Strawson's metaphysics ( | ) ...

Galen Strawson

Galen Strawson is an Oxford-educated analytic philosopher, as was his father P.F. Strawson. He writes about metaphysics and things metaphysical, as did his father. And re philosophies of nature and mind, he's among the present-day few who 'get it'. Today's mathematico-mechanical philosophy of nature, that which has so severely problematized philosophy and science, has got to go, he says, sooner or later. (And so it does.) Today's eliminativisms he laughs off as the 'silliest,' 'craziest' things in the history of mankind. (And so they are.) In short, I like Galen Strawson. So far I've taken in a full-length book of his (Selves: An Essay in Revisionary Metaphysics), several articles, and a YouTube lecture. And I want to write a little something on his panpsychist physicalism. (Go here for a onceover of the same from the man himself.)

What is it for something to be physical? Most nowadays enter the question scientistically. That is, they unthinkingly think that physical stuff is scientific stuff, is that which scientists may (at least in principle) get at scientifically. But scientism is at bottom physics-alism (as Strawson calls it), and physics-alism is at bottom mathematism. Something is to us physical, then, only insofar as it is quantitative. And so an irreducibly qualitative thing—a quale, say—is to us nonphysical, immaterial, supernatural. But how did this happen? How did we come to supernaturalise such very natural things as qualia? Well, here we may especially thank the revolutionary seventeenth-century. The early-moderns made heady scientific advances by working with strictly mathematical projections of the world, by abstracting from concrete reality only that which was quantitative. The problem was that they thereafter hypostasised the projections, they concretised the abstractions, fallaciously turning method into metaphysic. (There's reason to be methodologically qualitiless, but there's no reason to be metaphysically so!) Abstractions are of course incomplete descriptions of the things from which they abstract. But scientists and philosophers more and more understood the incomplete abstractions—both the quantitative and the qualitative—to be complete concretions. Enter now substance dualism and the mind-body interaction problem. (For the history, see E.A. Burtt's The Metaphysical Foundations of Modern Science.)

Many with a passing knowledge of philosophy are surprised to learn that, although philosophy has been around for some three millennia, the mind-body problem, as we understand it, is a seventeenth-century latecomer. Consider how things were in ye olden times. Everywhere we go, life and breath are interconnected. In the Hebrew scriptures, it is God's spirit-breath that livens the lifeless dust: 'The LORD God formed man of the dust of the ground, and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life' (Genesis 2.7; cf. Ezekiel 37.9-10.). So it is for both man and beast, 'yea, they have all one breath' (Ecclesiastes 3.19). And if God 'gather unto himself his spirit and his breath, all flesh shall perish together, and man shall turn again unto dust' (Job 34.14-15; cf. Ecc. 12.7). The thing to note presently is the breathiness of it all, the airiness, (and to us moderns, therefore, the physicality-materiality). Two Hebrew nouns translated 'soul', 'spirit,' and 'mind' in the KJV — nĕshamah and ruach — are also translated 'breath,' 'wind,' 'blast,' and 'air.' Note also that the Old-Testament man is a single thing, not dust here and spirit-breath there, but inspirited dust. There's no dust-spirit interaction problem.

Hurrying forward to pre-Socratic Greece, things are very much the same. Everybody knows that psychē, the standard Greek word for soul, means both air and breath. (It's the same with the Latin anima, cognate with the Greek anemos or 'wind.') And we needn't be reminded about pneuma. The Orphic poets sang that 'the soul enters into us as we breathe, borne by the winds.' And it was a prayer among Grecians not to die on a windy day, lest a soul be blown off to barbarian lands or waste places. The philosophers, too, all found room for soul-breath somewhere in their systems, monist or pluralist. Take the philosopher-doxographer Aëtius on Anaximenes:

'Anaximenes of Miletus, Son of Eurystratus, declared that the origin of existing things was air, for out of it all things come to be and into it they resolved again. "Just as our soul," he says, "which is air, holds us together, so breath and air surround the whole cosmos" ...'

