Strawson's metaphysics ( ||| ) ...

Galen Strawson

Where were we? From the seventeenth century onward, we've understood worldstuff to be altogether non-experiential, contra mindstuff. And so in the words of Schrödinger:

'We are thus facing the following strange situation. While all building stones for the [mathematico-scientific] world-picture are furnished by the senses qua organs of the mind, while the world picture itself is and remains for everyone a construct of his mind and apart from it has no demonstrable existence, the mind itself remains a stranger in this picture, it has no place in it, it can nowhere be found in it' ('On the Peculiarity of the Scientific World-View,' in What is Life? and Other Scientific Essays, p. 216).

For the past fifty or sixty years, philosophers (and scientists playacting as such) have tried ever so mindfully to explain mind mindlessly. Here the emergentists try to work experience back into worldstuff without reworking the altogether non-experiential understanding thereof. Meantime the scientismists feel that they must deny experience completely, even though denying is experiential, so as to be proper card-carrying materialists. And on and on and on. Absurdity upon absurdity upon absurdity. But if your premises lead you to the madhouse, straightly or circuitously, then you need to give them up. And Galen Strawson wants to help you, if you'll but let him. That's what he's here for. 

Something akin to shock treatment may be necessary for inpatients at the start. There's much for them to unlearn (viz., about four-hundred-year's worth of bad metaphysics). They've moved so far away from how things really are in rerum natura. And they always seem to think that we've got 'matter' in the bag, whereas 'mind' evades us. But, as with most every modern dogma, this is the reverse of the truth. Thus Strawson: 'We tend to think we have a good general understanding of what Russell calls the "intrinsic" nature of matter in spite of all the conundra of current physics and cosmology. But this belief is wholly unjustified ... When it comes to the mental, by contrast, we know quite a lot about its intrinsic nature' (Selves, pp. 285-6). What we really need is another scientifico-philosophical revolution, stresses Strawson [say 'stresses Strawson' three times fast], for day-to-day reality cannot be described 'by any non-revolutionary extension of current physics' (ibidem, p. 284).

Strawson's way to dissolve the problems is to say that worldstuff and mindstuff are both one and the same worldmindstuff. From the outset he wants to be a monist, but nota bene a monist who's adductive, not reductive. And that leads him to panpsychism/panexperientialism. Here everything is at least somewhat experiential. Strawson isn't saying that darning needles, porcelain teapots, and other household miscellanea are experiencers (à la H.C. Andersen). He wouldn't be able to look his fellows in the face again if he said that. It's all and only experiencers that have experiences. However, to steer around anything anywise dualistic, he must perforce say that darning needles are proto-experiencers. There must in all things be proto-experience, proto-mind, proto-what-it's-likeness, proto-qualia, et cetera. Already there are many problems here. (Do many proto-experiences add up to an experience?) And, yes, most of the perceptive thinkers nowadays go for something dualistic. (Some sort of property dualism isn't uncommon. Cf. David Chalmers and John Searle.) But Strawson wants to be a monist full-stop, though he grants that dualisms are intuitive (and monisms counterintuitive):

'Things are not as they seem if materialism Strawsonian monism is true; for if materialism Strawsonianism is true, then mental phenomena and non-mental phenomena, and in particular experiential (i.e. conscious) phenomena and non-experiential phenomena, do after all belong wholly to the same single sphere of being' (Selves, p. 71; my strikethroughs and italicizations of course).

What about God? To be a half-dualist monist is to set oneself about as far from God as possible. (It's also to set oneself about as far from reality as possible.) And to half-dualist monists, Strawsonian monism is much too godly, too mystical. If anything, it would disarm them in their theomachy. It may even be argued that Strawson's philosophy is just a sort of neo-primitivism, a neo-animism. (What, really, is the difference between a present-day Strawsonian and a pre-Socratic hylozoist or a pantheist Stoic?) And yet Strawson himself seems to think that by calling his holism a physicalism-materialism-naturalism he's somehow protecting himself from God. But the God-fearing ancients also had a holistic philosophy of nature. (Maybe he's thereby protecting himself from the God of Galileo, Descartes, and Malebranche, but not from the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob.) Earlier I talked of the breathy-airy understandings of soul-spirit in antiquity up to the Greeks, but that's not to say that they went away thereafter. Consider emperor Marcus Aurelius in the second century AD, foremost of the later Stoa, who called the soul an airy 'whirl' some six hundred years after Aristophanes (with whom we left off):

'If souls continue to exist, how does the air contain them from eternity? But how does the earth contain the bodies of those who have been buried from time so remote? For as here the mutation of these bodies after a certain continuance, whatever it may be, and their dissolution make room for other dead bodies; so the souls which are removed into the air after subsisting for some time are transmuted and diffused, and assume a fiery nature by being received into the seminal intelligence of the universe, and in this way make room for the fresh souls which come to dwell there ...'

