Brain Vol. 128 No. 2 © Guarantors of Brain 2005; all rights reserved
Book review |
THE HAND: A PHILOSOPHICAL INQUIRY IN HUMAN BEING
Raymond Tallis 2003. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press
Price £19.99.
ISBN 0 7486 1738 8
I AM: A PHILOSOPHICAL ENQUIRY INTO FIRST-PERSON BEING
Raymond Tallis 2004. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press
Price £19.99.
ISBN 0 7486 1951 8
THE KNOWING ANIMAL: A PHILOSOPHICAL INQUIRY INTO KNOWLEDGE AND TRUTH
Raymond Tallis 2004.
Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press
Price £19.99.
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The sway of Hartley in Coleridge's thinking continued until the process of writing poetry, and observing the linguistic efforts of his first child (named, obviously, Hartley), convinced him that such reductionism was not merely inadequate but preposterous. Coleridge was a convinced empiricist, on one level, but he was also a metaphysician and a poet. He was swayed by the new experimental sciences (one of his closest friends was Humphrey Davy), but he was also a believer in moral agency, the dynamism of the imagination and the evident transcendence of the human spirit: this was the man, after all, who made available to William Wordsworth some of his deepest philosophical ideas. But how to reconcile the apparent polar opposites of empiricism and metaphysics?
Tallis, like Coleridge, went through a youthful period of radical empiricism: ‘I declared myself to be a biochemical materialist’. The challenge, when he came out of his early scientism, was to develop a philosophical anthropology, he writes, ‘that doesn't depend upon the assumption that we have fallen from the sky’. How does one ‘turn one's back on biologism’, he goes on, ‘without at the same time turning one's back on biology and the biological facts about us?’ And again: how does one ‘take account of what science has told us about human nature without succumbing to scientism?’
The issue of reductionism versus perspectives that allowed for a more holistic, open, questing and imaginative view of human identity erupted in heated disputes in England in the 1790s, and spilled over into the early 19th century. How reminiscent the 1790s are of the 1990s, especially the heady early years of the Decade of the Brain, when it seemed that neuroscience and genetics were set to deliver not only psychopharmacological balms for every disease and dysfunction of the human spirit, but final explanations for the big problems of philosophy of mind: consciousness, agency and human identity. The philosophical promise of neuroscience had been noted indeed by Eric Kandel of Columbia University in 1985 when he declared, in the preface to the 1985 edition of Principles of Neural Science, that ‘one of the last frontiers of science, perhaps its ultimate challenge, is to understand the biological basis of mentation’. There arrived a spate of semi-popular books, many of them mixing pseudo-religiose terminology with the discourse of neurophilosophy and neurogenetic determinism (which promised to replace the vagaries of ‘folk psychology’—history, theology and social anthropology—with a more scientifically based, and therefore more reliable, mode of thinking). Paul Churchland talked of the ‘engine of the soul’; and the late Francis Crick talked of the ‘scientific search for the soul’. The religious references put anything smacking of transcendence in its place. Crick, as it happened, located the site of free will with ludicrous precision in the ‘anterior cingulate sulcus’[Sic; p.267]; and there was much excitement about the phenomenon of Wolf Singer's 40 Hz oscillation as a neural substrate of consciousness. Yet, the climate of reductionist explanations was not without irony. There was a neuroscientific joke doing the rounds, aimed, it seemed, at the Churchlands. ‘Why did the chicken cross the road?’ ‘Because its road-crossing neuronal mappings triggered... etc. etc.’ Less consciously ironic, but laughable all the same, was Dan Dennett's admission in Consciousness Explained that he had discovered in a novel, Nice Work by David Lodge, a powerful description of that illusory notion—the self: the metaphor of ‘multiple drafts’, as in literary drafts, that precede and constitute a final manuscript. Multiple drafts was the buzz phrase of Lodge's woman lecturer in English Literature who was over-bloated on French literary theory and Jacques Derrida. How strange that a neuroscientifically informed philosopher should come to load such significance on a novelist's metaphor enshrined in a satire that exposed the vacuity of literary deconstruction. As Gerry Edelman, a Nobel prize-winning holist, embattled in his Neurosciences Institute not far from the Salk where Crick was ensconced, commented laconically: ‘When pygmies cast such long shadows, it must be very late in the day indeed’. Meanwhile, Dan Dennett was far from complimentary about Edelman; nor was Crick, who had described his fellow Nobel prize winner's recent theory, neural Darwinism, a theory of human identity closer (in metaphorical terms) to a Brazilian rain forest than Dennett's photocopying machine image, as ‘Neural Edelmanism’.
