The Age of Mystery

Intellectual historians like to divide up the history of human thought into distinct periods and give them descriptive names: Antiquity, the Middle (Dark) Ages, the Early Modern Period, the Renaissance, the Age of Reason, the Age of Enlightenment, the Romantic Period, the Age of Analysis (I invented that one). But what is the right label for our current age? Does it have an identity of its own? What central idea defines it, if any? We should note immediately that the labels chosen don’t reflect the self-conception of the people falling under them. The ancient Greeks (pre-Socratic and post-Socratic) didn’t think of themselves as “antiquated” or defined by their temporal relation to Socrates; nor did thinkers of the Middle Ages conceptualize themselves as in the middle of anything, still less as “dark”. These labels were chosen by scholars in retrospect to characterize trends of thought that emerged in the fullness of time. No doubt they have some reference to what went through the minds of the individuals they describe, but they aren’t offered as avowed autobiographies (they might be rejected as such). The period I am interested in encompasses the nineteenth, twentieth, and twenty-first centuries: it includes Freud, Marx, Darwin, Mill, Bentham, Frege, Russell, Wittgenstein, Austin, Chomsky, Quine, the positivists, the analytical philosophers, and a lot of scientists (natural and social). I think many practitioners from this period would call themselves “naturalists”—especially those following Darwin and opposed to supernatural tendencies. They are secular, scientific, sane, and self-consciously savvy. They are down-to-earth, level-headed, and no-nonsense—not romantic, mystical, or religious. Some describe themselves as philosophers without the historical baggage of irresponsible speculation, obscure language, and dubious moral uplift. There is nothing priestly about them, or New Age, or Alternative. But from a more elevated perspective a pattern has emerged that is troubling to troubadours of the natural: the varying success of science in the last four hundred years has exposed areas of intractable difficulty. Science (including scientific philosophy) has now had a chance to prove its problem-solving power and has enjoyed notable successes, but it has fallen short of its earlier ambitions (starting with Newton’s “occult” theory of gravitation). Programs that once seemed promising have petered out, hit obstacles, or run aground. Here is a partial list: logicism and formalism in mathematics (Russell’s paradox, Godel’s theorem); behaviorism in psychology (Chomsky, cognitive science); generalized materialism (consciousness, intentionality); causal theories of perception, meaning, knowledge, and reference (sundry counterexamples); the puzzles of quantum physics; the limits of the computer model of mind; the origin of life. These areas are still much in dispute, but it is generally agreed that things have proved harder to crack than was anticipated; the old optimism is now under strain. Not surprisingly, voices have been raised to draw the appropriate lesson: all is not well in the onward rush to solve the “mysteries of nature” (Hume’s phrase). And the reason for this failure of naturalism is naturalism itself—the view of the human mind that has emerged in our post-Darwinian age. It isn’t so much the hold of the supernatural, a recrudescence of religion; it is rooted in the sciences of man. The voices in question include Chomsky, Nagel, McGinn, Pinker, Fodor, Kripke, and others. The old mysteries have not succumbed to the Age of Naturalism, and this has become increasingly evident as time has gone by—though it is not yet generally recognized. Nor should it be: we are still in the throes of the Age of Naturalism ushered in by Darwin and others. We are still trying to come to terms with the change of world-view these thinkers initiated. The old religious conception of ourselves and the universe still haunts and shapes our intellectual outlook (what we might call the “mini-gods” model). It will take some time before the lesson sinks in, but my prediction is that it will eventually sink in. When it does this age will be appropriately designated the Age of Mystery—the age in which the mysteries of nature became recognized for what they are. This age may go on indefinitely or it may come to an end with some new infusion of intellectual firepower: a fundamental mutation of the human brain, the arrival of advanced aliens, the development of artificial intelligence, or some blend of all three. In any case, my point here is that the current phase of intellectual history needs a suitable label and the Age of Mystery strikes me as fitting the bill. It had to come sooner or later—the time at which the limits of human intelligence became evident. Earlier ages did not make it evident (except to the very far-sighted), but glimmerings started to appear during the Renaissance (Locke, Hume, Kant, Newton), and later successes and failures made it increasingly evident. It was only a matter of time before the course of history revealed what should have been clear from the start—we are not gods but unusually brainy primates with an exaggerated opinion of ourselves. We are not only the naked ape; we are also the big-headed (literally) and big-talking (language-using) ape. We are (let’s congratulate ourselves) the cleverest of all the apes, with the highest IQ of any creature evolved upon this (probably dying) planet, but how impressive is that really? It is discouragingly relative. I sometimes think the most impressive thing about us is our art not our science, and certainly not our philosophy; intelligent aliens may marvel at what we have achieved musically and pictorially and poetically, but regard our intellectual efforts as distinctly B+. And it’s hard to imagine encountering an alien civilization whose music, painting, and literature strike us as markedly superior to our own; but it isn’t hard to imagine greatly superior science in an alien civilization (science fiction is full of it). After all, what can you expect of a two-pound brain made of spam that evolved in trees only a few short millennia ago? It took us a long time even to discover science and rational thought (why the delay?), so it isn’t surprising that our form of science should have its weak points and limitations. The miracle is that we know as much as we do (this itself is a mystery in the light of evolutionary science).[1]

