Introduction
Reasonable Naturalism and the Humanistic Resistance to Reductionism¹
Jocelyn Maclure

Markus Gabriel is one of the most exciting minds among the new generation of academic philosophers. He defends bold views on large metaphysical questions. In his previous work, he argued that the abuse of constructivism in ontology and epistemology called for a renewed kind of realism centered on the plurality of domains of objects or “fields of sense” that make up our reality. His work is based on an impressive command of a variety of past and present philosophical traditions. There is no sharp divide, for him, between philosophy and its history. And, as he points out in the opening chapter of this volume, he views the continental/analytic distinction as nonsensical and debilitating.

Gabriel adds his voice to a distinguished tradition of humanistic scholars who worry about the overreach of scientific discourse in our understanding of human reality and experience. A strand of that tradition finds its root in German philosophy, as exemplified by the responses gathered in this volume. This is not something that was planned in the design of this book when I reached out to a number of potential commentators, but it turned out that Charles Taylor, Jocelyn Benoist and Andrea Kern all implicitly or explicitly draw upon traditions such as idealism and phenomenology to support Gabriel’s take-down of naturalism in analytic philosophy of mind. Charles Taylor is a long-time critic of scientism and reductive naturalism.² Jocelyn Benoist is a leading expert on the origins of phenomenology and on the links between phenomenology and analytic philosophy.³ In her work in metaphysics and epistemology, Andrea Kern is articulating a brand of neo-Aristotelianism influenced by Kant and German idealism. All three, like Gabriel, have decidedly moved beyond the analytic/continental divide in contemporary Western philosophy.

In the piece which is the cornerstone of this volume, Gabriel challenges the hegemony of naturalism in analytic philosophy of mind. He starts from the classic problem of how the mind fits in the natural world. How can physical and biological processes which are not, as far as we can tell, conscious give rise to mental states such as desires, beliefs, and intentions? Once we give up, on the basis of our best natural sciences, the belief in an immaterial soul, how do we explain our conscious subjective experience and how does it map onto everything that we know about the physical world? Given that Cartesian “substance dualism” is no longer an option, the obvious temptation is to reduce the mental to more basic natural properties, such as brain processes, which are themselves explainable in terms of physical laws, mechanisms, and properties. But since it is not clear how studying various regions of the brain and neural activity is supposed to reveal what is a subjective experience, such as experiencing a first kiss with someone on whom you have a crush, many wonder whether we are confronted with a “hard problem” that may never be solved by the natural sciences, the neurosciences included.⁴

Gabriel associates naturalism, among other things, with the choice to see the mind as a natural kind and to reduce it to physical mechanisms. He thinks this choice is misguided. He wants to “put pressure on the entire framework” which made of naturalism an overarching speculative metaphysics rather than a sound approach to the study of the natural world. In contrast, he sketches a position that he calls “Neo-Existentialism,” which is:

the view that there is no single phenomenon or reality corresponding to the ultimately very messy umbrella term “the mind.” … what unifies the various phenomena subsumed under the messy concept of “the mind” after all is that they are all consequences of the attempt of the human being to distinguish itself both from the purely physical universe and from the rest of the animal kingdom. In so doing, our self-portrait as specifically minded creatures evolved in light of our equally varying accounts of what it is for non-human beings to exist. (pp. 9–10)

We may wonder, as Taylor does in his commentary, whether the reference to existentialism is the best way to characterize the view that he is putting forward and to bring together the philosophers from whom he is drawing inspiration. Gabriel’s “Neo-Existentialism” is much broader than the philosophical views expounded by Sartre and de Beauvoir after the Second World War. Some of the preeminent early figures of the movement such as Merleau-Ponty and Camus later explicitly rejected the label. Neo-Existentialism appears to include elements drawn from what is sometimes called philosophies of consciousness or subjectivity, German idealism, phenomenology, hermeneutics (as applied to selfhood, or narrative theories of the self) and philosophies of existence.

Gabriel clearly sides with those who reject the identity theory between the brain and the mind, as well as with those who think that the mind is not only in the head. I see him as a philosophical anthropologist who draws our attention to the inescapably cultural or social dimension of the mind. The mind is the result not only of the neural activity which makes consciousness possible but also of the self-interpreting, meaning-making, and collective symbolic activity which is the trademark of our species. As Gabriel puts it, “We should not expect that all phenomena which have been described from the intentional stance over the millennia, and for which we have some kind of record of documenting an inner life, could possibly be theoretically unified by finding an equivalent natural substratum for them” (p. 41). The German concept of “Geist” better captures the permeability between nature and culture than the English “mind.” One could perhaps say that Geist encompasses both biological and cultural evolution.⁵

That being said, Gabriel’s Neo-Existentialism appears to be ambiguous with regard to the exact way to think about the brain–mind relationship. On the one hand, he clearly states that he does not want his view to deny what has been firmly established by the natural sciences. He thereby accepts that having a certain kind of brain is a necessary condition for having a mind. He does not challenge the fact that all mental events have brain correlates. On the other hand, he asserts that “The notion that mind has to fit into the natural order is nothing but the most recent mythology, the most recent attempt to fit all phenomena that are relevant to human action explanation into an all-encompassing structure” (p. 38).

