Goldstein: Mind-Body Problem

excerpt from the novel

The Mind - Body Problem*
by
Rebecca Goldstein
(1983)

I am not in the habit of dismissing any criticisms of myself, and am in general always willing seriously to consider any denunciation. Perhaps it was true, I therefore found myself thinking, that all the questions that interested me were really pseudo-questions, mere phantoms of my mental night. I couldn't deny that I suffered from metaphysical tendencies, though I hadn't realized until then that they constituted an affliction. In my pre-Princetonian backwardness I would have said that Reality is the subject matter of philosophy, but the very word, I now learned, was philosophically taboo for its suggestion of metaphysical tendencies.

The field had made the "linguistic turn" and I ... had not. The questions were now all of language. Instead of wrestling with the large, messy questions that have occupied previous centuries of ethicists, for example, one should examine the rules that govern words like "good" and "ought." My very first seminar, given by a prominent visitor from England whose field, they told me, was metaphysics, was on adverbs. The metaphysics of adverbs? From Reality to . . . adverbs?

It appeared I was to spend the rest of my philosophical life thinking about language. For language is humanly manufactured and thus, presumably, thoroughly intelligible. The questions it posed might be difficult but were not, in principle, unanswerable. No more inexhaustible Reality to contend with and make us feel our human limitations. No more dark, inaccessible regions lying beyond the reach of reason's phallic thrusts. Reality was but a creature formed from one of the intellect's own ribs, from language. We could take care of her, fill her up and leave her spent.

The philosophical mind has long craved a limited universe. The pre-Socratic Pythagoreans, in their table of opposites, listed "limited" on the side occupied by "order," "light," "good," and "male." But only the last generation or two of philosophers have managed to show how very limited reality really is, extending no farther than our powers of expression. What a relief. What a blessed relief. No more bogeymen jumping out of dark corners shouting, "It can't be known! You'll never understand it!" These epistemological horrors used to be waiting at every philosophical turn. Now the nursery lamp of linguistic analysis has been turned on, dispelling all those scary shadows. There is the bright, cheery world of the nursery, small and familiar, with no sense of the unknown creeping in.

. . . It has struck me . . . that I know a surprising number of people who have never gotten beyond the "magic years," beyond the child's belief in his own supernatural powers. And a disproportionately large percentage of these are members of the philosophy department. Philosophy used to be thought of as the academic subject requiring the most maturity: it was all old men tripping on their white beards. But that was before they discovered the magic word, "meaningless." A phrase like "the meaning of life" is guaranteed to crack them up, producing the hilarity of pre-schoolers at bathroom words. They know how to make all such problems disappear. The meaning of life? Sentences have meanings, the conditions and nature of which they can elaborate in the greatest detail. Pondering about "the meaning of it all" is silly baby talk. Abracadabra.

It was confusing that philosophy had become the most anti-philosophical of all academic fields, not only refusing to consider any of the mysteries of existence (which is a position I can understand) but adamantly denying that there are any (which is a position I cannot understand). All metaphysical questions are meaningless, and anything that exceeds our comprehension can't be. Mystery is as impermissible as the logical contradiction, a sign that something is amiss in the reasoning. There is a kind of reductio ad arcanum form of argument employed by philosophers throughout the Analytic Philosophy Belt, from Oxford to Princeton and Harvard to the mispronounced Berkeley (named after the Irish idealist philosopher Bishop Berkeley, whose name is pronounced Barkeley). It's an analogue to the ancient reductio ad absurdum, the indisputable method of proving propositions true by showing their negations to lead to absurdities. Only with the reductio ad arcanum one proves that certain kinds of things can't exist by showing that their existence would present us with one or more nontrivial questions. Some, for example, have employed this method to argue away consciousness. For its existence would present us with the notoriously impenetrable mind-body problem.

"Reality doesn't accommodate itself to the size and shape of the human mind," I protested at one point in a philosophical discussion soon after my arrival, when I still felt entitled to voice philosophical opinions. Everyone stopped talking and stared at me. Finally, mercifully, someone spoke.

"That's a metaphysical statement" came the deadpan reply.

There could not, in that context, have been a worse insult.

. . . . .