[1] If we think of the gods (and God) as projections of the human mind, we find an interesting combination of qualities: they are conceived both as godlike and humanlike. They are seen as just like us in some respects but also markedly superior in other respects. So, we understand ourselves as having conceivable superiors while standing above all other animals. We don’t see ourselves as the pinnacle of perfection—in particular, we acknowledge the possibility of greater intellectual capacity. We are not completely deluded about our intellectual limitations, though we see ourselves as approximating to gods (unlike other animals). In that regard there is much truth in religion. Religion is (among other things) a tacit admission of (non-trivial) intellectual limitation, and hence of the permanent possibility of mystery—despite its attachment to the idea of a supernatural soul.

Phenomenology of Death

What is the phenomenology of death? What is it like to die? What does the final cessation of consciousness feel like? The answer is that there is no phenomenology of death, nothing it is like to die, no feeling of the end of consciousness. As Wittgenstein says, “Death is not an event in life: we do not live to experience death…Our life has no end in just the way our visual field has no limits.” (Tractatus, 6.4311) We don’t experience death because that would require survival of death: we would need to experience the far side of death. Consciousness ends at death, so there can be no consciousness of the transition to its absence—you can’t be conscious of the absence of consciousness. There is something it is like to experience the lead-up to death, an awareness that one is about to die, but there is no experience of the moment of death, its arrival and consummation. You can experience the end of a football game because you experience its aftermath, but you can’t experience the end of your life because you have no experience of its aftermath. You are gone at that crucial moment. No sooner is that moment upon you than your consciousness goes blank. In other words, you don’t experience the final border of your life. The same is true of its beginning: you don’t experience the coming-to-be of consciousness. Now it doesn’t exist, but now it does—but with no consciousness of the transition. That would require being conscious before you are conscious! So, the beginning and end of consciousness have zero phenomenology: it is impossible to employ phenomenological intuition at these crucial junctures. The phenomenological method is useless to gain insight into the borders of consciousness. No doubt it has borders, perhaps precisely detectable (by use of a brain scanner), but your consciousness is powerless to scrutinize the borders: it comes up empty at these terminal points. Thus, the end of consciousness is a mystery to consciousness, not even resolved by directly undergoing it. We have no impression of death at the moment of death, or birth at the moment of birth (I mean the onset of consciousness in the womb). We can’t even imagine the thing, though we know it occurs. We are cognitively closed to the event of dying, in the sense that we have no consciousness of it, and never can as a matter of principle. Wittgenstein is wrong to say that “death is not an event in life”, because there is an event of finally losing consciousness and it can occur in a living body; but what is true is that losing consciousness is not an event in consciousness—unlike, say, having a sudden thought or a sharp pain. As he remarks, the situation is logically like the borders of the visual field: we are not aware of these borders as borders, simply because we have no awareness of what lies beyond them. We know the border exists because we can’t see behind us, but we have no experience of the border as such—we can’t see this border. Death is a temporal border, and this is a spatial border. A generalization suggests itself: consciousness can never be conscious of its borders. This is a necessary truth about consciousness—a de re necessity, if you like. It is a necessity of phenomenology, though it is not verifiable by phenomenological inspection. It is a fact of phenomenology but not a phenomenological fact (did Husserl ever consider it?). We can grasp the intentionality of consciousness by the phenomenological method, but we can’t grasp the limits of consciousness by that method. The finiteness of consciousness is not a phenomenological fact about it. We can never think, “Oh, so that’s what the end of consciousness feels like”. Death is not a datum of consciousness; there are no death qualia. Sartre talked about the nothingness of consciousness, but its transition to nothingness is not an “immediate structure of the for-itself”. If we were conscious of its border, we would be