The fact was that neuroscience, neurogenetics and indeed Darwinian neurobiology and sociobiology were not yielding anything like a single, broadly agreed description of human nature, human identity, the self or high order consciousness. Neuroscientific and evolutionary explanations for what it means to be human had turned into a rowdy battle of insults as the intellectual divides came to resemble the Gangs of New York. Promoting this clash of views was an unprecedented generation of popular science books, the establishment of a Journal of Consciousness, and a flourishing new genre of Consciousness seminars and conferences. From one perspective, it appeared that the divide was between biological reductionists—Dennett, Crick, the Churchlands, Richard Dawkins, Stephen Pinker and Colin Blakemore et al.—and biological holists, including such figures as Edelman, Oliver Sacks, Stephen Rose, Pierre Changeux, Antonio Damasio and others, aided and abetted by philosophers of mind such as David Chalmers and Colin McGinn. Then there were the contributions of the physicists, and Artificial Intelligence researchers whose obsession with functionalism led them to suggest, as had David Marr, that consciousness no more depends upon neurons than aerodynamics depends upon feathers. In fact it was precisely the mechanical, functionalist hubris of Hans Moravek's Mind Children (he proposed the down-loading of individual minds into suitable software as a prospect for individual immortality) that led Roger Penrose to pull his physicist's rank and enter the fray with The Emperor's New Mind, closely followed by Shadows of the Mind. Penrose's contribution was the notion that the brain might be a kind of quantum computer, whose non-local, stochastic qualities could yield an explanation for consciousness where classical physics, and mere neurobiology, failed. Penrose, nevertheless, had been talking to a biologist, Colin Blakemore as it happened, and was intrigued by the possibility that microtubules (shades of David Hartley's tubules) in neurons would be appropriate candidates for a quantum brain. The huge numerosity of these microscopic hair-like cytoskeletal structures, and their capacity to contract and expand, suggested a half-way house between quantum and classical physics. For Edelman, the Penrose suggestion was to be dismissed out of hand as a mere surrogate ghost in the machine every bit as unacceptable as the substance dualism promoted by the late Sir John Eccles. Sir John, elderly then but intransigent, was attempting to reconcile contemporary neuroscience with the Thomistic notion of an immortal soul in his battles against the ‘materialists’ on the conference circuits. Edelman's comment made it clear that the major divide was not a question of dualists versus monists, but an antagonism more to do with the hubris of closed theories versus the humility of open theories. Both sides were insistent that human identity is nothing if not wholly embodied. Both sides, moreover, appealed to the auspices of Darwin. The real conflict was between those two strikingly discordant attitudes of mind, exemplified two centuries ago by Hartley versus Coleridge, and in conflict ever since: explanation versus understanding.
Tallis's first volume, The Hand: A Philosophical Enquiry into Human Being, is by far and away the best and the most important book in the trilogy. Tallis establishes his position on the far extreme of the opaque and open side of enquiry by invoking the discipline of ‘philosophical anthropology’. This pursuit, far from being a woolly area of philosophy, he claims, ‘may be its ultimate purpose, the point at which its different, more narrowly focused enterprises—the philosophies of mind, of art, of ethics, ontology, epistemology, metaphysics, etc.—converge’. In a daring (Tallis uses the word ‘reckless’) meditation on the relationship between brain and hand, taking in mathematics, language and the employment of tools, he makes connections between human dexterity, anthropology, genetics and metaphysics, to argue that humans ‘alone among all species, in some respects escaped our biological destiny’. Tallis is emphatically no Cartesian, and he is enthusiastic to build his case on what he calls ‘genetic anthropology’, but his purpose is to demonstrate how dramatically and decisively human beings have travelled from their organic origins. The problem, central to Coleridge's preoccupation 200 years ago, and boosted by the poet's acquaintance with the German philosophers of his era—Kant, Fichte and Schelling—is how to put man back into nature and yet confirm his transcendence (without resort, needless to say, to what the Churchlands like to call ‘spooky stuff’). Tallis attempts to square the circle in perhaps the most effective way possible, by adopting the instincts of the artist: to exemplify rather than merely to state; to ‘celebrate’ rather than merely to explain. As Tallis puts it, ‘Celebration ... has been just as important as explanation, if only as a way of making clear the enormity of what it is that has to be explained’. In Chapter 3 of The Hand, Tallis exemplifies, celebrates, the richness and sheer transcendence of gesture and dexterity of human beings, by closely observed comparisons with chimpanzees. ‘If we compare a grown-up chimpanzee that has finally learned the use of a percussion hammer to crack open a nut—the highest expression of tool-using in the animal kingdom—with an engineer poring over the computer-generated plans of a factory making components for a piece of advanced technology, then we can see that our animal cousins are not even poor relations—paw relations; they live in an different universe, albeit on the same planet’.
