The Paradox of Wu-wei

A review discussion of Edward Slingerland’s Trying Not to Try: The Art and Science of Spontaneity and larger issues of well being.

Review: In search of the soul

In Search of the Soul: Four Views of the Mind-Body Problem by Joel B. Green
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

I have read this book concurrently with Robert Cummings Neville’s Ritual and Deference: Extending Chinese Philosophy in a Comparative Context (SUNY Press, 2008). As I finish both books, I am struck by just how great a difference it makes to how one thinks philosophically and theologically, once one starts thinking comparatively. It is not through any great virtue of mine that I do think comparatively. I’m not even that sophisticated a comparative thinker. But as I read particularly the essays by Stewart Goetz and William Hasker in this book, I was shocked by just how insular their views were, and astonished by some of the claims they supposed to be fairly unobjectionable. Goetz is especially breath-taking at this, with his supposition that belief that I am an immaterial soul is entirely ordinary. He suggests the vast majority of people throughout history have shared this view of themselves, too. It’s a bold and interesting suggestion, but it also seems to be made in remarkable ignorance of what, say, ordinary Hindus, Buddhists, Confucians, Daoists, and many others have thought about themselves, to the extent we can know at all what they believed. Hasker is strong in his critique of reductionist materialism, but then proposes an incoherent “emergent dualism” in which the mind/soul arises from and is sustained by bodily process – unless God miraculously intervenes to sustain it some other way (which of course we know God does from scripture). I kid you not: Hasker says this. And so what begins as an interesting bit of work in public philosophy and theology morphs into a doctrinaire God-of-the-gaps confession.

To be clear, Goetz and Hasker are probably far better philosophers than I, and indubitably better analytic philosophers than I. They surely also understand neuroscience far better than I, although I have been trying to get a little more up to speed. But what a difference a sense for human difference makes. I just do not believe I am mistaken in seeing their approach to the issue as damagingly distorted by their evident attachment to versions of Christian commitment that appear to judge, a priori, “non-Christian” wisdom as essentially uninformative to the field of philosophical and theological anthropology.

Equally problematic is their shared commitment to, as best I can tell, a nominalistic substance metaphysics of selfhood. That is, both Goetz and Hasker seem to imagine the self to be quite unlike the body. The soul is immaterial, created and/or sustained supernaturally, and thereby immortal, in contrast to the material, natural, and mortal body. Moreover, the soul just is what it is – a simple, self-identical substance, complete in its individuality and in no need of relation to anything else to be what it is. (I expect – hope – their views grow more complex in their respective bodies of work. Yet, to the extent the essays in this collection serve as distillations of each contributor’s view, I find the pictures presented by Goetz and Hasker rather alarming.

So, what if the self is not a simple, self-sufficient substance? And have we then lost soul? This was where reading Neville’s book was most illuminating of my reading of the present one. Neville gives a clear and, I take it, a valid interpretation of Chinese philosophical and theological anthropology. That anthropology explicitly eschews a substance metaphysics of selfhood, and certainly with its suspicion of individualism cannot be considered nominalistic. As Neville defines it, the self is “a structured continuum between a centered readiness to respond and the ten thousand things,” a “continuum beginning from the inner center of responsiveness, that is, the intentionality of orientation, functioning specifically to take on orientations in body and mind to the close things of the intimate body, to things and persons of direct contact such as family, friends, and coworkers, and then to social situations, historical places, nature,and the vast cosmos – the ten thousand things each with its own discernible rhythm, dao, and discernible grain.” (158, 159)

To my sense of things, this characterization of self rings true. It also enables greater continuity of inquiry between the natural scientific study of human being and our efforts at philosophical and theological self-understanding – a considerable virtue in my book. Hasker invokes emergence in natural processes as far as it suits him, but in the end premises the claims he cares most about on a supernaturalistic theology. I don’t think that is playing fair, and I don’t think it’s necessary. It is a symptom of the intellectualism that limits so much of modern philosophical anthropology (which, tellingly, goes by the name “philosophy of mind”). So the latter two contributions to this book, by Nancey Murphy and Kevin Corcoran, are far more interesting to me.