immortal, since every event of losing consciousness would be present to an existing consciousness. It would be impossible for one’s consciousness to die, because it would always be accompanied by an act of consciousness that persists through death, which in turn would require another act of consciousness of its death. No, when consciousness ends it is never conscious ofits ending—it never experiences itself as passing into oblivion. It passes into oblivion without revealing what that process is like, because it is not like anything. We don’t know what it is like to be a bat and we don’t know what it is like to die—but in the one case there is something it is like and in the other there is nothing it is like (though there is something that it consists in). The end of consciousness is a process of some sort, a natural process, but it is not phenomenologically accessible.[1] It is a change of consciousness that is unavailable toconsciousness. Of course (and I have been consciously suppressing this fact throughout) death is not the only end of consciousness in life: there is also going to sleep. And here I will assert a bold conjecture: the death of consciousness is the same kind of event as the loss of consciousness we undergo every night in sleep. It too is not an “event in life”. So, there is nothing very remarkable about the end of consciousness (except that it is the final end): it is a daily occurrence, and it always involves the same basic law of phenomenology, namely that consciousness is never aware of its borders. This is why you never remember going to sleep: you never remember the experience of passing from wakefulness to sleep, because there is no such experience. You know you must have gone to sleep at some point but you had no consciousness of it—it just happened. It is a blank in your mental life. You might remember the thoughts you had while trying to get to sleep, even up to the last second, but you don’t remember the blissful moment of dropping off (strange phrase). For it didn’t occur inyour consciousness. You might even remember a dream you had immediately after falling asleep, because that occurred in your consciousness, but you draw a blank on the period during which you lost consciousness. You went from waking consciousness to dreaming consciousness with a gap in between. Wouldn’t it be interesting to know what this gap was like? But there was nothing it was like—no event in consciousness. You are never conscious of losing consciousness, because that would require consciousness of no consciousness, which is contradictory. So, sleep is like death in this important respect (hence the Big Sleep). Sleep doesn’t intellectually prepare us for death, however, since it too presents us with a cognitive lack: we don’t know what it is like to fall asleep either. Nor could we know this. Still, we know that death is very similar to falling asleep, which is not too terrible a thing. It is the Little Death. Our nightly Little Deaths precede our once-in-a-lifetime Big Sleep. Both are phenomenologically opaque, necessarily elusive, but they are alike in essence. They are both mysterious to us, from the phenomenological point of view, and for the same reason, but at least we have been there before many times. If we never slept, it would be different—then we would have no prior experience of losing consciousness, it would be an alien occurrence. But as it is we have been there many times, so we know what we are in for; it’s nothing new, nothing foreign. Imagine if you belonged to a species that went to sleep once in its life at a predictable time: this might be something feared yet celebrated, with many a ritual and preparatory oration. You might be apprehensive, anxious, and baffled—will you survive this unprecedented fall from consciousness (maybe some one-time sleepers have died)? We at least don’t have to face death with so little experience of its essential nature, i.e., the loss of consciousness. With us it is normal and routine; we just have to accept that this time there will be no waking up again. But the event itself won’t be so unnerving and potentially horrible (our one-time sleepers might be petrified of the process of dying itself, in addition to its outcome). At least we are not completely ignorant of what will be involved when the time comes. In any case, death and sleep are alike in being preceded by an event with no phenomenological reality.[2] This is a result of the very nature of consciousness and its borders: consciousness can never cross its own borders.

[1] Is it a mental event? If so, it is one that ends with an absence of mentality. Does it begin in the mind and end by exiting the mind? Is it psycho-physical? Maybe if we could experience it, we would know, but that is not possible. I leave the question for homework.

