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

Let us say the mind is what the brain does. This is a definition that makes the mind, whatever else, a participant in the whole history and experience of the body. (Steven Pinker offers the same definition, but modifies it differently. He says, “The mind is what the brain does; specifically, the brain processes information, and thinking is a kind of computation”—excluding the felt experience of thinking, with all its diverse burdens and colorations.) Elsewhere he says, with the certitude typical of his genre, “Family feelings are designed to help our genes replicate themselves, but we cannot see or smell genes…. Our emotions about kin use a kind of inverse genetics to guess which of the organisms we interact with are likely to share our genes (for example, if someone appears to have the same parents as you do, treat the person as if their genetic well-being overlaps with yours).” 2And again we have the self we experience at a qualitative remove from what the brain really does. Presumably we are seduced into collaborating in the perpetuation of some part of our genetic inheritance by those moments of love and embrace. But why are these seductions necessary? Why are they lovely to us? Why would nature bother to distract us with them? Why do we stand apart from nature in such a way that the interests that really move us should be concealed from us? Might there not be fewer of these interfamilial crimes, honor killings, child abandonments, if nature had made us straightforwardly aware that urgencies more or less our own were being served in our propagating and nurturing? There is more than a hint of dualism in the notion that some better self — the term seems fair — has to be distracted by ingratiating pleasures to accommodate the practical business of biology.

This automaton language of Pinker’s sounds a bit like Descartes. But Descartes theorized that the pineal gland, central and singular in the symmetries of the brain, moved one way or another to permit or obstruct the actions of the body, which he knew were governed by the brain. In his theory, the impressions of the senses, integrated in this gland, were appraised by the soul, which in Descartes is a term that seems pointedly synonymous with the mind. That is to say, his interest is in cognition and reason, not sin or salvation, and this in a physical and intellectual landscape inflamed by theological controversy in which those concepts figured prominently. Still, it is the soul that appraises what the mind integrates. In this way Descartes acknowledges the complexity of thinking, judging, and in his way incorporates the feeling of consciousness and the complexity of it more adequately than most theorists do now. He speaks of the mind, which he calls “I, that is to say, the mind by which I am what I am,” in ways that assume it is nevertheless accessible to instruction and correction by an I that stands apart from it. 3To correct the syntax of his thinking so that the anomaly is removed would be to deprive it of its power as testimony — we do indeed continuously stand apart from ourselves, appraising. Every higher act of the mind, intellectual, aesthetic, or moral, is, paradoxically, also an exercise in self-doubt, self-scrutiny.

What Descartes actually intended by the words “soul” and “mind” seems to me an open question for Descartes himself. Clearly they are no mere ghost or illusion. No doubt there are volumes to be consulted on this subject. What their meanings are for us as inheritors of the thought of the modern period is a more manageable question. I am excluding the kind of thinking on this point that tends toward the model of the wager. According to this model, we place our faith in an understanding of the one thing needful, and, ultimately, suffer or triumph depending on the correctness of our choice. By these lights the soul exists primarily to be saved or lost. It is hardly more our intimate companion in mortal time than is the mind or brain by the reckoning of the positivists, behaviorists, neo-Darwinists, and Freudians. The soul, in this understanding of it, is easily characterized by the nonreligious as a fearful and self-interested idea, as the product of acculturation or a fetish of the primitive brain rather than as a name for an aspect of deep experience. Therefore it is readily dismissed as a phantom of the mind, and the mind is all the more readily dismissed for its harboring of such fears and delusions.

Descartes complains that “the philosophers of the schools accept as a maxim that there is nothing in the understanding which was not previously in the senses.” The strictures of this style of thought are indeed very old. It strikes me that the word “senses” is in need of definition. As it is used, even by these schoolmen, it seems to signify only those means by which we take in information about our environment, including our own bodies, presumably. Steven Pinker says, “The faculty with which we ponder the world has no ability to peer inside itself or our other faculties to see what makes them tick. That makes us the victims of an illusion: that our own psychology comes from some divine force or mysterious essence or almighty principle.” 4But the mind, or the brain, a part of the body just as Wilson says it is, is deeply sensitive to itself. Guilt, nostalgia, the pleasure of anticipation, even the shock of a realization, all arise out of an event that occurs entirely in the mind or brain, and they are as potent as other sensations. Consistency would require a belief in the nonphysical character of the mind to exclude them from the general category of experience. If it is objected that all these things are ultimately dependent on images and sensations first gleaned from the world by the senses, this might be granted, on the condition that the sensory experience retained in the mind is understood to have the character the mind has given it. And it might be granted if sensory experience is understood to function as language does, both enabling thought and conforming it in large part to its own context, its own limitations. Anyone’s sensory experience of the world is circumstantial and cultural, qualified by context and perspective, a fact which again suggests that the mind’s awareness of itself is of a kind with its awareness of physical reality. The mind, like the body, is very much placed in the world. Those who claim to dismiss the mind/body dichotomy actually perpetuate it when they exclude the mind’s self-awareness from among the data of human nature.

By “self-awareness” I do not mean merely consciousness of one’s identity, or of the complex flow of thought, perception, memory, and desire, important as these are. I mean primarily the self that stands apart from itself, that questions, reconsiders, appraises. I have read that microorganisms can equip themselves with genes useful to their survival — that is, genes conferring resistance to antibiotics — by choosing them out of the ambient flux of organic material. This is not a pretty metaphor, but it makes a point. If a supposedly simple entity can by any means negotiate its own enhancement, then an extremely complex entity, largely composed of these lesser entities — that is, a human being — should be assumed to have analogous capabilities. For the purposes of the mind, these might be called conscience or aspiration. We receive their specific forms culturally and historically, as the microorganism, our contemporary, does also when it absorbs the consequences of other germs’ encounters with the human pharmacopoeia. Let us say that social pathologies can be associated with traumatic injuries to certain areas of the brain, and that the unimpaired brain has the degree of detachment necessary to report to us when our behavior might be, as they say in the corrections community, inappropriate. Then what grounds can there be for doubting that a sufficient biological account of the brain would yield the complex phenomenon we know and experience as the mind? It is only the pertinacity of the mind/body dichotomy that sustains the notion that a sufficient biological account of the brain would be reductionist in the negative sense. Such thinking is starkly at odds with our awareness of the utter brilliance of the physical body.