record we have made of our tenure on this planet, should be left out of account may reflect the schism in Western intellectual life that has alienated science and humane learning. But the schism itself has origins in the rejection by positivism and by influential voices in early modern science of the terms in which so much thought and collective memory have been interpreted and recorded.

An associated phenomenon is the notion that we know all we need to know when we have acquainted ourselves with a few simple formulae. We have been optimized by competition and environment, we are shaped by economic forces and means of production, we are inheritors of a primal guilt, we are molded by experiences of frustration and reinforcement. These are all assertions that have shaped modern thought. But they are not to be reconciled with one another. The Freudian neurasthenic is not the Darwinian primate, who is not the Marxist proletarian, who is not the behaviorists’ organism available to being molded by a regime of positive and negative sensory experience. To acknowledge an element of truth in each of these models is to reject the claims of descriptive sufficiency made by all of them. What they do have in common, beside the claim to sufficiency, is an exclusion of the testimonies of culture and history. These primary assertions make other information either irrelevant or subordinate to kinds of explanation that serve the favored theory. What is art? It is a means of attracting mates, even though artists may have felt that it was an exploration of experience, of the possibilities of communication, and of the extraordinary collaboration of eye and hand. The old conquerors may have meant to fling themselves against the barricades of fate and mortality, but in fact, through all that misery and disruption, they were really just trying to attract mates. The Freudian self is necessarily frustrated in its desires, and therefore it generates art and culture as a sort of ectoplasm, a sublimation of forbidden impulses. So, it would seem, the first thing to know about art, whatever the account of its motives and origins, is that its maker is self-deceived. Leonardo and Rembrandt may have thought they were competent inquirers in their own right, but we moderns know better.

Recently I read to a class of young writers a passage from Emerson’s “The American Scholar” in which he says, “In silence, in steadiness, in severe abstraction, let him hold by himself; add observation to observation, patient of neglect, patient of reproach, and bide his own time, — happy enough if he can satisfy himself alone that this day he has seen something truly…. For the instinct is sure, that prompts him to tell his brother what he thinks. He then learns that in going down into the secrets of his own mind he has descended into the secrets of all minds.” These words caused a certain perturbation. The self is no longer assumed to be a thing to be approached with optimism, or to be trusted to see anything truly. Emerson is describing the great paradox and privilege of human selfhood, a privilege foreclosed when the mind is trivialized or thought to be discredited. The clutch of certitudes that, together, trivialize and discredit are very much in need of being looked at again.

The mind, whatever else it is, is a constant of everyone’s experience, and, in more and other ways than we know, the creator of the reality that we live within, that we live by and for and despite, and that, often enough, we die from. Nothing is more essential to us. In this chapter I wish to draw attention to the character of the thinking that is brought to bear by contemporary writers on the subject, and also to a first premise of modern and contemporary thought, the notion that we as a culture have crossed one or another threshold of knowledge or realization that gives the thought that follows it a special claim to the status of truth. Instances I have chosen to present this case are necessarily few, but in this remarkably reiterative literature they may fairly be called typical.

There is at present an assertive popular literature that describes the mind as if from the posture of science. For the purposes of these writers, it is as if chaste and rational scientific objectivity certified the value of their methods and the truth of their conclusions. The foil for their argument, sometimes implicit, usually explicit, is that old romantic myth of the self still encouraged by religion or left in its wake as a sort of cultural residue needing to be swept away. I have no opinion about the likelihood that science, at the top of its bent, will ultimately arrive at accounts of consciousness, identity, memory, and imagination that are sufficient in the terms of scientific inquiry. Nor do I object, in our present very limited state of knowledge, to hypotheses being offered in the awareness that, in the honorable tradition of science, they are liable to being proved grossly wrong. What I wish to question are not the methods of science, but the methods of a kind of argument that claims the authority of science or highly specialized knowledge, that assumes a protective coloration that allows it to pass for science yet does not practice the self-discipline or self-criticism for which science is distinguished.

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