Or take Aristotle on Democritus:

'In the air there are many of those particles which he calls mind and soul. Hence when we breathe and the air enters, these enter along with it ... This explains why life and death are bound up with the taking in and letting out of breath ...' 

Or take even Aristophanes on Socrates:

STREPSIADES: Socrates! Dear Socrates!

SOCRATES: [suspended up in a basket] Why do you call me, creature of a day?

STREPSIADES: Tell me please, first, what is it you are doing?

SOCRATES: I tread on air and contemplate the sun ... I have to suspend my brain and mingle the subtle essence of my mind with this air, which is of the like nature, in order clearly to penetrate the things of heaven ...

It all sounds so overly physical-material to us. But, then, the physical-nonphysical, material-immaterial dichotomy wouldn't make sense to the ancients. We mean physical-material substance-dualistically. They knew no such substantial separation. (The bygone Greeks had the word sōmatikos, but not asōmatikos.) The ancient and the modern philosophies of nature are radically different. Hylozoism and animism are deeply rooted in ancientry, (as substance dualism is deeply rooted in modernity), and they hadn't been uprooted even by Aristotle's time. Don't let's forget, physical-nonphysical, material-immaterial dichotomising was historically very gradual. (W.K.C. Guthrie has lots of good writing here, e.g. in his multi-volume history of Greek philosophy and in The Greeks and Their Gods.)

So we came to supernaturalise natural things, thanks mostly to a 'fallacy of misplaced concreteness' (Whitehead). Suppose, however, that we want to be a naturalists, allowing the natural, disallowing the supernatural? Surely the commonsensical thing then would be to go back and renaturalise the supernaturalised, leastwise as much of it as we cannot do without. (And such, as we'll see, is Strawson's method.) But today's naturalists are generally not commonsensical—they're nonsensical. See, they accept the terms of the debate as put forward by the Cartesians. (Big mistake.) They accept the mathetismist definition of the physical-material-natural: all quantity, no quality. (Whereas Strawson wants to remix quantity and quality.) They accept res extensæ and reject res cogitantes. (Why? Well, really, it seems to be mostly theophobia. But this fear of God is the beginning of unwisdom.) Again, they're scientismists, therefore physicsalists, therefore mathematismists (both epistemologically and metaphysically!). Note how very Cartesian they are, then, despite their anti-Cartesian blustering. They let the dualists fallaciously dualise, and thereafter select from the dualisation for their monism. It's a fallacy within a fallacy. Thus Strawson writes that they out-Descartes Descartes (‘Realistic monism,’ p. 7 footnote). And it's just no good at all. For if you define matter as Descartes did, it follows logically that you must posit mind (short of brute, reasonless 'emergence'). Moreover, substance dualism isn't meant to be taken by halves, but if you're going to do so, you must take the supernatural half, mind over matter (à la G. Berkeley). For, among other reasons, 'it is less certain that there is non-experiential stuff than that there is experiential stuff'' (ibidem, p. 5 footnote).

Alright. Here's an adapted analogical summary. Say we ask the philosophers what an apple is. The old wisemen would present the apple to us as such in toto.

classical apple

But the Cartesians are too modish for such old-world holism. They first take the apple and put it in a high-powered juicer, the GALILEO-5000, made in Italy, limited warranty. One thing goes in, two things come out—the tasty liquids here, and the tasteless solids there. They then set them side by side, as close together as they may, saying: 'There, that's an apple! The wet and the dry interact somehow, but don't worry your heads about that.'

Cartesian apple

But now along come the present-day materialists. They say: 'You don't really believe in apple juice, do you? What a lot of superstitious nonsense! We now know much. An apple, we now know, is just a dishful of dry pulp. And wet juice, we now know, doesn't really exist.'

materialist apple

So Cartesians make two of one (also thereby making the juice-pulp interaction problem, the hard problem of juiciness, et cetera). Materialists then take but one of the Cartesian two, denying juice outright. Others say that juice 'emerges' from juiceless pulp, a conjuring trick. Still others try to remake apples ex post facto by mixing the juice halfwise with the pulp, but that always turns into applesauce ... 

More to come.