But why the focus on human exceptionalism? Tallis is convinced that our era, indeed our culture, is currently dominated by ‘debased accounts of human nature’ that make comfortable fits with debased explanations: the notion that human beings are zombies of a very nasty kind. ‘A multitude of (often warring) sciences (molecular biology, neurology, neuropsychology amongst others) and pseudo-sciences (sociobiology, psychoanalysis, evolutionary psychology and the like) have denied the distinctive nature of human beings’. His contention seems to me undeniable, not only in terms of debased accounts of consciousness (Dennett and Crick especially) that dismiss the central ‘qualia’ problem, but in the unrelenting deconstruction of human freedom and agency. The fretfulness that hovers over Tallis's text (reminiscent at times of George Steiner at his most anguished) is a token of his conviction that down-grading human nature is a self-fulfilling prophecy. We need to know the scope and limits of our freedom, as Galen Strawson has so admirably argued, in order to be free.
In an impressive internal dialogue with the shade of John Stuart Mill on nature, Tallis argues that the hand ‘is the instrument of transcendence required to bring us out of nature sufficiently to manipulate it beyond the kind of manipulations that are available to animals’. The capacity of the hand's ‘choice of grasps’, he contends, is the model that ‘awakens agency’. Out of the hand comes our wonderful ability to obey nature and also command it. Out of the hand comes our ‘self-fulfilling sense of agency, and the derivative notion of blame and (even) causation’.
In his second volume, I Am, Tallis turns his attention to first person individuation, embodiment and the shifting relationships between self-consciousness and the body, employing a mix of a British tradition of philosophy of mind—Quassim Cassam and Peter Strawson—and Continental phenomenology, notably Heidegger. Tallis's writing in this volume is often tortuous and raw as he argues with himself. Curiously, he is often more accessible in his source notes, which he employs as opportunities for second thoughts rather than as citations and references. While he acknowledges the biological bases of individuation, I wondered whether he was doing justice to the epigenetic uniqueness of the development of brain and CNS and the role of cell adhesion molecules, as described, for example, in Gerald Edelman's neural Darwinism trilogy. However, his ultimate interest lies in what he terms Existential Intuition, the appropriation of one's body and its world as an expression of freedom. ‘the first-person being plants the flag of here and now in an otherwise boundless world of material causation and enables the individual to be a point of origin in the universe.’
There is an inevitability about Tallis's insistence that his approach be underpinned by epistemology, the problem of knowing that lies at the heart of philosophy. In his third volume, The Knowing Animal, he presents us with what he calls the ‘case for epistogony’ which is no more and no less than Existential Intuition which he discusses in the second book, applied to the notion that underlying knowledge there is a sense that there is ‘more than I am sensing.’
As Tallis attempts to gather the strands of thought spread through a thousand pages of speculation delivered in a medley of styles of philosophical discourse, he lapses into a mood of valedictory scepticism. "What I have written in the present book and its two predecessors falls far below the aim of the pointing the way towards in-stasis, though the notion of the imminent revelation does justify the fact that much of what is said in it is merely descriptive rather than explanatory, and that, in common with most other philosophers, far from ironing things out I have merely shifted ‘the bump in the carpet’".
But it has been an impressive performance, in which the journey is more important than the arrival, and I for one will be happy to accompany him on his future voyages. Among my strongest reservations about the current work, however, is its tendency to self-indulgent wordiness, a lack of honed sentence making, lapsing at times into obfuscations reminiscent of his German philosophical mentors. At its best, English philosophy has a clarity, a politesse, that makes literature of speculation. Few and far between are the contemporary practitioners of such art: Colin McGinn, at his best, Anthony Kenny, perhaps, and Nicholas Humphrey. My other quarrel is that in the entire work, which purports to go to the heart of human nature and its freedoms, there is not a single mention of the operation, the scope and the limits of the individual imagination (save for a single brief citation of J. R. Napier). Much that Tallis writes about human dexterity might be applied to the notion of imagination; but I would like to read Tallis, an established philosopher of literature, speculating more specifically on the link between imagination, neurobiology, the individual and our capacity to make models of future choices.
Cambridge
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