Alienation

The OED defines “alienate” as “cause to feel isolated”; “alienation” is then “the state or experience of being alienated”. I have lived in the United States for 35 years and I am now officially alienated: I feel isolated, cut off, removed. It wasn’t always so—I used to feel integrated, joined. This is really the first time in my life I have ever experienced alienation; and it is multi-pronged, comprehensively so. I am hyper-alienated. How so? The obvious proximate cause is the political climate in this country, upon which I need not dilate, except to say that the level of stupidity has reached fever pitch. Many people feel this way at this moment, immigrants and non-immigrants alike. But I have a secondary (in fact primary) source of alienation: I am alienated from my profession, my history, my old friends, my erstwhile colleagues, university life, my previous life-style. Not completely alienated, to be sure, but the old framework has gone. I am no longer a part of the academic community in the country in which I live. So, I am doubly alienated. It is a strange feeling. It isn’t loneliness; it isn’t dislike, distrust, and disgust (though it includes those); it’s more a feeling of apartness, dislocation, dissonance. I look at the world differently; I see other people as alien (“unfamiliar and distasteful”: OED). I used to like talking to philosophers, but now I want to keep my distance, as if they have a disease (not all of them but the vast majority). I rarely interact with this particular demographic anyway, but I rather dread having to—I’m afraid of what I might say (would say). I tend to see people as a vast sea of atrocious aliens from whom I am violently estranged (this includes people I used to be good friends with). The alienation is comprehensive and deep. It isn’t a good feeling I can tell you. This means that I divide other people into two sharply distinct groups: the small group of people I am not alienated from and the much larger group that I am alienated from. All this is mitigated, however, by a highly contingent fact—I live in Miami. I find myself not alienated from the people I live among: Latin people, as they are known (to me they are just normal nice people, not nasty, not insane). These people are my people; I am not alienated from them. Cubans, Venezuelans, Colombians, Nicaraguans, Mexicans, Puerto Ricans, and so on. I am also not alienated from Europeans living here. I am fortunate in this respect. I suppose the thing that nags at me the most is that the people I would have felt solidarity with at this political moment are the very people from whom I am most alienated—academics, professors, university types. Bear in mind that I have not been on a university campus in over ten years, after spending the previous forty odd years in universities; nor have I attended a philosophical meeting here. This is really quite alienating.

The Unconscious Body

We are thought to have an unconscious mind, or minds. The idea is that we have two minds (or more) only one of which are we conscious of. We are aware of one mind but not of the other; hence, we know what is going on in the conscious mind but not the unconscious mind. It isn’t that the unconscious mind is a part or aspect of the conscious mind that we don’t normally attend to; it is a separate mind. It is a mind but it isn’t one that we sense or introspect or otherwise have access to, except by means of indirect theorizing. It may have a different nature from the conscious mind, containing different elements, functioning differently. We thought we had one mind, the one we are conscious of, but it turns out that we have more than one, and this mind (or these) is unconscious, unknown by us in the normal course of events. The question I want to ask is whether we might have more than one body: we have the body we are familiar with, the one we experience every day, but might we have an additional body that we are not conscious of? This would be an unconscious body—a body we are not aware we have. It may have a different nature from the body we know about. It stands apart from our conscious body, coexisting with it, possessing different properties. It doesn’t emerge into consciousness, though it may be investigated indirectly. It is, in short, the bodily analogue of the unconscious mind.

You might say that we do, but trivially, because there are facts about our ordinary body that we don’t normally know about. I know about the exterior of my body and something about its interior, but I don’t know about the internal organs or their microstructure. I am not conscious of these facts about my body. But this is not an unconscious body in the sense I intend; it is just my usual conscious body in its hidden aspects. It isn’t another body separate from the usual one. It’s the same body. This would be like saying that my conscious mind has aspects I don’t normally know about or pay attention to. So, what would count as a separate unconscious body? Easy: a fetus in the womb but not known about. If everyone carried such a body around with them but didn’t know it, they would harbor an unconscious body in the relevant sense. Notice that this body might itself be conscious; but its carrier would not be conscious of it. Likewise, the unconscious mind might be conscious in itself and to itself, but not be an object of consciousness for the mind associated with “I”: I am not conscious of my unconscious mind, but it might be. Put that aside: the point is that one body might contain another body that the conscious mind doesn’t know about. This, surely, is perfectly possible: suppose that there is a tiny body lurking somewhere in the recesses of the body that has never been discovered—that would be a second unconscious body. Or a parasite that hides its existence particularly well.