'No longer let thy breathing only act in concert with the air which surrounds thee, but let thy intelligence also now be in harmony with the intelligence which embraces all things. For the intelligent power is no less diffused in all parts and pervades all things for him who is willing to draw it to him than the aerial power for him who is able to respire it.' (Meditations, IV.21 and VIII.54). 

Reading the literature, it often seems they are talking of the selfsame worldmindstuff at varying levels of condensation and rarefication, so that there's uniformity beneath pluriformity. Here are earth and water, which rarefied become air and fire, which ultrararefied become aether. Then the traditional Christian understanding of body and spirit—(which is not substance dualistic, as popular opinion today says it is, reading modernism into pre-modernism)—was of course carried over from ancient Jewry. Yes, you'll find in the history of the faith every sort of anthropology — that man is one, two, three things, or two in one, or three in one. But the point is that when they spoke of body and spirit, flesh and breath, they didn't mean machine and mind as we do now. Justin Martyr (AD 100-165 ) could say that the soul is as perishable and corruptible as anything else (Dialogue with Trypho, V). And Tertullian (AD 145-220) had no problem saying that 'the soul is corporeal, possessing a peculiar kind of solidity in its nature,' that it 'has a bodily substance of its own,' and so on (De resurrectione carnis, XVII; cf. his De anima). The closest churchdom came to a fully worked-out and systematised anthropology was the Aristotelian hylemorphism ('matter-formism') of High Scholasticism, affirmed by the Council of Vienna in 1312. Here man is a psychosomatic totality. He is informed matter, insouled body. (Again, there are no interaction problems. For soul and body don't 'interact' at all.)

So I can't but wonder if Strawson is very much versed in pre-modern thinking. He knows his moderns well, entering into serious discussions with Locke, Hume, Kant, et al. But does he know his pre-moderns? They're not part of his discussions anyway. Aristotle is spoken of underbreath now and then in Selves. But that's about it. We don't find, say, Bonaventure or Aquinas in the index (though we find 'Winnie the Pooh' and 'Heffalump'). And all of this is somewhat worrisome, for we cannot really understand Western modernism until we really understand the Platonic-Aristotelian tradition, which came to an apogee in the Christianised Aristotelianism of the later middle ages. For modernism was contrarian above all. Much as teenagers do the utmost to be unlike their parents—going so far as to say the waist is a handbreadth above the knee, to severally inkstain themselves, and to do many other things traditionally associated with criminals—so the early-modern thinkers did the utmost to be unlike their philosophical forebears.

Anyway, the bottomline is: were the bygones to use modern terminology, they'd say that both body and spirit-soul are physical-material-natural, in much the same way that Strawson does. And when thinkers like him and Thomas Nagel talk about how we need a scientifico-philosophical revolution, they're really talking about a devolution, about returning to an older worldview (updated howsoever). But they're correct all the same. The scientific revolution turned the world upside down, and we need to turn the world upside up again. To me, then, although there's much to learn from Strawson, he has an all-too-modern mindset. He writes: '[Panpsychism] sounded crazy to me for along time, but I'm quite used to it, now that I know that there is no alternative short of substance dualism' ('Realistic monism,' p. 19). But there clearly are alternatives short of substance dualism: hylemorphism, for example. Moreover, David S. Oderberg, a present-day exponent of hylemorphism, teaches philosophy at the same university as Strawson. So Galen need only go down the hallway to learn all about it. No excuses then!

UPDATE: After writing the above, I had a small e-mail back-and-forth with Prof. Strawson, (something that came about per accidens). He was a very good sport. And I put it to him: what about hylemorphism? Here, after all, is another way of thinking altogether, dualistic but not so to speak a dualism. Plus, all the waving of hands and shrugging of shoulders that comes with panpsychism is absent. Strawson's reply: 'I don't really know what hylemorphism is.' So there we have it. (And him with Prof. Oderberg right around the corner too. Tsk, tsk.)