I began this essay but never pursued it. It was tentatively titled: 'Knowing Mind, Scientifically and Historically'. It was going to be an exploration of Collingwood's claim that philosophy of mind can be fully dissolved into history due to the fact that mind is only what mind does. Mind defined as pure activity needs to be studied only in concrete instances, that is, through history. Mind therefore cannot be studied by the natural sciences, which deal with regularity and generality.
As I move through my numbered days I continue to ask: Who am I? Or, even more urgently, I ask: What am I? This world remains a mystery to me. My place in it is still opaque, rarely presenting open fields, never pulling me into a full, comforting embrace. I’ve yet to hear the voice, which some seem to hear, calling: ‘You are perfect. You belong here. I love you.’ I merely move forward, timidly groping in the dark, stillness being foreign to my nature.
There are other voices, though. No shortage of them, in fact. Everywhere I turn there is a competing vision of what I am or what I can become: A Man. A Lover. A Husband. A Father. A Sane Person. A Healthy Person. A Law Abiding Citizen. A Sexual Being. A Soul. An Ego. An Id. Lastly, and most unequivocally, A Brain.
I can’t deny that I am, or may become, many of those things. Yet none of them feels quite right. None of those words will ever capture me. The question, ‘What am I?’ retains its weight, and I still carry it.
Self-knowledge is by necessity incomplete. We humans are the object that does not stay still, as they say. Or, more precisely, we are the animals that change in response to the way we speak of ourselves, we create ourselves by telling stories about ourselves. The quest for self-knowledge is thus reflexive: it continually turns in on itself, endlessly reacts to itself, and ideally becomes a kind of narrative self-creation.
I’m here to spend some time reflecting on this question, What am I? What does it mean to know myself? I’ll be doing some reflecting on my own thoughts and experiences, but I also have some philosophical claims I’d like to develop. Chiefly, the idea that contemporary philosophy of mind, with its emphasis on cognitive and neuroscience, is not producing something we can call ‘knowledge of mind.’ It answers not the question ‘what is the mind?’, but ‘what makes the mind possible?’. This question about the mind’s conditions of possibility, moreover, is always asked in the spirit of natural science: with the desire to produce an account of the mind that is consistent with and utilizes the insights of physics, chemistry, and biology. Such a union to the natural sciences, however, is precisely what prevents philosophy of mind from answering the question ‘what is the mind?’ For embracing the natural sciences as the path to self-knowledge means importing an assumption that is detrimental to the study of one’s own mind: that all explanations must be given in terms of regularities, generalities, and abstractions.
Knowledge of one’s own mind can never be a generic knowledge, applicable to all people in all times and places. No, it must be a unique knowledge of my particular mind in its own unique time and place. The only mind accessible to us is our own, therefore anyone who claims to know mind can only be claiming to know their own mind. This claim holds two interrelated implications for philosophy of mind. First, it means there can be no set of theoretical propositions that can hand knowledge of mind to us ready-made, we must delve into ourselves, plunge into the depths of our own minds and learn first hand who we are and what minds are. In short, there is no substitute for genuine reflection on ourselves. Second, this implies that any theoretical proposition made by philosophy of mind must be subservient to this process of personal reflection. What philosophy of mind tells us about what makes the mind possible is therefore not knowledge of mind in itself, but a set of propositions that can foster productive reflection on our own minds. I am proposing that we regard philosophy of mind in precisely the way that Shunryu Suzuki regards Buddhism:
The purpose of studying Buddhism is not to study Buddhism, but to study ourselves. It is impossible to study ourselves without some teaching. If you want to know what water is you need science, and the scientist needs a laboratory. In the laboratory there are various ways in which to study what water is. Thus it is possible to know what kind of elements water has, the various forms it takes, and its nature. But it is impossible thereby to know water in itself. It is the same thing with us. We need some teaching, but just by studying the teaching alone, it is impossible to know what ‘I’ in myself am. Through the teaching we may understand our human nature. But the teaching is not we ourselves; it is some explanation of ourselves. So if you are attached to the teaching, or to the teacher, that is a big mistake. The moment you meet a teacher, you should leave the teacher, and you should be independent
In claiming that philosophy of mind is subservient to reflection I am casting my allegiance to a school of philosophy advocated by Michel Foucault. In The Government of Self and Others Foucault argues that modern philosophy takes two dominant forms. The first is committed to the “question of the conditions of possibility of a true knowledge.... the analytic of truth” (20). This approach is typical for American philosophy of mind, with its emphasis on what makes the mind possible based on what we know about the natural world. This kind of philosophy strives more often for a normative scientific theory: A set of general propositions meant to identify and explain the regularities of a phenomenon, typically with the goal of prediction and manipulation. Alternatively, philosophy can strive to answer the question “What is present reality? what is the present field of our experiences?” (20). This is Foucault’s project, a type of philosophical reflection that strives not for complete systems, but for practical insights into ourselves and the world. A philosophy of mind carried out in this way would regard general propositions about the mind as incomplete in themselves, and would rather regard them as aids to thinking about ourselves in the present. Philosophy of mind, in other words, is not knowledge of mind at all, but a tool that allows us to know the only mind we can know, our own.
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