The question, then, is whether there actually is such a thing but more hidden. May we contain a body we don’t know about, as humans didn’t know they had a second unconscious mind till quite late in their history? The mind boggles: you thought you had just one body, but it turns out there is an extra body you didn’t suspect existed. You are multiply bodied as you are multiply minded. We are going to have to get pretty recherche if we are to find such a body, but the search should be enjoyable—and we are accustomed to finding greater plurality in the physical world than we expected (atoms, stars, universes). I can think of two possibilities: dark matter and the hidden brain. If dark matter exists, then animal bodies are partly composed of it: every physical object is really a double existence—dark matter and the usual bright kind. So, we have a dark body and a bright body; the dark body is unconscious, i.e., we are not conscious of it. If matter has dimensions we don’t know about, then bodies composed of it will have a dual nature: the dark body will be the analogue of the shadowy unconscious—a different form that matter in general can take.[1] Maybe dark bodies are more primitive than bright bodies, as the unconscious mind is often thought to be more primitive than the conscious mind. The second possibility is that the brain and nervous system might have a corresponding, though distinct, brain and nervous system coexisting with them—a kind of shadow body. We might, in effect, have two brains: the one we know about and another one we don’t know about. The reason is that the brain is correlated with the mind: the mind is the second brain. As it happens, we are conscious of this mind, but not as a second brain coexisting with the usual brain; so, let’s consider the unconscious mind in relation to the brain—is that a second brain-body? Suppose this mind to be identical to a certain physical system located in the head, though not any physical system we have ever heard of; it belongs to some future or possible science not to present science. Then we could say that inside the head are two brains (like the two hemispheres): the conscious brain (the one we know about) and an unconscious brain (that we don’t know about). It isn’t a whole body, to be sure, but it has enough autonomy to count as distinct from the regular brain; accordingly, we have two brains, one of which we are not conscious of (we can’t see or touch it). Maybe dark matter is bound up with it, since only dark matter can provide a foundation for the mental. My point is that it could turn out that we have more than one body, as it has turned out that we have more than one mind—and that the extra body is not something we are conscious of having. Physics and brain science are still in their infancy, and it might turn out that the usual model of the body is too simple: it has a duality we didn’t expect. The criteria of individuation for bodies might permit multiplying the number of bodies per person (or animal): this is epistemically possible. The unconscious mind is sufficiently different from the conscious mind that we count them as distinct (we are conscious of one but not the other, to start with); similarly, the body might harbor a duality that encourages the same largesse—there are two of them! People have multiplied spaces and times in a similar fashion, and even physical objects (e.g., Eddington’s two tables); we might find ourselves theoretically driven to multiply animal bodies. It is not a necessary truth that you have only one body, epistemically or metaphysically. What if Kant is right and there are two worlds, the phenomenal and the noumenal? Then you would have two bodies as a matter of metaphysical necessity. We are not conscious of the noumenal body, but it exists nonetheless. So, let’s not close our minds to body dualism. Why should the mind be capable of duality and the body not be? Perhaps the unconscious body is necessary to keeping us alive (as the unconscious mind keeps us sane, according to some).[2]

[1] I haven’t mentioned what is called the “astral body” in certain mystical traditions, which is supposed to be constituted of some sort of subtle energy within the mortal organic body. I don’t believe in this, but I think it indicates that the idea of a second body has some appeal to the human imagination.

[2] It is perhaps necessary to say that this paper is highly speculative, indeed fantastic. It belongs to the conceptual-imaginative side of philosophy.

Belief and Religion

It is possible to be religious and not believe in God, or gods: you just need to have religious practices but not theistic ontology. Atheistic religion is not a contradiction in terms. But can you be a theist and not be religious? That seems a more difficult undertaking: surely if you believe in God, you must be religious. Have you ever met someone who says he believes in God but isn’t religious? Might someone be a theist anti-religionist? Actually, I think this is possible, if never actual. A person might be convinced by a putative proof of the existence of God that there is a God—he can see no flaw in the proof—but find no attraction in religious practices, or even deplore such practices. He might even believe in the existence of the Christian God and still have no religious inclinations or feelings: no church, no prayers, no worship, no desire to please, no real interest. He might say, “Sure, there is a God, but frankly I’m just not that interested”. He might regard the existence of God as like the existence of other galaxies: they exist all right, but so what? He has other interests, is a busy man, prefers art and music. Religion leaves him cold. He never even thinks about God unless someone else brings the subject up.

If this is psychologically possible, why doesn’t it happen? It is true that people can believe in God and not be very religious in terms of religious practice, but is no one ever a believer but completely non-religious? I think the reason is this: people encounter talk of God only in a practicing religious context. They form their belief in God’s existence because of the religious practices in which it is embedded. They don’t first encounter talk of God in a seminar room discussing the ontological argument, or some other argument for God’s existence. The existential belief is practice-based. The two things are regarded as inextricable. And it is true that without the institutional backing a belief in God seems pointless and empty. Why believe in God if you don’t care for the corresponding institution, especially its moral component? Logically, the belief in God’s existence is separable from the religion associated with it; but socially the two are bound together. And it is difficult to be brought to a belief in God’s existence unless this belief is embedded in a religious practice, because the alleged proofs of God’s existence are questionable at best. Still, it is instructive to learn that God and religion are separable spheres, neither entailing the other. You can be religious and anti-theist, and you can be anti-religious and theist. The Abrahamic religions are steeped in theism, but other religions dispense with that hypothesis. I know of no sect that is both theistic and anti-religious, though it exists as a position in logical space. The closest we get are religions in which there is a belief in God but not much in the way of ceremony and pageant, or heaven and hell. A super-Protestant would be someone who believes in God but thinks it is impious to claim to know what God wants or what he is like. Perhaps he made the universe, but other than that we have no idea what he requires of us and has no role in determining morality. This would be a very thin religion and people would not flock to it.[1]

[1] People do sometimes believe in supernatural entities—angels, ghosts, spirits—but scarcely give them a second thought and don’t build their lives around them. Their actual religion might make no reference to these entities, being thoroughly naturalistic. They might worship a particular mountain, say, but accept that there are spirits lurking elsewhere (their dead ancestors). The human mind is nothing if not flexible.