[2] We are said to “fall asleep” but not to “fall a-death” and to “die” but not to “sleep-en” (“slipe”?).  Ordinary language resists the analogy, the identity: but couldn’t we say, “I sleepened (sliped) before midnight and I hope not to fall a-death for a long time”?  Of course, our language around death is notoriously tortured, torn between euphemism and appalled recognition (not to mention incomprehension). Let me suggest “to deconscious” instead of “to die”, as in “He peacefully deconscioused last night”—like “decoupled” instead of “divorced”. That would helpfully distinguish the end of the conscious mind from the end of the living body, and gives a suggestion of voluntariness.

I am pleased to report that Cambridge Scholars Publishing has agreed to publish a volume entitled Colin McGinn’s Philosophy: Further Reflections, edited by Ken Levy. I cordially invite sundry “feminist” groups to send their letters of protest to the publisher and editor; I can promise we will have a good laugh at them.

Character and Consciousness

It would be good to have a philosophy of character analogous to the philosophy of action or perception or emotion or thought or imagination or consciousness or the self. But we don’t. The subject hardly exists. I will take some steps to remedy that, focusing on the relationship between character and consciousness. First, let’s pin the subject down a bit, given its rather nebulous status. The OED gives us “the mental and moral qualities distinctive to an individual” for “character”. This is admirably concise and helpfully conjoins the mental with the moral. When we turn to “personality” we find “the combination of characteristics or qualities that form an individual’s character”; so, personality consists of the mental and moral qualities that constitute character—the one defines the other. Neither definition brings in the concept of a trait, but it is common to speak of personality and character traits: thus, character is to be defined as a combination of mental and moral traits, varying from person to person. What traits? A representative list would include: honesty, loyalty, generosity, impatience, integrity, empathy, bravery, fairness, wit, conscientiousness, flexibility, curiosity, and paranoia—along with their opposites. The first thing we feel inclined to say about this psychological terrain is that it is unconscious—or not conscious. But in what way is it not conscious? Not like the Freudian unconscious, which is the result of repression: no one represses their character traits—they are not generally shameful or disturbing to consciousness. They are not the source of neurosis or jokes or dreams or slips of the tongue. Nor are they like unconscious memories, which can be retrieved with mental effort; they were not once conscious and now lie in wait for conscious retrieval. Nor are they comparable to the unconscious mastery of our native language—computational machinery operating behind the scenes. They have their own sui generis form of unconsciousness, apparently. But they are also accessible to consciousness in another way: they can erupt into consciousness. Sartre gives the example of seeing a man walk into a room and feeing a sudden rush of conscious revulsion coupled with a strong desire to shun this man.[1] You thereby know that you hate him. Sartre calls this a “state”: it transcends the conscious convulsion that manifests it. It is not yet a trait of character, but it might be a symptom of such a trait, because you might be constitutionally prone to irrational hatreds and general interpersonal hostility. You might have the trait of irascibility. This Sartre calls a “quality” (note that the dictionary employs the same word). In fact, we don’t have a developed vocabulary for the type of property in which character consists, so we choose whatever locution that comes to hand. This suggests a certain ontological aporia, and is worth bearing in mind. The ontology of character is obscure, even ineffable. Some may reach for that philosophical catchall “disposition”: but that would be to try to reduce character to its manifestations in consciousness and behavior, and anyway would run into familiar problems with contrived dispositions in the absence of underlying character traits. In any case, our question has to do with the relationship between character and consciousness: between character reality and character phenomenology. Do we ever have flashes of conscious insight into our character? Is character necessarily hidden from consciousness? It is far from obvious that this is true; we might well experience such flashes. There might be something it is like to be irascible. An irascible man might be well aware of his tendency to irascible emotions and behavior—what with those upsurges of angry feeling at the slightest provocation or no provocation at all. He might feel perpetually on the brink of a violent outburst. That can happen for limited time periods in the life of many people, so what is to stop it occurring over a whole lifetime? A person could be consciously irascible and know himself to be so (or generous, empathetic, impatient, etc.) For example, it is perfectly obvious to me that I am an impatient individual, because I feel impatience all the time: I don’t infer it from my behavior—it