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

It is and may always be premature to attempt, let alone to assert, a closed ontology, to say we know all we need to know in order to assess and define human nature and circumstance. The voices that have said, “There is something more, knowledge to be had beyond and other than this knowledge,” have always been right. If there is one great truth contained in the Gilgamesh epic and every other epic venture of human thought, scientific or philosophical or religious, it is that the human mind itself yields the only evidence we can have of the scale of human reality. We have had a place in the universe since it occurred to the first of our species to ask what our place might be. If the answer is that we are an interesting accidental outcome of the workings of physical laws which are themselves accidental, this is as much a statement about ultimate reality as if we were to find that we are indeed a little lower than the angels. To say there is no aspect of being that metaphysics can meaningfully address is a metaphysical statement. To say that metaphysics is a cultural phase or misapprehension that can be put aside is also a metaphysical statement. The notion of accident does nothing to dispel mystery, nothing to diminish scale.

I consider the common account of the sense of emptiness in the modern world to be a faulty diagnosis. If there is in fact an emptiness peculiar to our age it is not because of “the death of God” in the non-Lutheran sense in which that phrase is usually understood. It is not because an ebbing away of faith before the advance of science has impoverished modern experience. Assuming that there is indeed a modern malaise, one contributing factor might be the exclusion of the felt life of the mind from the accounts of reality proposed by the oddly authoritative and deeply influential parascientific literature that has long associated itself with intellectual progress, and the exclusion of felt life from the varieties of thought and art that reflect the influence of these accounts. To some extent even theology has embraced impoverishment, often under the name of secularism, in order to blend more thoroughly into a disheartened cultural landscape. To the great degree that theology has accommodated the parascientific world view, it too has tended to forget the beauty and strangeness of the individual soul, that is, of the world as perceived in the course of a human life, of the mind as it exists in time. But the beauty and strangeness persist just the same. And theology persists, even when it has absorbed as truth theories and interpretations that could reasonably be expected to kill it off. This suggests that its real life is elsewhere, in a place not reached by these doubts and assaults. Subjectivity is the ancient haunt of piety and reverence and long, long thoughts. And the literatures that would dispel such things refuse to acknowledge subjectivity, perhaps because inability has evolved into principle and method.

The advance of science as such need not and should not preclude acknowledgment of so indubitable a feature of reality as human subjectivity. Quantum physics has raised very radical questions about the legitimacy of the distinction between subjectivity and objectivity. Indeed, there is now a suggestion of the pervasive importance to the deep structures of reality of something of a kind with consciousness. The elusiveness of the mind is a consequence of its centrality, which is both its potency and its limitation. The difficulty with which objectivity can be achieved, to the extent that it ever is achieved, only demonstrates the pervasive importance of subjectivity. I would argue that the absence of mind and subjectivity from parascientific literature is in some part a consequence of the fact that the literature arose and took its form in part as a polemic against religion. And it has persisted, consciously or not, in a strategy for excluding thought of the kind hospitable to religion from the possibility of speaking in its own terms, making its own case. Metaphysics in general has been excluded at the same time, even from philosophy, which since Comte has been associated with this same project of exclusion. The arts have been radically marginalized. In its treatment of human nature the diversity of cultures is left out of account, perhaps to facilitate the making of analogies between our living selves and our hypothetical primitive ancestors, so central to their argument, who can only have been culturally very remote from us indeed. When history is mentioned, it is usually to point to its follies and errors, which persist to the degree that the light of science has not yet fallen over the whole of human affairs.

There is an odd, undeniable power in this defining of humankind by the exclusion of the things that in fact distinguish us as a species. For this exclusion Comte is not to blame. He famously proposed an elaborate ritualized religion of Humanity, the Grand Being in his parlance. His theory of man and society has no heirs and was in fact shuffled out of positivist thought so promptly and thoroughly that no trace of it can be seen. Comte said that in his new social order, cooperation among people “must be sought in their own inherent tendency to universal love. No calculations of self-interest can rival this social instinct, whether in promptitude and breadth of intuition, or in boldness and tenacity of purpose. True it is that the benevolent emotions have in most cases less intrinsic energy than the selfish. But they have this beautiful quality, that social life not only permits their growth, but stimulates it to an almost unlimited extent, while it holds their antagonists in constant check.” 2To build a grand humanism on the foundation of the sciences was the dream and object of his philosophy.

No theory contemporary with us or influential among us would suggest that humankind is characterized by an “inherent tendency to universal love.” Comte wrote in the bloody period of European revolutions and counterrevolutions, and still he believed in the unrivaled power of the “benevolent emotions.” Our positivist writers on human nature assume that only self-interest can account for individual behavior. Selfish behavior is assumed to be merely reflexive, though it can be deceptive in its forms, for example when the reward toward which it is directed is social approval. And the deep and persisting acceptance of this vision as indisputable truth has had an epochal significance for the way we think. Comte has had his revenge for the decapitation of his philosophic system in leaving behind a word and concept — altruism, selfless devotion to the good of others — that has deviled parascientific thought ever afterward.

There are inevitable problems with parascientific argument. At best, arguments based on science, no matter what their source, are vulnerable over the medium term, at least, on account of the very commendable tendency of science to change and advance. At this point, the parascientific genre feels like a rear-guard action, a nostalgia for the lost certitudes of positivism. The physical universe, as it is known to us now, is not accessible to the strategies of comprehension that once seemed so exhaustively useful to us. Nevertheless, that it is accessible to these strategies is the core faith that continues to animate the writers in the parascientific tradition.

Comte, in the words of the eleventh edition of the Encyclopaedia Britannica , foresaw the evolution of human consciousness beyond its theological and metaphysical stages and into positivism. The article says, “When that stage has been reached, not merely the greater part, but the whole, of our knowledge will be impressed with one character, the character, namely, of positivity or scientificalness, and all our conceptions in every part of knowledge will be thoroughly homogeneous.” The impulse to impress all thought with one character is mighty in the literature of parascience, perhaps because it shared its cradle with philosophic monisms like positivism. This is true despite the fact that the traditions of modern thought, however rigorously self-consistent, are not consistent with one another — except in their shared impulse to nullify individual experience, which is perhaps as much a motive as a consequence of their rigor. William James, in an essay on Hegel, says he fears lest that philosopher’s monism, “like all religions of the ‘one thing needful,’ end by sterilizing and occluding the minds of its believers.” Perhaps there is something about a sterilized and occluded mind that is strongly associated with missionary zeal, an impatient need to enlist believers, to bring others into the fold. This zeal is another characteristic of the literature I have called parascientific. It has found in the object and glory of Comte’s system, altruism, an irresolvable anomaly and an irritant. 3