Both Murphy and Corcoran defend monistic, physicalist views of personhood. Murphy calls hers ‘nonreductive physicalism,’ and Corcoran calls his the ‘constitution view.’ Exactly how much there is to choose between them, even they do not seem completely clear about in this volume, although they do give it a go.

Murphy accepts there is no soul as a distinct substance. Insofar as that soul has served to explain distinctive human capacites, then, an alternative explanation needs to be offered. Murphy proposes the explanation can be found in brain functions in part, but, she says, “their full explanation requires attention to human social relations, to cultural factors and, most importantly, to God’s action in our lives.” (116) Another way to come at this is to note that Murphy’s physicalism is not mechanistic. Rather, it is a philosophy of organism. It is not dualism minus mind or soul, but a monism that relies on emergence of novel levels of organization and causation to account for “higher” capacities.

The sticky question for such a view concerns how a budding organism could get free enough from some basic kind of causation to allow a new kind to exert itself. Murphy answers by focusing on the phenomenon of “causal loops” which even the simplest organisms exhibit. Without going into detail, the point is that organisms can be said to behave, not just be caused, because causal loops permit “action under evaluation” that is, some regulation of more basic causal processes. (119) Later, Murphy goes so far as to call this “downward causal efficacy.” (129)

Stacked causal loops are the key to the emergence of self-evaluative behavior, or what Murphy calls self-transcendence. (121) Sophisticated language capabilities exponentially augment this capacity and launch organisms into the incredibly rich medium of culture. Whether all levels of causation are, or need to be, so interlocked as Murphy seems to suggest in appealing to downward causation, I don’t know. It seems to me that this may be a problem to worry about only if one already accepts a reductionist view. If Murphy’s physicalism is genuinely nonreductive in its explanation of behavior, then downward causation is not necessary. Well, maybe.

For me the most interesting aspect of Corcoran’s “constitution view of the person” is his attempt to explain personal identity not in logical terms, which goes along with the notion or persisting substance (Hasker exemplifies this approach), but in terms of causation. For Corcoran the monist, human persons are essentially and wholly physical; we are “constituted by our bodies without being identical with the bodies that constitute us.” (157) Remember, like the other contributors, Corcoran takes a literal view of Christian doctrines about a life to come. This conviction lies behind the following passage:

“When it comes to the persistence of bodies, I suggest we think this way. Human bodies are like storms. A tornado, for example, picks up new stuff and throws off old stuff as it moves through space. Human bodies are like that. They are storms of atoms moving through space and time. They take on new stuff and throw off old stuff as they go. And a body persists in virtue of the atoms that are caught up in a life-preserving causal relation at one time passing on that life-preserving causal relation to successive swarms of atoms at later times. My body has persisted into the present just in case the swarm of atoms that are caught up in the life of my body now have been bequeathed that life-preserving causal relation from the swarm of atoms that were caught up in its life a moment ago.” (166)

Corcoran names this condition of bodily persistence the “immanent causal condition.” And although he never says it quite this way, it is this, I think, that we can say is what I am. I am the immanent causal condition through which my body persists. (Corcoran does not say it this way, I suppose because he is committed to the language that the body constitutes the person, and this seems – but only seems, I stress – to suggest the priority of the body. As I note below, this means that even Corcoran seems committed to a substance view of the self.) Another way to put the point is to say, I am my life. This life is a physical life, but it is not identical with nor reducible to the material constituents of my body. I am the process of events which compose the immanent causal condition of my continuing existence.

What was striking to me is how all four of the authors seemed (to my surprise) to be committed to a substance metaphysics of the self, that is, that the self is a thing that endures self-identically through change. Not surprisingly, the dualists are most committed to such a view, but so in his way is Corcoran, who writes at length on how the identity of the self is maintained without recourse to an immaterial soul. Perhaps Murphy has given herself leeway to consider the self in other ways, but even if she is not explicit about it, it seems as though she conceives the self as an emergent entity that, since it exercises top-down causation on subordinate levels, deserves the status of substantiality. All these views leave me with some doubts. In the end, it makes more sense to me to think of the self as a process or a discourse that can be identified in a number of ways, each different, and perhaps not all commensurable.

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