Philosophy of Mind Without the Brain

As Collingwood so aptly observes, mind rendered in the language of natural science ceases to be mind. Indeed, the scientific commitment to reductionist analysis ensures that mind cannot be discussed as mind; it can only be discussed as brain, as chemical process, as matter.

What is the price of reductionist analysis? According to Mr. Allan Bloom, the price is the complexity and ambiguity of our inner life. Scientific analysis always involves the exclusion of certain elements of experience. As Winchester notes, taste, smell, color, and any other element of experience that can be written off as ‘subjective’, is necessarily ignored in scientific analysis. Clear thinking is inherently Procrustean. We cut the edges off of reality in order to think about it more precisely. Concepts come at the expense of reality’s complexity.

Nowhere is it more important to overcome the Procrustean tendencies of thought, however, than in the study of mind. The human mind is unique in that its pre-reflective experiences can be altered by the introduction of new ideas: the stories we tell are the lenses through which we experience the world. We are responsible for our own narrative self-creation.

To speak of the self as a brain, which necessarily involves ignoring certain parts of the mind, is to impoverish our experiences. If the stories we tell about ourselves leave no room for ambiguity, uncertainty, or powerfully confusing emotions, then those things will not register in our experience in all their clarity and vibrancy.

What I am insisting, then, is that we need a language that can both accurately describe mind, and help us preserve and amplify our experience of it.

There is such a thing as a philosophy of mind without the brain: it belongs to the humanities. It belongs to novelists, historians, poets, and philosophers (of certain kinds). This is the sentiment Bloom so clearly expresses in Love and Friendship. It is truly a tragedy, he claims, that psychology has been denied to the novelists and monopolized by the natural scientists.

I can think of no task more important to me than preserving the complexity of the human experience by developing a language that does it justice. This is the business of history and philosophy: to speak of mind in a way that maximizes the possibilities of mind, to use language as “a machine that continually amplifies the emotions,” as Flaubert would have it.