I wholeheartedly agree with Gabriel that we have good reasons to reject the physicalist monistic claim according to which mental states are only or primordially physical states. But one might think at this point that, broadly speaking, “naturalist” philosophers of mind and neuroscientists could more modestly claim that there are physical requisites for something like the intentional stance to be possible. Brain states are at least partly constitutive of mental states; they necessarily show up in any plausible causal story about the occurrence of mental events. This does not logically commit one to the view that mental states can be reduced to brain states or that they are epiphenomenal. Gabriel could perhaps recognize more empathically that to try to figure out what needed to happen in our neurobiological evolution for something like subjective experience to occur, or what needs to happen in my brain for me to enjoy a macchiato, is a scientific endeavor of tremendous importance. Once we recognize, as Gabriel does, that having a certain kind of brain is a necessary condition for having a mind, there will be a naturalist element in our theory. In his chapter, Gabriel seems to oscillate between including scientific naturalism within a richer philosophical view and a wholesale rejection of naturalism. I am myself inclined to think that, given the extraordinary explanatory power of the natural sciences, what we might call “reasonable naturalism” should be worked into a broader philosophical view of reality.

In fact, there is a way to read Gabriel’s chapter that suggests that reductionism, rather than naturalism, is the real target of his critique. Naturalists do think that the mind “fits” in the “natural order,” but they do not have to hold a monistic ontology according to which everything that exists must be reducible to a natural kind or that the progress of science will lead to the gradual elimination of all mentalistic concepts. For instance, many accept that one cannot explain social facts and institutions without invoking the causal efficacy of collective intentionality.⁶

If I am on the right track, further developing and specifying Neo-Existentialism will necessarily require a more direct and sustained engagement with some of the, to my mind, more plausible options in analytic philosophy of mind. I am thinking here of more or less overlapping positions such as “non-reductive physicalism,” “property dualism,” and “emergentism.” Spelling out why Neo-Existentialists are dissatisfied with these positions will help those, like me, who cannot endorse standard reductionist physicalism but who are as yet unsure about what is the best available theory.

In any case, I submit that Gabriel could accept what might be called the “underdetermination thesis”: the descriptions offered by the natural sciences cannot saturate our understanding of the mental and, eo ipso, of ourselves as human agents. If it is true that conceptions of the mind that contradict the laws of physics or of evolutionary biology should be seen as false, there are nonetheless a number of ways in which we can understand the mind that are incompatible between themselves and yet compatible with the laws of nature. Theories which argue, for instance, that the mind is both natural and cultural/intersubjective can agree that there are indeed neural preconditions for subjective experience, while still maintaining, like the authors gathered in this volume, that the mind is more than the brain and that naturalistic reductionism will never be able fully to explain mindedness. Leaving aside the sci-fi thought experiments that enjoy disproportionate popularity in analytic philosophy of mind, having a body and being embedded in a lifeworld or culture are, as far as we can tell, also partly constitutive of mental life.

As Gabriel, Taylor, Benoist, and Kern point out in their own way, mental states can be modified by other mental states, whereas natural facts are generally mind-independent: my false belief that a normal DNA sequence is made of six nucleotide bases does not change the fact that it is made of four. But my belief that the pill that I am taking following the researcher’s orders is a therapeutic drug and not a placebo might very well change my subjective state with regard to my symptoms even if it is in fact a placebo.

Or, to take another example: the tension that I feel in my hamstring when I push hard at the end of a marathon can very well be interpreted as utterly normal in that context, but as more painful and worrisome when I feel a similar sensation as I am quietly walking towards the subway station. What is going on in my muscle fibre, nervous system, and associated brain region is independent of my beliefs, but my conscious experience – how the tension feels to me – cannot be reduced to these physical properties. This seems to bring us close to “property dualism” – i.e., the position according to which physical properties do not exhaust the explanation of a mental phenomenon at the ontological level.⁷ Property dualism need not revert back to Cartesian substance dualism, as mental states can be seen as made of not particularly mysterious physical and social properties. The property dualist, like Gabriel, can say that cycling supervenes on bicycles but cannot be reduced to it. Cycling also requires the presence of a set of social meanings and practices put in place by intentional agents. A reasonable naturalist should not want to deny that.

Just as contrasting Neo-Existentialism with non-reductive theories will help move the discussion further, readers will also wonder to what extent Gabriel agrees with heterodox philosophers of mind, neuroscientists, and cognitive scientists who see the mind as embodied, embedded, and extended. I leave aside here an examination of the differences and similarities between the externalist theories which all assert that the mind cannot only be located in the head. Among contemporary externalists, some suggest that the mind, or at least cognition, includes artifacts such as cognitive tools,⁸ whereas others argue that the relationships between mind, body, and world are so intricate that the boundaries between them ought to be seen as thoroughly porous.⁹

I wrote above that Gabriel’s Neo-Existentialism appears much broader than historical existentialism. That said, one of the points in common between Neo-Existentialism and French atheistic existentialism is that, just as, say, Sartre’s “L’existentialisme est un humanisme” was for many, after the bleak and tormented years of the Second World War, a much awaited world-view, the kind of humanistic-yet-realist view sketched out by Gabriel in his work is much needed in a context where reductive naturalism, posthumanism, and the remnants of postmodernism remain, to different degrees, culturally influential. Many philosophers of mind, neuroscientists, and cognitive scientists will want to question specific arguments made by Gabriel and the commentators and deplore some of their omissions. This is fair, as this is how Neo-Existentialism can become more robust. But for those of us who feel ill at ease with the hegemony of reductive naturalism in some influential quarters of academia and of the broader culture, these views will be seen as evidence that the resistance is coming.

Copyright page

Introduction
Reasonable Naturalism and the Humanistic Resistance to Reductionism¹
Jocelyn Maclure

Notes