isn’t a theoretical posit designed to explain what I observe. I’m not agnostic about it or self-deluded or plain ignorant. I am fully conscious of my impatient nature (and I try to curb it, with limited success—oh how I suffer!). This puts the lie to a well-known bromide about the epistemology of character, namely that there is no first-person privilege about it. The idea is that I am as ill-placed as another person to know my character, because I have only behavior to go on; it is nothing like knowing I am in pain or thinking. Certainly, one can be fallible about one’s character, but it does seem true that consciousness can reveal character quite plainly, and in a way not available to anyone else. There is something it is like to have a particular personality type—a certain specific noema (in Husserl’s terminology). Character can be an intentional object of a conscious act. It isn’t always but it can be. Why isn’t it always? Who knows—maybe it is just a matter of cognitive economy, not wasting valuable conscious space on what it is not necessary to consciously know. But it does tell us that character occupies a strangely ambiguous position vis-a-vis consciousness: it both is and isn’t conscious (not at the same time, of course). I think that in general people know quite well what kind of person they are. Their character is displayed to their consciousness—in all its gruesome glory. They may flinch from it and try to avoid it, but they know—they know perfectly well. How could you not know if you are a constitutionally envious or ill-intentioned person? You have an envious consciousness, an ill-intentioned inner aura. You know that your character exists and you know its lineaments—this is much clearer to you than the nature of someone else’s character. There is no symmetry between your knowledge of your own character and your knowledge of other people’s character (there is a real other character problem). Your own character never surprises you in the way other people’s character can: it never comes as a revelation, a shock, a bitter disappointment. Your character is hooked up to your conscious cognitive faculties in a way that other people’s character is not (same brain, remember). I don’t sit around speculating about my character (“Maybe I’m an exceptionally loyal generous person, though I strike myself as a bit of a bastard”). Character has close connections with emotions, and I am well aware of those: how could a generous person have these emotions? Thus, people try to conceal their character from others: they know quite well that they are a certain way and they don’t want other people to know—they are not in the dark about it, as others are. They consciously exploit the first-person third-person asymmetry. People probably start to do this in the teenage years when social manipulation sets in and self-reflection gets a grip; then it becomes a way of life. It isn’t that they are blissfully unaware of their character faults, or what are deemed such; their conscious self-knowledge is what guides their social behavior. I myself constantly conceal my impatience—it is not an attractive trait. I adopt a look of benign calm, spiritual ease, while inside I am seething with impatience. Nobody would want to hang out with me if I didn’t do this. It is not news to me to be told that I’m an impatient individual. Anyway, character is manifested in consciousness. It has a phenomenology. It is “intuitable”. It is not a transcendent mental reality, slyly escaping the searchlight of consciousness. It is noteworthy that the character traits often deemed inaccessible to consciousness are the bad ones; it isn’t supposed that people are unconscious of their good qualities. Shades of Freudian repression here: we render unconscious what we are ashamed of being. But wouldn’t it be odd if the only unconscious character traits were a subset of the totality? They should all be equally conscious or unconscious, but then the bad ones should be as conscious as the good ones, which are not unconscious. The truth is that our characters are uniformly accessible to consciousness; not constantly before the mind, to be sure, but capable of being known by conscious awareness. We are not a closed book to ourselves, as the Freudian legacy would have it, but an open secret (open to ourselves, closed to others). Character and consciousness are therefore interwoven. Character traits are not covert states of an unconscious medium but intentional objects of conscious mental acts. We are aware of ourselves as characterful beings.  The first finding of the philosophy of character is: character is conscious.[2]

[1] The Transcendence of the Ego (1957), p. 63.

[2] I haven’t discussed such familiar questions as whether character traits should be regarded as reducible or irreducible, real or fictitious, indispensable or eliminable. Are they primitives in the psychology of personality or explicable in other terms? I tend towards a realist view in which they act as internal causes of behavior and conscious events. They are not dispositional properties defined by their manifestations. Bravery is not like solubility: to call someone brave is not to say what he or she would do in such and such circumstances; it’s more like saying a bridge is sturdy or a tree leafy.