The anomalies that plague accident as an explanatory model — the human mind, most notably — are no problem at all if it is assumed that accident does not explain us, that we are meant to be human, that is, to be aware and capable in the ways the mind — and how else to describe the mind? — makes us aware and capable. And what are those ways? Every poem, theory, philanthropy, invention, scandal, hoax, and crime of violence tells us more. No aspect of reality, from this point of view, need be simplified or limited to fit an explanatory model. One would think that the inadequacy of any model to deal with the complexity of its subject would make its proponents a bit tentative, but in fact the tendency of the kind of thought I wish to draw attention to is to deny the reality of phenomena it cannot accommodate, or to scold them for their irksome, atavistic persistence.
This is surely an odd way to proceed, especially in light of the fact that these schools of thought regard themselves as scientific, or as accepting of certain scientific insights that must lead any honest and enlightened person to embrace their view of things. The Berkeley philosopher John Searle objects to the commonly held conception that “suggests that science names a specific kind of ontology, as if there were a scientific reality that is different from, for example, the reality of common sense.” He says, “I think that is profoundly mistaken.” And he says, “There is no such thing as the scientific world. There is, rather, just the world, and what we are trying to do is describe how it works and describe our situation in it.”18 This seems to me so true that I would consider the statement obvious, or, as the philosophers say, trivial, if it did not make a claim, necessary in the circumstances, for the relevance to the study of mind of the fullness of mental experience.
John Searle is no transcendentalist. I do not wish to seem to recruit him in support of the religious position I have just declared. I do, however, take comfort in the fact that his objections to contemporary philosophic thinking about consciousness and mental phenomena are very like mine. He says of certain arguments offered by philosophers of the materialist school, “What they suggest is that these people are determined to try to show that our ordinary common-sense notions of the mental do not name anything in the real world, and they are willing to advance any argument that they can think of for this conclusion.”19 This is not a new state of affairs, nor one limited to Searle’s colleagues or to writers in fields related to his. The subject that interests me is in fact the persistence, through the very long period we still call “modern” and into the present, of something like a polemic against the mind — not mind as misnomer, nor as the construct of an untenable dualism, but mind in more or less the fullest sense of the word.
The resourcefulness Searle speaks of, the recourse to “any argument they can think of,” seems to me sometimes to be the unifying principle behind an apparent diversity of important schools and theories. Anthropology, positivism, Nietzscheanism in its various forms, Freudian and behaviorist psychology have all brought their insights to bear on this subject.
The word “modern” is itself a problem, since it implies a Promethean rescue from whatever it was that went before, a rupture so complete as to make context irrelevant. Yet if one were to imagine a row of schoolroom modernists hanging beside the schoolroom poets, Marx, Nietzsche, and Wellhausen beside Bryant, Longfellow, and Whittier, one would notice a marked similarity among them of pince-nez and cravat. The modern has been modern for a very long time. As a consequence of its iconic status, the contemporary remains very much in its shadow. Little that is contemporary is not also modern, and little that is modern departs as cleanly from its precursors as myth would have us believe. In one important particular, however, there seems to have been an authentic modern schism whose consequences are persistent and profound. Our conception of the significance of humankind in and for the universe has shrunk to the point that the very idea we ever imagined we might be significant on this scale now seems preposterous. These assumptions about what we are and are not preclude not only religion but also the whole enterprise of metaphysical thought. That the debate about the nature of the mind has tended to center on religion is a distraction which has nevertheless exerted a profound influence on the more central issue. While it may not have been true necessarily, it has been true in fact that the renunciation of religion in the name of reason and progress has been strongly associated with a curtailment of the assumed capacities of the mind.
THREE. The Freudian Self
Toward the end of his life, Carl Jung, remembering his association and his differences with Sigmund Freud, says, “Above all, Freud’s attitude toward the spirit seemed to me highly questionable. Wherever, in a person or in a work of art, an expression of spirituality (in the intellectual, not the supernatural sense) came to light, he suspected it, and insinuated that it was repressed sexuality. Anything that could not be directly interpreted as sexuality he referred to as ‘psychosexuality.’ I protested that this hypothesis, carried to its logical conclusion, would lead to an annihilating judgment upon culture. Culture would then appear as a mere farce, the morbid consequence of repressed sexuality. ‘Yes,’ he assented, ‘so it is, and that is just a curse of fate against which we are powerless to contend.’”1
In the context of the time, Freud’s aversion to what is here called “spirituality” is wholly understandable. He asked Jung “never to abandon the sexual theory,” telling him, “You see, we must make a dogma of it, an unshakeable bulwark.” When Jung asked, “A bulwark — against what?” Freud replied, “Against the black tide of mud … of occultism.”2 Though Jung does not share my interpretation of Freud’s meaning, which he finds mysterious, I would suggest that these words support an interpretation of the intention behind his metapsychological writing as a whole, which rests so heavily on this theory. Jung reports another conversation with Freud about “precognition and parapsychology in general,” which Freud rejected as nonsense. Jung says,
While Freud was going on in this way, I had a curious sensation. It was as if my diaphragm were made of iron and were becoming red-hot — a glowing vault. And at that moment there was such a loud report in the bookcase … that we both started up in alarm, fearing the thing was going to topple over on us. I said to Freud: “There, that is an example of a so-called catalytic exteriorization phenomenon.”
“Oh, come,’ he exclaimed. ‘That is sheer bosh.’”
3
That Freud could have placed hopes in a disciple capable of belief in this sort of thing — Jung says, “The question of the chthonic spirit has occupied me ever since I began to delve into the world of alchemy”—is surely remarkable. Though Freud is gracious and conciliatory toward the younger man in letters to him that refer to this episode, and to occultism itself, from Freud’s side the relationship must have been extremely tense. Jung reports another conversation in which his consuming interest in bog corpses actually caused Freud to faint. “Afterward he said to me that he was convinced that all this chatter about corpses meant I had death wishes toward him.” And, according to Jung, he fainted again when he heard the theory of the primal father disputed.4